13.

Jayhawk dreamed that night, a dream of memory, crisp and clear as if stored
in circuitry; and woke disoriented, imagining for a moment that she was
back in Seattle.  For a long time she lay curled in a tight ball, wishing
she could go back to sleep, could manage even that false escape.  It was
impossible.  At last she gave up, went back to her coding.

Her dream was of the night they'd destroyed Cavilard Base, nine desperate 
people against the largest Paradisian installation in Seattle, and
were sitting in a parking lot planning their strike against the last
and worst of the survivors, High Priestess Aliantha and her attendant
sorcerors.  

Ratty was sitting alone on the pavement weaving a summoning, trying to
call up aid for the fight they anticipated.  Jayhawk watched him idly,
expecting to see nothing, or at most a shiver in the air. 

The air shivered, shimmered, and a creature stepped out of the night, 
stood regarding Ratty.  A spider nearly the size of their station wagon, 
its impossible bulk limned with a tracery of shifting green light, an
ever-changing pattern flowing beneath the coarse black hairs that covered
it.  Smaller, it might have been called a wolf spider; it had the long 
legs of a hunter, knobbed joints towering far above Ratty's head.

All conversation in the car came to an abrupt halt, seven faces pressed
against the glass.

Clusters of eyes, black tipped with sparks of crimson, probed into theirs,
bent toward Ratty.  He looked up at it, did not move.

"What do you ask of me?" it said conversationally, a cool, vaguely sardonic
voice with a distinct Seattle accent.

"Help against my enemies, against the High Priestess," said Ratty in a
voice she could barely hear.

"And what will you give me in return?"

This seemed to dismay the shaman.  It went on, "I make an offer:  for
every life I take for you, I will take one for myself."

"I can't let you kill my people, I would be no better than my enemy."

"I do not mean to kill them.  That would be wasteful."

Ratty considered that, while the rest of the team held its collective
breath, waiting.  "I don't have the right," he said at last.  "I can't
give away people like that; they're not mine to give."

"I will promise to spare you and your friends."

"No.  No.  I can't do this."

"Then may I have leave to go?"  It turned a little, feather-light for all
its bulk, seemed about to walk off.  Its legs pivoted with the grace of
a fine machine.

Ratty raised one hand, made a convulsive clutching gesture.  "Wait.  I
will make an offer, I will....if you will aid us, I will search for a 
student for you, someone to willingly accept your power and do your work
in this world.  Is that what you want?"

It turned, stood almost over him, dwarfing his slim form.  "And you will
do this within three months, or else I will take you instead.  Yes?"

"What should I tell the one I choose, what will become of him?" Ratty
whispered.

"Do you wish to become my initiate?  No?  Then it is no concern of yours.
He will share my power and my knowledge, and he will understand it.  And
I will help you against your enemy."

Lights traced and shifted across its body, like a map of the dataflow,
the endless dance of the Matrix.  Jayhawk stared at it, caught between
admiration and terror.  It was beautiful, the most beautiful creature
she had ever seen.  She could barely breathe, afraid to attract its
attention to her.  And yet she didn't want it to go.

"How will I know," said Ratty at last, "who is suitable?"

"You will know them when you see them," said the Spider; though it
had no face to show an expression, she thought she detected amusement in
its eyes.  It glanced up at them once more--at her, she thought, and
would have drawn back if she could, hid from that probing many-eyed
gaze--back down at Ratty.  "Are we agreed?  Yes?"

"Yes."  As if dismissed by his words, the Spider turned away, walked off
in a direction that her eyes would follow only for a brief, offended
instant.  The night seemed very dark where it had been, and very still.
The crickets had stopped.

"All right," said Duende after a moment.  "Are we ready, then?  Let's
go."

14.  Exercise

Jayhawk was startled by a buzz, so much like her apartment doorbell that she
automatically said "Come in."  The door whisked open, and Martha peered
in.  "Hello!" she said.  "Feel up to a little exercise?"

"Hello," said Jayhawk coolly.  "I suppose so.  Let me get dressed."  She
gathered up an armload of clothes, retreated into the bathroom.

"How are you doing?  Need anything?"

"Fine.--Is there any, ah, news from Seattle?"

Martha frowned.  "Not really.  But don't worry yourself about that."

"I'm just curious," said Jayhawk as civilly as she could manage, re-
membering that she was not positive Martha knew her for an enemy.
"You said you were waiting to hear something."

"Ah.  Shamrock said he'd talked to your friends, they were fine....and
the people who'd been sent to, ah, talk to them have apparently been
called back.  Nothing to worry about there."

"Ha!" Jay said, almost with relief.  "You do know who I am, then."

The furrow between Martha's brows deepened.  "Of course we do.  I
explained all this, didn't you understand?  It was all in the message-
squirt that came with you."

"I thought you hadn't entirely figured that out."

"Not entirely, not yet.  But the part dealing with you was really
very clear."  Martha smiled brightly.  "Is there anywhere in particular 
you would like to go?"  When Jay shook her head, she went on, "I know--
exercise.  We need to get you started on some kind of program.  Can't
have you sitting around all day, it's not good for you."

Unwillingly, Jayhawk followed her through the featureless corridors
to an equally featureless room.  "Parallel bars!" said Martha,
gesturing, and a floor panel slid back to reveal a pair of chest-
high, polished wooden bars.  With surprising ease given her bulk,
Martha hoisted herself up onto them, arm-walked from one end to the
other.  "There.  Now you try."

Jayhawk managed a lurching progress about halfway across, dropped to
the floor with a snarl.  "I don't do exercise," she said.  "Not since
elementary school--"

"High time you got back to it, then.  You need to be healthy.  Sitting
around at a desk all day will not do at all."

"--And the person who made me do it then was awfully sorry."  It was a
lie.  She'd never taken the long-plotted revenge, though she wished
now that she had.  She folded her arms defiantly, back against the wall.
"If you have to teach me--"  A glimmer of real curiosity that she fought
to keep out of her voice, but didn't quite succeed "--why not something
useful, like the Matrix?"

"First things first.  You need to be in good shape for some of what
we're going to be doing, especially the Overnet.  A healthy mind, a
healthy body, a healthy--" slight pause "--spirit."

Jay wasn't sure whether it was the old hatred of forced exercise, or
the new terror--a healthy body, a healthy host for Aliantha when she
took over?--but she could not bring herself to cooperate.  It was not
the issue over which she'd have chosen to fight her captors, but...."I
can't do it.  Please.  I can handle jogging, swimming, something that
seems halfway real; but I can't stand exercise equipment, I never could."

Martha opened her mouth to protest, seemed to think better of it, said
apologetically, "I'm sorry, I didn't realize it was like that.  How
about jogging, then?  We could go outside--no, I forgot, you hate the
outdoors.  In the halls, then.  Would that be better?"

"All right."  It was a very small victory, but better than nothing.
"I'm terrible at it, though, we won't be going very far."

"Oh," said Martha with a smile, "I think you may surprise yourself."

They ran through a maze of featureless corridors, filling in one blank
after another on Jay's headware map.  To her surprise, she didn't find
herself noticably tired.  "You're very healthy," Martha said when she 
commented on this.  "Healthier than you've been in a long time, I think. 
Has Doc been to see you?"  When Jay shook her head, she went on, "That's 
a good sign, actually; he's only interested when things go wrong.  But so 
like him!"

She pulled to a sudden stop, glanced backwards. "Um.  How fast do you think 
you can run?"  Before Jay could formulate an answer, she laughed, said, 
"Never mind then.  I think we'd best hide out for a bit.  There's a storm 
coming." With a palm-touch she opened one of the hundreds of identical doors,
gestured inside.

Jayhawk hesitated for a moment, looking backwards.  She could see
nothing unusual.  The idea of bolting occured to her--into the "storm",
probably to her death, but perhaps a death that would put her outside
the Paradisian's reach....But Martha was faster, she told herself.  It
would never work.  Martha took her elbow, and she allowed herself to be
pulled inside.

The room was full of heavy machinery.  Martha called up benches, and
they sat, catching their breath.  "How do you know when a storm is
coming?"

"Something tells you," said Martha absently, apparently thinking about
something else.

"A prickly feeling?  Something like that?"

"Oh!  No, you're actually told.  It's the complex, as a matter
of fact--once you have a direct link to it, it warns you about such
things.  It can also help a lot with the building itself, which as you
may have noticed is something of a maze--and wait till you see a
rearrangement, and have to learn the whole thing again!  I don't bother
anymore....It would like to meet you, Jay, but we've been fending it
off; it can be rather, ah, over-eager with new people.  Maybe soon.  The
direct link is extremely helpful."  With an odd look at Jayhawk, she
changed the subject.  "I wrote some code that you probably still use at 
the University, some accounting packages.  What were you working on?"

"IC programming, mainly.  Why did you give up being an accountant?"

"Heavens, I wasn't an accountant, I just wrote the stuff.  That was a
long time ago, a lot of water under the bridge since then.  Before the
Matrix, even.  Do you remember 'hackers'?"

"I'm twenty-four years old," said Jayhawk with dignity, "I *was* a
hacker, before the Matrix."

Martha looked abashed.  "I'm sorry, I didn't realize.  You must have
been quite young.--Most deckers don't seem to realize non-Matrix
computing ever existed.  It's nice to meet someone else with an
appreciation for the history of the field."

"What system did you work on?"

Martha rattled off a familiar machine name--a dinosaur, but still in
use, Jay'd broken into it once just to see what the ancient archetecture
looked like--and said with approval, "It's good to see you taking an
interest in things."

"I'm a decker.  Curiosity is a way of life."

"A way of life.  Just you remember that."  At Jayhawk's puzzled look,
she went on, "We didn't think you were going to make it for a while,
we'd just about given up hope."

Jay shivered, thinking of the endless forest, the fever delirium.  She
had decided that whatever that nightmarish experience had been,
stimsense or delusion or some arcane reality, it coincided with Martha's
statements about how near she had come to death.  Martha said
thoughtfully, "What you went through is very difficult, most people
don't cope nearly as well as you did.  The methods we had to use to
recover you were rather, well, arcane.  Couldn't deal with it myself.
But you seem to be managing extremely nicely."

"What usually goes wrong?" said Jayhawk with morbid curiosity.

"I wouldn't say there was a 'usually'.  It varies with the person,
varies a good deal."

"Okay, what's been known to go wrong?"

Martha sighed.  "Ah, well, there's cyberware rejection.  That didn't
seem too likely in your case.  And then some people just can't adapt,
and they go insane, or the integration breaks down....A number of things
can happen."  She stood up briskly.  "The storm's gone, why don't we
head on back?"

Back at Jayhawk's room, she asked, "Do you need anything?"

"Computer access!" said Jay fiercely.

"Oh, you haven't found your terminal yet?  Terminal!"  When nothing
happened, she frowned, stared at the wall for a moment.  "It hasn't been
set up yet.  Let me see."  She extended a hand to the wall, three fine
metal prongs reaching out from her knuckles to mesh with a
previously-invisible socket.  Jayhawk's hands itched with the desire to
hit her, now when she was distracted...a stupid idea, she told herself,
and petty besides.  There was no getting out that way.

A terminal unfolded from the wall near the bed.  "There you go!
Everything should be set up.  I'll see you tomorrow--until then, just ask 
if you need anything.  Ah, you'll find that a lot of files have to be
secured against you at the moment.  I imagine you can get past that if
you try, but I really wouldn't recommend it.  There are some rather
dangerous things on this system, things you're not ready for yet."

Jayhawk stared after her with tightly clenched lips, then sat down
abruptly at the terminal, logged on.  There was a genererous little
subdirectory at hand, with her name on it; a quick investigation
showed that it was part of an enormous network, larger than anything the
University boasted.  Most of the files were scrambled in some way,
meaningless to her.

Everything she had put in her headware was filed neatly away in a branch
of her directory tree.  Experiment revealed that the file was constantly
updated with anything she added, and that the link was two-way.  A more
thorough search revealed that it was also being echoed to at least three
places in the system--perhaps more, if it were being encrypted during
transmission.  She leaned back, shook her head in wonder and dismay.  "It's
no wonder they go crazy," she said softly, aloud.  "No wonder at all."

Eventually she went back to work.  After all, she'd known there was no
secrecy; this only confirmed it.  If she was to escape, she would have
to pull off something so clever that they wouldn't understand it even
though they saw every step.

It seemed to her that if she ever stopped believing in the possibility
of escape, she *would* go mad, on the spot.

15.  Inside

Despite having written all the necessary code, despite headware that
checked out perfectly as far as she could tell, Jayhawk found that she
couldn't get onto the Matrix.  The program carrier in her palm would
link her with her terminal, give her a virtual keyboard and screen to
play with; but whenever she tried to go further, she was slapped back
into her body with startling suddenness, ACCESS DENIED flaring across
the inside of her eyelids.  She couldn't figure out why.

The frustration of her fourth or fifth attempt brought memories stirring
to the surface, memories of a dream of frustration.  She had been
trapped in a tiny doorless room, aware of everything she wanted just
outside, but unable to get at it.  And then something approaching,
something at once desireable and terrible....She couldn't remember any
more, though she thought the dream had continued.

She went back to her coding, surfaced from the near-trance of
concentration half an hour later with a gasp of realization.  "It would
like to meet you," Martha had said.  "We've been putting it off; it can 
be a bit over-eager with new people.  Maybe soon."

Her dreams were not her own.

She swore aloud, spent the rest of the evening devising checks on the
files that gave access from the mainframe to her headware memory.
Checks within checks, so that a cursory inspection would find only the
outermost.  A weak safeguard, but the best she could do.

That night the dream returned:  trapped in a tiny featureless prison,
all creation waiting for her outside.  Something approached, slipped
inside along the traceries of headware, began to meddle with the code 
she had written.  She tried to deny it access, failed.  Lines of text
scrolled by her eyes, changing too quickly for her to follow.  The intruder 
was *inside*, within her, making changes in her--she could feel it 
groping out into her arms, tugging at them, restructuring....

She woke in a cold sweat, arms wrapped defensively around her head.
Is that how it's going to be, is that what's going to happen to me?
Suddenly the headware link seemed invasive, a penetration of her being;
she scrabbled at the datajack ineffectually, caught herself.  With an
effort of will, she forced herself to check the safeguards she had set.
None of her files had been accessed.  As far as she could tell, none of
the headware code had been changed.  A dream.  

Nothing but a dream, a nightmare--and who wouldn't have nightmares in a
place like this? she told herself firmly, and went back to work.

Apparently sensing her mood, Martha was less chatty during their morning
jog; but at the end of it she said brightly, "Jayhawk, there's someone
who would very much like to meet you.  Is that all right?"

"Sure," she said with harsh defiance.  "Any time."  She was resolved not
to show fear, empty though the gesture might be.

"I'll try to set up an appointment for tomorrow, then.  Have a nice
day."

That night she drove herself to stay awake, helped by the timeless
constancy of the light.  She tried the tricks Channa had taught her when
the two of them were trying to disentangle the web of suggestions in
Jay's mind, hoping to bring to light whatever was keeping her off the
Matrix.  She found nothing, though the forbidding was just as obtrusive
as before.  Memories pricked at her, times in the past when she'd been
denied the Matrix for days or weeks.  The craving was not bad yet, but
it would be.  She was an addict, had been for years.

Morning crawled across her terminal clock, marked otherwise only by the
accumulating clutter of coffeecups.  Morning, and afternoon.  Martha did
not come.  Toward evening she had to admit to herself that she was
waiting for a knock on the door with as much impatience as fear, unable
to bear the waiting any longer.  She rubbed red-rimmed eyes, decided to
lie down for just a little while....drifted off while wrestling with a
detail of code, one more line in the escape plan.

She woke with a cry, sat up bolt upright, hands clutching her head.  A
sharp stab of pain made her draw back.  The program carrier in her palm
was fully extended, a smear of blood from her face on the thin metal
prongs.  She shook her hand violently, willed it to retract. 

The dreams had returned, clearer and more vivid.  An intruder within,
modifying and revising--not her physical form, nothing so trivial, but
her thoughts, the very structure and layout of her mind, the system
under which it operated.  She'd been helpless, little more than a
spectator.  And then another presence had joined it, working at the same
tasks, but not quite cooperatively--she had dizzying memories of the two 
successively adjusting and readjusting....

She climbed painfully out of bed, stripped off her clothes and left them
in a pile on the floor, and stood under a scalding hot shower.  It
helped a little, drove back some of the shivering.

Silently, face tipped up into the blinding spray of hot water, she said:
Spider, if you're really out there, if you're really listening, you had
better do something soon.  Because I'm going to go crazy if they keep me
here much longer.  I don't think I'll do you much good like that.

There was no answer at all.

[This one is particularly dedicated to the GM, Jon Yamato, who stayed up
until 2:30 AM so that I could see what happened next....]

16.  Bikes

After the nightmares Jayhawk slept only fitfully; when the door buzzed
she was awake at once, though painfully groggy.  "Come in."

"Hi, sleepyhead!  Want to go for a ride?"  Martha looked at her,
frowned.  "Are you feeling all right?"

"I, uh, I'm not quite used to not having a window, and I think I stayed
up too late."  She smoothed her nightgown awkwardly.  "If you could give
me ten minutes or so to get dressed and freshen up--?"

"May I see your wrist, please?  No, the other one," when Jayhawk
instinctively extended her left arm, unwilling to expose the program
carrier.  Martha wrapped her fingers gently around Jay's wrist, closed her 
eyes; Jayhawk tensed, but could sense nothing.  After a few seconds
Martha let go, looked up.  "Nothing's wrong as far as I can tell.  How
does a bike ride sound to you?  I can wait in the hall while you get
dressed."

Ten minutes later they were jogging through the featureless corridors.
"Missed you yesterday," said Jay, the most indirect approach she could
find to asking Martha what was going on.

"I'm sorry about that.  Other business.  I hope you weren't too bored?"

"Maybe you've forgotten, here, but out in the real world most people who
run the Matrix for a living are addicted to it."

"I know," said Martha uncomfortably.  "But we can't let you loose on the
Matrix until you've a little more fit.  Today should be a good test."

"Of what?"

"Of how well you interact with the machine, how well your cyberware is
functioning...."

"Oh!"  She had almost forgotten what the medical monitors had shown
here, the complex traceries of the vehicle rig woven through her nerves.  
Her bare room provided no way to test those abilities.

They turned down a corridor which did not appear on her map, entered a
huge open bay.  It could easily have accomodated a full-sized airplane,
though at the moment it held nothing more than a pair of motorcycles.
Martha gestured at them.  "Go ahead, pick one."

Jayhawk arbitrarily chose the left bike, looked it over carefully.
There was some extra machinery around the rear wheel, and an unfamiliar
panel at the front; otherwise it was not much different from her
long-lost Rapier.  "Good choice," said Martha.  "That's Brown."  She
straddled the other bike.  "Go ahead--jack in, see how it feels."

A small port on the handlebar seemed designed to take the program
carrier's prongs; tentatively she extended them, made the connection.
There was a brief, soundless, dizzying explosion of sensation; she found
herself sitting on the bike, vaguely aware of having run through a
series of checks.  It was a very odd feeling.  She could sense her
body, sense the bike, but both were distant, filtered as if through
several levels of indirection.  She felt as if she were floating in
space, disembodied, manuvering body and bike through some kind of
remote.

"All right?" said Martha's voice in her ear.  "How does it feel?"

She struggled for a moment, discovered how to talk.  "A little strange."

"Strange?  In what way?  Describe what you're feeling, please."
Martha's tone was unusually insistent.

"It's a lot like running a security system from the Matrix.  Aware, but
detached.  It's probably just habit--I've run security a number of
times, but I've never done this before."  She didn't believe that 
explanation herself, but she didn't want to tell Martha any more than 
she must.

She tried to shift her weight, found something resisting her.  It seemed
unnatural to move her body separately, awkward; she was interfering with
the bike's balance.  But she could do it, with concentration.

"Have you ever flown?  No?  Then we'll take it slow at first.  Ready?"
Martha wheeled forward; ahead of her, a door slid upwards.  For a moment
she was silhouetted against bright sky; then she vanished.

Jayhawk moved forward, saw from her weirdly disembodied point of view
that they were high up on the side of the pyramid, perhaps half a klick.
A dizzyingly steep ramp plunged down toward the grassy lawn far
below.  It all seemed a little too distant to be really frightening.
Before she had time to think about it, she was skimming downwards.

There was no sensation of speed; it was more like playing a video game
than being on a motorcycle.  She found herself disappointed.  Riggers
she'd known had described the experience as comparable to sex or
running the Matrix.  This was nothing.

Blocked!  She was being blocked out of a full link with the bike, just
as she had been blocked off the Matrix--and probably by the same
mechanism, whatever that was.

The ramp flared out a little at the base.  Martha was already racing out
across the lawn.  For just an instant Jayhawk felt the speed at which
she was moving, like a stone plummeting from the pyramid, felt the
wheels spinning smoothly, the gyros adjusting to her weight.  Then it
was gone, leaving only vision.

She gunned the bike after Martha, who plunged in among the trees,
following an almost impossibly narrow path.  It hardly seemed necessary
to concentrate at all; the bike knew what it was doing, needed only her
cooperation.  Ignoring the trees streaming past, Jayhawk concentrated on
her link with the machine, trying to break whatever barrier was keeping
her out.  The barrier was not quite adequate to its task; bits of sensation
leaked through, the pulse of the engine, the level of charge in its
capacitors, the wind in her hair.

An instant of breakthrough, dizzying exultation of speed--and something
reached back at her through the link, *into* her, trying to change--

She jerked her awareness forcibly back, almost disconnected from the
bike--looked up to see trees whirling at her, realized that she would
crash.  In an instant of panic she brought the bike to a skidding stop,
then tore her hand free and jumped off, backed away.  The engine wound
down to silence.

Martha did a hasty reverse, rode back to her.  "Jayhawk!  What's the
matter, are you all right?"

Jay slid down against a tree, arms wrapped tightly around her.  "Is that
what was supposed to happen?  Because if so, I don't think...I don't
think I'm interested in having any part of it."

"What's wrong?  Tell me what happened."

She looked up at Martha, terror and hatred naked in her eyes.  "You're
my enemy.  I shouldn't tell you anything."  Martha's eyes widened; she
went on, regretting what she was saying but unable to stop herself,
"Everything I tell you, every bit of cooperation I give you, is one more
step in damning myself."  In a voice thick with loathing, "You belong to 
the people who cut my boyfriend's heart out on an altar."

Martha looked down as if unable to meet her eyes.  "I'm sorry, Jayhawk.
There are some truly loathsome people here.  I'm sorry you ever had to
get caught up in this, as I'm sorry for myself."

"Is this how it was for you?"  Curious despite herself.

"Not exactly.  I was out exploring, years ago, and I found something....
I'll tell you the whole story, when I can.--Jayhawk, I want you to
survive.  Whatever you may think of me, that's the truth."

"Martha."  The older woman looked up.  "Tell me how I can die.  If I
know that...maybe I can go on living for a while."

"Do you really have to know?"  At Jay's nod she hesitated a moment,
weighing her words.  "It's really very simple.  Ask Slim to kill you.
He *will*; and you won't be recoverable."

"Thank you," Jayhawk whispered.

"But tell me, *please*, what is happening that is so dreadful."

"Something is trying to get into my mind, change me.  Just now: and I've
sensed it before, in my dreams."

"Here?  Through the bike link?"  Martha frowned.  "What do you think it
is?  I know you have some idea."

In an utterly toneless voice, Jayhawk said, "We had several indications
that Aliantha had no body of her own.  I believe that I am to be a host
for her."

Martha shook her head. "No.  I don't think so.  I saw the message she
sent, and it didn't sound like that.--I taught Aliantha, Jayhawk.  I
know her.  She has other choices, far more effective ones.  Using a
host body....The body image is never quite right, it never meshes
perfectly.  And that's catastrophic when doing anything...dangerous.
I'm sorry, I'm not explaining this very well.  The vocabulary--"

"No, I understand you.  What *did* she say to do with me?"

Martha hesitated.  "Part of the message was only for the Lord.  But from 
what I saw, it sounded to me....High Priestess.  Though I don't
know of where."  She wiped her hands on her pants, went on, "Possibly
the complex itself has taken an interest in you.  It is sometimes *much*
too eager with new people."

"That would have been my second guess."

"I could check that, if you like."

"Is 'who' really the important question?" said Jayhawk bitterly.  "How
can I stop it?"

"What did you do to bring it on?"

"I was trying to get around the override, whatever it is you've done to
keep me off the Matrix."

"I hoped you could break that.  I didn't use any Overnet tricks at all."
Martha smiled tentatively.

"It's probably the only thing that's saving me.  God, Martha, do you
remember...do you still know what it is to be afraid?  Some of them seem
to have forgotten."  She was thinking of Duende.

"Oh yes.  That's something that never goes away.  For some of us here,
that's all there is anymore."  She looked at Jayhawk with concern.  "I
can check if you like, see if the complex is responsible for this... 
intrusion."

"If you want."  She buried her head in her arms.  "Martha, could you try
to arrange that...the meeting you mentioned?  Maybe we can work
something out.  This sneaking in behind my back will not do."  Her voice
was not as brave as her words.

Martha was silent for a long moment.  "It says--not now, but tonight.
And it denies any responsibility for what you say just happened."  Jay
nodded, not looking up.  Martha hesistated, went on more softly, "We've
quite a way from the complex, and it's actually fairly private here.
There aren't many who have the power to monitor this place.  A lot of us
come out here sometimes, when we need to be alone....careful, of course,
that we don't run into each other.  It's something you should keep in
mind.  I want you to survive, Jayhawk, and I think you can.  But you're
going to have to work at it."

"Should I?  Isn't it my duty...to deny my enemy use of my talents?"

"And not to learn what you can, to escape with knowledge and power to
help your friends?"

Jayhawk looked up sharply.  "If you start thinking that way....Is that
what Roth and Chalker thought?  How they were caught?"

"Not exactly."  She sighed.  "Roth and Chalker were good men, there are
too few like them.  I regret that bitterly, I regret the hasty decision
that cost us their lives.  I don't want to lose you too.  You're
incredibly gifted, Jayhawk; you took to the bike like someone who's been
a rigger for years.  It would be such a waste."

A waste for what?  What is going to happen to me?  Aloud, she said
quietly, "I guess there are some questions you don't ask around here."
She stood up, offered Martha her right hand.

Martha looked at her in puzzlement.  "What--?"

"As one of the lost to another...thanks."

Martha smiled briefly, took her hand.  "I don't know what an old fool
like me has done to deserve this," she said hoarsely.

"That's probably one of the questions it's better not to ask."

"I suppose so.--Jayhawk, everyone here is crazy, one way or another.
But if you can figure out how...you can cope."

Jay laughed suddenly.  "That's what Duende said.  And Grant said,
joking, 'Everybody but you, of course.'  Duende just looked at him and
said 'No, everybody.'  You should have seen Grant's expression."  There
was a nervy hysterical edge to her laughter; hearing herself, she
sobered suddenly.

"He was good," said Martha.  "A little rough, but good.  I think you
could be better, I really do.  But at the moment it's all potential."

"Don't tempt me," said Jayhawk sharply.  "I'm confused enough as it is."
She sat on her bike.  "Shall we go back before we're missed?"

"Do you think you can handle the bike?"

"No problem."

"Do you want me to set up an Overnet program, to protect you
from...whatever it is?"

Jayhawk shook her head.  "I was aiding and abetting it, I don't think it
can get at me while I'm awake."

"While you're asleep, then?  It's perfectly safe, I use one myself."

"No."

Martha sighed.  "Jay, you really have to do something about these
self-destructive impulses."

"It's not self-destructive."  She struggled to put her reasons into
words.  "We have to find out what this is; I can't survive without the
Matrix, and you can't protect me there.  And we won't find out if you
block it, will we?"  It occured to her that she was hoping Martha would
disagree.

"No, we won't."  Martha nodded in apparent satisfaction.  "Jayhawk, do
you want me to remove the Matrix restrictions?"

"No."  At the other woman's questioning look; "I want to find out what's
going on; but a speeding bike is probably not the best place."

Martha chuckled.  "All right.  I think--I think I'm going to stay out
here a while.  You're welcome to hang around, do some exploring on your
own--"  Jayhawk shuddered, looking at the dense forest on either side,
something she had been trying to ignore "--or head on back.  You
shouldn't stay out past sunset, it gets pretty wierd around here at
night.--You're sure you can manage the bike?  No control problems, no
sluggishness?"

"I'm fine," she said, a little more forcibly than she had intended, and
jacked in before she had time to think about it.  The transition was
much smoother, no explosion of sensory input, just the strange distant
awareness of flesh and machine.  "See you later.--Take care of yourself,
Martha."

It was hard to believe that she was even this close to freedom, hard not
to turn the bike and head off into the hills.  The knowledge of the
headware radio stopped her...that, and a certain unwillingness to subject 
Martha to whatever penalties the unseen masters of Montaigne Paradisio 
would devise.

She kept her awareness carefully distant from the bike, gave the unseen
presence nothing to work with, and reached the pyramid without
incident.  Slim was waiting for her at the hanger.  She thought he
might question Martha's absence, but he said only, "She's a good woman,
Martha is."

Jayhawk nodded, afraid to answer, and they walked back to her room in
silence.  At the door, prompted by some kind of morbid curiosity, she
said, "Would you like to come in, have a soda?"

"No thank you, ma'am.  I'm a little shy with women, m'afraid."  Somewhat
relieved, she watched him go, then went into the bathroom and stripped
off her pants.  Scored into her leg were half a dozen long, shallow
scratches, where she had driven the prongs of the program carrier
through the cloth into her skin.  She put some antiseptic on them, sat
on the bathroom counter to think.

Aliantha intended her to be a High Priestess.  She remembered what Duende 
had said about them, the power and the madness he had described.  She 
remembered Aliantha.

'Everyone here is crazy, one way or another.'  Even Martha.

High Priestess.  What did that mean, beyond the undeniable power?  Why
would her enemies put such power in her hands?  If they could make her
loyal, what were they waiting for?  And if not--

Everyone.  She whispered aloud to the reflection in the mirror:  "Even
me?"

17.  Darkness

Resolved not to go to sleep, Jayhawk paced and drank coffee and put
together useless bits of electronics.  Hours dragged by.  Now and then
she glanced at her terminal, but left it alone.  Her imagination
suggested a sinister presence just outside the walls of her room, just
behind the glassy screen, waiting for her.

At exactly midnight she was startled up from the cable she was wrapping
by the soft whisk of her door opening.  "Hello?" she called.  There was
no response.  Skin prickling, she walked to the door, looked out.

The hallway had changed; it ended in a blank wall just to her left,
curved off to her right, the first curves she had seen in the complex.
She retreated into her room, hastily assembled a pocketful of useful
tools from the electronics kit, then stepped out cautiously into the
hall.  After all, she told herself, she hadn't been forbidden going out
alone, only told that if she *did* go out she would have an escort.
Their fault if they'd slipped up.

Some thirty meters along its gentle curve, the hallway ended in another
door, which hissed open as she approached.  The room beyond was pitch
dark.  She stopped on the threshold, waiting for her eyes to adjust.

A voice, somewhere in the darkness:  "Please come in."  It was barely
more than a whisper, the voice of something broken and in pain.  Jayhawk
stepped forward; behind her, the door sliced off the light.

There was a pungent smell in the room, something that had not been
apparent from outside; the smell of an animal imprisoned in a too-small
space.  "I've been wanting to meet you," the voice muttered, ahead of her 
and to her left.  Machinery hummed all around her.

"I noticed," said Jayhawk.  "Was that you in my nightmares?"

"You have nightmares?  So do I....ahh.  It hurts to talk, did you know
that?"

"I'm sorry."

"They're all sorry.  But it doesn't help much, does it?  I have not been
controlling your dreams, no.  I can't even control my own."

"My name is Jayhawk," she offered after a moment of silence.

"I know," said the other, and chuckled laborously. 

"If not you...who is it?  What is Aliantha doing with me?"

"Aliantha is dead.  You killed her."

Jay drew in a sharp breath, surprise and a vicious satisfaction flooding
through her.  "I didn't think that was possible."

"Normally it is not....It might be more accurate to say that she
sacrificed herself to save you."

"*Why?*"  Her voice echoed off the surrounding machinery.  "Why me?  I
don't understand."

The other sighed.  "Neither do I.  I never understood Aliantha, and I
have been trying for a long time.  Think on it, child.  Perhaps you can
tell us."

Jayhawk frowned.  "Her operations were in ruins, she'd lost just about
everything she had in Seattle.  If she cared about that, then maybe....I
don't know!  I didn't know her."

The voice in the darkness groaned softly, like someone rolling from one
position to another when all positions are painful.  Jayhawk froze in
place as huge masses of machinery slid by her, unseen but felt, almost
brushing her hair.  For an instant she seemed to be enclosed by
massive walls.  Thinking of sharp edges and live wires, she did not
reach out to confirm the impression.

"Have you ever loved anyone?"

"I don't know," said Jayhawk shortly.

"Honest...that is good.  Not even your parents?  Or is that a painful
thing, should I not ask?"

"No, no.  Mom and I...we weren't particularly close, but I guess we
loved each other, *that* kind of love.  But she...she didn't take to the
Matrix.  I haven't seen her in a while."

"You are hard to understand.  All of you."

"If you want lessons in being human," said Jayhawk, "you're asking the
wrong person."

"I am not interested in becoming a human."  Again the soft groan, and
the sense of massive objects shifting all around her, leaving only a
tiny spot untouched.

"You were one once, weren't you?"

"You are quick." 

Jayhawk reached out a hand cautiously, found that the space in front of
her was empty again.  "Do you want to see me, is that it?" said the
voice.  "Curiosity?"

"No, if you want your privacy who am I to take it away?"  She felt just
a little sorry for the--what *was* she speaking to?  The voice was not
discernably male or female.

"Interesting code, what you were writing."

"*I* don't get any privacy," she said bitterly, her sympathy evaporating.

"Child, child, you told it to me."

"I know that now.  I didn't then."

"Everything you do, everything you say...shouts at me."

"Not my fault!"

"No.  No one's fault." 

"Someone set this up, someone created Paradisio, *someone* is responsible."

"So long ago.  And that person has paid the price, far and above.  Or
perhaps not.  It becomes hard to remember."  The other sighed again.  "If 
you would like to see a working example of that code--"  A directory path. 
"Martha wrote it, years ago. Can you guess for who?"

"Aliantha."

"Yes.  But she never tried it.  I wonder why?  Perhaps you will tell me
someday."

Jayhawk shivered, said unhappily, "May I sit down?"

"There is a chair behind you." 

She felt backward, found it, sat down heavily.  "*I've* tried it.  It
was an interesting experience.  But damn it, you people seem to have
done everything first."  She had killed Aliantha, the trick had been
good enough for that.  It was almost a comfort, almost.

"It was a very profitable line of research...for some.  I would not
recommend that you try it here.  Or perhaps...perhaps I would."  A long
pause.  The animal smell was thick in the air.  "Do you believe in
fate?"  Before Jayhawk could answer, the other went on, "I don't, I
think, although they tell me....Perhaps I am getting senile.  That might
be it.  I like to think that all of this will be over soon, one way or
the other.

"You are probably tired.  I should let you rest."

Jayhawk stood, holding the back of the chair with one hand.  "If you
want to talk again--well, I'm not going anywhere, and I doubt you are
either.  Feel free."

"Let me give you something before you go."  A sharp tingle, almost
painful, ran through her, as if she had touched a live wire.  "You are
free to access the Matrix now, within this complex; we cannot let you go
further yet.  Take care."

"Thank you," said Jayhawk in a very small voice, caught between desire
and fear.

"You're welcome."  Behind her a door slid open, flooding the room with
glare; very vaguely she could make out the glitter of glass ahead of
her, the duller reflections of metal.  She groped her way out, walked
back down the corridor to her room.

She found Martha's code in a file which had previously been scrambled,
but was now plaintext.  It was fairly similar to her own.  Code to merge 
headware OS with the mainframe's, set her thoughts free within the 
machine itself.  Written for Aliantha.

It had the earmarks of something created on and for the Matrix,
difficult to understand outside its native habitat.  She puzzled over an
odd construction for a while, then almost without thinking about it set
her hand to the I/O port, jacked in.

The transition was perfectly smooth, without disorientation or shock; to
her surprise, the node she accessed was an almost perfect copy of her
room.  Martha's program was lying on the 'desk', a slender silver
needle.  It was a beautiful piece of code, written, examination
suggested, as much to be beautiful as to be optimal.

Her own Matrix image was just as she remembered, black-haired and
sheathed in silver.  She frowned, wondering at that.  The code
which maintained that image was lost with her deck.  Where was it coming
from?

Abruptly she jacked out, sat back, arms folded across her chest.  Free
on the Matrix, whatever barriers had kept her from it gone.  Did the
presences that lurked in her dreams have free access now too?  She had
sensed nothing while she was jacked in.  Not yet.

Her nerves prickled, teased more than satisfied by the brief delight of
the Matrix.  

Deliberately she shut the terminal down, lay down on the bed.  As she
was drifting off, a thought occured to her, an imagined scene:  A young
woman about her own age, sitting at a terminal much like her own,
talking to an unseen presence.  'Is there no way I can escape, not even
to die?'

'Not even to die, Aliantha.  Unless--unless you bring us someone to be
your successor.  Then you can go free.'

'She sacrificed herself for you,' the voice in the darkness had told
Jayhawk.  But it seemed to her now that it was the other way around;
that her life, her soul was the price for Aliantha's long-awaited death.

18.  Matrix

Jayhawk barely slept, afraid that something would intrude on her dreams.
The door's buzz was a relief from her tossing.

"Hello!" said Martha.  "Having trouble sleeping?  I thought you might
be.  Doc sent some pills, if you like."

"*No*.  Not a good idea."

"All right.  How did, ah, your meeting go?  What did he say?"

"He?  That's a he?"  The speaker in the darkness had reminded her, 
if anything, of her grandmother, dying slowly in a rest home.

"I think so, though I'm not quite sure.  It may not be relevant."

"He said that Aliantha was dead."  She had trouble keeping a certain
satisfaction out of her voice.

Martha stiffened, then let out a long slow breath.  "I know.  The news
came in last night."

Jayhawk bit her lip.  "Martha, were you and Aliantha friends?"

"I try to be friends with everyone.  We were quite close for a while,
though we drifted apart.  Friends, yes."

"I...I can't say I regret it.  But I sympathize."

Martha looked up.  "Oh, don't worry about me, Jay.  I'll cope, I always
do."  And in a softer voice, "But thank you for the concern.  Did he say
anything else?"

"Not really.  More introspection than conversation, if you know what I
mean.  He seemed unhappy."

"Yes....How are you feeling?  Are you up to a tour of the Matrix?"

"Sure."  She crawled out of bed, settled herself in her chair.  Martha
merely reached out, set her hand to a suddenly-appearing port in the
wall.

Smooth as silk, the transition, easy as opening her eyes.  She found
Martha already in the simulated bedroom, looking at her intently.  "All
right?" the older woman said.  "No problems?  Let's go."

For over an hour they wandered through the system.  As far as Jayhawk
could tell, it was a ridiculously accurate copy of the physical layout.
She could sort out nodes from internodes, sense the underlying
archetecture, but it would have been easy to pretend that she was still
in physical space.

They never approached the outside, never saw a SAN node.

Martha gestured briefly at a glass-walled hall.  "Security."  Inside,
banks of monitors flickered with activity, ringing a huge, rotating
model of the Northern Hemisphere.  Lights glittered across its surface.

Everywhere they went, Jayhawk had the impression of many people, furious
activity, just out of sight.  But she saw no one.

"Data Control Central."  Remembering the perfectly bare room Slim had
shown her, Jayhawk was intrigued to see a room packed full of computer
equipment, rather archaic but still impressive in its size.  Only on the
Matrix?  Or had it existed in the real world, and had they somehow
blinded her to it?

At last they made their way back to her room, Jayhawk filling in details
of her map as they went.  "So," said Martha.  "Tell me what you think,
honestly."

"Honestly?  A remarkably inefficient use of an unbelievably powerful
computer."  It had been all one system, as far as she could tell, a
system far huger than anything she had ever run.

Martha sighed.  "I think that once you get used to it, it adds a
certain...hominess?  I rather like it."

"It's very impressive."  Jayhawk turned away, the midnight hair of her
Matrix image cascading over her shoulder.  "If this was a test--and I
imagine it was--did I pass?"

"Can't you stop--" Martha began in annoyance.  "No, I suppose you can't.
It's not a test, Jayhawk.  I just thought you might be having trouble
sleeping, and might like some company, that's all."

"I'm sorry," said Jayhawk, a little abashed.  "I did enjoy it."  Casting
about for a safer subject:  "How does the interface work?  How is the
Matrix image maintained without a deck?"

They spent the next several hours in an intense technical discussion.  At
first Martha seemed to be feeling her way, trying to find how much
Jayhawk knew, but when her first attempts were met with ready
comprehension she unleashed a flood of information.  She seemed to have
all the technical journals at her fingertips, papers that Jayhawk had
intended to read but never gotten around to, others that she had never
heard of.  She called a halt only when Jayhawk was dizzy with
exhaustion.  "You'd better at least try to sleep, this is not good for
you at all."

Jayhawk bit her lip, tried to reason it out through the haze in her
mind.  If she stayed awake, eventually she would have to deal with the
enemy befuddled, sick and weak.  And she couldn't stay awake forever.
"Good night, then, and thanks again for the tour."

Martha nodded, and walked out of the room--still on the Matrix, Jayhawk
realized in startlement, leaving her body, presumably, jacked in near
the door.

But when she jacked out, looked around the room, Martha was gone.

19.  Dreams

Something was inside her, editing her headware code, the MCPC chips that
let her run the Matrix...probing into her thoughts, the vaguely-sensed
system that supported them.  She could not understand what it was doing;
she didn't know her own mind well enough.  She could only watch,
helpless.

Another joined it, a second presence...sometimes amplifying the changes
of the first, sometimes altering them, sometimes...restoring?  She
couldn't tell.

Jayhawk woke abruptly, lay staring up at the ceiling.  Her thoughts were
crystal-clear, sharper than they had been for days.  Almost too clear.
It was hard to push the terror away.

She recognized the second presence; it seemed to her that she had always
known who it was, managed somehow not to grasp the obvious until now.
It was Aliantha.

The first was familiar also, but she could put no name to it.

She lay and thought of ghosts, of Chalker and his gang haunting the 
ashes of their hideout.  She recalled the run she had made against a
computer which no longer existed, the cold shadows that had reached out
at her from places which the Matrix should never have touched.  She
remembered Aliantha.  For a few hours she had dared to hope that her death
meant....It meant nothing.  They had learned that, fighting the
Paradisians, living with Duende.  No escape.

She herself had died, if Martha was to be believed.  And here she was.

Jayhawk got up, logged into her terminal, checked the time.  Only an hour
had passed since Martha left her.  She rubbed her eyes, checked again,
wondering if she had slept for twenty-five hours; but the date was the
same.

She was not tired.  She felt perfectly rested, almost unnaturally
clear-headed, utterly healthy.  Cleansed, as if by a full night's sleep
and a vigorous shower.  Tingling with energy.

Letting out a long, slow breath, she jacked in, examined the safeguards
she had put on her headware code.  From the Matrix they looked
primitive, almost childish; she could see half a dozen ways around them.
She added another layer of defenses, Matrix code which she could never
have matched from outside.  None of her alarms had been triggered.  She
was not terribly surprised.

She spent a moment considering how she might allow the code to signal
her--could it sound an alarm?  Her terminal didn't have the
capacity, though she might be able....She shook her head, startled.
What had she been thinking?  Code to access the outside world directly,
to change, not this Matrix representation of her room, but the reality?
Impossible.

For a moment, until she attended to her own thoughts, she had been planning 
to do it.  And she had known how.

She finished setting the safeguards, went looking for Martha.  The
previous day's tour had included her office, a cluttered room somewhere
near the center.  Jayhawk found her there, bending over a bit of code
manifest as a broken bell.  She looked up when Jayhawk knocked, smiled.
"Come in.  I was just about to have a coffee break anyway."  Her smile
faded as Jayhawk cleared a place on one of the tables, sat down.  "Are
you all right?  It's not been very long.  Couldn't sleep?"

In a quiet toneless voice, Jayhawk said, "I slept for an hour.  I'm wide
awake, not tired at all.  Completely rested.  My dreams were horrendous."

"I'm sorry," said Martha, putting the bell down, then seemed to register
what Jay had said.  "Completely rested?  Physically?  Did you check, is
your body--?"

"I didn't move around much, but I felt fine.  Usually when I'm tired my
head aches, my eyes ache.  None of that."

"I think we should have a look at you," said Martha briskly.  "If you
don't mind?"

"I would like to understand."  Even to herself, she seemed unnaturally
calm, dangerously so.  So clear.  A little panic would have been a
kindness.

They returned across the Matrix to Jayhawk's room, and Martha asked
her to sit in the console chair, 'where' her physical body would be in
the real world.  The older woman then proceeded to pull out a succession
of tools from her pockets, some so ludicrous that Jayhawk suspected she
was deliberately manipulating the Matrix representation.  Trying to set
her at ease, perhaps.  She sat quietly while Martha peered and prodded
at her.

"Wonderful," she said at last with a smile.  "Absolutely wonderful.  I
wouldn't have believed it.  Your cyberware is--your whole body is
fine-tuned, as it were.  Perfectly balanced.  You're making a superb
adjustment, much better than we could have expected."  She looked at
Jayhawk's expression, winced.  "In any case, it would seem to be a
temporary condition, though perhaps later when you have better
control--"

"It wasn't me," said Jayhawk grimly.

"What?  Ah, the dreams.  There's been no sign of intrusion, though I can
check again if you like.  I think they're just nightmares, Jayhawk--
after all, you're trying to adapt to a radically new situation."  She
met Jayhawk's eyes for a moment, looked away.  "I've never seen such a
perfect match.  She was right after all."

"*Match with what?*"  Her skin crawled.  Her mind, her body, with
Aliantha's?

"Body and cyberware.  I had some doubts, but apparently she knew
what she was doing, as usual.  You're very luck--Well.  I don't think
anything is wrong with you.  Quite the contrary."

A third person entered the room with them, a stocky gnome with long
pointed ears; he handed Martha a slip of paper, bowed and vanished.
Martha unrolled and read it.  "No, no intrusions in some time.--I could
have a ward circle set up for you to sleep in.  Some people find them
helpful, though others--like me--can't tell one way or another."

Jayhawk hesistated, wondering what the powers that moved in her dreams
would do if their access were blocked.  "No, thanks."  She had not known
what she would answer until she heard herself say it.  "If you're right
it won't help, and if I'm right...it won't help."

Martha frowned.  "I could monitor you more closely, if you didn't mind
wearing--"  The device she produced resembled a tall, conical hat with a
red light at its top.  She chuckled at Jayhhawk's expression.  "I have
one with a propellor at the top, too, but I didn't think....No, I
thought not."  She set it on Jayhawk's head, where it tingled a moment,
faded to unnoticability.  "Make sure you're wearing that whenever you're
on the Matrix."

"I don't think that the Matrix--"

"No, well, it has extensions to the Overnet, and to a few...other
places.  Worth a try."

"Martha.  What will happen next, what is to be done with me?"  And when
the other woman hesitated, "Short-term, at the very least.  It would
really help to know."

"I imagine you'll finish recovering, and we'll make sure everything's
working correctly, body and cyberware."  Martha glanced at Jayhawk as if
wondering whether to say more, decided against it.  "I should get back
to work.  Always something going wrong around here.  It's enough to wear
an old woman out.  Not that I can't cope, mind you.  It just feels like
emptying the sea with an eyedropper sometimes."

"Can I help?"

"Bless your heart.  Of course you can."  She turned toward the door,
then stopped.  "Let me show you a shortcut.  This walking around is all
very well, but sometimes one's in a hurry."  She raised a hand in a
gesture startling only in its setting, the graceful shaping gestures of
magic.  Jayhawk tensed, watching in intent curiosity.

A silver line formed in the air in front of Martha, then rotated,
gaining width as it did, to become a shimmering rectangle of silver.
Martha stepped through it, vanished.  Jayhawk lingered a moment, wishing
for code with which to analyze the construct, then followed her.  She
found herself in Martha's workroom.  The silver door rotated back to a
line and vanished.

"Just CPU teleport, really," said Martha confidingly.  "Generalized, as
it were."  She cleared Jayhawk some working space, handed her a tangle
of wiring.  "Here.  See what you can do with this."

Jayhawk sat down, began to tease out the purpose of the code she was 
examining.  It was a trivial alarm of some kind, familiar in general
though constructed to unfamiliar standards.

"Jayhawk," said Martha after a few minutes, "are you interested in
learning the Overnet?"

"Passionately," she said without thinking, engrossed in her problem.

Martha sighed softly.  "All right.  I'll see what I can do."

20.  Ghosts

Jayhawk sat in confinement and brooded on ghosts...Aliantha's, and
eventually the first she had met, the ghosts of Chalker and his gang,
murdered by Parasdisio.  Terminated, rather, when it seemed that the
attack Jayhawk's group was making would succeed.  The blood was on her
hands too.

--As was Aliantha's, by all accounts.  A shiver of bitter pride, through
the fear.

Memories barely more than a month old.  It seemed like years.

**

Jayhawk sat sulking in Grant's bedroom, pretending to work.  It was no
use; curiosity was gnawing her out from the inside.  A node associated
with a non-existant computer!  What kind of freak of Matrix space could
that represent, what might its implications be?

Yoichi was watching her carefully, making quite sure that she didn't try
investigating it on her own.  She bristled with fury.  How dare he, what
business was it of his?  *She'd* rescued *him*, and now he was behaving
as if he were her nursemaid.

An idea occurred to her.  "I'm going to work from the Matrix side," she
said sweetly.  "I'll turn on the video monitor, okay?"  Yoichi nodded
approval.

Video monitored.  Anything she did on the Matrix would be displayed in
glorious full color for everyone in the place to see.  At least that was
what they thought.

She put together a packet of code quickly, pulling in recorded images
from earier runs.  Innocuous images, everyday Matrix operations.  From
this side, the video monitor appeared as a security camera fixed on her.
She hung her handiwork over its lens, grinned at it.  Within the box
she'd crafted, a miniature Jayhawk went on with her innocent business.
Free, she flashed across the Matrix, into the loose openwork tangle of
the Redmond Barrens.

The ghost node was still there, a flickering reverse-video image of the
castle gates that had once graced Wired Lightning's system.  Destroyed a
week ago, she had picked through the pieces herself.  Was the image
being sustained by some resonance among the surrounding nodes?  

Her analysis programs insisted that nothing was there at all.

What kind of data would flow through such a node naturally?  She
pondered for a moment, set up a loose generic disguise.  She'd pose as
network packets, electronic mail--*everyone* got electronic mail.  Even
ghosts.

Slipped through the portcullis, and was inside.

She had run Wired Lightning before, twice.  This was nothing familiar.
Grey mist, no sign of the node boundaries, no sense of the dataflow.
Somewhere behind her, an actinic spotlight cut into the mist; she could
see her own shadow, like a dwindling black tunnel.  She turned and
looked for the source of the light, succeeded only in blinding herself.

Her analysis programs offered nothing, not even the deceptively normal
readings of outside.  She might as well not have been on the Matrix.

The light would at least serve as a landmark.  She walked forward along
her shadow tunnel, the mist thick around her.  Like a Smoke program,
maybe, confusing her readings.

Abruptly it cleared.  She stood in a small, cluttered, unfamiliar room,
no part of the system that she'd seen before.  Wall hangings of wood and
leather, one whole wall apparently just a curtain of deerhide.  The
other furnishings were equally primitive, a bed stuffed with some kind
of plant, bare earth for the floor.  She peered more closely at the
walls.  Not a room at all, a *cave*.  How peculiar.

A shaft of sunlight made its way through the curtain.  She pushed it
aside, looked out.

The sunlight illuminated a small clearing surrounded by mist and the
suggestion of trees.  At the clearing's center something peculiar was
hanging in the air--like a window, but unsupported, unattached to its
surroundings.  She could see forest and mountains through it, tall
mountains snowless to their summits.  A middle-aged man dressed in ragged 
furs was sitting in front of the window, legs folded, chanting softly.  He 
broke off the chant abruptly, turned to stare at her.  It was Chalker.

She had helped carry his body to the pyre.  The first dead man she
had ever touched; she could still remember the waxy coldness of his
skin.

"Hello?" she said, rather inanely.  He rose, stood with his back to the
window, one hand raised.  There were faces in the mist around the
clearing, she saw now.  Pale, pale faces with empty eyes.

He spoke, apparently to her; the words were meaningless, a peculiar
mumble.

"I don't understand."  He frowned, spoke again.  Encrypted, she thought 
suddenly, and by a protocol she wasn't set to handle.  The thought was a 
flicker of reassuring normality.

He spoke a third time, more sharply, and took a step forward.  She
shrank back, felt something cold brush against her.  Unseen, the mist
had curled in, creeping between her and the curtain.  The faces in it
were speaking too.  She didn't understand them, didn't want to.  Cold 
fingers of mist plucked at her.  Cold waxy fingers.

*I can't talk to him anyway.  What's the point?*  she told herself,
turned and fled through the curtain.

There was no room beyond; only mist, clinging and opaque.  She thought
she could see a glimmer where the searchlight had been, but she wasn't
altogether sure.  Fighting panic, she groped her way toward it,
struggling with her software.  It still told her nothing, denied that
this place even existed.

There was the light, and the shadowy gates.  She flung herself out,
heedless of alarms--who would respond to an alarm here?  The telecom
node outside was reassuringly clean and normal and solid.  She fled back
toward Grant's system and her body.  Jacked out, and looked around in
relief.

Across the room, Ratty's head pricked up, crimson eyes fixed on her.
"Quick!" he hissed.  "Jay, don't move.  Everyone else, get out of the
circle."

Weeks ago Channa had painted a warding circle on the bedroom floor;
Jayhawk's chair and terminal were in it.  She clutched the back of the
chair, wondering what was happening, as the others crowded into the
marginal amount of unwarded space.

Ratty uncurled from the floor, raised his hands.  "Let me see you,
trespasser," he whispered.

A coldness like mist brushed against Jayhawk, coalesced.  The shadow of
a woman, mist-pale and translucent, stood at the circle's center.  "What
are you doing here?" Ratty demanded, his own face almost as pale.

"Cold," the apparition.  "So cold....waiting so long...."

"Go back," said the shaman in a voice of authority.  "You have no right
to be here, to take this one.  Don't you trust my word?  I have
promised you your vengeance, and you shall have it.  But you must wait
for the time of my choosing."

The woman bowed deeply, shivered into nothingness.  There was an instant
of stunned silence; then half a dozen voices babbled at once,
questioning Ratty.  Through the hubbub Jayhawk saw Yoichi looking at
her with an expression at once hurt and faintly admiring.  "All right,"
he said.  "How did you do it?"

Jayhawk grinned sheepishly and explained.  Yoichi shook his head.  "I
should have known.  All right.  But next time, will you *please* tell
me?  Someone has to keep an eye on you."

**

She would never see Yoichi again.  Or perhaps she would, and he would
look at her with the same wary disdain he gave Duende.  An agent of the
Paradisians.  Worse, if Martha was to be believed.  A High Priest.  Even
Duende had not been that.

'Isn't your duty to live, to escape back to your friends with power and
information they can use?'

She wished she believed it.

21.  Charlotte

Jayhawk paced in her room like a caged animal, unable to concentrate on
anything for more than an hour at a time.  She had nearly finished
rewriting the interface code, but she no longer had any hope that it
would help her escape.  The Paradisians had thought of it first, as they
seemed to think of everything first.

She searched the Matrix for Martha, but couldn't find her.  She managed
to spend several hours mapping the system before that, too, staled. 

At last she said to the listening air, "Send an escort, please, I'd like
to go out."  When she walked to the door Slim was already there, tipping
his hat to her.  She tried not to look at what was underneath it.

"Morning, ma'am.  Where'd you like to go?"

"Where would you recommend?"

He thought about it for a moment, forehead splitting into moist furrows.
"I could take you to the preservation range," he offered.  She nodded,
let him lead.

According to her headware map--which seemed to need continual updating,
new passages appearing or disappearing daily, though the basic layout
was constant--they walked nearly across the pyramid, skirting, as
always, the very center.  Slim palmed a door open, gestured her inside.
Or outside--it looked like night, starry night with trees all around.
The air was full of birdsong and the rich heavy smell of tropical
vegetation.

"Are you afraid of cats?"

"No..." said Jayhawk dubiously.  Animals of any sort made her somewhat
uncomfortable, but she was disinclined to explain even such a trivial
weakness to a Paradisian.

"Good.  I'll show you Charlotte."  He set off down a vaguely-discernable
path.  Jayhawk followed, wincing as the trees closed in.

Slim stopped in the middle of a clearing, pulled at a metal ring set
incongruously in the grass.  It lifted to reveal a small compartment,
from which he carefully removed several wrapped packages.  They proved
to contain--Jayhawk turned away hastily, somewhere between horrified
giggles and nausea.  *Someone who looks that much like raw meat himself
should--should be careful around predators, that's for sure.*  She bit
her lip savagely.  If she laughed out loud, Slim would ask why....

Slim sat down, apparently prepared to wait; after a moment she followed
suit.  The bird sounds, dampened by their presence, flared up again,
then died away suddenly to nothing.  Silent as thought, a huge shape
paced out from the darkness of the trees.

It did look like a cat, tawny-gold and richly furred, with dark tufts on
the tips of its ears and tail.  But it was larger than she had imagined
such creatures could become.  "Hello, Charlotte," said Slim softly; the
cat walked up to him, accepted a bit of raw meat with a dainty nip.  He
scratched behind her ears.

A mountain lion?  Jayhawk wondered.  A regular lion?  The cat had no
mane, only a slightly thicker ruffle in her fur.  She vaguely remembered
that only male lions had manes.  But surely they didn't get this big?
Her head would have reached nearly to Jayhawk's shoulder, standing up;
at it was, Jay was looking *up* into wide golden eyes.  Gengineered,
probably.  Another crazy Paradisian project.  "What is she?"  Gingerly,
she reached out, brushed her fingers across Charlotte's fur.  It was
softer than she had expected, and very thick.

"Like this," said Slim, scratching more forcefully.  Charlotte lay down
at his side, began to emit a rumbling purr.  "She's a hunting cat," he
went on.  "High Priest Merrow's project, before he died.  I've been taking
care of the projects, more or less.  Seemed as though someone should."
He offered Charlotte the rest of the meat, which disappeared in two
gulps.  "Isn't she beautiful?  So much fur....I always liked fur."
Charlotte rolled over, her paws kneading gently at the air.  Jayhawk
scratched her stomach, nodded.  The cat *was* beautiful, in an somewhat
frightening fashion.  She was reminded of the Spider.

"There's all sorts of animals here.  I think Charlotte's parents are
still out there, somewhere."  Slim's voice was almost dreamy.

The space on her map was grossly inadequate to the apparent size of this
midnight forest.  "What do they look like?"

"Like her, I think, but smaller.  She's still growing, that's what they
tell me.  Will be, all her life.  She's slowed down a little, though.
She grew powerful fast when she was a cub."

"Wow," said Jayhawk cautiously.  She didn't want to interrupt Slim in a
confiding mood.  The High Priest had died?  So it could happen?

"Sometimes I come out here and we lie down, Charlotte and I, and look at
the stars.  I always wanted to go to the stars when I was growing up.
Crazy dream.  You ever look at the stars, Jayhawk?"

"Not often, not in Seattle....Where did you grow up?"

Tonelessly:  "I don't think about that much anymore."

Stupid, Jayhawk, she berated herself.  If you can't say the right thing,
at least keep your big mouth shut.  For a long moment they sat in
silence broken only by the subterranean rumble of Charlotte's purr.

"Merrow said I'd have fur like this someday," Slim said at last, to
Charlotte or the air, she thought, rather than to her.  "But I guess he
was always too busy, and then he died.  Gone to heaven.  You believe in
heaven, Jayhawk?"

She thought about it for a moment.  "No.  I've *seen* where dead people
go."

"You have?"

She caught herself, remembering that the Paradisians might not know about
Chalker.  "Some people, anyway.  Maybe if you lived a good life...."
She laughed softly, inviting him to share the bitter joke.  He only
nodded gravely.

Silence again.  Charlotte seemed to have fallen asleep, her head on
Slim's knee.  The birds, emboldened, resumed their noisemaking.

"I like animals.  I guess I sort of took charge here, though there's
them as would dispute it."

"If you're taking care of them," she ventured, "you seem to have as much
right as anyone."

"Any animals around where you come from?"

"Squirrels, at the University.  They're real tame and cheeky, everyone
feeds them."  She'd been bitten by one once, when she disputed ownership
of her sandwich.

"We have squirrels around here, too.  Charlotte doesn't like them much."

"Or vice versa, I imagine."

He chuckled.  "Most of the animals, they're what you'd call real used to
people being around.  Not too wild anymore.  Charlotte and me, we're
pretty good friends."

Unwise though it seemed, she could not resist the opportunity to ask 
questions.  "Slim, do you know--do you know why they're keeping me like
this?"  Like a precious animal in an invisible cage....

"No, ma'am."  He rose, gently shifting Charlotte's head to the grass;
she hardly stirred.  "Best we be getting back."  His voice was more sad
than secretive.

The door back into the corridor-maze looked, from this side, like a
panel set into the trunk of a banyan tree.  Slim hesistated just before
touching it, said softly, "Jayhawk, you've been to see His Nibs, haven't
you?"

The speaker in darkness? she guessed, nodded.

"If you see him again, would you ask him about the fur?"

Caught by a sudden wash of pity and fury, she knotted her hands until
the metal of the program carrier bit into her fingers.  "I will.  I
promise."

They walked back in silence to Jayhawk's room.  "One thing, ma'am," he
said at the door.  "You don't have to call for me."

"They told me I needed an escort to go out."

He touched the brim of his hat in a kind of salute.  "I'll be there."
He was gone before she could think of a reply.

22.  Storm

Jayhawk dreamed that she was travelling, flowing from one abstract 
place to another, or perhaps stretched between them.  Travelling to 
a destination that was somehow subtly wrong, held back by a vaguely-
sensed attachment.  It broke at last with a terrible internal snap, 
catapulting her forward into--sunlight?  Into awareness.

Wide awake.  Three hours had passed on the terminal's time display.  

She wondered whether her captors were playing games with her.  Without
external cues, she had only the clock and her own biorhythms to go on,
and they clearly disagreed.  But somehow she didn't think so.  It had
*felt* like three hours' sleep.  But...sufficient.

She went back to her programming.

Several hours and an untasted lunch later, she was interrupted by Martha's 
appearance.  "Ready for a jog?"  She looked Jayhawk over carefully.  "You 
look like you're feeling better."

Jayhawk snorted, followed her out.  As they wove the maze of corridors,
Martha said seriously, "Do you still want to learn the Overnet?"  Jay 
nodded.  "We'll have to get Doc to give you a full checkup, then.
This afternoon, would that be all right?  He'll have to be, ah,
thorough, I'm afraid.  I can stay with you if you like, or ask someone
else....Of course, if you'd rather I didn't, I would understand
completely."

"I don't think it matters," said Jayhawk.  She'd been in and out of
cyberclinics since she was eighteen; medical examinations no longer
bothered her.  

Martha looked at her sharply, seemed to decide that she was sincere.
"It'll depend on what Doc says, of course, but if everything checks out
we can begin quite soon."

"Begin what?"

"Introducing you to the Overnet....I, ah, it would be better to save
this for later.  Procedures, you know."

Jayhawk stopped cold, collected herself with an effort, went on.  At
Martha's inquiring look, she said in a low voice, "When you tell me that
you can't explain something now, but it will be all right later, I
worry.  I think you should be able to understand why."

Martha snorted.  "I am *not* going to mess with you.  Don't worry about
that.--It's just hard to explain in advance, that's all.  Impossible,
really.  Jayhawk, did you enjoy the Matrix, the first time?"

Jayhawk stared at her.  "Of course I did.  It was like...like doing
one-finger typing all your life, and then getting a full-response keyboard.
Or--or like--"

Martha laughed.  "You don't have to tell me, I know."

"Why?"

"The Overnet...it reacts differently to different people, and they to
it.  Have you ever been the target of a spell?"  At Jayhawk's nod:
"What did it feel like?"

"Depends on the spell."  Martha looked at her in apparent surprise as
she went on:  "Sometimes you don't feel it at all, sometimes it's really
obvious.--Martha, is this instructions, or on your own initiative?"

"Some of both, really."  The older woman pursed her lips, thinking. 
"Have you ever been invisible?  What did that feel like?"

"I didn't feel anything in particular.  It was disturbing, not seeing
myself, but no worse than playing games with my Matrix image, and I've
done that.  You get used to it."

Martha stopped abruptly, nearly tripping Jayhawk.  "Damn!  I've got
business elsewhere, urgently.  Can you find your way back?"

"Sure."  She was still mapping every twist and turn in headware.

"See you later."  Without a word or gesture, Martha vanished, suddenly
and completely.  Jayhawk reached out, felt empty air.

She stood in the hallway with her mouth open, amazed.  Alone.--It's a
test, she realized suddenly.  To see which way I'll jump.  She turned
slowly, considering the labyrinth of the pyramid around her.  Well.  I
should probably go back.  But there's no one to say I have to hurry
about it.  "Especially since I'm out of breath," she said out loud, and
panted a little for the benefit of the unseen listener.

She mapped out a route back to her room, not quite the shortest, and
began a leisurely walk in that direction.  Some ten minutes later--the
corridors were all identical, nothing but her map to suggest progress--
there was a chime in the air about her.  An inhuman, sourceless voice 
said softly, "Warning.  Storm at 28777 dot 50."

Experimentally, Jayhawk responded, "Tell me where there's a room I can
shelter in.  I don't know the complex yet."  There was no answer.

The nearest room on her map was one of the gardens Slim had shown her.
She made a sharp turn, headed in that direction--jogging, now.

"Warning.  Storm at 28777 dot 5."

Something was moving in the passageway ahead of her.  A shimmer in the
air, like heat mirages over a summer road; translucent, but somehow
obscuring what lay behind it.  Jayhawk froze, one hand on the cool metal
of the wall.  It crept toward her silently.

*What would happen?  Would I die, could even the Paradisians bring me
back from that?*  She stared into the rippling air, caught on the edge
of decision, then tore her eyes away and ran.

Once more her own endurance surprised her; she reached her room only
mildly out of breath, having lost the storm almost at once.  She paused
in the open doorway, looked for it.  The corridors were empty and
still.  In all the times she had walked those halls, she had never seen 
a living thing besides Martha and Slim.

She rested her head against the doorframe, wondering at herself.  If it
had been a test....What would they conclude?  That she didn't have the
will to kill herself, or the initiative to grab at a chance to escape.
Duende had escaped Paradisio; reprogrammed the biomonitors and defused
the bomb they'd left in his skull, shattered a Gate behind him and
walked away free.

She was not Duende.  If there was any hope for her, it lay elsewhere.
On the Matrix--

She went back to her programming once more.

23.  Package

The medical exam came and went; Jayhawk was sardonically amused to note
that Doc seemed quite curious whether she was fertile.  If they thought
that B-movie horrors would impress her....

Some hours later, the door swished open.  She snatched up her toolkit,
looked out.  There was nothing to be seen but a large cardboard box.
She brought it in, set to unwrapping it, snorting at her immediate
suspicion that it might be a bomb.  She should be so lucky.

There was a silver card just inside the outer wrappings.  It said,
"Enjoy the present.  J."  Under that, carefully packaged in foam, was
her deck.

She turned it over several times, then took it to the workbench and
methodically disassembled it.  It *was* her deck, down to the little
bell Yoichi had installed to signal that she was on the Matrix.  The
wire leading to it still hung loose; she had clipped it herself.

She buried her head in her arms.  How had the Paradisians come by it?
Her friends....

Who was J?  She ran through names, beginning at the top.  Aliantha, or
Megan as Martha had called her.  Martha.  Slim.  Shamrock.  Lefty.  The
Steel Mage, the Investigator, Rhesa....

Jorge Mixcapotec had sacrificed Yoichi.  A priest, though not a High
Priest, she thought.  But Jorge was dead, burned to ashes in the last
fight at Cavilard base.  As if that mattered.

Eventually she put the deck back together, rigged up a connector cable 
that would match her datajack.  Holding her breath, she made the
connection--headware to deck, first, while she ran through the
checklist, then deck to mainframe.

She found herself in the Matrix image of her room.  Nothing had changed,
except for the menu of software nestled comfortably somewhere in the
back of her mind.  Her own programs, as a careful inspection verified.

*Something* should have been different.  She'd been running naked on the
Matrix, nothing but headware between her and the machine.  Having a deck
*had* to make a difference, didn't it?  All that stimsense software, all
that preprocessing?

She ran tests, jacked out and ran them again without the deck.  Nothing.
Identical to the limits of her measurements.  Because both were
stimsense illusions? she wondered.  It was an unappealing idea.

The near-perfect Matrix copy of her room was beginning to bother her.  In 
a distracted mood, she might mistake one for the other....Not a good 
situation, instinct warned her.  She dug through the deck software, found 
a semi-abstract pattern of gold and orange and plastered it across the 
Matrix walls.  There.  That was better.

The Matrix-image door whisked open.  Still jacked in, she looked out
into the next node.  There was nothing, not even a package.  Puzzled,
she disconnected.  The real-world door was also standing open, a bundle of
fabric blocking it.

Jayhawk got up, nudged the bundle with one foot until it unfolded.  Wall
hangings.  Gold and orange wall hangings.

She swore aloud, backed away as if the fabric might bite her.  The
consternation turned to giggles, almost hysterical ones.  So much for
getting a grip on reality, eh?  Well, she was *not* going to put the
stupid things up.  Let them do their own redecorating.

She logged back in for the illusion of privacy.  No doubt the Matrix room 
was as well-bugged as the real, but somehow it felt more solitary.

Methodically she checked through the software, found a program she had
been working on before her capture.  She was still engrossed in it when 
Martha arrived.  "Hi!  Glad to see you're okay--?"  A questioning look. 
"Just came by to see what all the activity was.  Mm, I like the walls."

"Just unpacking," said Jayhawk.  "Someone sent me a present."  She
gestured at the software, represented here by a wild collection of
blue-and-silver gear.

"Oh?  I thought you'd written it yourself."

"All of this?  In an *hour*?  I'm good, but not that good."

"Oh, I think you might surprise yourself.  I have a great deal of faith
in you."

"I don't know whether to be flattered on my own account or offended on
my code's."

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to step on any toes.--A present?  From whom?"

"I don't know.  The package said 'J'.  Martha, this is *my* deck, as far
as I can tell.  Does that mean my friends...?"

"Not as far as I've heard," said Martha briskly, "and I expect I would
have heard.  That's very strange, I can't think who could have sent
it.  I can check, if you like.  And on your friends, though there's no
one in Seattle anymore, so I can't imagine....Is there anything else
you'd like, while I'm at it?"

"News would be nice.--What did Doc say?"  She tried to keep the
eagerness out of her voice, failed.  Too much versimilitude in the
Matrix image, a mixed blessing.

"He's still working on his report.  I'll see if I can manage a newsfeed.
No posting priviledges, I'm afraid."  She smiled apologetically, excused
herself.

Jayhawk finished inventorying her software--not a bad assortment, if she
did say so herself, including a working copy of the code she and Kurt
had written, the OS/wetware interface.  She stored it carefully, not in
headware.  She didn't want the nightmares pawing through it.

A small gnome scurried into the room, offered her a card.  She took it,
read the text as the gnome stood by, arms folded behind its back.
'Nothing on either question, sorry.  Enjoy the news.  Martha.'  She
crumpled the card in her fist, deleting it, and nodded to the gnome; it
ran off.

She jacked out and lay on the bed, sudden exhaustion catching up with her.
Exhaustion and something else.  'I thought you'd written it yourself.'
Martha was a programmer, she knew how long it took to write good code.

Maybe she *had* written it herself.  J for Jayhawk.  Like the wall
hangings.  The pattern was there in her mind; she and Grant had designed
her deck from scratch, all the code was hers, or hers and Kurt's, or
hers and Yoichi's.  She'd been working on trying to reconstruct some of 
that code, and the machine, responsive to her desires...had provided it.

Don't be silly, Jayhawk, she told herself.  Why don't you go to sleep?
It will probably look better in the morning.  "No!" she said aloud, sat
bolt upright, heart racing.  *Would* it look better in the morning,
was that the trap?  Until the High Priestess' power was as natural to
her as breathing, and as essential?

No.  No.  She was fabricating terrors out of nothing, as the person who
had sent the package no doubt intended.  She mustn't let them get to her
like this.

Tired as she was, it was a long time before she could go to sleep.

24.  Honor

The whisk of her door opening woke Jayhawk from a heavy sleep.  She
slung her toolkit over her shoulder and went to investigate, still in
her nightgown.  Outside lay a long, curving corridor which she had seen
once before.

She frowned, biting her lip.  She didn't feel particularly wide-awake or
particularly eager for company.  But there might be something to learn;
and in any case, she had promised Slim.

The door at the passage's end was the same, and the musky darkness
beyond it.  She walked in, stood listening.

"Are you still interested in the Overnet?" said the soft, broken voice,
not quite where she had expected it.

"Yes.  Or maybe interested is the wrong word.  I don't know enough to be
interested.  Curious."  The darkness seemed to make the dreamy, not-quite
-awake feeling worse.  "Can I sit down?"

"There is a chair behind you."  She groped for it as the voice went on,
"What will you do there, Jayhawk?  Where will you go?"  It seemed to be
speaking more to itself than to her.

"I don't know."

"What are you?  What are you doing here?"

"I don't know!" she snarled.  "You should be able to answer those
questions, you've been watching me hard enough.  Why am I here?  Why are
you offering me this?"

"To ease the pain, child," it whispered.

"I don't know what I could tell you that you don't already know by now."

"Information," it mused.  "Is that what I need?  Will that let me
understand you?  I think not."

"I can tell you," she said in defiant anger, "roughly what must have
happened--the intent, if not the details.  We'd run Aliantha and her
bodyguard to ground, and we intended to kill them.  I imagine I found a
way to do it.  For my friends, for all the people whose lives she'd
destroyed."  And your turn is coming.

"Vengeance?  Is that what moved you?"

She looked down, suddenly abashed.  "I'm not a big fan of vengeance.
But it had to be done, to stop them."

"A matter of honor?"

She snorted.  "I've seen what honor gets you.  Roth was an honorable
man."

"Is that honor?"  There was a huge shifting in the room around her,
quicker and more powerful than it had seemed before.  She froze, a tiny
island of stillness in the maelstrom.  "Honor.  Preservation of one's
life.  Which is paramount, Jayhawk?"

She wanted to say:  Can you destroy Paradisio, is that what you are
hinting at?  *Do it.*  It's worth our lives.  

She couldn't say it.

"Words," she muttered.  "Honor, survival.  You can't take them in
isolation and put them on a balance.  A living person, a decision to
make, that's what's real.--That's what they taught me in college,
anyway."

"Situational ethics."

"Whatever you want to call it."

A moment's silence.  Its voice when it spoke suggested something short
of breath, but between sentences there was no sound of breathing at all.
"Tell me about Ratty.  Is he an honorable man?  Is it worthwhile,
this...."

Very carefully, she said, "If I willingly told you about him, it would
be betrayal.  No."  Her own kind of honor, such as it was....She
considered her choice of words, winced at it.  'Willingly.'  She knew,
and they doubtless knew as well, that there was no question she would
not answer, given drugs or threats or simple pain.

"I see."  Another long silence.  "You should go back to sleep."

She got up, leaned on the back of the chair.  "I--I promised to ask
this, I think you're the right one to ask.  Slim...wanted me to say that
he would still like to have fur."

"Fur."  Almost a chuckle.  "Pleasant dreams, Jayhawk."  The door slid
open behind her.

"You too," she said with a barely-suppressed snarl, suspecting irony,
and turned and walked out, not looking back.  She climbed back into bed
thinking that she wouldn't be able to sleep...quickly found that she'd
been mistaken.

Her dreams were of great masses sliding past her in the darkness.
Nothing more.

She woke a little tired, ran herself a hot bath.  Sitting in the
steaming, rose-scented water, pondering the night's events, she came to
three conclusions.

It was good to be tired again, to wake up slowly with coffee and steam,
not be flung awake by some convulsion of her reaction wiring.  It had 
seemed natural enough at the time, but she appreciated now what it had 
cost her nerves.

She owed the creature that spoke in the darkness--*was* it Merrow, the
dead High Priest? she rather thought so--a more sincere thank-you.  It
had warded her dreams.

And something was nagging at her, some missed nuance of the encounter.
She pegged it down at last over coffee and donuts.  The room she'd
awakened to, when she went out to speak with Merrow, had been emblazoned
with the orange and gold wall hangings of her Matrix node.

But the room she had returned to after their conversation had not.

Mary Kuhner 2/25/91