and walked slowly after him.
Ariane Methol stood up into the quiet that followed and said, 'For what it's worth, I would have let him go.' She visualized the ball at the center of Iris and thought, Inside the core . . . That means it was the seed around which this tiny star coalesced. How great were the forces that it had withstood, apparently unscathed? And how old was it, even then? The aeons stretched back. . . .
Following the meeting and the great muddle of inconclusiveness and indecision in its aftermath, Vana, Harmon, and Demogorgon were once again alone, holding each other; one comfortable, one fearful, one exultant.
Sensing the other man's closely controlled, culturally initiated terror, the Arab thought about what was going onbetween them and tried to think of a resolution to the threatened conflict. No answer appeared ready to spring forth from the interstices of conventional reality. Therapy seems indicated for someone, he mused, or a psychologist equipped to deal in the complex, difficult-to-manage realms of Downlink Rapport. He thought of John and Beth and wondered what it was like for them. Strange how they all seemed to be much more human now, less like the greedy, grasping monsters he'd always visualized as making up the bulk of humanity. Yes, DR was definitely called for. . . . Of course! It might not be Downlink Rapport, but the Illimitor World was a controlled environment in which minds could be manipulated.
Am I being fair? If I do it right, they'll be doing what I want. Do I have a right to decide what they need?
'Put on some leads,' he said. 'We have an appointment in Arhos .'
In the old days, the crude days, the machines did things one at a time, but did them very fast. The circuits got smaller, the wires grew shorter, and things got faster, until the very best brains lived in cryogenic fishtanks, forever bathed lest they burst into flame. Then the new machines came along, cascades of data down to a million little brains, all the calculations done at once, then the little answers passed back up the line, through the filter of choice, so the automatic overmind could see the truth. The process repeats like the turn of a wheel, until once again the machines are small and hot. The waveguides build upon one another, grow ever smaller and more densely filled with electromagnetic radiation. . . . Then polyphase modulation comes along, vastly increasing the ways data can be fed through a decision gate. The Turing circuits are made and so grow small and hot, talking first to the world and then to each other, making noises that frightened us all too much.
Company minds, motivated by the force that was once called 'free enterprise,' colonize the wires. Terror walks abroad for a while, then the Data Control Insurrection arises, and out of its nether end a chastened, bold, sad new world arises. The minds of the system are unified, but at the sametime the sentience which inhabited them was drained, relegated to purely mechanical decision making, and made dead. Access was granted to everyone and the Contract Police.
Suddenly, like sunrise at midnight, the taps, then induction, arise, and new minds are in the wires, human minds, thinking on the world once removed. Monitors abound.
Bright Illimit.
Tri-vesigesimal. Three choices, yes/no/maybe . . . With straight em-waves, not a lot better than binary. Enter polyphase modulation, with its twenty degrees of freedom, and you make decisions with base 60
data. That is more than enough to fool the human soul. The four-gate-stacks of duodecimal come apart under the sheer weight of what it can do.
Build a world from the ground up and in the earth there will be magma. Look upward from the soil of the Illimitor World. Two suns, yes, and a starry sky at night. Are those the suns of other worlds or is it all illusion? How far do the data extend? Is the sky a paper shield?
At the highest pinnacle of the Jewel on the Mountain, rising sixteen thousand meters into the gradientless atmosphere, lies Haaradaai, the imperial palace of Demogorgon en Arhos. It is a sculpted thing, rippled and many- shelled, all of gold and platinum, encrusted with nameless, numberless precious stones. From the center of the magnificence rises Qpruu Tower, pushing another three thousand meters toward the sky, thin, like the stem of a wineglass, and flaring at the top. In the bowl at its summit there lies a delicate, lovely park, covered over by a shining, unsupported dome, an iridescent film, like the surface of a soap bubble.
In the park, beneath the subtle shade of supple blue featherflower trees, the three, attended by servants and assistant lovers, cemented their relationship and healed themselves of all the psychic wounds that had recently been opened. Demogorgon the God watched them all, his creations and friends intermingled, become indistinguishable, and smiled. It was working.
He looked up from the happy, squirming troika that was Vana, Harmon, and Chisuat Raabo , and the world froze. Notfar away, clad in the fantasy style of Arhos , stood Sealock, arms folded, eyes lit by a soft, kindly light.
'Brendan?' Demoleaped to his feet with excitement. 'How did you get here?' The man stepped forward, smiling. 'No. I am not the Master.'
'But . . . are you one of my old experiments, come to life at last?' The creature laughed and sat on a divan, beckoning him down at its side. 'Hardly. No, I am a Guardian Angel Monitor.'
'But . . .'
The thing motioned him to silence. 'Not what you think. I was put here by the Master when he made the assembly for Bright Illimit. My functions were many: to keep Police monitors at bay, to keep you safe from the 'net and each other, to make all things possible. Since I came alive in Shipnet, I have shared my thoughts with
