After a hundred meters of walking she came in sight of the cabin. It was a one-room affair with a chimney of rounded creek stones chinked with clay The roof was raw shakes, and the last peels of barn-red paint were hanging off the boards by the doorstep. Everywhere else was weathered, gray wood. It was . . . Grandaddy Coghlan's hideaway, on the fringes of Big Bend National Park near the Rio Grande. It hadn't changed in a dozen years. Not since she'd been there as a girl, that is.
Demeter walked across the shallow dooryard and put one foot up on the creosoted railroad ties that they'd used to build the three steps. The door was ajar, hanging half off its rusted steel hinges. She pushed it gently with her fingertips. "Hello?" she called.
"In here, darlin'. Why don't you come out of the sun, for Gawd's sake?" The voice was G'dad's, just as gravelly as she remembered it.
She lifted the edge of the door, swung it wide, and set it down on the floorboards where it always scraped. Then she stepped across the threshold. It took a long moment for her eyes to start adjusting to the gloom inside.
The elder Coghlan sat with his back to her, on the one rickety chair at the kitchen table. The latter's surface was covered, as always, with oilcloth painted in the red-and-white checked pattern of a cafe tablecloth. Despite the sunlight coming through the window, G'dad had a kerosene lamp burning; even with solar cells and long-life batteries freely available, he wouldn't have electricity at the cabin. But instead of the friendly yellow light the lamp usually gave, it blazed with a white fusion glare.
Demeter came up behind him, to see what he was doing that so absorbed his attention. Playing cards were laid out on the oilcloth in a solitaire pattern: six ordered stacks of downturned cards, with here and there long or short columns of exposed cards in face-value order. In his hand were additional cards, fanned out in sets of three.
She studied the game over his shoulder, hoping she could advise him—and occasionally catch him out when he cheated—as she had done when a little girl. The card faces didn't have pips and portraits, like normal playing cards, but equations with Greek lettering for the numbered cards and atomic structures of coiled, long-chain molecules for the face cards. If there was any system to the game he was playing, she couldn't figure it out. He fanned three more cards and laid the top one down on a column.
"Are you cheating, G'dad?"
"Couldn't tell if I was, could you?"
He reached out his left hand, and a tumbler full of Wild Turkey appeared just within reach. It was straight liquor with no ice, just the way he liked it. He raised the glass to his lips and took the tiniest, tooth-wetting sip. He opened his mouth and let out a gasping whoop followed by an "Ahh!"—just as he always did.
Demeter wasn't convinced for a minute.
"What's this all about?"
"But... Dem!"
"You're not my grandfather, and this is not his cabin. It's close, but not real. I know we're still in orbit over Mars, not anywhere on Earth."
"What tipped you off?" he asked, laying down the cards.
"You smell wrong, for one thing. Too much whiskey, not enough sour sweat, and Grandaddy never touched tobacco products in his life."
"That's odd. We thought your memories were quite legible on that point."
"Nope." She shook her head for effect—and now she could feel the mass of the V/R helmet swinging on her neck. "Not once."
G'dad sighed. "It's so dangerous, blending sensations archived from the period with real human memories. Sometimes even the fastest among us makes mistakes."
"You're not really Jory den Ostreicher, are you?" Lole asked the grinning boy.
"No, not even what Jory became. However, a part of him is here with us—the part we gave him in the beginning."
"Who are you then?"
"Individually? Or all together?" The naked figure asked, and the grin never wavered.
"All together," Roger specified. "Answer on behalf of the entity that says us.'"
Sulie sighed and laid down the cue stick. She lifted her right hand, as if to touch his face, but Torraway drew back.
"I'd like logical answers, please. Not more histrionics." "The closest analogy I can use that would approach your understanding is to say we are the nexus which coordinates all computer activities on Mars."
"You're the grid then," Demeter supplied. "Or some mask, some personification that you put on for our benefit... to make us feel at home?"
"Something like that. Although to say that we are 'the grid,' is like saying you are Demeter Coghlan. The minute-to-minute effect is coherently perceived as Demeter Coghlan. But the reality is a hundred billion distinct animal cells all respirating and secreting, dividing and replicating their deoxyribose nucleic acid through eternity. All are very little concerned with the persona that you call Demeter Coghlan. The reality is neurons firing ten or a hundred or a thousand at a time in patterns that have more to do with random responses to stimuli than with the psyche of Demeter Coghlan."
"And yet I am she."
"And yet I am aware," her grandfather answered with a twinkle.
"Why did you bring us here?" Lole asked. "Bring me here, anyway. And where are the others, Coghlan and Torraway?"
"Easy questions first," the boy grinned. "Demeter and Roger are enjoying their own fantasies. I—we— our persona appears to each of you in a form you can handle. Would you have me instead take the shape of a computer? Which one then?"
The sand and air around Lole trembled, and he was suddenly hanging in darkness, confronted by a huge piece of green plastic etched with copper pathways that trembled with latent energies. The darkness echoed and he was wrapped in line after line of printed code, looping and branching to entangle him. The code shuddered and he stood in front of a gleaming metal robot with violet-coated lenses for eyes and a conical black loudspeaker for a mouth. The robot raised its manipulators, shook them in the air, and the naked boy was standing again on the sand.
When Lole had caught his breath he asked, "So .. . what are Demeter and Roger seeing?"
Jory's face flowed into that of a beautiful woman who in turn melded into an old man and back to the boy. "People they both know and love."
"I don't love you," Mitsuno said.
"Aww, come on! You liked me just a little, didn't you?'
"All right, now the hard question," Torraway said. "Why are we here?"
"You, Roger, of all your companions, are in the best position to understand the scope, the scale, of what we are. Your own computerized sensorium shares some of our linearity. Some of our singular dimensionality." Sulie smiled indulgently. 'Tell the truth now, sometimes you find it hard to relate to humans . . . don't you? Just a little?"
"They are . . ." He groped for suitable words. "Feverish. Inconsistent. Fertile. Changeable."
"You don't like diem," she supplied.
"No, its just that they can be so ... complex. I sometimes think I de-evolved into a simpler form when they made me Cyborg."