She waited until Tory's footsteps moved away, fading, defeat echoing after. Only then did Elin realize that her sensor had been scanning the same empty bit of Magritte's slope for the last five minutes.
It was time for the final Trojan horse. "Today we make a god," Tory said. "This is a total conscious integration of the mind in an optimal efficiency pattern. Close your eyes and count to three."
One. The hell of it was that Tory was right. She still loved him. He was the one man she wanted and was empty without.
Two. Worse, she didn't know how long she could go on without coming back to him-and, good God, would that be humiliating!
She was either cursed or blessed; cursed perhaps for the agonies and humiliations she would willingly undergo for the sake of this one rather manipulative human being. Or maybe blessed, in that at least there was someone who could move her so, deserving or not. Many went through their lives without.
Three. She opened her eyes.
Nothing was any different. Magritte was as ordinary, as mundane as ever, and she felt no special reaction to it one way or another. Certainly she did not feel the presence of God.
"I don't think this is working," she tried to say. The words did not come. From the corner of her eye, she saw Tory wiping clean his facepaint, shucking off his jumpsuit. But when she tried to sit up, she found she was paralyzed.
What is this maniac doing?
Tory's face loomed over her, his eyes glassy, almost fearful. His hair was a tangled mess; her fingers itched with the impulse to run a comb through it.
"Forgive me, love." He kissed her forehead lightly, her lips ever so gently. Then he was out of her field of vision, stretching out on the grass beside the cot.
Elin stared up at the dome roof, thinking: No. She heard him strap the bone inductors to his body, one by one, and then a sharp click as he switched on a recorder. The programming began to flow into him.
A long wait-perhaps, twenty seconds viewed objectively- as the wetware was loaded. Another click as the recorder shut off. A moment of silence, and then-
Tory gasped. One arm flew up into her field of vision, swooped down out of it, and he began choking. Elin struggled against her paralysis, could not move. Something broke noisily, a piece of equipment by the sound of it, and the choking and gasping continued. He began thrashing wildly.
Tory, Tory, what's happening to you?
"It's just a grand mal seizure," Landis said. "Nothing we can't cope with, nothing we weren't prepared for." She touched Elin's shoulder reassuringly, called back to the crowd huddling about Tory, "Hey! One of you loopheads-somebody there know any programming? Get the lady out of this."
A tech scurried up, made a few simple adjustments with her machinery. The others-still gathering, Landis had been only the third on the scene-were trying to hold Tory still, to fit a bone inductor against his neck. There was a sudden gabble of comment, and Tory flopped wildly. Then a collective sigh as his muscles eased and his convulsions ceased.
"There," the tech said, and Elin scrabbled off the couch.
She pushed through the people (and a small voice in the back of her head marveled: A crowd! How strange) and knelt before Tory, cradling his head ift her arms.
He shivered, eyes wide and unblinking. "Tory, what's the matterV
His terrible eyes turned on her. "Nichevo."
"What?"
"Nothing," Landis said. "Or maybe 'it doesn't matter' is a better translation."
A wetware tech had taken control, shoving the crowd back. He reported to Landis, his mouth moving calmly under the interplay of green and red. "Looks like a flaw in the programming philosophy. We were guessing that bringing the ego along would make God such an unpleasant experience that the subject would let us deprogram, without interfering- now we know better."
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.