She turned off the trid. There was a small alcove of a bathroom off the old man's quarters; there was no pool, only a shower. She stripped and took off the dark wig. If there had been a blower she would have washed her clothes, but there were only a couple of worn towels. She turned on the shower and slumped under it with water running through her bright, colorless, startling hair, over her shoulders and breasts and back. Her bones were etched out at ribs and hips, and her muscles made a clear chart of anatomy. Her knees were black and purple; she bruised very easily now.
She left before the old man returned. Trying to thank him would embarrass him and force him to search for words he did not possess. If she waited she might lose her courage and stay; if she waited she might convince herself that she did not need to run again to defy the Institute. If she waited they might trace her to him. It would not matter to them nor help their search if they questioned him, but it would confuse and hurt him. She felt strangely protective toward him, perhaps as he had felt toward her, as if people responded to helplessness in ways that had nothing to do with their capacity to think.
Outside it was dark again-- could be still dark, for all the sun Lais had seen. But the sleet had stopped and it was a midnight-blue morning, cold and clear, and even the city's sky-glow could not dim the stars. People strolled alone or in groups on the softly lit mall, or sat on the bronze or stone flanks of the sculptures of prehistoric beasts. Lais stayed in shadows and at edges. No frozen-young faces blanched on seeing her; no one sidled toward the nearest cmu booth to call the security agents. Many of the people, by their clothes and languages, were transients who had no reason to be interested in local news.
The haranguers were back after the rain: preachers for bizarre religions, recruiters for little outwoods colonies, proponents of strange social ideals. Lais could ignore them all, except the ones who preached against her. She could feel the age about them: they remembered. Only a few kept that much hate, enough to stand on walls and cry that the freaks were a danger and a curse. Lais crept by them on the opposite side of the path, as if they could know what she was just by looking. Their voices followed her.
Drained, she stopped and entered one of the frequent cmu booths. The door closed over the sounds. She needed to rest. The money she had scrounged and smoothed could buy no ticket now past the watchers in the port. She used it instead to open lines to the city's computers, and they returned to her the power of machines. Their lure was too great, measured against the delay. The problem lay so clear in her mind that the programs needing to be run sprang Out full-grown. She did a minute's worth of exploration and put a block on the lines so she could not be cut off as soon as her money ran out. It should hold long enough. Into the wells she inserted the data cubes she had carried around for two months. Working submerged her; reality dissolved.
Later, while waiting for more important output, Lais almost idly probed for vulnerability in the city programs, seeking to construct for herself a self-erasing escape route. The safeguards were intricate, but hidden flaws leaped out at Lais and the defenses fell, laying the manager programs open to her abilities. It was hardly more difficult than blocking the lines. At that moment she could have put glitches in the city's services and untraceable bugs in its programs. She could see a thousand ways to cause disruption for mere annoyance; she could detour garbage service and destroy commercial records and mismatch mail codes and reroute the traffic, and there were a thousand times a thousand ways to disrupt things destructively, to turn a community of a million people into the ruined inhabitants of a chaotic war zone. Entropy was all on her side. Yet when the city was stretched out vulnerable before her, the momentary eagerness to destroy left her. The fact that she could have done it seemed to be enough. Taking vengeance on the plastic people would have been senseless, and very much like experimenting with mice or rabbits or lower primates, small furry stupid beasts that accept the pain and degradation with frightened resignation in their wide deep eyes, not knowing why. The emotional isolation that might have allowed her to tamper with the city was shattered in her own experience and existence as a laboratory animal, knowing, but not really understanding why.
She slammed at the terminal to close down the holes she had made in the city's defenses, and touched it more gently to complete her work. She used an hour of computer time in less than an hour of real time.
The results came chuckling out: first one, then a second world ecosystem map in fluorescent colors, shading through the spectrum from violet for concrete through blue and green and yellow for high to low certainty to orange and red for theoretical projections. The control map was mostly blue, very little red: it looked good. Its data had been nothing but a sample of ordinary dirt, analyzed down to its isotopes, from the grounds of the outpost, where Lais had been working when she got sick. The map showed the smooth flow of natural evolution, spotted here and there with the quick jumps and twists and bare spots and rootless branches of alien human occupation. Its accuracy was extraordinary. Lais had not thought herself still capable of elation, but she was smiling involuntarily, and for a few moments she forgot about pain and exhaustion.
The second map had less blue and more red, but it seemed unified and logical. Its data had been a bit of a drone sample from an unexplored world, and it showed that the programs were very likely doing what they were supposed to do: deduce the structure and relationships of a world's living things.
Lais' past research had produced results that could hardly be understood, much less used, by normals. It would be extended and built on by her own kind, eventually, not in her lifetime, or perhaps not even in the lifetime that should have belonged to her. This time she had set out to discover the limits of theory applied to minimal data, and the applications were not only obvious but of great potential benefit. When the hounds tracked her, they would find her last programs, and they would be used. Lais shrugged. If she had wanted to be vindictive, she would have tried not to finish, but her mind and her curiosity and her need for knowledge were not things she could flick on and off at will, to produce results like handsful of cookies.
The screen blinked. Her time had run out long since, and the computer was beginning to cut Out the obstructions she had put in its billing mechanism. But they held for the moment, and the computer began obediently to print out the data blocks after the map and the programs. She reached to turn it off, then drew her hand back.
Among crystal structures and mass spectrum plots a DNA sequence zipped by, almost unnoticed, almost unnoticeable, but it caught her attention. She thought it was from the drone sample. She brought it back and put it on the screen. The city computers had all the wrong library programs, and who bothered to translate DNA anymore anyway? She picked a place that looked right and did it by memory; for Lais it was like typing. AUG, adenine, uracil, guanine. Start: methionine. Life is the same all over. The computer built a chain of amino acids like a string of popbeads. 2D valiantly masqueraded as 3D. Lais threw in entropy and let the chain fold up. When it was done she doubled and redoubled it and added a copy of its DNA. The screen flickered again; the openings she had made in the computer's safeguards were beginning to close, and alarms would be sounding.
The pieces on the screen began the process of self-aggregation, and when they were done she had a luminous green reproduction, a couple of million times real size, of something that existed on the borders of life. It was a virus, that was obvious. She could not stay and translate the whole genome and look for equivalents for the enzymes it would need. She did not have to. It felt, to all her experience, and memory, and intuition, like a tumor virus. She glanced at the printout again, and realized with slow shock, free-fall sensation, that this was from the control data.