Unblinking, they focused on infinity. “The walls! The walls fade like smoke! I can see through ceiling, rooms, and roof to the clouds beyond… Nay, the sky too is become pellucid and the stars stand bright and stark… But now e’en they too fade. I see…”
“What do you see, Sammy?”
For the longest moment Pepys was silent. Then,
“Music,” he said. “I see the music of the crystal spheres celestial.” He began to cry gently.
Wismon giggled. “Perfect madness. I could as easily have had him die. Come. This is only prologue to what I really wish to show you, dearest mentor.”
They exited, leaving Pepys afloat in the center of the court, weeping.
For half the length of the passage, Maxwell hesitated at each doorway and was waved on. Then Wismon nodded and Maxwell peeled back a sheet of tin, and they entered a courtyard. Again it had but a single inhabitant, a man. He had a bland face with an enormous beak of a nose.
Perched on a rope, he seemed some kind of ungainly bird.
As they entered, he looked up and smiled. “Hallo,” he said.
“Quite a crowd.”
“Yes, I’ve brought some friends to examine you,”
Wismon said. “You don’t mind?”
“Oh, no.”
“Question him,” Wismon commanded.
“All right,” Rebel said after a pause. “Do you know where you are?”
“This used to be Queen Lurline’s court. She’s gone now.
I’m the only one here. King Wismon is holding me as an experiment in recursive personality.” The man’s eyes sparkled with mirth.
“Do you know who you are?”
“King Wismon calls me Nose. For self-evident reasons.”
He rubbed his fleshy nose and chuckled. Rebel looked to Wyeth and shrugged. There was something askew in the man’s sourceless, irrational humor, but nothing in her or Eucrasia’s experience could explain it.
Wyeth looked thoughtful. “Let’s see. You showed me that last guy—Pepys?—to demonstrate how perfect a delusionary system you could create. So this must be a refinement on that. What is a step beyond delusion?” He snapped his fingers, glanced at Rebel. “Reality!” She caught his reference: It came from something she’d said when he was new-programmed, and she’d wanted to strip his persona down and start over again. Delusion was hard enough to deal with, she’d said, but a frivolous grasp of reality was worse. “You don’t believe that what you’re seeing is real, do you?”
Nose kicked his feet with joy. He had to grab at the rope to keep from floating away. “Oh, this is most entertaining.
Really!”
“Nose is a prototype of the perfect citizen,” Wismon said.
“His true persona is entirely hidden from the outside world. His surface persona is a perfectly consistent game the submerged persona plays. He thinks he is dreaming.
To him, his entire past is an irrational construct that’s just come into existence. Thus, he denies continuity but is able to act within it. He will accept anything, endure anything,for none of it is real. Which leaves me free to control his dreams. No matter what happens, he is happy to obey whatever instructions he receives. Isn’t that right, Nose?”
Nose nodded happily.
“All right,” Wyeth said sourly. “I’ll ask the question you want me to ask. Why are you showing me this creature?”
“Oh, that’s the best joke of all. Nose, why don’t you tell us who you are when you’re not dreaming?”
“Should I?” Nose laughed. “Well, what does it matter?
My name is Wyeth. I was Wismon’s mentor some years ago, and now I am his enemy. That’s why I’m dreaming about him. He’s getting out of hand, I’ll have to do something about him soon. Possibly even destroy him.
Maybe this dream will show me the pattern I have to act within.”
“That was your mystic voice,” Wismon said. “Do you care to hear your other voices? I can call them up from the depths, if you like.”
“No,” Wyeth said. “No, I… no.” He was ashen pale. “This is what you have planned for me, isn’t it?”
“What are you two talking about?” Rebel asked. Wismon mockingly mouthed the words in perfect unison with her, but she finished the sentence anyway.
“Please try not to be so obvious, Ms. Mudlark. My mentor has just realized that what I can do to his simulation I can do to him, access to metaprogrammer or not. He can be made into whatever I choose. But the joke goes deeper than that: Perhaps this man is not my mentor at all, but merely some poor fool I’ve programmed into thinking he is. Perhaps Nose here is the true Wyeth.
Perhaps neither of them is.”
“Wyeth is Wyeth,” Rebel said coldly. “If he can’t trust his own sense of self, he can take my word for it.”
“Ah, but how does he know that you exist? After all, I control the dream.”
Nose laughed delightedly.
“What I don’t understand,” Wyeth said, “is how you’ve accomplished all this in so little time. You’re a brilliant planner, but you don’t have the programming skills to write up the personas. Where did you get the programmers? There’s months of detail work in these two characters alone.”
“Thus we come full circle,” Wismon said. He flicked a finger at Maxwell, who disappeared out the doorway. “You have not yet mentioned why you entered my domain in the first place, but of course you didn’t need to. You wanted to recover the child-savant you snatched from the Comprise.”
“Yes, we came for Billy.”
“You never tested him for his aptitudes. Most careless.
To me the possibilities were obvious. Are you familiar with the cant term ‘plumber’? It means someone with a natural bent for the mechanics of wetcircuitry. In this child, the instinct is squared, or even cubed. He is preternaturally talented, a superplumber, if you will. I need only describe what I want, and he can draw it up.”
Maxwell returned, leading Billy Defector by the hand.
Behind him came Fu-ya and Gretzin, and from the apprehensive looks on their faces, Rebel could tell they had been left untouched, so they could care for him.
“A thought has been germinating, mentor, for some time, and I think it has finally come to fruition,” Wismon said. Maxwell handed the child a briefcase. “Billy. Bring up that map we made of my persona.”
Billy looked to Gretzin, and she nodded. He touched the briefcase’s surface, and an enormous wetware diagram filled all of the court with lacy green. There were tens of thousands of branchings visible to the naked eye alone.
“Test it one more time for a kink, would you?”
Billy’s fingers danced. A small red cursor zippedthrough the court, following the major persona branches, then moved to secondary and tertiary circuits. It moved too fast for the eye to fix on it for over a full minute, and then stopped. The solemn-faced child said, “No kink.”
Wismon smiled.
“Well, it was inevitable that sooner or later you’d come to the conclusion that I’ve been bluffing,” Wyeth said. “But the fact is that I’m not. You wish to believe I am because you’re unwilling to accept me as your superior. But I could destroy you here and now with a single word.”
“Then do it,” Wismon said.
“Right in the middle of your traveling freak show?”
There was an acid edge to Wyeth’s voice. “Come off it.
They’d rip my head off.”
Heavy lids crept down over Wismon’s eyes, until he appeared to be trembling on the brink of sleep. His every muscle froze to perfect stillness. Then, through lips that barely moved, he said, “Everyone here is to obey my mentor completely, no matter what he tells you to do. Only my direct orders override his. Do you understand? The two of us will talk now. Everyone else must wait outside.”
Two rude boys took Rebel by the arms and swept her through the doorway. “Are you satisfied now?” Wismon asked. But Rebel was already outside and couldn’t hear Wyeth’s answer.
Time passed.
In the quiet of the corridor, the cat women prowled up and down the rope, endlessly fascinated by their eternally new world. Their movements seemed unbearably slow to Rebel, as if they moved through a crystalizing flow of honey. One of the rude boys broke into a hutch and emerged wearing a woman’s lace collar. He primped and postured while the others laughed. Every now and then one would glance at Rebel, wistful dreams of violence in his eyes. Nose chuckled to himself.