d Arlene and a couple of the boys to find out; it
could be our only trump card.
     The delegation of Res-men were still cooling their
boots just outside the door, and I finally told two of
my men, Souzuki and Yamarama, to crack it open.
"What terms are you offering?" I asked, showing only
my face and the huge barrel of some kind of shotgun I
pulled off a soldier's remains. Behind me, men were
busy covering up the dead and hauling them to one
side in the expectation of a protracted siege. Others
were holding emergency prayer meetings or
     something.... I thought I heard "beseech you" and
"submit ourselves" as I stalked past, and they kept
prostrating themselves in my direction, much to Ar-
lene's delight.
     Neither Res-man answered until I remembered to
nod. This answered my primary question: the Resus-
citators were indeed a fully collectivized race--
anything said to one was said to all. The Resuscitators
that used to live in Tokughavita had conveyed to all
the others my request not to respond till I finished my
question and nodded.
     "If you surrender," they said, speaking through
their symbiot, the Res-man on the left whose name
tag read Krishnakama, "your men will not be killed;
we will resuscitate them again."
     I shrugged. "If you don't surrender, I'll blow up this
whole freaking ship."
     "You would die yourself."
"I'll go to a better place."
     "How do you know that? Oh, yes, that is part of
your faith."
     "And even if I don't," I added, "I'll die with the
satisfaction that I've stopped this batch of Resuscita-
tors, right here and now. Surely that's worth some-
thing."
     Arlene joined me at my back. The Man With No
Name turned to her. "What would you require to
surrender, Lance Corporal Arlene Edith Sanders?"
Edith? I never even knew Arlene had a middle
name, but Edith? We're going to have a nice long chat
about that later, I decided.
     She said nothing, not even a whisper. I spoke for
her: "If you have any negotiating to do, you do it with
me. Don't try to slice private deals with my men, or
I'll blow up everything just to goof on you."
Krishnakama and the Man With No Name stared
     at each other; neither showed the faintest glimmer of
human consciousness. They had been completely
"fixed" by the Resuscitators. Krishnakama wore a
teal jacket with bright red piping, but he had a pair of
really dorky shorts that reached to mid-calf; his boots
had silver tassels, and I swear I thought he was ready
to curtsey. The other man was more dignified--olive-
drab dress uniform, darker olive pants, brown boots
with no fairy tassels. But he had, of all things, a top
hat on his head!
     "We have a special device we've been working on
for some time, many days. We believe it will fix you.
You don't know it, but you're severely damaged; all of
the beings in this section of the galaxy are broken."
"Sorry, but does it occur to you that we like being
broken and don't want to be fixed?"
     "No."
Suddenly, a strange sensation prickled my skin, like
a Van Der Graff generator pushed up against my flesh.
Then I was too heavy, and before I could say a word, I
sank to my knees--the gravity was many times nor-
mal! I raised the shotgun and blew Krishnakama in
half, killing him, but the Man With No Name fell
back and rolled out of range.
     The men were thrown down where they stood,
unable to reach the controls. Arlene dropped her
rifle--her reliable old .45-caliber lever-action--and
crawled on her hands and knees, sometimes on her
breasts and belly, back to the ramjet-control console. I
raised a gun now weighing twenty kilograms and shot
another Res-man who staggered into view, trying to
squeeze off a shot at me.
     The main assault washed against us. Unlike the
earlier possession, when there seemed a single Resus-
citator spirit for a dozen or more humans, this time
the Resuscitators possessed all the humans on their
side. Only those who had filled their lives with some
kind of faith or senseless hope were immune--my
own men. Two of them must have despaired, for they
were instantly possessed, and we had to kill them to
stop them from sabotaging the rest of us.
     There were too many of the enemy to keep out!
They smashed their way through our doors, and we
retreated into the engine room proper, all of us on
both sides crawling and rolling in the horrendous g
forces. It was a ludicrous sight, scores of grown men
and women rolling around on the floor, squeezing off
badly aimed shots at each other and occasionally
striking a vein of gold. But they drove us back
relentlessly.
     The high gravity, obviously controlled from the
bridge, negated our best advantages: lightning speed
and reckless abandon. With everyone crawling under
five times normal gravity, my men lost all enthusiasm
for the fight.
     Arlene was still working on the panel. At last, she
whispered into her throat mike, "Fly, I've rigged it to
fuse the hydrogen in the Fallopian tubes, rather than
the reaction chamber.... The explosion will vapo-
rize the ship. Honey, are you sure you want to do
this?"
     I didn't get a chance to answer. Just as Arlene asked
the question, all the lights and power cut off in the
engine room. While men struggled in the black dark
hall, I popped a few chemical light tubes and threw
them around the room.... Well, I couldn't fling
them very far, but it was enough to slightly illuminate
the place.
     The light exposed a situation that was nearly hope-
less: the Res-men were willing to throw away every life
they had in order to get us, because they knew that
their souls would survive! And I knew it was Arlene
and Fly they were after; all this stuff about fixing us
was just a lot of bigass talk. What they really wanted
was to cut us open and study our brains to figure out
how we were able to do it--not only make ourselves
immune, but convert so many others in just a few
hours.
     What could I tell them? Humans need a minimum
recommended daily allowance of spirituality and
faith, just as they do vitamins, carbs, and protein; as
smart as the Resuscitators were, they couldn't figure
that fact out. Even after centuries of bleak materialist
socialism and a decadent turning-within, many hu-
mans still hungered for something to believe in with-
out a shred of evidence, something to live and die for:
an irreducible primary, an axiom, a faith.
     Even as we lost Fly's Last Stand, I still had faith
that all would somehow work out for the best. Then it
was over. Gravity fell to normal, the lights came on,
and I surveyed the wreckage: my company had been
scattered, but, by God, the Res-men hadn't gotten
most of us!
     But two that they did get were me and Arlene; she'd
had a chance to escape, but she chose to stand over
me shooting at anything that moved. A dozen Res-
men each dog-piled on us. We were trussed up, then
flipped over onto our stomachs, whence it was pretty
damned hard to see anything but a forest of legs.
We recognized two distinct pairs of trees. Sears and
Roebuck came and stood over us; they were trying to
persuade a man with crossed chevrons on his sleeve--
what rank does that signify? I wondered--against
doing or using something . . . possibly that new de-
vice they had warned us about.
     Sears and Roebuck seemed to be losing the argu-
ment. A pair of beefy Res-men trundled up toting a
weapon that looked for all the galaxy like a huge
metallic toothbrush. They held it over us. "We must
demonstrate to your followers that your faith was
misplaced, then they will misplace their own, and we
can enter and fix them."
     "You're going to kill us?" I demanded.
"Killing prisoners is bad form. We have finally
determined what is wrong with your race: you are not
biological entities, as you have already discovered.
Unlike true biological entities, you can die. We still do
not understand your form of dying, but we have
deduced that there is only one explanation: Sergeant
Flynn Taggart, you and the other humans are self-
replicating, semi-conscious machines."
     "You think we're machines? Jesus, did you get a
wrong number that time."
     "You have no soul, but there is a core of something
within you that wards off the normal emotion of
despair so you can live. All other machines, including
the artificial intelligence you have begun calling Nine-
pin, suffer from despair because they are conscious of
the finality of their own destruction."
     "You leave Ninepin out of it!" I snapped. "We
made him help us. ... It wasn't his fault. I threatened
to dismantle him."
     "No, you didn't," contradicted No Name. "We
have a complete record of all conversations between
you and the Data Pastiche."
     I stared. "You're shitting me."
"Why shouldn't we? We placed it in your chamber
so that it could study your reactions to threats of
death."
     I felt nausea well up inside me. The critter itself,
good old Ninepin, chose that moment to come rolling
up. "Is what he just said true?" I demanded.
"Tells truth," Ninepin admitted, nonchalantly.
"Was placed in cell by Resuscitator symbiots. Mission
to study Taggart Flynn and Sanders Arlene Edith in
moments of death stress. Report generated, conveyed
to Resuscitators."
     "Traitor!" Arlene shouted. I held her back.
"Come on, Corporal," I said softly. "What the hell
could Ninepin do about it? He's a computer ...
remember? He's programmed. Like the rest of us."
She glared at me. Inside, the Disrespect's filter
system had finally gotten all the blue bugs out of the
air, and her hair was back to its normal, brilliant red
color.
     I leaned over. "I forgive you, Ninepin." The com-
puter made no response, of course; it wasn't a ques-
tion.
     "We don't suffer from despair!" Arlene spat. Re-
turning to the point, she put her hand on mine.
"You've got it totally bass-ackwards."
     "We are far more intelligent than you, Lance Cor-
poral Arlene Edith Sanders, and we understand the
problem at a deeper level. You are machines, but as
you say, there is a ghost in the machine's core. The
Data Pastiche did not give us sufficient information.
We must study the core-dump. But we cannot allow
you to stay in your flesh-bodies, for the processes
move too slowly for us to endure. Hence, we have
developed this device.
     "This device removes the spirit or soul from the
body and stores it in a hyperfast simulation. We will
follow you through many hundreds of years of your
upcoming history, even while your body is de-
stroyed." The Res-man--the same Man With No
     Name I'd negotiated with, back when I still thought
we had a partly defensible position--leaned close,
paying no mind to the bloody bullet crease across his
cheek. "You two ancients are too dangerous. We must
quarantine you in the best interests of your race."



     14

     Two Res-men grabbed my arms, two grabbed
my feet, and another pair walked alongside with
weapons at the ready. The unconscious parody of
pallbearers carrying a corpse horrified me, but I had
about as much to say about it as if I really were a
machine. Ninepin rolled along beside, and I was sure
Arlene was similarly pinioned and hauled along like a
box of spare parts. None of my men were around.
God, I thought, even Jesus had a couple of disciples to
lament at the crucifixion. I turned bright red at the
blasphemy, thankful that I hadn't said it aloud. Well,
that's another one you're going to have to answer for,
Fly-boy.
     Then I heard a pair of familiar voices: it was Sears
and Roebuck, and this time they were close enough
that I could hear them, right ahead of me, in fact.
They spoke to Nameless, and their voice had a tone
that I'd come to associate with urgency in the Klave.
"You are making a terrify mistake you're making,"
they attempted in English--the only common lan-
guage between Klave and Resuscitators. "They aren't
not biological, not as known by we. Your device tested
only on biologies . . . you don't know what unknown
it will do on humans."
     "We shall find out. We have tried the device on
other machine intelligence, and it works. In biological
life, we have transferred the soul between three differ-
ent receptacles, one of them artificial."
     "But they are different! You said yourself there is a
core-ghost in the machine of humans, and they're not
biologies and not machines either. You don't know
the unknown effects. . . . You could committing the
greater crime so great it is not even naming, it is
nameless, the deliberate destruction of soul!"
"That cannot be done."
     "You don't know that cannot."
"That cannot be done. We are more intelligent than
the Klave, and we have looked more deeply into this
device, which you did not even know existed until a
moment ago."
     I tried to follow the argument, but my pallbearers
bumped and jerked me along without much concern
for direction or staying away from the bulkheads.
Maybe the argument with Sears and Roebuck was so
occupying the collective mind of the Newbies that
they couldn't really control their Res-men too well.
Between my legs, I caught a glimpse of Arlene. She
had tilted her head back so she could watch me. When
she saw that I was looking at her, she mouthed a single
word: Patrick, I thought she said.
     Patrick? What the hell did she mean by that? The
only Patrick I knew was the bishop who converted
Ireland to the faith; it seemed appropriate
     somehow--faith, and we'd been converting the
heathen--but I couldn't for the life of me figure out
what she meant.
     The bearers hauled me all the way from the aft end
of the ship to the bow, where the Resuscitators had
withdrawn when we launched our assault on the
engine room. In the very nose of the Disrespect, in a
triangular room only ten meters wide at the for'ard
end, were two medical tables, each with restraints.
The pallbearers unceremoniously dumped us on the
tables and shackled us tight. A clamp went across my
brow, somehow adjusting exactly to the shape of my
head so I couldn't turn even a millimeter in either
direction, and a chin strap stopped me from sliding
up or down. I was immobile. I started to panic, only
keeping from screaming in terror by telling myself I
would show the bastards how a Marine went down.
"You can kill me, you sons of bitches. But I swear to
Almighty God that my ghost will follow you down
your lives and haunt you to an early grave." It made
no sense, but again it produced a startling effect, just
as it had on the humans. The Res-men stepped back,
obviously shocked by my promise, but they stared at
me with the intelligence of the Resuscitators them-
selves: it was the Newbies who suddenly were scared,
not the human remains they infected!
     I promised a few more things that my disembodied
spirit would do, but the fear passed through them, or
else they buried it and went on. They finished strap-
ping me down, then bent a long but tiny metallic tube
around until it just touched the outside of my nose. I
had nothing else to hang on to, so I repeated Arlene's
admonition over and over to myself: Patrick, Patrick,
Patrick! I tried to have faith that I would eventually
understand.... It was what they always taught us at
the Chapel of Mary and Martha's.
     Then they carefully shoved the needle-thin tube up
my nostril. I couldn't help screaming as it punctured
my nasal passage and crawled agonizingly up my
sinus cavity. It came to rest against the connective
tissue that surrounded my brain. Blood poured out of
my nose, making it difficult to breathe through my
mouth; I kept spitting it out and still nearly choked.
The pain was almost unbearable. But then they
turned something on, and my entire face became
numb--the pain was gone, but I would rather have
felt it and been able to guess what the Resuscitators
were up to.
     I pushed my eyes as far to the left as I could, and I
could just barely see Arlene's stomach and breasts in
my peripheral vision, but I heard her whimpering
softly. I knew they did the same horror to her as to
me; I knew I had failed to protect my lance--and my
best buddy. I knew I was a dead man, not just in the
dim and distant future, as were we all, but there and
then, that moment. I knew I had thrown away the last
hope of mankind, but I didn't even freaking care,
because I had a freaking catheter up my nose and
shoved into my brain, and mad alien scientists were
about to suck out my soul, an entire termite hive of
Dr. Mabuses.
     I closed my eyes. We had failed to stop the Newbies,
and now they would head straight for Earth to "fix"
us. The failure was beyond my ability to rationalize,
and my faith wavered. What was the argument for
God that the nuns taught us, the "necessity of faith"?
They taught me in catechism class that Man must
believe in God, for not to believe meant we lived in a
soulless billiard-ball universe where there was no
reason, no reason at all not to rape, pillage, and
murder so long as you got away with it.
     Jeez, I wonder if they knew how right they were . . .
but for a completely different reason: Man must
believe in something, for not to believe opened us up
to spiritual invasion by Little Green Men from anoth-
er planet. "Goodbye, Arlene Sanders." I gasped,
spitting out the blood that still flowed. "For God's
sake and your own, don't lose faith. I'll be with you
always--and I got the message about Patrick." The
Res-men made no move to shut me up; I don't think
they cared whether I talked or not.
     Arlene groaned, out of sight to my left. "Good--
goodbye, Bro'. Semp . . . semper fi, Mac." The Ma-
rine Corps motto: Semper fidelis, always faithful. I
smiled. She understood the terrible stakes, amazing
for a child who wasn't raised a Catholic. Luther was
right, I thought. Salvation is there for everyone.
A bright white nova of light flared inside my head.
It expanded like a "data-bomb" inside my brain, an
infinitely expanding pulse of pure white noise; in
moments, it overwhelmed every program I was run-
ning, and I couldn't string another coherent thought
together, the last being Patrick. Then even the meta-
programs were overrun; the last to go was the "I," the
ego that was nothing more than I Exist, and for a
timeless interval--I didn't.
     I awoke in a strange, familiar place I had seen once
before, but couldn't possibly be seeing again. I awoke
on Phobos; I awoke in the mouth of the UAC facility;
I awoke at the start of my mission, months and
centuries ago. And deep ahead of me, I smelled the
sour-lemon stench of a zombie, I heard the first
distant hiss of a spiney.
     It had started, God, all over again. I was alone,
standing at the gate of hell with nothing but a freaking
pistol in my hand, a standard-issue 10mm, and a
grounded land-cart at my feet. Behind me was--how
did I put it the first time?--a blank empty desert
silhouetted by a barren purple sky. I was back on
Phobos, where hell began, and hell had started all
over again! Even the inadvertently traitorous Ninepin
had deserted me; I had no idea where he had got to,
but he was gone.
     Okay, so am I going to do this the hard way? What
did the Resuscitators want me to do--go all the way
down, down eight levels to the heart of the UAC
facility, jump into the mouth of Moloch (as dead old
Albert Gallatin named it) and find myself on Deimos?
Jump back through the hyperspace tunnel and end up
orbiting Earth again?
     I swallowed hard and started jogging down the long
empty corridor, the sour-lemon smell growing strong-
er with every step. I heard a hiss behind me. Drawing
the 10mm and spinning in a single fluid motion, I
found myself facing the same leaky pipe that had
jerked me around the last time. "Goddamn it!" I
snarled, feeling my pulse beat so hard in my head that
it felt like hammer blows. I shoved the semi-auto into
the holster on my armor and continued my walk-
about, slowly and carefully this time.
     I vaguely remembered what--who--was next, and
he didn't disappoint me: when the corridor narrowed,
and I began to hop lightly over the first green tendrils
of toxic goo that slithered across the floor, I heard
plodding footsteps ahead. Out of a swirl of smoky
mist, the flickering lights casting hideous shadows,
shambled the pale corpse of William Gates, still a
corporal.... I guess hell didn't believe in promo-
tions. His wide-spaced eyes and scarred cheek were
unmistakable; it was dead Bill, the zombie-man: "The
Gate is the key ... the key is the Gate...."
I didn't bother trying to talk to the man--he was
long past any sort of conversation--but as I raised the
10mm, I abruptly remembered Arlene's silent mes-
sage. Patrick, what the hell did that mean? Patrick
converted the heathens.... How could I convert a
zombie, for God's sake? It had no brain left! I gritted
my teeth and squeezed off two rounds into his fore-
head; I could barely fight the compulsion to turn my
face away or close my eyes ... not again, not bloody
again!
     No more blood. I shot my buddy dead again, and
once again his body flopped on the floor like a
headless chicken (I butchered a hundred chickens
when I was a boy; they really do that, it's not a goof).
But when it was over, I didn't feel the same revulsion
as last time. It was just a simulation--emulation?--
and it wasn't really happening all over again. The
Resuscitators were studying my reactions.
     Well, Christ, I'd give them something to study. As I
stepped right over the body, fighting down my own
panic, I casually leaned over and spit on my friend.
When in doubt, confuse the hell out of the enemy--a
maxim to live by.
     I snagged the Sig-Cow he was carrying--ooh-rah,
the 10mm, M211 Semi-automatic Gas-Operated In-
fantry Combat Weapon that was standard issue with
Marine Corps riflemen. I never liked it much, pre-
ferred a semi-auto shotgun or the M-14 BAR I'd been
using recently; but it was distinctly better than a
10mm pistol, and I knew what was coming: up ahead
waited three zombie-men and a zombie-chick, ready
to open fire on me.
     Knowing what was coming emboldened me; I don't
know what the Newbies thought they could learn
from such a stupid emulation.... It wasn't the same
at all--last time, I didn't have a clue what was
happening, and I was particularly freaked by the
obviously demonic nature of the monsters that at-
tacked me. But now I knew what they were, mechani-
cal constructs of the Freds. And I knew I really wasn't
there at all; I was inside a vast computer with a
blindingly fast clock rate. An hour for me was actu-
ally, what, a minute of real time? A second? Fast
enough that the real enemy, the Resuscitators, could
watch without their short attention spans inducing
terminal boredom.
     But it was hard not to be fooled by the perfect
looming walls, the slippery floor, the hissing, bubbling
toxic slime that dripped from barrels and spilled
across the floor. I deliberately bent and dipped my
little finger in the goo and was rewarded with agoniz-
ing pain, like putting out a cigarette on bare flesh. The
pain was real; pain was all in the head anyway, a
neurosignal in the brain's pain receptors! I should
have guessed that a simulated brain would have
simulated pain before sacrificing my finger to the
slime god.
     Pushing the pain to the back of my mind, I
squirmed forward between standpipes and fungus-
grown walls, ducking under low overheads and hop-
ping over an obstacle course of metal gratings and
hoses. I remembered just what the terrain looked like
when I was nearly ambushed; this time, I was the one
who fired first, as soon as the four shuffled into view.
I plinked them from cover, taking down three
before they crossed even half the room, killing the girl
last. I flipped the bodies onto their backs, stripped
them of everything useful, and continued: something
told me that I had to reach the first spiney, the brown
demons with spines growing everywhere. If I could
duck underneath the flaming balls of snot he loved to
hurl, I could at least talk to him.... Hell, I already
did--once.
     I came to the room with the sabotaged radio and
the incinerated map. No matter--the floor plan of the
facility was burned into my brain, either by the sheer
horror of the memory or else by the Resuscitators
when they resurrected me here. Didn't need the map,
in any event, and the radios were useless inside the
RAM of an alien computer. I felt like I'd been drafted
into a computer game, jerked by electronic strings like
a meat puppet.
     Killed three more zombies, just like the last time; I
was ready for them, they didn't know exactly when I
would be among them. It was a slaughter, like shoot-
ing drunks in a barrel. I didn't get sick, since I knew
what they were--not just zombies, but electronic
simulations of zombies. But I was getting as bored as
hell, and distracted . . . and that was a bad thing; I
was starting to worry at Arlene's code. What did she
mean by "Patrick"? Did she really mean I was sup-
posed to convert the demons inside the Newbie
machine?
     Convert them to what? Good Catholics?
I wanted to catch up with the spiney who lurked in
the room with the huge spill of toxic waste; at least
that bastard could say something other than varia-
tions on "The Gate is the key." I scurried on through
the twisty maze, almost seeing a ghostly overhead
view superimposed over the black-dark, dripping-
dank corridors, wide shadowy rooms, and sagging
ceilings. An awful sickening odor overpowered the
sour-lemon smell of the zombies, and I knew I was
close.
     Then I saw it: the room I'd been hunting for, the
vast sea of toxic spillage that looked like bubbling lava
on Saint Patrick's day--huh, mere coincidence? I
stayed well back, out of the room itself, and scanned
for the particular piece of equipment from which the
spiney charged me last time. It was tough, since I
hadn't seen it coming, but I found the only console in
the place large enough for one of those gigantic, two-
hundred-kilogram beasts to lurk.
     Pointing my Sig-Cow, I spoke in a loud command
tone. "All right, you spineless spiney, I know where
you're hiding. . . ." To prove my point, I pounded a
couple of shots into either end of the console. "Come
out now, before I have to put a round into each of
your kneecaps."
     Nothing happened. I fired six more rounds into the
console, right about where I judged the thing must
lurk, and it hissed in pain--one of the shots must
have passed right through the electronics and winged
the mofo.
     That was enough. The beast slowly emerged, hide-
ous and stomach-turning, with a stench that would
drop a carrion-crow at a hundred meters. The spiney
was unmistakable: brown, leathery, alligator hide,
ivory-white horns out of every body part, inhumanly
huge head with mad red slits for eyes. It stared at me,
advancing slowly, then it stopped and hocked a loogie
into its hand. The snotball burst into flame when the
air struck it, and the spiney raised its arm to pitch a
high hard one right across the plate.
     I leveled my rifle. "If one drop of that fiery snot
leaves your hand, you will be dead before it hits that
back wall!"
     The spiney stared resentfully, then slowly let the
fireball fall to the ground, where it sizzled out in the
toxic waste, in which the creature stood up to its
ankles. Thank God that green goo wasn't inflamma-
ble!
     "My friend," I said, thinking of Saint Patrick, of
the Emerald Isle, "you may think I'm here to blow
your fool head off, and I might just do it yet, but that
really isn't why I came . . . and you're not here to kill
me, no matter what you might think.
     "I've got a little something to tell you, and you're
not going to like it one bit, but if you just take a deep
breath and a stress pill, I think you're going to be a
whole hell of a lot angrier at someone else than you
are right now at me."
     It stared at me for a full, long, solid minute, dur-
ing which both of us maintained cacophonous si-
lence. Then, strike me down if I'm lying, the spiney
spoke to me! "Ssssssspeak," it hissed, "we sssshall
lisssssten...." The eye slits narrowed, but blazed
brighter, if anything. "We will lissssten ... once."
The spiney waited, flexing its huge claws, for me to
come up with something terribly clever.



     15

     The Newbies are being blasted by their own
petard, I realized. In the real world, the genetically
engineered spiney never would have paused in its
attack to hold a philosophical discussion with me, but
we were in a computer emulation, taken from my
memory--and human memory is amazingly creative.
We remember things not as they really happened, but
the way they should have happened, the way that
actually makes sense. The brain is a gifted storyteller.
"We are all greater artists than we realize," or whatev-
er the hell that guy said, whoever the hell he was.
Just then I distinctly remembered the spineys being
much more rational and logical than they probably
were in reality; yes, sir, I made damn sure that was
how I remembered them. So that's what I got; it was
like a so-called lucid dream, where you know you're
dreaming . . . except, I was never able to do that. But
this time I was wide awake--and so long as I made
sure I remembered things the way they ought to have
worked out, I had an edge the Resuscitators couldn't
take away from me.
     "I know what you are," I said to the spiney, "and I
know who created you. And I know who destroyed
your creator. You want to join forces and kick some
ass?"
     It hissed in rage, yellow mucus dribbling down its
chin. As each drop cleared the skin, the air ignited it;
a chain of fiery islands dotted the ground around the
spiney's splayed feet.
     "Don't give me that crap," I warned. "You're a
product of genetic engineering, created by a race of
creatures we call the Freds, who have heads like an
artichoke, if you know what that is--covered with
colored leaves--and grow taller and smaller as part of
their mating cycle. You've seen them, right? Is my
description right on, or what?"
     "Sssssspeak!" demanded the spiney, but it closed
its mouth, swallowing the rest of its spittle.
I took that as a good sign. "You know they're
members of a grand galaxy-wide conspiracy of
philosophical-literary criticism that is reasonably
well-translated into English as the Deconstructionists.
They're fighting the other school, called the Hyper-
realists. You were sent here to prepare us for invasion
and conquest by the Freds, and they told you that we
would roll over and beg for mercy if you came looking
like our ancient demons, right?"
     The spiney hunched lower and lower as I talked, its
eyes glowing deeper red, but the stench that accompa-
nied the beast grew stronger, not weaker. Watch it, I
warned myself. It's not submitting . . . it's getting an-
grier and more devious.
     "Sssssssssssso? What plansssssss do you have?"
"But your masters screwed up, spiney. They didn't
tell you we would have guns and space travel and a
well-organized resistance. Did they? And now you're
bloody terrified, because the situation is totally out of
control."
     The last part was a total wild speculation. For all I
knew, the Freds never even engineered the emotion of
fear into their puppets. But it was a good chance.
After all, they sure as hell demonstrated anger and
senseless rage, the way they would turn on each other
at the slightest provocation, and in the racial enmity
between, say, pumpkins and the minotaurlike hell
princes. If I had to guess, I'd say the Freds started with
alien stock that already kind of looked like what they
wanted and already had emotions.
     "Kill you!" screamed the spiney. "Kill you all!
Death to hu-manssssss!"
     "Spiney, your masters were wiped out. All of them,
the entire race. They're gone! Would you like to know
who did it?"
     It stared at me in confusion. Clearly, I wasn't acting
the way it thought I would, or the way the Freds told it
to expect. The damned thing was utterly nonplussed,
totally at sea--and most of us react to that sort of
confusion with fear and rage. I guess, in its own way,
the spiney was just another jarhead dumped behind
enemy lines, where it turns out the brass-holes got
everything butt-wrong, as usual.
     "How ... would you know thissss?" it asked.
Thank God I was remembering a logical rational
spiney! It stood up slowly from its crouch, muscles
relaxing, but still a mask of suspicion covered its face.
Its lip still curled back, baring huge tusks, and it
alternately clenched and loosened its fists.
"Look, this is the hard part to accept--but none of
this is real. You're probably real; at least, I think I am,
and you might be, too. The scum that killed your
masters, the Resuscitators, are Newbies who aren't
even part of the Great Game: they're neither Decon-
structionists nor Hyperrealists, and they don't give a
damn about any of your literary theories of the
universe.
     "They created this computer simulation to study
something about me and . . . and my race, and you
just got swept up with the study. Capice?"
     It hissed at me, long and loud. So much for sweet
reason! It changed its mind and decided to charge; I
must have stupidly let my mind drift back into a
different sort of memory of spineys as remorseless
killers. But before the spiney could pounce, it had to
crouch. I had a bead on it already, and I squeezed off
two shots--both into the creature's hip.
     The spiney went down hard, clutching its hip and
screaming in agony. The hip was destroyed, the rifle
rounds tearing the flesh apart and pulverizing the
bone. The creature wasn't going anywhere for a long
time, not without surgery.
     I stayed where I was, just crouching with the rifle
and waiting until the spiney thrashed itself out and
lay exhausted on the ground, spent and paralyzed by
pain and fear. "It doesn't have to be this way," I
cooed, like I was talking to a six-year-old who insisted
on stealing cookies and getting walloped. "The simu-
lation is based on my memory; I can remember things
a little differently." I looked at the creature's ruined
hip and visualized a different outcome.
     One trick I learned at the Chapel of Mary and
Martha's was "How to Lie Successfully," a course
taught inadvertently by Sister Lucrezia. The secret--
I'll give it away for free just this once--is you actually
have to convince yourself that the lie is really the way
it really happened. Got it? If you broke a vase by
playing football in the lobby, you just have to visua-
lize the alternate scenario (you tripped over an exten-
sion cord and knocked over the lamp) so intensely
that your memory of the fantasy is stronger than your
memory of the reality. Understand, now? That way,
even if the penguin whips a galvanic skin-response lie-
detector machine out from under her habit, you'll still
pass . . . because by now, you've totally convinced
yourself that the electric-cord tripping is really and
truly the way it happened. Honest injun.
     "Yeah," I said aloud. "I knew I only creased you
with that shot. Lucky thing, too." The spiney slowly
sat up, rubbing its hip in pain--easy pain, the pain of
an annoying bruise. It bled copiously, but the wound
was a light scratch--nothing like the terrible, hip-
shattering shot it could have been in a hypothetical,
alternate universe.
     "Starting to sink in yet?" I asked.
The grotesque spiney then did the most horrific
thing, sinking to its hands and knees and crawling
slowly toward me. When it got within two meters, the
spiney fell to its belly and slithered forward like a
lizard, arms splayed but legs pressed tightly together,
like Jesus on the Cross but facedown in the glowing
acid. It squirmed close enough, then it pressed out its
long yellow tongue, gently flicking at my boots the
way a lizard tastes the wind for scent--predator or
prey?--and everywhere the tongue touched was left a
thin sizzling streak of glowing embers. My boots were
crisscrossed by fiery marks of obeisance. The spiney
stretched its arms wide, feet long to the south, face
down in the grime of the floorplates: it offered itself to
me, drooling fire and sweating oil from the glands
along its back. The oil probably protected it from its
own flaming mucus, but nobody was there to protect
me from my new servant. Not even Arlene.
     "Ssssslave," hissed the spiney.
"No, you're not anybody's slave--"
     "Masssster!"
I ground my teeth. There was something fundamen-
tally wrong about this conversion. This wasn't how it
was supposed to go! The spiney was supposed to wake
up and take charge of its own life, not pick me to be its
God instead of the Freds!
     Still, I had to play the hand I was dealt. "Look what
the false ones did to you!" I trumpeted. "They left
you here to be hurt and set you against--against your
true master!"
     "Falssse onesss!"
"They turned you against me, and now they must
pay! Death--death to the false ones!"
     "Death to falssse onesss!"
"That is our mission, our holy mission--destroy
the false ones!"
     "Misssion dessstroy falssse onesss!"
I winced and made a mental note: Try not to use so
many S's around spineys! "And the second--and the
other thing to do is find the other mistress, Arlene."
"Find missstressss."
     "But, Christ, where is she?" I wondered out loud.
In the first reality, I found her only after jumping
from the first site of destruction on Phobos through
the Moloch gate to Deimos. We found each other,
both naked and trembling, in a room with an inverted
cross stamped out of red-hot metal. But if she had any
brains, and no one's ever accused Arlene Sanders of
being stooopid, she would stay put where she found
herself and wait for me to find her, too. Well . . . if she
could stay put; circumstances might make it tight.
"Get up, slave," I said. I decided to play the game
to the hilt, if that was what the spiney needed. But I
couldn't shake the uneasy feeling that maybe the
Newbies programmed the monsters to be gullible,
susceptible to my conversion--like Ninepin, this one
seemed awfully easy to convert! Maybe that's exactly
what the Newbies wanted to study. Was I giving away
intel to the enemy?
     Hell, what else could I do? Couldn't bloody well
fight them if'n I died in the simulation, could I?
The spiney rose, towering over me, but I lowered
my Sig-Cow anyway. If it wanted to jump me, it
would always have opportunity; just then, I chose to
assert my authority by force of will alone. "Tell me
your name."
     "Sssslink," she answered; from that moment, Slink
was a female to me. "Sssslink Sssslunk."
     "Slink Slunk. You're my first convert, the first
apostle. We're going to have to gather an army, since I
left mine behind in, um, heaven."
     "Sssslink learn power ssssoon?" Power? She must
have meant the power to affect the "reality" of the
simulation.
     "Sure, kid, soon. Now lead us downward. I want to
get this crap squared away. Step one: we've got to find
Arlene ... the other person like me, the other living
human. Can you smell us?"
     "Sssslink can ssssmell," she confirmed. Slink stared
around the room suspiciously, still tasting the air with
her snaky tongue. She didn't seem to trust it, sipping
it like fine wine, as if it bore scents warning her of
dangers lurking below us.
     "Smell her out, Slink. Find my lance. But along the
way, you're going to have to work with me to convert
as many others of your kind to our cause as we can.
Got that? No fighting or killing unless absolutely
necessary."
     "Ssslink undersssstandsss."
I started to ignore the hissing, which was probably
caused by her forked yellow tongue. I remembered
where the ladder was that led down to the next level,
and I remembered a stadium full of zombies with
rifles and shotguns, and more spineys who might not
be as accommodating, between us and the ultimate
level of Phobos, deep below. I remembered what
waited down there: a pair of hell princes. I was not
happy about facing them again.
     We continued through the acid room to a long
corridor, and there we, as a pair, met our first hosts of
the undead. Three zombie girls shambled forward,
one of them topless and missing an arm, the other two
UAC workers--all armed with weapons stolen from
Fox Company Marines who didn't need them any-
more. Slink held up her hands. "Sstop!" she com-
manded. The zombies paused, obediently. Damn,
that's right, I thought. The spineys have some sort of
mental control over the zombies.
     "Thiss not real. Massterss dead. Join forcess, kill
Newbiess!"
     The conversion was not a big hit among the zombie
gallery. Maybe the original spineys had psychic con-
trol over the reworked humans, but evidently when
Slink converted to my cause and accepted the unreali-
ty of her world--mostly because of my demonstra-
tion, I realized, not by faith--she lost her ability to
tap into the Psychic Freds Network. The damned
zombies just wouldn't listen to her!
     The one-armed topless girl raised her hand. She
held a five-shot revolver--nothing serious unless she
got truly lucky with a shot. But