“I won’t do it,” Rebel said. “I won’t let anyone touch my mind, I… I just won’t, is all.”
Wyeth turned away. There was tension in the muscles of his back. After a very long time, Rebel touched his shoulder, and he turned back abruptly, almost violently.
“Why are you being so stubborn?” he cried. “Why?”
“I don’t know why,” Rebel admitted. “It’s just the way I am, I guess.”
7
BILLY DEFECTOR
Rebel woke to an empty bed. She breakfasted and went in search of Wyeth. A pierrot directed her through a rock garden and around a kitchen, and a samurai sent her past the orgy pits and down a ramp. She came to a bottom ring room where three holographic wetware diagrams spun slowly in the air. Rebel saw that they were morphs of the same personality. Judging by the sickliness of the main branches and twisted distribution of the lesser limbs, it was a very badly damaged persona indeed.
The Comprise child sat beneath the rotating green spheres. He hadn’t slept. His face was puffy, his eyes glazed. His orange skin was blotchy with grey patches.
“What’s your name?” Wyeth asked. “Do you have a name?”
The boy shook his head. “I… uh, what?” Wyeth repeated the question, and without raising his eyes, the child said,
“B-Billy. Billy B-Be…” His voice stuttered to a halt.
Wyeth grinned and tugged the child’s braid. “We’ll call you Billy Defector, okay? Because you’ve come over to our side, you’re going to be human now. Would you like that?”
“He’s not going to thank you for doing this to him.”
“Shut up, Constance. Now, Billy, do you remember being a part of the Comprise? Do you remember what it was like?”
Billy’s head jerked up, eyes fearful. His hands twisted in his lap. Then he looked down again and mumbled, “I…
yes.”
“Good. Do you remember the briefing you got before coming here?” Billy said nothing. “Do you remember your instructions?”
Samurai parted for Rebel, and she slipped into the room. Her guard stayed outside. Freeboy glanced at her quickly from one corner, then away. His lips were thin, and he stared rigidly unblinking at Constance. Rebel walked over to him and whispered, “What happened to the kid’s face?”
“What? The blotches? We injected a phage under the skin to neutralize his dye; it takes a few days to flush it out of the system. Itches some, too. But since he’s not Comprise anymore, your boss doesn’t want him marked as one.”
“I thought your apple was supposed to deprogram itself.”
Freeboy curled his lip. Without looking at her he said pedantically, “For a normal psyche, a Billy Bejesus is a harmless, ego-intensive shyapple that leaves nothing behind but memories. But the Comprise have only embryonic egos—even the memory of having a strong personal identity is damaging to them. Changes the creatures drastically.”
“Shock imprint syndrome,” Rebel said, Eucrasia’s memories coming to her effortlessly. “Yes, of course.”
At the sound of her voice, Wyeth turned. “Sunshine!
Just the person I wanted to see. It seems you and I are the closest things to competent wetprogrammers we have.” He snapped open a thin white case and ran a finger down oneline of wetwafers. Hundreds of codified character traits, skills, compulsions and professions rippled under his touch. “I’d expected to just program up some experts. But it seems the regulations have changed in the last few years. Wetprogramming ware is very tightly controlled now. Beautiful, hey? None of the other professions are protected like that.”
Without any sense of transition, Rebel was at the case.
Her hands floated down over lines of joys, fears, sorrows, and ecstasies with unhesitating sureness, and teased out a manual skills program. It was for vacuum-casting ceramics as thin and delicate as soap bubbles. She slid it into an analyzer, tilting back her head to see its effect on the diagram overhead. The r-branch was straightened, but a self-destructive paradigm opened up near the midsection of the n-branch.
The rift was easily filled by altering the sensorium distribution and heightening religious susceptibility.
Rebel eased two more wafers into the analyzer, adjusted tone readings, and edited out a few irrelevancies. This strengthened the n-branch, but kinked the 1-branch at its first major split, so she replaced the ceramics wafer with a woodworking package. Little by little, the template began to shape up.
This was the great challenge, to find the health hidden within a damaged psyche and to assemble the programs that would restore it. She lost herself in the work. Some time later—minutes? hours?—she looked up again and found the interrogation was still going on. Not much progress had been made.
“Billy, do you remember being Earth? Do you remember what it was like?”
“It was like—” The child stopped and swallowed.
“Nothing happened. It was warm. No thoughts. Many thoughts. Nothing was real.”
“What kind of thoughts?”
Billy closed his eyes for a long moment. Then, in a rapid monotone, he said, “Rotate grating six raise two and rotate again reroute quote the Comprise agree in principle but with reservations unquote raise the vial of eagle’s blood reroute using Allen wrench adjust the potentiometer to the red mark reroute ship to Sanfrisco marked green code green reroute injecting kerosene between vascular stations seventeen and twelve reroute railroad bedding excavation—”
“Stop!”
Billy obeyed.
“What’s the problem?” Rebel asked.
Wyeth looked disgusted. “It’s all garbage. Bits and pieces jumbled together at random. I’m not going to learn anything from this child because he never knew anything.
He never thought a complete thought through in his life.
He just processed a constant flow of babble.”
Now Constance folded her arms, glaring at Wyeth. “He’s used to being a part of oceanic thought. You’ve ripped him out of his natural environment. Of course you can’t get any sense out of him… Look at him! He’s been damaged. Being remade in the mold of a human individual is a major devolutionary step for him.”
“Is it?”
“Yes, it is. God damn that superior smile, it is! This is the way that life evolves, from simple to complex. We’re all on an evolutionary voyage from the small and uncomplicated to the macrocosmic. From one-celled plants to comet oaks.
From amoebae through fish to apes. From simple sensation through sentience, intelligence, and then macrointelligence. Can’t you see the progression? All of life evolves toward Godhead.”
“A very pretty theory, but with all due respect, it’s full of shit.”
The boy was sweating. Constance wiped his brow. Hebegan breathing heavily, and she dabbed a fluid on his throat. As it sank through the skin, his breathing eased.
“You—”
Movement at the door. “Sir?” Two samurai escorted in a tall Comprise. “This one said he had to talk with you personally.”
“You have one of our number,” the Comprise said.
“Return him.”
Wyeth shifted slightly, put his hand on the child’s shoulder. Looking at Constance, he said, “Billy? Do you want to return?”
Billy trembled. His eyes darted here, there, everywhere but toward the Comprise. His body twisted away spasmodically. “In his condition, he can’t possibly give informed—” Constance began.
“Why?” Rebel asked the Comprise. “I mean, he can’t be much use to you in his condition. What do you want him for?”
“Experimentation. Dissection.”
Constance opened her mouth, shut it again. The Comprise spoke into the sudden silence. “We also require a good analytical laboratory, a surgery, and a supply of the drug administered to us. We will need to take a large number of tissue samples. The analytical equipment should be suitable for a comprehensive mapping of chemical trace effects in the brain. Earth will of course pay for your trouble.”
“The hell you say.” Wyeth’s face was hard.
Before the Comprise could respond, Billy bent forward, covering his head with frantic hands, and began to cry.
Gingerly, Rebel sat beside him, put an arm around his shoulders. He turned, throwing himself at her, and buried his head between her shoulder and neck.