Manta 3 - Ox Piers Anthony

Veg fired his blaster at it. The project charge should have heated the metal explosively and blown a chunk out of it. But the polished hide only gave off sparks and glowed momentarily. The thing spun about with dismaying mobility and came at him again, the vicious blade leading.

Ox by Piers Anthony

Veg bounded backward, grabbed the long crowbar, and jammed it end first into the whirring blade.

"Try a mouthful of that! " he said, shielding his eyes from the anticipated fragmentation.

The iron pole bucked in his hands as the blade connected. More sparks flew. The blade lopped off sections, two inches at a time: CHOP CHOP CHOP CHOP! Six feet became five, then four, as the machine consumed the metal.

At that point Veg realized he was in a fight for his life. He had come across the machine chewing up the stacked supplies as he emerged from transfer and thought it was an armored animal or a remote-controlled device. It was more than either; it had an alarming aura of sentience.

He tried the rifle. The flash pan heated as he activated it; steam filled the firing chamber. Bullets whistled out in a rapid stream, for the steam rifle was smoother and more efficient than the explosive-powder variety. They bounced off the machine and ricocheted off the boulders on either side. He put at least one bullet directly in its eye-lens, but even this did no apparent harm.

Still, the contraption had halted its advance. Something must be hurting it!

The rifle ran out of bullets. Veg grabbed an explosive shell and slammed it into firing position as the machine moved forward again. He aimed at the treads and let fly.

Sand billowed out, for an instant obscuring the target. The machine wallowed—but a moment later it climbed out of the cavity formed by the explosion and emerged undamaged.

"You're a tough one!" Veg said admiringly. He was a man of barely dominant peace; he loved a good fight when he could justify it. He hurled the rifle at the enemy.

The weapon flew apart as the whirling blade swung to intercept it. One large section bounced away to the side. The machine turned to chase after it, chopping the piece up where it had fallen and scooping it into a nether-hopper. It did not, he saw now, have parallel treads, but a single broad line of cleats, individually retractable like the claws of a cat. The hopper opened just before this wheel/foot—and closed tightly when finished, like a mouth. Sophisticated...

Veg grinned for a moment. Wonderful technology, but the stupid thing didn't know the rifle was no longer dangerous! It had fought the weapon instead of the man.

Then he sobered. The machine wasn't fighting the rifle, it was consuming it! It ate metal.

He hadn't been battling this thing. He had been feeding it. No wonder it had halted; as long as he was willing to serve good metal by hand, why should the machine exert itself further?

This revelation didn't help much, however. It suggested that the machine was distressingly smart, not dumb. The human party would need that metal to survive. He couldn't let a ravenous machine gobble it all down.

Still, that gave him an idea. If metal fed it, would food hurt it?

Veg tore open a pack of food staples. Here were breadstuff and vegetables and—he paused with Ox by Piers Anthony

distaste as his hand rummaged—meat.

Then he brightened. What better use for it? He hauled out a plastic-wrapped steak and hurled it at the machine, which had just finished the rifle, burped, and turned back toward the man. The blade rose to catch the package; bits of flesh, bone, and plastic splayed into the air.

This time he observed the scoop-like orifice, the hopper, in action behind the blade. The different processes of the machine were well coordinated. The bulk of the freshly sliced meat and bone funneled directly into this mouth, just as the metal had. Veg held his breath, another steak in hand.

Would the machine get sudden indigestion?

No such luck. A spout opened, and clear liquid dribbled out onto the ground: the surplus juices of the meat, apparently unneeded by the thing's metabolism. The machine assimilated the organic material as readily as it had the inorganic. And came on for more.

Would liquid short it out? External liquid, not digestive fluid. Veg found a bottle of water and heaved a full gallon at the fan. The machine was drenched.

First it shook; then it glowed all over. Death agonies for this nonliving creature? No—it was merely drying itself off efficiently by a combination of vibration and heat. It had not been incapacitated.

"Takes more brains than I got to handle this metal baby," Veg muttered as he danced nimbly aside. It was hardly the occasion for introspection, but Veg had high respect for the intelligence of his friend Cal and wished he were here at this moment. Cal could have looked at the oncoming machine and made one obvious suggestion, and the thing would be finished.

The two men had met years before, in space, introduced as a prank by idle crewmen. Veg was a vegetarian and, after too much ribbing, somewhat militant about it. Since he was also an extremely powerful man, the sniggers had soon abated. Rabbit food did not necessarily make rabbits.

Until word circulated of a man who was a pure carnivore, eating nothing but meat—man flesh, at that!—and who thought vegetarians were stupid. Veg had not reacted overtly, but his muscles had bulged under his shirt tensely.

Tiny, weak Calvin Potter—about as inoffensive as it was possible to be. Yet it was technically true: Owing to a savage episode in his past, he had been rendered unable to consume any food except human blood. And he was a genius, compared to whom all other people, including vegetarians, were stupid.

If Veg had suffered ridicule, it was minor compared to what Cal endured. Veg did not like being made a patsy for the torment of another man. He took the unhappy little Cal under his bone-crushing wing, and very shortly no one thought anything about him was even faintly humorous.

Yet as it turned out, Cal was the stronger man, able because of his intellect to tackle even a predator dinosaur alone and barehanded—and to survive. He had actually done it.

There was no way to summon Cal. Veg had beamed through to this alternate world first, to set things up for his companions and scout for any dangers. Aquilon was to follow in an hour, Cal in another Ox by Piers Anthony

hour, along with the mantas. All nice and neat.

Only about two hundred and fifty pounds could be transferred at one time, and the equipment had to cool off after each use. That was why things had to be spaced out. Or so the agents claimed. Veg didn't believe the male-agent, Taler; the female, Tamme, was obviously no more trustworthy, but on a woman it didn't really matter.

He retreated again. Well, he had found danger, all right! Rather, it had found him. An animate buzz saw with an omnivorous appetite. If he didn't figure out something pretty soon, it would eat him and the supplies and lie in wait for Aquilon...

That goaded him to fury. The thought of the lovely woman being consumed by the machine...

Veg had always been able to take or leave women, and because he was large, muscular, and handsome, he had taken a number. Until Aquilon, the girl who never smiled, came into his life. She was an artist, whose paintings were almost as beautiful as she. Though she was competent and independent, she was also deep-down nice. Veg had not known what real love was, but to know Aquilon was indeed to love her, though she had never solicited it. Part of that love now was to give her up without resentment; that was the essence she had taught him simply by being what she was.

She might have split the Veg-Cal friendship apart—but she needed them both as much as they needed her. So they had become three friends, closer than before, with no competition or jealousy between them. Finally she was able to smile...

"I'm going to get you out of here if it kills me!" Veg cried. He hoisted the bag of food to his shoulder and began running. "Come, doggie!" he called, flipping back a package of raisins. "Soup's on—if you can catch it!"

The machine had been sampling the fabric of the tent-assembly. It angled its blade to catch the raisins. Evidently it liked them better—more iron?—because it followed after Veg.

He led it across the desert, away from the supplies. His tactic was working—but what would happen when he ran out of food?

Aquilon stood chagrined at the carnage. The supplies had been ravaged, bits of meat and metal were scattered across the sand, and Veg was nowhere in sight. What had happened?

She cradled the egg in her arms, keeping it warm. It was a large egg, like a small football, nine inches long. It was all that remained of two fine birds she had known and loved. They had died, protecting her and it. There was no way to repay them except to vindicate their trust and preserve the egg until it hatched.

She felt a sudden urge to paint. She always painted when upset; it calmed her marvelously. She had painted the phenomenal fungus landscape of Planet Nacre, where she and the two men had had their first great adventure together. She had painted the savage omnivore of that world—and seen in it the mere reflection of the worst omnivore of all, man himself. She had painted dinosaurs—but how could Ox by Piers Anthony

she paint the ravening monsters that were the souls of human beings, herself included?

She could try; it might work this time. To make visible the ego of the human omnivore... but to do that she would have to put down the egg...

Then she saw the tracks. Veg's footprints led away from the camp, partly obscured by something he must have been dragging. Had he gone exploring? He should have stayed nearby, securing the camp against possible dangers, not gallivanting about the countryside. Not that there was much countryside to see; this was about as gaunt a locale as she cared to endure. Sand and boulders...

But what would account for the destruction of supplies? Someone or something had vandalized them, and she knew Veg would not have done that. The cuts were peculiar, almost like the marks of a rampant power-saw. Strange, strange.

She was worried now. If something had attacked, Veg would have fought. That was the omnivore in him despite his vegetarianism. That could account for the mess. If he had won, why wasn't he here? If he had lost, why were his footprints leading away? Veg was stubborn; he would have died fighting.

He would never have run.

She had thought she loved Veg at one time. Physically, sexually. She had tried to be a vegetarian like him. But somehow it hadn't worked out. She still cared for him deeply, however, and his unexplained absence troubled her.

She contemplated the prints. Could he have lost—and been taken captive? If someone held a gun on him, even Veg would not have been so foolish as to resist. Yet where were the prints of his captor?

There were only the treadlike marks of whatever he had been hauling... No, she still didn't have it.

First, there would be no one here to hold a gun or any other weapon on Veg. This was an uninhabited wilderness desert on an unexplored alternate world. They were the first human beings to set foot on it. Second, the prints diverged in places, sometimes being separated by several yards. If Veg had been dragging or hauling anything, the marks would have been near his own prints, always.

She stooped to examine the other marks more carefully, cradling the big egg in one arm. She touched the flattened sand with one finger. Substantial weight had been here—a ton or more, considering the breadth of the track and the depression of the sand. Like tire marks but wider, and there was only one line instead of parallel lines. What sort of vehicle had made that? Not a human artifact...

The obvious thing to do was to follow the tracks and find out. But she wasn't supposed to leave the campsite until Cal and the mantas were through the aperture, and she didn't want to walk into the clutches—treads?—of whatever had followed Veg. There was no real cover here apart from the boulders; as soon as she got close enough to see it, it would see her. And if it had made Veg move out, there was no way she could fight it. Veg was an extraordinarily able man physically.

So she would have to stay here, keeping a sharp lookout, and clean up the mess. If she were lucky, nothing would happen until Cal arrived. If she were luckier, Veg would return unharmed.

She turned, letting the bright sunlight fall on the egg, warming it. Ornet was inside that egg, the embryo of a bird that possessed a kind of racial memory: perhaps a better tool for survival than man's Ox by Piers Anthony

intelligence. If only the right habitat could be found. And if only a mate for the bird could be found, too. Maybe one could be fetched from Paleo, the first alternate-Earth, and the pair would start a dynasty here in some desert oasis, and she could watch the community prosper...

Desert oasis... this was Earth, or an alternate of it; the landscape matched some place and some time on the world she knew. Where—on Earth—was this? Cal was the only one who could figure that out.

The shadow of a human being fell across the sand before her, jolting her out of her reverie. Aquilon froze before she looked up; it was too soon for Cal to appear, and Veg could not have come upon her unawares. Who, then? She looked—and gave a little gasp of amazement. A beautiful blonde girl stood before her, shaped like a siren beneath her flowing hair. Siren in more than one way: She was nude.

The apparition's blue eyes surveyed the scene coolly. Aquilon, functionally attired in denim, felt out of sorts. "Who are you?" she demanded.

"Pointless to go into all that now," the nymph said. "Please give me the egg."

Aquilon stepped back involuntarily. "No!"

"You must. You can't preserve it any longer. Not here in the desert with the awful machines. I have found a new Garden of Eden, a paradise for birds; when it hatches there—"

"No one else can—" Aquilon broke off, realizing what her mind had balked at before. "You're me! "

"And you're me, close enough," the blonde said. "So you can trust me. You—"

"But you're—you're more—"

The woman's eyes dropped momentarily down to her own bosom, following Aquilon's gaze. "I bore a child; that's why. I lost mine; you'll keep yours. But you can't keep the egg."

Aquilon retreated. "A baby? I—"

"You are in danger. You can save yourself but not the egg. There is little time, and it's too complicated to explain right now. Give it to me." She reached out.

"No!" Aquilon retreated again, hugging the egg. Her mind was spinning with this inexplicable development. How had her buxom double manifested here? Could she trust her—or was it some weird kind of trap? To know that the egg really was safe...

"Give it to me!" the blonde cried, diving for her.

Aquilon straightarmed her, but the force of the woman's lunge shoved her back. Her heels caught against a bag of supplies, and she tumbled backward, the blonde on top of her. Both of them screamed.

The egg, caught between them, had been crushed. The large embryo within, released too soon, flopped blindly and died.

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Cal looked about. The supplies had been savaged. Veg was gone, and Aquilon was lying on the ground near a mound of sand. He rushed to her.

She was not dead. She was sobbing. She lifted a sand-smudged face to him as he put his hand on her shoulder. In one hand was a fragment of broken shell.

Cal realized that the precious egg had been smashed. She must have fallen while holding it and then had to bury the remains. Hence the tears, the mound of sand.

He felt sharp regret. That egg had meant a lot to her, and therefore to him. He had hoped it could be preserved until it hatched, inconvenient as that process was.

But more important, now: What had this loss done to Aquilon? And where was Veg? Had Veg had something to do with the destruction of the egg? No, impossible!

He let her be. She would have to recover in her own fashion. There was no genuine comfort he could provide; the egg was irrevocably gone. He analyzed the tracks instead—and was amazed.

Veg had gone somewhere across the desert and not returned. Aquilon had apparently fought someone—a barefoot person, possibly female, for the prints were small. Those tracks staggered a short way over the sand and then vanished. And some kind of vehicle had come and gone, doing damage to the supplies enroute.

Had the agents sent in other missions? Other people, with power equipment—and bare feet? For what reason? If there were two or more missions, they should have been informed of each other's presence so they could rendezvous. Certainly they should not have raided each other. And Taler, the agent leader, had had no reason to lie about this.

Still, the rebuilt-human-androids that were the agents were smart, strong, and ruthless in the performance of their assigned missions. Cal had a sober respect for them even when he had to oppose them. One agent of the SU series, Subble, had been assigned to ascertain the truth about the Nacre adventure; he had done so. Three of the TA series had been sent to salvage the alternate-Earth Paleo for human civilization; they had made a devastatingly direct attempt to do that, also, despite all Cal's efforts. As a result, the enclave of dinosaurs had been wiped out, the Orn-bird killed, and the trio of

"normal" people taken prisoner. As though a girl like Aquilon could ever be considered typical, or a man like Veg!

"Hex! Circe!" he snapped, turning to the creatures who were sitting motionless near the aperture, their lambent eyes fastened on him. "Find Veg. Careful—danger."

The two mantas leaped into the air, flattening into their speed-form as they moved. They sailed across the desert like two low-flying kites, swift and silent.

Aquilon rose. "Cal!" she cried despairingly.

He walked toward her, wishing with one part of his mind that she were the kind to fall into a man's Ox by Piers Anthony

arms when she needed comforting. But she was not; very seldom did she break down. She was a tough, realistic girl. As long as she lived, she would function well. That was probably why he loved her; her beauty was secondary.

"What happened?" he asked gently.

"A woman came and broke the egg," she said. "And she was me."

" You? " Those bare, feminine prints...

"Me. My double. Only more so. I hit her..."

Something clicked in his mind. "The alternate framework!" he exclaimed. "I should have known!"

"What?" She was so pretty when she was surprised!

"We're dealing in alternates now. There must be an infinite number of alternate-Earths. Once we start crossing those boundaries, we run the risk of meeting ourselves. As you did..."

"Oh!" she said, comprehending. "Then she was me. Only she'd had a baby. But why was she here—and where did she go?"

"We can't know yet. Did she say anything?"

"Only that I could survive but not the egg. She wanted to take it to some Eden..."

"She must have known your future. Perhaps she was from a slightly more advanced framework. In a year she could have had her baby and lost her egg, so she knew from experience—"

"No—it was her baby she lost." Aquilon shook her head, unsettled. "She said I would keep mine. But I'm not pregnant!"

"There are other alternates," he pointed out. "An infinite number of Aquilons will have had babies, and an infinite number more will be due. She could have mistaken you. She meant well."

"And I fought her," Aquilon said. "I shouldn't have done that..."

"How could you know? And you had a right to retain your egg no matter what she knew. You fought for it before to save it from dinosaurs."

"But now neither of us have it. She was crying as she left..."

"She wanted to save the egg—and instead destroyed it," Cal said. "She felt as you would feel."

Aquilon looked at him, her tear-streaked face still sandy—and lovely. "Then she is desolate. I should have given it to her."

"No. Each world must look out for its own. We fought to prevent Earth from despoiling Paleo; we must also fight to prevent other alternates from despoiling us. But we must understand that they are very much like us..."

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"Omnivores!" she said bitterly.

"But there is a positive side. Orn's egg has been lost in this alternate—but there must be many alternates where it was saved. In some you kept it; in others the other Aquilon took it. But the chick isn't dead, there."

"Ornet," she said. "Offspring of Orn and Ornette..."

He smiled. She was coming out of it. "By any other name... Now we must find out what happened to Veg."

Her eyes followed the tracks across the sand. "Do you think he—?"

"I sent the mantas after him. Somehow they know; they would not have gone if he were dead."

"Yes, of course," she murmured.

They cleaned up the supplies somewhat, making packs for each person, just in case. A blaster and a rifle were missing, and one of the long crowbars, suggesting that Veg had taken them. "But we already know that we face a strange situation," Cal warned her. "Conventional weapons may be useless."

"Machine!" she said suddenly.

Cal looked up inquiringly. "We have no machines here."

"My double—she said something about machines, here in the desert. 'Awful machines.' A danger—"

Cal looked once more at the tread-tracks. "A machine," he murmured thoughtfully. "Following Veg..."

"Oh, let's hurry!" she cried. "And take weapons!"

They started out warily, following Veg's tracks and those of the mystery vehicle. Cal was ill at ease; if a human being could appear from another alternate, so could heavy equipment. Suppose some kind of tank had been dispatched to hunt down the visitors to this world? They just might have walked into an interalternate war...

Aquilon stopped abruptly, rubbing her eyes. "Cal!" she whispered.

Cal looked. At first he saw nothing; then he became aware of a kind of sparkle in the air ahead. Faint lights were blinking on and off, changing their fairy patterns constantly.

"A firefly swarm?" Aquilon asked. "Let me paint it." She was never without her brush and pad, and now, without the egg to hold, she could paint again.

She hesitated. He knew why: Her sudden freedom made her feel guilty. How much better to have given the egg to her double! The woman would have taken care of it every bit as well as Aquilon herself because she was Aquilon—wiser for her bitter experience. Or at least, so it would seem—to Ox by Piers Anthony

this Aquilon at this moment. He had to divert her thoughts.

"Fireflies? With no plants to feed the insects?" Cal asked, posing what he knew to be a fallacious question. "We have seen no indigenous life here."

"There has to be life," she replied as she quickly sketched. "Otherwise there would be no breathable atmosphere. Plants give off oxygen."

"Yes, of course..." he agreed, watching the swarm. "Still, there is something odd here."

The sparkle-pattern intensified. Now it was like a small galaxy of twinkling stars, the individual lights changing so rapidly that the eye could not fix on them. But Aquilon's trained perception was catching the artistry of it. Color flowed from her automatic brush, brightening the picture. This was the marvelous, creative person he had known, expressing herself through her art.

The flashes were not random; they moved in ripples, like the marquee of an old cinemahouse. These ripples twined and flexed like living things. But not like chains of fireflies.

"Beautiful," Aquilon breathed. Yes, now her own beauty illumined her; she was what she perceived.

Suddenly the swarm moved toward them. The lights became bright and sharp. The outline expanded enormously.

"Fascinating," Cal said, seeing three-dimensional patterns within the cloud, geometric ratios building and rebuilding in dazzling array. This was no random collection of blinkers...

Aquilon grabbed his arm. "It sees us!" she cried in abrupt alarm. "Run!"

It was already too late. The glowing swarm was upon them.

Chapter 2

Survive!

OX assimilated the directive, knowing nothing but the need. How, why, mode, were absent; there was no rationale. Only the imperative. It was inherent in his being; it made him what he was. It was what he was: the need to survive.

He turned his attention to the external.

Disorientation. Distress. Nonsurvival.

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OX retracted, halving his volume. What had happened?

Survival dictated that he explore despite the pain of the external. OX realized that through DISTRESS related to NONSURVIVAL, certain forms of distress might be necessary to survival.

Judgment was required. He modified his capabilities to accommodate this concept and thereby became more intelligent.

Experiment and intelligence provided a working rationale: He had extended himself too precipitously and thereby thrown his basic organization out of balance.

The lesson: Expansion had to be organized. Four dimensions became far more complex than three, requiring a different type of organization.

OX extended a fleeting outer feedback shell to explore the limits of his locale. It was not large; he had room to move about but had to contain himself somewhat.

Discomfort. Minor distress but growing. OX hovered in place, but the discomfort increased. He moved, and it abated. Why?

The base on which he rested, the network of points, was fading. He was his environment; he occupied many small elements, drawing energy from them, making a sentient pattern of them. This energy was limited; he had to move off and allow it to regenerate periodically. Merely sitting in one spot would exhaust that set of elements: nonsurvival.

The larger OX expanded, the more points he encompassed and the more energy he consumed. By contracting within optimum volume he conserved survival resources. But he could not become too small, for that limited his abilities and led to dysfunction.

OX stabilized. But his minimum functional size was still too large for the territory to sustain indefinitely. He could exist at maximum size briefly or at minimum size longer—but the end was nonsurvival, either way.

Survive! He had to keep searching.

He searched. Unsuccess wasted resources and led to discomfort. Yet even in his distress, there was a special irritant. Certain circuits were not functioning properly. He investigated. All was in order.

He returned to the larger problem of survival—and the interference resumed persistently.

OX concentrated on the annoyance. Still there was no perceivable dysfunction. It did not manifest when he searched for it, only when he was otherwise occupied.

He set up a spotter circuit, oriented on the troublesome section. He had not known how to do this before the need arose, but this was the way of survival: the necessary, as necessary.

OX returned to his larger quest—and the irritation manifested. This time the spotter was on it. He concentrated, pouncing, as it were, on what he had trapped.

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Nothing.

Paradox. The spotter oriented on any malfunction; it was a modified feedback, simple and certain.

Yet there was a malfunction—and the spotter had failed.

OX suffered disorientation. Paradox was nonsurvival. It was also annoying as hell.

He disciplined himself, simplifying his circuits. No paradox. If the spotter hadn't caught it, there was no malfunction. But there was something. What?

OX concentrated. He refined his perceptions. Gradually he fathomed it. It was not his malfunction but an interruption from an external source. Thus the spotter had had no purchase.

Something was obscuring some of his elements. Not obliterating them but damping them down so that he was aware of the loss of energy—peripherally. When he investigated, he shifted off those particular elements, and the effect abated. He could only perceive it through that damping, while his circuits were functioning. Ghostly, it avoided his direct attention, for it was an effect, not a thing.

Was it an ailment of the elements themselves? If so, his survival would be more limited than originally projected—and he was already in a nonsurvival situation.

OX cast a net of spotters to determine the precise configuration of the damping. Soon he had it: There were actually three centers set close together. A stable, persistent blight. No immediate threat to survival.

Then one of the blight spots moved.

OX fibrillated. Distress! How could a blight move, retaining form? Stable or recurring form with movement was an attribute of sentience, of pattern. Blight was the lack of pattern.

Modification. Perhaps blight could slide somewhat, forced over by some unknown compulsion.

Nonsentient. All blight spots would suffer the same effect.

Another spot moved—the opposite way. Then both moved together—and apart.

Disorientation.

Chapter 3

TAMME

Tamme emerged from the aperture, alert and wary. She had not told the three explorers that she was coming along and did not expect them to be pleased. But after the disaster on the dinosaur world, Ox by Piers Anthony

Paleo, the agents were taking few chances. These people were not to be trusted; left alone, they were too apt to concoct some other way to betray the interests of Earth.

The camp was deserted. Tamme saw at a glance that weapons and food had been removed: more than would normally have been used in the three hours since the first person had been sent through. They were up to something already!

But it was strange. Too many footprints led away. Veg, Cal, Aquilon—and a barefoot person? Plus something on a caterpillar tread. And the two mantas.

Caterpillar? Hardly standard equipment. Where had they gotten it?

Answer: There was nowhere they could have gotten it. Tamme herself had put through all the supplies in advance, checking and rechecking a detailed roster. This was the first human penetration to this new world. Sensors had reported breathable air, plant life, amphibious animals, fish—all far removed from this desert where the aperture actually debouched but certainly part of this alternate.

Also advanced machines. That was what made immediate exploration imperative.

Machines did not evolve on their own. Something had to build them. Something more advanced than the machines themselves. Ergo, there was on this world something more than the sensors had indicated. Either an advanced human culture—or an alien one. Either way, a potential threat to Earth.

But windows to new worlds were hard to come by. The first such breakthrough had come only a few months ago, and Mother Earth naturally had not wanted to risk valuable personnel by sending them through a oneway aperture. So volunteers had been used—three space explorers who had gotten in trouble with the authorities and had therefore been amenable to persuasion. Expendables.

An unusual trio, actually. Vachel Smith: a huge vegetarian nicknamed Veg. Deborah Hunt, called Aquilon: named after the cold north wind because, it seemed, she seldom smiled. And Calvin Potter, a small, physically weak man with a fascinatingly complex mind. The three had been lost on a planet called Nacre—theoretically it glowed in space like a pearl because of its perpetual cloud cover—and had befriended the dominant life-form there: an animate fungus with extraordinary talents. The manta.

It had been a mistake to loose this group on the world beyond the aperture, and soon the authorities had recognized that. But by that time the trio, instead of perishing as expected, had penetrated to the nearest continent and gotten involved with the local fauna—they had a talent for that!—which turned out to be reptilian. In fact, dinosaurian. Extraction had been awkward.

Three agents of the TA series had accomplished it, however: Taner (now deceased), Taler, and Tamme herself. But when they made ready to return to Earth with the prisoners, another complication had developed. Their portable return-aperture generator had opened not on Earth but on a third world.

They had known there was risk involved—of exactly this kind. The apertures were experimental and erratic. Though Paleo was the only alternate to be reached so far from Earth, despite thousands of trials, one trial on Paleo had produced this unexpected and awkward payoff. Perhaps it was a better initiation point.

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The original Earth/Paleo aperture remained. It had been broadened so that massive supplies could be transferred, and the three agents had built their own prefabricated ship with which to pursue the fugitives. A fourth agent had remained to guard the original aperture, which happened to be under the ocean near a Pacific islet a thousand miles from the western coast of Paleocene America.

It had seemed easier to transfer back directly from this spot—on the continent—rather than make a tedious trip back with the prisoners. Location seemed to make little difference to the apertures; they could start at any point and terminate anywhere—usually in the vacuum of interplanetary space. They had radioed Taol for approval, and he had contacted the Earth authorities for approval. If the supplementary aperture were successful, it would greatly facilitate the exploitation of Paleo.

Then, with the surprise development, new orders: check it out with sensors and explore it personally if necessary—but HOLD THAT CONNECTION! There was no certainty they could ever locate that world again, given the freakish nature of apertures, so it had to be held open now. Earth, enormously overpopulated, its natural resources approaching exhaustion, needed a viable alternative to expensive commerce by space travel. This could be it. More personnel would be funneled through the main aperture in due course; meanwhile, use their present resources in case the connection became tenuous.

Thus, reprieve for the prisoners. They were free—to engage in another dangerous exploration. They had not, however, been told about the machines. This time an agent would accompany them. Just to keep them out of mischief.

Agents had been developed to handle this sort of emergency. An agent was not a person; he was an android on a human chassis, molded to precise specifications. Tamme had no past beyond her briefing for this mission; all she knew was the material in the common pool of information shared by every agent of the TA type. And that overlapped considerably with the pool of SU before her series and TE after it. But it was a good pool, and all agents were superhuman both physically and mentally.

She could handle this trio of humans.

She paused in her reflection. Better qualify that. She could handle them physically because her strength, reflexes, and training were considerably superior to theirs. And emotionally, because though she had feelings, they were fully disciplined. But the woman Aquilon had her points, and the man Calvin had a freakish mind that had already demonstrated its ability to fence successfully with the mind and perception of an agent. Random variation in the "normal" population had produced an abnormal intelligence. Too bad the authorities hadn't recognized it in time.

Tamme grimaced. The truth, known to every agent but never voiced, was that the authorities were not overly smart. If ever a class of agents were programmed to tackle the problems of Earth directly, they would begin by putting the incompetents out of power. What a waste, to serve a stupid master!

Meanwhile, the immediate: Was Cal behind this odd disappearance of the trio? Had he anticipated her presence or that of Taler—she had matched Taler, scissors/paper/rock, for the honor and lost—and arranged some kind of trap? Possible but improbable; there had been no hint of that in his mind before he was transferred. He could have done such a thing, but probably hadn't.

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All of which meant that the obvious surmise was the most likely one. She had forced herself to run through the alternatives first as a matter of caution. The three explorers must already have encountered one of the advanced machines of this world, and it had taken them—somewhere.

Which was one reason they had not been told in advance that Tamme was coming along. What they did not know, they could not betray. In case the machines turned out to be intelligent enough to make an interrogation. An agent had to consider every ramification.

So the expendables had been expended. That accounted for everything except the extra set of prints.

The bare feet walked into the sand and stopped as though the person had been lifted away at that point. But by what? A flying machine?

She checked the origin of the bare prints. The same: They appeared in the sand from nowhere. Odd indeed. Unless someone had intentionally made those prints by walking backward, then forward in his/her own tracks to make them seem like the mystery they were...

Tamme carried their spare aperture projector so that she could return to Taler on Paleo regardless of the firmness of the existing connection. Assuming hers did not open onto a fourth alternate-world!

For a moment she was tempted to go back immediately. This situation was eerie. Which was ridiculous; she was not afraid of isolation or death.

All right: She had a machine to deal with. A formidable one if it had so neatly managed to kill or capture all three humans and their mantas already. Best to tackle it promptly. And with extreme caution. Too bad she couldn't radio Taler across the aperture!

First she made a survey of the general premises. She ran, loping over the sand at about twenty miles an hour, watching, listening. There was nothing lurking nearby. She completed her circle and set out after the massed trail of footprints, machine tread, and manta marks. Veg and Aquilon, apparently together. A curious parade!

But soon the tracks diverged. Veg, tread, and mantas continued forward, but Cal and Aquilon turned aside—and stopped. Their prints disappeared just as the bare ones had. Two more people were gone inexplicably.

Another flying machine? Then why hadn't the others taken note? If they all were captive, why hadn't all of them walked all the way to wherever they were being taken? More mystery—and she was not enchanted by it. Her working hypothesis was taking a beating.

Tamme resumed the trail after making another scouting circle. She had good perceptions; she would have known if anything were hiding near. Nothing was.

Several miles farther on, the mantas diverged. One went to the left, the other to the right. An encircling maneuver? Encircling what if they were already captive?

Now she had to make a choice: Follow one of the mantas, or follow the main trail. Easy decision: Fast as she was, she could not face a manta. The fungoids could do a hundred miles an hour over sand or water. Veg she could overtake as long as he were afoot.

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But the machine was an unknown antagonist. She did not care to risk an ambush by such a device. So she followed the trail by eye, moving some distance to the side, alert for whatever she might find.

Veg's tracks were not forthright. Now they turned right, now left, and now they faced backward—but the scuffing of his heels showed he was walking backward, not changing the direction of his motion.

Facing the machine evidently but staying clear of it. Why? Overall, the trail curved slowly left as though the two were traveling in a great circle back to the base camp. Not exactly the pattern of captivity.

A manta appeared, moving swiftly over the sand. It was beautiful in its seeming flight; she had great admiration for its mechanical efficiency and artistry. Tamme was armed but held her fire; these creatures were phenomenally apt at dodging. So it was unlikely she could score on it from any distance, and she did not want to antagonize it unnecessarily.

It came to rest before her, coalescing into a dark blob, the huge single eye glowing. The mantas, she knew, projected an all-purpose beam from that eye; they both saw and communicated by means of it.

Was it trying to tell her something?

"Which one are you?" she inquired experimentally. They could actually see the compressions and rarefactions of the air that made sound; thus, they could in effect hear, though they had no auditory equipment. All their major senses were tied into one—but what a sense that one was!

The thing jumped up, flattened into its traveling form, and cracked its tail like a whip. Six snaps.

"Hex," she said. "Veg's friend. Do you know where he is?"

One snap, meaning YES.

Communication was not difficult, after all. Soon she had ascertained that Veg was in good health and that the manta would conduct her to him.

Veg was resting as she came up. He was leaning against a boulder and chewing on a hunk of dark bread. "Where's the machine?" Tamme asked, as though this were routine.

"It finally got full and lost its appetite," he said. "So it left. Lucky for me; I was almost out of food."

"You were feeding it?"

"It was bound to eat. Better to feed it what we could spare than let it take its own choice. Like vital supplies—or people. The thing eats meat as well as metal! But when I started feeding it rocks and sand, it quit. Not too smart."

So the machine had been attacking him—and he had foiled it at last by throwing what the desert offered. Veg might not be a genius, but he had good common sense!

Veg considered her more carefully. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"We don't trust you."

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"It figures." He wasn't even very surprised; she could read his honest minor responses in the slight tension of his muscles, the perspiration of his body, and the rate of breathing. In fact he was intrigued, for he found her sexually appealing.

Tamme was used to that in normals. She was sexually appealing; she had been designed to be that way. Usually she ignored her effect on men; sometimes she used it. It depended on the situation. If sex could accomplish a mission more readily than another approach, why not?

But at the moment her only mission was to keep an eye on the activities of these people. Veg was the simplest of the lot; his motives were forthright, and it was not his nature to lie. She could relax.

"Have some bread," Veg said, offering her a torn chunk.

"Thank you." It was good bread; the agents' supplies were always nutritious because their bodies required proper maintenance for best efficiency. She bit down, severing the tough crust with teeth that could as easily cut through the flesh and bone of an antagonist.

"You know, I met one of you agents," Veg said. "Name of Subble. You know him?"

"Yes and no. I am familiar with the SU class of agent but never met that particular unit."

"Unit?"

"All agents of a type are interchangeable. You would have had the same experience with any SU, and it would have been very similar with an SO, TA, or TE." His body tensed in quick anger. Amused, Tamme read the signs. Normals found the concept of human inter-changeability repulsive; they always wanted to believe that every person was unique, even those designed to be un-unique. If only they knew; the camaraderie of identity was the major strength of all agents. Tamme never wanted to give up any of her programmed attributes—unless every agent in her class gave them up. She only felt at ease with her own kind, and even other series of agents made her feel slightly uncomfortable.

"Decent sort of a fellow, in his way. I guess he reported all about what we said."

"No. Subble died without making a report."

"Too bad," Veg said with mixed emotion. Again Tamme analyzed him: He was sorry Subble had died but relieved that the report had not been made. Evidently their dialogue had grown personal.

"Agents don't antagonize people unnecessarily," she said. "Our job is to ascertain the facts and to take necessary action. We're all alike so that the nature of our reactions can be predetermined and so that our reports need minimal correction for subjectivity or human bias. It is easier on the computer."

"That's what he said."

"Naturally. It's what we all say." Again that predictable annoyance. Veg looked at her. "But you aren't alike. He—he understood."

"Try me sometime."

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He looked at her again, more intently, reading an invitation. Sex appeal again. He had evidently been through a traumatic experience with the girl Aquilon and was on the rebound. Here he was with another comely blonde female, and though he knew intellectually that she was a dedicated and impersonal agent of the government, his emotion saw little more than the outward form. Which was why female agents were comely—through they could turn it off at will. Normals had a marvelous capacity for willful self-delusion.

The other man, Calvin Potter, was far more intriguing as a challenge. But the expedient course was to enlist the cooperation of the most likely individual, and that was Veg. Cal would be deceived by no illusions; Veg was amenable, within limits, and more so at this time than he would be a month from now.

"We are alike," Tamme repeated, smiling in a fashion she knew was un like any expression Subble would have used. "I can do anything your SU could do. Maybe a little more because I'm part of a later series."

"But you aren't a man!"

She raised a fair eyebrow. "So?"

"So if someone socked you—"

"Go ahead," she said, raising her chin. She had to refrain from smiling at the unsubtlety of his approach. He moved suddenly, intending to stop his fist just shy of the mark. He was, indeed, a powerful man, fit to have been a pugilist in another age. Even sitting as he was, the force of a genuine blow like this could have knocked out an ordinary person.

She caught his arm and deflected it outward while she leaned forward. His fist passed behind her head and momentum carried it around. Suddenly she was inside the crook of his arm, and their heads were close together.

She kissed him ever so lightly on the lips. "There will come a time, big man," she murmured. "But first we must find your lost friends."

That reminder electrified him. He had a triple shock: first, her demonstrated ability to foil him physically; second, the seeming incipience of an amorous liaison with a female agent—intriguing as a suppressed fancy, upsetting as an actual prospect; third, the idea of dallying with a stranger while his two closest friends were unaccounted for.

Of course, Veg was not as culpable as he deemed himself to be in that moment. Tamme had scripted this encounter carefully, if extemporaneously. He had never supposed seriously that she would have anything to do with him—and he had not known that Cal and Aquilon were missing. The appearance of the mantas had seemed to indicate that things were all right; he hadn't thought to query Hex or Circe closely, and the mantas, as was their custom, had not volunteered anything or intimated that something was wrong. He had supposed that Cal and Aquilon were back at the camp, their occupation made safe by his diversion of the vicious machine.

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Tamme had shocked him with a kiss while informing him that this was not the case. In due course he would think all this out and realize that the agent had used him, or at least manipulated him. But by that time the significance of her remark "There will come a time" would have penetrated to a more fundamental level, and he wouldn't care.

Child's play, really. That was why Cal was so much more intriguing. She would of course make the attempt to impress Cal because he would then be less inclined to work against the interests of Earth—the interests as the Earth-Authorities saw them. But she expected to fail. The girl, too, would be a difficult one because the weapon of sex appeal would be valueless. Aquilon had sex appeal of her own in good measure—and it was natural rather than cultured. A rare quality! Also, Aquilon had already killed a male-agent, Taner; she would do the same with a female-agent if the occasion required it.

And there was a mystery: how had she killed Taner? She could not have caught the man off guard, and she could not have seduced him. Agents used sex as they used anything necessary. They were not used by it.

It had to have been through the agency of the mantas. The fungoids were extremely swift, and the strike of their whiplike tails could kill. But they had to be airborne to attack and within striking range, and the reflexes of an alert agent were sufficient to shoot down a manta before it could complete its act. It was a matter of split-second coordination—but the agent had the edge.

Taner had been careless, obviously. But that did not excuse the slaying of an agent. When the facts were known...

They were now both on their feet, ready to go. Veg's thoughts had run their channeled course.

"They're not at the camp?"

"No. Their tracks follow yours, then disappear."

"That true, Hex?" he asked the manta. Distrust of agents was so ingrained that he wasn't even conscious of the implied affront. Why should he take her word?

Hex snapped his tail once. Vindication. Tamme wondered whether the creatures could read human lies as readily as the agents could. She would have to keep that in mind.

"Maybe Circe found them," Veg said.

Hex snapped twice.

"I think you should look at the tracks," Tamme said. "Something strange is going on, and we may be in danger." Understatement of the day!

"Wait," Veg said. "The mantas came across with Cal, right? They must know." But as he spoke, he saw that Hex was ignorant of the matter.

Tamme shrugged. "I guess that Cal found you missing, so he sent them to find you. While they were gone, something got him." She perceived his new alarm and quickly amended her statement. "He's Ox by Piers Anthony

not dead so far as I know. He's just gone. The tracks walk out into the sand and stop. I suspect a machine lifted him away."

"A flying machine?" He pondered. "Could be. I didn't see it—but that ground machine sure was tough. But if—"

"I don't think it ate them," Tamme said, again picking up his specific concern. He had strong ties to his friends! "There's no blood in the sand, no sign of struggle. The prints show they were standing there but not running or fighting."

"Maybe," he said, half relieved. "Hex—any ideas?"

Three snaps.

"He doesn't know," Veg said. "Circe must be looking for them now. Maybe we'd better just go back to camp and wait—"

Tamme reached out, took his arm and hauled him to the side with a strength he had not suspected in her. They sprawled on the ground behind a boulder. Wordlessly, she pointed.

Something hovered in the air a hundred feet ahead. A network of glimmering points, like bright dust motes in sunlight. But also like the night sky. It was as though tiny stars were being born right here in the planet's atmosphere. She had never heard of anything like this; nothing in her programming approached it.

Hex jumped up, orienting on the swarm. He shot toward it.

"Watch it, Hex!" Veg cried.

But Tamme recognized a weakness in the manta. The creature had to be airborne to be combat-ready.

Actually it stepped across the ground rapidly, one-footed, its cape bracing against the pressure of the atmosphere. It had to aim that big eye directly on the subject to see it at all. Thus, the manta had to head toward the swarm—or ignore it. Probably the creature would veer off just shy of the sparkle.

Hex did. But at that moment the pattern of lights expanded abruptly, doubling its size. The outer fringe extended beyond the manta's moving body. And Hex disappeared.

So did the light-swarm. The desert was dull again.

"What the hell was it?" Veg exclaimed.

"Whatever took your friends," Tamme said tersely. "An energy consumer—or a matter transmitter."

"It got Hex..."

"I think we'd better get out of here. In a hurry."

"I'm with you!"

They got up and ran back the way they had come.

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"Circe!" Veg cried. "There's something after us—and don't you go near it! It got Hex!"

"Oh-oh," Tamme said.

Veg glanced back apprehensively. The pattern was there again, moving toward them rapidly. Circe came to rest beside them, facing it.

"We can't outrun it," Tamme said. "We'll have to fight."

She faced the swarm, trying to analyze it for weakness, though she did not know what she was looking for. The thing swirled and pulsed like a giant airborne amoeba, sending out fleeting pseudopods that vanished instead of retracting. Sparks that burned out when flung from the main mass?

"God..." Veg said.

"Or the devil," she said, firing one hip-blaster.

The energy streamed through the center of the bright cloud. Points of light glowed all along the path of her shot, but the swarm did not collapse.

"It's a ghost!" Veg said. "You can't burn a ghost!" He was amazed rather than afraid. Fear simply was not natural to him; he had run as one might from a falling tree, preserving himself without terror.

Tamme drew another weapon. A jet of fluid shot out. "Fire extinguisher," she said.

It had no effect, either. Now the swarm was upon them. Pinpoint lights surrounded them, making it seem as though they stood in the center of a starry nebula. Circe jumped up, her mantle spreading broadly, but there was nothing for her to strike at, and it was too late to escape.

Then something strange happened.

Chapter 4

SENTIENCE

First problem: survival in a nonsurvival situation.

Second problem: existence of mobile blight, detectable only by its transitory damping effect on elements.

Each problem seemed insoluble by itself. But together, there was a possibility. The existence of mobile nonpattern entities implied that a nonpattern mode of survival was feasible. Comprehend the Ox by Piers Anthony

mode of the blight, and perhaps survival would develop.

OX's original circuitry had difficulty accepting this supposition, so he modified it. The nagging distress occasioned by these modifications served as warning that he could be pursuing a nonsurvival course. But when all apparent courses were nonsurvival, did it matter?

He put his full attention to the blight problem. First he mapped the complete outline of each blight spot, getting an exact idea of its shape. One was virtually stationary, a central blob with extensions that moved about. Another moved slowly from location to location in two dimensions, retaining its form. The third was most promising because it moved rapidly in three dimensions and changed its shape as it moved.

This was the way a sentient entity functioned.

Yet it was blight. A mere pattern of element damping.

Pattern. A pattern of blight was still a pattern, and pattern was the fundamental indication of sentience. Thus, nonsentients were sentient. Another paradox, indicating a flaw in perception or rationale.

Possibility: The blight was not blight but the facsimile of blight. As though a pattern were present but whose presence suppressed the activation of the elements instead of facilitating it. An inverse entity.

Error. Such an entity should leave blanks where those elements were being suppressed: as of the absence of elements. OX perceived no such blanks. When he activated given elements, the presence of an inverse pattern should at least nullify it so that the elements would seem untouched. Instead, they did activate—but not as sharply as was proper. The effect was more like a shield, dimming but not obliterating the flow of energy. A blight, not a pattern.

OX suffered another period of disorientation. It required energy to wrestle with paradox, and he was already short of the reserve required for survival.

In due course he returned to the problem; he had to. It seemed that the ultimate nature of the spots was incomprehensible. But their perceivable attributes could be ascertained and catalogued, perhaps leading to some clarification. It was still his best approach to survival. Where a pseudopattern could survive, so might a genuine pattern.

OX developed a modified spotter circuit that enabled him to perceive the spots as simple patterns rather than as pattern-gaps. The effect was marvelous: Suddenly, seeming randomness became sensible. Instead of ghosts, these now manifested as viable, if peculiar, entities.

The most comprehensible was the outline-changing spot. At times it was stationary, like a pattern at rest. When it moved, it altered its shape—as a pattern entity normally did. But even here there was a mystery: The spot did not change according to the fundamental rules of pattern. It could therefore not be stable. Yet it was; it always returned to a similar configuration.

OX's disorientation was developing again. With another effort he modified his rationale-feedback to permit him to consider confusion and paradox without suffering in this fashion. The distress signals Ox by Piers Anthony

accompanying this modification were so strong that he would never have done it had he not faced the inevitable alternative of nonsurvival.

Now he concentrated on the observable phenomena. Possible or not, the spot moved in the manner it moved and was stable.

Another spot moved but did not alter its outline appreciably. It seemed to be circulating so as not to exhaust its elements, which made sense. But it traveled only in those two dimensions.

The third spot did not move. It only shifted its projections randomly. It had occupied the same bank of elements too long—yet had not exhausted them. Another improbability: Elements had to be given slack time to recharge, or they became inoperative.

Of course, a pattern that damped down elements might not exhaust them in the same fashion.

Could OX himself achieve that state? If he were able to alternate pattern-activity with pattern damping, he might survive indefinitely.

Survival!

Such a prospect was worth the expenditure of his last reserves of energy.

OX did not know how such an inversion might be achieved. The spot patterns did know, for they had achieved it. He would have to learn from them.

It now became a problem of communication. With an entity of his own type OX would have sent an exploratory vortex to meet the vortex of the other. But these spot-entities were within his demesnes, not perceivable beyond them.

He tried an internal vortex, creating a subpattern within his own being, in the vicinity of the most mobile spot. There was no response.

He tried a self-damping offshoot—another construction developed as the need manifested. The mobile spot ignored it. Was the spot nonsentient after all—or merely unable to perceive the activation of the elements?

He tried other variants. The mobile spot took no notice.

OX was pragmatic. If one thing did not work, he would try another, and another, until he either found something that did work or exhausted the alternatives. His elements were slowly fading; if he did not discover a solution—nonsurvival.

In the midst of the fifteenth variation of offshoot, OX noted a response. Not by the shape-changing spot at which the display was directed—by the stable-shape mobile spot. It had been moving about, and abruptly it stopped.

Cessation of motion did not constitute awareness necessarily; it could signify demise. But OX

repeated the configuration, this time directing it at the second spot.

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The spot moved toward the offshoot. Awareness—or coincidence?

OX repeated the figure, somewhat to the side of the first one. The spot moved toward the new offshoot.

OX tried a similar configuration, this time one that moved in an arc before it damped out. The spot followed it and stopped when the figure was gone.

OX began to suffer the disorientation of something very like excitement despite a prior modification to alleviate this disruptive effect in himself. He tried another variant: one that moved in three dimensions. The spot did not follow it.

But a repeat of the two-dimensional one brought another response. This spot always had moved in two dimensions; it seemed to be unable to perceive in three. Yet it acted sentient within that limited framework.

OX tried a two-dimensional shoot that looped in a circle indefinitely. The spot followed it through one full circle, then stopped. Why?

Then the spot moved in a circle of its own beside the shoot. It was no longer following; it was duplicating!

OX damped out the shoot. The spot halted. There was no doubt now: The spot was aware of the shoot.

The spot moved in an oval. OX sent a new shoot to duplicate the figure.

The spot moved in a triangle. OX made a similar triangle subpattern.

The spot halted. OX tried a square. The spot duplicated it. So did the shape-changing spot.

OX controlled his threatening disorientation. Communication had been established—not with one spot but with two!

Survival!

Chapter 5

CITY

It was like a city, and like a jungle, and like a factory, all run together for surrealistic effect. Veg shook his head, unable to make any coherent whole of it at first glance.

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He stood on a metal ramp beside a vastly spreading mock-oak tree overlooking a channel of water that disappeared into a sieve over a mazelike mass of crisscrossing bars lighted from beneath.

"Another alternate, I presume," Tamme said beside him. "I suspect we'll find the others here. Why not have your mantas look?"

Now Veg saw her standing beside Hex and Circe. "Sure—look," he said vaguely. He still had not quite adjusted to finding himself alive and well.

The mantas moved. Hex sailed up and over the purple dome of a mosquelike building whose interior consisted of revolving mirrors, while Circe angled under some wooden stalactites depending from an inverted giant toadstool whose roots were colored threads.

Veg squatted to investigate a gently flexing flower. It was about three inches across, on a metallic stem, and it swiveled to face him as he moved. He poked a finger at its center.

Sharp yellow petals closed instantly on his finger, cutting the skin. "Hey!" he yelled, yanking free.

The skin was scraped where the sharp edges had touched and smarted as though acid had been squirted into the wounds.

He raised his foot high and stamped down hard with his heel. The flower dodged, but he caught the stem and crushed it against the hard ramp. Then he was sorry. "Damn!" he said as he surveyed the wreckage. "I shouldn't have done that; it was only trying to defend itself."

"Better not fool with what we don't understand," Tamme warned a bit late.

"I don't understand any of this, but I'm in it!" Veg retorted, sucking on his finger.

"I believe that was a radar device—with a self-protective circuit," she said. "This place is functioning."

"Not a flower," he said, relieved. "I don't mind bashing a machine."

There was a humming sound behind him. Veg whirled. "Now that's a machine!" he cried.

"Climb!" Tamme directed. She showed the way by scrambling up a trellis of organ pipes to reach a suspended walkway. Veg followed her example with alacrity.

The machine moved swiftly along the original ramp. Its design was different from the one he had battled in the desert. It had wheels instead of treads and an assortment of spider-leg appendages in place of the spinning blade.

It stopped by the damaged flower. There was a writhing flurry of its legs. So quickly that Veg was unable to follow the detail, it had the plant uprooted, adjusted, and replaced—repaired.

Then the machine hummed on down the ramp.

"What do you know!" Veg exclaimed. "A tame machine!"

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"I wouldn't count on it. If we do any more damage, we may see a destroyer-machine. And if this is their world, we'll be in trouble."

"Yeah, no sand here." Veg nodded thoughtfully. "If that desert was the hinterland, this is the capital.

Same world, maybe."

"No. What we went through felt like a projection—and the atmospherics differ here. That's no certain indication, but I believe it is safer to assume this is another alternate."

"Anyway, we're jungle specimens, picked up and put down, remote control. In case we should bite."

He bared his teeth. "And we just might."

"Yet it is strange they didn't cage us," Tamme said. "And it was no machine that brought us."

"Well, let's look about—carefully." He walked along the higher path. It extended in a bridgelike arc over a forest of winking lights. These were bulbs, not the scintillating motes that had brought the party here. Which reminded him again: "What did bring us?"

Tamme shook her head in the pretty way she had. It bothered him to think that probably all female agents had the same mannerisms, carefully programmed for their effect on gullible males like him.

"Some kind of force field, maybe. And I suspect there is no way out of this except the way we came.

We're in the power of the machines."

He stopped at a fountain that seemed to start as a rising beam of light but phased into falling water and finally hardened into a moving belt of woven fabric. Very carefully because of his experience with the flower, he touched the belt. It was solid yet resilient, like a rug. "The thing is a loom!"

Tamme looked, startled. "No Earthly technology, that," she said. "Very neat. The light passes through that prism, separates into its component colors, which then become liquid and fall—to be channeled into a pattern of the fabric before they solidify. Some loom!"

"I didn't know light could be liquefied or solidified," Veg remarked. His eyes traced the belt farther down to where it was slowly taken up by a huge roll.

"Neither did I," she admitted. "It appears that we are dealing with a more sophisticated science than our own."

"I sort of like it," he said. "It reminds me of something 'Quilon might paint. In fact, this whole city isn't bad."

But it was evident that Tamme was not so pleased. No doubt she would have a bombshell of a report when she returned to Earth. Would the agents come and burn all this down, as they had the dinosaur valley of Paleo?

Hex returned. "Hey, friend," Veg said. "Did you find them?"

One snap: YES. "All in one piece?"

Three snaps: confusion. To a manta, fragmentation was the death of prey. The creatures were not Ox by Piers Anthony

sharp on human humor or hyperbole.

But Cal and Aquilon were already on their way. "Veg!" Aquilon called just as though nothing had changed between them. She was absolutely beautiful.

In a moment they all were grouped about the light-fountain-loom. "We've been here an hour," Cal said. "This place is phenomenal!" Then he looked at Tamme, and Veg remembered that Cal had not known about her crossover. "Where are your friends?"

"Two alternates away, I suspect," Tamme said.

"You drew straws, and you lost."

"Exactly."

"She's not bad when you get to know her," Veg said, aware of the tension between the two.

"When you get to know them..." Aquilon murmured, and he knew she was thinking of Subble.

"I realize that not all of you are thrilled at my presence," Tamme said. "But I think we have become involved in something that overrides our private differences. We may never see Earth again."

"Do you want to?" Cal inquired. He was not being facetious.

"Is there anything to eat around here?" Veg asked. "We're short on supplies now."

"There are fruiting plants," Aquilon said. "We don't know whether they're safe, though."

"I can probably tell," Tamme said.

"See—lucky she's along!" Veg said. It fell flat. Neither Cal nor Aquilon responded, and he knew they were still against Tamme. They were not going to give her a chance. And perhaps they were right; the agents had destroyed the dinosaur enclave without a trace of conscience. He felt a certain guilt defending any agent... though Subble had indeed seemed different.

It didn't help any that he knew Tamme could read his emotions as they occurred.

"Any hint of the machines' purpose in bringing us here?" Tamme asked.

Cal shrugged. "I question whether any machine was responsible. We seem to be dealing with some more sophisticated entities. Whoever built this city..."

"There's some kind of amphitheater," Aquilon said. "With a stage. That might be the place to make contact—if they want to."

"Doesn't make much sense to snatch us up and then forget us!" Veg muttered.

"These entities may not see things quite the way we do," Cal said, smiling.

They examined the fruit plants, and Tamme pronounced them probably safe. Apparently she had finely developed senses and was able to detect poison before it could harm her system.

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The amphitheater was beautiful. Translucent colonnades framed the elevated stage, which was suspended above a green fog. The fog seemed to have no substance yet evidently supported the weight of the platform, cushioning it. Veg rolled a fruit into the mist, and the fruit emerged from the other side without hindrance: no substance there!

"Magnetic, perhaps," Cal said. "I admit to being impressed."

"But where are the people who made all this?" Veg demanded.

"Why do you assume people made it?"

"It's set up for people. The walks are just right, the seats fit us, the stage is easy to see, and the fruit's good. It wouldn't be like this if it were meant for non-humans."

Cal nodded. "An excellent reply."

"What about the machines?" Aquilon asked. "They move all around, tending it."

"That's just it," Veg said. "They're tending it, not using it. They're servants, not masters."

"I can't improve on that reasoning," Cal said. That struck Veg as vaguely false; why should Cal try to butter him up? To stop him from siding with Tamme?

"But if human beings built it—" Aquilon started.

"Then where are they?" Veg finished. "That's what I wanted to know the first time 'round."

"Several possibilities," Cal said thoughtfully. "This could have been constructed centuries or millennia ago, then deserted. The machines might have been designed to maintain it, and no one ever turned them off."

"Who ever deserted a healthy city?" Veg asked. "I mean, the whole population?"

"It happened at Çatal Huyuk in ancient Anatolia. That was a thriving neolithic city for a thousand years. Then the people left it and started Hacilar, two hundred miles to the west."

"Why?"

"We don't know. It happened almost eight thousand years ago. I suspect they ran out of game because of overhunting, and no doubt the climate had something to do with it."

"I don't like that one," Veg said. " These builders didn't have to hunt for a living. If something happened to them, it sure could happen to us."

"On the other hand, they could be here now, sleeping—or watching us."

"I don't like that, either," Veg said.

"Or perhaps this is a prison city, made for the confinement of enemies or undesirables until sentence is pronounced."

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"You get worse as you go," Veg said, grimacing. " You try it, 'Quilon."

Aquilon smiled. That still gave him a nervous thrill, for he remembered when she could not smile back on Planet Nacre. In certain ways things had been better then. "How about a vacation resort for honored guests?"

"Stop there," he said. "I like it."

"At any rate," Cal concluded, "whatever brought us can certainly remove us—and will when it so chooses. We would do well to conduct ourselves decorously."

"Segregation of the sexes?" Aquilon asked mischievously.

"He means not to break anything," Veg said—and realized too late that no one had needed any interpretation. Neither girl was stupid; Veg himself was the slow member of the group. It had never bothered him when they were three; now that they were four, it somehow did.

"You understand that, mantas?" Aquilon asked. "We don't want trouble."

The two fungoids agreed with token snaps of their tails. Aquilon had, in her way, taken the sting from his verbal blunder, for the mantas did need to have human dialogue clarified on occasion. Still the sweet girl, 'Quilon, and he loved her yet—but not in the same way as before. Oh, if certain things could be unsaid, certain mistakes taken back... but what was the use in idle speculation? In time love would diminish into friendship, and that was best.

"For now, let's rest," Tamme said.

Rest! Veg knew Tamme didn't need it half as much as the others did. The agents were tough, awfully tough. And in their fashion, intriguing.

Cal nodded agreement. He would be the most tired. He was much stronger than he had been when Veg met him back in space before Nacre, and now he could eat ordinary foods, but still his physical resources were small. "The mantas will stand guard," Cal said.

Tamme gave no indication, but somehow Veg knew she was annoyed. She must have planned to scout around alone while the others slept; maybe she had some secret way to contact the agents back on Paleo. But she could not conceal it from the mantas!

Then Tamme looked directly at him, and Veg knew she knew what he was thinking. Embarrassed, he curtailed his conjectures. And Tamme smiled faintly. Bitch! he thought, and her smile broadened.

They found places around the chamber. The benches were surprisingly comfortable, as though cushioned, yet the material was hard. Another trick of the city's technology? But there was one awkward problem.

"The john," Aquilon said. "There has to be one!"

"Not necessarily," Cal replied, smiling in much the way Tamme had. "Their mores may differ from Ox by Piers Anthony

ours."

"If they ate, they sat," Veg said firmly. "Or squatted. Sometime, somewhere, somehow. No one else could do it for them."

"They could have designed machines to do it for them."

Veg had a vision of a machine slicing a person open to remove refuse. "Uh- uh! I wouldn't tell even a machine to eat—"

"A variant of dialysis," Cal continued. "I have been dialyzed many times. It is simply a matter of piping the blood through a filtration network and returning it to the body. Painless, with modern procedures. It can be done while the subject sleeps."

"I don't want my blood piped through a machine!" Veg protested. "Now I'll be afraid to sleep for fear a vampire machine will sneak up on me, ready to beat the oomph out of me!"

"Dialysis would only account for a portion of it," Aquilon murmured.

"Oh, the colon can be bypassed, too," Cal assured her.

Veg did not enjoy this discussion. "What say we set aside a place, at least until we find a real privy?

In fact, I can make a real privy."

Cal spread his hands in mock defeat. "By all means, Veg!"

"I will forage for building materials," Tamme offered.

"I'll help," Aquilon said. "Circe?"

"That is kind of you," Tamme said. Veg wondered whether she meant it. Foraging alone, the female agent could have explored the city widely and maybe made her report to Taler. Now she couldn't—and even if she moved out too quickly for Aquilon to follow, the manta would keep her in sight. Smart girl, 'Quilon!

Then he glanced at Tamme to see whether she were reading his reactions again. But she was not watching him this time, to his relief.

His eyes followed as the two women departed. How alike they were, with their blonde hair and shapely bodies—yet how un like! Would they talk together? What would they say? Suddenly he was excruciatingly curious. Maybe he could find out from Circe later.

"I think you need no warning," Cal said quietly as he poked about the suspended stage. "Just remember that girl is an agent, with all that implies."

Veg remembered. Back on Earth the agents had moved in to destroy every vestige of manta penetration. They had burned Veg's northern forest region, gassed the rabbits and chickens of the cellar-farm in Aquilon's apartment complex, and bombed the beaches where Cal had lived. Then they had come to Paleo and brutally exterminated the dinosaurs. That memory was still raw—but years Ox by Piers Anthony

would never completely erase the pain of it.

They were agents of what Aquilon called the omnivore: man himself, the most ruthless and wasteful killer of them all. He knew, how well he knew!

Yet—Tamme was a mighty pretty girl.

"Once we had a difference of opinion," Cal said. "I hope that does not occur again."

Veg hoped so, too. He and Aquilon had argued against making any report on the alternate world of Paleo, to protect it from the savage exploitation of man. Cal had believed that their first loyalty had to be to their own world and species. Their difference had seemed irreconcilable, and so they had split: Cal on one side, Veg and Aquilon on the other. And it had been a mistake, for Cal had in the end changed his mind, while the other two had only learned that they were not for each other. Not that way, not as lovers, not against Cal.

This time there was no question: They were all three against the omnivorous government of Earth.

The agents were incorruptible representatives of that government, fully committed to their computer-controlled program. In any serious choice, Veg knew his interests lay with Cal and Aquilon, not with Tamme.

Yet it had not worked out with Aquilon, and Tamme was a pretty girl...

"It is possible to divorce the physical from the intellectual," Cal said.

God, he was smart—as bad in his way as Tamme was in hers. "I'll work on it," Veg agreed.

They built the privy and also a little human shelter of light-cloth from the fountain-loom. It seemed ridiculous to pitch such a tent inside the doomed auditorium—but the city was alien, while the shelter seemed human. It served a moral purpose rather than a physical one.

The mantas found meat somewhere while the humans ate the fruits. Survival was no problem. Veg conjectured that there were either rats or their equivalent in the city: omnivores for the mantas to hunt. Maybe no coincidence.

But as they ranged more widely through the city, they verified that there was no escape. The premises terminated in a yawning gulf whose bottom they could neither see nor plumb. This was, indeed, a prison. Or at least a detention site.

"But we were not brought here for nothing," Cal insisted. "They are studying us, perhaps. As we might study a culture of bacteria."

"So as to isolate the disease," Aquilon added.

"We're not a disease!" Veg said.

Cal shrugged. "That may be a matter of opinion."

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Veg thought of the omnivore again, destroying everything from flies to dinosaurs, and wondered.

"What happens to the culture—after they know what it is?"

"We'd rather not know," Aquilon said a bit tightly. Veg felt a surge of sympathy for her. She had salvaged nothing from Paleo but the egg—and that was gone.

Tamme didn't comment, but Veg knew her mind was working. She was not about to sit still for the extermination of a used culture.

"That's for sure!" Tamme said, startling him, mocking his own speech mannerism. Once more he had forgotten to watch his thoughts. He knew she was not really a mind reader, but the effect was similar at times.

"It is my suspicion that our captors did not construct this city," Cal said. "Otherwise they would not need to study us in this manner. More likely the city was here, and we were there, so it combined us, trusting that we were compatible."

"That might be the test," Tamme said. "If we are compatible, we have affinities with the city, and so they know something about us. If we had died quickly, they would have known we had no affinities.

Other samples, other environments, hit or miss."

"Score one for it," Aquilon said. "I rather like it here. Or at least I would if only I were certain of the future."

"If my conjecture is correct," Cal continued, "we have two mysteries. The origin of this city—and the nature of the sparkle-cloud. And these mysteries may be mysteries to each other, too, if you see what I mean."

"Yeah, I see," Veg said. "City, sparkle, and us—and none of us really knows the other two.

"With a three-way situation," Aquilon said thoughtfully, "we might have a fighting chance."

"If only we knew how to fight!" Veg said.

Night came again inside the auditorium as well as out. They ate and settled down.

Then Veg saw something. "The sparkle-cloud!" he exclaimed. "It's back!"

It shimmered on the stage, myriad ripples of lights, pattern on pattern. They had seen it in daylight; by night it was altogether different: phenomenal and beautiful.

"A living galaxy!" Aquilon breathed. "Impossible to paint..."

"Energy vortex," Cal said, studying it from a different view. "Controlled, complex..."

"It's staying on the stage," Veg said. "Not coming after us!"

" Yet," Tamme put in succinctly.

"If only we could talk to it!" Aquilon said.

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"How do you communicate with an alternate-hopping energy vortex?" Tamme inquired. "Even if it had a brain, there's a problem in translation. More likely it is just a field of force generated by some distant machine."

"Even so, communication might be possible," Cal said. "When we use radio or telephone or television, we are actually communicating with each other. What counts is who or what is controlling the machine or the force."

"Translation—that's the key!" Aquilon said, picking up from Tamme's remark. "Circe—send it your signature."

The manta beside her did not move. The eye glowed, facing the vortex.

After a moment Aquilon shrugged, disappointed. "No connection," she said. "Their energy must be on different bands."

"It is possible that we are seeing the mere periphery of some natural effect," Cal said. "A schism between alternates, a crack in the floor that let us fall through to another level—no intelligence to it."

Suddenly the vortex changed. Whorls of color spun off, while planes of growing points formed within the main mass. Lines of flickering color darted through those planes.

"A picture!" Aquilon exclaimed.

"Must be modern art," Veg snorted.

"So called 'modern art' happens to be centuries old," Cal observed.

"No, there really is a picture," Aquilon said. "You have to look at it the right way. The planes are like sections; the lines show the outlines. Each plane is a different view. Look at them all at once, integrate them..."

"I see it!" Tamme cried. "A holograph!"

Then Cal made it out. "A still life!"

Veg shook his head, bewildered. "All I see is sheets and squiggles."

" Try," Aquilon urged him. Oh, she was lovely in her earnestness! He needed no effort to appreciate that. "Let your mind go, look at the forms behind the forms. Once you catch it, you'll never lose it."

But Veg couldn't catch it, any more than he had been able to catch her, back when he thought she was within his grasp. He strained but only became more frustrated. He saw the flats and curves of it but no comprehensible picture.

"It's all in the way you look," Cal explained. "If you—" He broke off, staring into the vortex.

"Amazing!" Veg looked again, squinting, concentrating, but all he saw was a shifting of incomprehensibly geometric patterns with sparkles flying out like visual fireworks. "That's Orn!"

Aquilon cried. "No, it's a chick—"

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"The hatchling," Cal said. "Ornet. Yet how—?"

"And a baby manta!" she continued. "Where are they?"

"Back on Paleo, maybe," Veg said, annoyed. "What sort of a game are you folks playing?"

"No game," Tamme assured him. "We see them."

" 'Quilon!" Cal cried. "Look! Behind that obscuring sparkle. Can that be—?"

"It is," she cried. " That's a human baby! " She shook her head, but her eyes remained riveted to the picture. "My God!"

Veg strained anew but could make out nothing. He was getting angry.

"Your God," Cal said. "I remember when you found that expression quaint."

Aquilon drew her eyes momentarily from the stage to look at Cal, and Veg felt the intensity of it, though he was not a part of it. She was moving inexorably to Cal, and that was right; that Veg loved her did not mean he was jealous of his friend. Cal deserved the best.

"I was painting," she said. "That first night on the mountain... and you said you loved me, and I cried." Her eyes returned to the stage. "Now I have picked up your mannerisms."

Veg put his own eyes straight at the indecipherable image. The human relations of the trio were just as confused as that supposed picture, only coming clear too late to do any good. He had not known Cal and Aquilon were so close, even back at the beginning of Nacre. He had been an interloper from the start.

Suddenly all three others tensed as though struck by a common vision. Veg knew now this was no joke; they could never have executed such a simultaneous reaction—unless they really had a common stimulus. "What the hell is it?" he demanded.

"A machine!" Aquilon exclaimed, "that whirling blade—"

" Where? " Veg cried, looking around nervously. But there was no machine. Aquilon was still staring into the vortex.

"That must be what Veg fought!" Tamme said. "See the treads, the way it moves—no wonder he had such a time with it! The thing's vicious!"

"Sure it was vicious," Veg agreed. "But this is only a picture—or a mass hypnosis. I don't see it."

"You know, that's a small machine," Cal said. "A miniature, only a foot high."

"They're all babies!" Tamme said. "But the others are no match for that machine. That's a third-generation killer."

"Throw sand at it!" Veg said. For a moment he thought he saw the little machine buzzing through the Ox by Piers Anthony

depths of sparkle. But the whirling blade spun off into a pin-wheel, and he lost it. He just didn't have the eye for this show.

"They can't throw sand," Aquilon said breathlessly. "Ornet and the mantling don't have hands, and the baby can't even sit up yet."

"They would hardly know about that technique of defense yet," Cal added.

"Well, they can run, can't they?" Veg demanded. "Let them take turns leading it away."

"They're trying," Tamme said. "But it isn't—"

Then all three tensed again. "No—!" Cal cried.

Aquilon screamed. It was not a polite noise, such as one makes at a play. It was a full-throated scream of sheer horror.

Veg had had enough. He charged the stage, leaped to the platform, and plunged into the center of the glowing maelstrom, waving his arms and shouting. If nothing else, he could disrupt the hypnotic pictures that had captivated the minds of the others.

He felt a tingling, similar to his experience the last time. Then it faded. He was left gesticulating on the stage, alone. The sparkle-cloud was gone.

Chapter 6

FRAMES

Things progressed rapidly. The two blight spots were sentient; they responded to geometric subpatterns readily and initiated their own. They had individual designations by which they could be identified, and these they made known by their responses. The shape-changing one was Dec, a ten-pointed symbol. The mobile-stable one was Ornet, indicative of a long line of evolving creatures or perhaps, more accurately, a series of shifting aspects of identity. The third was not responsive in the same way, but Ornet identified it as Cub, or the young of another species. Each entity was really quite distinct, once the group was understood.

The blights had a need, as did OX. He grasped the concept without identifying the specific.

Ultimately, the mutual imperative to be SURVIVE. OX needed more volume; the spots needed something else.

When the spots were amenable, they made perfect geometric figures. When they were distressed, they made imperfect figures. OX did the same. Thus, they played a wide-ranging game of figures: I Ox by Piers Anthony

do this—does it please/displease you? Is it nearer or farther from your mode of survival? You do that—I am pleased/displeased as it reflects on some aspect of my survival.

Given enough time, they could have worked out an efficient means of communication. But there was no time; OX's elements were fading, and he had to have answers now. He had to know what the spots needed, and whether they had what he needed.

So he ran a frame-search. Instead of laboriously exchanging symbols, he surveyed the entire range of prospects available to him.

In a few, the spots were more active. They made excellent figures. In others, the elements were stronger, better for him. Guided by this knowledge, OX arranged his responses to direct developments toward the most favorable prospects.

But somehow these prospects faded as he approached them. The spots ceased cooperating.

OX surveyed the framework again, analyzing it in the context of this alteration. Somehow the act of orienting on his needs had made those needs unapproachable.

He tried orienting on the prospects most favorable to the spots—and then his own improved.

Confusion. His survival and that of the spots were linked—but the mechanism was unclear.

By experimentation and circuit modification, he clarified it. The spots needed a specific locale, both physical and frame—that part of the framework where there were certain stationary spots. As they approached that region, they did something that enhanced the strength of his elements.

This was an alternate solution to his problem! He did not need greater volume if his existing elements recharged faster. The proximity of the spots, in some cases, enhanced that recharging. OX directed the responses to further enhance recharging while keeping the needs of the spots in mind.

Suddenly the spots responded. Amazingly, the elements flourished, recharging at such a rate that OX's entire survival problem abated.

In retrospect, comprehension came. The elements were not individual entities; they were the energy termini of larger subpatterns. These systems were physical, like the ground. The spots were physical.

The spots catered to the needs of the energy plants and thereby improved OX's situation.

Dialogue improved also. OX learned that one of the most important needs of spots and element-plants was fluid—a certain kind of liquid matter. In the presence of this fluid, spots of many varieties flourished. Some were mobile spots of semi-sentient or nonsentient nature, distinct from the three he knew. Others were stationary and nonsentient—and these also were of a number of subtypes. Some provided nourishment for the sentient spots, and so these were facilitated by the transfer of liquid and increased access to certain forms of ambient energy. Others, of no direct interest to the sentients, produced nodules of processed energy that projected into adjacent alternate-frames. These were the elements!

The physical sustenance that the spots provided for their own plants also aided the element plants.

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They became more vigorous, and so the elements were stronger. So, by this seemingly devious chain, when OX helped the spots, he helped himself. Not just any spots, for the semi-sentients had no care at all for the plants and would not cater to OX's preferences. But the sentient spots, grasping the interaction between them, now cared for the element plants as they cared for their own. It was largely through Ornet, the most sentient spot, that this understanding came about.

Survival seemed assured. Then the machine came.

OX recognized it instantly, though he had never experienced this type of interaction before. Alarm circuits were integral to his makeup, and the presence of the machine activated them. Here was Pattern's deadliest enemy!

In certain respects the machine was like a spot, for aspects of it were physical. But in other respects it was a kind of pattern, or antipattern. It possessed, in limited form, the ability to travel between frames, as OX did. Ordinarily, he would have noted only its pattern-aspect, but his necessary study of the spots had provided him with a wider perspective, and now he grasped much more of its nature.

Suddenly the spots had enhanced his survival in quite another way, for when he viewed the machine as a double-level entity, he found it both more comprehensible and more formidable.

It could not touch OX directly, but it was deadly. It destroyed his elements by shorting out their stores of energy and physically severing the element-plants from their moorings, leaving gaps in the network. Such gaps, encountered unawares, could destroy a pattern entity.

The machine was also a direct physical threat to the spots and hence, in another respect, to OX's own survival. He could avoid it, moving his pattern to undamaged elements—but the spots had no such retreat. They could not jump across the frames of probability.

The spots were aware of this. They were furiously mobile, interacting with the machine. Ornet was distracting it by moving erratically, while Dec swooped at it, striking with a sharp extremity. But the machine was invulnerable to such attack. In a moment it discovered less elusive prey. It turned on Cub.

Cub did not take evasive action. He merely lay where he was while the attack-instrument of the machine bore down.

The blades connected. Thinly sliced sections of the physical body flew out as the action continued.

The solids and fluids were taken into the machine, and Cub was no more.

After that, the machine departed. It was a small one, and its immediate survival need—its hunger—had been sated by the matter in Cub. The crisis was over.

But Dec and Ornet had a different notion. They suffered negative reaction. They were distressed by the loss of their companion, as though he were related in some way to their own survival. It was a thing they were unable to convey directly to OX, but he understood their need, if not their rationale.

They had expended much attention assisting Cub from the outset, and they required him to be undefunct.

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Accordingly, OX surveyed the alternates. A number existed in which one of the other spots had been consumed by the machine, but OX concluded these were not appropriate. He located those in which all three spots survived intact.

Knowing an alternate frame and entering it were different things. OX had directed events toward favorable alternates before—but now he had to travel through the fourth dimension of probability, isolate one from many, and take the spots with him—when the options had been greatly reduced by the force of events. He could readily remove the spots to a frame in which they would not suffer immediate attack by the machine; it was much more difficult to do this after that event had actually occurred.

He tried. The consumption of energy was colossal, diminishing his elements at a ruinous rate. Once started, he had to succeed, for only in the proper alternate would the elements remain sufficiently charged for the maintenance of his pattern. Failure meant nonsurvival.

The spots could be moved so long as they remained within the boundaries of his animated form. He could not move them physically from place to place, but he could transfer them from one version of reality to another. It was in his fundamental circuits, just as knowledge of machines was in them; he knew what to do—if he could handle himself properly. Moving blight spots was more difficult than merely moving himself.

The framework wrenched. OX fibrillated. The frame changed. OX let go, disoriented by the complex effort. For a time he could not discern whether he had succeeded or failed.

...rstanding came about.

Survival seemed assured.

Then the machine came.

OX recognized it instantly, though he had never experienced this type of interaction before. The intrusion of the machine activated his alarm circuits. Here was Pattern's deadliest threat!

OX acted. He formed a decoy shoot designed to preempt the attention of the machine. It resembled ideal prey because it exhibited tokens keyed to the machine's perceptions: the glint of refined, polished metal; the motion of seeming blight; the sparkle of the periphery of a true pattern-entity. The machine was not intelligent enough or experienced enough to penetrate the ruse. It followed the shoot.

The shoot moved out on a simulated evasion course, the machine slicing vigorously at it. The shoot would fizzle out at a suitable distance from the locale of the spots—by which time the machine would have forgotten them. The threat had been abated, and all the spots were safe.

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Chapter 7

FOREST

Agents were disciplined; they had firm control over their emotions. Even consciousness-changing drugs could not subvert this, unless their actions overrode the total function of the brain. The subconscious mind of an agent was integrated with the conscious so that there were no suppressed passions, no buried monsters.

But the brutal slaying of a human infant had shaken her. The agent training and surgery could not eliminate the most fundamental drives that made her a woman. To watch, even in replica, a baby being sliced alive like so much bologna and funneled into the maw of a machine...

Then Veg had disrupted the image, and it had not returned. Perhaps that was just as well.

Another thing bothered her: the feeling that the image was not a mockup but a transmission. As with a televised picture: a replica of events actually occurring elsewhere. If so, this was no threat to cow the captives; it was the presentation of vital information.

Perhaps the controlling entity expected them to absorb the news like so many sponges. Probably there was more to come. But she was not inclined to wait on alien convenience. It was time to act.

Before she could act, she had to reconnoiter and get back in touch with Taler. That meant giving Cal and the mantas the slip.

But she could not afford to leave the human trio to its own devices. That was why she had come along on this projection! If she left them alone now, they could come up with some inconvenient mischief, just as they had on Paleo.

Answer, straight from the manual: take a hostage. There was no problem which one. Cal was too smart to control directly—if, indeed, he could be controlled at all. He had given the agents a lesson back at Paleo! Aquilon would be difficult to manage because she was female, and complicated. The mantas were out of the question. So it had to be Veg: male, manageable, and not too smart. And she had primed him already.

Meanwhile, the others were recovering from their shock. No subtlety here; they reacted exactly as human beings should be expected to. Perhaps that was part of the point: The aliens intended to test the party in various ways, cataloguing their responses, much as psychiatrists tested white rats.

"What does it mean?" Aquilon asked, shading her eyes with one hand as though to shut off the glare of the vision.

"It means they can reach us—emotionally as well as physically," Cal said slowly. "Whenever they want to. We could be in for a very ugly series of visions. But what they are trying to tell us—that is Ox by Piers Anthony

unclear."

Tamme turned to the nearest manta. "Did you see it?" she inquired.

"Circe didn't see the vision," Aquilon answered. "Their eyes are different; they can't pick up totalities the way we do. They have no conception of perspective or of art."

Tamme knew that. She had studied the material on the fungoid creatures before passing through the aperture from Earth to Paleo. She knew they were cunning and dangerous; one had escaped captivity and hidden on a spaceship bound for the region of space containing the manta home-world of Nacre.

It had never been killed or recaptured despite a strenuous search, and they had had to place a temporary proscription on Planet Nacre to prevent any more mantas from entering space.

The manta's eye was an organic cathode emitting a controlled beam of light and picking up its reflections from surrounding objects. That radar eye was unexcelled for the type of seeing that it did and worked as well in darkness as in light. But it had its limitations, as Aquilon had described. Yet if the mantas had seen the cloud-picture, this would have been highly significant.

Cal understood. "We see with one system, the manta with another. A comparison of the two could have led to significant new insights about the nature of the force that brought us here and showed us this scene." He shook his head. "But we have verified that the mantas see only flares of energy in the cloud, winking on and off extremely rapidly. They can not perceive the source of these flares and are not equipped to see any pictures."

"Let's sleep on it," Veg said gruffly.

"The baby—something about it—" Aquilon said.

"What's a baby doing by itself in an alternate world?" Veg demanded. "Whatever you folks thought you saw, it wasn't real."

Tamme differed. "A little manta, a little flightless bird, and a little human being—there's a pattern there, and they looked real. I was able to read the bodily signs on that baby. It was thirsty. I'd say it was real, or at least a projection made from a real model."

"Odd that it should be in a nest," Cal remarked.

"I recognized it somehow," Aquilon said. "I don't know who it was, but it was somebody. Maybe one of us, back when..."

Cal was surprised beyond what he should have been. Tamme would have liked to question him about that, but this was not the occasion. Why should a conjecture about his infancy make him react? But Aquilon was right: There was a certain resemblance to Cal—and to Aquilon herself. Had the alien intelligence drawn somehow from human memories to formulate a composite infant?

They settled down. The trio shared the interior of their tent, unselfconsciously; Tamme, by her own choice and theirs, slept apart. She had not been invited along, and they did not want her, but they accepted her presence as one of the facts of this mission.

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Tamme's sleep was never deep, and she did not dream in the manner of normals because of the changed nature of the computer-organized mind. Much of human sleep was a sifting, digesting, and identification tagging of the day's events; without that sorting and filing, the mind would soon degenerate into chaos. But agents were reprogrammed regularly and so required no long-term memory cataloguing. Rather, she sank into a trancelike state while her body relaxed and her mind reviewed and organized developments with a view to their relevancy for her mission. It took about an hour; agents were efficient in this, too.

Now the others were asleep, Cal deeply, Aquilon lightly, Veg rising through a rapid-eye-movement sequence. The two mantas were off exploring; if she were lucky, they would not check on the supposedly quiescent human party for several hours.

She stood and removed her blouse, skirt, and slippers. Her fingers worked nimbly, tearing out friction seams and pressing the material together again in a new configuration. This was one trick male agents didn't have!

When the clothing was ready, she removed her bra, slip, and panties and redesigned them, too. Then she reassembled herself in an artful new format, let down her hair, and relaxed.

Sure enough, Veg's REM proceeded into wakefulness. It was not that he had complex continuing adjustments to make in connection with his rebound from Aquilon—though he did. He had merely forgotten to visit the privy before turning in. Tamme had known he would rouse himself in due course.

Veg emerged from the tent. Tamme sat up as he passed her. He paused, as she had known he would.

He could barely see her in the dark, but he was acutely conscious of her locale. "Just goin' to the..."

he muttered.

"It happens," she said, standing, facing him, close.

Hope, negation, and suspicion ran through him. She picked up the mixed, involuntary signals of his body: quickened respiration and pulse, tightening of muscles, odors of transitory tension. She could see him, of course, for she had artificially acute night vision—but her ears and nostrils would have sufficed. Normals were so easy to read.

Veg walked on, and Tamme walked with him, touching, matching her step to his. There was a faint, suggestive rustle to her clothing now that set off new awareness in him. He did not consciously pick up the cause of this heightening intrigue, but the effect was strong. And in his present emotional state, severed from Aquilon, he was much more vulnerable to Tamme's calculated attack than he would normally have been.

Outside the auditorium there was a light-flower, its neon petals radiating illumination of many wavelengths. Now Veg could see her—and it was a new impact.

"You've changed!"

"You merely behold me in a different light," she murmured, turning slightly within that differing Ox by Piers Anthony

glow.

"Some light!" he exclaimed. She could have traced the process of his eyes by his reactions: warm appreciation for face and hair, half-guilty voyeurism for the thrust of her bosom and newly accented cleavage thereof, wholly guilty desire for the enhanced swell of her hips and posterior.

But his guilt was not straightforward. He ordinarily did not hesitate to appreciate the charms of women. But he had not been exposed to other women for some time. His experience with Aquilon and the knowledge that he was in the company of an agent made him hold back. He felt no guilt about cleavages and posteriors—merely about reacting to them in the present circumstances. This guilt in turn heightened the allure in a kind of reverse feedback. Forbidden fruit!

She turned away, interrupting his view of the fruit, and led the way along the path, accenting her gait only that trifle necessary to attract the eye subtly. Here the way was like a tunnel under swirling mists. Translucent figures loomed within the ambience, never quite coming clear, even to Tamme's gaze. There were so many marvels of this city—if only it were possible to establish contact with Earth so that it all could be studied and exploited!

They had built the privy over the Black Hole: a well of opacity fifteen feet across and of no plumbable depth. Cal had conjectured that it had once been an elevator shaft. Now it served as a sanitary sink.

While Veg was inside, Tamme brought out the miniature components of her projector. It would project a spherical aperture seven feet in diameter that would hold for fifteen seconds. After that, the unit would shut down, conserving its little power cell. The cell recharged itself, but slowly.

One problem was that she could not take the aperture projector with her. She had to step through the sphere while it existed. It would be disastrous to be caught halfway into the field as it closed down!

Part of her would be in the other world, the remainder here—and both would be dead. Too bad people did not possess the regenerative powers of earthworms: cut one in half, make two new individuals!

Actually, the apertures were two-way. They were really tunnels between alternates that one could move through in either direction. The trouble was that the device could not be activated from the far side. No doubt in time the technicians would develop a key for that purpose—or perhaps they had already but simply hadn't gotten it into production yet. Alternate-projection was a nascent science.

She expected no difficulty but took no unnecessary chances. She wrote a short message addressed to Calvin Potter and attached it to the generator.

Veg emerged. It had only been a couple of minutes, but the agent had worked extremely rapidly. All was in order.

"What's that?" he asked.

"An aperture generator," she said, rising to approach him.

"You mean you had one of those all along?" he demanded. "We could have gone back anytime?"

Ox by Piers Anthony

"Yes and no," she said. "I could have used it anytime—but it is a calculated risk. Our aperture technology is emergent; we seem to have less than a fifty per cent reliability of destination."

"You're getting too technical for me," Veg said, eying her displayed torso again. But she knew he understood the essence; he merely liked to assume a posture of country-boy ignorance when anyone used difficult words. This window might or might not take them back where they started from.

"We set our aperture projector on Paleo for Earth," she said. "Instead, it opened onto the machine desert. This one has a complementary setting. It should take us back to where the other one is. But it may not."

"We?" he asked. "You can go where you want to; I'm staying with my friends."

She could knock him out and toss him through. But she wanted his cooperation in case of emergency, and it was always better to keep things positive when possible. "I thought it would be more private this way," she said, using her specific muscular control to twitch her left breast suggestively.

The suggestion scored. But with his flare of desire came immediate suspicion. "What do you want with me?"

Time for a half-truth. "These generators are two-way—but it is better to have an operator. When I'm over there"—she indicated the prospective field of the projector—"I can't turn it on again over here.

And if it doesn't open in the right place, I could be stranded." She shrugged, once more making a signal with her décolletage. "That might please some of you, but..."

"Uh-uh," he said, giving her one more correct call. "We're all human beings, up against things we don't understand. We've got to stick together."

"That's right. So—"

"So you want me to cross over first? No thanks! I did that before and almost got gobbled by a machine."

"No, I'll go," she said.

He relaxed, his suspicion warring with his desire to believe her. She knew Cal had warned him not to get involved with an agent. "Then you want me to turn it on in an hour to bring you back?"

"Yes." She took a breath, skillfully accentuating the objects of his gaze in yet another ploy. "Of course..."

"Not much privacy," he remarked, "if I'm here and you're there." Now he was getting angry, as the lure retreated, despite her seeming agreement to his prior objections. Fish on a hook.

"Well, the projector can be set to go on automatically after a certain period. A simple clockwork timer. And the limit is not necessarily an hour. It's a combination stress-time parameter with a safety factor. We could slip a load of five hundred pounds through—twice the normal—but then we'd have to wait four hours to return. The time multiplies at the square of the mass, you see. For sustained use, Ox by Piers Anthony

two hundred and fifty pounds per hour is the most efficient."

"I see," Veg said. "So we could both go through. Together we wouldn't weigh more than three fifty—"

"Three sixty."

"Hold on! I'm two hundred, and you can't be more than one thirty—"

"You're two-oh-five; you have prospered in the wilderness, I'm one fifty-five, including my hardware."

"You sure don't look it!"

"Heft me."

He put his big hands under her elbows and lifted her easily. "Maybe so," he said. "Sure no fat on you, though."

"Agents are more solid than they look. Our bones are laced with metal—literally. And the android flesh with which we are rebuilt is more dense than yours. But you're right: no fat in it."

"I know you're tough," he agreed, not altogether pleased. "Still, might be safer if we both went in case there were bad trouble at the other end."

She would be better off alone if there were real trouble. But that was not the point. "Yes. But then there would be a long, uninterrupted wait—and no one could reach us." She breathed again.

Veg was not slow to appreciate the possibilities. Two, perhaps three completely private hours with this seductive woman! "Safety first!" he said. "Let's go take a look."

He had taken the bait, lured by the thrill of exploration as well as her own enticements. And she really had not had to lie. It was safer with two, in a routine crossover, and the limitations of the generator were as she had described.

She really had taken more trouble than strictly necessary to bring him along. A knockout or a straight lie would have done the job in seconds. But either of these techniques would have led to complications later. This way, not only would he serve as an effective hostage—he could be of genuine assistance in a variety of circumstances. All she had to do was prepare him.

She could do a lot with a man in three hours.

"All right," she said. "You're armed?" She knew he was; she was merely alerting him.

He nodded. "I keep a knife on me. I lost my other hardware to that machine back in the desert."

"If there's any long-distance threat, I'll cover it."

He glanced once more at her half-exposed breasts. "Yeah—like Taler."

Ox by Piers Anthony

She laughed honestly this time, knowing he knew there was no jealousy between agents. She set the return aperture timer for three hours, leaving a reasonable margin for recharging, then activated the projector.

As the sphere formed, she drew him through the aperture beside her.

There was no passage of time, just the odd transfer wrench. They emerged in a world apart. Where there had been surrealistic buildings, now were trees.

Not the desert world. She had been afraid of this.

"Not Paleo, either—or Earth," Veg said, for once divining her thoughts before she read his.

Tamme looked about warily. "How do you know? This is a forest—and there are forests on both worlds."

"This is the forest primeval," he said, unconsciously borrowing from American literature.

"Evangeline," Tamme said.

"Who?"

"Longfellow's poem from which you quoted. Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie, vintage 1847."

"Oh. That's right—you agents do that. Got too much of that dense android muscle in your brains." He grimaced. "What I meant was that this forest has never been touched by man. So it's not Earth—not our Earth. And it's a high rainfall district, so it's not the desert world—not this place, not this millennium, anyway. Look at the size of that pine!"

"The aperture does not necessarily lead to the same geographic spot on the alternate," she reminded him. "Each alternate seems to differ in time from the others, so it could differ in space, too, since the globe is moving. For instance, we're in day here instead of night, so we must be elsewhere on the globe. There was vegetation on other parts of what you call the desert world."

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