The woman's heavy lips were not pouty at all when she was smiling. "I know Michel, everyone does.

Call me Vera, will you, honey?"

Still, a certain strain was in the air. Some awkwardness having to do with the way adults conducted their social lives had just happened, or was happening right now. Into the silence Frank said, "Michel and I were just talking about Lancelot. The difficulties thereof."

"Oh?" Vera looked properly concerned. "If it's not about the forcefield math, I'm afraid I can't help much."

"More like piloting problems," Michel said unhappily.

"Honey, if it's getting to you after all, you better tell the medics." Vera's concern grew more real. "Or tell my husband. Or I'll tell him for you."

"Getting to me? Oh no. It's not that I get sick using Lancelot, or anything like that."

Frank's middle box put out two metal stick-arms, let them swing rhythmically from their upper joints. It seemed to be a gesture miming patience, taking the place perhaps of slow thumb-twiddling.

Vera saw this and shook her head. "Look, boys, I think I'll just leave you to your piloting discussion.

Catch you later, both of you."

"Caaatch yoouu." Frank's answer came in a voice for once tuned far outside the human vocal spectrum, deep as the cough of some giant predator.

Vera giggled. With a wink in Michel's direction and a small wave for both of them she turned in her swinging skirt and strode back in the way that she had come, leaving Michel with a momentary vague curiosity as to why she had come this way at all.

But he had more demanding things to think about. "Can I ask you something, Frank?"

"Sure. If I can ask you something, too."

"What?"

"Promise you'll try to teach me how you do it. With Lancelot. When there's time."

Michel paused. "I'll try."

"You don't sound too hopeful. Anyway, what was your question?"

Michel drew a deep breath, and with the sensation of stepping into a gulf of unknown depth he asked, "Do you ever have the feeling that you're becoming some kind of a machine?"

"Is that all? h.e.l.l, no. Well of course in a sense this hardware that you see has become a part of me. But I'mnot a part of anything except myself . . . oh, maybe you mean when piloting a ship? Yeah, then there's a sense, a very strong sense sometimes, in which the ship and pilot become a unit. But I had that feeling, pretty much the same, before I was all smashed up. It's a pilot's feeling of becoming more than he is otherwise."

"Not of being swallowed up by anything, though."

"Swallowed up? No." Frank paused, his liquid lenses sliding and rotating carefully. "That answer your question?"

"I don't know. No it doesn't, really."

"Ah. To me, Lancelot doesn't feel like a machine at all. If it was a machine, felt like a machine, then I could live with it. But to you it does, and the machine part is taking over the live part, is that it? The live part being you?"

"Yes." It was a surprising relief to have said that much, at last, to someone.

"This feeling ends, I trust, when you take the d.a.m.ned thing off."

"Yeah. Only . . ."

"Why don't you complain about it, as Vera suggested?"

"Then they might not let me wear it." Confession, coming almost in a whisper. "I feel happier when I have it on. And then like there's less of me, or something, every time when they take me out of it again."

"h.e.l.l." A heartily sympathetic though mechanized snort. "I'mhappier when I'm in a ship."

That wasn't it, though. Or was it? Michel didn't feel sure enough to argue. And certainly he felt better for confession. Even-or especially-to a set of boxes.

Frank remained silent for more than five seconds, which was for him a long and thoughtful pause. "Let's take a walk," his speakers grunted then.

Michel caught up with a skip to the swiftly moving train, and then walked quickly to hold his place beside it. He was led purposefully back into the regions where other people and other moving machines were common.

A liquid lens on the head box was studying Michel. Frank asked, "I don't suppose they've shown you any of the pseudopersonalities."

"The what? No."

"I don't know why in h.e.l.l he doesn't communicate with you. It would give you a better perspective on the whole operation."

They pa.s.sed signs warning about security zones. They pa.s.sed one live guard, for whom Frank did not even slow.

"Colonel Marcus? I should see the kid's clearance, if he's going-"

"Stuff it.Youshould have a clearance, just to talk tohim."

That behind them, they kept walking and rolling on. Then Frank stopped abruptly, before a plain door with no handle. He put out one of his metal arms and with a touch on the door's featureless surface transmitted some kind of opening code. It opened to let them enter a small and heavily shielded storeroom.

There were a couple of narrow aisles, between low racks. Each rack held hundreds of metal cases, each case being of a size for an adult to carry about one-handed, and fitted with an appropriate grip.

Frank rolled between the racks, inspecting labels. "These are the little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds we're supposed to replace in the Lancelot system. Or rather you, and other kids like you if they ever find any, are going to replace 'em.Ican't hack it. I really can't."

"I don't understand." The cases held complex components of some kind, meant to be plugged into something larger. Beyond that Michel could get no feeling for them.

With a metal arm Frank drew a case down from a rack. Then he trundled down the aisle with it to the end of the room, where work s.p.a.ce had been provided, and slid it expertly into a large console. He made adjustments on a viewer, and a moment later beckoned to Michel.

Looking in, through what seemed to be some great power of optical magnification, Michel could see what at first glance appeared to be imitation snowflakes, cobbled together out of what might be plastic, in a complex and vast array.

Frank's voice beside him said, "This one's theRed Baron.Quite a story connected with it. Some of the others here have seen use in combat too, incorporated into conventional fighting ships as well as earlier versions of Lancelot. In places where live human brains tend to fail under the strain. These stand the strain, but they can't really do the job. Not well enough."

The nameRed Baronmeant nothing to Michel, who was discovering how to tune the viewer. His adjustments led him down through level after level of magnification. When light-quanta became too coa.r.s.e to image the next level of detail properly, electrons were automatically subst.i.tuted, and quarkbeams succeeded those grosser ent.i.ties in turn. The crystalline complexity that had suggested snowflakes was still present, composed of what form of matter Michel could no longer guess, diminishing apparently without limit into finer and finer delicacies.

"This looks like-like something natural. But it isn't."

"Nope. People made it. Go on, tune it finer if you like."

He did, until the device reached its ultimate limit. The interior of the pseudopersonality was like no other artifact that Michel had ever examined. The smaller the scale on which he looked at it, the finer and more perfect its structure appeared.

"These are imitation personalities, kid, most of them modeled on historical individuals. Imitation minds, of a sort. They were invented to be used in historical simulations, and in desperation the powers who run things have tried to make 'em work in s.p.a.ce combat. Instead of the subconscious minds of living brains.

There are parts of our minds that live outside of time, you know."

"I've heard that. I don't know if it's-"

"It's true. It's what gives us the edge, sometimes, over the enemy. One of the things that does."

Michel was not listening very carefully. He was awed by what he saw-not by the thing's capabilities so much as by its workmanship, which impressed him even more than Lancelot's. He murmured something.

"They work in fractal dimensions when they make these, Michel. Know what that means?"

Michel shrugged. He didn't expect to comprehend the specialized words that adult technologists used among themselves. "Something very small, I guess."

"It's roughly like this: A line has one dimension, a point has none. Fractal involves something in between."

Michel raised his eyes from the viewer, prodded the pseudopersonality's case with one finger where it partially projected from the console. "And this can replace a human operator in Lancelot?"

"Not very well, as I say, or we wouldn't be here. Anyway, you better believe they wouldn't put this particular pseudo in."

"Why not?"

"It has to do with who the real Red Baron was. Someone they wouldn't want to trust with Lancelot. Like me." Frank's speakers emitted a series of rising squeals that Michel understood as sardonically formalized laughter. "But h.e.l.l, even I can outdo these in Lancelot. Which is the point I wanted to make when I brought you here. You and I are alive, and this stuff is hardware. Some people around here who talk a lot of philosophical c.r.a.p have trouble with that distinction." Contempt had grown in Frank's voice. "If these things, the finest machines we can make, could do my job better than I can, Tupelov wouldn't have dragged you all the way here from Alpine, and we wouldn't be taking you out to the proving grounds in a couple more days. We're human beings. We're the bosses when it comes to any partnership with machines. And also we're gonna win the war. If anyone should ask you."

"Frank? Two more questions?"

"Shoot."

"Who's really going to be using Lancelot in combat?"

A five-second hesitation. "Someone who can use it really well."

Michel nodded slowly; it was an answer he had, really, already known. And it was something that he was going to have to think about. "Second question. Where are the proving grounds?"

"Christ, they don't tell you anything. The moons and the rings of Ura.n.u.s make up the one we're going to use. It takes about six hours to get out there from here."

SEVEN.

Even before Elly Temesvar was fully awake, her body and mind had at some level recognized the subtle differences between natural gravity at the Earth's surface and artificial gravity set at a level of not quite one standard G. She had been dreaming of mountains, and a log building with a peaked roof . . .

So when her eyes opened it was with more curiosity than surprise that she discovered herself to be lying on her back on a berth in a small cabin. Her surroundings did not much resemble the interior of any service ship that she had ever ridden in, being decorated in an ornate and obviously civilian style, and her curiosity increased.

In the next moment, memory returned with a rush. An immediate attempt to jump to her feet got her nowhere at all; something was holding her almost motionless. Straining her neck somewhat, she could just manage to raise her head enough to look down at her body. Over her gray Temple garments ran some kind of webbing, laced to the frame of the berth at many points. Her mind, seeking frantically for rea.s.surance, could come up with nothing better than the feeble suggestion that the bonds might be meant only as an emergency restraint against strong acceleration. But in that case there ought to be some way for the occupant to loose the bindings, and she could discover none. She could move little more than her fingertips.

. . . As she now recalled the scene, she had simply taken them for tourists. Tourists were coming and going in the Temple at all hours, frequently, and there had seemed to be no reason for her to inspect this small group closely. Elly closed her eyes now, trying to remember. Two women and a man, the man white-haired she thought, following Deacon Mabuchi across the nave, approaching the place where Elly sat talking with her visitor. Now she could summon up a vague recollection of something rather small but evidently heavy, carried swinging in the man's left hand. The group had proceeded casually right up to where she sat with Lombok, and then . . . then it had been too late. Now she remembered seeing Lombok go down, just before she had blacked out herself. So it would seem that Lombok had not been a willing partner in her kidnapping, or whatever this might be.

Across the tiny cabin, almost within arm's reach had she been able to reach out an arm, there was another berth. But it was unoccupied, folded back to make part of the bulkhead.

A moment later, a door near Elly's head slid open. A tall, white-haired man in silvery civilian clothing looked in at her calmly from a narrow corridor outside. "Are you at all hurt?" he asked, sounding mildly concerned, and also very much in control.

At second glance, Elly judged that her visitor's hair was not age-white but only extremely blond, as if he were a natural albino who had elected to have repigmentation treatment limited to his eyes, which were a very pale blue, and his skin, of an untanned Caucasian pallor. He was waiting for an answer.

Elly moved her fingers, about all that she could do in the way of testing. "I don't think so," she answered, trying to sound calm.

"We had to act abruptly. We could not take the risks of argument." It was not an apology, only an explanation. "But I hope to be able to release you soon, Ms. Temesvar."

"What keeps you from releasing me now? And who are you?"

"You can call me Stal. It means 'steel,' in an old language, and I rather like it." He spoke as if his likes and dislikes were important things indeed. Elly realized that to his helpless prisoner they might well prove to be important.

Stal continued: "You really are among friends aboard this ship." The words seemed meant as rea.s.surance, but his set features did not soften at all as he spoke. He glanced out into the corridor behind him now, and made a small beckoning motion with his head. A moment later he pressed himself back against the bulkhead, making room in the narrow doorway for a figure familiar to Elly, that of a stocky man of middle height, with Oriental features and black hair. This was Deacon Mabuchi, like Elly still wearing Temple gray, a soft smock above work trousers and plain boots.

The Deacon stood beside her berth, his round face glowing down at her with some triumph she could not comprehend. He murmured gently, "Sister Temesvar-"

"Deacon, explain to me-"

The Deacon mildly overrode her protest. "All now aboard this ship, Sister Temesvar, are in fact our fellow Heralds of the Savior, though they do not yet admit it, even to themselves. The fact is that the Savior has come, and these folk, unlike our own t.i.tular leaders in the Temple, have recognized It."

Elly didn't know what to say. For her, allegiance to the Temple faith had been only the path of least resistance, acceptable as truth because every other belief or mental att.i.tude seemed to have been blocked, made practically impossible by what she had witnessed and experienced at the Core.

Mabuchi's own faith was obviously something quite different. While Stal stood back, watching the two of them as imperturbably as before, the Deacon's eyes shone down exultantly, possessively, at Elly.

"And you, Sister Temesvar, you are the most fortunate of women. Today, the only glory that can matter has become yours. It is through you that the Savior has taken final form for us. Through you life and death alike will be no more. Through you the Earth and all that has grown from Earth will attain final peace."

There was a silence in the small cabin. Three people, each one looking from one face to the other of the remaining two, expectantly. Each one, thought Elly, with a purpose at right angles to the other two, so none of them really understood another.

Her own purpose right now was simply to get free. "All this has some connection with my child, doesn't it?" she demanded sharply. Getting free meant arguing with these men, and arguing would seem to require knowing what they wanted and expected. And Lombok had been digging for information on the subject of her offspring. Something had come up. . . .

"Child no longer," intoned Mabuchi. The words that began pouring from him now sounded like a quotation from some secret ritual that Elly had never heard before: "Flesh of man and woman no longer, though still in a fleshly garment robed . . ."

Stal chimed in: "Lord of force and metal, Lord free of life and death alike . . ." It was impossible to tell if his harsh voice held mockery or struggled to restrain true feeling. Watching Stal, Elly was suddenly struck with the idea that the man looked the way he did because of a deliberate attempt to cultivate a metallic appearance. This idea in turn suggested something else to her, something that made her abruptly begin to feel faint. Stop that, she ordered herself.

And made herself interrupt the chanting men: "Where are you taking me, and why?"

Mabuchi deferred to Stal, and it was the white-haired man who answered: "We are taking you to meet the ent.i.ty who was your son, Ms. Temesvar. That means going out to the new military proving grounds, out in the Uranian system."

That was an answer that explained nothing, that in fact seemed to make no sense at all. "Why should he be there?" Before leaving the service Elly had heard of the new proving grounds, but she had no idea of what might be going on there now.

"He is there because the badlife seek to use him." The epithet was frightening enough to bring on a new surge of faintness, all the more frightening because it slipped from Stal's lips with such unselfconscious ease. At the moment Elly could not remember ever hearing anyone use the word in real life before. It was a word from fiction, from the stage, on which the actors who played goodlife tended to emphasize it, striving for maximum shock effect.

Mabuchi too was moved, though for another reason. "The Savior should not be called 'he,' " he protested to his colleague.

"I beg your pardon," the tall man responded stiffly. "But to this woman, the Savior is still her child. And we must try to attune ourselves to her psychology- Ms. Temesvar, the badlife have grasped at least the fact that your offspring is unusual, and they mean to use him as part of a weapons system. Have you ever heard the code nameLancelot?"