He knew that it would probably tax his vivid imagination to the full to figure out an answer.

5.

You're moving through a red world, which blazes here and there into incandescent yellows and whites, and fades in its shadowed regions to burgundy and black. It's difficult to make out shapes, because nothing is in sharp focus, and even the shape of the world itself is wrong; it's as though you're looking up through a piece of bottle-gla.s.s at a jumbled panorama which sometimes seems impossibly wide and at others impossibly narrow.

Your field of vision alters as you move, rhythmically canting from side to side. You're hugging the ground, but you can't be crawling because there's no sensation of lurching. You wish that you could feel the pressure of your body against the rock, but you can't. Nor can you hear the sound which you make when you movea"though there ought to be a sound, which you could surely pick up if your hearing weren't impaired.

(There are probably other senses which are guiding your host, though, which are unavailable to you.) You pause, basking beneath the brilliant sky, spreading yourself out to soak up its energy.

Time changes, as if it were folding in on itself; the world fades and flickers.

(You struggle for some kind of description which you can offer yourself in order to help you understand what is happening. It's as though your consciousness is fadinga"not into a dream, because you know that you're dreaming alreadya"but from sharp attentiveness into distant reverie. You wish that you knew what sensations ought to accompany such a drift, if any should. It might be like drug-induced euphoria, but there's no way to know.) Nothing happens until you begin to move again, sliding away from the bright-lit surface into the burgundy shadowsa"but you still don't really feel the force of the pa.s.sing moments; you still can't recapture the state of full attentiveness. You bury yourself in shadow, reducing the bright world to a crevice which cuts slantwise across your field of vision, blurring to become an undifferentiated river of light.

Time pa.s.ses; you can't tell how much.

You're on the move again now, coming out of the shadows again, into a world very different from the one you left. The sky, which was a field of fire, has now become a pit of darkness. The shadows are softened now, though the surfaces over which you move have not yet faded from dark red to black. You move swiftly, with a sureness which suggests purpose and competence.

Suddenly, there's something in your field of vision which burns with an oddly frail and fugitive brightness as it moves among the shadows. Its radiance cannot compare with the brighter lights which surrounded you before, but in this darkened world it stands out like a candle-flame.

(You wonder what att.i.tude your host has to this curious dancing blur. Is it perceived as the epitome of beauty? Is there any luscious antic.i.p.ation of pleasure in the sight of it, or the following of it? How does the magnet of instinctive necessity feel to the hunting snake which is thus drawn along? What can it possibly be like to live in an inner world of feelings unpolluted by thoughts?) The end, when it comes, is unexpectedly swift. You move with astonishing rapidity, and the candle-flame which was a mouse or a frog is suddenly gonea"engulfed, you must presume.

(Your host, no doubt, can feel the shape and taste of it as it pa.s.ses back from mouth to throat, but you have only borrowed the Lady's sight; your feelings are your own, and they are alien to this mode of experience. You cannot truly be a man dreaming that he is a snake; you are a much stranger hybrid than thata"a man eavesdropping on that insufficient fraction of a snake's dream which can be captured by a cunning machine.) You're moving again, but once again your attentiveness is slipping. Once the purposes of instinct are served, your senses slide into that more quiescent mode which is not sleep but which nevertheless detaches you from time. You can't judge the pa.s.sing of the minutes or the hours, and the world becomes so dark and empty that you can't follow its subtle changes, despite the fact that you aren't still.

Nothing changes until your eye is caught again by a flicker of fire, at which point your consciousness is sparked again and made to rejoin the stream of time.

This time, the fire is much greater in extent, though no brightera"indeed, its brightness is patchy, greater at the extremities of its enormous being than at the connective core.

(As you struggle to make sense of the second-hand vision you're suddenly reminded of the effort of trying to perceive a human figure in that pattern of stars which early astronomers dubbed Orion; that a.n.a.logy provides you with the clue which you shouldn't have needed. Once you've realized that it's a giant at which you're looking, with face and hands illuminated more brightly than those parts of the body which are obscured by clothing, it becomes easier to make sense of the movements of the blur.

You realize, with an odd sense of wonderment, that you're probably looking at yourself as seen through the eyes of your closest companiona"that you're peering into a peculiar distorting mirror. You wish, briefly, that you had seen yourself through Pasco's eyes, or Carl Preston's, for the sake of comparison, because the alienness of your appearance now would seem less troublesome and less threatening if you'd already undergone trans.m.u.tation by the eyes of human beings.

You try to figure out what you're doing, but it isn't easy. The movements of your limbs and body have to be inferred, and the fact that the image remains stubbornly unfocused means that three dimensions of movement are effectively reduced to two. If you were running or leaping it would be easier, but you seem to be doing something much more ordinarya"and you're already beginning to fade into the folds and confusions of collapsed time, because you're too familiar to warrant the attention of the Ladya"too much a part of her strange, private and thought-free worlda.) Time pa.s.ses, anda The Kid tried as best he could to explain what it was like being inside Lady Venom's being looking out, but it was difficult. Dr Yokoi tried to help him by asking questionsa"but when they had finished, the Kid couldn't believe that they had got much out of it. All that Yokoi's two-way linkages could pick up were visual images, and it was impossible to judge whether such images contained any evidence of alienness or not. There was no hint of any explanation for the special rapport which existed between the snake and the man.

That explanatory void worried the Kid now, though it never had before. He had asked himself for the first time whether the talent which sealed the special relationship was really the Lady's, or whether it was his own. If it was his own it seemed to be operating independently of any conscious direction, but that might be only one more facet of his alienness, if he was an alien.

If.

He still didn't believe that he wasa"but ever since Junichi Tanagawa had obliquely raised the possibility, it had preyed on his mind. When Yokoi finally stopped asking questions about his impressions of the Lady Venom tape, the Kid was quick enough to dive in with a few of his own.

"Do you believe what Tanagawa said about the possibility of earth having been invaded by alien life?" he askeda"though he realized even as he said it that the question was wrongly phrased.

"It is not a matter for belief," said Yokoi contentedly. "It is conjecture only."

"But you think it's a strong enough possibility to be worth checking?"

"All possibilities must be checked. The facts are very disturbing, and we must leave no hypothetical stone unturned in searching for an explanation."

"Which particular facts are were talking about?" asked the Kid.

"The changes in the earth's climate and the increasing rate of mutation are the fundamental observations which cause us to be anxious. There are other observations too which might be unconnected, or which might be secondary effects. There are evident changes in patterns of human behaviour, which tempt some to refer to a plague of madnessa"but we know that human behaviour can and does become very peculiar in response to extreme situations."

"Ghost dancing," said the Kid, in a low tone. "It's all just ghost dancing."

"Perhaps," said Yokoi. "This is not the first time in history when environmental changes have stimulated an explosive growth in Millenarian fervour. The Roman Empire was extended during a phase of global warming, and contracted again when the climate began to get colder. The initial growth and rapid spread of Christianity may itself have been connected with that brief environmental destabilizationa"but in its early phase Christianity, like all the other great religions, was essentially defensive; faith and hope were effective mainly at a personal level. Collective actions on behalf of the faith were necessarily

small-scale a"the Crusades and the Inquisition resulted in the deaths of thousands of individuals, but could not harm the planet itself. Nowathings are different."

"I don't know," said the Kid dubiously. "I've run into a few followers of these weird cults on the road, and I hear the horror stories that get bandied abouta"the human sacrifices and that sort of thing. It's all small-scaleaexcept maybe the Josephites in Deseret."

"That is not the only exception," Yokoi told him. "The Catholic Church has undergone considerable changes lately, in the style of its operations. But what causes our directors most anxiety is the secret organization known as the Temple. How numerous its members are we cannot tell, and it certainly does not follow the ancient pattern of the great religions in trying to win converts among the poorest and least powerful members of society. For this reason, its growth is very un.o.btrusive. But it differs from the old religions in the power which is already at its disposala"technological and economic power out of all proportion to its membership.

"The Sioux ghost dancers who were slaughtered at Wounded Knee had only imaginary armour, Zero-san, and their guns were inferior. But what would the history of the world be like if their ghost-shirts really had been invulnerable, and their bullets unstoppable? The Temple may have a very considerable a.r.s.enal to add to its armour of invisibility."

"I never heard of the Temple," said the Kid warily. "It can't be that big."

"Nor have the two men who were captured along with you. Nor, I suspect, has the famous Dr Zarathustra. Nevertheless, there is a possibility that the Temple are the true owners of GenTech. We have only the vaguest notion of what GenTech's ultimate aims and ambitions may be, but another of the hypotheses which must be considered if we are to account for the rapid deterioration of the world's environments is that their pollution is being deliberately engineered."

"By GenTech?"

"Ultimately, yes," Yokoi a.s.serted.

"But Mitsu-Makema is, no doubt, utterly innocent. Its directors are all good and humane men who would make the earth into a paradise if only they could. None of its industries produce poisonous wastes, none of its workers are exploited, and none of its PR men would dream of manufacturing black propaganda in the hope of convincing its loyal employees that the rival corps are run by the Devil himself."

Dr Yokoi shrugged his shoulders in an oddly delicate fashion.

"Yeah," said the Kid disgustedly. "It ain't a matter for belief, but all possibilities must be considered. It's bulls.h.i.t, Dr Yokoi. If a sandrat like me can see it, why can't you? Are you so sure your own bosses have clean hands? Maybe they're the inner enclave of the Sons of Okhotsk, or the Blood Banner Society."

"Mitsu-Makema is a multinational corporation, not a j.a.panese company," Yokoi reminded him. "GenTech is more powerful, even in j.a.pan, than we are. This has nothing to do with nationalism, Zero-sana"it has to do with the survival of all life on earth."

"And what exactly are M-M doing to fight the good fight," asked the Kid sarcastically, "apart from improving horrorshow technology?"

"We have what we call the Ark project," Yokoi informed him. "We are hollowing out vast underground caverns in several remote parts of the worlda"there is one beneath us herea"where we hope to establish closed ecological systems. We hope to preserve independent biospheres there no matter what happens on the surface. If alien life has indeed invaded the earth, we will have a redoubt to which we can retreata"and if there really are men who have the power and the will to visit an apocalyptic catastrophe upon their fellow men, we may be able to ensure that they are not the sole survivors."

"Are you offering me a ticket for one of these underground Arks?" asked the Kid.

"You have a chance to earn one," countered Yokoi.

"I bet you've already earned yours."

"That hardly matters," Yokoi observed. "I am old and you are young. My interest in the farther reaches of the future is personally disinterested, although I must confess to a strong desire to serve the needs of my children and my grandchildren. You, on the other hand, may have the chance to witness the coming apocalypsea"no matter what form it may take."

"I've been living on borrowed time since I blew up my first GenTech wrapper," said the Kid sourly. "Ever since that disc came into my hands the debt-collectors have been out in force. I didn't have much of a future even before I went up against GenTecha"even before I first joined the Low Numbers. People like me don't think about the future, Dr Yokoi. We can't afford to."

"You can now," said Yokoi insistently. "You can and you must."

The Kid had hardly opened his mouth to replya"without knowing exactly what he was going to saya"when alarm bells started ringing. Yokoi leapt to his feet and ran to the computer consoles which ran along one side of the wall. The Kid could see that half a dozen red lights were blinking, and he didn't have to be told that whatever was wrong was nothing trivial.

Suddenly, the immediate future seemed to be something worth worrying about.

"What is it?" he asked. "Is the reactor going to blow?"

"We are under attack," said Yokoi, in an incongruously soft tone.

"Attack?" said the Kid, totally fed up with being made to sound like a stupe, always incredulous.

"Not by aeroplanes and men with guns," the scientist added. "But the attack is no less deadly for all thata"the attack is coming through the datanet, blasting the webs which connect us informationally with the outer world. We have been invaded by hostile software. We have severed all our communications links with the outside world, but it may be too late. Our systems are going crazy, and we cannot shut them down." While he said all this he was just standing there, looking ona"an innocent bystander in a crazy costume.

"Is this the latest battle in the corp war?" asked the Kid, licking his lips.

"Yes it is," answered Yokoi. "Whether it is because you are here, I do not know, but there can be no doubt that we have a major problem on our hands. If we cannot recover control of the systems, the reactor may blowa"and if it does, we are all dead. The temperature outside is forty degrees below zero, and there is nowhere to run to. Please go to your rooma"I will be needed."

The Kid didn't move until Yokoi had gone, and even then he lingered, watching the play of red light across the consoles and the signals flickering over the screens. None of it meant anything to hima"it wasn't his world. It all looked absurdly like some arcade game, gleefully telling its player that he had lost.

The Kid wondered where Lady Venom was, and whether she'd be affected by the sudden influx of chaos into the base's hardware; but there wasn't anything he could do. It wasn't his game and he didn't have a coin to put in the slot to set it all up again.

As he went back along the corridor to his own room he was reminded of the way that Lady Venom's senses had occasionally slipped into neutral gear, out of synch with the pa.s.sage of time. It might, he thought, be a useful trick to have at one's disposal.

The lights were off inside his room, though the corridor was still lit. He thumbed the switch as he moved in, cursing when nothing happened in response.

He didn't want to be left in the dark, and would have gone back out again immediately, but he felt himself grabbed by two strong arms and pulled inside. Something sharp was pressed into the side of his throat, hard enough to let him know that he would be cut if he resisted.

"Hi, Kid," said a guttural voice, which he recognized readily enough as Ray Pasco's. "Guess what?"

The Kid didn't have to guess; he knew.

He was back in the real world.

Part Four.

No Sin Except Stupidity.

1.

While Pasco strapped himself into the co-pilot's seat Carl shoved the Kid into the narrow s.p.a.ce behind it. The Kid's hands were tied but his legs were free, and he managed to get through, leaving the way clear for Carla"who had occupied himself in the meantime by stripping the goggles from his face and pushing back the hood of the parka.

He could hardly believe what had happened, but he had to admire the way Pasco had taken advantage of it all. That was a handy little tool-kit the SecDiv surgeons had stashed away in the big man's thigh, all ready to pop out at the bidding of the smart sensor The VTOL lifted into the air with what seemed like painful slowness, and hung there hovering while the pilot swung the nose around. Carl watched in fascination from behind the seats.

The radar-synthesizer display on the console in front of Pasco told them both that there were three missiles coming after thema"the sim turned them into little red arrows, as though by a mere trick of representation it could render them impotent, but they seemed to Carl to be closing in with relentless swiftness. M-M hadn't liked being attacked, and they didn't like their prisoners taking a hike across the icefield under cover of all the confusion.

Carl couldn't believe that they cared much about Kid Zero, who was only an insignificant p.a.w.n in the game now that the disc was anybody's and everybody's, but the Kid had become a symbol, and possession of him was a point on the score of whichever side could gain it.

Carl saw that Pasco was clenching his fingers and looking anxiously around, probably wondering what the little plane had to shoot back at the Mitsu-Makema men on the ground.

The black cross which was the plane never moved from the centre of the sim screen, but the background suddenly scrolled over to one side, and the red arrows were swimming against its tide. Carl felt the force of their acceleration pushing him backwards, and he had to cling hard to the back of Pasco's seat. His ears were filled with the appalling roar of the jet engine, but he kept his eyes on the screen. A cloud of little blue needles exploded from the black cross, expanding into the gap which separated it from the red arrows. When the arrows reached the cloud they popped out of existence one by one. It was as easy at that! As simple as the most basic of arcade games!

"Microthermites," drawled the pilot laconically. "Gets the heat-seekers every time, even when the a.r.s.e end's belching h.e.l.lfire. That lot'll melt a h.e.l.l of a lot of ice when it goes down."

Carl let out his breath very carefully.

"Have they got anything to give us trouble on the way out?" asked Pasco.

"Naw. Once we're away from the fortress we're free and clear. Our worms disabled most of the firepower in the base. You okay?"

"I will be soon," Pasco replied. Carl could tell that the SecDiv man was as high as a kite on his own adrenalin, exultant with the thrill of their incredible escape. Personally, he didn't feel nearly so good.

"Where are we going," Carl asked, "and how soon do we get there?"

"Tierra del Fuego," the pilot told him. "They'll transfer you to a cargo-transporter therea"it'll be a bit more comfortable than this little thing, and it'll have range enough to get you back to the States. What's the bundle you fetched out of Arkville?"

"Kid Zero," said Pasco.

"That so? We launched a major web a.s.sault on Mitsu-Makema just to s.n.a.t.c.h some two-bit motorpsycho?"

"Not exactly," said Pasco gloatingly. "We launched a major web a.s.sault on Mitsu-Makema in order to teach the freakers a lesson. They interfered in a little police action we had going, and they probably managed to steal something which belonged to us. It was a matter of principle."

"It was nearly World War freaking Three," muttered the pilot, scanning his instruments. "We never hit anyone like that before. If their freaking reactor had blown we'd never have got out. I thought this year's policy was softly softly."

"I don't make policy," growled Pasco. "I just carry it outa"and I'm freakin' glad they backed me up for once. Jesus I'm stiffa"those M-M b.a.s.t.a.r.ds shipped us down there inside some kind of glorified horrorshow booth. I hope we hit the suckers where it hurts most."

"We did that all right," said the pilot tersely. "Now all we have to do is wait for them to hit us backa"and take it from there."

The s.p.a.ce behind the c.o.c.kpit was narrow, but there was room for Carl to sit down. He decided that he ought to face Kid Zero, as he was supposedly covering him with the guna"though he was pretty sure that the Kid wouldn't be going anywhere. Pasco had advised him to belt the Kid and make sure that he didn't wake up until they were back in the States, but Carl was reluctant to do that. Doc Zarathustra wanted the Kid alive, and Carl was firmly resolved to fulfil that part of his mission, now that there seemed to be no possibility whatsoever of getting his hands on the disc or the rattlesnake. Besides which, the Kid had treated him decently enough when the tables had been turned.

In his heart of hearts, Carl was glad that they hadn't had a chance to s.n.a.t.c.h the snake along with the Kida"that was a prize he was happy to leave to Mitsu-Makema.