This was central to Vard's concern-the fact that Zor had done nothing less than make love to this creature. In her approximation of human guise and human-made raiments. In her very chambers and in her very bed ... For such was the only way that the secrets could be revealed. The process, dear Vard, required a complete joining-mind-to-mind, bodyto-body-and passion to accompany it. Or, in Zor's case, an approximation of passion, a semblance of love.

Oh, in a sense he did love her, he supposed. He certainly envied her, lusted after the knowledge the Flower of Life had imparted to her. But as to all this mindspeech about remaining on Optera, about actually relinquishing some of his physicalform so that they might remain mates here ... Well, that was arrant nonsense. He could no more live here-even with the secret shared and revealed-than he could abandon the quest for enlightenment that had already taken him to scores of star systems and hundreds of planets.

Furthermore, there was a husband to consider.

Nothing like the Regis, this creature that called himself the Regent. And Zor had barely given him a second thought when it had come down to formulating his plan for seduction and conquest. But there was something about the Regent that rendered him more human than the Regis could ever be, for all her recently evolved anatomic curves, erogenous zones, and self-shaping talents. And it was just this mysterious humanness that Zor made use of to ensure that the Regent was absent from the hive for long periods at a stretch.

The Regent, it seemed, had a curiosity for Zor and his kind that rivaled Zor's curiosity for the Regis. Only the Regent was less interested in the physical and psychological differences that separated them than he was in the very artifacts the technovoyagers used in their everyday lives and travels. It was as though the creature wished only to fill his world with such things-instruments and devices and ships. So it had been easy enough to arrange for the Regent to be taken on a tour through this or that part of the ship or flown to distant places on his own Optera when the need arose.

And that need had arisen often these past months . . . Zor smiled to himself, lying with the Regis now, his arms wrapped around her. He recognized that the transference was almost complete, the language of the Flower almost his. But he recognized, too, that there were rules governing the use of this language and, quite possibly, that he had been made aware of something misunderstood by the Queen-Mother herself. The Flower of Life apparently held a secret of its own, one that had yet to be seduced from it.

A secret Zor would one day call Protoculture.

Scott Bernard sat stiffly in his chair as the two majors led Marlene into the Ark Angel's briefing room. Cabell, the Grants, Louie Nichols, and several intelligence officers from G2 were seated at the long table. Bulkhead displays flashed color-enhanced visual close-ups of Haydon IV, an updated count of production vessels, an alphanumeric Karbarran attack countdown. The ship had turned slightly to port to keep the reconfigured artifact centered in the exterior viewports. The accretion disc of Ranaath's Star pinwheeled in the background, a sinister wheel of fortune.

Marlene, red hair pulled back behind her ears, looked ill. "Take a seat," Vince began, sounding like a physician about to deliver bad news.

With a nervous glance, at Scott, Marlene lowered herself into one of the plastic chairs. He held her gaze for a moment and looked away, tight-lipped.

Niles Obstat cleared his throat. "I think you know why we've asked you here."

"I'm-I'm not sure," Marlene told the intel chief.

Vince grimaced and blew out his breath. "We've tried to give you time to think through your position, er, Marlene. But I'm afraid time has run out for all of us. We have reason to believe you can tell us where the Regis is, and we need that answer now."

Marlene swallowed and found her voice. "I've been trying-"

"Don't give us any of that," Obstat said, cutting her off. "You're Invid, and what one of you knows, you all know. Just tell us where we can find the Regis, and we'll put an end to this. It's for your own good, too," he added. "How else are you planning to get home if we don't take you there?"

Scott was tempted to tell Obstat how Sera had gone home but held his tongue. Marlene was staring at the director, lower lip trembling.

"But don't you see, I'm not all Invid," she replied. "I have-"

"You're all Invid as far as we're concerned," a woman officer sneered.

Marlene closed her eyes and shook her head. "If that's true, then how is it that one of your own kind loves me?" Her eyes found Scott, as did everyone else's in the room. "Tell them, Scott, please. Make them understand."

"Well, Colonel?" Vince said, averting his eyes. "Suppose you tell us."

Scott's hands clenched beneath the tabletop. He looked at Marlene as he slowly rose to his feet.

"I'm sorry, Commander," he began, "but I guess our trick didn't work." Again he locked eyes with Marlene. "It was a good idea to make it seem like you were releasing her in my custody, but I guess she just didn't buy it. I certainly did my part to convince her that I ... loved her, sir. But she wouldn't tell me anything."

Scott swallowed hard and continued. "Hell, I would have told her anything she wanted to hear to get that information. I sure don't mind admitting now that this was the toughest charade I've ever had to play out. Pretending love for this ... Invid. And all the while thinking about what they did to Earth, what they've probably done to our friends and comrades on the SDF-3." Scott snorted, averting his eyes from the table. "I think all I managed to do was help convince her she really is human, Commander. Imagine that, will you-this Invid, human."

Wide-eyed through Scott's confession, Marlene suddenly put her hands to her head and screamed.

The scream was a nonhuman one.

She aimed a finger across the table at Scott. "You betrayed me! You told me you loved me!"

Scott held his breath.

Marlene was about to continue, when her body was seized by a violent paroxysm. The two majors flanking her leapt from their seats as she began to fade from view.

"Don't touch her!" someone warned. As if anyone was about to.

Scott thought he might pass out, but just then Marlene rematerialized, skin tinged green and expression vacant. Her right hand was still raised but pointed out the viewport. She regarded the table for a long moment, as though challenging anyone to speak. But it was Marlene herself who broke the spell her brief disappearance had cast.

"There," she said finally with utter contempt.

Scott joined the others at the table in following her finger. "Ranaath's Star?" Obstat stammered. "Your queen is inside the black hole?"

"You asked to know," Marlene said flatly.

"Christ," Louis Nichols muttered. "Veldt wasn't kidding when he said the Ark Angel isn't built for the trip."

"I know how difficult that was for you, Scott," Vince said after Marlene had been taken from the room. "But we had to know. You understand, don't you?"

Scott looked up at him, face drained of blood. "And is she going to understand that I was lying just now?" He sighed heavily. "I've sentenced her to death, Commander. I've killed her."

Dr. Penn almost laid a hand on Scott's shoulder but withdrew it. "She had to remember who she was, son. The shock was necessary. You couldn't have prevented it, anyway. She belongs to her own kind, not here, divided, trapped in two separate worlds."

Scott uttered a sardonic laugh. "A lot of good it did us, Doctor." He motioned with his chin toward the viewport. "The SDF-3 is out of reach."

"Haydon doesn't seem to think so," Louie said into the silence. "Look," he explained as heads turned, "I realize that any directional coordinates we could coax from the Awareness would be useless now. But Haydon's obviously convinced that it's possible to follow the lead, no matter where it ends up."

Vince shook his head. "If you're thinking that I'll risk taking this ship into that . . . " he said, indicating Ranaath's Star. Louie held up his hands. "I'm not. I was only going to suggest that instead of pilfering coordinates, we steal one of those ships."

Minmei was crying when she left the music room. But what she had first assumed to be a rapturous outpouring brought upon by the harmonies of the clones' psalms she now understood to be tears of sadness. The ancient songs had awakened an aged hurt inside her one she could not be certain was even hers, but it touched her as though it was and was connected somehow with Rem.

The tears were flowing patently by the time she rushed blindly onto the lift, where she ran straight into Lisa Hayes Hunter.

"Minmei," Lisa said, surprised. "What's wrong?"

The odd thing was that the sight of Minmei's tears actually helped to dam the flow of Lisa's own. Relieved by her exec only moments before, Lisa had nearly fled the bridge like a lovesick adolescent, crushed by the discovery that a romance meant to last an eternity was not even going to survive the football season! She was at a loss to explain just what had brought the nosedive on-some aftereffect of the argument with Rick, perhaps, or just plain concern for his well-being planetside-and she was headed for the nursery to press Roy to her breast with a vengeance.

"Do you want to talk about it, Minmei?" Lisa asked, feeling that the situation was awkward all of a sudden. Their friendship had been on a steady decline since Lisa and Rick's wedding day. The Sentinels campaign hadn't helped, nor had Minmei's fling with T. R. Edwards and her subsequent retirement from public life. But Lisa had heard that Minmei had been on the mend, thanks to Rem. And hadn't Rick mentioned something about her singing again?

Well, maybe it was one of those artistic mood swings, Lisa started to tell herself, when Minmei said, "It's Rem."

Lisa eyed the young woman who had slipped onto the lift behind Minmei and was off to one side now, pretending disinterest in the conversation. The woman had security written all over her.

"Come on," Lisa said, leading Minmei off the lift at the Hoed deck. "Now tell me what happened," she added, a few steps down the quiet corridor.

Minmei sniffled and ran the back of her hand under each eye. "That's just it, Lisa, I don't know what happened. I just, it's just . . . I'm feeling like he used me. Just the way everyone else has done for my whole stupid life." She took a deep breath. "The singing hasn't helped me. It's made me feel worse about everything. He just wanted me to sing so he could take his little trip down memory lane."

Lisa waited for her to continue.

Minmei sniffled again. "It's for Zor," she said dismissively. "He thinks the old Tiresian songs will jar memories of Zor's early experiences on Tirol and Optera."

"Optera?" Lisa said, thinking suddenly of the planet below. A planet that had appeared out of nowhere.

"I just keep feeling he's betrayed me somehow," Minmei explained, sobbing. "He doesn't love me. He probably never loved me."

Lisa was not listening. Some half-formed realization had begun to vie for her attention, a thought she could not quite assemble. But before she knew it, she had taken Minmei by the upper arms and was shaking her. "Did Rem tell you why it's so important he recall Zor's memories?"

Minmei looked up, startled.

Lisa dropped her arms at her sides and exhaled. "Minmei, listen to me. I'm on my way to the nursery right now because I feel like Rick's been lying to me about something. That he's really in love with that little idiot Sue Graham or someone. But I know that isn't true, even if he has been acting like a complete jerk." She looked into Minmei's eyes. "And I'm sure Rem hasn't betrayed you. It has something to do with this place, Minmei. Something we haven't considered yet." She gnawed at a finger, remembering Roy. "It's even begun to affect the children."

Minmei looked ashen. "Oh, please, don't tell me that," she said, turning to face the corridor wall. "You can't tell anyone, Lisa," she added, "but I'm carrying Rem's child."

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

Although Wilfred Gibley is most often credited with the discovery of machine mind and the development of cyber-interface technology (See Shi-Ling's "Sometimes Even a Yakuza Needs a Place to Hide"), Nichols was to become the movement's principal advocate and spokesperson. Evidence suggests that Nichols himself may have been working along similar lines as early as May of 2031, when he wrote: "It was Bowie [Grant] that started me thinking. He used to say that he thought of music, like mathematics, as this place somewhere out there that adepts could tune into. And that the key signatures and notes and scales were actually solid things you could approach in that realm. So I thought: Why couldn't it be the same for data? After all, what's mind but a union of music and math?"

Bruce Mirrorshades, Machine Mind and Arthurian Legend

Hodel, Commander of the Karbarran flotilla, counted down the seconds. He thought about Cano, the brother he had lost when the N'trpriz had been destroyed, and wondered how many others he would grieve for before the battle was through.

Haydon IV had yet to respond to the ultimatum, although the Tiresian, Cabell, claimed to have been in touch with a high-ranking official planetside who had affirmed that no offworlders would be released. The Haydonite had also warned against the use of force to achieve that end. In his capacity as amateur historian, Hodel was inclined to believe him. He was conversant as any with the facts regarding the Mo'fiint Incident, in which 870 dreadnoughts at the command of a would-be empire builder had attempted to add Haydon IV to her long list of conquests. Eight hundred and seventy ships annihilated in a matter of minutes . . . But history was just that, or so the Karbarran High Authority had admonished Hodel when he had brought the Mo'fiint Incident to their attention. So, in his capacity as battle group commander, he was expected to disregard any Haydonite counterthreats communicated to the Ark Angel and accept on faith that history mattered only to the victors.

Moreover, it was obvious from the recordings made during the N'trpriz's final moments that K'rrk had committed a series of tactical blunders. He had failed to break off communication with Haydon IV's artificial sentience and had thereby allowed the Awareness access to the ship's onboard Tiresian-manufactured AI-which in turn had been based on Haydonite designs!

This time in there would be no such contact. The Awareness had been given ample opportunity to respond; the deadline had not been met, and it was time therefore to actualize the threat. Haydon IV would be given no second chance.

And neither would the ships of the flotilla.

Hodel buried the thought behind a confident scowl and rose from his command chair as the zero-line display triggered battle-station sirens throughout the ship.

"Order all ships into attack formation," he growled to his communications officer. "Full ahead, on my command, Ntor. "

"Aye, sir," Ntor responded from her station. "Sekiton drives at maximum power, all systems enabled. "

The battle plan was a straightforward one now that the safety of the hostages was no longer considered a mission priority. Haydon IV was simply to be beaten into submission. The loss of the five hundred or so merchants and traders planetside would be regrettable but acceptable.

Colonel Mo'fiint had felt no need to justify her actions when she had given the order to attack Haydon IV. The goal, after all, had been conquest.

Much as today, Hodel thought.

"Planetary reconfiguration in process, Captain," the science officer advised. "Haydon IV is disengaging from the moon. Weapons nacelles retracting. We are being scanned and targeted."

Hodel swiveled to study displays. The giant artifact was rotating to face the flotilla, its materiel transfer tubes traversing local space like twin cannons. "Standard evasion, Ntor," he directed forward. "Close all communication frequencies."

"Repositioning of the labor droneships, Captain," the science officer updated. "They are being deployed to repel strikes directed against the surface."

Hodel growled to himself. "Order fighter teams away as soon as we're within range."

"Aye sir."

Hodel watched the forward screens. "All right, Ntor, let's clear a path for them. On my mark . . ."

Aboard the Ark Angel, Louie Nichols and his crew of comic-crazed compjockeys were headlocked into that part of the ship's AI mainframe linked to the commo device Veidt had left in Exedore's care.

The data room was a yard sale of consoles, monitors, slave decks, sensory boosts, psi-amps, and enhancers; a tangled nest of F/O lines, power leads, and interface cables, with the team members positioned about like switches and relayssome sprawled on the floor beneath tables, cranial cyberports studded with titanium plugs and alloy adapters, others cross-legged atop tables and racks, fiddling with tuning knobs, keying input, fingering touchscreens, but loving every minute of it, thrilled to be back where they belonged, ghosts in the mind of the machine.

Vince Grant had just sent word that the Karbarrans were making their move and that Haydon IV was readying what promised to be a crippling response. It had been Louie's signal to commence an attack of his own devising, not directed _ against the planet, however, but against the psychodynamics of its ruling artificial intelligence. With luck, the Awareness will be too busy attending to matters of defense to notice Louie and his cowboys' subtle approach, too preoccupied carrying out the timeless dictates of its enigmatic program to realize that someone was toying with its emotions.

Louie, Gibley, Strucker, and the rest were not going in so much on-line as they were on-wave, in an attempt to grapple with the Awareness where it lived, loved, and loathed. Unified, the discorporate raiders aimed to plant the seeds of selfdoubt, to stir a bit of regret, to suggest a path to redemption. To inject a virus if all else failed.

Louie could feel the cyber surge as he punched into machine mind, the hands to which his thoughts were now only remotely connected hovering over the console's directional cross and touchpad, his hands-on-trigger-and-stick. The cyber-surge was the rush of a crimson-tipped stimulant, a kick clear out of the world. He could feel Stirson and ShiLing headlocked into the same vibe, telepathic twins flanking him like recklessness and daring, an upside Scylla and Charybdis.

Machine mind was dimly lit, boundless but crowded with the color-coded spires and sentry towers that guarded Ark Angel's mainframe cores. Below was the network's familiar grid of pulsating lights, data highways for the grounded and uninspired. Louie laughed as he soared above bridges and constructs, executing flyboy rollovers between mainframe pillars and pyramids as he closed on the access link to Veidt's device.

Exedore's computer construct was over the horizon, stuck in the real stuff, blazing a trail for the team. Louie thought he could almost detect the Zentraedi's fingers hammering overhead like thunder in that weatherless domain.

Down the link into the device, a jump fueled by thought from ship to reconfigured world, into a much smaller spacea foyer of a kind, an antechamber defined by the dark maws of derezz gates, the looming shadows of security fences. Gibley's construct slid to a halt nearby, freaked by the sight, wavering like the filament in a shaken bulb. Exedore was giving it his all, hacking away with commands, but there were defensive, commands beginning to line up behind the walls: retaliatory icons ordered in by executive decision.

Louie steeled himself, hands set for play in the Ark Angel's dreamscape. Gibley, Strucker, Stirson, and Shi-Ling were eager trotters, panting at the start of the course.

An access window suddenly flashed transparent. Exedore had punched through.

Gibley's construct took the point as the Awareness deployed its net.

Time to fry, Louie thought.

"I've found a way in!" Exedore announced, hands raised above the keyboard in surprise.

"Yeah, and I've found a way out," Dana told him from the front threshold as repeated blasts shook the room. The laser fence disabled, the Praxians had already gone through to lend support to the Karbarran revolt.