Suddenly fury filled her. She hacked and hacked. Some of the heads she recognized as they burrowed deeper into the building, others she didn’t. The last one was Tony’s, and instead of vanishing it grew a body—not Tony’s but David Aronson’s genemod-perfect body, the body she had tried to seduce three years ago when he had rejected her. Tony/David started undressing her, and she immediately became excited. “I always wanted you,” she said. “I know,” he replied, “but I had to stop twitching first.” He entered her and the world above their heads exploded into strings of thought.
“No, wait a minute,” Miri said to Tony, “those aren’t the right strings.” She looked up, concentrated, and changed the strings at several points. Tony waited, smiling with his beautiful mouth on the motionless body. When Miri was done changing the strings, he reached out to hold her again and such tenderness, such peace flooded Miri that she said joyously, “It doesn’t matter about Mother!” “It never did,” Tony said, and she laughed and stroked him and—
—woke up.
Miri started in terror. The lab swam back into existence around her. It had been gone, been replaced by—
She had been asleep. She had been dreaming.
“N-n-n-no,” Miri moaned. How could she have been asleep? She? Dreams were what Sleepers had, dreams were thought-construct described in theoretical brain studies…The holoterminal was once more dark. Slowly the man faded back in.
The shapes. His equipment had projected shapes, and then there had been answering shapes in her mind. Like thought-string edifices—but not. From a different part of her brain, perhaps, not cortical? But the feeling of peace, of joy, of tremendous oneness with Tony, that could only have come from her cortex. She had dreamed it. He had—she dredged up the Earth word—“hypnotized” her with his mind shapes, his poetry on aloneness, and then the shapes in the hologram had drawn forth her own dreaming shapes…
But there had been more. Miri had changed the dream. She had concentrated on the strings above her and Tony’s heads and changed them, deliberately. She could see both versions now, in memory.
Miri sat very still, as still as she had in the dream.
“Drew Arlen,” a too-hearty voice was saying over the holo of the man in the chair, “Lucid Dreamer. The new art form that has taken the country by flash! This is a nonreplicable program, Livers out there in Holo-Land, so to purchase your own copy of one of Drew’s six different Lucid Dreaming performances—”
Miri pressed Tony’s code to replicate. The man in the chair froze in time.
She put her head between her knees, still dazed. She had been dreaming. She, Miranda Sharifi, Sleepless and Superbright. She could see Tony still, feel his arms around her, feel the depth of the building below her, its endless rooms. She could still see the thought strings, solid as matter, that she had reached up and changed.
Miri raised her head from her knees and went to her work terminal. She fixed the program glitch. It was easy; all she had to do was follow the strings she had seen in the dream, the ones she had changed. She typed in the pinpoint DNA code she had been hunting for three years and had never really seen. The program ran it against her parameters, probability tables, and neurochemical interactions. The comparisons and modeling would take a while to complete, but Miri already knew—the genemods were the right ones. They were the ones she had been searching for, had been circling around, but had not seen until a part of her dreaming mind had looked in a different way at the facts in her thought strings, and added what was missing.
That was right; her mind had added what was missing, what had always been missing, all her life. The ideas—not linear, not knotted into strings, not connected in perceptible ways—from the missing part of her mind. The dreaming part. No—the lucid dreaming part, which reached into a universe deeper than one story, to pull out things she had never guessed were there and yet were indubitably hers. Things she—the conscious Miri—could partially manipulate in the dream world.
Miri looked at the frozen holo of the artist in the chair. He was smiling faintly; unseen light glinted on his glossy hair. He had bright green eyes. She felt again the dream orgasm with Tony. Every fiber of her fierce, young, single-minded personality knotted itself around the figure of Drew Arlen, who had given her this gift, this redemption.
Lucid dreaming.
Miri rose. She wanted to synthesize her neuorological compound, test it, and take it. She knew it would work. It would inhibit the stuttering and stammering and twitching of the Supers without impairing their superabilities. It would let them be themselves, only with an added dimension.
Like lucid dreaming. Oneself, only more so.
But there was something else to do first. She called up the library program and set it for the widest possible preliminary search parameters: all data in Sanctuary records, in legal Earth databanks for which Sanctuary paid stiff fees, in illegal Earth ones for which they paid even stiffer fees. She added the search programs Tony had designed and taught her to use, the ones that accessed databanks their owners thought completely secure. Miri added anything else she could think of. She wanted wanted to know everything there was to know about Drew Arlen. Everything.
And then she would figure out how to get to him.
The beggars crowded into Raoul’s lab, sitting on benches, the desk, the floor. They talked softly, as they usually did to each other, allowing a long time for the words to come out. Most of the time they didn’t look directly at each other. Nearly all wore masks now, some elaborately ornamented.
Miri’s mask was undecorated. She wasn’t going to wear it long.
“N-n-n-nucleid p-p-p-p-p-prot-teins—”
“—f-f-f-found a n-new r-r-ribbon fl-flow—”
“—t-t-t-two p-pounds h-h-h-heavier—”
“M-my n-n-n-new si-si-sister—”
“C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C—” A grunt of frustration. The first terminal came out to call up a string program.
“Wait a minute before you turn to string communication,” Miri said. “I have something to show you.”
The room fell into frozen silence. Miri took off her mask and brushed her long bangs from her eyes. She gazed at them serenely from a face that didn’t twitch, or jerk, or tremble.
“Uhn-n-n-n-n,” someone said, as if punched in the stomach.
“I found the pinpoint code,” Miri said. “The enzyme is easily synthesized, has no predicted side effects and none observed in myself—so far anyway—and can be delivered by slow-drip subcutaneous patch.” She rolled up her sleeve to show them the slight scar, rapidly regenerating, on her upper left arm.
“The f-f-f-f-f-formula!” Raoul, the other biological researcher, demanded hungrily.
Miri called up the string edifice on her work terminal. Raoul pasted himself in front of it.
Christy said, “Wh-Wh-When?”
“I put the patch in three days ago. Since then I haven’t left the lab. No one has seen it but you.”
Nikos said, “D-d-d-d-do m-m-m-m-me!”
Miri had prepared twenty-seven subcutaneous patches. The Beggars formed an assembly line, with Susan disinfecting the upper arm of each of them, Raoul making the incision, Miri inserting the patch, and Diana bandaging tightly. There was no need for stitches; the skin would regenerate.
“It takes a few hours for the effects to kick in,” Miri said. “The enzyme has to direct the manufacture of a sufficient amount of neuro-transmitter.”
The Supers looked at Miri with shining, twitching eyes. She leaned forward. “Listen—there’s something else we have to talk about.