Chip looked at the gun and at Wei. Wei, on an elbow, looked across the room and up at Chip.
Chip backed away, toward the end of the room, toward its corner, looking at the white-plastered pillars, the white-hung blue arms over the center pit. He raised the gun.
“Chip!” Wei cried. “It’s yours! It’ll be yours some day! We both can live! Chip, listen to me,” he said, leaning forward, “there’s joy in having it, in controlling, in being the only one. That’s the absolute truth, Chip. You’ll see for yourself. There’s joy in having it.”
Chip fired the gun at the farther pillar. A red thread hit above the white discs; another hit directly on one. An explosion flashed and roared, thundered and smoked. It subsided and the pillar was bent slightly toward the other side of the room.
Wei moaned grievingly. A door beside Chip started to open; he pushed it closed and stood back against it. He fired the gun at the bombs on the blue arms. Explosion roared, flame erupted, and a louder explosion blasted from the pit, mashing him against the door, breaking glass, flinging Wei to the swaying wall of equipment, slamming doors that had opened at the other side of the room. Flame filled the pit, a huge shuddering cylinder of yellow-orange, railed around and drumming at the ceiling. Chip raised his arm against the heat of it.
Wei climbed to all fours and onto his feet. He swayed and started stumblingly forward. Chip shot a red thread to his chest, and another, and he turned away and stumbled toward the pit. Flames feathered his coveralls, and he dropped to his knees, fell forward on the floor. His hair caught fire, his coveralls burned.
Blows shook the door and cries came from behind it. The other doors opened and members came in. “Stay back!” Chip shouted, and aimed the gun at the nearer pillar and fired. Explosion roared, and the pillar was bent.
The fire in the pit lowered, and the bent pillars slowly turned, screeching.
Members came into the room. “Get back!” Chip shouted, and they retreated to the doors. He moved into the corner, watching the pillars, the ceiling. The door beside him opened. “Stay back!” he shouted, pressing against it.
The steel of the pillars split and rolled open; a chunk of concrete slid from the nearer one.
The blackened ceiling cracked, groaned, sagged, dropped fragments.
The pillars broke and the ceiling fell. Memory banks crashed into the pits; mammoth steel blocks smashed down on one another and slid thunderously, butted into the walls of equipment. Explosions roared in the nearest and farthest pits, lifting blocks and cushioning them in flames.
Chip raised his arm against the heat. He looked where Wei had been. A block was there, its edge above the cracked floor.
More groaning and cracking sounded—from the blackness above, framed by the ceiling’s broken fire-lit borders. And more banks fell, pounded down on the ones below, crushing and bursting them. Memory banks filled the opening, sliding, rumbling.
And the room, despite the fires, cooled.
Chip lowered his arm and looked—at the dark shapes of fire-gleaming steel blocks piled through the broken border of ceiling. He looked and kept looking, and then he moved around the door and pushed his way out through the members staring in.
He walked with the gun at his side through members and programmers running toward him down white-tiled corridors, and through more programmers running down carpeted corridors hung with paintings. “What is it?” Karl shouted, stopping and grabbing his arm.
Chip looked at him and said, “Go see.”
Karl let go of him, glanced at the gun and at his face, and turned and ran.
Chip turned and kept walking.
6
HE WASHED, sprayed the bruises on his hand and some cuts on his face, and put on paplon coveralls. Closing them, he looked around at the room. He had planned to take the bedcover, for Lilac to use for dressmaking, and a small painting or something for Julia; now, though, he didn’t want to. He put cigarettes and the gun in his pockets. The door opened and he pulled the gun out again. Deirdre stared at him, looking frantic.
He put the gun back in his pocket.
She came in and closed the door behind her. “It was you,” she said.
He nodded.
“Do you realize what you’ve done?”
“What you didn’t do,” he said. “What you came here to do and talked yourself out of.”
“I came here to stop it so it could be reprogrammed,” she said, “not to destroy it completely!”
“It was being reprogrammed, remember?” he said. “And if I’d stopped it and forced a real reprogramming—I don’t know how, but if I had—it would still have wound up the same way sooner or later. The same Wei. Or a new one—me. ‘There’s joy in having it’: those were his last words. Everything else was rationalization. And self-deception.”
She looked away, angrily, and back at him. “The whole place is going to cave in,” she said.
“I don’t feel any tremors,” he said.
“Well everyone’s going. The ventilation may stop. There’s danger of radiation.”
“I wasn’t planning to stay,” he said.
She opened the door and looked at him and went out.
He went out after her. Programmers hurried along the corridor in both directions, carrying paintings, pillowcase bundles, dictypes, lamps. (“Wei was in it! He’s dead!” “Stay away from the kitchen, it’s a madhouse!”) He walked among them. The walls were bare except for large frames hanging empty. (“Sirri says it was Chip, not the new ones!” “—twenty-five years ago, “Unify the islands, we’ve got enough programmers,’ but he gave me a quote about selfishness.”)
The escalators were working. He rode up to the top level and went around through the steel door, half open, to the bathroom where the boy and the woman were. They were gone.
He went down one level. Programmers and members holding paintings and bundles were pushing into the room that led to the tunnel. He went into the merging crowd. The door ahead was down but must have been partway up because everyone kept moving forward slowly. (“Quickly!” “Move, will you?” “Oh Christ and Wei!”)
His arm was grabbed and Madhir glared at him, hugging a filled tablecloth to his chest. “Was it you?” he asked.
“Yes,” Chip said.
Madhir glared, trembled, flushed. “Madman!” he shouted. “Maniac! Maniac!”
Chip pulled his arm free and turned and moved forward.
“Here he is!” Madhir shouted. “Chip! He’s the one! He’s the one who did it! Here he is! Here! He’s the one who did it”
Chip moved forward with the crowd, looking at the steel door ahead, holding the gun in his pocket. (“You brother-fighter, are you crazy?” “He’s mad, he’s mad!”)
They walked up the tunnel, quickly at first, then slowly, an endless straggle of dark laden figures. Lamps shone here and there along the line, each lamp drawing with it a section of shining plastic roundness.
Chip saw Deirdre sitting at the side of the runnel. She looked at him stonily. He kept walking, the gun at his side.
Outside the tunnel they sat and lay in the clearing, smoked and ate and talked in huddles, rummaged in their bundles, traded forks for cigarettes.