"I think I've exhausted all the resources of self-discovery available to me," she told the Pierrot when he came to collect his tip. "And I've still got half the morning left to kill."
He glanced at her powder-blue facepaint and smiled politely.
"It's selective black."
"Huh?" Elin turned away from the lake, found that an agtech carrying a long-handled net had come up behind her.
"The algae-it absorbs light into the infrared. Makes the lake a great thermal sink." The woman dipped her net into the water, seined up a netful of dark-green scum, and dumped it into a nearby trough. Water drained away through the porous bottom.
"Oh." There were a few patches of weeds on the island, where drifting soil had settled. "It's funny. I never used to be very touristy. More the contemplative type, sort of homebodyish. Now I've got to be doing something, you know?"
The agtech dumped another load of algae into the trough. "I couldn't say." She tapped her forehead. "It's the wetware. If you want to talk shop, that's fine. Otherwise, I can't."
"I see." Elin dabbed a toe in the warm water. "Well, why not? Let's talk shop."
Someone was moving at the far edge of the island. Elin craned her neck to see. The agtech went on methodically dipping her net into the lake as God walked into view.
"The lake tempers the climate, see? By day it works by evaporative cooling. Absorbs the heat, loses it to evaporation, radiates it out the dome roof through the condensers."
Coral was cute as a button.
A bowl of fruit and vegetables had been left near the waterline. She walked to the bowl, considered it. Her orange jumpsuit nicely complemented her cafe-au-lait skin. She was so small and delicate that by contrast Elin felt ungainly.
"We also use passive heat pumps to move the excess heat down to a liquid-storage cavern below the lake."
Coral picked up a tomato. Her features were finely chiseled. Her almond eyes should have had snap and fire in them, to judge by the face, but they were remote and unfocused. Even, white teeth nipped at the food.
"At night we pump the heat back up, let the lake radiate it out to keep the crater warm."
On closer examination-Elin had to squint to see so fine- the face was as smooth and lineless as that of an idiot. There was nothing there; no emotion, no purpose, no detectable intellect.
"That's why the number of waterfalls in operation varies."
Now Coral sat down on the rocks. Her feet and knees were dirty. She did not move. Elin wanted to shy a rock at her to see if she would react.
What now? Elin wondered. She had seen the sights, all that Magritte had to offer, and they were all tiresome, disappointing. Even-no, make that especially-God. And she still had almost a month to kill.
"Keeping the crater tempered is a regular balancing act," the agtech said.
"Oh, shut up." Elin took out her briefcase and called Father Landis. "I'm bored," she said, when the hologram had stablized.
Landis hardly glanced up from her work. "So get a job," she snapped.
Magritte had begun as a mining colony, back when it was still profitable to process the undifferentiated melange soil. The miners were gone now, and the crater was owned by a consortium of operations legally debarred from locating Earthside.
From the fifteenth terrace Elin stared down at the patchwork clusters of open-air laboratories and offices, some separated by long stretches of undeveloped field, others crammed together in the hope of synergistic effect. Germ-warfare corporations mingled with nuclear-waste engineering firms. The Mid-Asian Population Control Project had half a terrace to itself, and it swarmed with guards. There were a few off-Swiss banking operations.
"You realize," Tory said, "that I'm not going to be at all happy about this development." He stood, face impassive in red and green, watching a rigger bolt together a cot and wire in the surgical equipment.
"You hired me yourself," Elin reminded him.
"Yes, but I'm wired into professional mode at the moment." The rigger packed up his tools, walked off. "Looks like wevre almost ready."
"Good." Elin flung herself down on the cot and lay back, hands folded across her chest. "Hey, I feel like I should be holding a lily!"
"I'm going to hook you into the project intercom so you don't get too bored between episodes." The air about her flickered, and a clutch of images overlaid her vision. Ghosts walked through the air, stared at her from deep within the ground. "Now we'll shut off the external senses." The world went away, but the illusory people remained, each within a separate hexagonal field of vision. It was like seeing through the eyes of a fly.
There was a sudden, overwhelming sense of Tory's presence, and a sourceless voice said to her, "This will take a minute. Amuse yourself by calling up a few friends." Then he was gone.
Elin floated, free of body, free of sensation, almost godlike in her detachment. She idly riffled through the images, stopped at a chubby little man drawing a black line across his forehead. Hello, Hans, she thought.
He looked up and winked. "How's it hanging, kid?"
Not so bad. What're you up to?
"My job. I'm the black-box monitor this shift." He added an orange starburst to the band, surveyed the job critically in a pocket mirror. "I sit here with my finger on the button"- one hand disappeared below his terminal-"and if I get the word, I push. That sets off explosives in the condenser units and blows the dome. Pfffft. Out goes the air."
She considered it: a sudden volcano of oxygen spouting up and across the lunar plains. Human bodies thrown up from the surface, scattering, bursting under explosive decompression.
That's grotesque, Hans.
"Oh, it's safe. The button doesn't connect unless I'm wetwired into my job."
Even so.
"Just a precaution; a lot of the research that goes on here wouldn't be allowed without this kind of security. Relax-I haven't lost a dome yet."
The intercom cut out, and again Elin felt Tory's presence. "We're trying a Trojan horse program this time-inserting you into the desired mental states instead of making you the states. We've encapsulated your surface identity and routed the experimental programs through a secondary level. So with this series, rather than identifying with the programs, you'll perceive them all indirectly."
Tory, you have got to be the most jargon-ridden human being in existence. How about repeating that in English?
"I'll show you."
Suddenly Elin was englobed in a sphere of branching crimson lines, dark and dull, that throbbed slowly. Lacy and organic, it looked the way she imagined the veins in her forehead to be like when she had a headache.
"That was anger," Tory said. "Your mind shunted it off into visual imagery because it didn't identify the anger with itself."
That's what you're going to do then-program me into the God-state so that 1 can see it but not experience it?
"Ultimately. Though I doubt you'll be able to come up with pictures. More likely, you'll feel that you're in the presence of God." He withdrew for a moment, leaving her more than alone, almost nonexistent. Then he was back. "We start slowly, though. The first session runs you up to the basic metaprogramming level, integrates all your mental processes, and puts you in low-level control of them. The nontechnical term for this is making the Christ. Don't fool around with anything you see or sense."