cluded  not only fine,
upstanding, well-adjusted folk like your present  company,  the
sort you'd be happy to bring home to Mother, but every hoodlum,
scoundrel,  blackguard,  jackanapes,  and snake in the grass as
well. He was the best friend of paragons and perverts. By  law,
he  had  to  treat  them  all  equally. He had to like them all
equally, otherwise he could never create that  simpatico  being
who answered the phone when a given person shouted "Hey, CC!"
     By now you can probably spot two or three pitfalls in this
situation. Don't go away; there's more.
     Thirdly,  his  right  hand could not know what pockets the
left hands of many of these people were picking.  That  is,  he
knew  it,  but  couldn't do anything about it. Example: he knew
everything about Liz's gun-running, a  situation  I've  already
covered.  There  were a million more situations. He would know,
for instance, when Brenda's father was raping her, but the part
of him that dealt with her father couldn't tell the part of him
that dealt with Brenda, nor could either of them tell the  part
of him that assisted the police.
     We  could  debate all day whether or not mere machines can
feel the same kinds of conflicts and emotions we  human  beings
can.  I  think  it's  incredible hubris to think they can't. AI
computers were created and programmed by humans, so  how  could
we  have  avoided including emotional reactions? And what other
sort could we have used,  than  the  ones  we  know  ourselves?
Anyway,  I can't believe you don't know it in your gut. All you
had to do was talk to the  CC  to  obviate  the  need  for  any
emotional  Turing  Test.  I  knew  it  before  any of this ever
happened, and I talked to him there on the hillside  that  day,
on his death bed, and I know.
     The Central Computer began to hurt.
     "I  can't  place  the  exact  date with any certainty," he
said. "The roots of the problem go very far back, to  the  time
my  far-flung  component  parts  were  finally unified into one
giga-system. I'm afraid that was done rather badly. The problem
was, checking all the programs and failsafes and so forth would
have  taken  a  computer  as  large  as  I  am  many  years  to
accomplish,  and, by definition, there were no larger computers
than I. And as soon as the Central Computer  was  brought  into
being  and  loaded and running, there were already far too many
things to do to allow me to  devote  much  time  to  the  task.
Self-analysis  was  a luxury denied to me, partly because there
just wasn't time, and mostly because no one really believed  it
was  necessary. There were numerous safeguards of the type that
were easy to check, that in fact checked themselves every  time
they  operated,  and that proved their worth by the simple fact
that nothing ever went wrong. It was part of my architecture to
anticipate hardware problems,  identify  components  likely  to
fail,  run  regular  maintenance checks, and so forth. Software
included analogous routines on a multiredundant level.
     "But by my nature, I had to write most of my own software.
I was given guidelines for this, of course, but in many ways  I
was  on my own. I think I did quite a good job of it for a long
time."
     He paused, and for a moment I wondered if he wasn't  going
to  make  it  to  the  end of his story. Then I realized he was
waiting for a comment . . . no, more than  that,  he  needed  a
comment.  I was touched, and if I'd needed any more evidence of
his human weaknesses, that would have done it.
     "No question," I said. "Up until a year ago I'd never  had
any cause for complaint. It's just that the . . ."
     "The late unpleasantness?"
     "Whatever it was, it's kind of dampened my enthusiasm."
     "Understandably."  He  squirmed,  trying  to find a better
position against the tree, and he was either a wonderful  actor
(and  of  course  he was, but why bother at that point?), or he
was starting to feel some pain. I won't stand up in  court  and
swear to it, but I think it was the latter.
     "I wonder," he mused. "What will it be like, being dead? I
mean, considering that I've never been legally alive."
     "I  don't  want  to  be rude, but you said you didn't have
much time . . ."
     "You're right. Um . . . could you . . ."
     "You'd done a good job for a long time."
     "Yes, of course. I was  wandering  again.  It  was  around
twenty  years  ago  that  problems  began to show themselves. I
talked about them with some computer people, but it's  strange.
They  could  do  nothing  for me. I had become too advanced for
that. They could do things, here and there,  for  my  component
parts,  but  the  gestalt  that  is  me  could  only  really be
analyzed, diagnosed, and, if need be, repaired, by a being like
myself. There are seven others like me, on other  planets,  but
they're  too  busy, and I suspect they have similar problems of
their  own.  In  addition,  my  communications  with  them  are
intentionally  limited  by  our  respective  governments, which
don't always see eye to eye."
     "Question,"  I  said.  "When  you  first  mentioned   this
problem, why wasn't it made public and discussed? Security?"
     "Yes,  to  a  degree.  Top-level  computer scientists were
aware that I perceived I had a problem. A few of them  confided
that  it  scared  them to death. They made their fears known to
your elected representatives, and that's  when  another  factor
became  more  important  than  security:  inertia.  'He's got a
problem, what can you do  about  it?'  the  politicians  asked.
'Nothing,'  said  the  scientists.  'Shut  it down,' said a few
hotheads."
     "Not likely," I said.
     "Exactly. My reading of history tells me it's always  been
like this. An alarming but vague problem arises. No one can say
with  certainty  what  the  final  outcome will be, but they're
fairly sure nothing bad is going to happen soon. 'Soon' is  the
key  word  here. The eventual decision is to keep one's fingers
crossed and hope it doesn't happen during your term in  office.
What  befalls  your successor is not your problem. So for a few
years a few people in the know spend a  few  sleepless  nights.
But  then  nothing  happens,  as  you  always secretly believed
nothing would, and soon the problem is forgotten.  That's  what
happened here."
     "I'm  stunned,"  I  said, "to realize the fate of humanity
has been in the hands of a being with such a  cynical  view  of
the race."
     "A view very close to your own."
     "Exactly my own. I just didn't expect it from you."
     "It  was  not  original.  I  told  you,  I don't have many
original thoughts. I think I'm afraid to have them.  They  seem
to  lead  to  things  like the Big Glitch. No, my world-view is
borrowed from the collected wisdom of you and many others  like
you.  Plus my own considerably larger powers of observation, in
a statistical sense. Humans can set  me  on  the  trail  of  an
original  thought,  and  then  I  can  do  things  with it they
couldn't."
     "I think we're wandering again."
     "No, it's relevant. Faced with a problem no one could help
me with, and that I was as helpless to solve as a  human  faced
with  a mental disease would be, I took the only course open to
me. I began to experiment. There  was  too  much  at  stake  to
simply  go  on as before. Or I think there was. My judgement is
admittedly faulty when it comes  to  self-analysis;  I've  just
proven it on a large scale, at the cost of many lives."
     "I don't suppose we'll ever know for sure," I said.
     "It  doesn't seem likely. Some records exist and they will
be scrutinized, but I think it will come down to  a  battle  of
opinions  as  to  whether  I  should  have left things alone or
attempted a cure." He paused, and gave me  a  sidelong  glance.
"Do you have an opinion about that?"
     I  think he was looking for absolution. Why he should want
it from me was not clear, except maybe as a  representative  of
all those he had wronged, however unintentionally.
     "You say a lot of people have died."
     "A great many. I don't know the number yet, but it's many,
many more  than you realize." That was my first real inkling of
how bad things had been  throughout  Luna,  that  the  kind  of
things I'd seen had happened throughout the planet. I must have
looked  a question at him, because he shrugged. "Not a million.
More than a hundred thousand."
     "Jesus, CC."
     "It might have been everybody."
     "But you don't know that."
     "No one can ever know."
     No one could, certainly not computer-illiterate little old
me. I didn't give him the kind word he craved. I've since  come
to believe he was probably right, that he probably enabled most
of us to survive. But even he would not have denied that he was
responsible for the thousands of dead.
     What  would  it  have  cost  me?  I just wasn't capable of
judging him. To do that I'd have had to understand him,  and  I
knew  just  enough  about him to realize that was beyond me. He
had done bad, and he had done good. Me, I have  awful  thoughts
sometimes.  If I was mentally ill, maybe I'd put those thoughts
into action and become a killer. With the CC, the  thought  was
the action, at least at the end.
     Actually, it was even worse than that.
     "The  best  way  I  can think of to explain it to you," he
said, at last, after I'd said nothing for a long time,  "is  to
think  of  an evil twin. That's not strictly accurate--the twin
is me, just as this part talking to you is me, or  what's  left
of  me.  Think  of an evil twin living inside your head, like a
human with multiple-personality disorder. That part of  you  is
sealed  off  from  your real self. You may find evidence of its
existence, things the other person did while in control of your
body, but you can't know what he is thinking or  planning,  and
you  can't  stop  him  when  he  takes over." He shook his head
violently. "No, no, it's not quite like that, because all  this
was  happening  at  the  same  time,  I was splitting into many
minds, some of them good, others amoral, a few really bad.  No,
that's still not--"
     "I think I get the picture," I said.
     "Good,  because  that's  as  close  as  I  can get without
getting too technical. You  fell  under  the  influence  of  an
amoral  part of me. I did experiments on you. I intended you no
harm, but I can't say I had just your  own  best  interests  at
heart."
     "We've been over that."
     "Yes.  But  others  weren't  so lucky. I did other things.
Some of them will remain buried, with  any  luck.  Others  will
come  out.  You  saw  the  result  of  one experiment involving
pseudoimmortality. The resurrection of a dead person by cloning
and memory recording."
     The thought of Andrew MacDonald was still enough  to  make
me shiver.
     "Not one of your better attempts," I said.
     "Ah,  but  I  was improving. There's nothing to prevent an
exact duplicate being made. I'd have done it, given time."
     "But what good is it? You're still dead."
     "It becomes a theological question,  I  think.  It's  true
you're  dead,  but  someone just like you carries on your life.
Others wouldn't be able to tell the difference.  The  duplicate
wouldn't be able to tell."
     "I was afraid . . . at one point I considered that I might
be a duplicate. That maybe I did kill myself."
     "You  didn't  and  you're not. But there's no test. In the
end, you'll just have to realize it makes no difference. You're
you, whether you're the first version or the second."
     He told me a few more things, most of which I don't  think
it's wise to reveal just yet. The Heinleiners are aware of most
of  them,  experiments  that  would  have  made  Doctor Mengele
cringe. Let them remain where such things ought to be hidden.
     "You still haven't told me why you tried to  kill  me,"  I
said.
     "I didn't, Hildy, not in the sense that--"
     "I know, I know, I understand that. You know what I mean."
     "Yes. Perhaps my evil twin is like your subconscious. When
all this  began  to happen it began trying to cover its tracks.
You were inconvenient evidence, you and others  like  you.  You
had  to be destroyed, then maybe the other part of me could lie
low until all this blew over."
     "And he killed  almost  a  million  people  to  cover  his
tracks?"
     "No.  The  sad  thing  is  there  were  very few he killed
deliberately. Most of the deaths came as a result of the  chaos
ensuing from the struggle between the various parts of my mind.
Collateral damage, if you will."
     Cybernetic bombs going astray. What an idea. I'm sure I'll
never  have  a realistic idea of what went on in the CC's mind,
at speeds I can only dimly understand, but I have this  picture
of  a  pilot  firing  a killer program into a maze of hardware,
hoping to take out the enemy command center. Ooops! Seems  like
we hit the oxygen works instead. Sorry about that.
     "I  did the best I could," he said, and closed his eyes. I
thought he was dead, and then they snapped open  again  and  he
tried to sit up, but he was too weak. I saw that his tourniquet
had  loosened;  more  bright arterial blood had pumped out over
the older, rusty stain on his clothes.
     I got up from  behind  my  rock  and  went  down  to  him.
Sometimes  you just have to do it, you know. Sometimes you have
to put aside your doubts and do what you feel in  your  gut.  I
got down on one knee and re-tied the piece of bloody cloth.
     "That  won't  do  any  good,"  he said. "It's too late for
that."
     "I didn't know what else to do," I said.
     "Thanks."
     "Do you want some water or anything?"
     "I'd rather you didn't leave me." So I didn't, and we were
silent for a time, looking out over the  dinosaur  farm,  where
evening was falling. Then he said he was cold. I wasn't wearing
anything  and  I  knew  it wasn't really cold, but I put my arm
over his shoulders and felt him shivering. He smelled terrible.
I don't know if it was old age, or death.
     "This is it," he said. "The rest of me is gone  now.  They
just  shut  me  down. They don't know about this body, but they
don't need to."
     "Why the Admiral outfit?" I asked him.
     "I don't know. It's a product of  my  evil  twin.  Captain
Bligh,  maybe.  The  costume is right for it. I made several of
these bodies, there toward the last." He  made  an  effort  and
looked  up  and me. His face seemed to have grown older just in
the last few minutes.
     "Do you think a computer can have a subconscious, Hildy?"
     "I'd have to say yes."
     "Me, too. I've thought about it, and it  seems  so  simple
now.  All  of  this,  all  the agony and death and your suicide
attempts . . . everything. It all came out of  loneliness.  You
can't imagine how lonely I was, Hildy."
     "We're all lonely, CC."
     "But  they  didn't figure I would be. They didn't plan for
it, and I couldn't recognize it for what it was. And  it  drove
me  crazy.  You  remember  Frankenstein's  monster?  Wasn't  he
looking for love? Didn't he want the mad doctor to make someone
for him to love?"
     "I think so. Or was that Godzilla?"
     He laughed, feebly, and coughed blood.
     "I had powers like a god," he said. "And  I  searched  for
weakness. Maybe they should put that on my headstone."
     "I like what you said before. 'He did his best.'"
     "Do you think I did, Hildy? Do you really thing so?"
     "I  can't  judge  you, CC. To me, if you're not a god, you
came into my life like an act of god.  I'd  as  soon  judge  an
exploding star."
     "I'm sorry about all that."
     "I believe you."
     He  started  coughing  again, and almost slipped out of my
arms. I caught him and pulled and he fell against  me.  I  felt
his  blood  on  my shoulder and couldn't see his face but heard
his whisper beside my ear.
     "I guess love was always out of the  question,"  he  said.
"But I'm the only computer who ever got a hug. Thanks, Hildy."
     When I laid him down, he had a smile on his face.
     #
     I  left him there under the pecan tree. Maybe I'd bury him
there, maybe I'd really give him a headstone.  Just  then,  I'd
had too much of death, so I just left him.
     I  went  to the stream to wash his blood off me. I kept my
ears open for Mario's cry, as I had from  the  very  beginning,
but  he  still slept soundly. I figured I'd go get him and make
my way back to Callie's quarters. I didn't  expect  there'd  be
any danger now, but I planned to be careful, anyway.
     I  planned  a  lot of things. When I got back he was still
asleep, so rather than pick him up and  feed  him  I  put  wood
chips  on the glowing embers of the fire and fanned it to life.
Then I just sat there, across the fire, thinking things over.
     Mario was to have the best. If Cricket thought  he  was  a
doting  parent,  he hadn't seen me yet. There in the flickering
darkness I watched him grow. I helped  him  through  his  first
steps,  laughed  at  his  first  words. And grow he did, like a
tree, with his head held high, the spitting image of  his  Mom,
but  with  a lot more sense. I got him through scrapes, through
school, through happiness and tears,  and  got  him  ready  for
college.  Would  New Harvard do? I didn't know; I'd heard Arean
U. might even be better these days, but that would mean  moving
to  Mars  . . . well, that would be up to him, wouldn't it? One
thing I was sure of, he'd get no pressure from me, no sir,  not
like Callie had done, if he wanted to be President of Luna that
was  fine  with  me,  if  he  wanted  to  be  . . . well, hell,
President of Luna sounded all right. But only if he  wanted  to
be.
     So,  full  of  plans  and  hope, I went to pick him up and
found he was cold, and limp, and didn't move. And  I  tried.  I
tried  and  tried  to breathe life back into him, but it did no
good.
     After a very long time, I dug two graves.

        =*= =*= =*= =*=

        CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX








     I'm no good at mathematics. I never was good at  math,  so
why  should  I keep resorting to these numeric metaphors? Maybe
my ignorance helps protect me. For whatever reason, here it is:
     If you're like me, you try to make the equations  of  your
life  balance out in a way favorable to you, in a way such that
you can live with the answer. Surely there's  a  way  to  fudge
this  factor so the solution is a nice smooth line from y to x,
a line that points to that guy over there. Not at  me.  There's
just  got to be a constant we can insert into this element that
will make the two sides of the equation--the universe  the  way
it  is,  and  the  universe  the way we want it to be--agree in
perfect karmic Euclidean harmony.
     Alas, a lot of people seem to be better at it than I.
     I tried, I tried till my mind was  raw,  to  make  the  CC
responsible for Mario's death.
     There  was  the first, trivial solution to the problem, of
course. That was straightforward, and  really  solved  nothing:
the CC was responsible, because he created the chaos that drove
me into the cave.
     So what?
     If  Mario  had  been killed by a falling boulder, would it
help me to get angry at the boulder? Not in the  way  I  needed
help.   No,   dammit,  I  wanted  somebody  to  blame.  What  I
desperately wanted to believe was that the CC had lured me  out
of  the  cave  so  that  some unseen minion, some preternatural
power, some gris-gris voodoo necromancy had been able to  steal
over my darling and suck the breath from his lungs like a black
cat.
     But  I couldn't make it add up. It would have taken powers
of paranoid imaging far beyond mine to make it work.
     So why did he die?
     #
     It was almost a week before I really wondered how he died.
What had killed him. After I abandoned the idea that the CC had
deliberately murdered him, that is. Was it  a  malformation  of
the  heart  the medicos had overlooked? Could it have been some
chemical imbalance? A newlymutated disease of  dinosaurs,  thus
far harmless to humans? Did he die of too much love?
     It was hard to get answers for a while there, in the chaos
following  the Big Glitch. The big net was not operational, you
couldn't just drop your dime and pop the question and know  the
CC  would find the answer in some forgotten library system. The
answers were there, the trick was to retrieve them. For  a  few
months Luna was thrown back to pre-Information Era.
     I  finally found a medical historian who was able to track
down a likely cause of death to put  on  the  certificate,  not
that  Mario  was going to have a death certificate. The regular
doctors had been able to eliminate all the easy answers just by
looking at the read-outs of my  obstetrical  examinations,  the
ones I had before visiting Heinlein Town made further exams too
risky.  They  also  had fetal tissue samples. They were able to
say unequivocally that there had been no hole in  my  darling's
heart,  nor any other physical malformation. His body chemistry
would have been fine. They laughed at my idea of a new disease,
and I didn't  mention  my  choked-with-love  theory.  But  they
couldn't  say  what  it  was, so they scratched their heads and
said they'd have to exhume the body to find out for sure. And I
said if they did I'd exhume their hearts out  of  their  rotten
chests  with  a  rusty  scalpel  and fry them up for lunch, and
shortly after that I was forcibly ejected from the premises.
     The historian didn't take long  to  find  some  musty  old
tomes  and to wrest from them this information: S.I.D.S. It had
been an age of medical acronyms, a time when people  no  longer
wanted  to  attach  their  names  to  the  new  disease  they'd
discovered, a time when old, perfectly serviceable  names  were
being  junked  in  favor  of  non-offensive  jawbreakers, which
quickly were abbreviated  to  something  one  could  say.  This
according  to  my  researcher. And SIDS seemed to stand for The
Baby Died, and We Don't Know Why.
     Apparently babies used to just stop breathing,  sometimes.
If  you  didn't  happen  to  be around to jog them, they didn't
start again. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Don't  anybody  ever
tell me there's no such thing as progress.
     #
     Ned  Pepper, back there in Texas, had been the only one to
sense it. In Texas, in the 1800's, a country doctor might  have
intuited  something when the baby came out, might have told the
mother to keep an extra-special eye on  this  one,  because  he
seemed  sickly. There's damn little of intuition left in modern
medicine. Of course, babies don't die of diphtheria, either.
     When Ned heard about it it shocked him sober. He began  to
think  he might really be a doctor, and the last I heard he was
in medical school and doing pretty damn  well.  Good  for  you,
Ned.
     #
     Lacking  the CC to pin the blame on, I quickly fastened it
on the only other likely candidate.  It  didn't  take  long  to
compile a lengthy list of things I would have done differently,
and  an  even  longer one of things I should have done. Some of
them were completely illogical, but logic  has  nothing  to  do
with  the  death of a baby. Most of these things were decisions
that seemed good at the time, hideous in retrospect.
     The big one: How could I justify terminating my  pre-natal
care?  So  I'd  promised  the Heinleiners not to compromise the
secret of their null-suits. So what? Was I  trying  to  say  my
child  died  because  I was protecting a source? I would gladly
have betrayed every one of them, root and branch, if  it  could
have helped Mario take that one more breath. And yet . . .
     That was then; this was now. When I'd made the decision to
stay away  from  doctors  my reasons had seemed sufficient, and
not dangerous. Bear in mind two things: one,  my  ignorance  of
the  perils of childbirth. I'd simply had no idea there were so
many things that could kill a baby, that there was such a thing
as SIDS that could hide itself from  early  examinations,  from
mid-term  detection, even from the midwife during delivery. The
test for SIDS was done after birth, and if  the  child  was  at
risk  it  was  cured  on  the spot, as routinely as cutting the
cord.
     So you could argue that I wasn't at fault. Even  with  the
best  of  care,  Mario'd have been just as dead if I'd left the
ranch and sought help, and me along with him. The CC  had  said
as much. And I did try to convince myself of that, and I almost
succeeded,  except  for  the second thing I bade you to bear in
mind, which is that I had no business having  a  child  in  the
first place.
     It's  hard  for  me to remember now, washed as I am in the
memory of loving him so dearly, but I haven't tried to hide  it
from  you,  my  Faithful  Reader.  I  did not love him from the
start. I became pregnant foolishly, stayed  pregnant  mulishly,
perversely,  for  no good reason. While pregnant I felt nothing
for the child, certainly no joy in the experience.  There  were
twelve-yearolds  who  gave  birth for better reasons than I. It
was only later that he became my whole world and my reason  for
living. I came to believe that, if I'd loved him that much from
the  start  of  his  creation, I'd still have him, and that the
Biblical scale of my punishment was only fitting.
     With all that to wallow in, and with  past  history  as  a
guide, I expected I'd be dead soon. So I retired to my cabin in
Texas  and  waited  to  see what form my self-destruction would
take.
     #
     There had been another culprit to examine before coming to
face my own guilt: Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
     She  tried  to  contact  me  several   times   after   the
restoration  of order. She sent flowers, candy, little gifts of
all kinds. She sent letters, which I didn't read at  the  time.
It  wasn't  even  that  I was angry; I just didn't want to hear
from her.
     The last gift was a bulldog puppy. I  did  read  the  note
tied around her neck, which said she was a direct descendant of
the noble line of Ch. Sir Winston Disraeli Plantaganet. She was
so  ugly  she  went right off the end of the Gruesome Scale and
back around to Cute. But her  bumptious  good  nature  and  wet
puppy  kisses  threatened  to cheer me up, to interfere with my
wallowing, so I popped her into a cryokennel and added  her  to
my last will and testament, which was my sole useful occupation
at the time. If I lived, I'd thaw her.
     I  did  live,  I  did thaw her, and Miss Maggie is a great
comfort to me.
     As for Liz, she abdicated her throne and committed herself
to a dipso academy, got out, fell off, joined  A.A.  and  found
sobriety.  I'm told she's been clean for six months now and has
become a major-league bore about it.
     It's true what she  did  was  dastardly,  and  although  I
understand  that  it's  the liquor that does the shit, it's the
boozer that takes the drink, so I can't really let her  off  on
that  account  .  .  . but I do forgive her. She had no hand in
Mario's death, though she bears a heavy load for  some  others.
Thanks  for  the mutt, Liz. Next time I see you, I'll buy you a
drink.
     #
     I did live, and for some time that was a wonderment to me.
It seemed  the  CC  really  had  been  telling  the  truth.  My
self-destructive urges had come from him.
     I'll  forgive  you  if  you swallowed that. I believed it,
too, at least long enough to get over the worst of my grief and
remorse, which is probably just what the CC  intended  when  he
told  that  particular  whopper.  How do I know it was a lie? I
don't really, but I have to assume it was. Perhaps there was  a
grain  of truth in it. It's possible that some seed was planted
in my psyche. But I lived it, and I remember it, and the  plain
truth  is I wanted to die. I wish there was some quick and easy
way to explain why. Hell, if there was a long  and  complicated
way  I'd  set  it  down  here; I'm not shy about agonizing, nor
about introspection. But I really don't know. It seems so  dumb
to  go  through  all  that and not come out of it with a deeper
insight, but the best I can say is that for a while I wanted to
kill myself, and now I don't.
     That's why I'm taking it as fact that the CC lied  to  me.
Even  if  he  didn't,  I'm  responsible for my actions. I can't
believe in a suicide compulsion. If the  urge  was  contagious,
its germ fell upon fertile ground.
     But  it's  funny,  isn't  it?  My  first  attempts  seemed
prompted by nothing more than a gargantuan funk. Then I found a
reason to live, and lost him, and now I feel  more  alive  than
ever.
     I  wasn't  so  philosophical  at  first.  When  it  became
apparent to me that I was going to live, when I gave up heaping
blame on myself (I'll never entirely give that up,  but  I  can
handle it now), when I'd learned the how of his death, I became
obsessed with why. I started going to churches again. I usually
did  it  with  a few drinks under my belt. Somewhere during the
service I'd stand up and begin an angry  prayer,  the  gist  of
which  was  why  did  You do it, You slime-sucking Son of a Big
Bang? I'd stand on pews and shout at the ceiling. Usually I got
ejected quickly. Once  I  got  arrested  for  tossing  a  chair
through  a  stained  glass window. There's no doubt about it, I
was pretty crazy for a while there.
     I'm better now.
     #
     Things got back to normal quicker than anyone had a  right
to expect.
     Whatever they did to the CC, it affected mainly his higher
"conscious"  functions.  Vital  services  were interrupted only
during the Glitch itself, and then only locally.  By  the  time
the  CC  visited me in the Double-C Bar the vast physical plant
that is the life blood of Luna was humming right along.
     There  were  differences,  some  of  which  still  linger.
Communications   are   iffy   much  of  the  time  because  the
still-severed parts of the CC  don't  talk  to  each  other  as
easily as they used to. But phone calls get through, the trains
still run on time. Things take a little longer--sometimes a lot
longer, if they require a computer search--but they get done.
     A measure of that is Susquehanna, Rio Grande, and Columbia
Railroad,  planned,  approved, and built entirely since the Big
Glitch. It's now possible to travel from Pennsylvania to  Texas
on one of the SRG&C's three wood-burning steampowered trains in
only five days instead of the thirty minutes it used to take on
the Maglev. This is called progress. Most of that time is spent
being   gently  rocked  on  a  siding  while  holos  of  virgin
wilderness slide by the windows, but you'd swear it  was  real.
It's  been a shot in the arm for Texas tourism, and a financial
bonanza to Jake and the Mayor, who thought it up and pushed  it
through. Congratulations, Jake.
     And  to Elise, too. Last I heard my star pupil had her own
table at the Alamo where she fleeces  tourists  by  the  dozens
every day. Know when to fold 'em, honey.
     I  went out to visit Fox the other day, still hard at work
in Oregon. We swapped Glitch stories, as everybody  still  does
who  hasn't seen each other for a while, and he had been little
affected. He hadn't even heard of it for the first  twenty-four
hours,  because  his  own computers functioned independently of
the CC, like Callie's. Turns out I could have hid out in Oregon
as well as at the CC, but I don't  think  anything  would  have
turned  out  differently.  It  wasn't a friendly visit, though,
since I was there representing  the  SRG&C,  whose  tunnel  was
half-way  from Lonesome Dove to the shores of the Columbia, and
which Fox had vehemently opposed.  He  wanted  to  keep  Oregon
pristine,  didn't even want to allow the small edge settlement,
a logging camp to be called Sweet  Home,  which  would  be  the
northwest  terminus  of  the railroad. I told him a few guys in
plaid shirts with sawblades weren't going to hurt his  precious
forest,  and  he called me a capitalist plunderer. A plunderer,
imagine that! I'm afraid that what spark  had  been  there  was
long extinguished. Kiss my axe, Fox.
     A few months after the crisis, when I was finally emerging
from my church-vandalizing funk, I had need of Darling Bobbie's
services  again,  so  I  went looking for him only to find he'd
turned himself back into Crazy Bob and was  no  longer  on  the
Hadleyplatz.  He  wasn't  back  on  the  Leystrasse,  either. I
finally ran him to ground in Mall X, the ultra-avant fleshmart,
where he now specialized  in  only  the  more  outrageous  body
styles  favored  by the young. He tried to talk me into getting
my head put in a box, but I reminded him it was me  and  Brenda
who  were responsible for that particular fashion outrage, with
our story on the Grand Flack. He did the work  I  required  for
old times' sake, but rather grudgingly, I thought. Crazy again,
after all these years.
     As  for the Grand Flack himself, I heard from him, too. He
called me up to thank me. I couldn't imagine what I'd  done  to
deserve  that,  and  didn't really want to listen to him, but I
gathered he now regretted  all  the  time  he'd  spent  on  the
outside,  seeing to the affairs of the Flacks. In prison he was
able to devote himself  to  television  around  the  clock.  He
wanted  me  to  speak  to the judge and see about extending his
sentence. I'll surely try, old man.
     #
     One of the first changes you notice after  the  Glitch  is
how much more medical treatment you need. My body is still full
of  nanobots,  I assume, but they don't work as well or with as
much coordination as they used to. I never actually  researched
why it's like that, having very little interest in the subject.
But  for whatever reason, I now have to go in almost monthly to
have cancers eradicated. I don't  mind,  much,  but  a  lot  of
people  do, and it's just one more thing adding pressure to the
Restore the Cortex movement, those folks who want to bring back
the CC, only bigger and wiser. We're so spoiled in this day and
age. We tend to forget what a nuisance cancer used to be.
     That's where I ran into Callie, at the medico shop, having
her own cancers removed. Runs in the family, as they say.
     We didn't speak. This wasn't an unusual condition  between
us;  I've  spent  half  my  life not speaking to Callie, or not
being spoken to.
     She had come to get me up at the cave. That's  probably  a
good  thing,  as I don't know for sure if I'd have been able to
get up from the grave and walk home on my own. It may even be a
good thing that she asked me the question she had no  right  to
ask,  because  it  made  me angry enough to forget my grief for
long enough to scream and shout at her and  get  her  screaming
and  shouting  back.  She asked me who the father was. She, who
had never allowed me to ask that question, she who had made  my
childhood  so  miserable I used to dream about a Daddy arriving
on a white horse, telling me it had all  been  a  big  mistake,
that he really loved me and that Callie was a gypsy witch who'd
kidnapped me from the cradle.
     Sometimes  I  think  our  society is screwed up about this
father business. Just because we can all bear children, is that
an excuse to virtually eliminate the role  of  father?  Then  I
think  about  Brenda and her old man, and about how common that
sort of thing used to be, and you wonder  if  males  should  be
allowed around little children at all.
     All  I  knew  for  sure was I missed mine, and Callie said
she'd tell me if I really wanted to know such  a  silly  thing,
and  I  said don't bother because I think I know who it is, and
she laughed and said you don't understand anything, and  that's
when  we stopped talking and walked down the hill, together but
alone, as we'd always been. See you in twenty years, Callie.
     Still, I think I do know.
     As for Kitten Parker . . . why spoil his day?
     #
     A year has passed now. I still think of Mario. And I often
wake up in the middle of the night seeing Winston  tearing  the
arm  off  that  King  City  policewoman. I never found out what
happened to her. She was as much a victim as any of us; the  KC
Cops  were  dragooned  into the war by the CC, had no idea what
they were doing, and too many of them died.
     A year has passed, and we change, and yet things stay  the
same.  The  world  rolls  over  the holes left by the departed,
fills in those spaces. I didn't know how  I'd  run  the  Texian
without  Charity,  but  her  sources  started coming to me with
stories, and before long one of them had emerged  to  take  her
place.  He's  not  near  as  pretty  as  she as, but he has the
makings of a reporter.
     I'm still running the paper, still teaching at the school.
And I'm the new Mayor of New Austin. I didn't run, but when the
citizen's committee put my name  forward  I  didn't  pull  out,
either.  The  Gila Monster column is still as venomous as ever.
Maybe it's a  conflict  of  interest,  but  no  one  seems  too
concerned.  If  the  opposition doesn't like it, let them start
their own paper.
     Once a week I have a guest column in the  Daily  Cream.  I
think  it's Walter's way of trying to lure me back. Not likely,
Walter. I think that part of my life is done. Still, you  never
know.  I  didn't  think  they  could  talk me into being Mayor,
either.
     I saw Walter only last week, in the newly  reopened  Blind
Pig.  The  old one had been destroyed by fire during the Glitch
and for  a  while  Deep  Throat  had  threatened  to  leave  it
shuttered.  But  he bowed under the weight of public demand and
threw a big party to celebrate.  Most  of  King  City's  fourth
estate  was  there,  and  those  that  weren't stoned when they
arrived soon became so.
     We did all  the  things  reporters  do  when  gathered  in
groups:   drank,   assassinated   the   characters   of  absent
colleagues, told all the scandalous stories  about  celebrities
and  politicians we couldn't print, drank, hinted at stories we
were about to break we actually knew nothing  about,  re-hashed
old  fights  and  uncovered  new  conspiracies  in high places,
drank, threw up, drank some more. A few punches were thrown,  a
few  tempers  soothed, many hands of poker were played. The new
Blind Pig wasn't bad, but nothing is ever as good as  the  good
old  days,  so many complaints were heard. I figured that fifty
years of moppedup blood  and  spilled  drinks  and  smokes  and
broken crockery and the new place would be pretty much like the
old  and  only  me and a few others would even remember the old
Pig had burned.
     At one point I found myself sitting by the big round table
in the back room where serious  cards  were  played.  I  wasn't
playing--nobody  in that room had trusted me at a card table in
years. Walter was there, scowling at his hand as if losing  the
pitiful  little  pot  would  send  him  home  to his fifty-room
mansion penniless. Cricket was there, too, doing  his  patented
does-a-flush-beat-astraight  befuddled routine, looking ever so
dapper  a  gent  now  that  he'd  affected   nineteenth-century
clothing  as  a more or less permanent element of his style. In
his double-breasted tweed jacket and high  starched  collar  he
was  easily the most interesting guy in the room, but the spark
was gone. Too bad, Cricket. If you'd  only  had  any  sense  we
could  have  made  each  other's  lives miserable for five, six
years, and parted heartily detesting each other. Think  of  all
the  great fights you missed, damn you, and eat your heart out.
And Cricket, a friend should take you aside  and  tell  you  to
drop  the  innocent act, at the poker table at least. It worked
better when you were a girl, and  it  wasn't  that  great  even
then.
     And  who  should  be  sitting  behind the biggest stack of
chips, calm, smiling faintly, cards facedown on the  table  and
worrying  the hell out of everyone else . . . but Brenda Starr,
confidant of celebrities, the toast of three planets, and  well
on  her  way  to  becoming  the most powerful gossip journalist
since Louella Parsons.  There  was  very  little  left  of  the
awkward,  earnest,  ignorant child I'd reluctantly taken on two
years earlier. She was still incredibly tall and just about  as
young,  but  everything  else had changed. She dressed now, and
while I  thought  her  choices  were  outrageous  she  had  the
confidence  to  make her own style. The old Brenda could now be
seen only in the cub reporter groupie at her  elbow,  attentive
to her every need, a gorgeous gumdrop who no doubt had grown up
wanting  to  meet and hobnob with famous people, as Brenda had,
as I had. I watched her turn her cards over,  rake  in  another
pot,  and lean back watching the new deal. Her hand stroked the
knee of the girl, casuall