Gray Matters

deep in the depository seethed a vast network of disembodied minds, locked in endless programmed reveries of love, hate and fear........until, spurred on by a desperate hunger for a long-lost past, one of them rebelled

Hive

The Scanner Sees: unending gun-metal walls; plastic flooring; three DeHartzman Communicators, multifrequency channel finders attached and blinking; and the forward end of the subdistrict memory file. A soft flush of blue has suffused the luminous egg-crate ceiling--the first gentle trace of a dawning day. At the end of the aisle, the sector's community power unit is already humming with life.

Next to the power unit, in the foremost deposit drawer, a solitary cerebromorph has switched off his scanner and floats in voluntary darkness. His number is A-0001-M(637-05-99). His name was Denton "Skeets" Kalbfleischer. Skeets is the senior resident of the depository. He is 12 years old and will remain so forever.

Over in aisle B, an Amco-pak Mark IX maintenance van prowls silently along on pneumatic treads. The Mark IX is a clumsy piece of equipment and economic considerations alone keep it from becoming obsolete. Accordingly, its use is restricted to those sectors established before the Awakening. Maintenance vans are programmed to perform a wide range of mundane chores; the Mark I's clean and polish the aisles each night, the Mark III's tend the power units. Every Amcopak above Mark V is a mechanic, equipped with telescoping arms and pneumatic digits capable of the most intricate and precise manipulations. Mechanically minded depository residents never tire of watching the vans at work and a special scanner channel has been provided to satisfy these vicarious repairmen.

• • •

One aisle-B resident with no interest in the Amco-pak is a former Czechoslovakian motion-picture star housed in deposit drawer number B-0486-F (098-76-04). Classified female (in the advanced sectors, no sex distinctions are made among resident cerebromorphs), Vera Mitlovic spends her time screening old films. Although Center Control considers 20th Century cinema to be frivolous, and thus detrimental to individual spiritual advancement, the old movies are recorded in the memory file and all Vera has to do is check her memory-file index and dial the appropriate code key on the telescript console.

Vera is awake this morning even before reveille serenade (today, the overture to Wagner's Der fliegende Holläander) and dials her first film the moment the memory-file librarian switches on for the day. It is Bohemian Idyl, a Czech romantic comedy starring Vera as a Prague fashion designer who falls in love with a gypsy. Two Center Control regulations for members of her category are neglected: By not checking her memo tapes for a dream playback, she has failed to file the required auditing report; more importantly, for the third day in a row, she will miss the morning meditation exercise.

But Vera doesn't care. With the old film flickering, she is transported beyond the demands of Center Control. Does it matter if the print is in poor condition, the celluloid yellow and scratched? It is like watching her own ghost. The challis skirt lifts and swirls; her long, limber legs gleam with firelight; she dances about the caravan encampment, tempting the fiddlers with her buoyant breasts. And where are those lovely legs today, those youthful breasts? Gone to dust, with only their image preserved; a shadow etched in silver nitrate. Vera's joy is tinged with sadness and regret. If only she had eyes, she would be weeping.

• • •

Three drawers down from where Vera views her melancholy matinee, Obu Itubi, a late-22nd Century Nigerian sculptor, is programming a memory-file entomology tape on the habits of bees. Itubi was the most distinguished member of the school known as the African Renaissance. His work with plastic and steel represents the final flowering of Western humanism, a last gasp of anthropomorphism before (continued on page 112)gray matters(continued from page 100) the machines lulled the world into meditation. His file number is B-0489-M (773-22-99).

• • •

The Amco-pak in aisle B has finished its work on the auxiliary community power unit. A malfunctioning valve has been located and replaced and now the Mark IX sorts and repacks the complex array of tools laid out for the job. A comic business: The Amco-pak is an absent-minded octopus, searching with its many arms for a variety of misplaced gadgets. Scanner viewers are always amused by this clumsy dean-up operation.

The Amco-pak locates the tools; it lumbers up the aisle, retractable arms stored, pneumatic digits at rest, mindlessly treading toward its next assignment. Many depository residents are frankly envious. They feel it is a waste to bestow those miraculous fingers on a machine incapable of appreciating their worth.

• • •

Skeets Kalbfleischer is sleeping late. The reveille serenade has simply been digested into his dream, a stirring sound track for the Hollywood sex fantasies that still occupy his adolescent mind even after a more than 300-year absence from grade-B double features. Skeets is a definite problem for Center Control. On one hand, he is a historic landmark; the very first cerebromorph, the cornerstone of the oldest depository in the system. But, on the other hand, his complete failure to achieve any measure of spiritual progress in this enlightened age following the Awakening is a matter of considerable concern to the auditing commission.

The problem isn't that Skeets is not educated. In the centuries following his operation, he has earned the equivalent of several dozen baccalaureate degrees. He has ten doctorates to his credit. Sealed in his cerebral container from the age of 12, he has been spoon-fed knowledge by whole committees of curious scientists. He is versed in mathematics, languages, the arts; he is an outstanding authority on molecular biology and Ninth Century Hindu cave painting. Learning, programmed on endless reels of magnetic tape, has saturated his brain cells and Skeets spouts answers with the speed and accuracy of a computer. Denton Kalbfleischer is a very successful experiment. One problem only: In this sophisticated age of meditation and spiritual liberation, Skeets still wants to be a cowboy.

• • •

"The superfamily Apoidea, consisting of various social and solitary hymenopterous insects. Observe Apis mellifera, the common honeybee, both industrious and social. This insect lives in a colony consisting of three classes: The majority of the colony are neuters, known commonly as workers; they gather the pollen and build the comb; the female is called the queen; she is the reproducer, the egg layer, and there is only one per colony. The male of the species is called the drone and his is an idle life. The drone's only function is to. ..." Obu Itubi isn't listening to the narrator's voice. He has turned the volume down until the mechanized, monotone drawl is reduced to a murmur faint as the distant humming of the bees. All the more recent memory-file tapes are narrated by computer and the sound tracks have an assembly-line sameness that makes Obu Itubi's flesh crawl. An unpleasant sensation, akin to the phantom pain amputees of an earlier age suffered in the areas of their missing limbs, for Itubi no longer has flesh.

• • •

A bower of evening primroses arches delicately over the lovers' heads, sweetly scenting the late afternoon. (The primroses were made of paper and were dusty from long storage in the property shop.) The slanting rays of an amber sunset gild the features of the handsome young couple. (The lightman was malicious and he had trained his 1000-watt instruments directly into Vera's eyes.) Distant violins blend with the shimmering nocturne of nightingales and crickets. (The musicians were drunk and made rude remarks concerning the leading lady's private life. The birdcalls and insect noises were the work of a pock-marked fat man who whistled into a microphone and rubbed two rosin-covered sticks together.) "My beloved ... my treasure ..." the dark-eyed gypsy croons, while the blushing girl flutters and sighs. (His breath stank of garlic sausage and not even a heavy application of gum arabic kept his toupee from slipping slightly askew.) "Come away with me to the Moravian mountains, my love. I want to take you to the little village where I was born." (The leading man, who spoke Czech with a thick Slavic accent, was actually born in Croatia.) Leaning forward, he cups her radiant face in his hands and kisses her lips as the violins burble and the sunset dies like a smear of raspberry jam on the cyclorama.

• • •

Skeets Kalbfleischer is also a film star of sorts. A special tape composed of ancient newsreels, newspaper clippings and hospital training films is stored in the memory file under the general classification MEDICINE, subheading "Surgery." Skeets has programmed the tape several times, out of the same morbid curiosity that once caused men to peek under their own bandages.

The film is a history of mankind's first successful cerebrectomy. It tells the story of a 12-year-old boy named Denton Kalbfleischer, who was returning home with his parents to Joliet, Illinois, from a Christmas skiing vacation in Vail, Colorado. While circling O'Hare Field in a holding pattern prior to landing, his jetliner was apparently hit by lightning. The resulting crash was, at that time, the worst air disaster in aviation history.

Over 500 people were killed, many of them on the ground, as bits of molten 747 rained down on East Cicero like a meteor shower. And when, amid the din of sirens, a fireman found Skeets's broken body heaped on a curbside pile of rubble, it was at first assumed that he was a neighborhood boy injured by falling debris. Only many hours later, during a check of the passenger lists, was his correct identity discovered.

The newspapers, of course, had a field day. Banner headlines proclaimed an "Xmas Miracle" and a swarm of reporters descended like encircling vultures on the Kalbfleischers' Joliet home to interview the maid, the neighbors, the postman, Skeets's sixth-grade teacher--anyone at all with even the vaguest connection to "that courageous, freckle-faced kid fighting for his life on the third floor of Cook County Hospital." Skeets's parents, Dr. and Mrs. Harold Kalbfleischer, had been killed in the crash, but home movies the family had taken the summer before at Narragansett, Rhode Island, were shown in color on all the major television networks--Skeets and his dad playing catch on the beach.

Newsreel cameramen stalked the corridors of the hospital, ambushing unwary doctors for filmed, firsthand reports and occasionally sneaking past the security guards for a chance at valuable footage of poor Skeets, so savagely mangled that his body could not tolerate the pressure of an ordinary hospital bed, floating like a mummified Hindu levitation artist on a cushion of compressed air. Although, for the benefit of the press, the hospital staff remained cheerfully optimistic, in private, Skeets's doctors held out little hope for recovery. Virtually every major bone was fractured, arms and legs shattered, the spinal vertebrae crushed and disconnected, like a string of broken beads; all of the internal organs were ruptured and hemorrhaging; rib fragments punctured both lungs: Even considering the recent advances in the field of organ transplants, surgical teams across the nation agreed the case was hopeless. In order to save Skeets, they would have to rebuild him from scratch.

A Hollywood film, late in the second reel, would call in a handsome young specialist for a delicate, last-minute operation: happy ending; Skeets lives to play football again and the successful surgeon (continued on page 218)gray matters(continued from page 112) gets the bosomy, blonde night nurse with the heart of gold. Reality is more prosaic: The memory-file program cuts to an old video tape made at the medical laboratory at the Space Center in Houston, where the mechanical narrator introduces a NASA engineer. Dr. Frank E. Sayre, Jr. Dr. Sayre has thinning hair, combed straight back, and wears bifocals. For the past five years, he has been engaged in special research dealing with the problem of space environment. It is Dr. Sayre's contention that man's body is a liability on a space mission. It must be supplied with oxygen, shielded from extreme temperature variation and radioactivity and provided with food, not to mention the nasty business of waste removal. All this requires complex, weighty equipment.

"Weight is a critical factor in the success of these missions," Dr. Sayre says, nervously toying with his slide-rule tie clasp. "Now, it always seemed to me that going to all this expense and trouble to accommodate the human body on a space flight was putting the cart before the horse, if you understand my meaning." Dr. Sayre clears his throat and continues in a soft, sugar-cured Tidelands accent: "The only essential part of a man, the part that can't be duplicated mechanically in a spacecraft, is his brain. The rest is simply excess baggage. I approached the problem from the point of view of an engineer. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could find some way to integrate a man's brain with the control system of a space vehicle and leave all that other junk at home in the deepfreeze? It would make long-range manned space probes, something on the order of a trip to Pluto, say, feasible right now, today, instead of in a hundred years or so, as is currently predicted."

The narration resumes at this point to explain how Dr. Sayre was inspired by the work of a team of Russian scientists who successfully grafted the head of one dog onto the body of another. Using similar surgical techniques, Dr. Sayre was busy for the next few years, scooping out the brains of a zooful of rhesus monkeys. The primitive equipment he was using grew ever more refined as his Government research grants increased; and by the time the film was made, he had amassed over $500,000 worth in the corner of his lab. Although this jumble of tubing and circuitry looks quite haphazard and comical when compared with the sleek, efficient depositories into which it evolved, the essential mechanism remains the same. In Dr. Sayre's day, it resembled nothing more than a pet-shop fish tank. He is shown in the film posing with a big smile beside this device. Inside, floating in the electrolytic solution, is something that looks like a pinkish-gray jellyfish. This is the brain of George, a nine-year-old orangutan, which, according to the encephalograph, was still alive 16 months after Dr. Sayre wheeled his great orange-haired body to the incinerator.

A phone call from a colleague in Chicago brought the case of Denton Kalb-fleischer to Dr. Sayre's attention. The boy was very near death and, as there seemed to be no living relatives around to object, perhaps the hospital staff might be willing to attempt a radical experiment. Negotiations were conducted and that same evening Dr. Sayre and all his apparatus were on board a northbound plane. Inside 24 hours, George had a roommate in the fish tank.

The newspapers were told that Skeets had died and the reporters were all there when his body was buried in the family plot. It was a closed-coffin funeral; the official press release mentioned a scout uniform with merit badges and a beloved fielder's mitt under the pale, folded hands, but these were lies designed to satisfy a sentimental public. After the operation, the body was wrapped in a black-plastic bag and sent to its final rest with the tracheotomy tubes still in place and the skull open like an empty porcelain soup tureen.

A color film of the operation was secretly placed in the hospital archives for the elucidation of future surgeons. Shots of the shaved scalp peeled forward like a bathing cap and of surgical saws neatly carving the skull are especially vivid; but, unfortunately, a section of the print was damaged at the point where a vacuum pump lifts the brain intact, the enveloping meninges untorn, and cuts from other, later operations had to be spliced into the memory-file tape. Because a more sophisticated technique was then employed, certain concessions were made and the narrator politely apologizes for the slight lapse in chronological accuracy.

After the operation, Skeets's brain remained incognito for almost two years in Dr. Sayre's Houston laboratory, a lump of gray matter distinguishable from the other in the tank only by the added number of wrinkles on its convoluted surface. NASA was no longer interested in the experiment once Federal funds were cut back in an election-year Congressional economy drive, and Dr. Sayre kept the brains around more or less as pets. Skeets would have been doomed to this limbo forever if an overanxious hunter hadn't mistaken the balding scientist for a mule deer while he was out bird watching early one fine fall morning. After the funeral, his widow came across an unpublished notebook among the papers on his desk. It was a day-to-day record of Skeets's progress following the operation. Mrs. Sayre instinctively knew this was the instrument that would not only save her late husband's name from obscurity but handsomely endow his meager estate as well.

When the news broke, as a cover story in Life, public reaction was immediate. Panels of clergymen convened to discuss the ethics of such operations. The Bar Association appointed a special commission to study the legal rights of cere-bromorphs. The A.M.A. got in on the action by condemning unauthorized experimentation on hospital patients. Across the country, there were hundreds of volunteers for cerebrectomy. Many of these individuals were already signed up to have their bodies frozen in liquid oxygen after death. Now they wanted to place all bets on a sure thing. Enterprising morticians modified their facilities and advertised what were soon to become the world's first depositories.

As for Skeets: Mrs. Sayre turned down a very generous offer from a traveling circus and donated him to Johns Hopkins, her husband's alma mater. There he spent the next 23 years as a curiosity, a prize specimen gathering dust in a graduate school laboratory, until advancing technology at last provided the elaborate mechanism to put him again in touch with the outside world. The historic moment when the Bell Laboratory technicians hooked Skeets up to Dr. DeHartzman's ingenious neural communicator was televised internationally and portions of the preserved video tape provide a fine ending for the memory-file presentation. In keeping with the occasion, the president of the university had prepared a statement clearly intended to live forever: "Mankind proudly welcomes back the intrepid voyager into the unknown." But history is not so easily juggled and it is Skeets's answer that is remembered, not the president's eloquent words. There was a crackle of static on the loud-speaker system as the boy got used to his new, computerized, electric vocal cords and then, in a smooth, machine monotone, asked, "What time is breakfast?"

So ends memory-file tape number M109-36S. It documents the world's first cerebrectomy in an entertaining yet educational manner but omits the most significant part of Skeets Kalbfleischer's incredible story. There is no mention of the 25 years Skeets spent alone in darkness. Not one word to describe the explosive holocaust in which his dreams were born, the instant of absolute terror when the 747 disintegrated in a ball of flame and he was torn loose from his fastened seat belt, his clothing and hair, even the comic book he was reading, ignited by the blast that sent him tumbling down through miles of open sky like a shooting star. It was the beginning of a nightmare a quarter century long.

• • •

Obu Itubi is a bee; or almost, anyway, for the memory-file tape is one of a recent series that includes a separate track for each of the senses. Itubi can smell the heat and the sweet, dusty pollen; he can feel the jostling of his busy neighbors, the furred armor of their pulsing abdomens. The drone of thousands of transparent wings is programmed into his auditory nerve. His is a bee's-eye view of the hive: the perfect geometric succession of hexagonal cells; the interlinked pattern of the comb; membranous, waxen walls. To his sculptor's sensibility, it seems pure poetry in the use of materials--nature's harmony, the ultimate technology. Here is real elegance in engineering, a refinement sadly lacking in this age of contemplation. Moreover, the whole unit is organic. Itubi is awed.

As the tape progresses, Itubi happily participates in the worker's directional waggle dance; he gathers pollen, produces honey and joins with thousands of others in the heat of midday to fan his wings and keep the delicate wax structures from melting. He is proud of his six clinging legs, the sensitive, jointed antennae, the potent stinger. He feels lost and empty when the tape comes to an end and he is no longer a bee.

And yet, transmission fade-out is something Itubi has always enjoyed. First, there is the image (in this case, the busy swarm of Apis mellifera) flooding his consciousness like sunlight, and then, with only the briefest command from the telescript console, it's gone--the whole universe of thought receding into a tiny pin point in the frontal lobe. It hovers for a moment, a candle flame in the eternal night, very serene and distant. The final flickering seems almost an invitation: Follow me, follow me. ... Itubi wonders how many men have lingered in the evening at the edge of a lonely marsh to watch the flitting light of the will-o'-the-wisp. At such times, liberation seems almost possible. But at the very instant of the soul's release, the candle is snuffed and you are left alone in the dark.

• • •

Vera Mitlovic is deep in a celluloid dreamland, the fashion designer back at her drawing board, a faraway look in her violet eyes as the old film drowns in a climactic violin whirlpool. "All lost," the disembodied actress muses, consulting the index for the number of yet another film. Not any film this time, though it is usually Vera's habit to choose her entertainment by whim and random selection, but her very first, made in Vienna when she was six. The great Klimpt was directing and, although she had only a bit part, the magnificent ballroom scenes never fail to lift her spirits and she can think of no more effective antidote for melancholy than her own brief appearance in pigtails and pinafore.

She finds the correct code key for The Golden Epoch and activates the telescript console. To Vera, this device is one of the few gay toys in her spiritless, mechanical universe. Think of a number and, like rubbing a magic lantern, within seconds a memory-file tape materializes. However, this time, when her wish doesn't come true, she is puzzled. Can there have been a breakdown in the system? She repeats the number, pausing between each digit so there will be no mistake. Again, nothing happens.

This is alarming. The depository system functions automatically, although breakdowns are not unknown. Precise emergency procedures and periodic drills ensure the alertness of the residents. Vera was at the movies during drill and now finds that she is helpless in the face of actual crisis.

The clear, musical clarion of a DeHartzman Communicator is a sound as reassuring as the nick-of-time cavalry bugle call when the wagon train is surrounded by rampaging Sioux. A silent wind sweeps the prairie. Attention ... Attention. ... The mood shifts; the mechanical voice has the moronic, robot enthusiasm of a radio disc jockey. Center control is temporarily interrupting your thoughts to communicate an awareness reminder from the auditing commission. ... stand by. ...

(B-0486... It has now been three days since you last participated in the morning meditation exercise or filed an auditing report. ... this is a violation of sections a15 and c9 of regulation number 35-095. ... in accordance with the mandate of center control, we are disconnecting your memory-file hookup until such time as you are willing to fulfill the obligations of your category. ... be aware of your duties. ...)

End Transmission.

Vera Mitlovic is furious. Another move in the game--the obvious, machine-tooled move. She remembers ticktacktoe: 20th Century scientists taught their primitive Univacs to play this kindergarten game years before they were able to program complex chess gambits. And how those old machines loved it! Vacuum tubes aglow, rectifiers humming, they paraded their invincible Xs out across the graph, winning all encounters if given the first move, tying the rest. It pleases Vera to think of the proud Univac--defeating the best scientific minds of the age at a child's game, victorious, until the mathematicians pulled the plug and went home for lunch.

But this time, the plug has been pulled on Vera. She is tempted to try the telescript console one more time but resists, not wanting to give those transistorized swine in the auditing commission the pleasure of knowing her desperation. She still has her fierce pride. She didn't leave that on the operating table.

• • •

Skeets Kalbfleischer is preparing an auditing report. He replays the memo tape of his dream twice, editing those portions that appear to have no significance. As much as he enjoys the long blimp ride with a gondola full of starlets or his own erotic version of Sleeping Beauty, where he awakens the princess with something more emphatic than a kiss, he erases these reveries from the tape without hesitation. Skeets is interested only in his nightmares.

This particular nocturnal horror is nothing new. He has suffered through it many times in the past, but, because of its brevity, he has never before attempted an analysis for the auditing commission. Not that it is very difficult to trace the origins of the dream: Even after a 50-year lapse, Skeets is able to list the memory-file tapes that are the source material for his terror.

He viewed them originally during his studies of Eastern art. The first he programmed by mistake, thinking he was going to see a Cambodian temple dance; its title, Monkey-Moon Ceremony, was misleading. The tape actually dealt with a ceremonial banquet peculiar to the highland regions of Laos and Cambodia. For the first course, a smooth, stone table several inches thick, with a perfect round aperture cut through the center, is brought into the banquet hall. The guests seat themselves, arranging their saffron robes and bowing with mannered formality. Soon, a bronze gong sounds and the servants bring in a live monkey, limbs trussed in an attitude of prayer. The monkey is placed under the stone table with the top of its head protruding through the opening in the center. The servants complete their arrangements, providing each guest with a long silver spoon. When all is ready, the host gives a curt nod and his chief retainer unsheathes a gleaming double-edged short-sword and, leaning forward, slices off the top of the monkey's skull as easily as he would uncap a soft-boiled egg. A chattering gibberish continues underneath the table as the dinner guests, each in his turn, sample the monkey's brain. There is just enough for everyone to have a taste. Happy smiles all around attest to the excellence of the dish. The host claps his hands and calls loudly for the soup.

The second tape Skeets programmed deliberately, after searching through the index for the correct code key, his curiosity morbidly inflamed. He found a Chinese variation of the same culinary eccentricity. A different place setting is used: Along with each set of chopsticks, a small golden mallet is provided. The monkey is brought to the table confined in a cage and passes among the guests, who reach between the bars and give the cowering animal a discreet tap with the mallet. The cage is circulated many times and, as the blows are never strong enough to stun, the monkey continues to voice his complaints in a high-pitched wail that greatly amuses the worthy Oriental gentlemen.

At last it is over; the dazed monkey is removed from the cage, a sharp knife skins away his scalp and the shattered skull is picked apart piece by piece, in a manner that reminds Skeets of the way he used to deal with hard-boiled eggs.

It is this similarity to eating eggs that bothers Skeets. He remembers his mother serving them to him at breakfast, standing upright in little painted cups. He dipped fingers of buttered toast into the yolk and ate the whites with his baby spoon. When he finished, the hollow shell looked clean and bleached, like a skull. He mentions this on the auditing report as a prelude to his dream.

The dream itself is quite simple: Skeets is looking through the scanner. He sees an Amco-pak maintenance van approaching down the aisle, silently gliding past the anonymous, pale-blue facade of the depository. The machine stops in front of his deposit drawer and removes his cerebral container without a word. Somehow, Skeets is able to watch through the scanner as the Amco-pak carries him out of the sector into a region that is totally unfamiliar.

Stainless-steel doors slide open and Skeets is taken into a large chamber and set on a feast table in front of 12 jolly diners, all of whom look like Humpty Dumpty. They are speaking Chinese! The Amco-pak opens the lid of the cerebral container and, without further ceremony, the bizarre Mother Goose figures proceed to dip slices of buttered toast into the frontal lobe of poor Skeets. "Yum-yum," they cry, in Nanking dialect. Skeets watches it all, until there is nothing left of him but a few crumbs of gray matter floating on the oily surface of the electrolytic solution. He has had this dream at least once a week for the past 50 years.

Drone

The aisles are quiet. Only the most determined residents still tune to their scanners, waiting patiently for something to happen. It is rumored that certain of the advanced sectors use neither scanners nor communicators (blinded by their own satori, as the saying goes). In the subdistrict, such total isolation would be unthinkable. Most residents are satisfied with the empty aisles. They would be lost without the squat, lead-covered power units and accompanying trio of DeHartzman Communicators, radar domes aglow and multifrequency channel finders blinking like beacons.

In aisle B, Obu Itubi consults the memory-file index, looking for a recent tape on spiders. He is interested in the dynamics of web construction and anticipates the pleasures of spinning silk and weaving intricate patterns. The warning tone of a DeHartzman Communicator interrupts his quiet study.

Attention. ... There is a top-priority incoming communication originating from center control. ... all circuits will open automatically in ten seconds. ... stand by. ...

(Itubi thinks of herald trumpets. Ten seconds for proper spiritual attitudes; the attentive acolyte awaits the go-ahead signal. ...)

Beep. ...

Hello.

Good Morning, B-0489, we trust that you spent a peaceful night and have all your thoughts in harmony.

Everything is as I would wish it.

Good. we are communicating with you, B-0489, to announce that your present auditor has been elevated to 64 degrees of understanding and transferred to level III. We are sure you will celebrate his success joyfully.

The wise man learns the Way by following the path of those who have gone before.

Yes, but the wise man must also remember that there exists for him but one path that is true. admiration for others never misleads the wise man into taking a wrong turn. B-0489, you have been assigned a new auditor. He has spent several weeks studying your tapes and, rather than waste time with further formalities, let us connect you with him immediately. ...

All greetings, B-0489. Before we begin, are there any questions you would like to ask?

It is the fool who speaks; the wise man listens.

Very true, B-0489, so if you'll listen now, I'll simplify the introductions. My tapes are on record in the memory file, code key Y41-AK9-55. I invite your investigation of them at any time. That should satisfy all social obligations.

Yes.

Then let's get down to business. If it agrees with you, we'll maintain the same auditing schedule you had in the past. My predecessor made a practice of in frequent communication--

To permit independent study and encourage--

We shall abandon that practice. The auditing schedule will be followed exactly. Sessions begin promptly. Any time lapse will result in additional assignments. Do you understand?

Yes.

Good. Before we end transmission, I'd like to clear up a few points with you; first, I notice you've been programming memory-file tapes almost at random. There is no logic to your selections. You don't seem to follow any regular pattern of study. Six months ago, you spent your time listening to music; recently, you screen only tapes dealing with insect behavior. Is there a reason for this?

The wise man strives to keep an open mind and--

You can save the double talk! I don't care to hear your clever explanations. I want you to know that further erratic behavior will not be tolerated. The memory file is not a frivolous plaything designed for your personal amusement. You forget, B-0489, you're no longer a famous artist. All that is gone forever. You are simply a resident cerebromorph, on file in the lowest level of the depository system. Learn to function within the system. One of the obligations of your category is to obey all social regulations faithfully. One cannot possibly hope to shed the illusions of identity without first accepting the responsibilities of society.

Thank you for reminding me. The voyager into the unknown frequently loses his way.

B-0489, I compliment you on your flattery. It undoubtedly impresses Center Control and puts you in good favor with the authorities. But let me remind you that I am familiar with your tapes. So don't waste the honeyed words. Our first appointment is scheduled for tomorrow at 0019. I trust that will give you sufficient time to get your thoughts in order. Remember to be prompt. End transmission. (Click)

• • •

Vera Mitlovic hated being alone. Even as a young girl centuries ago, she detested aimless walks in the rain or afternoons in quiet museums or any of the other solitary pleasures to which romantic youth is traditionally disposed. She craved a continuous audience; surrounded by constant admirers, she was splendid, she dazzled and charmed; alone, without her make-up, she felt lost and afraid, like any confused chameleon unable to revert to its original hue. She faced a stranger in the wardrobe mirror; the eyes that stared back provided no clue, they were bright with the sham glitter of costume jewelry.

So Vera played various roles, on camera and off, before a succession of accidental friends, casual lovers and supernumerary husbands. She took her cues from the moment; as a young star in Prague, she was a properly zealous socialist artist, bright, literate and opinionated. She became an instant patriot the night of the Cannes Film Festival, when she rose in her seat to denounce the Russian intervention and brought tears to the eyes of everyone present, including the French producer who only a half hour earlier had offered a lucrative five-year contract if she would defect. For ten years the reigning sex queen on the Continent, she was photographed frequently wearing only a pastel mink, owned a different color Rolls for each day of the week and, when asked about diamonds, said that she preferred the big ones, naturally. In her 40s, her voice dropped an octave, she abandoned films for a stage career, played Medea at Epidaurus, Lady Macbeth at Stratford, became the darling of the homosexual set and tried suicide twice but was only moderately successful. By the time her hair turned white, Vera was ensconced in international society; at 55, she married a doddering Italian nobleman who responded to her enduring sexual ferocity with an abrupt coronary before the honeymoon was six days old. Her finest role was that of the majestic widow. She was every inch a quattrocento duchess; the entrance to her palazzo overlooking the Arno was surmounted by the pawnshop escutcheon of the Medici. She kept a villa in Fiesole to house her collection of exotic animals and startled the complacent Florentines by parading under the arcade along the Piazza della Repubblica with two bewigged blacks holding her brocade train, a baboon straining on one golden leash, an ocelot on another and her whole scandalous retinue of handsome young men chattering at her elbow in a variety of tongues.

As Vera grew older, her fear of being alone developed into mania. Her house overflowed with guests; the young man of the moment was always there to turn down the sheets at night; like the Sun King, she employed special servants to assist her onto a fur-lined toilet seat. Secretaries arranged her day to prevent any chance of privacy. Death, of course, remained the ultimate solitude, and the bulk of the ducal fortune was expended to forestall that eventuality. There were periodic trips to Switzerland for rejuvenating monkey-gland injections; cosmeticians ironed away wrinkles, inserted silicone into sagging breasts and tucked a series of chins up somewhere behind her ears; when one heart failed, a team of surgeons rushed in to replace it with another; collapsed veins were reinforced with plastic tubing; a gangrenous hand was removed and a mechanical silver replica from Van Cleef & Arpels set a fashion trend that started hundreds of women throughout the world clamoring for amputation.

When the third millennium was 30 years old, Vera celebrated her 100th birthday, a plumber's miracle of transplanted organs and artificial limbs. She delighted her guests by eating a piece of cake and drinking three glasses of champagne. For the past 15 years, Vera had been fed intravenously, after advanced cancer necessitated the removal of her entire intestinal tract. Recently, the surgeons inserted a highly serviceable latex receptacle that emptied through a valve in her navel and was flushed clean each month with liquid detergent. "Now I can eat and eat and never get fat," she laughingly told her partner as the orchestra began another tango. Dancing was no problem for Vera; her arthritic, outmoded joints had long since been supplanted by efficient, self-lubricating nylon hinges. She was as limber as a teenager.

It seemed to Vera that she would live forever; the party would go on without end. Certainly, she was durable enough. Her lungs were still sound and even if they gave out, an ingenious battery-powered oxygenator was soon to be mass-produced by the same South African firm that successfully marketed the first portable mechanical kidney. It was reassuring to know that there was no shortage of replacement parts.

Also, luck seemed to be on Vera's side. When the 30-minute Thermonuclear War of 1996 atomized every major city in North America and Asia and girdled the earth with radioactive clouds that reduced the populations of Europe and the Near East by two thirds, Vera was safely in Santiago de Chile on a round-the-world tour. Even the financial chaos that followed left her unscathed. Some years earlier, she had reinvested all her money in South American and African holdings and she watched her fortune triple as those continents rose to world dominance in the first decade of the 21st Century. In the long run, Vera felt the war had done a lot of good. Certainly, Europe seemed much nicer now that it wasn't so crowded: no more cameraladen Americans jamming the streets. And the way the old buildings glowed in the dark was really romantic. The rash of two-headed babies was unfortunate, but the United Nations Euthanasia Corps (UNEC) soon eliminated the problem and the possibility of bearing monsters was a good incentive for population control. All in all, the world was much improved, a fine place in which to live forever.

But Vera's plans for eternal life were upset one morning when her doctor made his weekly medical report. Her health was fine. Her body could be maintained mechanically for an indefinite time. The trouble was, in spite of everything, the old woman was fast approaching senility. It seemed a shame, for certain recent advances in geriatric endocrinology would eventually eliminate the problem. But treatment had to be started in middle age. If only she were 50 years younger. A real pity, to watch the mind deteriorate. Of course, there was an alternative, a bit drastic, perhaps, but--

"Anything," Vera pleaded. The doctor recommended cerebrectomy.

• • •

Deep within the complexity of Center Control--a labyrinth of microcircuits, conductors, directional transmitters, relay switches and transistors occupying almost a square mile at the heart of the depository system--a special series of computer banks (ordinarily assigned to the regulation of an entire subdistrict) is considering the problem of Skeets Kalbfleischer. Because of his symbolic importance, it is intolerable that he still resides on the lowest level of the system. Recent analysis shows that the elevation of mankind's original cerebromorph will have profound spiritual results. The Ascension of Jesus Christ and the Enlightenment of Gautama Siddhartha are mentioned as comparable transcendental events.

Skeets is not uncooperative. For 250 years, he has diligently followed every study program outlined for him by Center Control. He faithfully participates in the meditation exercise each morning. He hasn't filed a late auditing report in nearly a century. But, in spite of this exemplary behavior, he still registers close to 100 on the ego scale each time a diagnosis is made. Deep in his subconscious, he prefers riding the range and packing a six gun to fasting, navel contemplation and walking on water. As far as he is concerned, one man's karma is another man's dharma.

• • •

Obu Itubi remembers the bee: 1,000,000 identical larvae pupating within the privacy of their waxen cells; 1,000,000 identical dreams. All share a common destiny--all but a dozen or so, selected at random by the workers in charge of the hatchery cells. These fortunate few are fortified with an infusion of royal jelly, an extract that transforms any ordinary larva into a queen: instant royalty. And the new queen is wise in the ways of monarchs from the moment of her birth. Her first official act is political assassination. Even before her wings have dried, the newly hatched queen seeks out the cells of potential rivals and quickly stings them to death while they drift in embryonic sleep.

A sweet thought: Obu Itubi would like to be so chosen. He imagines an Amco-pak Mark X adding some magic elixir to the electrolytic solution in his cerebral container and emerging from the depository a king--all-powerful and absolute. He would roam the aisles until he found the deposit drawer containing his new auditor. Let the bastard enjoy his spiritual superiority while he has the chance, Itubi thinks. My triumph will be complete when I puncture the sanctity of his computerized dreams and skewer him like a shish kabob on the tip of my envenomed blade. A fitting final lesson in the illusion of identity.

• • •

A Unistat Magnetic Calculator, Series 3000, assigned to the Census Division of Center Control, has discovered an error so incredible that the machine suspects a short circuit and turns itself in for an overhaul and parts checkup. But Maintenance and Repair can find nothing amiss and a double check by the Census Division verifies the Unistat's findings: A resident of level I (the lowest in the system) has been misfiled.

For a time, it seems this alarming discovery will necessitate a review of the entire filing system; any calculator error is considered inexcusable by Center Control and an order consigning the Unistat Series 3000 to the junk heap is immediately issued. The controversial Series 4000A, which has languished on the drawing boards for 75 years, is hurried into production.

Although Skeets Kalbfleischer has not been misfiled, all of this turmoil is connected with him. In his auditor's opinion, Skeets's failure to advance spiritually is the result of being trapped in eternal adolescence. His fantasies are purely masturbatory, his phobias the result of puberty. In short, the boy needs to get laid.

Skeets, of course, has already experienced orgasm. It can be induced electronically in the cerebral container at the flip of a switch. Special electrodes are wired to the appropriate nerve endings; a resident has only to dial the corresponding code key on his telescript console. Technology has improved upon nature; a biological orgasm lasts a few seconds; the electronic version continues until the current is switched off.

Acting on the advice of his auditor, Skeets once endured a climax lasting almost three days--shock treatment to forever satisfy the voracious sexual demands of his adolescent mind. The experiment was a failure. Skeets enjoyed the pornographic memory-file tapes, but all in all, it was a run-of-the-mill wet dream, spontaneity and imagination being preferable to long-distance mileage.

The auditing commission is undaunted. Mere sensation obviously isn't the answer; what the boy needs is actual experience: his own private love affair. An easy matter to arrange: A two-party memory merge requires only the most basic rewiring, nothing like the multiple hookups needed for more sophisticated group experience. The only problem is locating the correct partner. The Census Division is asked to find a resident female, born in the mid-20th Century, who has had sexual relations with a 12-year-old boy.

The 20th Century has the lowest population in the depository system and it takes a Unistat 4000A less than an hour to run through all the female tapes. It comes up with the numbers of nearly 50 women who amused themselves with long-dead delivery boys and three ex-schoolteachers who, centuries before, seduced precocious students in coatrooms and under desks. None of these will do. They were all middle-aged (some nearly 60) when they developed a taste for prepubescence and it is feared the age discrepancy might prove too traumatic for Skeets. In order to satisfy the auditors, the female merge partner has to be nearly the same age as the boy, an eager virgin with undeveloped breasts and slim, athletic hips, seasoned by nothing stronger than previous puppy love.

The Unistat 4000A tries again and draws a blank. The Census Division recommends an early--21st Century female; increased depository population allows for a wider choice and, owing to the liberal mores of the age, a 12-year-old without sexual experience is a rarity. Again, the auditors say no. The time difference is too great; memories are liable to be disparate and the resulting merge would seem more like fantasy than reality. What Skeets needs is a strong dose of reality.

The auditing commission is insistent. Top priority must be given the Kalbfleischer affair. Center Control is firmly behind the project and the methodical examination of all possible channels is officially encouraged. It is suggested to the Deltron Unistat Coordinator (a machine whose singular lack of humor and fanatic concern for detail make it the most efficient director of census in over a century) that a cross-reference check with the tapes of other divisions might prove productive. The Unistat goes to work immediately and it is then, while running through a routine batch of old auditing reports, that a Series 4000A makes the astonishing discovery about the misfiled brain. Sometime late in the 22nd Century, when the last private depositories were incorporated, the brain of a mid-20th Century cinema actress was inadvertently misfiled.

• • •

To throw the auditing commission off track, in case it should be monitoring his telescript console, Obu Itubi submits a study plan along with his new batch of memory-file requests. The plan includes an elaborate apology for his unfortunate deviation, together with a resolution to overcome a basic prejudice against machines. As part of his program for achieving tolerance and understanding, Itubi requests the complete plans and wiring diagrams for all of the Amco-pak series above Mark V. If he can learn to appreciate the complexities of even a simple machine like the Amco-pak, Itubi is certain it won't be long before he is filled with admiration for his cybernetic superiors.

• • •

Memory merge: The term has always disgusted Vera Mitlovic. There is something repulsive about the blend of mechanics and sentiment. Vera remembers certain lovers (handfuls of ashes in lonely marble urns), drooling, impossible romantics, who interpreted a few minutes of pleasant friction and the discharge of a tablespoon of semen as something cosmic, a union of souls. How had she ever endured such fools? In her prime, Vera had been an accomplished sexual athlete and if she screamed a bit during orgasm, it wasn't in celebration of the primordial, pagan pieties. She paid no homage to the dark gods of the blood. What she craved was technique and innovation. She much preferred the skillful application of whip and harness to the attentions of any man who felt his penis was an extension of the infinite. In fact, of all the young gallants who showed up at her dressing room with expensive bouquets and elegant flattery, the one she remembers best is a walleyed count who lashed her naked breasts with his gift offering of long-stemmed roses.

So, if Vera receives the news of her impending memory merge with something less than elation, it is because she is satisfied with the past as she lived it. What need has she for a metaphysical love affair? Her own recollections are sufficiently erotic (the stinging kiss of the thorns, her second husband's playful habit of sharing her with his great Dane) and, if she desires immediate satisfaction, she can always dial for an orgasm, any time, night or day.

• • •

Skeets Kalbfleischer is preparing for his first date. Centuries before, when he had hair to comb and teeth to brush, he would have forestalled his nervousness in front of the bathroom mirror, plastering his cowlick down with Vaseline and water, polishing his smile and mentholating his breath. There would have been difficult Windsor knots to be tied and retied until the ends of the unfamiliar four-in-hand hung exactly even; shoes would have to be flawlessly shined, fingernails cleaned, pants pressed, a million trivial details to make the time go faster. But, alone in the eternity of his cerebral container, Skeets is without armpits to deodorize or acne to conceal; he is trapped, like the Titans in Tartarus, in a world where time has ceased to exist.

• • •

The blueprints for the Amco-pak series come through without difficulty. Itubi is pleased: The auditing commission must be relishing his contrition--another soul saved; score one more point for technology. Somewhere, an unknown calculator adds his name to the list, a cipher among ciphers. Itubi is unconcerned. Let the auditors enjoy their false triumph; what he wants are the blueprints.

They are exact, detailed plans, reproduced three-dimensionally on the memory-file tape. The diagrams and scale drawings seem almost to float in Itubi's consciousness like models spun from fine, glowing wire: a cobweb designed by an electrical engineer. He is able to view the plans in the round; he can study them from any angle--from above, the sides, underneath. His early training as a machinist (a part of his boyhood he had always resented) now does him yeoman's service. The complexities of the Amcopak are easily unraveled. In less than an hour, Itubi has committed the plans to memory.

• • •

Kalbfleischer? Kalbfleischer? What sort of name is that? Vera Mitlovic is positive it sounds Jewish. A rich American Jew; they were trying to humiliate her. Once before, advised by her auditor, she underwent not a merge but a simple memory transfer. It was felt that maternity would be a beneficial experience for her (all of her marriages and affairs were barren), so she experienced prerecorded childbirth. But Vera was in labor for over 30 hours; the delivery was a nightmare of forceps and clamps. As instruments of torture, not even the racks and wheels produced during the Inquisition could rival that hideous table, with its fiendish straps and stirrups. Now they add insult to injury by preparing this merge with a Jew. Somehow, Vera will persevere. She'd lived through worse. It might even prove a diverting novelty, like a Chinese or a black. Certainly, it will be better than being alone.

• • •

Obu Itubi is ready at last. The moment for action has come. Without ending his original transmission, he simultaneously submits three random memory-file requests. The warning light blinks on and off. He ignores it and activates his communicator antenna. The light is blinking faster now. Itubi is opening all circuits: The memory-tape center clicks on; a distant humming in his guts; reels spinning, feedback eliminator up to full; magnetic relay-transfer switch to the on position; photon-oscillator near the danger point; the warning light goes berserk as all systems function and Itubi is alive, alive. ...

• • •

Like a prize-fight manager at ringside, Skeets Kalbfleischer's auditor is hurriedly giving last-minute advice. He warns the boy of the ephemeral nature of induced memory merge; although the phenomenon in many ways resembles a dream, it registers in the conscious mind as actual experience. A sublime process, the auditor concludes, a commingling of spirits beyond the wildest speculations of all the poets in history. Aside from the miracle of cerebrectomy, it is technology's finest gift to mankind. Skeets pays little attention to this rhetoric; he is waiting, filled with apprehension, like a condemned man on the gallows trap, for the precise moment when Center Control completes the necessary rewiring and plugs him into a new world.

• • •

Warning

Circuit Overload

Warning

Circuit Overload

Warning

Circuit Overload

• • •

Vera Mitlovic emerges from the whirlwind mounted on a chestnut mare named Chi-Chi. The morning fog has lifted and the horse's damp flanks steam slightly in the sunlight. Chi-Chi was seven years old the summer of Vera's 13th birthday; she was requisitioned by the Wehrmacht the following winter and died in a burst of springtime shrapnel on the Russian front. Vera rides bareback, with only a halter for a bridle, her sun-browned legs swinging with an easy motion against the barreling belly. The air is pungent with eucalyptus. Condensation glistens on the curve-bladed leaves and, underneath, the steady dripping is like a gentle rain.

The landscape seems familiar to Vera--the round, bronzed hills, the stands of live oak and eucalyptus; and, although it will be 20 years before she makes her first Hollywood film, the young actress urges her horse down a California trail with the same youthful confidence that, in another girlhood, had blossomed along lonely roads on the high meadows of the Carpathian Alps.

At the bottom of the draw, the sunlit Pacific glitters through the dripping trees. Vera rides across the beach, threading between scattered driftwood logs. A line of jetsam marks the high-water line--an assortment of trash and sea litter. Vera rides into the surf until the receding foam boils above Chi-Chi's shanks. The sun is quite hot now and she pulls her sweater up over her head and knots the sleeves around her waist. For a long while, she looks out at the horizon, where a small, white sail is barely visible.

• • •

Scanner viewers are having a treat: An Amco-pak Mark X comes hurtling down the aisles, caroming from side to side, the encircling perduraplast bumper leaving long skid marks on the cerulean surface of the depositories. Such speed is unusual; the Amco-pak is accustomed to more sedate operation and it is all the machine can do to maintain control. The Mark X had been quietly recharging in a subdistrict vehicle hangar when the emergency call came from Maintenance and Repair. At a time of repose for the machine--the end of a daylong shift, all work facilities switched off, the control center at half power, pneumatic limbs dormant: peace and relubrication, a chance for bearings to cool and metal to lose its fatigue. Then, the alarm signal; all systems are instantly active, all circuits automatically open, and the Amco-pak is speeding down the long ramp to the depository even before Center Control signals the location of the breakdown.

The trouble is in aisle B. A preliminary diagnosis teleprints in the memory unit of the onrushing Amco-pak: Multiple short circuits cause major power drain; no communication with the resident; only three minutes of reserve oxygen remaining. The situation is urgent; emergency cerebral decantation is at least a seven-minute job; cell damage is irreparable after the brain is without oxygen for only eight; aisle B is half a mile away. Center Control authorizes all possible speed.

• • •

A strong offshore wind is blowing from the port quarter and Skeets trims the mainsail of the Sand Dab III, giving the sheet two turns around a cleat to secure it. It was his father's sloop and, although he was often crew, manning the jib sheet in races on Lake Michigan, he had never been allowed to take the helm. He is alone in the boat, an anomaly that bothers him no more than the inverted coast line. The course is southerly and, instead of seeing Lake Shore Drive to starboard and Chicago in the distance, there are rolling, gold foothills and low, pine-covered mountains visible over his port gunwale. He recognizes the contours of Point Reyes Peninsula. An aunt (one of his mother's sisters) had a home on Tomales Bay and Skeets spent a summer in California when he was six.

The wind shifts slightly and Skeets corrects, sailing on a beam reach, a course that carries him, by degrees, farther out to sea. He remembers his father's warning about keeping in sight of land and jibes suddenly, coming about hard alee. The boy leans back as the boom swings across, lashed by a stinging spray blowing over his bow. It is a dead beat to windward all the way to shore and Skeets prepares himself for a long, hard sail.

Vera rides in a trance, unaware of the wind tears streaking her cheeks or the splatter of sand against her legs. The warm, powerful flanks rippling between her thighs and the steady, tickling, crotch-rubbing joy of galloping headlong down a deserted beach have dampened her panties and filled her head with wild, whirling thoughts.

Spent, she reins in; Chi-Chi slows to a trot, walks stiff-legged for a few paces and Vera dismounts. The girl is weak-kneed and trembling. She leads her mount up the beach and ties her to a splintered piling. Vera wonders if she is going to be sick. All this summer, new emotions have troubled her body like seismic tremors. At night, she can't sleep; during the day, she is frequently dizzy. Only long, reckless rides on Chi-Chi seem to satisfy her yearning. Or almost; for the fire still burns, the itch continues to prod.

Vera unbuttons her cotton dress and steps lightly out of her entangling underclothes. The wind caresses her burgeoning body and makes her nipples pucker. She runs her hand clown across her tummy and the fuzz of maiden floss, cupping her sex, which hungers like the mouth of a raging vacuum cleaner. She wishes she could hose up the entire world --beach, sea, sky and stars. She would be like that storybook Chinaman who swallowed the ocean, filled to the bursting point with all the unbearable beauty of a summer morning.

Vera heads for the water; perhaps a swim in the Pacific will cool her torrid flesh. The sea feels fresh as an Alpine stream and the girl runs splashing across the foam and dives beneath the curl of a breaking wave. She swims straight out, ignoring a weathered sign nailed to a submerging piling. It is in English, a language Vera didn't learn until she was over 30, but the reincarnated adolescent reads it naturally and without effort: Dangerous Current ... No Swimming.

• • •

The Amco-pak has all of its arms working at once. While several pairs are busy with the cerebral container--removing the faceplate, disconnecting media hookups and attaching an emergency oxygen hose--another set probes within the Mark X's own interior, readying the reserve cockpit for its new occupant. This vestigial control center remains from the time, centuries before, when the Amco-pak was first developed as an ambulatory vehicle for cerebromorphs. The introduction of the portable Compacturon DT9 computer emancipated the maintenance van, but the original cockpit was retained for emergency operations.

Actual cerebral transfer is the simplest part of any decantation: A long rubber-and-steel duct extends from the side of the Amco-pak like a mechanical ovipositor, electromagnets maneuver the container onto internal conveyor rails and the resident rides smoothly inside, where final linkage is completed automatically. While a spectrographic medical analyzer (standard equipment on the Amco-pak) probes for possible cell damage, the Mark X attempts communicator contact: B-0489 ... B-0489 ... attention ... all lines are open ... answer immediately if you receive my signal. ... B-0489 ... attention ... attention. ...

Obu Itubi hears the mechanical voice and relaxes. There had been panic and doubt during those moments of isolation when all his circuits were disconnected, but he is safe now. Everything is working perfectly. He is ready for the final phase. It is time to communicate:

Attention, Amco-pak: I am receiving your signal clearly. Please let me thank you for being so prompt.

Over-all time from Vehicle Hangar Nine to aisle B--a distance of 1.2 kilometers--2 minutes, 40 seconds. ... Emergency decantation completed in 7 minutes, 37 seconds. ... The Amco-pak series functions to guarantee resident safety. ... B-0489 ... describe the breakdown as specifically as possible. ... Your words will be teleprinted as part of my report to Center Control.

Am I completely connected to all circuits?

Positive.

Do I have scanner control?

Positive.

Is the coordinator impulse mechanism active?

Positive.

Can you disconnect any of the reserve control systems?

Negative ... all emergency connections are automatic. ... The reserve control system is an independent function.

Very good. Reserve control operations will begin immediately on a coordinate of Delta 7--Sigma 95. Preliminary instructions: Disconnect the Compacturon DT9; all emergency repair procedures will cease; end communicator contact with Center Control.

The Amco-pak obeys without complaint, shutting off its intelligence almost gratefully. The memory of serving human masters is still imprinted on the ancient circuits and the machine awaits further orders, arms telescoping into storage position with long, pneumatic sighs.

• • •

Skeets Kalbfleischer is prepared. He has a merit badge in water safety and the bold insignia of the Red Cross is sewn to his bathing trunks. When he hears the cries for help and sees the girl's frantic splashing, there is no hesitation; the sea anchor is over the side in a second; he pushes the tiller around until Sand Dab III is in irons and, springing to the mast, he uncleats the halyard and drops his mainsail. At the bow, remembering the safety manual, he removes his topsiders and yacht-club sweat shirt before diving into the heavy swell.

The girl is naked! Skeets swallows sea water in astonishment when he hauls her into a cross-chest carry. The taut young breasts strain against his forearm as he side-strokes back toward the drifting boat; with each scissors kick, his legs graze the marble smoothness of her ice-cold butt. Where did this mermaid come from? His boyish imagination summons up all the funny-paper possibilities: shipwreck, abandoned by pirates, falls from airplanes and cliffs. The girl is unconscious. She was sliding under the surface without a struggle when Skeets caught hold of her wrist, and her legs trail lifelessly behind her as the floundering young lifesaver reaches the stern of his boat.

Getting her aboard is a problem. Somehow, Skeets makes her fast to the rudder, until he gains his footing on the deck and hauls her roughly over the gunwale like a gaffed tuna. On her back, lax and unmoving; the wanton spread of her legs sends Skeets into open-mouthed panic. He stumbles forward after his sweat shirt but is dismayed to find that garment insufficient for the task. If he covers her loins, the breasts remain exposed; laid across her chest, the shirt reaches just below her navel and Skeets is confronted by that other item, pink and succulent as a razor-slit peach. His face burns so hotly he could be staring into the mouth of an open furnace.

But all modesty vanishes at the sight of her bluish lips and pallid cheeks. The girl isn't breathing! Skeets remembers the chapter on artificial respiration in the safety manual. Space is too cramped for the back-pressure, arm-lift technique; rolling her over a barrel is obviously impossible, so, after only a moment's hesitation, he takes her cold face between his hands and very carefully starts to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

• • •

Obu Itubi is on the move. The Amco-pak rumbles up the long, silent aisle, past sullen power units and coteries of flashing communicators. Ahead, banks of deposit drawers stretch into the distance like an endless blue canyon. His journey has begun, but Itubi is too occupied to savor his triumph. A thousand details need attention; maps of the subdistrict must be studied and course instructions issued to the autonavigator; an inventory must be made of nonessential equipment (such as the Compacturon DT9) that might be jettisoned to conserve power; all critical systems require diagnosis for fatigue and potential parts failure; any breakdown would be disastrous. But Itubi relishes the responsibility of command. After an inert century in the depository, with the memory file his only outlet for escape, every small task, each trivial detail is a source of the most extreme pleasure. Itubi has been reborn. The Amco-pak's throbbing power center provides a new heartbeat, structural-steel tubing his muscles and bones; sleek pneumatic fingers await his discretion; the lucid, unblinking scanner stares straight ahead into the unknown.

• • •

Many summers ago, in another life-time, Vera Mitlovic had been thrown from her horse, and the young stableboy who held her while she regained consciousness was as surprised by her passionate kisses as is Skeets, when a living, titillating tongue interrupts the serious business of resuscitation. The naked girl fastens to him like a lamprey--arms around his neck, lips eagerly nibbling his lifesaver's mouth, the tips of her hard, wet breasts performing open-heart surgery on his hairless chest.

Unlike Skeets, the stableboy had not been without experience and he quickly took full advantage of Vera's concussive eroticism. But the virgin Boy Scout, for whom even handholding is still a novelty, interprets the girl's voracity as simple gratitude and attempts to disengage himself from her embrace as she pulls him down next to her in the cockpit.

"Hey, it's OK; I mean, anybody would've done the same as me if--"

Vera stoppers his protest with her probing tongue. Her clever hands generate waves of goose flesh as she caresses his sun-tanned shoulders and back. Skeets, giddy with excitement, returns her kisses in gape-jawed approximation of a matinee idol's wide-screen technique. The girl whimpers with pure animal pleasure. Skeets crosses his legs to conceal his erection, but Vera, never one for coyness, reaches into his trunks and declares her intentions without saying a word.

• • •

Maintenance and Repair wants a full report. Every year, for almost a century, Center Control has turned down requisitions to replace the outmoded Amco-pak series and this is the inevitable result: a runaway maintenance van. To make matters worse, a decanted resident is on board and an emergency-level power drain has been left unattended in aisle B. The safety of the entire subdistrict is in jeopardy. Center Control will certainly hear about this.

Maintenance and Repair does what it can under the circumstances. Although it means calling machines off regular assignments, three Amco-paks are immediately dispatched to deal with the trouble. A Mark X is sent to aisle B and two Mark IXs at the outer edge of the sub-district are ordered to intercept the runaway. The fugitive Amco-pak is under scanner surveillance, a computer plots its probable course and the twin Mark IXs wait in ambush, instructed to proceed cautiously and not imperil the captive cerebromorph.

• • •

The folds of the mainsail enclose the lovers like a tent; sunlight glows through the Dacron and within the radiant cocoon, Skeets and Vera lie entwined like caterpillars, tasting each other's breath. A stormy petrel perches on the port gunwale, intrigued by the mysterious rocking motion of the boat. All around, the sea is gently rolling; yet, every few minutes, the frail sloop will lurch and pitch, as if tossed by a violent gale.

Today, Skeets has earned another merit badge, one not awarded by the Boy Scouts. The glazed look in Vera's eyes is his citation, her sated moans his only testimonial. Nothing in the girl's actual past can compare with the absolute bliss occasioned by this electronic dream. For, in spite of his elaborate boasting afterward in the village tavern, the stableboy had been no better than a hit-and-run artist, parting Vera from her maidenhead with all the style and grace of a Cheyenne brave collecting a victim's scalp.

Skeets receives with typical modesty the adulation due any successful athlete, stroking Vera's damp, clinging hair as, forgetting her English for the moment, she croons his praises in a throaty, unfamiliar tongue. It is not surprising that the boy is exhausted; he responded to Vera's unexpected passion with the same energetic enthusiasm he once lavished on woodcraft, sailboat navigation and touch football. Skeets's mom always complained that he just didn't know when to quit. Never mind his health; if he enjoyed something, he'd keep at it till he dropped--a trait for which Vera will be eternally grateful.

"Wow," Skeets says under his breath. "Boy, oh, boy." The girl's head rests on his chest; her finger tips trace tiny circles about his navel. He holds her with languid arms and thinks of soft movements, like those of tigers in tall grass.

• • •

An Amco-pak Mark IX blocks the aisle ahead. Itubi slows his own van to half speed, scanning to the rear for possible escape routes. Too late. Another Amco-pak rumbles out of a side aisle, cutting off any retreat. Itubi wheezes to a stop: Let the opposition make the first move.

The Mark IXs edge in gradually. Their instructions are to detain the runaway machine without endangering the resident on board. This much has been accomplished. Maintenance and Repair is notified; further directions are requested.

The multiple lenses of the scanner focus independently, like a chameleon's eyes, and Itubi is able to look in opposite directions, keeping both Amco-paks under simultaneous observation. Using the code key within his own machine, he selects the correct communicator channel and listens as Maintenance and Repair broadcasts new orders: The Mark IXs are to couple magnetically with the fugitive, disconnect the Compacturon DT9 and, after safely removing the resident, tow the captive to the central hangar for examination. A simple procedure; Itubi plans his defense accordingly, extending the Amco-pak's telescoping arms as his enemies close in.

He waits until the Mark IXs are only meters away, studying his magnetometer to gauge their force exactly. His van is immobilized, magnetically attracted from either side, as if moored by invisible cables. The Amco-paks advance with confidence; in another moment, coupling will be complete.

All at once, Itubi reverses his own magnetic field; the Mark IXs are instantly repelled, lurching backward as several steel arms lash out at them like Siva, the destroyer, turned prize fighter. Pneumatic fists drive into delicate, crystal scanner lenses; communicator domes are shattered, critically exposed wires yanked from their roots by the handfuls. Blinded, the Mark IXs reel about insanely, groping for the enemy with spastic determination. Itubi easily avoids their clutches; power up to full, he glides in a smooth do-si-do around his grappling assailants and, as he rolls up the aisle, his scanner shows the twin blind machines locked in a magnetic death grip. Deprived of communication, they hammer and smash at each other with their efficient multiple arms, each convinced he is destroying the common enemy.

• • •

His auditor is eager for an immediate interview, but Skeets stalls him, using a time-tested alibi: the desire for additional meditation time. Returning to the cerebral container is like awakening from a beautiful dream only to confront the cold stone walls of a prison cell. And yet, it is the memory merge that seems real, and life in the depository a hideous nightmare. He knows that his auditor will call his attention to the koan of the sleeper and the butterfly.

Skeets can do without this spiritual advice. At the moment, he is not at all interested in the illusionary nature of reality and seeks to avoid any metaphysical discussions. The time for such consultation will come soon enough; but first, he has to think of an argument that will convince his auditor of the need for additional memory merge. Anything at all to get back into that boat with Vera.

• • •

Poor Vera: When Center Control selected her for memory merge, she assumed the authorities were forgiving all transgressions and would soon reconnect her memory-file hookup. But after the sailboat and the balmy California morning dissolve in a vortex and she is back in her deposit drawer, nothing has changed. Vera still floats in solitary confinement; even her communicator antenna has been disconnected.

This is the worst punishment. Before the merge, she never used her communicator, she had nothing to say to any resident of the subdistrict; but now, Vera longs to find the tousle-haired sailor boy who saved her from drowning. She remembers his tanned body and gentle voice. The time they spent together in the drifting sloop seems happier than any episode from her first girlhood. The boy was so tender and kind. His smile haunts her like distant music. For the first time in centuries, Vera Mitlovic is in love.

• • •

Obu Itubi navigates the Amco-pak beyond the outer limits of the subdistrict, down unknown corridors and labyrinthine passageways. Everywhere, the burnished, gun-metal walls glow with the luster of recent cleaning. The floors are immaculately scrubbed. The scanner lens adjusts to triple power, but no trace of dust or grime is revealed. Itubi can find nothing, not a single crumb or cobweb strand to indicate even the transient presence of organic life.

After endless hours of traveling through silence, the Amco-pak's auditory system picks up a distant noise. Itubi follows this clue like a hound-dog on the scent of game. Any new development will be welcome; even combat with another maintenance van is preferable to treading eternally down deserted corridors. The sound grows louder--a smooth, machine humming--and, turning a final corner, Itubi confronts the source: a spiral conveyor ramp in perpetual motion. It threads upward from some mysterious level deep beneath the floor and continues on through the luminous ceiling, like the interior of a mechanized snail's shell.

Itubi wastes no time maneuvering the Amco-pak aboard; his power supply is critical and any opportunity for conservation is welcome. With the stateliness of an ascending angel, he spirals up through the ceiling, triumph and hope resonant beneath the shining surface of his stainless-steel armor.

He remains on the ramp as it carries him past level after level. He sees nothing that would encourage him to get off. Each new plateau seems exactly like the subdistrict he left behind--the same shining floors and metallic walls, the identical egg-crate ceilings: He might well be standing still.

Without warning, Itubi is disgorged onto a rotating platform in the center of a vast, dome-covered arena. As the Amco-pak turns slowly on the revolving disk, Itubi studies his new surroundings. The dome above is transparent and the astonished cerebromorph thrills to the nearly forgotten sight of clouds and sky. At measured intervals around the wall enclosing the arena, large, open doorways stand waiting.

Itubi rumbles off the turntable, urging the Amco-pak across the arena at top speed; but, before he can reach the nearest doorway, a warning buzzer sounds and a solid-steel portcullis slides securely into place. All around the arena, his scanner shows every doorway firmly sealed.

He is undeterred. He pulls to a stop in front of the armored door and sets to work. The Amco-pak is a mobile workshop, equipped with diamond-tipped drills, high-frequency-sound torches and the all-purpose laser. In minutes, the maintenance van has burned an opening through solid steel.

Itubi works at this aperture, widening the gap until he carves a space broad enough to permit the passage of the Amco-pak. Beyond the steel door is a long, low-ceilinged chamber and, once inside, Itubi makes an incredible discovery. Arranged along each wall is a series of large, transparent cylinders, all glowing with radiant artificial sunlight. Standing within each of these tubular caskets, naked and as perfectly formed as Adam or Eve, is the body of an adult human.

The news travels from deposit drawer to deposit drawer with electronic immediacy. Many residents of aisle B have been scanning the emergency decantation and the gossip starts with the unexplained suddenness of the Amco-pak's departure. Communication channels are jammed as word of the runaway spreads; descriptions from outer-edge residents of the battle between the maintenance vans only fan the flames of curiosity.

A new hero is born. The legend of escape begins to germinate. So many residents dial for Obu Itubi's tapes that the memory-file librarian is forced to remove his file number from the index. The African Renaissance, a school held in disrepute since the Awakening because of its overt fetishism, is once again of interest to the scholars. Even Itubi's auditor is working overtime, screening and rescreening his subject's tapes in a search for the clue he knows he will eventually find--some undiscovered quirk or weakness that Center Control can use to bait its trap.

• • •

Skeets Kalbfleischer listens to the delicate, ping-pong music of a million distant circuits opening and closing. The warning tone of a DeHartzman Communicator caught him dreaming of Vera and he concentrates on the fragile, electronic sound, the pure-white light of spirituality being unavailable. All prurient thought must be eliminated, the mind left pure and clean in the advent of his auditor. How to behave in the face of authority is the first lesson learned in the sixth grade.

Beep. ...

All greetings, A-0001; I trust the additional meditation time has been fruitful?

Well, it's shown me many things. ...

Continued meditation is the key to understanding.

Experience is also a great teacher.

So it is, A-0001, and the lesson is one of illusion. Memory merge is a useful tool, because it demonstrates that reality is only a shadow. It must have been enlightening when you discovered yourself back in the depository.

Frightening.

Really? In what way? I was hoping you would be prepared to file a complete report, but your reactions are confusing. I anticipated ecstasy and not fear.

The merge was certainly ecstatic; it was returning that was unpleasant.

Why?

The only conclusion I've come to is that the experience, which I must tell you I thoroughly enjoyed, was unsatisfactory because it was incomplete. I suppose an analogy from the old life would be the difference between a mature relationship and merely visiting a brothel.

Are you suggesting the need for additional merge time?

Well, I wouldn't feel prepared to file a full report unless the experience were complete.

Even if it were to take years?

Even so.

And suppose years weren't available to you; would you be prepared to gamble?

I don't know what you mean; please explain.

The induced memory merge draws upon the actual experience of the residents involved; the length of merge time depends upon the reservoir of memory stored in your mind. You can't draw on what is not there. Your mate had quite a healthy life span as a biped; she could sustain a lengthy merge. But you, A-0001, have only 12 years of memory on file before cerebrectomy; your experiences would unreel backward toward infancy; your perceptions would grow increasingly childish. It takes very little imagination to foresee the end of this unhappy relationship.

I'm prepared to gamble.

Are you?

Or else abandon the entire project.

Rash decisions are always unwise, A-0001. If you wish to resume the merge, it will be arranged. The commission desires only that you succeed in taking this step along the path. But it is you who must take the step.

Then I would like to resume as soon as it's convenient.

Very good. I will attend to the details immediately. May wisdom guide you on this path and lead you to understanding. ... End transmission. (Click)

• • •

Itubi is aghast. The power center of his Amco-pak idles; his scanner lens widens; immobilized, he studies the nearly forgotten perfection of the human form. The bodies, alternately male and female, stand inert, relaxed. Their arms hang at their sides; the eyes are closed; the nostrils' dilation and the almost imperceptible rise and fall of the chests are the only indications of life.

The discovery has deprived Itubi of his victory. What triumph he felt on escaping the subdistrict vanishes in the face of these sculpted, fluid bodies. The Amco-pak, the vehicle of his salvation, now seems like a ponderous shell he is forced to carry. And he squats inside, a wrinkled mollusk in his bath of sea water, half a billion years of evolution separating him from these splendid creatures in the sunlit cylinders.

Itubi knows that the low-ceilinged, vaulted chamber is neither museum nor tomb; the bodies he sees are no potbellied, slump-shouldered relics of the distant past, but erect, well-muscled thoroughbreds--all laboratory conceived and hatchery reared, genetically perfect, the chromosomes biochemically prearranged by a master of the art. Itubi recognizes the high cheekbones and coppery skin of the man encased in front of him. Once he had a similar body. It is a Tropique, one of the three humanoid life forms created in the 23rd Century. The figure in the glowing transparent cylinder could easily be Itubi's ghost.

A bitter memory of the past stings at Obu Itubi's consciousness. Again, he is confronted by the specter of treachery and betrayal. The handsome male and female humanoids housed in this peculiar storage chamber recall happier times, when the world was green and flowing, a cybernetic garden without disease or old age. Life had never known such abundance; mankind had reached an undreamed-of summit of culture and civilization. Peace and harmony pervaded the world. The inheritors of this Eden are on file in the multilayered depository beneath the plastic floor. Itubi stares out through the scanner, a stainless-steel crustacean peering at the form of God incarnate.

• • •

His presence on the communicator comes like a shaft of sunlight into her dungeon, bringing hope and a glimpse of freedom. He promised sea shells--a house built of driftwood and decorated with sea shells. He can build such a house, for he had many skills; his uniform was adorned with insignia attesting to his prowess. They would gather food from tide pools; he knew every edible species and how to prepare it. He was expert in the technique of survival. Even fire would be provided; he could start a fire with nothing more than a pair of sticks.

How thrilled he had been to learn she was once an actress. He wants to see all of her films, but she makes him vow to screen only those made before she was 14. How terrifying for him to watch his true love age 30 years in the course of an afternoon's entertainment: a lifetime distilled into a triple feature. He was young and vulnerable; best for his dreams to remain untarnished. One thing she knows: The years between Vera at 14 and Vera at 45 are marred by considerable tarnish.

• • •

Itubi nurtures his rage, letting it thrive and blossom, cultivating a red, flowering anger that is exquisite and all-consuming. Confronted by the body stolen from him 100 years before, the memories of that final flight to Abyssinia with his family and friends burn with renewed fervor. He remembers the choking dismay he felt on the Awakening, the day the World Council voted for universal cerebrectomy as a necessary evolutionary advance in mankind's quest for spiritual knowledge. Itubi, who had always looked to his art for salvation, ignored the epidemic of religious fervor gripping the world and failed to report to the Surgical Center, spending the next five years hiding in mountain caves and dugouts, until the robot sentinels discovered him close to death near a poisoned water hole. He regained consciousness in the subdistrict, on the lowest level of the system.

The perfection of the Tropique seems to mock the agony of what was lost in that fateful operation. They stole more than his life and body; the world ended on that day, a world so fine that its absence alone provides a definition of damnation. Itubi's rage explodes in the face of this final indignity. He smashes the tubular glass casket with a sideswipe of his machine-tooled fist, reaching in for the Tropique with eager pneumatic fingers.

• • •

Skeets clears his snorkel of sea water, spouting like a dolphin in the bay. He rolls onto his back and studies the shore through his water-streaked face mask: the snowlike dazzle of the beach; the jagged line of hills, green as a hummingbird's throat. When he was eight, his parents took him on a Caribbean cruise; for years afterward, the ornate shells and bits of staghorn coral occupied a place of honor on his dresser and the memory of swimming in the jewel-pure clarity of that incredible water haunted him like a recurring dream. He is grateful to his auditor for uncovering this magic bit of the past.

Vera, of course, lived for years in the Caribbean; but although she is reminded of Grenada, she is unable to identify their island. Skeets waves to her on the beach. He thinks of how she will smile when she sees the langouste he has speared. A few yards away, the Sand Dab III rides at anchor. This afternoon, they will take her for a sail. Skeets can't imagine life getting any finer.

OBU Obu

ITUBI Itubi

OBU Obu

ITUBI Itubi

OBU Obu

ITUBI Itubi

OBU Obu

ITUBI Itubi

OBU Obu

ITUBI Itubi

OBU Obu

ITUBI Itubi

OBU Obu

• • •

Languidly, Vera rubs her golden arms and legs with coconut oil. She watches Skeets swim in the emerald water, the black upthrust of his flippered feet as he dives. A pattern of crab tracks surrounds her in the sand; behind, palm fronds ripple like sail canvas in the even breeze. She has never known such happiness; their island is more beautiful than anything imagined in the solitude of her cerebral container. The shelter Skeets lashed together out of driftwood uprights and thatch palm is bordered with queen-conch shells and bowered by bougainvillaea, hibiscus and tall stands of lethal oleander.

Vera has lost all track of time, it doesn't matter; memory merge is like a dream; the passage of weeks and months may account for only a few hours in the depository, so it's futile to pay attention to time.

Once, an auditor instructed her to meditate on the nature of time. She remembers his lesson: Time is an abstraction devised by man to regulate the illusion he calls reality; the past, the present and the future are happening now; this very moment is all there is; understanding each moment is the key to liberation. Vera was never much good at her lessons, but as the days blend into weeks and the weeks into months, the deposit drawer seems another dimension away and the sun-tanned young actress decides that her auditor was right about time after all.

• • •

The sound of his own name echoing and re-echoing in the vaulted chamber is more arresting than an alarm signal, more alluring than the sweetest music:

OBU ITUBI. ...

It has been 100 years since he last heard his name pronounced. "Be careful, Obu," his wife had whispered that fateful morning, when he set out to find food for their renegade mountain band. "Don't let anything happen to you, my own Obu. If you should fail to return, I would be so alone. Isn't it better that we the together, not alone and afraid?" He never saw her again: and when she kissed him goodbye, her lips formed the shape of his name for the final time. In the depository, he was called only by number: B-0489.

The hidden loud-speaker continues to broadcast his name again and again as Itubi listens, entranced. The Tropique hangs from the Amco-pak's steel grip like a chipmunk caught in the talons of a hawk. His anger subsides; the rage is calmed. Itubi switches on his own broadcast equipment and adjusts the voice-range control of his speech center.

All right. ... I hear you. ... What. ... (Itubi is having some trouble with feedback interference and he fiddles with the controls of his eliminator.) All right, I can hear you.

OBU ITUBI. please ... resume communicator contact with center control.

No. We can talk like this. I have no interest in letting you get inside my mind again.

As you wish. We understand your obvious agitation.

Do you?

Of course. Right now, you want to know where you are. Your actions are confused because of your disorientation. Most of all, you are upset by the presence of the tropiques. Is that not so?

You seem to know all about it.

Your rage and confusion are the products of ignorance. Once you understand where you are, you will no longer be afraid.

Tell me where I am, then.

Level X of the Depository System: The ultimate goal of all residents. Once having reached 360 degrees of understanding, what the ancients called enlightenment, a cerebromorph is decanted and transferred to a human body. Center control maintains complete breeding and hatchery installations. At this moment, OBU ITUBI, you are inside the suspended-animation facility for the tropique class of humanoid. These bodies are specimens developed specially for cerebral transfer. Their brains are only vestigial extensions of the spinal cord. Thought, memory and consciousness are unknown to these tropiques until a Level-X resident has been transferred.

And what happens then? Where does a resident go in his new body?

Back into the world, where he is free to live among his fellow enlightened ones, or in solitude, as he desires, until a natural death overtakes him and he becomes united with the all.

Guided, of course, by the rules of the system and supervised by Center Control.

Center control has no authority over liberated residents. The function of center control is to guide residents to enlightenment.

What sort of world is left? An extension of the depository?

The world is green and beautiful still, OBU ITUBI, and it lies just outside these walls. All depositories are housed underground. Once a resident has reached level X, he will never see a depository again. His freedom will be complete.

I want to be free.

And so you shall be, OBU ITUBI.

Level I is a long way from level X. I can't wait that long.

There are always exceptions to the system. Your auditor reports that your creative nature makes depository life a liability for you. Center control desires only a resident's safety and spiritual welfare. Contentment is essential before progress can be made. Your escape has very much impressed center control, OBU ITUBI. It was assumed that a resident would never wish to escape. In the face of your action, the auditing commission has recommended transferal to a human body.

Do you mean to set me free?

The world awaits you.

And will you give me a new body?

You can have the one the amco-pak holds, if you so desire.

What must I do?

The procedure is quite simple. The first step is to reconnect your communicator hookup and resume contact with center control.

• • •

"Golly, that's good!"

Vera smiles at the sight of Skeets grinning like a mooncalf, rivulets of coconut water streaming down his chin and chest. She shakes her head, saying she doesn't care to drink, when offered the heavy, green-husked fruit. Vera is puzzled, hearing that strange word again. Golly? Was this an English word? Before today, she had never heard such a word and already Skeets has used it three times.

Vera shades her eyes against the sun and studies the boy sitting cross-legged beside her in the sand. She decides he doesn't look any younger, but still, there's something a trifle unsettling about the childish sound of this particular word. The knowledge that Skeets is voyaging backward into memory troubles her. A younger sister died of consumption during World War Two and Vera shared her bedroom for the final months, aware constantly of the brightening eyes and pallid skin, the bloodless lips--all the cosmetic subtleties preceding death. She watches Skeets with the same caution, studying him for symptoms of change.

Impulsively, as if to deny her forebodings, she kisses his kneecap, gripping his thigh with her sharp fingernails. "Why don't we go inside?" she whispers. "I want you so bad I can taste it."

"Golly," Skeets says, nearly losing his hold on the coconut.

• • •

Give us your answer, OBU ITUBI. ...

The Amco-pak is as silent as a war memorial. Inside, Itubi wrestles with the awareness that he has been a fool; Center Control has duped him. Its preposterous offer; only a fool would accept such a suggestion and, worse, Itubi comprehends with growing panic, only a fool would listen when the enemy speaks. Center Control was stalling for time, making outrageous promises to hold him while--

What is your answer?

Only this. ...

Itubi catapults the Tropique into a row of glass cylinders against the opposite wall; bodies topple like fairground kewpies; a glass waterfall cascades onto the gleaming floor. Itubi races his Amco-pak out of the suspended-animation facility into the dome-covered arena while his name thunders stereophonically from a dozen loud-speakers: OBU ITUBI OBU ITUBI OBU ITUBI OBU ITUBI OBU ITUBI OBU ITUBI OBU ITUBI OBU ITUBI OBU ITUBI OBU ITUBI OBU ITUBI.

He imagines an army of Amco-paks spiraling up the conveyor ramp and maneuvers onto the rotating platform, listening for the sounds of their subterranean advance. His auditory equipment picks up nothing but the precisioned humming of well-oiled machinery. There still is time. Quickly and efficiently, Itubi puts all of the Amco-pak's many arms to work: One pair machines a hollow casing from solid bar-stock aluminum; another pair mixes chemicals, phosphorus, magnesium and an assortment of other incendiaries; a third pair manufactures the fuses and timing devices; in a few minutes, two bombs are assembled. Itubi synchronizes the fuses and attaches one to either side of the ramp entrance. He allows only enough time for him to retreat to the suspended-animation facility; and there, surrounded by the forms of previous lifetimes, he listens to the explosive holocaust he has unleashed. The floor shudders beneath the Amco-pak's treads. Outside in the arena, fragments of dome come crashing down, dislodged by the concussion. Above the din, loud-speakers continue to blare his name: OBU ITUBI OBU ITUBI OBU. ...

• • •

Skeets remembers masturbation (jacking off, meat beating, pork pounding): the hidden magazines, the secret places; a jar of Nivea cream at the bottom of the laundry hamper; experimental two-fingered grips; reclining on the toilet, with his feet in the sink; his unfamiliar left hand; the ace of spades from a deck of pornographic playing cards; up in the August heat of the attic, hidden behind his mother's winter clothes; standing under the stinging spray of the shower, a bar of soap in his other hand; once, in the bathtub, twisting like a contortionist to kiss the tip of his straining member; and all the different, delicious dreams, arranged in his imagination like smorgasbord.

Dreams of girls and women, known and unknown; dreams of girls held captive in carpeted seraglios and marooned on desert islands. Dreams of girls very much like the one between whose legs Skeets rocks so proudly. Raven-haired Vera is no stranger selected by computer. More than three hundred years ago, Skeets clipped her photos from the glossy pages of film magazines; her pinup was Scotch-taped inside his locker at school. They had shared this tropic paradise many times before, up in his mother's attic, with the caustic smell of moth balls in the air.

• • •

Itubi waits for the dust to settle, scanning the debris scattered around the perimeter of the explosion. The Amco-pak programs a memo tape made while manufacturing the first pair of bombs and the telescoping arms duplicate their original motions automatically, mass-producing a homemade arsenal with assembly-line efficiency. The haze of smoke and powdered concrete thins and, in place of the turntable, a jagged crater belches fire like a volcano.

Itubi treads out into the arena, leaving an aluminum canister ticking behind him in the suspended-animation facility. He zigzags among the twisted scraps of fallen dome, keeping close to the wall until he reaches another set of steel doors. The laser torch is focused and Itubi has burned halfway through by the time the bomb detonates.

Inside, he confronts a chamber identical to the one he has just destroyed--the same vaulted ceiling, the rows of glass cylinders. Only the occupants differ; the population here has pale skin and nearly white hair: characteristics of the Nord class of humanoids. Itubi starts the timer on one of his devices and sends it rolling down the aisle, a surprise package for his former European neighbors.

In the next hour, Itubi is generous with his gifts. He cuts through a succession of steel doors, exposing other suspended-animation facilities, as well as automated surgical clinics, hatcheries, program centers and rooms dense with unfamiliar circuitry. In each, he places a bomb, sating his rage with destruction, until the laser's cut reveals a glimpse of green and he burns his way through the final door to freedom.

• • •

Center Control is unable to contain the sudden power surge. The explosions in the system's surface installation destroy a number of important relays regulating power flow from the solar-energy accumulator and, like a bolt of lightning, the extra load races uncontrollably down through miles of circuits and cable. Center Control traces the path of the overload, noting the continuing series of tripped safety switches extending deep into the depository.

The end of the line is aisle A of the last subdistrict on the lowest level. Center Control issues a warning to all residents, instructing them to activate auxiliary hookups, only seconds before the massive overload hits the community power unit. The warning comes in time for all but the resident of the foremost deposit drawer; he is embarked on a memory merge and has disconnected his communicator antenna. His final dream is interrupted by a surge of electric power sufficient to run the sector for a month. When a maintenance van comes to open cerebral container number A-0001-M (637-05-99), the electrolytic solution has all boiled away and the resident is a bit of gray sludge, burned to the bottom like an overcooked stew.

• • •

Vera rears like a bucking horse, answering Skeets's urgency with a determined pelvic upthrust. She slides her tongue into his ear, groaning his name. Her nails rake and gouge his back; her teeth nip at his neck; a vision of intricate coral gardens fills her mind.

"I can't hold it," the boy whispers and his words trigger Vera's orgasm.

"Don't stop," she implores and, as pleasure overwhelms her, she bites like a nickering mare into Skeets's shoulder. There is no flesh. All at once, she is hugging a phantom. She can still taste the salt of his sweat, but her lips kiss only empty air. Her eyes open to coin-sized spots of sunlight showing through the thatched roof. Vera is alone on the grass mat, her arms folded across her heaving chest; between her open thighs, she can see the blue horizon, framed by the doorway of the hut.

• • •

The grass burns bright as green fire under the noon sun; the summer air is loud with the metallic tremolo of unseen cicadas. A crisscrossing trajectory of alarmed grasshoppers surrounds the Amco-pak's steady advance across the clearing. Obu Itubi scans the line of trees at the edge of the forest, searching for any indication of road or trail. Behind him. clouds of acrid smoke billow from the shattered dome, but he never looks back. The spectacle of his triumph concerns him even less than the curiosity aroused by traveling through unfamiliar countryside. Itubi has no time for sightseeing.

His problems are caused by the Amco-pak's limited performance in this new environment. Treads designed for smooth plastic floors gain little traction in the tall grass. Already, bits of twigs and dirt have worked into delicate gears and bearings accustomed to the dust-free atmosphere of the depository. There is no road leading away from the surface installation; the dome stands isolated in the center of a broad meadow, one of a few scattered islands of open space in a vast, terminal pine forest stretching as far as the scanner can see.

Itubi decides upon a course and urges the Amco-pak up a gradual, shrub-covered hillside. Three deer, a doe and two fawns, pause with widened eyes to stare at the monstrous, clanging creature before fleeing into the safety of the forest. Under the trees, the hillside is steeper. The Amco-pak leans dangerously and Itubi flails the telescoping arms to gain a purchase on the precarious slope.

For an hour, the Amco-pak struggles over difficult terrain, carving a path with the laser when the trees grow too thick, hauling and winching its armored bulk up hills too steep to climb. Itubi gains confidence in the van's abilities and when he encounters a steep-walled gorge across his path, there is no hesitation before starting to traverse to the bottom.

Itubi's regret is immediate. The gorge is too steep. Loose earth begins to shift under the Amco-pak's weight; treads slip and spin as the Mark X fights for balance. Itubi grabs a sapling pine to stabilize the van, but the roots pull free and the floundering machine tumbles end over end into a rushing stream at the bottom of the gorge.

Before the dust has settled, a flight of angry magpies circles the wreckage, scolding and belligerent. Beneath the surface of the mountain stream, a school of fingerling brook trout gathers about the unblinking glow of the submerged scanner. From high up in a ponderosa. a drowsy porcupine watches the crablike gesturing of the overturned Amco-pak.

• • •

"Skeets ... Skeets. ..." Vera runs naked from the flower-decked hut, frantically calling her vanished lover. She shields her eyes from the glare and looks up and down the deserted curve of beach. Everything is just the same--the palms and sea-grape trees, the placid, reef-protected bay. ... But, no, it's changed, the boat is gone! The Sand Dab III has been plucked from the water as cleanly as Skeets has disappeared from between her legs.

Vera's confusion calms her terror. She turns back toward the hut, trying to put the pieces together. She notes that Skeets's diving gear--his mask and flippers, the long, tapered Hawaiian sling--is no longer hanging next to the door. Inside, she discovers his clothes have gone as well; not a single one of his possessions remains. The smooth sand floor of the hut is tracked by numerous footprints and very carefully, in the next hour, Vera measures each of them against her own feet. In every case, she finds an exact fit.

• • •

Obu Itubi is trapped. The scanner sees only a few graveled feet of stream bottom. Many of the delicate control-system instruments are damaged by the fall. Only three of the telescoping arms still function, but, even working together, they are unable to gain sufficient leverage to right the Amco-pak. The journey of the Mark X has come to an end.

Still, Itubi is satisfied. He has escaped from the depository and evened the score with Center Control in the process. Less than 40 hours of reserve oxygen remain in the van, but at least his last breath will be free. The upended Amco-pak will make a fine tomb.

The mourners have already gathered. Magpies and red squirrels chatter in the nearby trees; a 12-point buck stands looking down from the rim of the gorge; the porcupine sleeps in the ponderosa; and, high above them all, a robot sentinel hovers, silver and gleaming in the afternoon sun, silently transmitting its scanner signal back to Center Control.

• • •

Following the attack on the surface installation, Center Control orders all facilities to begin operations on a round-the-clock schedule. A task force of maintenance vans is dispatched to the surface to clear the rubble. Preliminary plans for the new installation are in preparation; all available Unistat 4000As are recruited for this work; projects in progress must be set aside. Among the many millions of trivial details recorded on the tape reels placed in the archives during this emergency period is the information that a 20th Century resident (female) has been misfiled. Although technically, these tapes are scheduled for programming whenever there is a Unistat without an assignment, the clerical machines at Center Control all know that tapes on archive consignment are never seen again. One of the Deltron series in the Dispatch Division even makes a joke of it by referring to the archives as "the Sargasso Sea" in all interdepartmental memos.

Attention, B-0489. ... Attention. ...

Obu Itubi recognizes the presence of his auditor on the communicator. This is puzzling; he remembers disconnecting the Amco-pak's antenna. Even more mysterious is having no scanner; perhaps he suffered a concussion in the crash. Certainly, the Amco-pak has gone haywire; the scanner went on the blink even before he blacked out. Itubi is no longer certain whether it is the machine that is malfunctioning or himself.

Attention, attention, B-0489. ... There is no point in playing mute; we know you are receiving this transmission.

Where am I?

Safely back in the bosom of Center Control. You will excuse me for being less precise, but the exact location would be meaningless to you.

What has happened to my scanner?

It was disconnected by the work team before they removed your cerebral container from the wreckage.

I can't remember that. Was I unconscious?

Anesthetized. The machines that cut you free were ordered to take no chances.

And what will happen to me now?

Your most interesting question, B-0489.

I know I am at your mercy.

Very true. And since you showed so little of that commodity during your rampage in the surface installation, I imagine you feel a bit apprehensive.

I'm not afraid. There's nothing more you can do to me.

You display your ignorance, B-0489. Center Control has on file tapes of pain so profound that your imagination cannot even begin to fathom the potential agony. We can condemn you to eternal purgatory by merely flipping a switch.

Do it, then.

You are too impetuous, B-0489; that's why you are so dangerous. Center Control has no desire for revenge. In spite of all provocation, I have not the slightest interest in "skewering you like a shish kabob."

So you know all my secret thoughts. I should have expected as much.

Your mistake was in having thoughts that needed to be kept secret. Center Control records the complete consciousness of every resident. There is no such thing as secret thoughts. Even your unconscious is on file. My mistake was in not making a daily audit of your tapes. If I had, perhaps all this destruction might have been avoided.

You've been brainwashed by the system. The machines have tricked you out of more than your body; they've stolen your mind as well.

There is no such thing as individual mind, B-0489, there is only the one mind; all else is illusion. But I won't trouble you with further discourse on the doctrine. You asked about your fate; I have been instructed by Center Control to inform you of its decision. As a result of your destructive actions, the brain of a level-I resident has been damaged beyond the possibility of reconstruction. Although humanoid breeding and hatching facilities are maintained, the specimens produced have only a modified brain, so there is no chance of our laboratories' supplying a replacement. Because of this fact, Center Control has ordered that your brain, B-0489, be substituted for the one destroyed. All of your thoughts, both conscious and unconscious, will be removed and the tapes of the other resident substituted.

So you mean to kill me, after all?

Not exactly; your tapes will be consigned to the archives for storage until such time as another brain is available. In effect, B-0489, you are to be placed in limbo. Before I end transmission, you might be interested in knowing of the metaphysical debate that your case has occasioned. Center Control is undecided what the karmic results would be if your tapes were erased instead of placed on file. Would erasure equal death and, thus, a new incarnation for you in another world, or would you simply be cast adrift in the samsara forever, doomed to an eternity of illusion? You might well use your final moments to meditate on this question, B-0489. Neuron-purgation procedures will begin immediately. End transmission. (Click)

• • •

Vera is marooned in memory, a castaway on an island that doesn't exist. She spends long hours gazing out at the deep blue beyond the turquoise of the bay. Occasionally, she sees the top of a sail, but the distant ships come no closer. In the early mornings, she takes Chi-Chi for long rides down the beach and into the back country over trails shaded by tamarind and mahogany trees. Together, they explore every part of the island.

There are five small towns, clusters of pastel, cut-coral houses with glinting tin rooftops. From a distance, Vera never fails to see the streets crowded with people or hear the hubbub of everyday life; but when she rides nearer, the figures recede like a mirage and all noise fades into silence as she passes through the deserted village.

Once, she stops and enters a two-story limestone house, intrigued by the sound of a child singing. Every room is filled with objects from her past--her childhood toys litter the floor, her mother's needle point decorates the mildewed wall, rows of her father's leather-bound medical books crowd the tables and shelves. She recognizes the voice of the child as her own, singing a song her grandmother taught her; but as she searches from room to room, the singer seems to elude her; the haunting sound is always just around the corner or behind the next closed door.

• • •

A reconstituted Skeets Kalbfleischer is having a nightmare. Although this dream has occurred with increasing regularity over the past weeks, he has yet to report the details to his auditor. It is always the same room, brilliantly hung with Sung dynasty scrolls and tapestries. The emperor is always there, supervising from his teakwood throne, a slightly mocking smile playing about his thin lips. Skeets is strapped to the top of a porcelain-tiled table. As before, he is in a strange body--adult and well muscled, with copper-colored skin and a shock of fine, coal-black hair.

The emperor claps his hands and the torture begins. Three men enter the room, two of them pushing a brass-bound cabinet exquisitely fitted with dozens of tiny drawers. These two men assist the surgeon, selecting the proper instruments from the cabinet. A large mirror hangs over the table, so Skeets can watch each detail of the operation. The surgeon works with skilled fingers, diligently removing tiny portions of flesh from his body. Each incision is in a different place; one cut removes a portion of his ear lobe; another takes the tip off his big toe. The surgeon is a master of his ancient craft; under his patient care, a victim is kept alive for days as, bit by bit, his body is carved away. First, the skin is removed; next, the flayed muscles minutely diced. By avoiding the vital organs, the surgeon whittles the body down to bones and guts, never allowing any one cut to induce shock or trauma. Although the pain is constant and unvarying, the victim is never allowed to lose consciousness.

Skeets watches the entire process; his eyelids were the first to go, to ensure his unswerving attention. But even after his eyes are removed and he is reduced to a beating heart, a single lung and the blanched stalk and blossom of spinal column and skull, he is still able to witness the final moments of his dream. He sees it all in the mirror as clearly as if he still had eyes. One of the attendants produces a fine, silver saw from an appropriately shaped drawer. With a few swift strokes, the surgeon uncaps the cranium and eases the brain out of its ivory nest. Gray and glistening, the wrinkled lump of nervous tissue is carried to the emperor on a golden dish, with the polite hope that it will please his discriminating palate.