“I don’t follow you.”
“People change, minute to minute. They show you different sides, different aspects. You and I are treating each other differently now than we did at the beginning of the day. Reactions vary. Moods vary. Not Lucian. He’s exactly the same as he was at the start. It’s like he’s locked into one mood, one moment, one idea. We only get to see one aspect, because that’s all there is.”
“Hmmmm. Could be the rest of it is there, and he just needs to figure how to let it out?”
“Not likely we’ll understand him if he does,” Larry said darkly. “He’s not exactly easy to follow. In more ways than one.”
“Ah, something new on that,” Marcia said. “We’ve been pulling in every expert we can, and they believe he’s got some sort of damage to his speech centers—or else the Charonians didn’t do such a good job connecting to them.”
“In other words, he can’t talk very well,” Larry said. “That much I could have told you.”
“He may not be very good at it, but he’s trying,” Marcia said. “Trying very hard. Our tame experts tell me he probably can’t understand speech very well, either, that’s he’s having trouble with words in any form. Massive dyslexia. The signs in that imaginary tunnel you’re in aren’t intelligible, for example.”
“So?”
“So if he can’t talk, and he can’t write, all he’s got left is visual signaling, and he’s having trouble with that, too.”
“Wait a minute. So he’s walking me through this imaginary maze to show me something he can’t talk about? Showing me is the only language he’s got left?”
“Right.”
“Then why doesn’t he take me straight to what I need to see? Bring up the image I need to see?”
Marcia did not answer at first. “Marcia? Did you hear me?”
“I heard you. I was just trying to work up the nerve to answer you. Look, this next is just my idea, all right? I haven’t talked it through, and there’s no data to back it up.”
“All right. You’ve got me good and nervous,” Larry said.
“Okay. I was thinking. Yes, he’s walking through a mind. But why are we assuming it’s his mind?”
“My God. The Wheel.” Larry looked around the tunnel in sudden alarm, half-expecting to see a horde of Charonians materialize.
“Why not? The Wheel’s dead, but most of it was electronics and circuits and memory blocks. They’re not going to rot. The circuits, the pathways, are still there, if you know how to read and interpret them.”
“But wait,” Larry protested. “This tunnel looks halfway like humans made it. Charonians don’t make signs or light fixtures.”
“You’re seeing some element of the Wheel’s dead, frozen memory as perceived and interpreted by Lucian. His mind is making analogs and interpretations of what’s really there. That’s why he can’t lead you directly to what it is he wants to show you. He’s in the Wheel’s memory system, and the Wheel’s dead, with half the circuits destroyed. He’s trying to find his way through, trying to find a way forward and lead you there.”
“Sweet God. That almost makes sense.” Larry stood up, and winced as the exoskeleton chafed against his shoulder. Walking through an alien mind… The back of his neck tingled, and he felt the overwhelming urge to look behind himself—as if there could be something there. Suddenly he wasn’t tired anymore. He toggled back to the comm circuit. “Come on,” he said to Lucian. “Let’s get this over with.”
“Come,” Lucian said. “Times goes. Not long.”
Marcia MacDougal watched the repeater video through eyes numbed with weariness. The central display on her terminal was repeating the imagery being fed to the VR system’s right-eye display. It jerked and wobbled and swayed with every movement of Larry’s head. It was important for her to see what he saw, but it was not easy to watch. Selby, sitting at the console next to Marcia’s, wasn’t having a much easier time of it. She looked like death warmed over, and Tyrone Vespasian was not in much better shape.
Larry was standing up, turning, facing forward, following Lucian as they moved through the world that Lucian was imagining for them. The tunnel shimmered, shook, dissolved, and suddenly the two of them were walking along the lunar surface, the now-vanished Earth riding in the sky. Larry must have been having a hell of a time dealing with the abrupt changes of scenery. It seemed as if they were moving through random images dredged from Lucian’s past.
“Bloody mess, isn’t it?” Selby asked.
Marcia sighed, nodded, and rubbed her eyes. She wasn’t quite sure which mess Selby was referring to. There were so many to chose from. She leaned back in her chair and looked up at the confusion of the control center. That was a laugh. If there was one thing completely absent here, it was control. It was a jumble of hardware in a bubble tent inside a side tunnel of the Wheelway. No one even understood exactly what was going on. They had used Lucian Dreyfuss’s preserved body as their lab rat—but now the lab rat had taken over the experiment, and sent the research staff scuttling in all directions. There was nothing here but too many bodies and too much computer gear crammed into too small a space, all the consoles and computers and simulators jammed in every which way, all the experts they had pulled in from everywhere hovering about, trying to watch and understand and be helpful. The most help most of them could offer would be to go home, but Marcia couldn’t think of any polite—or effective—way of telling them that.
They had pulled in experts in brain structure, in abnormal psychology, in virtual reality simulation systems and TeleOperator op-erations and Charonian artifacts and medical imaging and vision systems and a half-dozen other disciplines besides. There were no experts in putting them all together. Yet. Maybe there would be when this was over.
For the moment, Marcia would have traded the whole roomful of brainpower for one person who could give her solid, definitive answers to a pair of questions: What in the world was Lucian Dreyfuss doing? Was there any purpose to his actions, or was Lucian just wandering some hallucinatory interior landscape at random, his mind unhinged, with Larry forced to follow behind?
Sooner or later—almost certainly sooner—they were going to have to get Larry out of that suit and give him some rest. Then would be the moment to bring out Vespasian, let him try and keep Lucian company for a while.
But Marcia knew, better than anyone, just how fragile their link to Lucian was, how many variables were tangled up together. No one completely understood the hookup they were using. If Marcia was right, somewhere on the other side of the circuit the human VR system was indirectly linked into the Lunar Wheel’s memory system, with Lucian Dreyfuss serving as the link between them. They were that close to breaking into the enemy’s Heritage Memory. She wasn’t about to make any changes that might break that link before she had to. If that meant driving Larry to and beyond the point of exhaustion, then so be it.
She looked back to the display terminal and saw the image change again—no, not change. Take flight. She watched as Lucian Dreyfuss looked up into the stars as seen from the Moon—and then stepped up into the sky.
She blinked and looked again. Yes. Lucian was walking on nothing, striding upward and forward.
“Marcia—he just started flying!” Larry said over her headphones.
“Follow him,” she said. “This is the first impossible thing he’s done since he woke up. It could be important. He’s been in fog, tunnels, and enclosed, covered spaces. Maybe he’s been looking for the sky all this time. He wanted to show us something in the sky.”