background. Distorted biblical quote. I will fear no evil because evil fears me. Sometimes he would go to stare at it and grin. He liked the thought. He wasn't the only one. Cass Mitchell, the lab's incredibly ancient founder, something like a hundred and thirty years old, also came to look at it. Once, the wizened creature looked up at him and winked. 'Looks just like my dad!' he cackled. Another time the old man, who was kept alive only by the prostheses that his wealth could afford, had muttered, 'Go ahead, bitch! Make my bed!' As he turned away, Sealock supposed that, if he lived long enough, brain rot would get him in the end as well.
But I won't be his age for a hundred and ten years, he thought. What would biotech be like then?
Most people don't live that long anyway. The average age of death from systemic failure was around ninety. Maybe I'll be run over by an RT-mod next Tuesday. . . .
He walked the dark roads, stood beneath the glittery lights of the entertainment shells. It was in vogue for the hookers to go naked these days. Some of them wore body paint, or tattoos, and many shaved their pubic hair into artistic patterns, or off entirely. That had an appealing look to it. You could see what you were getting into.
He stood and watched. They turned their tricks on the street and it made a show that amused him. Nearby, a hairless woman stood bent over, holding her ankles while a customer fulfilled his needs in her. The fee was already in her tote bag, representing the last days of the ancient money economy. Sealock felt himself growing horny and walked on.
At home . . .
Brendan Sealock lived quietly. He sat at the table and worked on his problems with the Duodecimal Work-Frame Inequalities. They had only been solved five years ago and were hard to understand. In the bed, Cara Mia entertained a matched set of burly prizefighters. They were larger men than Sealock, but in much poorer condition. He paused to watch them humping away, and speculated. . . .
Projections. Projections. Tensors and maximalizations . Optimal courses and winding rivers of thought. As Sealock gave up his life in chunks and great bites, reliving it as it left him, Centrum replaced the pieces from its own modulus of experience. Similar machines can be exchanged one segment at a time until they are interchanged, without ever having been moved. Becoming. Becoming. Seedee life flowed into him as a steady stream of thick, rich oil.
Seven Red Anchorelles—7red, he was called—worked at a desynthesizer unit deep in the folds of the Mother Ship sea. He was happy in his tasks, secure in the knowledge that he too contributed to the advancement of the Grand Design, as much as anyone under the everlasting light of the Starseeder Centrum. Living his life against the backdrop of the Wavy Matrix Machine, he worked and loved and his soul evolved in a double-spiral pattern, ever outward and upward. Epicycles came and went, aglow. All along the Wavy Matrix were the great tadpole-shaped units that made the ship live. Synthesizers, the storehouses and factories that made raw materials into whatever was needed. Polyphase reactors that took current from the immense photovoltaic generators and stored it chemically, making raw materials and power as needed. Desynthesizers which took unwanted goods and returned them to a storable raw state. Interphagic units, for the storage of the world's raw substance. Here and there, like great silver balloons, were enormous vacuoles that contained a variety of gas-dependent processes. They pulsed like hearts.
Somewhere, in lands 7red had never had occasion to experience, along the great Axis, lay the flight and governing machinery. The gyroscopic control system; at the south pole, the Detection Mast and Lander Bay; at the north pole, the hot immensity of the photon drive.
Normally, the ship coasted on its course, a dirigible planetoid wafting silently along among the stars, but when a correction needed to be made a great spear of hard, coherent radiation would lance out, stabbing deep into the bright clouds of the dawning night. The universe was a billion years old now and aging rapidly. Though quasars abounded, it was black between the galaxies. 7red thought about it, pheromonic messages circulating through his infrastructure, mixing to make new ideas. The universe was a pocket, trapped far below the bubble boundary of its single-monopole domain. The rules said that there had to be other such spaces, in other such domains, probably unreachable. And beyond the eka -event horizon of the many domains? The unimaginable hot density of what one far-future daughter sentience would come to call deSitter Space. 7red could picture it in his chemicals, but the picture was a distorted one, stepped down to match his capacities, tiny circles spread through eleven dimensions reduced to the dimensionless points of a trefoil-concept mathematics. Only Centrum, last of the Starseeder forefathers, could think of it in terms of the real space-time that surrounded them. For the time being, the Creation was less than its Creator. Work ended because the task was completed and 7red, restless component in an unresting ecosystem, flew off to the Mating Nest, still thinking his happy thoughts. 7red loved to think, as they all did. He knew his history, but that was for Centrum alone to tell the Time Traveler. In the interval of flight, he expanded his concept of space.
It proceeded from the cosmic infinitesimal, vacuum boilersswelling out of nowhere to provide the vacuoles that held the packets of radical characters making up the pseudoparticles of reality, to the universal infinity, the ever receding wave front of the monopole domain, which pushed the unthinkable end point ahead of the uncrossable horizon. It was a frustrating concept, yet likable. Satisfying. He reached the Mating Nest and entered its latticework. Cooloil awaited him, her tasks completed also. They were not sexually differentiated, these Seedees, for their evolution had not included that complexity, yet the Time Traveler imposed his own regimen of still persisting ideas. 7red loved Cooloil; she stilled his raging mind, calmed his conceptualizations. Cooloil loved 7red; he stoked the banked fires of her soul, set her pheromones to singing. They made a handsome dyad, an island of simple beauty in a sea of more complex arrangements. Their song of ideal counterpoint was appreciated and envied by the vaster audience without.
They coupled.
Anophagomotor apparatuses met, anchorelles fused, arms interlocked. Their valves opened to each other in closely docked proximity and their juices flowed. The pheromonic oils, the vehicles of thought and communication, mixed and, for a while, 7red and Cooloil were one being. The Time Traveler felt their pleasure as his own and marveled at its simplicity. There was no complex machinery, no invasiveness of Downlink Rapport here. There was no remaining vestige of separateness, no identity. Nothing in his former life compared with it. It was the ideal to which all other beings of the later time must aspire in vain. He wondered at his own remaining isolation and felt despair. It was not possible for him, not in the hard-wired circuitry of a solid-state mind. Ideas came whirling. The
