strength of the creature’s grip shocked her. Now a second Ent was moving toward her, reaching for her. Nervously, she glanced up at her companions, wanting to get out of this. No one seemed aware of the problem. Gia appeared absorbed by the constant stream of sound the other four Ents uttered. Dori was talking to Zion, their backs turned to Lil.
The second alien touched her with its long gray-furred fingers. She saw the extra joint clearly. Its eyes looked steadily into hers, something secret moving in their depths. Then one eye tracked slowly to the left, past Lil, toward the dark edge of the forest, and the pupil widened; the other, narrow-slitted, transfixed her with its gaze.
Lil panicked. She jerked her hands in her captors’ grasp, twisting away. Her foot slid from under her on the slick surface.
As she went down, the Ent wrenched her arm sideways, so that she crashed awkwardly to the ground.
CHAPTER THREE
Torchlight flickered fitfully...tall houses threatened...the dark street tunneled. He ran endlessly...the houses leaning over...arriving nowhere, fear gnawing at his innards. A door opened...light knifed out across the darkness...the houses vanished. A line of women advanced on him...arms swung in unison...faces gleamed under oiled skulls. He was arguing now, but darkness devoured his words. Still the women advanced. He knew they would march across his body and leave him dying. He screamed.
And broke out of the dream.
Zion Marit sat up, soaked with sweat, his heart still pounding. He groped for the controls that operated the light in his cabin and succeeded in knocking a small pad off the table beside his bunk.
“Is something troubling you, Civilian Marit?”
“No, HANA. Just a bad dream.” Like a mother, he thought, responding to her child’s cry in the night. That wasn’t so farfetched, given this type of biocomputer.
“Have you had it before?”
“Yes.”
“Do you wish to talk about it?”
“I’ll write it up.”
The small green light on the unobtrusive panel above the table glowed at him, and he absorbed its mute reassurance. Nothing could be too terrible while the computer was keeping watch over them. He lifted the stopper from the water jug and poured into the beaker. It was a little after midnight. He’d spent the evening in Lil’s cabin, both of them indulging in some much-needed mood improvement—though the accident that injured her hip had put a temporary crimp in Lil’s style. He must have tumbled straight into this nightmare the minute he lay down to sleep. The cold liquid chased the lingering mood of the dream out of his head. Wide awake now, he swung his feet over the edge of his bed.
“Would you like me to help you unravel your dream?”
He smiled. “I like your imagery. But there’s nothing particularly complicated to unravel. I can deal with it myself.”
“As you wish,” HANA said.
What happened to Lil had to have been an accident, of course. Both he and the LangSpec had had a lot of physical contact with the Ents yesterday, and there’d been no suspicion of violence. But Madel—the kind of MedSpec who always followed the rules, he could tell—had insisted on a day’s delay before they went down again. She and Lil would be running behavioral analyses with HANA. He’d fretted at the delay, but Madel hadn’t listened to him. “There’s no hurry, anyway,” Lil told him. “We’ve got lots of time.” The LangSpec indicated she’d be glad to use the day going over her data with HANA.
He was the one obsessed with time now.
He retrieved the pad from the floor and opened it up. HANA probably disapproved of such antiquated activity as writing when it could have provided him with the same service much faster and with less effort. Yet for him, the act of taking stylus in hand and forming symbols on a page was far more intimate an activity than dictating to a notebox or a computer. Slow as it was, he found it freeing, allowing him the leisure to explore emotions he’d otherwise manage to keep hidden from himself. That was the way he thought—with his hands, making the abstract concrete. Art for him was a way of exploring his own mind.
Besides, this time he didn’t want to let HANA see what he was writing until he’d finished encoding it.
He wrote carefully in a neat script that differed from print only by the slant and final curve he gave to the letters, exploring the origins of the dream in a letter to other young men back on Earth. He would never know if it was received, or if it was, if it made any difference. But he had to write.
He’d been quite young when he’d first realized the world was made up of two kinds of citizens: those who knew themselves to be superior and necessary, and the second kind who were merely tolerated. Later he noticed the difference was anatomical. But it hadn’t seemed too much of a tragedy until much later still, when he’d become aware that some of the members of the first group planned to eliminate the second group altogether.
The first time he’d seen clones he’d been fascinated by the mirror images they presented. Did they think alike? Dream alike? If they were to paint or sculpt, would the work of one resemble that of the others the way their expressions echoed each other? After a while, he realized that the clone groups were always females. But he’d been on the verge of adulthood before he understood that in their existence was the denial of the need for his.
His memories flowed steadily in the idiosyncratic code he’d devised ahead of time, to be translated by a few trusted lieutenants. If he could have spent his life at the art school in Cuzco, where CenCom had sent him when he was twelve, he would have been content. His days would have been filled giving life to the visions that spun endlessly in his imagination. In the thin air of that high city, surrounded by ghosts of lost civilizations, he would have pursued his art and taught others in a quiet peace that might have lasted until he was old and white-haired like his teachers. Time had been his to play with, and it had been endless. But the coming of the clones disrupted his world. He’d left the mountains to find the answer to the question they posed: if there was no need for his existence, then what was its meaning?
He set the stylus down and gazed about him. Smooth, gently curving walls met his gaze, practical surfaces, functional hatches where he’d stowed the few possessions he’d had time to bring with him, sterile colors. Everything spoke of economy and efficiency; function led esthetics in starship design. His fingers itched to rearrange, repaint.
“Do you need something, Civilian Marit?”
“No.”
He could see how this constant concern for his welfare could soon become annoying. He didn’t want to know how they built biocomputers, but something suggested HANA’s brain was female.
He picked up the stylus and continued. The topic needed reinterpretation. And the group of young men in the cell he’d recruited would benefit from his insight.
“Civilian Marit,” HANA said severely, “you need a sleep period in order to function effectively.”
He paid no attention. Once he’d realized what was happening, he’d moved to oppose it. In Cuzco there’d been others who shared his beliefs, some male, some female, people who worried about the danger of a computer-planned humanity. A tall girl with long blond braids had recruited him, reaffirming in the high, sweet darkness under the spinning stars that nature had been right after all.
Her name was Kari, and he’d never see her again. At the thought, the old anger churned in him.
“Civilian Marit, I really must insist....”
He could, if he wanted to, use memory-stim to recapture the scene with Kari in full detail. He could attach the tiny electrode to his scalp, and HANA would do the rest. All the poignancy and pain would be his to taste again and again—
He didn’t want to.
Afterward, he’d begun to speak out. No one listened at first. Then as time went on the wrong ones listened. The first time he’d been