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match the facade nature had inflicted upon him. Live up to those looks or
become a laughingstock because of them first popinjay of Kerrion space, he
prodded silently, baiting the image- And then the deeper speaker inside of him
did make an answer, whispering like a chiding data pool:
"Every animal is driven to pasture with a blow," says
Heraclitus. "It is hard to fight with anger, for what it wants, it buys at the
price of soul."
Was he, then, consumed by a passion he could not de-
tect, as the arrogant daemon in his mirror would have him believe? If so, he
did not know where, when, or why he might have hidden it.
He was en route to make peace with his mother, to
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give her back her freedom, if nothing more. Even if she refused his
friendship, continued to impose upon him her ban of silence, she would have
access to the Tyche. In it she could travel wherever she chose, not subject to
bans or decrees or the strictures laid upon pilots by their guild.
The ruse of presenting the cruiser to an infant was no longer necessary. When
it had been crucial, he had ago-
nized over its transparency. But no one had made the obvious deduction. Now,
it did not matter, so this could not be the root of his distress.
But the man in his mirror, of all men, was the only one who had never misled
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him, and as he toweled, shaved, and pulled on a clear, skin-hugging mil-suit,
then flight satins of dusky blue darker than his eyes, he dug at the
foundation of his thoughts, seeking error, a chink through which the wind of
unkind fortune might blow.
He found none, and when he slipped on boots and quit his stateroom for Tyche's
helm he was taut with irrita-
tion. Was it Bucyrus, the thought of her seeking such a poor port, despite the
storm? He threw himself into the single acceleration couch in Tyche's minimal
control cen-
tral, annoyed beyond expression. The dream, he insisted to himself, was just a
dream. The meaning of it was built of stress and unending complexity. In
Shebat's dream dances, he always wore the medallion Parma had given him, just
as he wore it now. In dreams, no matter whose, he never failed to mark it as
important. He and Shebat had decided between them that the meaning of this re-
current symbol was simply its obvious one: on his gold medallion was the
Kerrion emblem; on his heart, the weight of it never lessened. Not even in
dreams could he shed its burden. This dream, then, was one of procedure, an
admission of mistakes, a remonstrance from his inner person which said only:
You have proved yourself less than perfect, once again.
"Good morning, Tyche. Status?"
Greens came up on the encircling walls, on the arms of the black-and-silver
couch in which he sat, on canted mini-monitors before him like cases on a
docket.
' He had now done his piloting for the morning. This afternoon, they would
exit sponge.
He got up, wandered about the control central, trailed
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his hands over the manual support panel set into the wall by the lock. Here,
Kerrion redundancy stilt lurked. Here, real pilotry could, in an emergency, be
done. A second-
ary system, it dwarfed the primary helm, extending, be-
hind cosmetic panels, halfway around the curve of the room. Silver-chased
false fronts would roll away, with a push of one large, red button, to reveal
it; a pilot's couch would come up through the floor, taking position under an
emergency hatch which was indicated with red, lit ar-
rows above his head.
He left the control room, made breakfast in the galley.
Sitting there with his heated packets unopened, he drank real coffee (Earth
coffee, a special gift for Ashera) and rehearsed what he might say to his
mother to make her love him once again. His eyes wandered over lockers full of
food, over the obligatory emergency air supply and three-mil pressure-suits,
helmets hanging above them like potential ghosts waiting to be animated. He
put his legs up, crossed his feet at the ankles, and said, Tyche, line through
to Danae."
Although he had helped conceive the specs from which
Tyche was realized, he had not realized how much con-
tact with the Danae and the Marada had affected him: he wanted from Tyche the
kind of companionship Penrose got from Danae, and that was not to be. He could
have held a conversation with her inboard computers, but the cruiser's
innermost self was inaccessible to humanity, a protection for a cruiser which
must ship under diverse masters and never flinch, or imprint, never be more
than a transportation mechanism as far as any man could see.
Within her was a soul if cruisers had souls, and
Chaeron thought that perhaps they did which could keep its own time, a twistor
clock more sensitive than any other which man had made, which never lost power
or an instant of time. To do away with man's mind as timekeeper (and perhaps,
eventually, man altogether, so that a cruiser could be dispatched on automatic
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and would embark from point A and debark at point B at a desired and
prespecified moment of human time), a fur-
ther step toward humanizing or cruiserizing mechani-
cal intelligence had been taken in Chaeron's AXV. Tyche had, at her heart, a
next-to-etemal tamperproof power
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EARTH DREAMS
source that kept in constant contact with cruiserkind on purpose. To integrate
the accidental development of
cruiser-awareness into circuitry, Chaeron's theoreticians had dealt with
fundamental problems as to the nature of time. Was it discrete units, like
chronons, picoseconds, minutes a compendium of pointlike instants? Or was it
indivisible, eternal, an unbroken stream? The math said, both. The math was
revolutionary, dealing with basic problems of motion, sequentiality and
dimensionality as they had never been dealt with before. And they were long
overdue to be dealt with, codified and logically stated, now that cruisers
demonstrated the proclivity to independent thought that could only be called
'minded-
ness.' In an eight-dimensional framework, embedded in a revolutionary
spacetime manifold which, with complex numbers, could describe events in
real-time, a place had been found for cruiser consciousness in the theoretical
scheme of things. The Tyche could, hypothetically, make sponge entrance and
sponge exit entirely on its own, using for referential chronology the
synchronization of its own clock with either the base-clock which Chaeron's
shipwrights had put into sponge to tick away eternity somewhere beyond
spacetime's gate, or cruiser-sequen-
tiality itself, which would exist as long as any cruiser, anywhere, was under
power.
Doing these things had meant reexaminmg sponge theory, and that had been done,
if inconclusively.
Chaeron particularly liked one theorist's wry "layman's explanation" of his
conclusions: sponge is "heaven"; the minute amount of energy released by every
living thing when it decomposes reverts to sponge, whence it came;
the blue-green glow pervading that achronal slice is made, not of energy
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