...rstanding came about.

Survival seemed a.s.sured.

Then the machine came.

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

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

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

Chapter 7.

FOREST.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tamme knew that. She had studied the material on the fungoid creatures before pa.s.sing through the aperture from Earth to Paleo. She knew they were cunning and dangerous; one had escaped captivity and hidden on a s.p.a.ceship bound for the region of s.p.a.ce containing the manta home-world of Nacre. It had never been killed or recaptured despite a strenuous search, and they had had to place a temporary proscription on Planet Nacre to prevent any more mantas from entering s.p.a.ce.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Veg emerged from the tent. Tamme sat up as he pa.s.sed her. He paused, as she had known he would. He could barely see her in the dark, but he was acutely conscious of her locale. "Just goin' to the..." he muttered.

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

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

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

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

"You've changed!"

"You merely behold me in a different light," she murmured, turning slightly within that differing glow.

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

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

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

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

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

One problem was that she could not take the aperture projector with her. She had to step through the sphere while it existed. It would be disastrous to be caught halfway into the field as it closed down! Part of her would be in the other world, the remainder here -- and both would be dead. Too bad people did not possess the regenerative powers of earthworms: cut one in half, make two new individuals!