Ginneh’s laugh was light and gracious. “Well, that’strue, darling, but I’d rather hoped to spare your ego that realization.”
“Mmmm.” Wyeth stood and took up the leash. “Consider me on the payroll, then.” He led Rebel away.
Not far from the park, they climbed a winding set of wooden stairs high up a druid tree to a platform restaurant built out onto the branches, where they ordered puff pastries and green wine. The glasses had wide bowls and tiny lips. Wyeth frowned down on his and capped it with his thumb. He slowly swirled the green liquid around and around. Rebel waited.
Wyeth looked up suddenly. “Where were you?”
“What’s it worth to you?”
Hands closed around the wine glass. They were big hands, with knobby joints and short, blunt fingers. A
strangler’s hands. “What do you want?”
“The truth.” And then when he raised an eyebrow, she amended it to, “Truthful answers to as many questions as I ask you.”
A moment’s silence. Then he rapped his knuckles on the table and touched them to his brow and lips. “Done. You go first.”
Slowly, carefully, she recounted the past hour. She felt good up here among the leaves, where the light was green and watery and the gravity was slight. She felt like she could lean back in her chair and just float away… out of the chair, out of the restaurant, beyond the branches, into the great dark oceans of air where whales and porpoises sported, and the clouds of dust algae blocked out the light from the distant trees. It felt like home, and she stretched out her story through three glasses of wine.
As she talked, Wyeth’s face remained stiff. He hardly even blinked. And when she was done, he said, “I cannot for the life of me understand how any one human being can be so stupid!”
“Hey,” Rebel said defensively. “It’s your own fault I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re up to. If anyone here was stupid, it was you.”
“Who do you think I was talking about?” he said angrily.
“I was just too clever for my own good. While I was building an elaborate trap for Snow and her ilk, they walk up and have a long chat with you! One perfectly beautiful opportunity blown all to hell because I—well, never mind.”
He took a deep breath and then—like a conjurer’s trick—he was instantly smiling and impish. “Go ahead, ask your questions. You want me to start by explaining Snow?”
“No. Well, yeah, but later on. I want to start with something very basic. You’re not really human, are you?
You’re a new mind.”
He grinned. “Who should know better?”
“Please. You already hinted that I did the programming on you. But I don’t remember a damned thing, so don’t get all coy on me, okay? Give me a straight answer. Just what the fuck is a tetrad?”
“A tetrad is a single human mind with four distinct personalities.” His face changed expression, to serious, then distracted, then open, and finally mischievous.
“That’s what we am. Or should I say, that’s what I are?”
5
PEOPLE’S SHERATON
You’re in for something that’s pretty rare this far from a planetary surface,” Wyeth said.
“What’s that?”
“A windstorm.”
Beneath its elaborations—balconies, outcroppings, light and heavy gravity wings, bubbles and skywalks—thesheraton was a simple orbital wheel, with three floors moving at slightly different speeds to maintain Greenwich normal gravity. Wyeth had set up security headquarters in the lobby at the foot of the elevator from the central docking ring. He sat behind the front desk, eyes moving restlessly as he scanned a dozen holographic inputs. A
tone-controlled mike rested before him, and he murmured instructions into it from time to time, pitching his voice for the channel desired.
Rebel sat in a sling chair, staring out through the window wall. The stars trembled with the flicker of subliminal memories. She could see Wyeth reflected on the inner surface of the glass.
There was a cascade of movement across the window.
“We’ve secured the locks, sir. The people aren’t very happy about it. Minor violence at tanks twelve and three.”
Despite her samurai paint, the woman hardly looked like security. She’d been recruited from the tanks and wore a daisy-yellow cloak and far too much jewelry.
“They were notified,” Wyeth said. When the woman was gone, he sighed. “I wonder at people. If they don’t understand why they can’t use the locks for an hour or two, then what do they think is waiting for them when we reach Mars orbit? I’m afraid they’re in for a rude awakening.”
Spacejacks were bolting the preassembled segments of the geodesic around the sheraton and tanks, working with programmed efficiency. The structure was covered with transparent monomolecular skin. From Rebel’s chair, it looked like a faint haze gathering across the stars. The workers began spraying powdered steel over the completed exterior, vacuum-welding layer upon layer.
Now it was like watching the heat death of the universe, the stars slowly clouding up and fading to black. Gloom swelled and overwhelmed everything. Finally the only light within the geodesic was what spilled from the windows of the sheraton.
“This is spooky,” Rebel said. Suddenly she had an overwhelming sense of someone standing at her shoulder.
She whirled, and no one was there.
“You like it, huh?” Wyeth threw an exterior camera projection onto one quadrant of window. From outside, the geodesic looked like a gigantic ball bearing, dazzlingly bright in the raw sunlight. Stars rippled over its flank. Just off center was the distorted reflection of Londongrad, with the Kluster corporate logo (two classical figures, one bending) superpainted on its side. In an unfamiliar voice Wyeth said, “Think of it as an enormous cell. The tank towns at the center are the nucleus. The sheraton is… oh, the centrosome, I guess. The air plant would have to be the mitochondria.” He laughed and spread his arms. “And behold! A new form of life floats upon the winds of space.
What vast, unimaginably complex creatures will evolve from this first simple cell, a million years hence?”
Rebel looked up sharply. “Which one of you is that?”
Again that strange laugh. “The pattern-maker, I guess you’d call me. I’m the intuitive one, the persona that guesses at the big picture, that decides what we think about God and infinity. Of course, it’s only a name. In an Aboriginal hunting party, I’d be the shaman.”
“Hah?”
“Don’t you know where the tetrad comes from? Eucrasia patterned us after the ancient Aboriginal hunting party.
They went out in groups of four, and no matter what individuals they picked, during the hunt they took on four distinct roles—the leader, the warrior, the mystic, the clown. It made for a remarkably stable and efficient group.
And it makes for a remarkably stable and efficient mind.”
This was all very familiar. Staring out into the darkness, Rebel saw half-formed memories of Eucrasia’s past striving to take shape. “I thought she was a persona bum?”
“Well, a little bit of a persona bum, yeah. But a hell of a good wetsurgeon in your own right.”
“In her own right.”
“Whatever.” As they talked, Wyeth occasionally turned away to touch an unseen control or murmur an order.
People continually passed through the lobby. A squad of security samurai took the elevator up to the docking ring, armed with truncheons and barbed pikes, and looking dangerous. In their wake, a young kid with mahogany skin strode in. He stood at the window, hands behind back, peering out with elaborate interest.
“What are you doing here?” Rebel asked coldly.
“Hey, I got experience in security work.” Maxwell put a hand on her shoulder, and she stood, knocking it away.
Without looking up, Wyeth said, “He’s a messenger. I need any number of runners who can take messages in and out of the tanks.”
“He’s not painted as a messenger.”
“Yes, well, we’re dealing with the Comprise here. The less programming the better.”