Elin felt her nails dig into her palms. "Sure I can," she said. She hopscotched down the crater to the surface. There the ma.s.s driver stood, a thin monorail stretching kilometers into the Imbrium, its gentle slope all but imperceptible.

"You're identifying with the woman who used to be Elin Donnelly. There's nothing wrong with that; speaking as a wetsurgeon, it's a healthy sign. But it's something you've got to grow out of.''

"Listen, Shostokovich, tinkering with my emotions doesn't change who I am. I'm not your dead lady friend, and I'm not about to take her place. So why don't you just go away and stop jerking me around, huh?"

Tiny repair robots prowled the ma.s.s driver's length, stop-ping occasionally for a spotweld. Bluesparks sputtered sound-lessly over the surface.

"You're not the old Elin Donnelly either, and I think you know it. Bodies are transient, memories are nothing. Your spontaneity and grace, your quiet strength, your impatience- the small lacks and presences of you I've known and loved for years-are what make you yourself. The name doesn't matter, nor the past. You are who you are, and I love you for it."

"Yeah, well, what I am does not love you, buster."

One of the repairbots slowly fell off the driver. It hit, bounced, struggled to regain its treads, then scooted back toward its work.

Tory's voice was almost regretful. "You do, though. You can't hide that from me. I know you as your lover and as your wetsurgeon. You've let me become a part of you, and no matter how angry you might temporarily be, you'll come back to me."

Elin could feel her body trembling with rage. "Yeah, well if that's true, then why tell me! Hah? Why not just go back to your hut and wait for me to come crawling?"

"Because I want you to quit your job." , "Say what?"

"I don't want you to become G.o.d. It was a mistake the last time, and I'm afraid it won't be any better with the new programs. If you go up into G.o.d and can't get down this time, you'll do it the next time. And the next. I'll spend my life here waiting for you, re-creating you, losing you. Can't you see it-year after year, replaying the same tired old tape?" Tory's voice fell to a whisper. "I don't think I could take it even once more."

"If you know me as well as you say, then I guess you know my answer," Elin said coldly.

She waited until Tory's footsteps moved away, fading, defeat echoing after. Only then did Elin realize that her sensor had been scanning the same empty bit of Magritte's slope for the last five minutes.

It was time for the final Trojan horse. "Today we make a G.o.d," Tory said. "This is a total conscious integration of the mind in an optimal efficiency pattern. Close your eyes and count to three."

One. The h.e.l.l of it was that Tory was right. She still loved him. He was the one man she wanted and was empty without.

Two. Worse, she didn't know how long she could go on without coming back to him-and, good G.o.d, would that be humiliating!

She was either cursed or blessed; cursed perhaps for the agonies and humiliations she would willingly undergo for the sake of this one rather manipulative human being. Or maybe blessed, in that at least there was someone who could move her so, deserving or not. Many went through their lives without.

Three. She opened her eyes.

Nothing was any different. Magritte was as ordinary, as mundane as ever, and she felt no special reaction to it one way or another. Certainly she did not feel the presence of G.o.d.

"I don't think this is working," she tried to say. The words did not come. From the corner of her eye, she saw Tory wiping clean his facepaint, shucking off his jumpsuit. But when she tried to sit up, she found she was paralyzed.

What is this maniac doing?

Tory's face loomed over her, his eyes gla.s.sy, almost fear-ful. His hair was a tangled mess; her fingers itched with the impulse to run a comb through it.

"Forgive me, love." He kissed her forehead lightly, her lips ever so gently. Then he was out of her field of vision, stretching out on the gra.s.s beside the cot.Elin stared up at the dome roof, thinking: No. She heard him strap the bone inductors to his body, one by one, and then a sharp click as he switched on a recorder. The program-ming began to flow into him.

A long wait-perhaps, twenty seconds viewed objectively- as the wetware was loaded. Another click as the recorder shut off. A moment of silence, and then- Tory gasped. One arm flew up into her field of vision, swooped down out of it, and he began choking. Elin strug-gled against her paralysis, could not move. Something broke noisily, a piece of equipment by the sound of it, and the choking and gasping continued. He began thrashing wildly.

Tory, Tory, what's happening to you?

"It's just a grand mal seizure," Landis said. "Nothing we can't cope with, nothing we weren't prepared for." She touched Elin's shoulder rea.s.suringly, called back to the crowd huddling about Tory, "

Hey! One of you loopheads-somebody there know any programming? Get the lady out of this."

A tech scurried up, made a few simple adjustments with her machinery. The others-still gathering, Landis had been only the third on the scene-were trying to hold Tory still, to fit a bone inductor against his neck. There was a sudden gabble of comment, and Tory flopped wildly. Then a collec-tive sigh as his muscles eased and his convulsions ceased.

"There," the tech said, and Elin scrabbled off the couch.

She pushed through the people (and a small voice in the back of her head marveled: A crowd! How strange) and knelt before Tory, cradling his head ift her arms.

He shivered, eyes wide and unblinking. "Tory, what's the matterV His terrible eyes turned on her. "Nichevo."

"What?"

"Nothing," Landis said. "Or maybe 'it doesn't matter' is a better translation."

A wetware tech had taken control, shoving the crowd back. He reported to Landis, his mouth moving calmly under the interplay of green and red. "Looks like a flaw in the pro-gramming philosophy.

We were guessing that bringing the ego along would make G.o.d such an unpleasant experience that the subject would let us deprogram, without interfering- now we know better."

Elin stroked Tory's forehead. His muscles clenched, then loosened as a medtech reprogrammed the body responses. "Why isn't anyone doing anything?" she demanded.

"Take a look," Landis said, and patched her into the intercom. In her mind's eye, Elin could see dozens of wetware techs submitting program after program. A branching wetware diagram filled one channel, and as she watched, minor changes would occur as programs took hold, then be unmade as Tory's mind rejected them. "We've got an imagery tap of his Weltanschauung coming up," some nameless tech reported.

Something horrible appeared on a blank channel.

Elin could take only an instant's exposure before her mind reflexively shut the channel down, but that instant was more than enough. She stood in a room infinitely large and clut-tered with great, noisome machines.

They were tended by malevolent demons who shrieked and cackled and were machines themselves, and they generated pain and madness.

The disgust and revulsion she felt was absolute. It could not be put into words-no more than could the actual experi-ence of what she had seen. And yet-she knew this much about wetware techniques-it was only a rough approxima-tion, a cartoon, of what was going through Tory's head.Elin's body trembled with shock, and by slow degrees she realized that she had retreated to the surface world.

Tory's head was still cradled in her arms. A wetware tech standing nearby looked stunned, her face gray.

Elin gathered herself together, said as gently as she could, "Tory, what is that you're seeing?"

Tory turned his stark, haunted eyes on her, and it took an effort of will not to flinch. Then he spoke, his words shock-ingly calm.

"It is-what is. It's reality. The universe is a d.a.m.ned cold machine, and all of us only programs within it. We perform the actions we have no choice but to perform, and then we fade into nothingness. It's a cruel and noisy place."

"I don't understand-didn't you always say that we were just programs? Wasn't that what you always believed?"

"Yes, but now I experience it."

Elin noticed that her hand was slowly stroking his hair; she did not try to stop it. "Then come down, Tory. Let them deprogram you."

He did not look away. "Mcfcevo," he said.

The tech, recovered from her shock, reached toward a piece of equipment. Landis battered her hand away. "Hold it right there, techie! Just what do you think you're doing?"

The woman looked impatient. "He left instructions that if the experiment turned out badly, I was to pull the terminator switch."

"That's what I thought. There'll be no mercy killings while I'm on the job, Mac."

"I don't understand." The tech backed away, puzzled. "Surely you don't want him to suffer."

Landis was gathering herself for a withering reply when the intercom cut them all off. A flash of red shot through the sensorium, along with the smell of bitter almond, a p.r.i.c.kle of static electricity, the taste of kimchi. "Emergency! We've got an emergency!" A black and white face materialized in Elin's mind.

"Emergency!"

Landis flipped into the circuit. "What's the problem? Show us."

"You're not going to believe this." The face disappeared and was replaced by a wide-angle shot of the lake.

The greenish-black water was calm and stagnant. The thrust-cone island, with its scattered gra.s.s and weeds, slumbered.

And G.o.d walked upon the water.

They gawked, all of them. Coral walked across the lake, her pace determined but not hurried, her face serene. The pink soles of her bare feet just touched the surface.

/ didn't believe her, Elin thought wildly. She saw Father Landis begin to cross herself, her mouth hanging open, eyes wide in disbelief. Halfway through her gesture, the Jesuitical wet ware took hold. Her mouth snapped shut, and her face became cold and controlled. She pulled herself up straight.

"Hans," the priest said, "push the b.u.t.ton."

"No!" Elin shrieked, but it was too late. Still hooked into the intercom, she saw the funny little man briskly, efficiently obey.

For an instant, nothing happened. Then bright glints of light appeared at all of the condenser units,harsh and actinic. Steam and smoke gushed from the machinery, and a fraction of a second later, there was an ear-slapping gout of sound.

Bits of the sky were blown away.

Elin turned, twisted, fell. She scrambled across the ground and threw her arms around Tory.

The air was in turmoil. The holes in the dome roof-small at first-grew as more of the dome flaked away, subjected to stresses it wasn't designed to take. An uncanny whistling grew to a screech, then a scream, and then there was an all-encompa.s.sing whoomph, and the dome shattered.

Elin was flung upward, torn away from Tory, painfully flung high and away. All the crater was in motion, the rocks tearing out of the floor, the trees splintering upward, the lake exploding into steam.

The screaming died-the air was gone. Elin's ears rang furiously, and her skin stung everywhere.

Pressure grew within her, the desire of her blood to mate with the vacuum, and Elin realized that she was about to die.

A quiet voice said: This must not be.

Time stopped.

Elin hung suspended between moon and death. The shards and fragments of an instant past crystallized and shifted. The world became not misty, exactly, but apositional. Both it and she grew tentative, possibilities rather than actual things.

Come be G.o.d with me now, Coral said, but not to Elin.

Tory's presence flooded the soupy uncertainty, a vast and powerful thing, but wrong somehow, twisted. But even as Elin felt this, there was a change within him, a sloughing off of ident.i.ty, and he seemed to straighten, to heal.

All around, the world began to grow more numinous, more real. Elin felt tugged in five directions at once. Tory's pres-ence swelled briefly, then dwindled, became a spark, less than a spark, nothing.

Yes.

With a roaring of waters and a shattering of rocks, with an audible thump, the world returned.

Elin unsteadily climbed down the last flight of stone stairs from the terraces to the lake-front. She pa.s.sed by two guards at the foot of the stairs, their facepaint as hastily applied as their programming, several more on the way to the nearest trellis farm. They were everywhere since the incident.

She found the ladder up into the farm and began climbing. It was biological night, and the agtechs were long gone.

Hand over hand she climbed, as far and high as she could, until she was afraid she would miss a rung and tumble off. Then she swung herself onto a ledge, wedging herself be-tween strawberry and yam planters. She looked down on the island, and though she was dizzyingly high, she was only a third of the way up.

"Now what the h.e.l.l am I doing here?" she mumbled to herself.

She swung her legs back and forth, answered her own question: "Being a p.i.s.s-a.s.s drunk." She cackled. There was something she didn't have to share with Coral. She was capable of getting absolutely blitzed and walking away from the bar before it hit her. It was something metabolic.

Below, Tory and Coral sat quietly on their monkey island. They did not touch, did not make love or hold hands or even glance at one another-they just sat. Being G.o.ds.

Elin squinted down at the two. "Like to upchuck all over you," she mumbled. Then she squeezed her eyes and fists tight, drawing tears and pain. Dammit, Tory!Blinking hard, she looked away from the island, down into the jet-black waters of the lake. The brighter stars were reflected there. A slight breeze rippled the water, making them twinkle and blink, as if lodged in a Terran sky. They floated lightly on the surface, swarmed and coalesced, and formed Tory's face in the lake. He smiled warmly, invitingly.

A hand closed around her arm, and she looked up into the stern face of a security guard. "You're drunk, Ms.," he said, "and you're endangering property."

She looked where he pointed, at a young yam plant she had squashed when she sat down, and began to laugh. Smoothly, professionally, the guard rolled up her sleeve, clamped a plastic bracelet around her wrist. "Time to go," he said.

By the time the guard had walked Elin up four terraces, she was nearly sober. A steady trickle of her blood wound through the bracelet, was returned to her body cleansed of alcohol. A sacrilegious waste of wine, in her opinion.

In another twenty steps, the bracelet fell off her wrist. The guard snapped it neatly from the air and disappeared. Despair closed in on her again. Tory, my love! And since there was no hope of sleep, she kept on trudging up the terraces, back toward Hans's rathskeller, for another bellyful of wine.

There was a small crowd seated about the rock that served Hans as a table, lit by a circle of hologram-generated fairy lights. Father Landis was there, and drinking heavily. "To-morrow I file my report," she announced. "The synod is pulling out of this, withdrawing funding."

Hans sighed, took a long swig of his own wine, winced at its taste. "I guess that's it for the Star Maker project, huh?"

Landis crossed her fingers. "Pray G.o.d." Elin, standing just outside the circle, stood silently, listening.

"I don't ever want to hear that name again," a tech grumbled.

"You mustn't confuse G.o.d with what you've just seen," Landis admonished.

"Hey, come on!" Hans said. "She moved time backwards or something. I saw it myself. This place exploded-doesn't that prove something?"

Landis grinned, reached out to ruffle his hair. "Sometimes I worry about you, Hans. You have an awfully small concept of G.o.d." Several of the drinkers laughed.

He blushed, said, "No, really."

"Well, I'll try to keep this"- she leaned forward, rapped her mug against the rock, "fill this up again, hey?-keep it simple. We had a.n.a.lysts crawl up and down Coral's descrip-tion of the universe, and did you know there was no place in it anywhere for such things as mercy, hope, faith? No, we got an amalgam of substrates, supraprograms, and self-metaediting physics. Now what makes G.o.d superior to us is not just intellect-we've all known some d.a.m.n clever b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. And it's not just power, or I could go and buy an atomic device on the black market and start my own religion.

"No, by definition G.o.d is my moral superior. Now I myself am but indifferently honest-but to Coral, moral con-siderations don't even exist. Get it?''

Only Elin noticed the haunted, hopeless light in Landis's eyes or realized that she was spinning words effortlessly, without conscious control. Deep within, the woman was caught in a private crisis of faith.