The trees flowered, and so did the creatures. The flowers expanded until there were neither trees nor creatures, only flowers. The oasis itself expanded until there was no desert at all, only large and small flowers.

A streak appeared. Cub couldn't tell whether it was a wall or a solid bank of fog. It cut off some of the flowers. They did not wither; they metamorphosed into colored stones. The fog-wall increased until it concealed everything. Then it faded, and in its wake were planes, multicolored, translucent, and set at differing angles. Machines rolled up and down them, chipping away here, depositing there, steadily altering the details of the configuration without changing its general nature. Cub hardly bothered to question why; he knew that there would be too many whys in all alternity to answer without squeezing out more important concerns.

The planes dissolved into bands of colored light, and these in turn became clouds, swirling in very pretty patterns, developing into storms. Rain came down, then snow—Cub recognized it, for snow fell on the enclave seasonally, forcing him to fashion protective clothing. But this was not only white; it was red and green and blue, shifting as the alternates shifted.

In due course it solidified into walls of stone: They were passing through a cavern, a huge hollow in the ground. Cub recognized this also, for last season he had fashioned digging and chipping tools and dug deep, deep into the ground, trying to ascertain whether there was any escape from the enclave in that direction. He had, in fact, made a small cavern. But it was useless, and he had given up and closed it over. Now they used it for winter storage and occasionally for shelter from storms.

A tremendous room opened out on one side, far larger than the cave Cub had made. Then the stone closed in again as though the very walls were moving.

Wait! Cub signaled. I saw something. Go back.

The shoot gave a controlled fadeout equivalent to the drooping of Ornet's tail feathers or Cub's own shrug of the shoulders. The moving walls reversed, opening into the cavern.

There! Cub indicated. Geographically—move over.

Now the others spotted it. In the center of the cavern a creature was doing something. It was working on some sort of machine... no, the thing was too simple to be a machine, merely a mechanical device, perhaps the ancestor of a machine. Sound emerged, pleasant, harmonious. The thing was playing music, similar to that Cub himself could make with voice and the beat of his hands on a log, but smoother, prettier. The creature's tentacles touched the device here and there, and the melodious sound issued.

Follow that frame, Cub directed, as though the other members of his party had no preferences. But Ox by Piers Anthony

they were content to follow his lead in this. In physical motion, Dec was supreme; in memory, it was Ornet. In imagination, it was Cub, and they all knew it.

OX oriented—and the single alien musician became two, then eight, and then a myriad of players.

The music swelled resoundingly. Then the creatures changed, becoming humanoid, and finally human.

Your kind! Ornet squawked.

Startled, Cub examined them more carefully. My kind!

They changed to tall green plants, playing the instruments with leaves and roots. Wait! Cub signaled, too late.

But OX was already backing up. The Cub-type players re-formed, went alien, returned, went naked, elaborately clothed, and finally focused on a compromise.

My kind! Cub repeated, half dazed. But what are those others? He gestured toward some individuals that differed slightly. They resembled him, but their torsos varied, and their faces were bare as though they were not yet grown.

Female of your species, Ornet squawked. Show the natural version, OX.

OX obliged, shifting to the unclothed players.

Mam females lack the urinary appendage, Ornet explained, gesturing with his beak. But they possess structures for the nursing of infants. My ancestors have not observed your particular species, but these are merely modifications of the type.

Cub stared at the nursing structures, appalled yet fascinated. I would like to put my hands on those, he signaled.

This can not be done, the shoot replied. We can not interact.

I know it! Cub gestured irritably, though for a moment he was tempted to challenge OX to make a circuit for the attempt. Let's go on.

They went on—but after that Cub's attention was on his memory of his kind, on the bare-fleshed females. If only there were some way to get across the barrier physically!

Suddenly Mach appeared, rising up out of the storage cave. All of them were caught off guard. Once more the machine had been too cunning for them and had arranged to come on their special frame-trip, after all!

The thing came whirling its blade and spinning its treads, forcing the physical beings out of its way, and its pattern-disruptive emanations were so strong that OX had to move explosively to avoid nonsurvival effects. Cub could see the sparkles flying out like a stellar display on a chill night.

Then the group mobilized, as it had so many times before. Ornet served as decoy, flapping his wings Ox by Piers Anthony

and squawking just outside the range of the blade. Dec swooped by, flicking his tail at the perceptor bulbs. Cub stood back and threw stones into the blade. And OX formed shoots that spun across the elements in the machine's vicinity, distracting its alternate-frame perspective.

They could hardly damage Mach, let alone destroy it; it was invulnerable to their attack. But their combined harassment made it uncomfortable and always drove it back.

This time it persisted for an extraordinary time. It was undeniably strong. But finally the stones and sand that Cub shoveled at its blade and into its hopper discouraged it. Sand did not hurt it, but it was unable to disgorge it while under attack. And so it retreated—just far enough to abate their defensive action.

Through the years they had come to a kind of understanding with Mach. Once the machine retreated, they would let it alone—and it would not attack again that day. Truce, while both sides recuperated.

Neither side had ever broken that tacit agreement; that temporary security was too important. Mach actually seemed to be honest; perhaps the mechanical circuits prevented dishonesty in any form. This was one of the things about the machine that Cub respected. Sometimes he and Dec and Ornet sought out Mach and attacked it merely to invoke the truce so that they could be assured it would not attack them while something important was going on.

Cub threw himself down, panting, as the machine became quiescent. It remained within the area of OX's influence—but Cub had no desire to drive it outside. They had brought it along on this trip, and they would have to return it to the normal enclave. It would not be right to leave it stranded.

Once he had wished for some way to rid the enclave of this constant menace. Now he had the chance—and would not take it. Not merely because of his interpretation of their truce; because he was even more certain that Mach was a sentient entity, too, and deserved a certain measure of respect.

But then he remembered what he had seen beyond the enclave, in the cave of the musicians, and forgot the machine.

Chapter 13

DREAMS

13

Aquilon wiped her eyes with her fists. "This R Pentomino is a menace!" she complained. "I'm getting a headache! It just goes on and on."

Cal pulled his head out of the innards of the machine. "I told you it was an impressive dead end after eleven hundred and three moves."

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"I know. I wanted to see for myself."

"Try the glider," he suggested.

"The what?"

"You have been dealing with stationary forms. There are others. Here." He extricated himself and came over. "This is the glider." He made the pattern of dots on her canvas-sheet: f

"That's another pentomino!" she said indignantly.

He shrugged and returned to his work. "I hope to convert this machine to a specialized oscilloscope, or facsimile thereof, so that we can translate our signals into pattern-language. I have the feeling that the pattern-entities are as eager to talk with us as we are to talk with them. Think how confusing we must be to them!"

"But we are solid and visible!" she said, working on the new figure. It had gone from [1] f to [2] g to [3] h In fact, it was now a mirror image of its original form, turned endwise. Funny.

"Precisely. An entity whose system is based on patterns of points would find our mode of operation virtually incomprehensible."

She made the next figure, jumping straight from one to the next without such laborious additions and erasures. [4] i "Do you think Veg is all right?"

"I doubt I ever get used to the caprices of female thought," he remarked. "Veg is with Tamme."

"That's what I meant."

"Jealousy—at your age?"

She looked at the next figure: [5] f "Hey—this thing repeats itself on new squares! It's like a blinker—only it moves!"

"Precisely. Patterns can travel. The glider moves diagonally at a quarter the speed of light."

"Speed of light?"

"An advance of one square per move is the maximum possible velocity in this game, so we call it the speed of light. The glider takes four moves to repeat itself, one square across and one down, so that is one quarter light-speed."

She looked at it, nodding. "Beautiful!"

Veg would have said, "So are you." Not Cal. He said: "A variant of that formation is called the Spaceship. Spaceships of various sizes can move at half the speed of light. As they go, they fire off sparks that vanish, like propulsion."

"The sparkle cloud did that!" she cried.

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"Yes. We also know of a 'glider gun' that fires off gliders regularly. And another figure that consumes gliders. In fact, it is possible to fire several gliders to form new figures at the point of convergence—even another glider gun that shoots back at its parent guns, destroying them."

"If I were a pattern, I'd be very careful where I fired my gliders!" Aquilon said. "That game plays a rough game!"

"It does. As does all nature. I should think assorted defensive mechanisms would appear by natural selection, or the game would be unstable—assuming it were self-willed. The possibilities are obvious."

"Especially when you get into three dimensions!"

"Yes. It is a three-dimensional computerized grid I am working on now. I wish I were a more experienced technician!"

"I think you're a genius," she said sincerely. And she felt a flare of emotion.

"You can help me now if you will. I'll need some figures for my three-dimensional grid."

"What's wrong with the ones we have? The R Pentomino, the glider—"

"They won't be the same. A line of three points would manufacture four new ones, not two—because of the added dimension. That would form a short cross, which would in turn form a kind of hollow cube. I believe that's an infinitely expanding figure—and that is not suitable for our purpose. We need figures that are approximately in balance—that neither fade out too rapidly nor expand to fill the whole framework."

"Hm, I see," she murmured, trying to trace the three-dimensional permutations of the figure on her two-dimensional canvas. She compromised by using color to represent the third dimension. "Your line becomes an indefinitely expanding three-dimensional figure, as you said. Looks like two parallel caterpillar treads with eight cleats in each, if I haven't fouled it up. But almost any figure expands; there are just too many interactions."

"Agreed. So we must modify the rules to do for three dimensions what 'Life' does for two. Perhaps we must require four points to generate a fifth and let a point be stable with three or four neighbors.

Perhaps some other combination. If you can suggest viable rules and figures, it will save me time, once I have this equipment modified."

"I'll try!" she said, and bent to it. They both had difficult, intricate jobs, and from time to time they had to break off. They also chatted intermittently during the work.

"Say—did you ever find the missing earthquake?" Aquilon asked suddenly.

Cal paused momentarily at his labor. She knew he was finding his mental place, as she had just made another momentous leap of topic. To her surprise, he placed her reference accurately. "We were separated three days on Paleo, during which time there were two tremors, a minor and a strong one. I Ox by Piers Anthony

remember them clearly."

"For a genius, you have a poor memory," she said, smiling over her complex dot-pattern. "We were separated four days, and there were quakes on the first three. You must really have been absorbed with that dinosaur not to notice."

"Odd that we should differ on something so easy to verify," he said. "Shall we compare notes in detail?" It was as though he were inviting her to a duel, certain that she would lose.

Aquilon was intrigued. "Let's."

"You and Veg went to the island—"

"Not that much detail," she said, embarrassed. Then she reconsidered. "No—let's put it out in the open. You wanted to make a report on Paleo that would surely lay it open to exploitation and destruction—"

"I changed my mind."

"Let me finish. I wanted to help Orn and Ornette survive because they were unique, intelligent birds and I liked them. Veg went with me." She took a breath and forced herself to continue. "Veg and I made love that night. Next morning he went to see you at the raft—and the first tremor came."

"Yes. After he left the raft, I set sail. I was aware of the tremor; it made the water dance. About fifteen seconds, mild."

"Even a mild earthquake is horrible," she said, giving her head a little reminiscent shake. "That was the first day, the first quake. So we agree."

"So far." She could tell from his tone that he was still sure she was wrong about the tremors. She was also a bit uneasy about the seemingly bland response to her confession concerning Veg. "The second day Circe came and told us a predator dinosaur was after you, but you wouldn't let the mantas help you. I thought we should leave well enough alone. Veg hit me and headed off."

"He should not have done that." Again, too mild a response.

"Cal, I didn't want you to die—but I thought it was more important that you be allowed to do what you felt you had to do, your own way."

"Precisely. Veg blundered."

So it was all right. Cal understood. She should have known he would. "Later that day the second quake came. It shattered the eggs—all but one. It was violent, awful."

"I was on the mountainside. The tremor knocked Tyrannosaurus off his feet and rolled him down the mountain. I was afraid he was too badly hurt to continue the chase. Fortunately, he suffered minimal damage."

Aquilon grimaced, knowing he was not being facetious. Cal had wanted to conquer the dinosaur Ox by Piers Anthony

himself, without the help of an act of God. "So we agree on the second day, the second quake."

"We agree. I continued on up the mountain and slept in a volcanic cave. Next day the agents came—Taler, Taner, and Tamme."

"No," she said firmly. "Next day there was a third quake. It tore the island apart. A plesiosaurus got Ornette, so Orn and I had to ferry the egg to the mainland the day following—the morning of the fourth day, the day the agents came. I'll never forget that awful journey through the water, protecting the egg! I had to use Orn for support—"

Cal nodded thoughtfully. "So you really did experience an extra day and tremor!"

"You lost a day, Cal. What happened to it?"

He sighed. "This suggests something too fantastic to believe. In fact, I don't believe it."

So there was something! "This sounds fascinating! You have a secret?"

"In a manner of speaking. I didn't think it was anything significant. You would have been the first to know had there been anything to it. All men have fantasies—and all women, too, I'm sure. But now—I wonder. Alternates do exist, and in some of them are virtual duplicates of ourselves. The woman you met, the naked Aquilon—"

"Don't tell me you dream of naked Aquilons!" she said, pleased. But at the same time, the memory of the lost egg upset, her. She had so wanted to save the Orn species...

"More than that, I'm afraid. After all, I have seen you naked in life."

She remembered the time she had run nude on Paleo before they found the dinosaurs. She had not realized that he had paid attention. "You always loved me. You said so back on Planet Nacre. And I love you. But there's never been much of a—a physical component, has there?"

"The major component," he said seriously.

"Oh? I thought all things were intellectual to you."

He peered at her over the machine. "You are leading me on."

"That's what I mean. You are too smart for me, and we both know it. I couldn't deceive you with feminine wiles if I tried. You intellectualize everything to the point where you feel no physical passion." She felt a little shiver as she said it, wanting him to deny it. She had taken the initiative with Veg, and that had been wrong; he had resented it and repaid her with a blow. Not a conscious motivation, perhaps—but she was sure that it had been one of his unconscious ones.

"Intelligence is irrelevant. You have shown me my error in the counting of tremors, for example."

"That's right. What did you do with that day and that quake? Chase naked Aquilons?"

"Yes."

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She looked at him sharply, for he sounded serious. "You did? "

"Bear with me if I affront your sensitivities. I think this is something you should know."

"I'm not affronted," she said, keeping her eyes on her diagrams. "Intrigued, though..." She certainly was; the three-dimensional life-game analysis was now no more than a pretense.

He buried his head in the machine so that only his voice reached her. She returned to her work with an effort and listened, visualizing what he described.

"I escaped Tyrannosaurus by hiding in a volcanic cave, the night of the day we had the second tremor. It was warm in there, for the water of the stream was hot. I was extraordinarily tired, yet keyed up: It had been the greatest adventure of my life. I had, in my fashion, conquered the dinosaur!

"I found myself a comfortable ledge, sprawled out, and fell into a perspiring stupor. I thought of dinosaurs and conjectured that one of the duck-bills like Parasaurolophus, with the enormous nasal crest, might have been able to survive the heat of that cave. Its breath through the inside of that crest would have cooled its tissues, as the breath of a dog cools its tongue and thus its body. But if the creature stayed too long or strayed into the cave and got lost, it might have died and been washed out through the river-canyons of the far side of the mountain range. Idle speculation of the type that entertains me."

"I know," she agreed softly. Who else but Cal would care whether the body of a duck-billed dinosaur washed out one side of the mountain or the other?

"I must have slept off and on. It was not really comfortable in that heat. Toward morning that conjecture about the duck-bill roused me. Could it get out of the dinosaur enclave through the mountain? Could I? Driven by curiosity, I began to explore the cavern, going far back into the mountain. The heat was terrible; when it reached about one hundred forty degrees Fahrenheit I turned back. I was naked; I was sweating so profusely that clothing would have been useless.

"Then I saw something. It was nestled in a recess, invisible from the mouth of the cave. I would have missed it but for my acute night vision, sharpened by my night in the cave. It was a little machine. Its presence amazed me, for it suggested that man had been there before. I fiddled with it, trying to ascertain its condition and purpose. I lifted a kind of key from it.

"A cone of pale light projected from the device and bathed me. I felt a strange wrenching. For an instant I feared I had been victimized by some type of booby trap, though why anything of that nature should be placed there I could not guess. Then the machine was gone, and I stood in the cave, the key in my hand.

"Astonished, I set it down on a convenient ledge and looked about. Far down at the mouth of the cave I saw a glow; dawn was coming.

"I went back to that entrance to check on Tyrann, my reptile nemesis. He was still there, sleeping, his great nose almost touching the cave. In fact, his bulk blocked the flow of water, making it form into a puddle. Beyond him was the snow of the mountain, covering the canyon rim where the heat of the Ox by Piers Anthony

river did not reach. An odd sight: dinosaur in snow!

" 'Cal!' someone cried. 'I thought you were dead!' "

"I turned, startled. You were there, 'Quilon, nude and lovely. Your yellow hair floated down your back like the glorious mane of a thoroughbred horse, and your blue eyes were bright. I doubt you can appreciate how lovely you were to me in that instant. I had come very near death, and you were an angel.

" 'I escaped, thanks to this convenient cave,' I said, as though it were of no moment. I do not remember my exact words, of course, but it was something equivalently inane.

" 'So did I,' " you said. 'Cal, I could have sworn I saw Tyrann get you! It was awful. Then he came after me, and I just made it here—'

" 'I told the mantas not to interfere. Why did you come?'

" 'I love you,' you said.

"You were not speaking intellectually or theoretically or platonically. Your voice trembled with the devotion of a woman for her lover. You were wild and forward, and I—I was powerfully moved by it. You meant it.

"Your vision of seeming death had charged you, first with grief, then with enormous passion. We were naked, and in love, and it seemed wholly natural that we resort to the natural culmination. All the suppressed urges I had entertained toward you were released in the bursting of that dam; it seemed I could never get my fill of your body. And you were eager for me; you were a creature of lust. It was as though we were two animals, copulating interminably, driven by an insatiable erotic imperative.

"All day we remained in that cave. Once there was a terrible tremor. It bounced Tyrann half awake; it dislodged stalactites from the back of the cave. We were afraid the mountain would collapse in on us—so we made love again, and slept, and woke, and did it yet again.

"At night I woke, disgusted with myself for using you like that. Yet even as I looked at you in your divine sleep, the passion rose in me again, and I knew that I had to get out of the sight of you if I were not to succumb again. So I retreated to the back of the cave.

"I remembered the key and searched for it in the dark. My hand found it on the ledge. I picked it up and shook it—and suddenly there was a illumination about me, and I experienced that dizzy feeling—and there was the machine in front of me again.

"Alarmed, I returned to where you slept—but you were gone. You could not have left by the cave mouth, for Tyrann was there, and there were no fresh tracks in the powdering of snow near him. I was sure you had not left by the rear passage, for I had been there. Yet there was absolutely no evidence of your presence; even the lichen on the ledge where we had made love was undisturbed, as though no one had ever been there.

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"Forgive me: My first thought was intense regret that I had not awakened you for one more act of love before you disappeared. Then I cursed my sordid nature, for I would love you as strongly were I a eunuch. I lay down and tried to piece it out, and finally I slept again. In the morning I knew it had been a dream—an extravagant, far-fetched, ridiculous, wonderful, masculine wish fulfillment. And so I put it out of my mind, ashamed of the carnal nature underlying my love for you, and I have maintained a proper perspective since."

Aquilon sat leaning over her diagrams, stunned. The episode Cal had so vividly described had never happened, and it was shocking to hear him speak so graphically, so uncharacteristically. Yet it mirrored the secret passion she had longed to express if only there were some way around her inhibitions and his. And it touched upon something hideous, something she herself had buried until this moment.

"Cal—" she faltered but had to force herself to go on, lest he think it was revulsion for the sexual description that balked her. Yet she could not say what she had intended, and something almost irrelevant came out instead. "Cal, the key—what happened to it?"

"What happens to any dream artifact when the sleeper wakes?" he asked in return, as though glad for the change of subject.

"No—did you keep it, or put it back? Did you check for that machine again? It should have—"

"I must have replaced the key automatically," he said. "I never returned to the rear of the cave. It was part of my disgust, and I refused to humor the passions of the dream by checking."

"Oh!" It was a faint exclamation of emotional pain. He had never even checked! But that pang freed her inhibition somehow, and now she was able to approach her own hidden concern. "Cal, you said I thought you had died in your dream. What did I say?"

He did not answer, and she knew he was suffering from acute embarrassment, realizing how frankly he had spoken.

"Please, Cal—this is important to me."

His voice came back from the machine. "Not very much. We did talk about it some, but it was not a pleasant subject, and there obviously had been some error."

Aquilon concentrated. "Tyrann galloped after you, those awful double-edged teeth snapping inches short of your frail body, the feet coming down on you like twin avalanches. Snap! and your rag-doll form was flung high in the air, striped grisly red, reflected in the malignant eyes of the carnosaur.

Tyrann's giant claw-toes crushed your body into the ground; the jaws closed, ripping off an arm.

Your head lolled from a broken neck, and your dead eyes stared at me not with accusation but with understanding, and I screamed."

Now Cal's head jerked out of the machine. "Yes!" he exclaimed. "That's what you said in essence.

How could you know?" Then he did a double take. " Unless you actually were there in that cave—"

"No," she said quickly. "No, Cal, I wasn't there. I was stranded on an earthquake-torn island with Ox by Piers Anthony

Orn's egg. I swear it."

Still he looked at her. "You desired my death?"

"No!" she cried. "I dreamed it—a nightmare. I told that dream to the birds, Orn and Ornette, that third day, before the last quake. That I had seen you die."

"You dreamed it—the same time I dreamed my—"

"Cal," she said, another shock of realization running through her. "In some alternate— could it have happened? "

He came to her. "No. How could I have made love to you if I were already dead?"

She caught his hand, shaken, desperate. "Cal, Cal—your dream was so much better than mine. Make it come true!"

He shook his head. " 'Quilon, I did not mean to hurt you. It was only that if there were an unaccounted day for me, I would be compelled to believe that somehow—but the whole thing is insane. I do love you—that much has never been in doubt—but I slept around the clock in that cave, recovering from the ravages of that chase, and it is hardly surprising that exaggerated fancies emerged, an ugly expression of—"

"I don't care!" she cried. "Your dream was not ugly; mine was. Yours was more accurate than your belief. I am like that—or could be, would be, if I thought I'd lost you. You like to think I'm cold and chaste, but I'm not. I never was! I seduced Veg—it's no platonic triangle. I made a mistake, but this is no mistake. I want to love you every way I can!"

He studied her uncertainly. "You want the dream—and all that it implies?"

"Your dream, not mine. Then you'll know me as I am. Yes, I want it—now!"

He shook his head, and she was suddenly, intensely embarrassed, afraid she had repulsed him by her eagerness. Did he only love the ethereal image, not the reality?"

"I take you at your word," he said. Relief and surprise flooded her, made her weak. "After we complete this project."

"Communication with the pattern-entities? But that may take days!"

"Or weeks or years. There will be time."

"But the dreams, the cave—"

"We are not in the cave."

She saw he was not going to re-enact the dream-orgy of lovemaking he had described. Had she really thought he would? This was Cal, civilized, controlled. The chaste, celestial personification—it was not of her but of him.

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Yet he had acceded. Why?

Because he wanted to give her time to reconsider. The impulse of the moment was too likely to lead to regret, as with her and Veg, or with Cal and his dream-girl in the cave. He would not grasp what he was not assured of holding.

It was better this way.

He kissed her. Then she was sure of it.

So it was not the dream. It was love, shifted from the suppressed to the expressed—gentle, controlled, and quiet. It was more meaningful than any wild erotic dream could have been, this simple affirmation of commitment.

Glowing inside, she completed her charts while he worked on the machine, as though there had been no interruption. It was as though they had walked through a desert and suddenly been admitted to an exotic garden filled with intriguing oddities and fragrances that could be explored at leisure together.

Yes—there would be time!

"I worked out 'ideal' rules for one, two and three dimensions," she said brightly. "One dimension would be a line. It takes one dot to make another, and any dot with two neighbors or no neighbors vanishes. It doesn't work very well because one dot makes a figure that expands at the speed of light indefinitely, and you can't even start a figure with less than one. For two dimensions, same as now: Three dots make a fourth, and a dot is unstable with less than two or more than three neighbors. Since up to eight neighbors are possible, it has far more variety than the one-dimensional game."

"Of course," Cal agreed.

"For three dimensions there are twenty-seven potential interactions, or up to twenty-six neighbors.

We should require seven neighbors to make a new dot, and the figure is stable with six or seven. Less than six or more than seven will eliminate a given dot. So a cube of eight dots would be stable, each dot with seven neighbors—like the four-dot square in the two-dimensional version."

Cal nodded. "I believe it will do. Let's try some forms on our cubic grid, applying those rules."

I believe it will do. And Aquilon was as pleased with that implied praise for her work as with anything that had happened.

Chapter 14

FORMS

14

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Cub had become minimally communicative during the tour, and OX did not understand this. Had he been injured during the battle with Mach?

It is the mating urge, Ornet explained, delving again into his memory-experience of mams. Sight or smell of the mature female stimulates the male to interact with her.

Why? OX inquired, finding the concept obscure.

It is the way they reproduce their kind. My kind performs similarly; Dec's has a separate mechanism.

The machines are distinct from us all.

Why should any kind of being require reproduction?

We originate, we age, we die, Ornet squawked. It is the way of physical species. If we do not reproduce ourselves, there will be nothing.

Still OX could not grasp it. I do not reproduce myself. I exist as long as my elements are charged and numerous.

You surely do reproduce yourself, Ornet squawked. I have not seen enough of your type to fathom the mechanism, but my memory indicates that it must be—for all entities. In some way you were conceived by your forebears, and in some way you will transmit your heritage to your successors.

Perhaps if you encountered a female of your species—

There are no pattern-females, OX replied. I read that in my circuits. I have the potential to become anything that any pattern can be.

Ornet drooped his tail feathers. He never engaged in speculation; the past was his primary interest.

OX sent a shoot to question Dec. Why should spots die or reproduce themselves? it flashed.

The two are synonymous, Dec replied. To die is to reproduce.

This did not satisfy OX, either. A pattern needed neither to die nor to reproduce. Why should a spot?

Dec was emitting a complex array of signals. OX adjusted his circuitry to pick up the full spectrum.

Dec was capable of far greater communication than either of the others, for he used light, the fastest of radiations. OX could perceive it by the effect of his elements: minute but definite. He had long since intensified his perceptions of such variations so that observations that had once been beyond his means were now routine. Now he activated a really intricate perception network, more comprehensive and sensitive and responsive than ever before.

Then Dec's whole mind was coming across on the transmission, as clearly as if it were a barrage of pattern-radiation shoots:

[DEATH]

[SPORES]

[MERGING]

[REPRODUCTION]

*

*

*

*

[cessation]

[carriers of]

[two sources]

[growth of cells]

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[animation]

[genetic code]

[crossover]

*

*

*

[chain of habitats]

[philosophical]

[female male]

[ramifications]

OX assimilated it and fed back his questions on the aspects of the concept. The dialogue was complex, with loops of subdefinitions and commentary opening out from the corners of the major topics, with both obvious and subtle feedbacks and interactions between concepts. It required maintenance of a circuit larger than the rest of his volume. OX stayed with it, devoting whatever attention was necessary. He refined his circuits, added to them, revised...

And found himself within the mind of Dec.

Now he felt the force of gravity, a vital component of Dec's motion; the pressure of atmosphere, another essential; the impact of physical light on his eye. He felt the musculature of the single foot, opposing the constant pull and unbalance.

These things had been mere concepts to him before, described but not really understood. It was one thing to know that a physical body had weight that held it to the ground; it was quite another to experience that ubiquitous force on every cell of the body. A factor that was of no importance to OX

in his natural state was a matter of life and death to this physical being; a fall could actually terminate Dec's existence! Thus, gravity equated with survival. Yet gravity was only one of an entire complex of physical forces. No wonder the spots were different in their reactions from OX; their survival depended on it!

And he understood the synonymity of death and reproduction, how the primed body dissolved into its component cells that became floating spores that met and merged with the spores of another deceased fungus entity and then grew into new entities. Without death there was no replication, and without replication there would be no more entities of this type. Yet this process was necessary to the evolution of the species, and without evolution it would also pass. Death equated with survival—death of the individual, survival of the species—because the demands of the physical environment were always shifting. OX now understood the essential nature of these things, and the lightness of them. Multiple physical imperatives set fantastic demands, requiring complex devices of survival unknown to pattern-entities.

Then he was out of the physical, back in his own nature, fibrillating. He had never before experienced sensation and thinking of this type; there was a phenomenal amount of data to assimilate and circuits to modify. The physical was a whole separate existence, with its unique imperatives!

OX had learned more in this one encounter than in any prior one. He now realized all the way through his being that the intellectual systems of the spots were as complex and meaningful as his own. The spots were, indeed, complete entities.

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He modified his circuits to incorporate a perpetual awareness and appreciation of this fact. Just as alternity was infinitely variable, so was intellect! His comprehension of existence would not be complete until he had experienced the inner nature of each spot—and of a machine.

He formed a shoot to approach Ornet. By motions and flashes that coincided with the creature's mode of communication, OX made known his mission: to exchange minds for a moment. Ornet was receptive; he had long been curious, in a paleontological way, about the inner nature of patterns, since they had so little place in his memory.

The mechanism of exchange differed from the one that had been effective with Dec, for there was no mass-level tool of light. Instead, OX had to create a shoot-circuit that duplicated the bird's every observable contour and function, correcting it as Ornet directed. OX made himself into another Ornet, with feet and claws and wings and beak, subject to gravity and all the other manifestations of the physical aspect. Then this form moved to coincide with the presence of Ornet, and the shoot's points picked up the signals of the body's nervous functioning, the living animation of its cells.

Slowly, the mapping progressed, merging the element pattern with the physical pattern. And as the overlap became sufficient, OX began to receive Ornet's sensations and thoughts directly.

Ornet was old. His species was normally adult in the third year after hatching and faded after twenty.

Ornet was twenty now. His powers were receding, his feathers losing their gloss, his beak its sharp edge. He felt a kind of vacuum in his life, but he had not been able to define it until OX had questioned him about Cub. Then his memory had been evoked, making it clear—but far too late. He had never had contact with a female of his kind, never been aroused—and so had lived without really missing it. He was not given to speculative thought or to emotional reactions; he accepted what was and worked only to enhance survival and comfort.

This personality, in a manner quite different from Dec's, was compatible with OX's own mode. But because Ornet's reproductive aspect was quiescent, OX still had no direct comprehension of it. And so long as his understanding was incomplete, he lacked a potential tool for survival.

It was evident that Ornet did not have to die in order to reproduce his kind. But if the death/reproduction connection were not valid, what was?

OX phased out, moving the shoot away from coincidence with the body of the bird. Deprived of their guidance by the minute electrical stimuli of the physical nervous system, the subcircuits collapsed. It was a non-survival jolt—but only for the shoot. In a moment OX reorganized in a more stable format, recovering equilibrium.

He had absorbed another vast segment of reality and comprehended to some extent the process of aging and its relation to death. But it was not enough.

Now he came to Cub. Cub, by the reckoning of Ornet's memory, was now in the young prime of his life. And he had, as OX himself knew, a marvelously powerful and versatile reasoning mechanism.

He was the source of OX's confusion; now perhaps he would be the resolution of it.

OX made another phase-in shoot, this one in the form of Cub. Small and tight as it was, this lone Ox by Piers Anthony

shoot was nevertheless far more complex than OX's entire being had been at the time of his first emergence into awareness. I wish to join you, to understand you completely, the shoot signaled.

Do as you like, Cub responded indifferently.

OX attuned his subcircuits to the nervous impulses of living matter, as he had so recently mastered with Ornet. He slid the shoot over to merge.

There was a period of adjustment, for though the principle of functioning was similar, between Ornet and Cub, the detail differed. Then awareness focused.

It was a maelstrom. Rational misgivings warred with unattainable urges. The picture of a naked-Cub-species female formed, her arms and legs outstretched... dissipated in an aura of revulsion... reformed.

OX watched, felt, experienced. Now he, too, felt those amazing urges. The attraction/repulsion of the reproduction/death complex; the need to overtake, to grasp, to envelop, to penetrate—countered by inability, confusion, and guilt. Desire without opportunity, force without mechanism. Compulsion so great it threatened to nullify survival itself. Emotion.

OX twisted out of phase with such an effort that he carried the entire enclave into another frame. His system was in terrible disarray; his circuits warred with each other.

But now he understood the spots' need to reproduce their kinds. He knew what emotion was. Having discovered that, he was unable to eliminate it from his system; the profound new circuits were part of his pattern.

But OX realized that his survey was still incomplete. He had learned marvelous and dismaying new things—but that only increased the need to learn the rest. Perhaps little of significance remained, and there were nonsurvival aspects to the continuation of this search—but he had to do it. Survival and emotion drove him.

He searched out Mach, the wild machine.

OX anticipated resistance, but Mach was quiescent. Perhaps it was waiting to ascertain the nature of this new attack. OX formed a shoot-image of it, then cautiously phased in.

This was dangerous because the machine, unlike the living spots, had certain pattern-aspects. It was aware of the elements, though its existence did not depend on them, and it could use them to make those special patterns that extended across frames. This ability was very limited, but this was one reason why OX had such trouble nullifying Mach's attacks. Mach could almost match OX's maneuverability across frames, provided that travel was restricted to adjacent or nearly adjacent ones.

And the machine could drain the elements of so much energy that they would not serve a pattern-entity for some time.

OX found the nerve circuits on the physical level of the machine, adapting to them as he had for Ornet and Cub. And slowly he became Mach.

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The machine intellect was distinct from those of the living spots. Its impulses ran along metal conduits with appalling force and dealt with motors and transformers and switches and harsh chemical reactions rather than the subtle interactions of life or pattern. Yet it was sentient.

This was Mach—and now OX understood. The machine had needs fully as compelling as those of the other entities. Its prime motive was similar to theirs: SURVIVE. But it required energy transformed from matter by more brutal processes. Most of the physical substances it could obtain from its environment, but a few were in critical shortage here in the enclave.

It was the lack of these substances that made Mach desperate and dangerous. The machine required them in order to develop its potential to reproduce its kind—and some of them could be filtered from the bodies of the living spots. There was no inherent personal animus; Mach attacked because it was driven by a need that could not be denied, in much the fashion of Cub's need. Gradually, as it realized that the spots were in fact sentient, it came to equate destruction of them as long-range nonsurvival and tried to resist the urge to take what beckoned. But it could not.

Supply those substances, and Mach would no longer be an enemy. The machine might even cooperate with the other members of the enclave. Its strength on the physical level was such that it could be of substantial assistance to them—especially in the effort to break out of the enclave.

OX had developed combat circuits to oppose the inimical behavior of the external patterns. Now he comprehended that patterns were ill equipped to indulge in such activities. Their intellectual comprehension translated only poorly into action. This was one reason the external patterns had done nothing but observe after arranging the enclave.

Machines, in contrast, were entities of action. Mach's mind contained pragmatic instructions for accomplishing many tasks, provided the tools existed. OX now saw that he, as a pattern, had tools that the machine did not. Now OX understood enough, and he had a new sense of motivation. He made ready to act.

Chapter 15

ALTERNITY

15

They stood on a metal highway, and a tank was bearing down on them. It was a monster, with treads as high as a man and a nose needling forward like that of an atmosphere-penetrating rocket.

Veg's dizziness left him. He charged to the side. Tamme was right beside him, guiding his elbow in case he stumbled.

The tank careened on by, not swerving.

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"Was that another trap?" Veg asked breathlessly.

"Coincidence, more likely. Do you recognize this alternate?"

He looked about. All around them were ramps and platforms, and on these structures vehicles of every size and shape sped by. Some were quite small, and some were tiny—the size of mice, or even flies. But all were obviously machines.

"A bit like downtown Earth," he muttered. "But not—" He paused. "The machine world! This is where they breed!"

"I doubt they breed," she said. "Nevertheless, this is a significant discovery."

"Significant! Those machines are half the problem! I had to fight one of them halfway across the desert to protect our supplies!"

"Only to fall prey to the sparkle-cloud," she reminded him.

"Yeah..."

A dog-sized machine headed for them. It had perceptor-antennae extending from the top, and it emitted a shrill beeping.

"We're discovered," Tamme said. "I think we'd better move on."

But it was already too late. The seemingly aimless paths of the machines suddenly became purposeful. From every side they converged.

"I think we'd better not resist," Tamme said. "Until we locate the projector, we're at a disadvantage."

They certainly were! They were now ringed by machines, several of which were truck-sized, and there was a dismaying assortment of rotating blades, pincers, and drills. But she had already noted a containment pattern to their activity rather than an attack pattern.

A container-machine moved up, and two buzz saws herded them into its cage. The mesh folded closed, and they were prisoners.

"You figure this is the end of the line?" Veg asked. "I mean, maybe the hexaflexagon goes on, but if the machines catch every visitor..."

"Uncertain," Tamme said. "Some may avoid capture, some may escape, some may be freed."

"How many agents do you figure are traveling around here?"

"It could be an infinite progression."

Veg was silent, chewing over that. She could read his concern: an endless chain of human beings parading through the worlds, right into the maw of the machine? That would explain how the machines knew so well how to handle them! And why the nose-woman on the fog world had not Ox by Piers Anthony

been surprised or afraid. The alternates would be like tourist stops...

They cruised up to a metal structure. "A machine-hive," Veg muttered, staring out through the mesh, and his description was apt. It rose hugely, bulging out over the landscape, and from every direction machines of all sizes approached, while others sped outward. The hum of their engines was constant and loud, like that of hornets. A number were flying machines, and these ranged from jet-plane to gnat size. They zoomed in and out of appropriately diametered holes.

Their own vehicle headed for one of the truck-sized apertures. The machine-hive loomed tremendously as they approached; it was a thousand feet high and as big around.

"Any way out, once we're in? " Veg asked apprehensively.

"I could short the gate mechanism and get us out of this vehicle," Tamme said. "But I don't think that would be expedient."

Veg looked out of the rushing landscape. They were now on a narrow, elevated railroad-trestle like abutment fifty feet above the metal ground. Small buzz-saw machines flanked them on trestles to either side, and a pincer-tank followed immediately behind. There was no clearance for pedestrians.

"We must be doing a hundred miles per hour," he remarked.

"More than that. The lack of proximate and stationary objects deceives the eye."

"Well, if the machines wanted to kill us, they'd have done it by now," he said. But he hardly bothered to conceal his nervousness.

So they stayed put. In moments their truck plunged into the tunnel—and almost immediately stopped.

Tamme, anticipating this, caught Veg about the waist before he was flung into the wall. "Well, aren't we cozy," she murmured as she let him go.

"I wish you wouldn't do that," he muttered. He meant that she could have warned him instead of demonstrating her superior strength again—and he also knew that she was aware of his reactions to contact with her body. She nodded to herself; she was in fact teasing him, probably trying to build up her own self-image in the face of her deterioration of set, of agent-orientation. This was a weak human device, and she would stop.

The gate opened. They stepped out. The gate closed, and the truck departed. But other bars were already in place, preventing them from following the vehicle out.

"Now we can make our break," Veg said. He put his hands on the bars and shook them. "Yow!"

Tamme knew what had happened. The metal was electrified. "They have had prior experience with our form of animation," she said. "Possibly the first agent escaped, but we shall not. We'll have to wait and see what they have in mind for us."

"Yeah," he agreed dubiously.

Tamme was already exploring their prison. It was brightly lit by glowing strips along the corners, the Ox by Piers Anthony

light reflecting back and forth across the polished metal walls. One wall had a series of knobs and bulbs. They were obviously set up for human hands and perceptions. The machines would have no use for such things!

There was a pattern to the bank of knobs. It resembled the controls to a computer. The knobs would be to activate it, the lights to show what was happening.

"Very well," she murmured. She turned the end knob quickly, removing her hand as it clicked over.

There was no shock. The light above that knob brightened. Sound came from hidden speakers: raucous, jarring.

Tamme reversed the knob. The sound died. "Alien juke box," Veg muttered.

"Close enough," Tamme agreed. She turned the next knob.

Sound rose again: a series of double-noted twitterings, penetrating.

She turned that off and tried the third. This was like the roar of ocean surf, with a half-melodious variable foghorn in the background.

There was over a hundred knobs. She tried them all—and got a hundred varieties of noise. Then she started over. On the second round the sounds were different; there were no repeats.

"This may be fun to you, but it's my turn to sleep," Veg said. He lay down on a raised platform that seemed made for the purpose.

Just as well. She could work more efficiently if he were safely out of mischief. She could have zeroed in on the sounds she was looking for much faster but preferred to wait until Veg got bored, for a reason she did not care to tell him. Now she got down to serious business. Still it took time. For two hours she tried new sounds until she got one vaguely resembling human speech. She turned this off, then on again—and it was a different, yet similar patter. She tried again on the same knob, but though the human-sounding voice continued, it was no closer to anything she understood.

"Have to find the key," she murmured inaudibly. "Not getting it yet."

She left the knob on and turned to the next. The voice modified, becoming less human. So she went to the knob on the other side, and now the voice became more familiar.

In this manner, slowly, she centered on a language approximating contemporary English. She knew she could narrow it down to her exact dialect but refrained.

Veg woke with a start. "Hey—that's making sense!"

Tamme warned him into silence with a fierce gesture. Now that the language was close, the machine could probably identify their precise alternate—which was the point of all this. She wanted communication without complete identification, lest her world be in peril.

But the machine—actually it was an input to the main hive intellect—had heard. "Curminicate, yez,"

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it said.

"Yez," she agreed, while Veg looked bewildered.

"Ujest noob; abdain edenddy."

That's what you think! she thought. I'll unjest your noobs but not to abdain edenddy. I want an approximation, not identity.

She adjusted knobs, bringing it closer. She pretended to be trying to obtain identity while actually adapting herself to the new pattern so that the machine would be satisfied the language was her own.

This was a clever trap: letting the captives pinpoint their own alternates so that their worlds could be nailed.

Meanwhile, she hoped Veg had sense enough to keep his mouth shut. A few words from him now could tip off the machine.

"Now—gestons," she said.

"Esk."

"Furst geston: wheer or we?"

"Machina Prime, sender of ralofance."

Mentally she translated: Machine Prime, center of relevance. No modesty about this alternate!

"Wat wont with os?" Already the artificial speech pattern was becoming set so that she could think in it and use it automatically. So while Veg's brow furrowed in confusion, to her it was like an ordinary conversation: What do you want with us?

"Merely to identify you and to establish amicable relations between our frames."

Tamme was glad Veg could not follow the machine's dialect readily, for he would have laughed aloud. Amicable relations between the home-alternate of the killer machines and Earth? Unlikely!

Fortunately, she was an expert liar. "This is what we want, too. We shall be happy to cooperate."

"Excellent. We shall send an emissary to your frame and establish an enclave there."

Which enclave would be blasted out of existence—if it came anywhere close to true-Earth. But it wouldn't. "We shall make a favorable report on our return," she said. "But at present we must continue on through our pattern of frames."

"By all means. We are conversant with your pattern. In fact, we have entertained many of your life-forms before. But we must advise you: There is danger."

Friendly advice from the machine? Beware I "Please explain."

"Your form of sentience is protoplasmic; ours mechanical. Yet we have many similarities, for we Ox by Piers Anthony

both require physical housings and must consume matter in order to produce functioning energy. The enemy is not physical, consumes no matter, and is inimical to rational existence. No physical being is secure on any frame, for the enemy is far more skilled in frame-shifting than either machine or life.

But your pattern takes you through an enemy home-frame, and there the danger is magnified."

Oho! So the machines sought liaison against a common antagonist. This just might be worthwhile.

"We do not understand the nature of this enemy.

"Its nature is not comprehensible by material beings. It resembles a cloud of energy-points, sustained on a framework of nodes."

The sparkle-pattern! This was an insight indeed! "We have encountered such entities but did not appreciate what they were. They moved us from one frame to another involuntarily. From that frame we escaped and are now attempting to find our way home."

"They do this to our units, also. We are able to resist to a certain extent, but they are sronger than we in this respect."

"Stronger than we, too," Tamme said. "We are very clumsy about frame travel." All too true—which was one of the things that rang false about this proposition. If the machines had true alternate-travel, as this one implied, they had little need of human liaison. If they didn't, there was not much help Tamme's world could offer.

"Two frames are stronger than one."

"We agree. What next?"

"Will your world accede to a contract?"

Contract? What was this? Now she wished she could interpret the physical mannerisms of the computer the way she did with men! "That depends on its content."

"Agreement to interact for mutual benefit. Establishment of interaction enclaves. Transfer of beneficial resources."

Now she was catching on. "I believe my world would be interested. But once our government has ratified the contract—"

"Government?"

"That select group of individuals that formulate the mechanisms and restrictions of our society so that there will not be chaos."

"Individuals?"

Oh-oh. "Your machines are not separate entities?"

"They are separate physically but part of the larger entity. Separated from the society, our units become wild, subsapient, without proper control. Only in unity is there civilization. This is why we Ox by Piers Anthony

are unable to travel far between frames; our units become separated from the hive and degenerate into free-willed agents."

"That is a difference between us. We are distinct sub-entities; we retain our sentience and civilization when isolated from our hive." But privately she wondered: did human beings really prosper in isolation. Agents certainly did not! For normals it might take a generation, but individuals cut off from their societies did degenerate. Apparently the effect was more intense with the machines. That would explain why this hive-computer was rational, while the machine Veg had met was vicious.

Without its civilized control, it had reverted to primitive savagery.

"That is now apparent. It explains what had been a mystery about your kind—though you behave more rationally than your predecessors."

So some had tried to fight "Perhaps you have made it easier for us to be rational by providing an avenue for communication. It would also help if you made available those substances we require for our energy conversions—organic materials, water, clean air."

"This we shall do on your advice."

Very accommodating; she almost wished she could afford to trust the machine. Aspects of its society were fascinating. "How should we reach you again? Our meeting here is random; we would not be able to locate your frame again." Maybe she could turn the tables, identifying the machine-alternate without giving away Earth.

"We shall provide you with a frame-homer. This is a nonsentient unit that will broadcast a signal across the framework. We shall be able to locate it by that signal, once it is activated."

"Excellent. We shall activate it when the contract is ready."

A slot opened below the knobs. Inside a little drawer was a lentil-sized button. "No need. This will activate itself when the occasion is proper."

So they weren't gambling overmuch on the good faith of the other party, either! Tamme took it and filed it away in a pocket. "Good. Now we must proceed."

"We shall provide you with your material needs if you will explain them."

She hesitated, then decided to gamble. Why should the machine poison them when it already had them in its power? More likely it would do them every possible little service in the hope of getting them and its unit safely to Earth, thus making firm contact. So she described the type of vitamins, proteins, and minerals that life required.

After some experimentation, the machine produced edible, if unappetizing, food synthesized from its resources. Tamme and Veg were hungry, so they ate and enjoyed. She kept Veg silent while she gave advice for future cuisine. Though she did not regard any human beings that might follow as her friends, the common enemies were a greater threat; let the humans settle their differences in private.

Also, let some other Earth be taken over if that was the way of it.

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"You understand," she said at the conclusion of the meal, "we can not guarantee when we will reach our home-world, or if we will. Alternity is complex."

"We understand. We shall conduct you to your projector."

"Thank you."

A truck appeared. The bars lifted. Tamme gestured Veg inside, at the same time touching her finger to her lips. She did not want him blabbing anything while they remained within the hearing of any machine, which she now knew to be no more than a unit of the hive.

They rode out of the giant complex, and she felt a very human relief. Shortly they were deposited at a platform. Set on a pedestal was a projector.

Tamme wasted no time. She activated it. And they—

—were standing in mist again.

"Okay—now can I talk?" Veg demanded.

"Should be safe," she said. She had considered whether the lentil-signal could overhear them but decided not. If it were sentient, it would lose its orientation away from the hive-frame, and if it were not, it would probably be inactive until activated. Why should Machine Prime care about their dialogue when their world of Earth was so near its grasp? Calculated risk; she was not ready to throw it away yet but did not want to keep Veg silent forever.

She forged through the mist toward the next projector.

Veg followed her with difficulty. He had to crawl on hands and knees, taking deep breaths from air pockets near the ground. "That pidgin English you were jabbering—sounded as though you made some kind of deal—"

"The machine culture wants permission to exploit Earth," she said. "Apparently they have very limited alternate-transfer capacity, hardly ahead of ours, and unless the whole hive goes, the machines become wild. So they want to place an identifying beacon on our alternate—they call it a

'frame'—so that they can zero in with a full self-sustaining enclave. That means a hive-brain. They say they need a contract between alternates, but I don't believe that. Who would enforce such a document?"

"Yeah, who?" he echoed.

She found the projector and activated it.

They stood within the closing walls.

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"I don't think it's smart, showing them where Earth is," Veg said.

"Don't worry. If there's one thing I'm not going to do, it's take their button to Earth. I'll find a good place for it—somewhere else in alternity."

"Yeah." He was right behind her as she moved toward the next projector, avoiding capture by the walls. "But what was this about a common enemy?"

"The sparkle-cloud. They can't handle it, either. It is the ultimate alternity traveler. But the fact that we have a mutual enemy does not necessarily make us allies. I played along with the hive-brain only to get us out of there. Which it probably knew."

"Then why did it—?"

"That beacon-button is probably indestructible short of atomic fusion. We're traveling through alternate frames. It's bound to key the machine boss in somewhere even if we throw it away—and it could pay off big if we actually get it to an exploitable world."

"Like Paleo?" They skirted the burned-out decoy projector, mute evidence that this was the same frame they had visited before.

"Like our Earth. From what I observed, those machines with their physical power and hive-unity could probably devastate Earth. Our population would become an organic source of nutrition, and our terrain would represent expansion room for their excess units."

Veg scratched his head. "Are we sure they would do that? Maybe they really are trying to be—"

"It is what we would do to them."

He nodded. "I guess so. The old omnivore syndrome. Do unto others before they do it unto you. You know you agents wanted to save the alternates for Earth to exploit. Now that we're running into tough civilizations, or whatever—"

"Right. It may be better to close off the alternate frontier entirely. I shall make a complete report on my return. It may be that your dinosaur worlds will be saved after all."

"That's great!" he exclaimed, giving her arm a squeeze with his big hand. He was so strong that she felt discomfort, though no ordinary man could harm her. "Even though it's too late for the real Paleo."

"There will be countless alternate Paleos—and it is not certain that we eliminated all the dinosaurs from that one. It was the manta spores we were after, you know."

He was silent. She knew the memory of the destruction of the Cretaceous enclave of Paleo still tormented him, and she had been one of the agents responsible.

They reached the projector. This one was charged, though it would not have been had they not spent that time interviewing the hive-computer. Sooner or later they would return to a frame too quickly and be unable to project out despite pressing need to do so. She would have to prepare for that, if Ox by Piers Anthony

possible. What would be the best way to survive for two hours under pressure? Educate Veg?

Meanwhile, they both needed some rest, and they could not be assured of getting it on an untried world. Veg had slept in the hive, but he was still tired, and she was not in top form. She activated the projector.

They stood in the forest again, as she had anticipated. "I believe this location is secure," she said.

"We'll rest for six hours before continuing."

"Good enough!" Veg agreed. But he hesitated.

"You will not be able to relax here while I'm in sight," she told him. "Short of obliging you or knocking you out—"

"Uh-uh! I'll take a snooze down beside the other projector. That way we can guard both spots."

She nodded acquiescence. His discipline in the face of his powerful passion for her body was remarkable, if somewhat pointless. He had indulged himself with the woman Aquilon and had been unsatisfied, so now he was doubly careful. He wanted more than the physical and was content to gamble against the odds in the hope of achieving it. Unfortunately for him, the odds were long—perhaps a thousand to one, against. She was human, at the root, so theoretically could fall in love. But agents were thoroughly conditioned against irrelevant emotion, and they had virtually no subconscious with its attendant ghosts and passions.

It would be better for him to accept the reality and indulge the passing urge he felt for her, knowing that there was no deeper commitment. That would abate his tension and make this alternate tour easier. Yet she had learned just enough respect for him to let him do it his own way. His human capriciousness and curiosity had already opened several profitable avenues, such as the hexaflexagon parallel, and might do it again. They were a good team: disciplined agent, variable normal.

If his indecision became a threat to her mission, she would have to act to abate it. That could mean seducing him directly or stranding him on some safe alternate. Neither action would leave him satisfied, and that was unfortunate.

Perhaps she would have to deceive him, pretending to love him. She could do it if she really tried.

But she did not care to. "Maybe I'm getting too choosy, like him," she muttered. "The real thing, or nothing..."

Now she needed rest. She slept.

They stepped from the forest into a forest. Flexible green plants stood on a gently sloping bank of black dirt. As trees they were small, but as vegetables, large. In either case, strange.

"No problem here," Veg said cheerfully. "Just vegetables, like me."

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"Trouble enough," Tamme murmured.

"I know. You wish I'd lay you or forget you. Or both. And I guess it makes sense your way. But I don't have that kind of sense."

Good. He was coming to terms with the situation. "These plants are strange."

He walked to the nearest and squatted beside it. "I've seen strange plants before. They all—oh-oh!"

She had seen it, too. "It moved."

"It's got thick leaves and tentacles. And what look like muscles."

Tamme surveyed the assemblage. "We had better find the projector rapidly. The plants are uprooting themselves."

They were. All about the two intruders, the plants were writhing and drawing their stems from the earth.

"I'm with you!" Veg cried. "Next thing, they'll be playing violins... over our bones."

Together they ran up the slope, casting about for the projector. This brought them out of the region where the plants were walking and into one where the foliage had not yet been alerted. But the new plants reacted to the alien presence the same way.

"They can't move rapidly, but there are many of them," Tamme said. "You'd better arm yourself with a stick or club if you can find it."

"Yeah." Veg ran over to a stem lying on the ground. He put his hands on it. "Yow!"

It was no dead stalk but a living root. The thing twisted like a snake in his hands, throwing him off.

Meanwhile, the other plants were accelerating. Now they were converging with creditable alacrity, their thick, round roots curling over the ground, digging in for holds.

"Here's a weapon," Tamme said, drawing a yard-long metal rod from her clothing.

Veg paused to stare. "Where'd you hide that? I've worn that outfit of yours! No club in it."

"It telescopes," she explained. "Be careful—it's also a sword. It weighs only ounces, but it has a good point and edge. Don't cut yourself."

"Edge? Where?" He looked at the blunt-seeming side.

"There's an invisibly thin wire along the leading face, here. It will cut almost anything with almost no pressure. Trust me; don't rub your thumb on it."

Veg took the blade and held it awkwardly in front of him. He had obviously never used such a weapon before, but she had no time to train him now. "Just do what comes naturally. Stab and hack.

You'll get the feel of it."

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He stepped out and chopped at a branch of the nearest plant. The sword sliced through easily, the broad part wedging open the cut made by the wire. "Hey—it works!"

Tamme let him hold off the plants while she searched for the projector. She hoped there was one; they always ran the risk of a dead end, a frame in which the original projector had been destroyed or was inaccessible.

The walking plants did not seem to feel much pain, but after Veg had lopped off quite a few branches and stems, they got the message and withdrew. Veg was able to clear a path wherever Tamme wanted to go. He was enjoying this, she knew; though he would not kill animal life to eat, he would kill attacking vegetables.

Then something else appeared. Not a plant; it was vaguely humanoid, yet quite alien. It had limbs that terminated in disks and a head that resembled a Rorschach blob. It emitted a thin keening.

"Is that a machine, plant, or fungus?" Veg asked.

"Mixture," she replied tersely. "Inimical."

"I'll hold it off," Veg said. "You find the projector."

"No, the thing is dangerous. I'll tackle it."

"Thanks," Veg said sourly. But he moved off, allowing her to make a stand while he searched.

Aliens were hard to read, but the malevolence seemed to radiate out of this thing. Obviously it recognized her general type and intended to exterminate it. Had a human agent done something on a prior visit to arouse justified antipathy, or was the creature a hater of all aliens? Or could it be the farmer growing these plants they were mutilating? In that case, its attitude was more that of a man with bug spray. It hardly mattered now; she had to deal with it.

The creature came close and suddenly charged her, its hand wheels leading. They were spinning like little buzz saws—which they surely were. She leaped aside, not wishing to reveal her technology by using a power weapon. The longer she fenced with it, the more she would learn about it. Was it intelligent, civilized—or was it more like a vicious guard dog? The evidences were inconclusive so far.

The saw-wheels came at her again. This time she stepped in, blocking the two arms with her own, forcing the wheels out while she studied the musculature and perceptive organs of the torso. The thing's skin was cold and hairy, like that of a spider.

In the moment her face was close, an aperture opened and spewed out a fine mist. Caught off guard, she did not pull her face away in time. It was an acid, and it burned her skin and eyes, blinding her.

She touched her hip. Her blaster fired through her skirt, bathing the creature in fire. It's body crackled as it was incinerated. The keening stopped.

"Yo!" she heard Veg call.

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She ran to him, orienting on the sound. She had been trained to handle herself regardless of injuries.

She used the echoes from her own footsteps to identify obstructions, such as the tall moving plants.

"Here—in a pile of rocks," Veg said as she came up.

"Is it charged?"

"Think so. I've never been quite sure how you could tell."

"Time to learn." While she talked, she focused on her autonomic system, blocking out the pain.

"There's a little dial in the base with red-green markings. Read it."

He stooped. "It's on green."

"Right," she said, though she could not see anything. The flaming in her face retreated as her pain-block took effect, but that was only part of the problem. The damage was still being done, but she could not yet wash the acid off. "Now let's see if you can activate it."

"That I know. You shove this thing, this little lever—"

She heard the echoes of his voice and knew that the changing walls were there. They had made the shift.

"Now let's see if you know the way to the next projector."

"Hey—how come all this practice now? " He paused. "Hey—your face—it's bright red! What happened?"

"That animal-mineral-vegetable was also a skunk."

"Acid!" he cried, alarmed. "Acid in the face! We've got to wash that off!"

"No water here. Let's move on."

"Your eyes! Did it get your—?"

"Yes. I am blind."

She did not need the visual input to pick up his shock and hurt anger. "God, Tamme—"

"I can function. But it will help if you find that projector."

"Come on!" He took her hand.

"You run ahead. I am well aware of your location."

"Okay." He let go. They moved down the flexing passage.

He did know the way. They reached the projector. "Lefthanded—and it's not ready," he announced.

And the next frame should be the forest—safe, pleasant, with plenty of fresh cold water in a nearby Ox by Piers Anthony

stream. Out of reach.

"Someone must have used it since we did," he said. "Been almost eight hours since we were here last." Then he caught himself. "No—I'm thinking of the time we slept. We left here only about an hour ago. Hey—I never gave you back your watch. You don't need it right now, though, I guess."

It was a pitifully naïve attempt to distract her from the insoluble problem. "I doubt anyone has been here since we were," she said. "But we have no notion how many are traveling this pattern. This is an inversion, possibly part of another hexaflexagon, with its own personnel."

"Can't we push it?" he asked plaintively. "The dial is getting toward the green..."

"Dangerous. An incomplete transfer might deliver dead bodies. We don't know."

"We've got to clean out those eyes. Make them tear." Another hesitation. "Or do agents ever cry—even for that?"

"My eyes teared. The damage was done in the first seconds, and after that it was probably too late for water, anyway." Had she not been preoccupied with their escape, she would have thought of this before. It was another mark of the pressure she was under and her loss of capacity as an agent, quite apart from her vision.

"Permanent or temporary?"

"Temporary, I think. It is a superficial burn, clouding the retinas."

"Then we're okay. We'll rest until you heal."

"We may not have time."

"Stop being so damned tough and act sensibly! Going off handicapped is stupid—you know that."

She nodded. "It was stupid letting myself fall into the acid trap. I've been making too damn many human errors."

"Now you even sound human." He sounded pleased.

"We'll give it a few hours. Agents recover quickly."

"Any other girl'd be crying and dependent," he grumbled.

Tamme smiled. "Even Miss Hunt?"

"Who?"

"Deborah Hunt. I believe you were close to her at one time."

"You mean 'Quilon!" he exclaimed. "We never use her original name, any more than we use yours."

He paused. "What was yours?"

"I have no other name."

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"I mean before you were an agent, you were a girl. Who were you? Why did you change?"

"I do not know. I have no memories of my civilian status—or of my prior missions as a TA-series agent, female. The debriefing erases all that. All agents of a given series must start their missions with virtually identical physical and intellectual banks."

"Don't you miss it sometimes?"

"Miss what?"

"Being a woman."

"Like Aquilon Hunt? Hardly."

"Listen, don't cut at her!" he snapped.

"I admit to a certain curiosity about the nature of this emotion that grips you," she said. "Passion, pleasure, pain, hunger, I can understand. But why do you maintain an involvement with a woman you know must go to your best friend and avoid one with me that would carry no further entanglements?"

The question was rhetorical: She knew the answer. Normals lacked fit control over their emotions and so became unreasonable.

"You want my involvement with you?" he asked incredulously.

"It is a matter of indifference to me except as it affects my mission." Not wholly true; she had no real emotional interest in him but would have appreciated some entertainment during her incapacity. This conversation was another form of that entertainment.

"That's why," he said. "You are indifferent."

"It would be useful to know what she has that I do not."

"Any other woman, that would be jealousy. But you only want to know so you can be a more effective agent."

"Yes." Another half truth. The continuing strain of too long a mission made her desire some kind of buttressing. The temporary love of a man offered that. But it would not be wise to tell him that; he would misinterpret it.

"Well, I'll answer it. 'Quilon is beautiful—but so are you. She's smart, but you're smarter. As a sex object, you have it all over her, I'm sure; she has the body, but she doesn't know how to—well, never mind. What it is, is, she needs a man, and she cares."

"Agreed. You have not answered my question."

Veg choked. "You don't care. You could drop me in a volcano if it helped your mission. You don't need anyone—even when you're blind."

"True. I have never denied this. I have no such liabilities. But what positive asset does she have Ox by Piers Anthony

that—"

"I guess I can't get through to you. Her liabilities are her assets—that's how Cal would put it. Me, I just say I love her, Cal loves her, and she loves us. I'd let the universe go hang if that would help her.

It has nothing much to do with sex or strength or whatever."

Tamme shook her head, intrigued. "This is far-fetched and irrational. It should be informative to put it to the test."

"Shut up!"

"That, too, is intriguing."

Veg got up and stomped away. But he did not go far, for the walls were waiting.

Tamme threw her mind into a healing state, concentrating on the tissues of her face and eyes. She, like all agents, had conscious control over many ordinarily unconscious processes and could accelerate healing phenomenally by focusing the larger resources of her body on the affected area.

The external lenses of the eyes were small but hard to act on directly; this would take several hours of concentration.

When the projector was recharged, Veg took them through.

Tamme continued the effort in the forest, and in four hours her vision began to clear.

"You mean you can see again?" Veg demanded.

"Not well. I estimate I will have three-quarters capacity in another two hours. Since we should have two familiar frames coming up, that will suffice. Once I desist from the specific effort, the rate will slow; it will take several days to get beyond ninety per cent. Not worth the delay."

"You're tough, all right!"

"A liability, by your definition."

"Not exactly. You can be tough and still need someone. But we've been over that before."

In due course they moved on to—

—the mist frame—

—and the alien orchestra, following the hexaflexagon pattern. Their strategy of plowing straight ahead seemed to be paying off; they were stuck in no subloops. Probably they had not been stuck before; they just had not understood the pattern.

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"Now we strike a new one," Tamme said.

"You ready?"

"My vision is eighty per cent and mending. The rest of my faculties are par. I am ready."

"Okay." And they went through.

Tamme lurched forward and caught hold before she fell. Veg dropped but snagged a hold before going far. It was an infinite construction of metal bars. They intersected to form open cubes about six feet on a side, and there was no visible termination.

"A Jungle gym!" Veg cried. "I had one of these at my school when I was a kid!" He climbed and swung happily.

"Let's find a projector," Tamme said. "Got to be on one of these struts."

"We need to establish a three-dimensional search pattern. There is no variety here as there was in the colored planes. We don't want to double back on checked sections."

"Right. Maybe we'd better mark where we started and work out from that. Take time, but it's sure."

They tied his shirt to a crossbar and began checking. Sighting along the bars was not much good; the endless crosspieces served to interrupt the line of sight so that the presence of the projector could not be verified. It was necessary to take a direct look into each cube. In the distance the effect of the massed bars was strange: From some views, they became a seemingly solid wall. From the center of a cube, there seemed to be six square-sectioned tunnels leading up, down, and in four horizontal directions.

When sighting routinely down one of these tunnels, Tamme saw a shape. It looked like a man.

She said nothing. Instead, she sidled across several cubes, breaking the line of sight in all three dimensions, and searched out Veg.

She was able to orient on him by the sound. "You're out of position," she said.

"No—I'm on the pattern. You're off yours."

"I left mine. We have company."

"Oh-oh. Alien?"

"Human."

"Is that good or bad?"

"I'm not sure. We'd better observe him if we have the chance."

"Here's the chance!" Veg whispered. Sure enough, a figure hove into view along a horizontal axis.

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"That's you!" Tamme whispered. "Another Veg!" She knew what he was going to say: Your eyes must be seeing only forty per cent! I'm HERE! But she was wrong. "Well, we figured this could happen. Another couple, just like us, from a near alternate. We've just got to find that projector first."

Tamme made a mental note: The episode with the acid thrower must have thrown off her perceptions.

Not only had she misread Veg's response, he sounded different, less concerned than he should be.

She would have to reorient at the first opportunity to avoid making some serious mistake.

Meanwhile, she concentrated. "We have the advantage because we saw them first. We can enhance our chances by conducting our search pattern ahead of them. That way they'll be checking a volume of space that we have already covered—where we know there's no projector."

"Smart!" he agreed.

Tamme calculated the probable origin of the competitive party, based on her two sightings of the strange Veg and the assumption that the other couple had landed not far from their own landing. They worked out from that. There was some risk the projector would happen to be on the wrong side of the other couple, but all they could do now was improve their chances, not make them perfect.

And suddenly it was there, nestled in a hangar below an intersection. Tamme approached it cautiously, but it was genuine. And it was charged.

Now she had a dilemma. She had control of the projector—but her larger mission was to eliminate Earth's competition, even that of a very near alternate. Should she tackle her opposite number now?

No. If the other couple had taken the same route around the hexaflexagon, it had to have been earlier, for the two-hour recharging time of the projectors required at least that amount of spacing out. But it was also possible that the others were flexing the other way—backwards, as it were. In which case they could not yet have encountered the walking plants and the acid-spraying keeper. So that other agent, male or female, would be in top form and would have a material advantage. That was no good.

Better to proceed on around the next subloop and tackle the competition when they crossed again in this frame. Then she would be ready. With luck, the other agent would not even know the encounter was incipient, and that would more than make up for the eye deficiency.

She activated the projector.

And they stood amidst sparkles.

"Well, look at that!" Veg said, impressed.

"A home-frame of the pattern-entities," Tamme said. "Another major discovery."

"Yeah. They told us at the bazaar, but I didn't expect it so soon."

Tamme did not stiffen or give any other indication of her reaction; her agent-control served her in good stead. Instead, she continued as if he had said nothing unusual, drawing him out. "They said a Ox by Piers Anthony

lot at the bazaar."

"Yeah. But what else could we do? By cooperating, at least we save our own alternates, maybe. I'm sorry if we have to go against our duplicates who didn't make it there—but in the end, it's every world for itself. And with the pattern-entities right here on the circuit—well, so much the better."

"If those patterns don't spot us and transport us right out of the network."

"Yeah. Let's get on with it."

They got on with the search. But now Tamme knew: She had picked up the wrong Veg. This one was traveling the other way and had been through at least one alternate—the "bazaar"—that she hadn't.

And some sort of agreement, or treaty, had been made there involving other alternate Vegs and Tammes.

She had been right: Herself, from another alternate, was her enemy. And it was herself, for Veg would have known the difference immediately had his companion been a male agent.

Every frame for itself. Her Veg would not have agreed; this Veg did.

Ironically, she preferred the attitude of her original Veg. He had more conscience; he cared.

Meanwhile, he was with the other Tamme.

She had to complete the subloop and get back to the Jungle gym before that enemy Tamme caught on. The bitch would not be slow, either! So long as that other did not locate the projector, her search pattern would continue, and there would be little interaction between the agent and the man. But if they found it and had to wait for the recharge, there would be time.

And if they found the shirt tied at the point of arrival... there would be two shirts, one from each Veg.

A dead giveaway! Why hadn't she thought to recover that shirt?

It had, after all, been sheer luck, her finding the projector first. She had figured a pattern based on her two sightings of the opposition—and at least one of those sightings had actually been of her own man! No science in that! But the same sort of coincidence could bring the other Tamme to the same projector. The enemy Tamme would have to wait while this Tamme could move—if she found the projector on this frame soon.

Maybe it would be better to avoid contact entirely and go on. No—that would be deserting her Veg and bringing along one who would surely turn uncooperative when he caught on. And she was trapped on a subloop; there was no way out but through the Jungle gym frame.

The projector on this subloop would probably be charged. She might complete the trip around within one hour and catch the enemy completely off guard. That would be best. Her vision would not be much improved within that time, but the element of surprise was more important.

What about this Veg? No need for him to know. He had already served to alert her, and he was no threat.

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"Hey, these aren't the same," he commented, watching a swirl of sparkle almost under his nose. "See, they're smaller, and they don't fade in and out. This one's staying right here in this alternate, as though it doesn't know any better."

"You study it," she said, casting about for the projector. "The information could be valuable." Maybe it would keep him occupied and innocent.

He watched it. "You know what I think—this is a primitive one, like a three-dee R Pentomino. It just rides on a few elements, maintaining itself, not doing anything fancy. Maybe this isn't the sparkle home-alternate, but a fringe-alternate, with animal-patterns instead of advanced-sentient ones. They must have a whole range of states just as we do—some hardly more than amoebas, others superhuman. Superpattern, I mean." He chuckled. He certainly had been to places she hadn't. R

Pentomino? He seemed to have a much better grounding on the sparkles. It showed in his terminology and his attitude. "Maybe you can work out the whole sequence of patterns," she suggested. Where was that projector?

"Yeah. How they start as little three-dimensional swirls across the elements, like wind rattling the leaves of a poplar, and then begin modifying things to suit themselves. How some turn into predator patterns, gobbling up others, until the good patterns learn to shoot them down with glider guns. But then the bad ones start shooting, too, and they just keep evolving, dog eat dog, only it's all just patterns on energy-nodes. Finally they achieve higher consciousness—only they don't even know what it is to be physical. They think that the only possible sentience is pattern-sentience. And when they finally meet up with sentient material beings, it's like a nightmare, like monsters from the deeps, impossible but awful. Yeah, I think I can see it, now. Too bad we can't talk with them, tell them we understand..."

Tamme paused in her search, listening. The man was making sense! Could that be the rationale of the mysterious pattern-entities? The machines called them enemies, but if it were really just a monumental case of misunderstanding...

Then she spotted the projector and put aside irrelevant conjecture. "Let's go, Veg!"

One step to the—

—orchestra, then another back to—

—the Jungle gym.

"I have your man captive," the other Tamme said, indicating the direction with a minimal nod of her head. "Do you yield?"

Rhetorical: To yield was to die. But it was true: Veg was efficiently gagged and bound with the two shirts, his legs tied so that he hung by his knees from a bar.

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"What's this?" the free Veg asked, amazed. "Why'd she tie her own companion?"

Tamme glanced at him. "I am the other agent. I have not been to the bazaar."

The expected spate of emotions ran through him. A stranger he was, yet he was very much Veg, slow in certain ways, noble in others. "Then why didn't you—?"

"Tie you? What purpose? She is the dangerous one."

"But she tied me—and you didn't!"

"I may have known you longer," Tamme said. And gotten soft! "Though it was not you I knew, precisely." Of course, she should have put him more obviously under her control, as a counter to the alternate-Tamme's threat. Yet another mistake.

The free Veg looked from one Tamme to the other, disconcerted. Then he spoke to the other. "Listen: I changed my mind. I'm not fighting anyone. This isn't right."

"Then go untie your double," Tamme said, realizing that her human error had converted to an odd kind of advantage: The alternate-Veg had been neutralized. "You men are basically gentle; she and I are not so hesitant."

"Yeah." The free Veg went to help the bound one, passing between the two women. Then he halted, facing his own: "Okay—I can't stop it. But maybe I can make it fair. Get rid of your power weapons."

"Get out of the way," Tamme Two said. She held a laser in her hand.

"Or shoot me first," Veg said. "Use that, and you'll sure as hell have to shoot me sometime because I won't work with you anymore."

He was serious; the signals were all over him. It was a trifling threat to an agent. Still, Tamme knew what was going through the other's mind because it was her mind, too—her mind as it had been a few days ago when she was tougher, less corrupted by individual sentiment. Veg had been more than neutralized; he was now sympathetic to the Tamme he had not known, more gentle than his own.

Liability had become strength. Tamme Two could dispense with him—but the man had commendable qualities and was proving more useful than anticipated. Why antagonize him needlessly? Especially when she had the advantage, for the other had evidently been injured in the face...

Tamme Two dropped the laser. Tamme One drew and dropped hers. Because they were agents, they could read each other—well enough, at least, to know whether a given weapon was about to be dropped or fired. The lasers fell almost together down through the endless shaft of cubes.

"And don't use any others," Veg Two said. "Just your hands, or hand-powered stuff. Okay?"

Tamme Two nodded. She would make the sensible compromise to retain his good will, minor as its value was. He moved on.

Then both girls were moving. Actually, the laser shot would have been risky because it lacked power Ox by Piers Anthony

for instant effect, and there would have been time for both weapons to be used. Direct combat would be more decisive.

Tamme One swung around her bar, getting out of the direct line of vision. She had the disadvantage, and they both knew it; she had to use evasive strategy, hoping for the break that would reverse the odds. She ran along the topside of another bar toward her opponent.

But the other had anticipated her. A hand came from below to catch her ankle. Tamme One leaped into space, jackknifing to catch Tamme Two's hair. The other jerked aside and countered with a high kick.

Tamme caught a bar and swung around it and back to her feet. Tamme Two dived at her, pressing her advantage. Tamme raised a knee to catch her in the chest, but Tamme Two caught her shoulders and sat down suddenly. This was an old judo technique, yoko wakare or side-separation throw.

Ordinarily, it was performed on the ground; in this case, there was no ground and no firm footing beyond the bars. The pull was tremendous. Tamme fell forward, somersaulted in air, and caught Tamme Two's ankles.

Then the telescoping sword manifested. Tamme Two's hands were free; Tamme One was momentarily exposed. The first slash caught her on the side, cutting open her clothing and severing the flesh through to the ribs. Her inferior vision had betrayed her; she could have countered as the sword was being drawn had she seen it in time. Now she was wounded, and the advantage was shifting from marginal to gross.

She let go and dropped, taking a moment to cut off the flowing blood by will power. But Tamme Two dropped with her, slashing again with the sword. Tamme drew her own and whipped it at her enemy—but her reflexes were slowed by the regenerative effort, and Tamme Two parried easily.

Tamme reached out and caught a bar one-handed. The wrench was terrible, but her body was brought up short.

And Tamme Two stopped with her, kicking the sword from her hand and simultaneously stabbing for the heart. Tamme twisted aside, too slow, and the point missed by two inches, piercing her left lung instead.

Never before had she realized how devastating an opponent she was, how implacable, how efficient.

Tamme Two was an agent at par; Tamme herself was an agent at eighty per cent vision, caught by surprise, with diminished sense of purpose. Any one of those differences was critical, and now she was done for. Could she take the other with her into oblivion?

It took Tamme Two a moment to yank out the sword, for the power of the thrust had projected the point entirely through the body. Tamme took advantage of that moment to club Tamme Two on the side of the neck, preparatory to catching her in a literal death grip.

Tamme Two dodged again, reducing the effect of the blow, and blocked the clasping arms. Tamme was already dropping down through the cubes—but her hold was not tight, and Tamme Two slipped through. The double suicide would only kill one.

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This time Tamme Two let her go, knowing better than to come again within reach of those arms.

Instead, she drew and threw a fine knife. It shot straight down with unerring aim to embed itself in Tamme's skull, penetrating the brain.

"I am going to space," he said.

"If you do, I will kill myself," she said.

Bunny heard her parents engaging in their solemn, serious dialogue, terrified. Knowing there was nothing she could do. They never fought, never argued; when either spoke, it was final.

Actually, they had never spoken these words; the words were in Bunny's mind, her nightmares. But they reflected the unvoiced reality, building over the years into inevitable decision.

Her father went to space, unable to resist the gratification of a lifelong lure. Ocean sailing was in his ancestry; the nature of the challenge had changed, not his response.

Bunny understood this, for he had told her of space, its myriad wonders only now being revealed, its compelling fascination. Neutron stars, black holes, quasars; alien life, mysterious artifacts of long-dead empires; acceleration, free fall; meteors, comets, craters. She wanted to go, too.

The day he left, her mother carefully scraped the insulation from the apartment's energy line and shorted it out across her body. Bunny was an orphan.

"I know your father was lost in space, and your mother died when you were a child," he said. "This is what first attracted me to you. You needed me, and I thought that was enough." He paused to walk around park space, idly knocking his powerful hands together. "I'm strong; I like taking care of things. I wanted to take care of you. But Bunny, it isn't enough. Now I'm ready to marry—and what I crave is a wife figure, not a daughter figure. It just wouldn't work out, and we both know it."

She did know it. She didn't plead, she didn't cry. After he left, she followed the model she remembered as closely as was convenient. She jumped off the passenger ramp into the moving line of a major freight artery.

"Both arms severed at the shoulders, one leg mangled, internal organs crushed. Heart and liver salvageable; kidneys unsalvageable. Brain intact. It would cost a fortune, but we could reconstitute her. To what point? she is medically indigent, no parents, no insurance, no special dispensations, no extraordinary talents, and she obviously doesn't want to live."

"A suitable prospect, would you say?"

"Yes. You would be doing her a favor. She doesn't want to remember."

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"Very well, You will authorize the condemnation procedure?"

"I don't see much choice; it's that or death in hours."

So Bunny's mangled but living remains were condemned as legally unsalvageable, and the government assumed possession in much the same manner as it acquired the right of way through a slum.

Two years later, the rebuilt, retrained body and brain were issued under the stamp of an agent, series TA, female.

Tamme opened her eyes. A snout-nosed near-human leaned over her. "Hvehg!" the woman called.

A man came, bearded, putting his strong hand on hers. It was a hand very like that of the man Bunny had hoped to marry. "You'll make it, Tam," he said. "We're taking good care of you."

"Who?" It was hard to speak; she was weak and confused, and she needed... too much. He would reject her if he knew.

"You don't remember who you are?" the man asked, alarmed.

She made an effort. "I am TA. You?"

"You don't remember me?" This seemed to bother him even more.

"Is this the start of a mission? I don't know how I got here, or who either of you are, or anything.

Please tell me." Speaking was such an effort that she knew she would soon have to desist—and she hardly understood her own words. TA?

"I am Veg. This is Ms Hmph, near as I can pronounce it. You were badly hurt, nearly dead; I brought you here, and the Hmphs made a place for us. We'd met them before on our trek through alternity."

"Alternity?"

"Brother! You really are out of it. Maybe you better rest now."

The mere suggestion was enough. She sank into sleep.

Her first mission as a TA was on Earth. She was told nothing, not even that it was the first. As with all agents, her mind was erased and reset between assignments, so it made no difference to her or the computer whether it was the first or the last. This reprogramming was to preserve the series identity; the computer needed assurance that any agent of a given series would respond and report precisely as allowed for. That way there was negligible human distortion; it was as though the computer itself had made the investigation. It was an efficient system, replacing the outmoded FBI, CIA, and similar organizations.

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Had Bunny been aware of the transformation, she would have been incredulous. The weak, frail, insecure girl now was superhuman—literally. She could run thirty miles an hour and sustain it for miles: twice the world record for normals. She could invert herself and walk on two extended fingers.

She was thoroughly grounded in the use of a wide variety of weapons, from bazookas to kitchen knives, and was also adept at barehanded combat. She had the equivalent of college degrees in a number of technical and liberal arts. And she had a stunning face and figure.

But Bunny was not aware. Bunny was part of the dross that had been erased. Her body and brain had been stripped to their fundamental content, then recycled.

Tamme found herself in a riot-prone city. She moved among the people, questioning, searching out her mission. She had been given a single name and a probable address, no more. And in due course she found it; there was an assassination plot against a touring official. As the steam rifle oriented, so did she. The assassin died a fraction of a second before he fired, and Tamme returned to her barracks.

There she indulged in the predebriefing relaxation that was customary, almost mandatory: play being a recognized adjunct of the fit man. It was postponed for the agents until after completion of their missions, partly as additional inducement for performance, partly because that was the time of their greatest divergence from the agent-norm. Freshly briefed agents would have found each other so predictable as to be dull; postmission agents had differing experiences to discuss and were to a certain extent different people. Interaction became entertaining.

She met a male of the SU series. He was fascinating. He had been dispatched to apprehend a moonshine gunsmith and had been shot in the foot by one of the old-fashioned contraptions. She played nude water polo with him, and because of that foot was able to hold him under while she made the first score. But then he had hauled her under with him, and for four minutes they both held their breaths while they made love—though love was too strong a term for this physical release of passion.

"Will we ever meet again, Subble?" she asked as she lay in his arms, floating on the surface, enjoying the almost-combatlike exercise of power that no normal human could match.

"It hardly matters," he replied. "We will not remember or care." And he shoved her head under, brought her bottom up, and penetrated her again... as a subterfuge while he knocked the ball in for the tying score.

After she got even with him for that, they both reported for final debriefing, and all had been erased.

Now Tamme did remember. She sat up with an anguished effort, her wounded side and chest excruciating. "Subble died on his next mission!" she exclaimed.

Strong arms came about her shaking shoulders. "Easy, Tam," Veg said. "You're dreaming."

"No—I'm only now coming awake! You knew him!" she cried. "You killed him!"

He bore her back to the bed. "We knew him. We liked him. 'Quilon especially. He was a decent sort.

For an agent. He may have died, but we didn't do it."

Ox by Piers Anthony

She clung to him. "I'm terrified! Stay with me—please!"

"Always." He lay down beside her, smoothing her troubled forehead with his hand, careful of the bandage. "Rest. Rest. You're still very weak."

Tamme had other missions. One by one she relived them: one a mere interview with a scientist, another a spell as housemistress to an outpost halfway across the Earth-Sphere of colonization, keeping the normals sane. She had acted, always, with complete, objective ruthless-ness, forwarding the interests of that government that had fashioned her in that manner it required.

Right up until her assignment on the first alternate world, Paleo. That mission, surprisingly, had been a multiple-agent venture. It brought her to the present.

When she was well enough to walk, Veg took her out of the house. The building was made of blocks of foam-like fog, and it tended to degenerate. Periodically, the farmer and his family cut new fog from the bank and built a new residence. The makings of the old house were chopped up for cattle bedding; the bovines liked the impregnated people-smell of it.

They were hard workers, these Fognosers (as Veg called them), and their children helped. They used hands for brute work, and prehensile snouts for fine work. They harvested certain types of mist for foods; most varieties tasted rather like scented soap but were nutritious.

"Now I remember," Tamme said. "We met these people once, and you showed them the hexaflexagon."

"Yeah. They have seen many Vegs and many Tammes, but I was only the second one who happened to show the hex. Lucky I did because they remembered us. I mean, distinguished us from all the others just like us and helped. I've been making hexaflexagons like crazy; that's how I repay them."

"And how shall I repay you? " she asked.

He shook his head. "I wasn't doing this for pay."

She gripped his hand. "Please—I need you. I want to please you. What can I do?" Oh, God—she was pleading, and that would drive him off.

He looked at her. "You need me?"

"Maybe that's the wrong word," she said desperately.

His mouth was grim. "When you use a word you don't understand, just manipulate—yes, it's the wrong word!"

"I'm sorry!" she cried. "I won't use it again. Only don't be angry, don't turn away..."

Ox by Piers Anthony

He held her by the shoulders at arm's length. "Are you crying?"

"No!" But it was useless. "Yes." If only she hadn't been so weak physically and emotionally! Strong men didn't appreciate that.

"Why?"

What was left but the truth? "When you are near me, I feel safe, secure. Without you, it is—nightmare. My past—"

He smiled. "I think you have already repaid me."

What did he mean? "I don't understand—"

"You had a brain injury on top of everything else. I guess it gave you back all those erased memories, right back to—Bunny. And it broke up your conditioning. So now you can have nightmares from your subconscious, you can feel insecure—that's why you need someone."

"Yes. I am sorry. I am not strong." Like a child, weak; like a child, to be taken care of.

He paused, chewing meditatively on his lower lip. Then: "Do you remember our conversation once about what 'Quilon had that you didn't?"

She concentrated. "Yes."

"Now you have it, too."

"But I'm weak. I can't stand alone, and even if I could—"

He looked at her intently, not answering. Her ability to read emotions had suffered, perhaps because her own were in such disarray. She could not plumb him for reaction, could not be guided by it. She was on her own.

"Even if I could," she finished with difficulty, "I would not want to."

Then with an incredible brilliance it burst upon her.

"Veg—this, what I feel, the whole complex, the fear, the weakness, the need—is this love?"

"No. Not fear, not weakness."

She began to cry again, her momentary hope dashed. "I'm not very pretty now I know. My face is all splotched and peeling from that acid burn, and I've lost so much weight I'm a scarecrow. I'm Bunny all over again. So I don't have any right to think you'd—" She broke off, realizing how maudlin she sounded. Then she was furious at herself. "But damn it, I do love you! The rest is irrelevant."

She turned away, sorry she had said it yet glad the truth was out. She remembered Bunny, but she was not Bunny. When he left her, she would not commit suicide; she would carry on, completing her mission... somehow.

Ox by Piers Anthony

He took her into his arms and kissed her, and then she needed no other statement.

Tamme grew stronger—but this made her uneasy. In a few more days she was able to outrun Veg and to overcome him in mock combat. She tried to hold off, letting him prevail, but he would not let her.

"I want you healthy," was all he said.

"But once I achieve full capacity, I'll have emotional control," she said. "I will be able to take you or leave you—as before."

"I love you," he said. "That's why I won't cripple you. I've seen you as you are when the agent mask is off, and that's enough. We always knew it couldn't last between us. When you are well again, it'll be over. I'll never say it wasn't worth it."

Her face was wet, and she discovered she was crying again. She cried too much these days, as though making up for the tearless agent. "Veg, I don't want to be like before! I don't care how weak I am if it means I can stay with you."

He shook his head. "I had a quarrel with Cal once on Paleo, and so did 'Quilon. She was miserable, and I was with her, and we thought that was love. It wasn't. Real love doesn't need weakness or misery. I won't make that mistake again."

"But when I was strong, you said—"

"You can be as strong as Sampson, I don't care!"

"Please—"

" I'm strong for a normal man," he said. He picked up a stick an inch in diameter, spliced it between the fingers of one hand, and tensed his muscles. The stick snapped into three pieces. "But I need people. I need Cal, and I need 'Quilon, and I need you. You didn't need anyone."

Tamme picked up a similar stick and broke it the same way. The fragments flew out to land in a triangle on the ground. "I'm strong, too—and now I need you. But what about tomorrow?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. All I can do is live for today. That may be all we have. That's the way it is with agents, isn't it?"

She drew the knife she carried. "If I stuck this back into my head, maybe it would—"

He dashed the blade out of her hand. "No! What's got to be, 'sgot to be!"