“No. I don’t want anyone screwing with my mind.”
He sighed. “Well, you’ve got to be able to defend yourself. So we’ll have to reprogram you the old-fashioned way, with an instructor and lots of practice. Same results, just takes a lot more time and sweat. Treece.” A thick little troll of a samurai slipped from his broomstick and floated beside it, one hand touching the saddle. He had a dark face and a froggish mouth. “Teach her.”
Treece unlashed two singlesticks from his back and offered one to Rebel. She dismounted and accepted it.
They both tied cloaks to saddles and kicked their vehiclesaway. “Good. Now take a whack at me.”
Rebel eyed the swart little man, shrugged, and lashed out fast and hard, flinging back her opposing arm to control her drift. She was not at all surprised to see Treece slip out from under her blow—he was, after all, the instructor—but she was amazed when he slammed the back of her stick with his own, and the added energy set her tumbling end over end. “First lesson,” Treece said.
“You’re going around and around one little point in your body, something like an axis. That’s your center of mass.”
“I know that!” Rebel said angrily, wishing Wyeth weren’t watching her. She concentrated on not getting dizzy. “I grew up weightless.”
“I grew up in gravity. Does me no good against somebody programmed judo.” He let her spin. “Now the center of mass is very important. First off, you set somebody spinning around it, their effectiveness is lessened. Got all they can do to keep themselves oriented—their thrusts and parries won’t be as crisp as they might be.” He reached out with his stick and Rebel seized it, putting herself stable in relation to him again.
“Second, you’re going to want to remember to strike at the center of mass.” He poked at her with the tip of his staff.
“Try it yourself. Move around all you like. What’s the one point of your body you can’t move when you’re afloat? It’s your center of mass. It just stays there.” He jabbed at her again. “Now. Move away from this.”
All in a flash, Rebel slammed her singlestick forward, two-handing it against his weapon with a crack that made her palms smart. Reaction threw her over his head, and on the way by she took a swipe at his skull. Treece brought his stick up for a parry and hook that brought them back to stable positions. “Absolutely right,” he said. “When you’re afloat, all serious movement is borrowed from your opponent.”
The samurai all floated in a plane, honoring a consensushorizon. Treece wheeled upside down, leering at her. “So touching your opponent is both the source of opportunity and your greatest danger. Take my hand.” Rebel reached out, and instantly he had seized her wrist, climbed her arm, and taken her throat between stick and forearm. “I could snap your neck like this. Once you’ve been touched, you’re vulnerable. But you can’t accomplish a damned thing without touching your opponent.” He moved away, grinned sourly at her. “That’s what makes it a skill.”
Wyeth had been leaning back in his saddle, eyes closed, directing his pocket empire via a transceiver equipped with an adhesion disk. Now he opened his eyes and said,
“That’s as nice a paradigm for political maneuvering as I’ve ever heard.”
Rebel started to respond and almost didn’t hear her instructor’s stick whistling toward her in time to parry.
“No small talk!” Treece snapped. “We’re done with talk now anyway. No more theory, no more gab, just dull, repetitive exercise. Rest of today and every day until you get it right, is nothing but sweat.”
A long time later, he looked disgusted and spat into the orchid. “Enough. Same time tomorrow.”
Samurai brought up their broomsticks. Rebel felt exhausted, but pleasantly so. Aware of her every muscle.
Luckily, Eucrasia had kept her body in good shape.
They rode to the edge of the orchid and stopped. Wyeth hitched his broom to an air root, and Rebel followed suit, while the guard moved away, expanding their patrol.
Wyeth clambered along a thick trunk, inexpertly grabbing for handholds. Rebel followed more gracefully.
They came to the end of the plant, a break here as sudden and startling as when a climax forest gives way to grassland. Out in the darkness, distant stretches of the air plant were like streamers of luminous clouds. Alone and bright, the sheraton spun like a wheel. Its light was redder now, almost noontime orange. The silvery glimmeringsabout it were people flitting to and fro like mayflies.
Finally Wyeth said, “This is the first time I’ve ever had people working under me. I’ve always been something of a lone wolf.”
Rebel looked at him, not sure what to say. At last she feebly joked, “More of a lone wolfpack, hey?”
“I guess.”
More silence. Then, “What’s it like?” Rebel asked.
“Having four personas?”
“Well… when I’m not actually in use, I don’t really do anything. I have a passive awareness of myself. I see what’s going on. It’s like there are four of us standing around a small stage, with a bright light on its center. We watch everything that happens, hear it all, feel it all, but we don’t do a thing until we step into the light. When we’re in the dark, we don’t really much care. Sometimes all of us are in the light, and—” His voice changed slightly—“sometimes two of us are in the light, but one keeps his mouth shut. Another half hour monitoring and I expect to be spelled.” His voice changed back again. “That was my warrior aspect. Right now he’s directing security back in the sheraton. That frees me up to use the body.”
“That’s weird,” Rebel said. “The way your voice changes.
You don’t really have to speak out loud to communicate with yourself, do you? I mean, you can think something and the others will pick up on it?”
“No, I have to talk or at least subvocalize, because… well, thoughts are most of what a persona is, you see. They’re the architecture, they define the shape and existence of a persona, where it starts and where it lets off. We can’t share our thoughts directly—”
“—without breaking down the persona,” Rebel finished for him. “Yeah, that’s right, they’d all merge together, like breaking the membrane between twinned eggs.”
“Eucrasia’s training is really coming back to you.”
Rebel looked away. “You don’t have to sound so cheerful about it. It’s like—I feel these memories closing in on me, crushing me. They’re all hers, and none of them mine, and I can feel myself being affected by them, you know? I think they’re changing me, making me more like her.” She fought down a dark, helpless urge to cry. “Sometimes I think all those memories are going to rise up and drown me.”
Wyeth touched her arm. “Your persona is only a mask,”
he said in his pattern-maker voice. “Ultimately it’s not important. You — your being, your self — are right here, in the compass of your skull and body.” Rebel shivered again under his touch, and she turned to him. Then, it was like the singlestick exercise of climbing your opponent’s arm—it happened all in a furious instant, too fast for thought. Wyeth’s arms crushed her to his body, and they were kissing each other. She wanted him so desperately it was hard to believe that he had reached for her first.
“Come on.” Wyeth drew her back into the orchid, into a space that was dark and sheltered. He slid her cloak from her and set it to the side. His hands moved down her body, rolled away her cache-sexe. He buried his face in the side of her neck.
“Wait,” Rebel said. “I want the big guy.”
He looked at her questioningly.
“Your warrior aspect. I want to make love to you while you’re being the warrior.”
Later, Rebel went out riding with the fool. They laughed and joked as they went no place in particular. “You’re going to have to give up your irrational prejudice against wetprogramming,” Wyeth said, smiling. “It’s useful stuff.
If I didn’t have another persona running the sheraton, I couldn’t be out here now, gallivanting about with you.”