Elin stroked Tory's forehead. His muscles clenched, then loosened as a medtech reprogrammed the body responses. "Why isn't anyone doing anything?" she demanded.
"Take a look," Landis said, and patched her into the intercom. In her mind's eye, Elin could see dozens of wetware techs submitting program after program. A branching wetware diagram filled one channel, and as she watched, minor changes would occur as programs took hold, then be unmade as Tory's mind rejected them. "We've got an imagery tap of his Weltanschauung coming up," some nameless tech reported.
Something horrible appeared on a blank channel.
Elin could take only an instant's exposure before her mind reflexively shut the channel down, but that instant was more than enough. She stood in a room infinitely large and cluttered with great, noisome machines.
They were tended by malevolent demons who shrieked and cackled and were machines themselves, and they generated pain and madness.
The disgust and revulsion she felt was absolute. It could not be put into words-no more than could the actual experience of what she had seen. And yet-she knew this much about wetware techniques-it was only a rough approximation, a cartoon, of what was going through Tory's head.
Elin's body trembled with shock, and by slow degrees she realized that she had retreated to the surface world.
Tory's head was still cradled in her arms. A wetware tech standing nearby looked stunned, her face gray.
Elin gathered herself together, said as gently as she could, "Tory, what is that you're seeing?"
Tory turned his stark, haunted eyes on her, and it took an effort of will not to flinch. Then he spoke, his words shockingly calm.
"It is-what is. It's reality. The universe is a damned cold machine, and all of us only programs within it. We perform the actions we have no choice but to perform, and then we fade into nothingness. It's a cruel and noisy place."
"I don't understand-didn't you always say that we were just programs? Wasn't that what you always believed?"
"Yes, but now I experience it."
Elin noticed that her hand was slowly stroking his hair; she did not try to stop it. "Then come down, Tory. Let them deprogram you."
He did not look away. "Mcfcevo," he said.
The tech, recovered from her shock, reached toward a piece of equipment. Landis battered her hand away. "Hold it right there, techie! Just what do you think you're doing?"
The woman looked impatient. "He left instructions that if the experiment turned out badly, I was to pull the terminator switch."
"That's what I thought. There'll be no mercy killings while I'm on the job, Mac."
"I don't understand." The tech backed away, puzzled. "Surely you don't want him to suffer."
Landis was gathering herself for a withering reply when the intercom cut them all off. A flash of red shot through the sensorium, along with the smell of bitter almond, a prickle of static electricity, the taste of kimchi. "Emergency! We've got an emergency!" A black and white face materialized in Elin's mind. "Emergency!"
Landis flipped into the circuit. "What's the problem? Show us."
"You're not going to believe this." The face disappeared and was replaced by a wide-angle shot of the lake.
The greenish-black water was calm and stagnant. The thrust-cone island, with its scattered grass and weeds, slumbered.
And God walked upon the water.
They gawked, all of them. Coral walked across the lake, her pace determined but not hurried, her face serene. The pink soles of her bare feet just touched the surface.
/ didn't believe her, Elin thought wildly. She saw Father Landis begin to cross herself, her mouth hanging open, eyes wide in disbelief. Halfway through her gesture, the Jesuitical wet ware took hold. Her mouth snapped shut, and her face became cold and controlled. She pulled herself up straight.
"Hans," the priest said, "push the button."
"No!" Elin shrieked, but it was too late. Still hooked into the intercom, she saw the funny little man briskly, efficiently obey.
For an instant, nothing happened. Then bright glints of light appeared at all of the condenser units, harsh and actinic. Steam and smoke gushed from the machinery, and a fraction of a second later, there was an ear-slapping gout of sound.
Bits of the sky were blown away.
Elin turned, twisted, fell. She scrambled across the ground and threw her arms around Tory.
The air was in turmoil. The holes in the dome roof-small at first-grew as more of the dome flaked away, subjected to stresses it wasn't designed to take. An uncanny whistling grew to a screech, then a scream, and then there was an all-encompassing whoomph, and the dome shattered.
Elin was flung upward, torn away from Tory, painfully flung high and away. All the crater was in motion, the rocks tearing out of the floor, the trees splintering upward, the lake exploding into steam.
The screaming died-the air was gone. Elin's ears rang furiously, and her skin stung everywhere. Pressure grew within her, the desire of her blood to mate with the vacuum, and Elin realized that she was about to die.
A quiet voice said: This must not be.
Time stopped.
Elin hung suspended between moon and death. The shards and fragments of an instant past crystallized and shifted. The world became not misty, exactly, but apositional. Both it and she grew tentative, possibilities rather than actual things.
Come be God with me now, Coral said, but not to Elin.
Tory's presence flooded the soupy uncertainty, a vast and powerful thing, but wrong somehow, twisted. But even as Elin felt this, there was a change within him, a sloughing off of identity, and he seemed to straighten, to heal.
All around, the world began to grow more numinous, more real. Elin felt tugged in five directions at once. Tory's presence swelled briefly, then dwindled, became a spark, less than a spark, nothing.
Yes.
With a roaring of waters and a shattering of rocks, with an audible thump, the world returned.
Elin unsteadily climbed down the last flight of stone stairs from the terraces to the lake-front. She passed by two guards at the foot of the stairs, their facepaint as hastily applied as their programming, several more on the way to the nearest trellis farm. They were everywhere since the incident.
She found the ladder up into the farm and began climbing. It was biological night, and the agtechs were long gone.
Hand over hand she climbed, as far and high as she could, until she was afraid she would miss a rung and tumble off. Then she swung herself onto a ledge, wedging herself between strawberry and yam planters. She looked down on the island, and though she was dizzyingly high, she was only a third of the way up.
"Now what the hell am I doing here?" she mumbled to herself.
She swung her legs back and forth, answered her own question: "Being a piss-ass drunk." She cackled. There was something she didn't have to share with Coral. She was capable of getting absolutely blitzed and walking away from the bar before it hit her. It was something metabolic.
Below, Tory and Coral sat quietly on their monkey island. They did not touch, did not make love or hold hands or even glance at one another-they just sat. Being gods.
Elin squinted down at the two. "Like to upchuck all over you," she mumbled. Then she squeezed her eyes and fists tight, drawing tears and pain. Dammit, Tory!
Blinking hard, she looked away from the island, down into the jet-black waters of the lake. The brighter stars were reflected there. A slight breeze rippled the water, making them twinkle and blink, as if lodged in a Terran sky. They floated lightly on the surface, swarmed and coalesced, and formed Tory's face in the lake. He smiled warmly, invitingly.