The primary sources for this tale are chants of the Te'hen of the Arafan Cluster. They recount the adventures of Bhena-d'kha and Ta-rossa, a star-sprite and the servant-girl he created from the dust of a dead moon.
But herein, demons have become "memories." Valdak, Bostak and the devil-sibs Sod'vha, Ahn'hva and Jahn'hfra are transmuted into less-mystical but no less intriguing forms. The latter half of this episode finds the Demon-King Ahk'hvol split in two: one aspect becomes Achibol, drunk and pathetic, and the other aspect, vague and mysterious, has overtones of a distant, familiar Evil. *
(Kaledrin, Senior Editor)
"There!" Kaledrin sighed. "A quiet, literary reflection on the new chapter. With Saphooth minding his own business, things seem almost normal around here. Even the flood of indignant letters has peaked."
"The quiet before the storm," Abrovid muttered ominously.
"What do you mean?" Kaledrin's eyestalks rotated swiftly and his chitin-plates tightened over his soft parts.
"The flood of supportive letters from fanatical one-worlders hasn't peaked yet," Abrovid replied.
"Fringe cultists and fundamentalists. They'll lose interest soon enough. This is a literary project, remember. The biocybes have no instructions about religious matters." He relaxed again, like a bud opening in the sunlight of noon.
"Seems to me you can't separate them from what the biocybes are coming up with, though. Saphooth doesn't even try."
"Eh? What have you heard?" Again, Kaledrin shrunk against himself.
"I've gotten a listing of his calls. Would you like to look at it?" He held up a data-cube that seemed, to Kaledrin, to gleam with bright, Evil light, not distant at all.
"Give me that!" the scholar snapped, lurching with all seven free tentacles outstretched.
Benadek drew Teress close. He was going to have to explain everything, and it would not be easy.
There had been more to the first dose of memories than rusty skills and terminology, as Benadek had his first inkling when he had tried to sleep. He had tossed and turned, unable to get comfortable, sprawling across his wide bed in vulnerable, exposed positions no urchin would adopt. Just as baby tree-men never let go of their mothers' fur even in sleep, just as sloths and bats clung upside down, urchins never sprawled; they wedged in dark crevices or huddled foetally in places too small for their enemies. They never snored. But Benadek had wakened sprawling and snoring.
A day or so later he had started drinking coffee, and liking it. He had not even realized that his finger had pushed the COFFEE BLACK button instead of the LIPTONS® one until he had drunk most of a cup, and enjoyed it.
"That was when I discovered that Dr. Vladek Sovoda, the biochemist, wasn't completely dead," he told Teress. "He snored, and liked coffee. And he was inside me."
"What did you do?"
"I hunted him down inside my brain and nerves and cells," Benadek said with an indecipherable shake of his head and the faintest of sly grins, "and I killed him." Teress's hissing indrawn breath warned him he had gone too far. "It wasn't like that, not really," he explained hurriedly. "He wasn't a real personality. But behavioral memories like his preference for coffee were influencing me without my consent, even my knowledge."
It had been extermination, not murder. The Sovoda-thoughts had only begun to congeal in Benadek's brain, to form synaptic trails that would become memories and action-patterns. Most still floated free in his bloodstream and cells, strands of ribonucleic acid coded for the production of specialized neurotransmitters, complex proteinlike molecules that would determine new connections in the gray shadows of his brain. The differences between such Sovoda-thoughts and Benadek's own body-chemicals were as slight as the reversal of a loosely bonded hydroxyl on a primitive amine. A lone enzyme might act as a neurotransmitter, causing the firing of first one synapse, then another and another, their characteristic pattern resulting in a flash of memory or an action, or both. Such subtle, weakly bonded differences identified them as Sovoda-mind. The developers of the memory-transplant techniques had not known there were differencesafter all, there were hundreds of neurotransmitters, perhaps thousands, if one counted dual-purpose enzymes whose neural functions were masked by more obvious body-regulating uses. Only a handful were fully understood. But Benadek knew them all. . . .
Extermination. As Sovoda-memories drifted to his brain, he "imagined" antigenstheir ID tags bumps of bonding-energy. In the rapid shuttling of energies of his own thinking, in structures like tiny glands, antibodies formed. Ironically, Sovoda's own understanding of the complex relationship between brain, glands, and the immune system betrayed him. He could not have used that understanding directly, but Benadek could. So Benadek, lymphocyte-borne, hunted and killed.
"When I'd wiped out his individuality, leaving only the memories I wanted to keep, I wished I hadn't. He wasn't a bad person, even though he was an ancient . . ."
"Achibol's an ancient too," Teress interrupted.
"Of coursethough he may be as different from them as we are. But that's another story. I shouldn't have been so thorough. I was scared. It would have been harder to have kept all of him, isolated from the `command network' I call `me.' This next time, I will."
"You should talk to Achibol before there's a `next time.' "
"He'll get angry and refuse, then watch me more carefully. Besides, he's been drinking too much. I only saw him drunk once, before we came herewhen I first . . ." Benadek grinned at a secret memory, " . . . when I first met him. I've got to get to work fast, and get him out of here."
"He's idle and frustrated," she agreed. "But are you sure you can handle more memories? What about last night? Is that one trying to take over?"
"Not yet. I've been able to recognize him and channel what's left of his personality into a safe place, bound up in chemical form. Will you help with the next one? I can do it alone, but it would be easier with you to monitor things."
Teress reluctantly agreed. "But if things get out of hand . . . if I even think they are . . . I'm going to get Achibol. All right?"
They started that night, after the sorcerer was asleep. Benadek still thought of him as the "sorcerer" even though his doses of ancient memory gave him a fair understanding of what the old man really was. Even his averred long life was not that mysterious any more. Sovoda, the biochemist, had known several experiments that might have led to Achibol's kind of immortality. Most required sophisticated equipment for blood filtering, ion-flushing, electrochemical stimulation and so forth. One technique, developed in Europe, used a viruslike "nanomachine." Injected into a host, it checked cells' chromosomal DNA for errors by comparison with its own codes and stimulated genes that harmlessly destroyed erring cells. It could not repair cells, but as long as the host had others that could divide without error, he could function without symptoms of aging.
That report dated to the decade before the Plan was put into effect. A lot might have been done in those ten years.
The apprentice pushed speculation aside. Teress eyed the equipment and the big chair with its wires, cables, tubes, and straps, and shuddered. "Is that where the frozen memories are kept?" she asked, pointing to the freezer doors. Benadek nodded. She watched him punch in strings of characters. Her sleep-taught familiarity helped her understand what he did.
The data he called up was presented as lists. The main one catalogued occupational skills in broad, general categoriesmore occupations than she had ever imagined. "What are those?" she asked, pointing at the final category: <MISC>. She reached over Benadek's shoulder and shifted the cursor. She read downward from Astronomy past Agronomy, Library Science, Musicology, Psychology . . . and stopped at Philosophy.
"What kind of doctor is that?" Benadek asked, scanning the single record that appeared.
"Someone who thinks about things out on the edges of what's known. See? The Ethics of Technological Power. That sounds interesting."
"What?"
"A book, I suppose. Try that one."
"Huh? You mean his memories?" At Teress's emphatic nod, he shook his head. "I need to know about computers and military security and . . ."
"Later. Choose him this time." She spoke with such cool conviction that there was no need for her to state the obvious: if Benadek gainsaid her, he would have to proceed without her. He shrugged, then typed in a string of code.
<BOSTWICK, James Wold;
374-46-6390-1318; Access 4D;>
<RETRIEVAL IN PROCESS>
<RETRIEVAL COMPLETED. SPECIMEN
ACCESS CHUTE 4D.>
<IS SUBJECT PROCESSED?>
"That's me," Benadek said. "I've got to get in the chair. Four-dee. That's the fourth door over and the fourth one downsee the green light?" Teress examined the storage wall while Benadek seated himself. He showed her how to strap him in, and told her where to place monitoring pickups. Gritting her teeth, she slid the intravenous taps into his wrists and neck and taped them down. "You'll have to use those padded tongs to pick up your philosopher," he told her. "He's about seventy degrees Kelvin right now." Having no experience with anything colder than the iron hoops on a frozen bucket, Teress had to imagine how her skin might stick to the frosted, fuming metallic canister she found behind door four-dee. She slid it into a machined receptacle and dogged its insulated cover down.
"You'll have to do the rest from the terminal," Benadek said.
"How did you ever . . ." she began.
"I had to run back and forth a lot, and I wasn't strapped in. I had a lot of trouble with the IVs."
"I can imagine," she murmured, marveling at his determination. She typed [Y] to indicate that the "subject" was indeed "processed," and followed a series of prompts that caused one piece of equipment after another to light up, hum, whir, or otherwise indicate readiness to precede.
* * *
"Another?" Teress protested. "But you haven't slept since the last one." Six days, six steaming, frost-covered vials containing the essences of men's lives. Benadek's body fluids swam with foreign substances. His mind was aswarm with vivid, conflicting life-images of scientists, a philosopher, an Inuit shaman (again Teress's choice).
"I've done fine so far, haven't I? When all this stuff comes together, I'll have everything I need."
"And what will that be? I don't see why . . ."
"I want to know who's controlling the honches, what they're trying to do, how to fight them, if I must and . . . and what's the right thing to do."
"I was right, wasn't I?" she stated. "About the philosopher?" She knew that Benadek's last "want" was a reflection of the scholar Bostwick's careful, pondering manner. Had Benadek's behavior and thought-patterns not shown signs of the philosopher's effect, Teress had been prepared to take a fire axe to the computer terminal, the restraint chair, and the memory-storage compartments. She still paid close attention to Benadek's utterances, especially after his assimilation of the army security chief and the Air Force astronaut. Like honches, military men were too fearsome to be allowed to run freely within the mind and body of whatever Benadek eventually became.
No memories could furnish the answers he sought, she realized. They were all long dead before the first honch was born, but they "knew" the systems the honch-creators had used, and their thought-patterns were more appropriate than hers or Benadek's.
"Trust me?" he had pleaded. She had little choice.
The Benadek who stood before her was not the obnoxious boy she had first met. He answered questions with polysyllabic words or paraphrased equations that probably held no meaning for anyone alive besides himself. Sometimes, when he realized what he had said, the lost boy would surface in a rueful, mischievous grin. "I didn't know that a minute ago," he would say. "I wonder what I mean?"
More and more often, he knew exactly what he meant, though no one of the individuals he had greedily consumed could have assembled the thoughts and concepts he wove. "I'm a catalyst," he told her. "I allow them to `talk' with each other, but I'm not one of them, and they're not me. I'm an arena where their ideas fight. I skim off what I want, and let them go onand on and on."
"How did you avoid the madness the ancients suffered?"
"I'm differentas are you. It has to do with changing."
"Then I could do it too?" she asked cautiously, her expression halfway between fear and feral eagerness. "I feel so ignorant. If I could learn . . ."
He shook his head slowly. "Achibol was more right than he knew when he called the transfers murder. I could show you how to kill the relict personalities, as I did my first one, but unless . . . until . . . you can control your own changes, I can't teach you how to shunt them safely aside, and still let them live."
"I'll pass," she said, sighing with the release of tension that had built up without her awareness. "One more time, you said? Promise?"
"Just once, and I'm done. I promise."
The door swung open with enough force to set wires in motion, and slammed against its stop. "No more!" Achibol bellowed. "I've heard every despicable word." He staggered, his robe aswirl about his skinny legs. He was drunk. Teress backed away, frightened less by his anger than by his glazed, unfocused eyes.
"I was afraid of your intemperance," he snarled. "You were too eager. From the first time I told you of this place, you planned to rape it, didn't you? As you'd have raped Teress? Sylfie?" Benadek flinched, and pain invaded his eyes. "How many?" Achibol pressed, swaying as he stood. "How many have you destroyed in your unholy, wanton quest?"
"None, Master," Benadek replied, regaining his composure and rising to face Achibol squarely. "Or . . . only one, the very first. The rest are more alive than they could hope to be in another host. I have them all."
"Impossibleyou'd be driven mad! Your body and mind would be a battlefield. You've learned how to choose a tidbit here, a dab there, and destroy the rest. No man could survive what you say you've done."
"Then I am either mad, Master, oras I've long suspectedI'm no man, but something different." He drew himself up to his full height, and looked the old man straight in his hazed, fiery eyes. "I refuse to discuss it until you're sober."
"Are you the master here, and I the apprentice?"
"I'm apprentice to Achibol, not wine." Benadek feared the old man would strike him with his staff, or down him with its emanations. But Achibol spun unsteadily on his heel and reeled out. Teress followed him.
Benadek's shoulders slumped. He squeezed his eyelids together to ease their burning, swung the heavy door shut and bolted it from the inside. The red sign glowed brightly:
EXPERIMENT IN PROGRESS
Perhaps Teress could make the old man see reason, or at least sober him up so Benadek could explain. In the meantime, he would have to do the procedure by himself this last time, else Achibol might, even in his drunkenness, find some way to thwart him.
Memories roiled and swirled in his blood, prototypic vestiges of thought not yet mapped in synapses, little more than molecular codes for the living connections they would become, if he let them. His visualizations were clearer now, thanks to those sequences he had chosen to integrate into the vast complexity of his brain . . .
Each strand of foreign RNA-analogue was attached to a similar strand that had originated in the ancients' laboratories as a retrovirus. Its own code was carried not on the double strands of deoxyribonucleic acid but on more primitive, single-stranded RNA. Encapsulated in sheaths of viral protein, they pierced cellular membranes, then synthesized enzymes that cut his own stranded, coiled, and twisted genetic molecules with an accuracy no surgeon could duplicate. Viral RNA drew cellular nucleosides to it and created DNA versions of its foreign codes. Spliced into the host's own genome, they programmed his brain to make new connections in a manner similar to, but subtly different from, what his own embryonic cells had used to create brain connections in the first place. They created spurious thoughts and memories he could hardly distinguish from his own.
There was haunting similarity to the change, but the memory-codes merely governed the configurations of synapses, and regulated the kind and the numbers of neurotransmitter moleculesdopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, and a host of othersthat would determine the intensity and "color" of the impulses that passed from one neuron to another. What was a memory or a thought? Was it no more than a specification for what cells are activated at one time, a subset of all the possible internal connections that many billions of neurons could make? The foreign memories were no longer matter, but connections of synapses physiologically no different than those that grew out of his own experiences and actions. His brain was like any other, but more connected. The memories of others did not occupy the parallel pathways that they, as individuals, had strived to create; he was not one man with many brains. He was one man with one brain, one seat of his being. But he was more "intelligent" than any man before.
That had been the mistake previous subjects had made, for which they had paid with internal war that began in insanity and ended when molecular warriors stormed the final strongholds of the brain stem and the autonomic functions. The new memories could not be compartmentalized. Too many synaptic pathways were the same for each memory-set, indeed were identical for every human being, and the war for the use of those vast but limited superhighways could not, among more than two minds, ever be settled. Instead the battles spread to secondary routes, byways, and finally paths and country lanes, into the thrumming caves of the heart, the gateway sphincters of gut and glands, the fingers and vocal cords. They led not to wisdom but to spastic death.
Benadek alone had visualized another way, a template for processes he could never truly see. Just as an ignorant man could picture his lymphocytes as tiny octopi eating invading bacterial sharks, thereby auto-stimulating his immune response, so Benadek created, out of the stuff of his own brain cells, new tags that identified neurotransmitter molecules as his own, or as James Wold Bostwick's, or Paula Race Farr's.
He did not, as might a conventionally educated man, distinguish between cholecystokinin molecules digesting food in his gut and the same substance regulating synaptic firings in his brain. He saw how such enzymes served dual functions, separated only by the length of an artery, the threadlike path of a nerve. He did not distinguish synapses' recognition-shapes from identical antigen-receptors on certain very specific "memory" immune cells. Those were subtle convolutions, shaped by molecular charges pulling against each other in infinitely varying but individually constant ways, far too complex for his still-crude resolution. On the level of his body's protein structures, Benadek saw no real difference between a memory, a hormone, or a disease.
How could he keep the foreign bodies, neither destroying nor succumbing to them? Where could he save them, ready for his call, to be integrated as convenient bits and pieces according to his need of them? Benadek considered his brain a massive, diversified gland, his glands as scattered brains, and his immune cellsthat remembered the shapes of thousands, even millions, of antigensas disenfranchised thoughts. Such chemical thoughts were no different from cerebral ones, only slower. They depended for transmittal on the pulse and flow of blood from one part of him to another, from glandular emitter to distant neuronic receptor.
As each rush of foreign information was forced into him by the pumps and micropistons of the restraint chair, Benadek called upon his B-lymphocytes and his tiny neural "endocrine glands." He forced the twisting coils of bases and sugars, the loose- and tightly bound hydroxyls, hydrogen atoms, oxygen and phosphate ions, in the cells of his roiling, surging gut, to accept them. To accept and subtly change them. No longer would antibodylike motes in his blood tag them for ingestion by hungry macrophages, or mark them for subtler destruction by T-cells, for neutralization in a hundred devious ways; instead, the visitors were tagged for delivery to sites far from his vulnerable brain, where they happily penetrated his lesser cells and became part of them.
Love was a vagrant memory. Its ultimate source, said the American entomologist, Anna Reschke, his fourth assimilation, was the heart. He understood that it was not literally so; the part of Dr. Reschke that was now Benadek admitted there was no silly valentine-shaped organ where "love" resided, that the notion was a childish fancy with no basis in fact.
Loveaccording to Jean-Francois Ailloud, a French naturalist of Vietnamese, European and North African ancestry, Benadek's eighth acquisitionwas seated in the liver (or so his emotions insisted). Of course the rational Frenchman Benadek hosted insisted that there was truly no specific seat for any emotion. They resided no more in liver than in bowels or, as the foolish American woman proclaimed, in the heart.
Benadek knew both were right and wrong. No emotion or thought resided in isolated purity within the brain. Heart, liver, gut, and hot, working muscles all supported the vast chemical process of mentation. As his clever cells and raw, unsheathed enzymes routed intruding memories not to his brain but to tiny subcellular glands in his heart-muscle, to dark, mysterious cells in his liver and spleen, to all the slow, secretory parts of his body, they would discover the verity of his visions.
Dispersed and fragmented, the thoughts of his new companions were safe from each other and from Benadek's immune system. While Benadek-thoughts leaped swiftly between tight-woven brain cells, across synaptic gaps so tiny the space between tightly pinched fingers would seem vast, other-thoughts followed the course of blood vessels, their speed regulated by the beat of his heart, and politely queued in bumbling, molecular fashion in his thalamus, hippocampus, and amygdala, to be assimilated, translated and integrated (or rejected) at his discretion. Within him a dozen others lived on, thought, wondered, and partook of the taste of his own thoughts, the aroma of his food, and the contentment of his evacuations. It was a slow life, and placid, but none saw fit to complain, for it was life, not the frozen suspension they had endured unknowingly for two thousand years.
* * *
When Benadek staggered from the memory lab, Teress waited outside, despairing, after almost twenty hours. She flung herself in his arms. "I thought you died," she wailed, looking up into his fatigue-reddened eyes. Even as a deeply buried part of her muttered acerbic, disgusted comments concerning her prideless, undignified performance, its complaints were washed away by relief. Tears flooded her eyes as she realized how much the ill-mannered boy had come to mean to her. As he wrapped her in his arms, she accepted unquestioningly that he was taller than she, that his arms were thicker and sheathed with muscle that she had never noticed before, and that rank maleness replaced the sweet, boyish scent she had come to associate with him.
"When you didn't come out, I thought . . . are you still Benadek?"
"I'm still me," he murmured in her ear, "perhaps more so than ever before."
"Achibol was here twice," she told him. "He's terribly worried."
"Worried, or angry?" he asked, his grin making deep grooves beside his mouth, where before only boyish crinkles would have formed.
"With Master Achibol, who can tell?" she joked as adrenaline dissipated.
"I'll see him soon, but I doubt he'll be happier. I want to talk with him out on the surface, not here."
"Up above? But why?"
"Because it's neutral ground. Down here . . . " Benadek waved his hand lethargically, not wanting to let go of Teress or let her move away. " . . . surrounded by all this, I'm a soul-consuming monster. Up there in the `real' world he'll be able to see me as Benadek again, and berate me as he always has, instead of fearing what I've become."
"I've never thought of Master Achibol as being afraid. But you're righthe is terrified. I hope your plan works."
"It will," Benadek assured her.
"Are you sure you're all right?" she asked again. "You seem different."
"I am different," he agreed, drawing her closer, "and much more than just all right." His hand crept up behind her neck.
Her face was already close, her eyes joined with his, as she rose on tiptoe to meet his lips. "Shut the door," she murmured.
Later, when she awakened entangled limb for limb with him, warm and limp in the aftermath of her failed resolutions, the door was closed. For once, the tiny, critical voice within had nothing to say. Had she still been a cat, she would have purred.
When Benadek awoke, he rediscovered her, and more time passed before they began planning his escape from the underground facility.
During the long periods when Benadek had struggled with the computers, the foreign memories, and himself, Teress had been above ground several times. Ostensibly she checked their back trail to assure that no honches had found it and followed them. In reality, she got out from under the oppressive mass of earth and let her body rhythms adjust once more to sun and moon and stars overhead. She felt the wind and reassured herself that she was not soul-dead as well as buried. When the time came, she would go most of the way with Benadek, then return to fetch Achibol.
He dressed quietly, then kissed her more awkwardly than before. Her shoulders felt cold where he had held her, and she felt suddenly bereft and alone. The small, contemptuous voice inside was no comfort.
Firelight licked at the rudely woven wall of sticks and brush. The wind was flat and steady from the southwest. Achibol approached carefully; the shadow cast by the fire seemed larger than Benadek's should be. Had he grown? The sorcerer swallowed dryly, though physical changes were trivial, compared with what he feared Benadek might have become. But he would soon know. Benadek was unique. If his personality were no longer his own, he could not hide it.
"Master Achibol? Come out of the wind. I've brewed tea." Benadek's familiar inflections were reassuringthere was no trace of ancient accents. The mage circled the windbreak and approached the fire.
Brushwood flames flared and crackled briskly. Benadek's eyes sparkled in the vermilion and gold light. They were not dark and beady, as when he had first met the boybut then, they had not been like that since the first time he had changed, in the swamp. Let him speak. If ancient minds commanded him, they'd not be able to hide. Their arrogance would give them away.
"Well, boy," he assayed, "have you survived intact, as Teress tries endlessly to assure me?"
"I'm still Benadek, Master. But I'm hardly the same. I understand things that were mysteries before."
"Tell me," Achibol commanded quietly, his heart fluttering less fiercely than a moment before.
"I understand what I am, and I know what we must do next,"
"It's still `we,' is it? I was afraid you'd have no use for me any more." Achibol's gruff sarcasm was transparent. Benadek grinned. More of Achibol's doubts fell away before that wide, sunny smile. "Well?" he prompted.
"Well, what?"
"What are you, now that you know all these things? And what must we do?"
"I'm the ultimate adaptation to a mutagenic environmentheredity under the control of mind. I'm what the pure-humans were evolving toward. Mind is the only island of stability in the shifting waters of shape and chemistry."
"Were evolving? Aren't you proof that they still progress?"
"The crisis that forced our evolution is past. Atmospheric ozone is back to normal. Radiation levels are low, and most heavy metals are locked as oxides at the bottom of the seas. The atmosphere is as pure as before man discovered coal. The human race is as stable as it ever has been, and pure-human genes have no selective value. They'll gradually be lostif they're not wiped out by our enemy."
"Indeed, you've learned much," Achibol said, nodding emphatically and pulling on his goatee. "I hadn't thought things through that far. But what enemy? The honches?"
"Honches are symptoms of the planners' failures. Living ancients are orchestrating the campaign of extermination against the pure-humansand against a certain old brown man who's managed to stay alive since nineteen-ninety-three." The grin on Benadek's fire-lit countenance stretched all the way across his narrow face as his master's astonishment grew.
"Even that? You understand that too?" Achibol whispered.
"Not directly, not the pain of it. There were no black men's memories in the lab. I can't know the alienation of being the last of my kind, of seeing the others die, one by one. How could I? But for me, for the pure-humans, there's still hope. If we succeed, such small differences will fade next to the changes I anticipate."
Achibol drew breath to question further, but Benadek forestalled him. "Unless we succeed here, there'll be no future. But your race isn't necessarily more extinct than the `white' one. Being an `American' prejudiced you. When's the last time you heard from Africa?"
"That thought has occurred to me," the old man agreed, first nodding, then angrily shaking his head to clear the blur of undignified tears. "But I doubt the white militarists who took over the plan considered black simples worth designing. What if the only blacks to survive are like you and Teresspure-humans, in danger of extinction?" He shrugged. "At any rate, I am, or was, an American, and my assigned place is here. But you haven't said what you plan for us, right now."
"The ancients must be found," Benadek replied. "They've had two millennia to dig in, so it won't be easy. And then, we've got to neutralize them."
"How will we find them?"
"Through Circe, and the military data banks. That's one reason I took the memories. I had to know enough to ask the right questions. Between me, you, and my `silent partners,' they can't hide forever."
"I wish I could believe those `silent partners' are truly better off now than frozen," Achibol said pensively. "Not that I don't accept your belief, mind you."
"Can you accept that I needed them? Even if you think of them only as soldiers who must die for a cause? You told me I'd have to ask my own questions here, and answer them."
"It will have to be enough."
"One more thing . . ."
"Yes?"
"Circeall Biopsych Threeis failing. Sooner or later, those memories still stored will decay."
"You're right. Perhaps those you've taken are better off than the rest." Achibol got stiffly to his feet. "Well, boy? You can't sit here stargazing forever when there's work to be done."
"The Archmandrite of Vestivol? The Senior Prior of the Reformed Gathering of the One Beginning? The Guardians? The Rite of the Old Believers? Ab, those are fringe cultists and archconservatives. Saphooth is mad even to acknowledge them. What's he thinking of? We've got to put a stop to this." Kaledrin rose to full motator height and in his rush slid directly over his static-free work surface instead of going around it.
The two men glided down empty halls, hesitating at Saphooth's door. It was partly open, which was against the secretive old man's custom. Only the glow of monitor-lights on his ancient printer gave notice that it was not an abandoned storeroom. The shadowed, boxy forms of his simian-adapted furniture loomed like so many crates.
"Of course," Kaledrin thought, an uncomfortable suspicion already forming. A sheet of printed material projected from the machine. "Light," he commanded. As the lights came up, he snatched the sheet free. "He did it again," Kaledrin muttered. With a rattle-plated air of dejection, he handed the paper to Abrovid. "He outflanked us. Old bones has resignedand he didn't even have the grace to appoint me his successor."
"Resigned?"
"Read it for yourself. I should have seen it coming."
"What's SOMAthe `Society of Man, Absolute'?" Abrovid murmured.
"Pan-ecumenical fundamentalists. It's recently become MYTHIC's chief financial backer." He shuddered. "What a fool I've been. I thought it was just Saphooth's greed."
"Saphooth's working for them?" Abrovid asked with a gesture of amazed negation.
"For them? No. Read on. He's their new director. And considering SOMA's financial backing, he's probably still our boss!"
"But what does this mean for MYTHIC? Will they shut us down?"
"Oh, no. They'll fire me and appoint someone more `flexible.' The Board of Trustees will resist, but Saphooth wouldn't have resigned unless he knew he could still control MYTHIC, perhaps more firmly than ever."
"What will you do now?"
Kaledrin tightened his body-plates into a suit of faintly iridescent armor. "I'll fight him."