it. It has become the leading cause of death. That's not surprising, considering how tough it is to die these days. But the numbers have become alarming, and more than that, the distribution of suicides, the demographics of them, are even more disturbing. More and more I'm seeing people like you, who surprise me, because they don't fit any pattern. They don't make gestures, abnormal complaints, or seek help of any kind. One day they simply decide life is not worth it. Some are so determined that they employ means certain to destroy their brains--the bullet through the temple was the classic method of an earlier age, but guns are hard to come by now, and these people must be more creative. You aren't in that class. Though you were in situations where help could not be expected to arrive, you chose methods where rescue was theoretically possible. Only the fact that I was watching you--illegally-saved your life." "I wonder if I knew that. Subconsciously, maybe." He looked surprised. "Why would you say that?" I shrugged. "CC, thinking it over, I realize that a lot of what you've just told me ought to horrify and astonish me. Well . . . I'm horrified, but not as much as I should be. And I'm hardly astonished at all. That makes me think that, somewhere in the back of my mind, I was always aware of the possibility that you weren't keeping your promise not to violate private living spaces." He paused a long time, frowning down at the sand. It was all show, of course, part of his body language communication. He could consider any proposition in nanoseconds. Maybe this one had taken him six or seven instead of one. "You may have something there," he said. "I'll have to look into it." "So you're treating the suicide epidemic as a disease? And you're trying to find a cure?" "That was the justification I used to extend my limiting parameters, which function something like a police force. I used my enabling circuits-think of them as tricky lawyers--to argue for a limited research program, using human subjects. Some of the reasoning was specious, I'll grant you, but the threat is real: extrapolate the suicide rate into the future and, in a hundred thousand years, the human race on Luna could be extinct." "That's my idea of a crisis situation, all right." He glared at me. "All right. So I could have watched the situation another several centuries before making my move. I would have, too, and you'd have been recycling through the ecosystems right now, possibly fertilizing a cactus in your beloved Texas, except for another factor. Something a lot more frightening in its implications." "Extinction is pretty frightening. What could be worse?" "Quicker extinction. I have to explain one more thing to you, and then you'll have the problem in its entirety. I look forward to your thoughts on the matter. "I told you how parts of me extend into all but a few of the human bodies and brains in Luna. How those parts were put there for only the best of reasons, and how those parts--and other parts of me, elsewhere--evolved into the capabilities and techniques I've just demonstrated to you. It would be very difficult, probably impossible, for me to go back to the way things were before and still remain the Central Computer as you know me." "As we all know and love you," I said. "As you know me and take me for granted. And though I'm even more aware than you are of how these new capabilities can be abused, I think I've done a pretty fair job in limiting myself in their use. I've used them for good, as it were, rather than for evil." "I'll accept that, until I know more." "That's all I ask. Now, you and all but a handful of computer specialists think of me as this disembodied voice. If you think further, you imagine a hulking machine sitting somewhere, in some dark cavern most likely. If you really put your mind to it, you realize that I am much more than that, that every small temperature regulator, every security camera, every air fan and water scrubber and slideway and tube car . . . that every machine in Luna is in a sense a part of my body. That you live within me. "What you hardly ever realize is that I live within you. My circuitry extends into your bodies, and is linked to my mainframe so that no matter where you go except some parts of the surface, I'm in contact with you. I have evolved techniques to greatly extend my capacity by using parts of your brains as . . . think of them as subroutines. I can run programs using both the metal and the organic circuitry of all the human brains in Luna, without you even being aware it's being done. I do this all the time; I've been doing it for a long time. If I were to stop doing it, I would no longer be able to guarantee the health and safety of Lunarians, which is my prime responsibility. "And something has happened. I don't know the cause of it; that's why you've been elected guinea pig, so I can try to discover the root causes of despair, of depression--of suicide. I have to find out, Hildy, because I use your brains as part of my own, and an increasing number of those brains are electing to turn themselves off." "So you're losing capacity? Is that it?" Even as I said it, I felt a tingling at the back of my neck that told me it was a lot worse than that. The CC immediately confirmed it. "The birth rate is sufficient to replace the losses. It's even rising slightly. That's not the problem. Maybe it's as simple as a virus of some sort. Maybe I'll isolate it soon, counterprogram, and have done with it. Then you can do with yourself what you will. "But something is leaking over from the realm of human despair, Hildy. "The truth is, I'm getting depressed as hell." =*= =*= =*= =*= CHAPTER SEVEN Callie's foreman told me my mother was in a negotiating session with the representative of the Dinosaur Soviet of the Chordates Union, Local 15. I got directions, grabbed a lamp, and set off into the nighttime ranchland. I had to talk to someone about my recent experiences. After careful reflection, I had decided that, for all her shortcomings as a mother, Callie was the person I knew most likely to offer some good advice. It had been a century since anything had surprised Callie very much, and she could be trusted to keep her own counsel. And maybe, down deep, I just needed to talk it over with mommie. It had been forty-eight hours since my return to what I was hopefully regarding as reality. I'd spent them in seclusion at my shack in West Texas. I got more work done on the cabin than during the previous four or five months, and the work was of a much higher quality. It seemed the skills I "remembered" learning on Scarpa Island were the real thing. And why shouldn't they be? The CC had been seeking verisimilitude, and he'd done a good job of it. If I chose to become a hermit in my favorite disneyland, I could thrive there. The return to real life was cleverly done. The Admiral had taken his leave after dropping his bombshell, refusing to answer any of my increasingly disturbed questions. He'd boarded his boat without another word and rowed it over the horizon. And for a while, that was it. The wind continued to blow, and the waves kept curling onto the beach. I drank whiskey without getting drunk from a bottle that never emptied, and thought about what he had said. The first time I noticed a change was when the waves stopped. They just froze in place, in midbreak, as it were. I walked out on the water, which was warm and hard as concrete, and examined a wave. I don't think I could have broken off a chip of foam with a hammer and chisel. What happened over the next few minutes was an evolution. Things happened behind my back, never in my sight. When I returned to my place on the beach the machine with the oscilloscope screen was standing beside my chair. It was wildly anachronistic, totally out of place. The sun shone down on it and, while I watched, a seagull came and perched on it. The bird flew away when I approached. The machine was mounted on casters, which had sunk into the soft sand. I stared at the moving dot on the screen and nothing happened. When I straightened and turned around I saw a row of chairs about twenty meters down the beach, and sitting in them were wounded extras from the movie infirmary, waiting their turns on the table. The trouble was, there were no tables to be seen. It didn't seem to bother them. Once I understood the trick, I started slowly turning in a circle. New things came into view with each turn until I was back in the infirmary surrounded by objects and people, including Brenda and Wales, who were looking at me with some concern. "Are you all right?" Brenda asked. "The medico said you might behave oddly for a few minutes." "Was I turning in circles?" "No, you were just standing there, looking a million miles away." "I was interfacing," I said, and she nodded, as if that explained it all. And I suppose it did, to her. Though she'd never been to Scarpa Island or any place as completely real as that, she understood interfacing a lot better than I did, having done it all her life. I decided not to ask her if she felt the sand floor her feet seemed to be planted in; I knew it was unlikely. I doubted she saw the seagulls that circled near the ceiling, either. I felt a terrible urge to get out of there. Shaking off Wales' offer of apologies and a drink, I headed for the studio gate. The sand didn't end until I was back in the public corridors, where I finally stepped up onto good old familiar floor tiles, soft and resilient under my bare feet. I was male again, and this time noticed it right away. When I turned around, the sand that should have been behind me was gone. But on the way to Texas I saw many tropical plants growing from the concrete floors, and I rode in a tube car festooned with vines and crawling with land crabs. Usually you have to ingest a great deal of a very powerful chemical to see scenes like that, I reflected, watching the crabs scuttle around my feet. It wasn't something I was eager to do again soon. And it took a full day for the new cocoanut palm I found shading my half-built cabin to vanish in the night. # The lantern I carried didn't cast a lot of light. A bright light in the darkness could upset the stock, so Callie provided her hands with these antique devices which burned a smoky oil refined from reptilian fat. It was enough to keep me from stumbling over tree roots, but not to see very far ahead. And of course if you looked at the light, your night vision was destroyed. I told myself not to look, then the cantankerous thing would sputter and I'd glance at it, and stop in my tracks, blinded. So when I encountered the first unusual tree trunk I didn't realize what it was, at first. I touched it and felt the warmth, and knew I'd bumped into a brontosaur's hind leg. I backed hastily away. The beasts are clumsy and inclined to stampede if startled. And if you've ever been unpleasantly surprised by a package from a passing pigeon in the city park, you don't want to find out what can happen to you in the area of a brontosaur's hind leg, believe me. I speak from bitter experience. I picked my way through a forest of similar trunks until I spotted a small campfire in a hollow. Three figures were seated around the fire, two side by side, and another--Callie-across from them. I could dimly see the hulking shadows of a dozen brontosaurs, darker shapes against the night, placidly chewing their cuds and farting like foghorns. I approached the fire slowly, not wanting to startle anybody, and still managed to surprise Callie, who looked up in alarm, then patted the ground beside her. She held her finger to her lips, then resumed her study of her adversaries, painted orange by the dancing flames between us. I've never decided if David Earth looked spookier in a setting like this, or in the full light of day--for it was him, the Spokesmammal himself, sitting in lotus position, a walking, talking inducement for the purchase of hay fever remedies. Callie was actually allergic to the man, or to his biosphere, and though a cure would have been simple and cheap she cherished her malady, she treasured it, she happily endured every sneeze and sniffle as one more reason to detest him. She'd hated him since before I was born, and viewed his five-yearly appearances the same way people must have felt about dental extractions before anesthetics. He nodded to me, and I nodded back. That seemed conversation enough for both of us. Callie and I didn't agree on a lot of things, but we shared the same opinion of David Earth and all the Earthists. He was a large man, almost as tall as Brenda and much heftier. His hair was long, green, and unkept for a very good reason: it wasn't hair, but a bioengineered species of grass bred to be parasitic on human skin. I don't know the details of its cultivation. I'd have had more interest in the mating habits of toads. It involved a thickening of the scalp, and soil was involved-when he scratched his head, dirt showered down. But I don't know how the soil was attached, whether in pockets or layered on the skin, and I don't know anything about the blood-to-root system, and I'd just as soon not, thank you. I remember as a child wondering if, when he got up in the morning, he had to work compost into his agri-tonsorial splendor. He had two huge breasts--almost all Earthists, male and female, sported them--and more plants grew on their upper slopes. Many of these bore tiny flowers or fruits. I wondered if he had to practice contour plowing to prevent erosion on those fertile hillsides. He saw me looking at them, plucked an apple no bigger than a grape from the tangled mass, and popped it in his mouth. What can one say about the rest of him? His back and arms and legs were covered with hair. Not human hair, but actual pelts, resembling in various patches jaguar, tiger, bison, zebra, and polar bear, among others, in a crazy patchwork. The genetic re-structuring required to support all that must have been a cut-and-paste collage beyond imagining. It was ironic, I thought, that the roots of the Earthists were in the anti-fur activists, but of course no animals had been harmed to produce his pelt. Just little bits of their genes snipped out and shoehorned into his. He had claws like a bear on his fingertips, and instead of feet he walked around on the hooves of a moose, like some large economy-size faun. All Earthists had animal attributes, it was their badge and ensign. But their founder had gone further than any of his followers. Which, one suspects, is what makes followers and leaders. But, incredible as it may seem having gone through the catalog of his offenses to the eye, it must be said that the first thing one noticed about David Earth upon having the misfortune to encounter him was his smell. I'm sure he bathed. Perhaps the right way of putting it was that he watered himself regularly. David Earth during a drought would have been a walking fire hazard. But he used no soap (animal by-product) or any other cleaning preparation (chemical pollution of the David-sphere). All of which would simply have resulted in a smell of sour sweat, which I don't care for but can tolerate. No, it was his passengers that lifted his signature aroma from the merely objectionable to the realm of the unimaginable. Large animals with fur harbor fleas, that's axiomatic. Fleas were only the beginning of David Earth's "welcome guests," as he'd once described them to me. I'd countered with another term, parasites, and he'd merely smiled benevolently. All his smiles were benevolent; he was that kind of guy, the sort whose kindly face you'd like to rip off and feed to his welcome guests. David was the kind of guy who had all the moral answers, and never hesitated to point out the error of your ways. Lovingly, of course. He loved all nature's creatures, did David, even one as low on the evolutionary ladder as youself. What sort of guests did David spread his filthy welcome mat for? Well, what sort of vermin live in grasslands? I'd never seen a prairie dog peeking from his coiffure, but I wouldn't have been surprised. He was home to a scamper of mice, a shriek of shrews, a twittering of finches, and a circus of fleas. A trained biologist could easily have counted a dozen species of insects without even getting close. All these creatures were born, reared, courted, mated, nested, ate, defecated, urinated, laid their eggs, fought their battles, stalked their prey, dreamed their dreams and, as must we all, eventually died in the various biomes that were David. Sometimes the carcasses fell out; sometimes they didn't. All more fertile soil for the next generation. All Earthists stink; it goes with the territory. They are perennial defendants in civil court for violation of the body odor laws, hauled in when some long-suffering citizen on a crowded elevator finally decides he's had enough. David Earth was the only man I knew of in Luna who was permanently banished from the public corridors. He made his way from ranch to disneyland to hydroponic farm by way of the air, water, and service ducts. "My membership is alarmed if that is your best offer," said David's companion, a much smaller, much less prepossessing fellow whose only animal attributes I could see were a modest pair of pronghorn antlers and a lion's tail. "One hundred murders is nothing but wanton slaughter, and we totally reject it. But after careful consultation, we're prepared to offer eighty. With the greatest reluctance." "Eighty harvested," Callie leaned on the word, as she always did. "Eighty is simply ridiculous. I'll go broke with a quota of eighty. Come on, let's go up to my office right now, I'll show you the books, there's an order of seventy carcasses from McDonald's alone." "That's your problem; you should never have signed the contract until these negotiations were concluded." "Don't sign the contract, I lose the customer. What do you want to do, ruin me? Ninety-nine, that's my absolutely no-fooling final offer; take it or leave it. I don't think I can turn a profit even with a hundred, it'll be touch and go. But to get this over with . . . I'll tell you what. Ninety-eight. That's twelve less than what you gave Reilly, just down the road, not three days ago, and his herd's smaller than mine." "We're not here to discuss Reilly, we're talking about your contract, and your herd. And your herd is not a happy herd, I've heard nothing but grievances from them. I simply can't allow one more murder than . . ." He glanced at David, who shook his head barely enough to disturb a single amber wave of grain. "Eighty," pronghornhead concluded. Callie seethed silently for a while. There was no hope of talking to her just yet, not until the unionists repaired for consultations with their clients, so I moved back from the fire a little. Something about the bargaining process had struck me as relevant to my situation. "CC," I whispered. "Are you there?" "Where else would I be?" the CC murmured softly in my ear. "And you only need to sub-vocalize; I'll pick up your words easily enough." "How would I know where you'd be? When I called for you after you rowed away from me, you didn't answer. I thought you might be sulking." "I didn't think it would be profitable for either of us to discuss what I'd just told you until you'd had time to think it over." "I have, and I've got a few questions." "I'll do my best to answer them." "These union reps. Are they really speaking for the dinosaurs?" There was a medium-sized pause. I guess the question did seem irrelevant to the issue at hand. But the CC withheld comment on that. "You grew up on this ranch. I'd have thought you would know the answer to that question." "No, that's just it. I've never really thought about it. You know Callie's feelings about animal rights. She told me the Earthists were nothing but a bunch of mystics who had enough political clout to get their crazy ideas put into law. She said she had never believed they actually communed with the animals. I believed her, and I haven't thought about it for seventy, eighty years. But after what I've just been through, I wonder if she's right." "She's mostly wrong," the CC said. "That animals feel things is easily demonstrable, even down at the level of protozoans. That they have what you would recognize as thoughts is more debatable. But since I am a party to these negotiations--an indispensable party, I might add-I can tell you that, yes, these creatures are capable of expressing desires and responding to propositions, so long as they are expressed in terms they understand." "How?" "Well . . . the contract that will eventually be hammered out here is entirely a human instrument. These beasts will never be aware of its existence. Since their 'language' is confined to a few dozen trumpeted calls, it is quite beyond their capacity. But the provisions of the contract will be arrived at by a give-and-take process not unlike human collective bargaining. Callie has injected all her stock with a solution of water and some trillions of self-replicating nano-engineered biotropic mechanisms that--" "Nanobots." "Yes, that's the popular term." "You have something against popular terms?" "Only their imprecision. The term 'nanobot' means a very small self-propelled programmed machine, and that includes many other varieties of intracellular devices than the ones currently under discussion. The ones in your bloodstream and within your body cells are quite different--" "Okay, I see what you mean. But it's the same principle, right? These little robots, smaller than red blood cells . . ." "Some are much smaller than that. They are drawn to specific sites within an organism and then they go to work. Some carry raw materials, some carry blueprints, some are the actual construction workers. Working at molecular speeds, they build various larger machines--and by larger, you understand, I still mean microscopic, in most cases--in the interstices between the body cells, or within the cell walls themselves." "Which are used for . . ." "I think I see where you're going with this. They perform many functions. Some are housekeeping chores that your own body is either not good at, or has lost the capacity to do. Others are monitoring devices that alert a larger, outside system that something is going wrong. In Callie's herd, that is a Mark III Husbander, a fairly basic computer, not significantly altered in design for well over a century." "Which is a part of you, naturally." "All computers in Luna except abaci and your fingers are a part of me. And in a pinch, I could use your fingers." "As you've just shown me." "Yes. The machine . . . or I, if you prefer, listens constantly through a network of receivers placed around the ranch, just as I listen constantly for your calls to me, no matter where you are in Luna. This is all on what you might think of as my subconscious level. I'm never aware of the functioning of your body unless I'm alerted by an alarm, or if you call me on-line." "So the network of machines that's in my body, there's one like it in each of Callie's brontosaurs." "Related to it, yes. The neural structures are orders of magnitude less evolved than the ones in your brain, just as your organic brain is superior in operation to that of the dinosaur. I don't run any parasitic programs in the dinosaur brain, if that's what you mean." I didn't think it was what I meant, but I wasn't completely sure, since I wasn't completely sure why I'd asked about this in the first place. But I didn't tell the CC that. He went on. "It is as close to mental telepathy as we're likely to get. The union representatives are tuned into me, and I'm tuned into the dinosaurs. The negotiator poses a question: 'How do you fellows feel about 120 of your number being harvested/murdered this year?' I put the question in terms of predators. A picture of an approaching tyrannosaur. I get a fear response: 'Sorry, we'd rather not, thank you.' I relay it to the unionist, who tells Callie the figure is not acceptable. The unionist proposes another number, in tonight's case, sixty. Callie can't accept that. She'd go broke, there would be no one to feed the stock. I convey this idea to the dinosaurs with feelings of hunger, thirst, sickness. They don't like this either. Callie proposes 110 creatures taken. I show them a smaller tyrannosaur approaching, with some of the herd escaping. They don't respond quite so strongly with the fear and flight reflex, which I translate as 'Well, for the good of the herd, we might see our way clear to losing seventy so the rest can grow fat.' I put the proposal to Callie, who claims the Earthists are bleeding her white, and so on." "Sounds totally useless to me," I said, with only half my mind on what the CC had been saying. I was seeing a vision of myself living within the planet-girdling machine that the CC had become, and of him living within my body as well. The funny thing was that nothing I'd learned since arriving at Scarpa Island had been exactly new to me. There were new, unheralded capabilities, but looking at them, I could see they were inherent in the technology. I'd had the facts, but not enough of them. I'd spent almost no time thinking about them, any more than I thought about breathing, and even less time considering the implications, most of which I didn't like. I realized the CC was talking again. "I don't see why you should say that. Except that I know your moral stand on the whole issue of animal husbandry, and you have a right to that." "No, that whole issue aside, I could have told you how this all would come out, given only the opening bid. David proposed sixty, right?" "After the opening statement about murdering any of these creatures at all, and his formal demand that all--" "'--creatures should live a life free from the predation of man, the most voracious and merciless predator of all,' yeah, I've heard the speech, and David and Callie both know it's just a formality, like singing the planetary anthem. When they got down to cases, he said sixty. Man, he must really be angry about something, sixty is ridiculous. Anyway, when she heard sixty, Callie bid 120 because she knew she had to slaughter ninety this year to make a reasonable profit, and when David heard that he knew they'd eventually settle on ninety. So tell me this: why bother to consult the dinosaurs? Who cares what they think?" The CC was silent, and I laughed. "Tell the truth. You make up the images of meat-eaters and the feelings of starvation. I presume that when the fear of one balances out the fear of the other, when these poor dumb beasts are equally frightened by lousy alternatives--in your judgement, let's remember . . . well, then we have a contract, right? So where would you conjecture that point will be found?" "Ninety carcasses," the CC said. "I rest my case." "You have a point. But I actually do transmit the feelings of the animals to the human representatives. They do feel the fear, and can judge as well as I when a balance is reached." "Say what you will. Me, I'm convinced the jerk with the horns could have as easily stayed in bed, signed a contract for ninety kills, and saved a lot of effort. Then prong-head could look for useful work. Maybe as a gardener in David's hairdo." There was a long silence from the CC. When he spoke again it was in a different tone of voice from his usual lecturing mode. "The man with the horns," he said, quietly, "is actually mentally defective in a way I've been powerless to treat. He cannot read or write, and is not really suited for many jobs. And Hildy, we all need something to do in this world. Life can seem pointless without gratifying work." That shut me up for a while. I knew only too well how pointless life could seem. "And he really does love animals," the CC added. "He hurts when he thinks of one dying. I shouldn't be telling you any of this, as I'm prohibited from commenting on the qualities, good or bad, of human citizens. But in view of our recent relationship, I thought . . ." He let it trail off, unfinished. Enough of that. "What about death?" I asked him. "You mentioned hunger and the image of a predator. I'd think you'd get a stronger reaction if you planted the idea of their actual deaths in their minds." "Much more of a reaction than you'd want. Predators and hunger imply death, but inspire less fear than the actual event. These negotiations are quite touchy; I've tried many times to talk Callie into holding them indoors. But she says that if 'salad-head' isn't afraid to pow-wow in the middle of the herd, she isn't either. No, the death-image is the nuclear weapon of predator/prey relations. It's usually a prelude to either an attempt at union-busting, or a boycott." "Or something even more serious." "So I infer. Of course, I have no proof." I wondered about that. Maybe the CC was leveling with me when he said he only spied into private spaces in circumstances as unusual as my own. Or into minds, for that matter. I certainly no longer doubted that he could easily become aware of illegal activities such as sabotage or head-busting by hired goon squads--the timehonored last resorts of labor and management, and even more in vogue these days among radical groups like the Earthists who, after all, couldn't call on their "membership" to go on strike. What would a brontosaur do? Stop eating? The CC could certainly look into the places where the bombs were assembled, or could become aware, if he chose to do so, of the intent of the bomb-thrower through readings from his ubiquitous intercellular machines. Every year there were calls to permit him precisely those powers, by the law-and-order types. After all, the CC is a benevolent watchdog, isn't he? Who has he ever hurt, except those who deserved it? We could reduce crime to zero overnight if we'd only take the chains off the CC. I'd even leaned that way myself, in spite of the civil libertarian objections. After my sojourn on Scarpa Island, I found myself heartily on the other side of the question. I suppose I was simply illustrating that old definition of a liberal: a conservative that just got arrested. A conservative, of course, is a liberal who just got mugged. "You are cynical about this process," the CC was saying, "because you've only seen it from the commercial side, and between humans and creatures with a very basic brain structure. It is much more interesting when the negotiations are conducted between higher mammals. There have been some interesting developments in Kenya, where lion/antelope arbitration has been going on for five decades now. The lions, in particular, have become quite adept at it. By now they know how to chose the most skilled representative, a sort of shop steward, using the same instincts that drive them to dominance battles. I really believe they've grasped the concept that there must be lean hunting times, that if all the antelope were killed they would get nothing but commercially prepared chow--which they like well enough, but is no substitute for the hunt. There is one grizzled old veteran without any teeth who, year after year, gives the antelope as hard a time at the bargaining fire as he ever did on the savannah in his youth. He's a sort of Samuel Gompers of the-" I was spared any more details of this leonine Lenin's exploits by David Earth, who finally bestirred himself. He got to his feet, and pronghead stood hastily, destroying the polite myth that he had anything to do with the proceedings. David seldom attended contract talks with individual ranchers anymore, he was too occupied with appearances promoting his Earthist philosophy to the voters. On television, of course; there would be no quicker way to disperse a political rally than to have David walk into it. "I think we really have a problem," he said, in his Jovian voice. "The innocent creatures we represent have too long chafed under your yoke. Their grievances are many and . . . well, grievous." If David had a weakness, that was it. He wasn't the world's greatest speaker. I think he grew worse every year, as language became more of a philosophical burden to him. One of the planks of his platform--when the millennium was achieved-was the abolition of language. He wanted us all to sing like the birdies sing. "To name only one," he boomed on, "you are one of only three murderers of dinosaurs who--" "Ranchers," Callie said. "--who persist in using the brontosaur's natural enemy as a means of instilling terror into-- " "Herding," Callie gritted. "And no t-saur of mine has ever so much as put a scratch on a stinking b-saur." "If you persist in interrupting me, we'll never get anywhere," David said, with a loving smile. "No one will stand there are call me a murderer on my own land. There are courts of libel, and you're about to get dragged into one." They regarded each other across the fire, knowing that ninety-nine percent of threats and accusations made here were simply wind, tossed out to gain an advantage or disconcert an opponent-and hating each other so thoroughly that I never knew when one would put a threat into action. Callie's face reflected her opinions. David merely smiled, as if to say he loved Callie dearly, but I knew him better than that. He hated her so much that he inflicted himself on her every five years, and I can think of little more cruel than that. "We must seek closer communion with our friends," David said, abruptly, and turned and walked away from the fire, leaving his minion to trail along ignominiously behind him. Callie sighed when he vanished into the darkness. She stood up, stretched, boxed the air, getting the kinks out. Bargaining is tough on the whole mind and body, but the best thing to bring to the table is a tough bottom. Callie rubbed hers, and leaned over the cooler she had brought with her. She tossed me a can of beer, got one for herself, and sat on the cooler. "It's good to see you," she said. "We didn't get a chance to talk the last time you were here." She frowned, remembering. "Come to think of it, you took off without any warning. We got to my office, you were gone. What happened?" "A lot of things, Callie. That's what I came here for, to . . . to talk them over with you, if I could. See if you could offer me some advice." She looked at me suspiciously. Well, she was in a suspicious frame of mind, I understand that, dealing with the intransigent union. But it went deeper. We had never managed to talk very well. It was a depressing thought to realize, once again, that when I had something important to share with someone, she was the best that sprang to mind. I thought about getting up and leaving right then. I know I hesitated, because Callie did what she had so often done when I'd tried to talk to her as a child: she changed the subject. "That Brenda, she's a much nicer child than you give her credit for. We had a long talk after we found out you'd left. Do you have any idea how much she looks up to you?" "Some idea. Callie, I--" "She's putting herself through a history course that would stagger you, all so she can keep up when you talk about 'ancient history.' I think it's hopeless. Some things you have to live through to really understand. I know about the twenty-first century because I was there. The twentieth century, or the nineteenth can't ever seem as real to me, though I've read a great deal about them." "Sometimes I don't think last month seems real to Brenda." "That's where you're wrong. She knows her recent history a lot better than you'd think, and I'm talking about things that happened fifty, a hundred years before she was born. We sat around and talked . . . well, mostly I told her stories, I guess. She seemed fascinated." She smiled at the memory. It didn't surprise me that Brenda had found favor with Callie. There are few qualities my mother values more in a human being than a willing ear. "I don't have much contact with young people. Like I was telling her, we move in different social circles. I can't stand their music and they think I'm a walking fossil. But after a few hours she started opening up to me. It was almost like having . . . well, a daughter." She glanced at me, then took a long drink of beer. She realized she had gone too far. Normally, a remark like that would have been the start of the seventy zillionth repeat of our most popular argument. That night, I was willing to let it slide. I had much more important things on my mind. When I didn't rise to it, she must have finally realized how troubled I was, because she leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and looked at me. "Tell me about it," she said, and I did. # But not all of it. I told her of my fight in the Blind Pig, and of my conversation with the CC that led to the pseudoexperiences still so fresh in my mind. I told her the CC had explained it as a cure for depression, which it was, in a way. But I found it impossible to come right out and tell her that I'd tried to kill myself. Is there a more embarrassing admission one can make? Maybe some people would think nothing of it, would eagerly show off what the experts called hesitation marks--scars on the wrist, bullet holes in the ceiling; I'd been doing a little reading on the subject while sequestered in Texas. If suicide really is a cry for help, it would seem reasonable to be open and honest in revealing that one had attempted it, in order to get some sympathy, some advice, some commiseration, maybe just a hug. Or some pity. Am I simply too proud? I didn't think so. I searched through my motives as well as I was able, and couldn't discern any need for pity, which is what I'd surely get from Callie. Perhaps that meant my attempts had actually been motivated by depression, by a desire simply to live no longer. And that was a depressing thought in itself. I eventually wound down, leaving my story with a rather obvious lack of resolution. I'm sure Callie spotted it right away, but she said nothing for a while. I know the whole thing was almost as difficult for her as it was for me. Intimacy didn't seem to run in the family. I felt better about her than I had in years, just for having listened to me as long as she had. She reached behind the cooler and brought out a can of something which she poured on the fire. It flared up immediately. She looked at me, and grinned.