"The vehicle part is just a fringe bennie. They're really these ultra-cool live-in pods that you connect yourself to for the most intense…"
"Give up our Amorphicoms, Eee^aholi? You're joking. Why, the mere mention of the idea at the People's Council would…"
"Right on, R. No way! The Amorphi is the coolest thing this side of…"
"And why should we give them up, you bellowing old fool? Just to humor your delusions?"
"Beezy's right. They need the Cyclogeneron, or it is Heat Death City. The end of M-31 as we know it."
"Our people will never surrender the pleasures they have struggled so hard for centuries to secure. People mil kill for the possession ofanAmorphi. To bodypilot is the most rewarding experience known to…"
"They are wickedly wasteful," Jorge concedes.
"And addictive as sin," adds Roberto, Jorge's twin and sometime needle sharer.
"A massive drain on the Grid."
"The Grid?" Linda whispers.
"It's no use. Even if I managed to win over the whole Planetary Radix, we still wouldn't possess more than a fraction of the energy we need to manufacture the Cyclogeneron. The entire tappable Grid wouldn't provide…"
"Could someone tell me why he needs an accelerator the size of a…?"
"Man! You get particles to that speed and collide them: you can Do It All. Make a new star. Create new forces. Name it."
"Only — one hope — left. Must — renew interplanetary contact — with Heli-otria."
"I give up."
"Heliotria. The other world."
"That's it! I knew it. Bishop Perpetuus. The Touring Monks. The Ikonankh."
"Sure, Mr. Massive Brain Case. I could have told you that a half hour ago."
"Much has changed since Andromeda last made contact with Heliotria. The good Bishop Perpetuus must have died generations ago."
"Will somebody please rescue me?"
"Shh! A long time ago they hyper-tapped this other planet, where these monks went about in robes chanting all the time and the head abbot gave them this jewel thing… "
"More like a little metal statue."
"And so long as they had this figure from the monks on Heliotria, the Andromedans could open up the space-time fabric between the planets. Only that was in the past, and now it's the distant future."
"I must return the Ikonankh to Helio…"
"Don't risk it, dude. You'll never get the thing back."
"… where it will act as a powerful beacon, drawing into our galaxy, across the space threshold, all those with special abilities. The ones the Heliotrians call…"
A minor emergency with Suzi Banks's new hardware precludes Linda's witnessing the polychrome passage of the Ikonankh through the opening it tears in space. She returns just in time to exclaim, "Oh, lo-lo-look! See what it's doing! How come the thing is only going after kids?"
"Because" — the shortcut Methuselah at last condescends to address her—"that's the core commercial market for this kind of bullshit. Real adults don't waste their lives watching this Gerber drool."
"Well, you're still hanging around."
"Dodgers don't start for another two hours," Nico says, with the barest giveaway glint. "Quit. You tickle me, lady, you die a slow death."
"Wait a minute." Linda breaks off the brawl. "I just got it. They're all ancient there in M-31, aren't they? They have no…?"
"That's right. Nobody knows how it came about. It's always been that way."
"Oh." The monosyllable comes up out of her throat, a bit of phlegm wrapped around an acid lemon drop that went down the wrong pipe. She will choke on it, on the image of this bewildered Thursday afternoon class, huddled around the fable-fire for whatever feeble electron-beam spark it might still emit, whatever slight stay, its half-hour postponement of heat death. Not one of them knows. Look: look now, what the primitive metal casting does. It stands still while Heliotria's ravenous fads slither past in reflex after-spasms, faster than she can track. It draws toward itself hands still raw from thumb sucking, gathering them up with the crisis touch, catapulting them, adding their increment of ergs to swell the eternally just-insufficient Grid.
The Ikonankh swims in front of her to fill the screen. She watches as the summoning trinket burrows through the tube's phosphor trail and lands in this room. It materializes, pulsing, beating its metal wings, come to recruit a last-ditch rescue for the universe's doomed omnipo-tents, to enlist these ignorant psychics, robust in their innocence, to put them to work assembling, arresting, assisting in the most desperate invention necessity ever mothered.
Meanwhile, in another galaxy just around the bend, Kraft is performing sloppy seconds on an emergency repair cobbled together by Plummer on an eleven-year-old male who was riding semifigurative shotgun in a car that a couple club brothers had taken out on community loan. Ably assisted by a cordial that subsequently registered all kinds of exotic blood concentrations, the driver power-skidded the vehicle into the rear end of a tomato-motif, twenty-four-hour pizza delivery van. The kid cohort happened to be picking his teeth with a wooden skewer at the moment of impact.
His cruising buddies would give no name for him aside from "the Rapparition," a tide they claimed he'd legally earned in brilliant public battle. The boy was past interrogation, so that was the handle that went down on the ER paperwork. Plummer's initial repair consisted of removing the larger bits of toothpick from their resting place in the boy's soft palate. The Rapparition's first slurred words upon swimming up from under the anesthetic were "The movement lives on; you can't slash it down. You can't even long to make it gone."
The scrape of the sutures makes him wretch, but the Rapparition gets the words out. By the time Kraft inherits the kid for all the rest of the patchwork, he's become Carver's blessed peacemaker. When Tony the Tuffian and that Rib Fix from the Crack Pack go tearing each other's sutures out in a territorial blood dispute, the Rapparition interposes himself between them, declaiming,
This is a plea
For u-ni-ty
Between the He and the We
And the Me and the She.
We're on a mission
Here, so don't start dissin'.
Ya got to listen to the Rapparition:
Use your God-given powers of analysis!
We got to break through this crip-pl-ing paralysis.
Kraft could not have put the matter more succinctly. Today's follow-up procedure is aimed at repairing a bit of the damage Plummer's stopgap palate patch-up has done to the Rapparition's dactyls. Nothing life shattering. In fact, almost opera buffa fare compared to much of what society has been shoving under Kraft's blade as of late. But it is, nevertheless, a long, grueling, painstaking, delicate transaction of considerable consequence to one who has chosen speech over any of the deadlier assault weapons in aggression's arsenal. A constructive bit of craftwork, placing it in the decided minority of piece labor assigned Kraft in this place.
Still under the influence of the Rapparition's cadence, half desperate to convince himself of the feasibility of a Lindaesque lightness in the face of wounds beyond fusing, or maybe just punchdrunk with overwork, Kraft notices an upbeat, potato-chip rhythm using his cerebrum as electronic drum pad while he closes. The pernicious little beat goes: Let's have a jammer (uh), I said let's jam (rest, rest, rest) in the slammer. And mixed in there, like undercoatings of old wallpaper forever unsteamable unless one is willing to gouge out half the drywall along with it, the phrase's Renaissance counterpoint: Lulla lullaby, my sweet little baby. What meanest thou to cry?