So for intensive days and sleepless nights the ship itself was refitted with the ultimate in weapons, and the crew reshuffled to use them best. The second ship was bigger than the first. It had to be; it had more to carry. Besides the new rocket launchers and the white-noise radio projectors that, some hoped, might damage that strange purple glow that had swallowed the President's ship, it had a crew of ten rather than three. There was Manyface himself, adamant on going no matter what the doctors or the administrators said. There was Tchai Howard, of course, cheated out of his first chance, urgent to punish and revenge. And there was a strike force, seven hard-trained, tough assault guerrillas just back from a little pacification mission in Botswanaland, along with their commander. All ten of them, those last days, slept in one huge room, relieved themselves in open toilets, were never out of sight of each other for any minute, all through their training, right up to the moment when the dressers fitted them all into their suits and the technicians handed them into the ship.
All the same, when the ship was ready to blast off, Manyface was frightened.
Nothing was easy or simple for Manyface, not even fear. He wasn't all frightened. Angorak Aglat wasn't frightened. Angorak had once been a security marshal in the Mexican protectorates, when courage was an occupational requirement. Neither were Shum Hengdzhou or Tsai Mingwo, and Potter Alicia was too vague and cloudy in her perceptions to be really frightened. She spent her time asking to have the tape of her daughter's voice—a message they had coerced from Maria on promise of full citizenship and honors for her unborn child—played back to her. It didn't help when it was; she forgot it quickly again every time, for her connection with reality had always been tenuous. Those were the brave members of the committee. Corelli Anastasio, on the other hand, was scared blind. He had suffered all his life from agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces, and what space could be more open than space? Hsang Futsui and Dien Kaichung were edgy with the irritation of fear, and so the currents of emotion that flowed in the soupy sea that was the collective mind of Manyface were sour with tension. The orderly workings of the committee were troubled.
This was annoying to Manyface—to the original Fung Bohsien and to all his added selves—because, really, this couldn't have come at a worse time! Just when Dien Kaichung, the latest implant, was settling down! Just when the postoperative confusion and the psychic nausea had begun to pass, so that the committee could once again deliberate in orderly fashion and speak, most often, with a single voice!
So the takeoff was bad, really bad. The whole first battering thrust as the spacecraft pushed itself away from the surface of the Earth was tainted and sickened with the flood of panic from Corelli and Hsang and Dien; so was the recheck in low Earth orbit; so was the boost toward the alien ship. "Calm down! Calm down!" Many-face shouted inside his head. "We must keep control! Much depends on it!"
And as a matter of fact all the voices were saying much the same thing, and all equally loudly; so that it was a pity they didn't hear each other.
When the voices of Manyface met in executive session—which was always, since they had no escape from each other but death—there were eleven of them.
There was Angorak Aglat, mountaineer from the southern provinces of the Chinese nation, former peace marshal and artillery officer. As a person with a body of his own, he had been slightly deaf from the explosion of cannon next to his ears. For that reason he often shouted. As a scrap of remnant gray matter tucked into someone else's skull he still shouted. Angorak was never wrong. He knew this to be true, though sometimes other people did not seem to believe it. Angorak was sardonic and greedy; Angorak was smart, but not smart enough to know that he was not necessarily smarter than every other human being he would ever encounter, even within the limited space of Manyface's swollen skull.
Potter Alicia was the sweet one, the one who hated to see her skullmates at odds. Potter would soothe one and plead with another, urging them all toward peace. Potter would arbitrate unendingly, even well past the point where arbitration and patience seemed reasonable. Even past the point where the disputants had begun to dislike her more than they disliked each other. Potter would accept any slight or insult or outburst of anger from any of those other minds she lived with, just for the purpose of bringing peace to their councils. Potter had been an agronomist, mother of two, and she was always sweet, except sometimes when the issue was something that Potter herself wanted.
Su Wonmu had been a high Party member, though not 210 one who mattered much to the other high Party members. Su had been a soccer player. Su had always been thoroughly reliable in a political sense; he grasped new Party lines as soon as they were formed. He managed quickly and easily to live within them, to defend them, to explain them—even when they were hardly explicable. So when the high Party officials decided it was an investment worth making to humanize their image and looked around for a popular, safe candidate to join the Presidium, Su was an easy choice. Inside Manyface's skull he was still easy. He just was not of much use. He was the person in every committee who seconds motions other people make.
Corelli Anastasio—ah, he was a weird one. Pure indigene. Ancestors American for two centuries. He was the scientist. He was also a wimp. He was as politically reliable as Su Wonmu, which is to say he lacked any conviction of his own as wholly; this made him trustworthy. What made him weird was that he was glad to be dead. He had left behind him grown children and a bitter divorced wife. He didn't mind being in Manyface's skull. It was safer there.
The other one that mattered, really, was Shum Hengdzhou. In his life as an autonomous human being he had not been anything much. He had been the father of two middle-sized girls and a section leader in a steel mill when the ladle of molten metal splashed over his body. No political background. Unknown outside his mill and home. All that had given him salvation, or as much salvation as anyone could find in somebody else's head, was that he had been the first totally destroyed, biologically compatible human being available with a salvageable brain when Manyface proposed to continue the implants as an experiment. He was also rather a decent person. The other implants, vainglorious about their more illustrious past histories, tended to look down on him. Shum accepted that. He was second only to Potter Alicia in anxiety to smooth out stress and less likely than Potter to make demands of his own. For Shum had little of his own to demand and no right to demand it.
Of most of the others, not much trace remained of "personality," for their implants had been taken from far more fundamental regions of the brain. Yet every one of them contributed his own special flavor to the soup. To Manyface himself, as chairman of the board, each voice was uniquely distinctive. He could not have told how he recognized them. There was no sound to carry clues. A choice of words, an intensity of will, a tremor of self-doubt—those were the characteristics he could recognize.
And he could hear them all, all the time—and sometimes the voices were maddening.
Manyface was nearly stable within his own head when he got into the rocket. It had been long enough since the implant of Dien Kaichung for Dien to settle down. His terrified screams and convulsions at finding himself dead, trapped, imprisoned within the skull of Manyface had dwindled to an occasional sob—the soundless equivalent of a sob. The rest of the inhabitants of Manyface's now healed skull had moved around to accommodate him. ("But no more, please," said Corelli pettishly. "It's getting really crowded!")