“And?”
“Don’t be jealous.”
“Darling Fee, I love you and always want the best for you. You’ve turned into a great lady and I’m bursting with pride because you’re my only daughter… my only child. You know, don’t you, that the Group can’t have children. That’s one of the prices we pay.”
“Oh—” Her face crumpled into tears.
“Yes, I understand. You’ll have to put that behind you.”
“But I—”
“No,” I said firmly. “Not now. Be a great lady and concentrate on Sequoya. What happened to him?”
After a long pause she whispered, “We must be very quiet, Guig.”
“Y? W?”
“We’re safe now because he’s asleep.”
“Safe from what?”
“Listen. When Lucy Borgia killed him in the Extrocomputer complex…”
“I remember. Painfully.”
“Every brain and nerve cell was detached. Isolated. An island.”
“But they linked up their synapses again, and he came back to life.”
She nodded. “How many cells are there in the brain, Guig?”
“I don’t know. A hundred billion, maybe.”
“And how many bits in an Extrocomputer?”
“Same answer. I don’t know. But I’d judge these stretch jobs have thousands of billions.”
She nodded again. “Yes. Well. When he was dead, when every nerve cell was isolated, the Extro bits moved in on the Chief. Each bit became a squatter on a brain cell. He’s the Extro and the Extro is the Chief. That’s the other person or thing we hear talking through him.”
“Don’t go too fast, Fee. This is hard to grasp.”
“And every other electronic machine can talk to the Extro through him and hear it through him. That’s why we have to be careful. They’re a network and they report everything they pick up from us. Maybe even what we think.”
“To the Extro?”
“Y.”
“Through the Chief?”
“Y. He’s like a switchboard.”
“Are you sure?”
“N. You have to understand, Guig. I live in a constant crossfire of transmission. I hear from the bottom of the spectrum to the top. Some bands come in loud and clear, others are vague and distorted. I can only pick up what’s going on with the Chief in bits and pieces. No, I’m not sure.”
“I see. You’ve been invaluable as usual, Fee. Thank you.”
“If I’m so valuable why didn’t you help me against the guards? We could have taken them.”
“Maybe. I’ll explain another time, another place. No S. Now go take care of Sequoya, love. I need a while to think about this.” And that was when I thought what I reported earlier about Guess being possessed by a demon. Trouble is, I said it wrong. I put it in terms of passion. There is no passion in a computer, there’s only cold logic, if precisely programmed. Yet the crux of it was this: If Fee was right and the Extro had indeed taken possession of Guess, plus all the other electronics in the world, what would be the outcome of this commensalism, collaboration, symbiosis or, most probably, parasitism? Who was feeding on whom? It was a question I couldn’t answer.
A segment of the bubble swung open and a guard came in, pulling a float of food. “Mini,” he called cheerfully. Meals these days are named Mini, Semi, Demi, Grandi, and Midi. “Come and get it, you contemptible bubbirds, before the Board gets you. The condemned man ate a hearty meal before execution.”
Suddenly I realized he was speaking XX and then I saw it was Houdini.
“Harry!” I exclaimed.
He winked. “Eat your food. Leave the rest to me.”
“But what are you doing here?”
“Why, I got your message and came.”
“What message? Who message?”
“That can wait. Make the scalp mavin eat. I can’t spring a weak man.”
He left and the segment closed. Houdini is an escape artist and has been under contract to organized crime (in alternate generations) since it became organized, and if you want to know how Wu Tao-tzu did it, ask Harry. Wu was the greatest painter of his time. He created a tremendous mural on a wall of the Imperial Palace in Peking. When he unveiled the painting to the court, he walked up to it, opened a door painted in the mural, stepped through, and was never seen again. That’s Harry’s style.
“I don’t want to die. I’m too young to die,” I said happily and began to eat.
Poulos joined me. “You know, Guig, we might have gnawed our way out of this bubble if we were willing to light up like a glowworm. What’s in this carafe?”
“Looks like a burgundy to me.”
“Ah, no. It is Argentine. Trapiche viejo. Very good but of no great distinction.”
“How d’you know?”
“I own the vineyard. My dear, coax Dr. Guess to drink a little wine and give him some of this meat custard. We must restore his strength. Guig, I have always disagreed with your assertion that epilepsy is associated with brilliance and the unusual. I suffer from the petit mal myself — you know, momentary blackouts — but that in no way proves your theory. I don’t regard myself as brilliant. Do you? What is your candid estimate of me?”
“Brilliant and unusual.”
“Pah! You dorer la pilule.”
It turned into a ridiculous argument. It’s preposterous trying to convince a cat who owns a quarter of the world that he’s brilliant and unusual. Most of the Group is well fixed; time and the Greek’s advice do that for us, but a quarter of the world! I tried a flanking attack. I called, “Fee, love, come and eat something.”
She joined us at the floater. “I’ll tell you a little story about the transformation of a member of the Group,” I went on. “A long time ago he led a peasant revolt in Cappadocia.” The Syndicate stiffened slightly, but that was all. His control is magnificent.
“The revolt got out of hand and many outrages were committed. He could do nothing to stop it. When the revolt was crushed and he was captured, the nobles devised an ingenious death for him. They sat him on a red-hot throne, wearing a red-hot crown, holding a red-hot scepter. He endured the torture superbly.”
Fee shuddered. “What saved him?”
“One of those Turkish earthquakes that still kill by the thousands. This one shook the castle apart and when he came to he couldn’t believe he was alive. He was under the dead bodies of the nobles, and their corpses had shielded him from the falling masonry.”
Fee is no fool. She looked at Poulos with awe. “You are the most remarkable man in the world.”
“Have I made my point, Greek?”
He shrugged.
“But the torture,” Fee asked. “No damage? No scars?”
“Indeed yes,” the Syndicate answered. “No one could look at me without turning queasy. That’s another reason why I became a gambler. We game at night and in those days it was by candlelight. Even so it is said that I gave rise to the Dracula legend. They called me Count Drakon. Drakon is Greek for serpent, so you can imagine.”
“But you’re stunning now.”
“All skin grafts and bone prosthesis, my dear, courtesy of the great Lucy Borgia. It might amuse you that Len da Vinci supervised the reconstruction. He said he’d be damned if he’d trust a physician’s taste in esthetics. Borgia has never forgiven him for that.”
Five guards entered the bubble, terrifying in their white neutral suits which made them look like Abominable Snowmen. Their captain gestured and four of them stripped, revealing perfectly innocuous bods. “Get in,” Harry ordered us. We get into the neutrals. I didn’t ask any questions. You don’t quiz Wu Tao-tzu. He led us out and closed the bubble.
“Come.”
“Where?” the Chief’s voice asked.
“Chopper.”
“No. Capsule first.”
“Are you Guess?”