CHAPTER 14

Holographic stars glowed softly in Ubu’s navigation display. Letters floated alongside the stars, codes that marked systems with human habitation.

Civilization.

In Ubu’s inner ear pulsed a distant whisper of sadness. He was planning Runaway’s journey home. After a few last cargo containers were stored, Twelve was taken aboard, and the last AI delivered, it would be time to leave Maria the Fair...

A red light glowed on the board. The nav comp was saving the plot automatically.

While Ubu worked on the nav board, Beautiful Maria was on Beloved’s vessel hammering out the contract for the next deliver: improved AIs and software, some designed for singularity shots, others for other purposes, all in exchange for another shipment of pharmaceuticals.

She had also persuaded Beloved to sign a contract, with Twelve as her agent. If the human authorities demanded to know how Runaway came by its cargo, they could show a legal, binding contract, albeit an implausible one. Since what passed for a thumbprint would be decidedly nonhuman, Maria had taken a microcamera with her, intending to get a photo of one of Twelve’s retinas. Twelve’s eyes were sufficiently human in structure that they might pass, particularly if Maria managed to fuzz some of the details and use computer color enhancements.

Beloved’s rhythms beat in Ubu’s heart. The bright points of holographic light gleamed in their cube of darkness. Coded numbers referencing Angelica, Bezel, China Light, Salvador, all coded in Ubu’s memory as well as the comp, each the location of one defeat or another...

He didn’t want to go back.

On his return, he knew, everything would change. Ubu didn’t want to lose the strange, precarious happiness he had found. The bubble of contentment that had risen in him these last weeks he knew to be fragile, and he feared that it would burst under the strain of living again among others of his predatory, unforgiving species.

He had everything he wanted now. All he could do, back in human space, was lose it.

Lose Maria.

A bell rang brightly on the communications board. Maria had concluded her negotiations, and was now sending the recording for Ubu to look at. Ubu saved his piloting plot and stepped to the comm board, where he made sure the record had been received intact.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw one of the airlock telltales go from green to red. Maria returning.

Ubu began walking to the galley. He was late in making dinner.

*

Panic whimpered urgently in Twelve’s blood, its volume rising at times to a doleful wail of total despair. The human ship, all sharp angles and cold pitted metal, grew larger with every second, closer, more alien and overwhelming. Twelve fought for control, wrestled with the clumsy suit harness, barely stopped his trajectory in time to avoid smashing headfirst into Runaway’s silver flank.

Clumsy in his gloves, he manipulated the lock controls, entered the lock, cycled it. The inner door rolled open with sinister, near-silent efficiency. Ubu and Beautiful Maria hovered on the other side, their bodies glowing in ghastly yellow light. They were without vac suits, but each had a portable receiver and a headset that translated their words for broadcast by shoulder-mounted holographic projectors. “Welcome to Runaway, Volitional Twelve,” Ubu said. “If you will remove your vac suit, we will show you to your quarters.”

Twelve tried to remember the sounds for later. He trained one eye on his keyboard and tapped an answer: “I tremble at the honor done me by the reverend bossrider.”

He detached the food canister he carried on his back and broke the seal on his suit. Runaway’s sterile, comfortless air flooded his senses. The corner of every room and passage was square. His palps searched the air in vain for trace of Beloved, for the airborne signals that marked the solace and glory of her presence. His vocoder failed to detect her drumsong. Panic rose in him again.

He fumbled with the suit harness, dragged the suit off, was shown how to stow it in a locker. Carrying his food canister, he followed Ubu and Maria through an anteroom, down a corridor, into another room. It was large and filled with a distant hum, the whisper of circulating air, glowing lights and displays.

“This is the auxiliary control room,” Maria said. “We’ll put you here. The room is weightless unless we’re under acceleration, and in that case you can use one of the couches.”

“I am overwhelmed by the trust of the reverend bossrider, that he would put me in such a critical location.”

With a graceful movement of her head, Beautiful Maria tossed her drifting hair out of her eyes. Twelve wondered what precise purpose this “hair” served. The dictionary definition that he’d been fed was precise as to nature, but not function. Possibly hair was intended to enhance her “beauty,” whatever in turn that was.

“We have wondered about matters of elimination,” Maria said. “There is a toilet cubicle in the corner, but we’re uncertain whether or not you are compatible with it.”

“I excrete pellets and a small amount of fluid from a valve between my legs,” Twelve said. Maria and Ubu looked at each other.

“Sounds familiar,” Ubu said. “Guess the toilet’ll work.”

Twelve received instruction in the zero-gee toilet and the acceleration couches. Beautiful Maria then produced a small boxlike object, a cheerful bright red in color.

“This is a multichannel recorder,” she said. “When turned on, it will record any sound in the room. When you want to practice speaking, you can record our speech on one channel and your own speech on the other. You can compare your speech to ours and refine your pronunciation.”

Twelve was overwhelmed. “Many thanks, reverend bossrider. I shall treasure the recorder and guard it well.”

Twelve took the recorder. The red surface was some kind of soft resinous material, grained like the skin of a nonvolitional loader. Maria demonstrated the machine’s use. Twelve practiced briefly, producing sounds from his voder, recording them on Channel One and playing them back. He set the machine to record the rest of this conversation on Channel Two.

Ubu hooked one foot under one of the bars of the command cage. He pointed to each of the five couches. “Each acceleration couch is placed at a different post. Navigation, pilot’s station, shooter’s station, communications, ship systems... We ask you not to use any of the equipment unless you have been instructed and have asked permission.”

“Of course, reverend bossrider.”

“We would like to show you how to use the communications board. From here you can speak to us if you are in need, or call up music or hype to aid you in learning our language.”

“I thank you, reverend bossrider.”

Maria gracefully twisted herself in air, planted her feet on a wall, pushed off gently, and caught the padded bar above the comm board. She slid easily through the bars of the command cage and floated above the board. Maria looked at Twelve and showed her white teeth—a “smile,” Twelve knew, a gesture which he was slowly learning to think of as reassuring. “Are you familiar with the concept of a hype?” she asked.

“A recorded drama, usually of a sensationalist nature.” Twelve’s recitation was from memory.

“You understand that a hype is fiction? That it never happened?”

Twelve contemplated this notion—though the word was in his vocabulary, he’d never had to think about it till now— and he restrained a delicate shudder. “It is a recording of a lie, then?”

Ubu and Maria looked at each other, then at Twelve. “Yes,” Maria said. “In a sense.”

Twelve trembled as two instincts warred in him. He did not wish to pollute his mind with untruth; but neither did he wish to offend his hosts.

“Hypes are dramas about fictional people and—” Beautiful Maria fell silent for a moment, looked at Ubu, looked back. “They’re the sort of thing that can happen, but usually don’t, and they’re arranged so as to leave out all the boring parts. All the parts that don’t matter.”

Twelve gazed at her. Suddenly he was very lonely. “I will consider this, Beautiful Maria.”

“Dramas,” Ubu interjected, his voice loud, “are full of hypothetical action. They are things that might happen, and they explore... the ways in which humans might respond to things that. . . might happen to them. Jesus Rice. I’m repeating myself. But—” He looked at Maria and performed a complex gesture that rippled his shoulders.

“We don’t want you to take them too seriously,” Maria said “Some of them are very violent, and I don’t want you to believe that humans are normally as violent as this. But humans find violence interesting and they dramatize it a lot.”

Twelve worked through this slowly. “Hypes are based upon hypothetical action?”

“Yes.” Maria’s hair drifted before her face and she shook it out of the way. What was it for? Twelve wondered. At some appropriate moment he would ask.

“So hypes are instructive in nature?” Twelve asked. “They demonstrate how humans should act in certain circumstances? As with the simulations of singularity shots in your AI?”

“Yes,” said Ubu.

“No,” said Maria.

Shock exploded in Twelve at the realization that Beautiful Maria had just contradicted the bossrider. A thrill of agony ran through him in anticipation of Ubu Roy’s revenge. Would he order her dissolution immediately? Or would he simply kill her now and take her head?

To Twelve’s amazement Ubu had no reaction. He just looked at Maria without any discernible expression. “Yes and no,” Maria corrected. “The range of behavior in hypes is both positive and negative. It demonstrates the range of human behavior rather than any single—rather than what is necessarily correct.”

Ubu looked at Twelve. “Maria is right,” he said.

Twelve froze in astonishment. The reverend bossrider had not only permitted himself to be contradicted, but had allowed his opinion to be swayed by that of his servant.

Twelve felt weak. He was well out of his depth.

Docilely, he allowed himself to be instructed in the use of the comm board. Ubu and Beautiful Maria took their leave, saying that they had to prepare for Runaway’s departure. They would signal him when they were ready for acceleration.

Twelve used the toilet and, without waiting for the signal, webbed himself into the acceleration couch in front of the comm board. His mind was in turmoil.

The air was horribly dry and thick. The yellow light seared his vision. A small white quadruped floated through the door, stared at him for a long moment as it drifted across the room, said nothing, touched the far wall, and sprang out in haste. Twelve’s mind wailed for a taste of Beloved. He ordered his recorder to play Channel Two.

“Yes.”

“No.”

Horrible. Evil. Blasphemy.

Yes/No, his mind danced. No/Yes.

They were all mad. They entertained themselves with lies and contradicted their superiors without fear of obliteration. He was trapped here. Panic keened in his veins.

The signal for acceleration came. Was he ready? Maria asked.

Yes/No, he thought. His graceful inner fingers typed an affirmative answer.

The cage gimbaled as acceleration came, gentle at first, then with a hideous rumbling intensity. Gravity compressed his flesh, dropped ballast on his hearts. It became hard to breathe. His mind swam. Twelve squeezed his eyes shut and gave himself up to terror, to death.

The horror seemed to go on forever.

Then, suddenly, it was over. The rumbling ceased and Twelve floated free in his webbing. His hearts surged as if to make up for lost time.

Beloved! he wailed.

Yes, he thought. No.

*

Beautiful Maria’s soft hair drifted against Ubu’s face, offered a warm blanketing touch. He stroked his cheek against it. Maria leaned closer, kissed his throat, thrust her hips against Ubu, swallowing him.

Ubu was anchored by his upper set of arms from a padded castoff bar set in the ceiling of his compartment. The centrifuge had been locked down prior to acceleration, and he held himself in place by fingertips alone, his lower arms holding Maria’s hips, giving her the freedom to move as inspiration took her.

Maria kissed him, tasted his salt skin. He hung motionless as Maria danced against his body. She dusted his smooth muscles with her fingertips, brushed the tips of her breasts against his chest, slowly turned her head from side to side in order to draw her hair’s caress across his face and neck.

Ubu released the castoff bar and the two bobbed around the room, their slow trajectory altered in minor ways as their mass reacted to their movements. They finished in Ubu’s rack, strapped together in his webbing, Ubu’s four arms tangled in the polymer harness, his arm and shoulder muscles flexing as he sought leverage, traction, advantage...

Maria’s pleasure receded slowly. She stretched herself, infusing her muscles with blood. Her skin seemed a complex organic sensor set to receive radiations of pleasure, striations of happiness, coded signals of joy from the electron world that wove its nets about her, as complicated as the tangle of harness webbing in which she lay... She opened her eyes, saw her view obstructed by clouds of drifting hair, pulled it behind her head. Ubu’s body hung in the webbing a few heartbeats away. His eyes were distant.

“I wonder what our passenger would think of this,” Maria said.

Ubu took a moment to process this comment. “He’d probably think we’re fusing. Like him with Beloved.”

“That’s what we were doing.”

He grinned. “I think we’re a little better than that.”

“Probably. It doesn’t look like much fun for him.”

“I wonder if he knows what fun is.”

She drew her hair away again. “Will you braid my hair? Be weightless for a while yet, and it’ll just get in my way.”

“Sure.”

Maria turned over. Ubu sat astride her and held her between the strong muscles of his thighs while his four arms worked the plait with care and precision. He finished and she stretched again, hanging content in the webbing.

“I don’t want to go back,” Ubu said. The tone in his voice made her look at him over her shoulder.

“I’ll be ready,” she said. “I’d like to get on Angel’s Fringe again.” She grinned. “See some old friends. Play some blackhole. It could be fun now the stakes don’t matter.”

“The Fringe is dying,” Ubu said. “We can’t stop that. No matter how successful we are.” He looked away. “I don’t want to have to watch it go.”

She frowned at him. Something had changed. “What’s the matter? What happened?”

He shrugged. “It occurred to me that right now we’re winners. We’ve got sole knowledge of an alien civilization, a cargo hold worth tens of millions, our freedom... and if things go well, all we can do is keep what we’ve already got. And if things don’t go well, we lose it.”

We lose each other. That, she knew, was what he meant. She rolled over, faced him.

“There’s nothing we can do, right?” she said. “We can’t hide out here forever.”

“No.”

“And we’ve got our plans. Your plans. Prefabricated ships, stations...”

“Yeah.” He gave a halfhearted grin. “Lots of plans. But right now we’re ahead, and I’ve never been ahead before, and I just wish we could quit.”

She sighed, let herself drift among the polymer straps. “I don’t know what you want, Ubu,” she said.

“Just what I’ve got now. Nothing more, not really.”

Maria put her arms around his neck, looked level into his eyes. “Hey. Things change.”

“Yeah.” Suddenly his eyes were hard—brittle chips of blue glass. He reached for the webbing, began taking it down, untangling himself.

Maria’s pulse beat a little quicker. “Where are you going?”

“Time to get ready for the shoot.” His voice was sharp. He was angry, and Maria couldn’t tell why. “And we should show Twelve how to use the fuge elevator before we have to do it under gravity. If he isn’t used to the setup he may break something.”

Sadness wafted over her. She didn’t know how this had started, how to end it, what it meant.

“Okay,” she said. “If that’s what you want.”

After learning how to enter the centrifuge hub and ride the little elevator to the primary control stations on the lower level of the fuge, Twelve returned to auxcontrol and strapped himself into his couch. He remained there during the shoot, frozen with terror. He’d never been conscious during a shoot and was afraid it would be as horrible as the breakaway acceleration from the bluegreen giant. He listened to the automated countdown while his fingers gripped the arms of the chair, and then—there wasn’t even a blink in his consciousness —it was over. Amazement flowed through him, then joy. He had survived with body and mind intact.

He opened his food locker, ate, drank water from the tap—no one had shown him how to use the cup dispenser—and then used the toilet. He played with the recorder. “We would like to sshow you how to usze the communicationz board,” he repeated, trying to get Maria’s inflection right. He kept making accidental, incidental buzzing sounds, and he had a hard time working with the sibilants. “From here you can zbeak to uzz if you are in need, or call up muszic or hype to aid you in learning our language.”

Hype. Twelve tried not to think about it.

He ran the recorder forward, repeating the words, fixing them in his mind; but before long the conversation wandered into disturbing areas and Twelve decided not to face the problem of human contradiction just yet.

Twelve listened to the first part of the conversation several times and repeated the words aloud, playing them back, until he could do a presentable imitation of Ubu and Maria, not just their words and inflections but the voices themselves. He tried inventing sentences using these same words in a different order, but the mixture of Ubu’s and Maria’s voices sounded odd, and for this he had to invent another voice, a kind of modulation of the first two. He worked hard at it.

Time passed. He ate and drank again.

He found himself looking at the comm board.

Hype.

His hearts beat faster. Twelve bent to the comm board, called up the index, chose one title from the hundreds available, and started his recorder.

The title of the chosen hype was Bloodbath in Building Four, which suggested to Twelve’s hopeful mind that the subject matter might have to do with genetics. Unfortunately the title proved misleading.

The hype’s action was complex and left much to ponder. It seemed to concern a struggle for supremacy among a number of human clans. The main character, Ahmad, was an “agent” for one clan, and had somehow been inserted into another clan for the purpose of discovering their intentions— the precise mechanism of this insertion, which Twelve would have found interesting, was regrettably left unclear. Twelve understood how useful it would be to be able to pass one’s own servants off as those of someone else; but Twelve had never heard of any way in which genetic markers could pass undetected. Still, here Ahmad was, operating among his enemies, without their smelling out his origins. Possibly, Twelve noted, Beloved could purchase this ability from the humans and make herself and her servants nearly invincible. Twelve would inquire.

Twelve observed that much of human communication seemed to be transmitted via facial “expression,” primarily through the constant motion of “eyebrows,” which were forever wigwagging up and down, in and out. Twelve began to categorize these positions but gave up the task as hopeless—there were too many, and he did not yet understand enough context.

Ahmad’s task was quite soon complicated by the appearance of an enemy female, Kirstie, whose profession was described as “rughunter,” a word not available in Twelve’s vocabulary but apparently meaning someone engaged in the detection of the agents of enemy clans. Instead of avoiding Kirstie, Ahmad seemed inexplicably attracted to her. Twelve could not at first understand this perversity, but later deduced that Kirstie’s type possessed valuable hereditary traits which Ahmad’s clan was anxious to acquire. Kirstie, not surprisingly, was suspicious of his approaches and pressed her mouth and nose to his body frequently in a presumed attempt to detect his alien genetics. Ahmad demonstrated his confidence in his own masking abilities by permitting this.

There were complicated intrigues going on at the same time—in the absence of Kirstie’s clan head, who oddly enough was never shown or referred to, various servants conflicted as to the interpretations of clan policy and began killing one another in a perfect frenzy. Kirstie was involved in this slaughter and Ahmad persuaded her to join with the forces of his own clan in restoring order. Though this was not made explicit, it would appear that his price for assistance was possession of Kirstie and her valuable genetics, for after a long combat, in which the forces of Kirstie’s clan were almost entirely destroyed, she returned without protest to Ahmad’s clan.

Reflecting on the drama afterward, Twelve concluded that despite Maria’s insistence that hypes were not necessarily didactic, this particular hype had nevertheless an instructive message, namely that lines of authority had to be firmly established. If Kirstie’s clan head, in her absence, had merely indicated which of her servants was to give orders and which to obey, none of the self-destructive attempts to dictate policy would have ever been initiated, and the clan wouldn’t have suffered civil disorder and destruction.

Twelve used his recorder to play bits of the dialogue back, and he added to his repertoire of words and phrases. During this process, Beautiful Maria appeared and asked him if he was well. Twelve used his voder in response.

“Got nothing to wrack about,” he said, a favorite phrase of Ahmad’s.

“Interesting,” Maria said, after a pause. She informed Twelve that there would be another shoot within an hour or so, and that after she and Ubu had rested they and Twelve would be able to talk if Twelve so wished. Twelve indicated his readiness.

Maria left and Twelve called up the directory of hypes. He decided to look for something less violent if possible and chose a drama called The Libation Bearers, a title that seemed pacific enough. He strapped himself into the chair, turned on his recorder, and waited for enlightenment.

Hours later, after two shoots in a row, Maria found Twelve catatonic in his acceleration couch. He was lying on his left side in a slightly curled posture. His eyes gazed unfocused in four different directions, like carelessly dropped marbles. Mouth branches floated in and out with steady breaths. His keyboard transmitter had slipped its strap and floated over his head.

He would not respond. Beautiful Maria hung on to the castoff bar at the top of Twelve’s couch. She hoped Twelve was asleep, that this behavior was something normal. Anxiety skittered under her skin. Twelve’s steady breathing continued unabated. Tiny drops of drool were flung by the mouth branches into the weightless room. With a push of her fingers Maria moved to the comm board and called Ubu.

The hype file, she saw, was still up. Maria reversed herself, hooked her feet into the straps beneath the board, and checked the index for any hypes that had been run in the last few hours. Bloodbath in Building Four, it said, and The Libation Bearers. Both had been played to their conclusion.

Ubu appeared, followed by Maxim, who bounded slowly and gently about the room, interested in the stranger but keeping his distance. Ubu tried to awaken Twelve, first with a call, then by prodding and nudging. He looked at Maria. “What was he doing?”

“Watching a couple of hypes.”

“Which ones?”

Maria told him. He frowned. “I saw that first one,” he said, then drifted to the comm board and looked up The Libation Bearers. “This one’s old,” he said. “It’s been in the comp since the ship was built. ‘An adaptation of the classic drama by Aeschylus,’ it says. Jesus Rice. No wonder I’ve never looked at it.”

“Who’s Aeschylus?”

“I’m still working on libation.” Ubu looked at Twelve, gnawed his lip. “All we can do is keep a watch on him and hope he comes out of it. Don’t want to start filling him full of human medication.”

“We could watch the hypes. See if we could figure out what set him off.”

“It might not be the hypes. He might be sick. Maybe we infected him.”

“Let’s hope it’s not mutual.”

“Let’s.” He thought for a moment. “It wasn’t the shoot, right? He was okay after the first shoot?”

“I guess. He talked to me. He used some old slang I hadn’t heard in years.”

Ubu sighed. “I’ll bring a sleeping harness up here. One of us should stay with him.”

Maxim, bored, drifted away.

Maria looked at Twelve and was startled to see him move, shift slightly in his webbing. Her heart lifted. She waited for his eyes to focus, for his body to come to attention. In vain.

He had made himself a little more comfortable, that was all. It offered at least a little hope that something in there was still responding.

They waited for him to regain consciousness. Waited for hours.

*

Ubu put the headset down, the final staves of The Libation Bearers still ringing through his mind. He had watched it through the stim set rather than risk driving Twelve further into shock by playing the thing out loud again. The drama had been bewildering and frustration flittered in Ubu like the hype’s pursuing Furies.

He shook his head. “Weird,” he said.

“What was it about?”

“A bunch of old-time people living in Mudville. The mother kills the father before the story starts, so the son and daughter team up with a god to kill the mother and her boyfriend. The whole thing was—I guess it was poetry. And there was this weird... bunch of women... who wandered through the play, singing and dancing while beating cymbals and drums. And there were demons as well as the god. I guess they were demons.” He shrugged. Undirected anger shivered through him. “Pretty strange. I don’t know what to make of it.”

“Have we got a fastlearn on it?”

“I doubt it.” His hands started tapping keys. “I don’t think the vid is what upset Twelve,” he said. “There wasn’t even any violence on camera. It all happened somewhere else. Bloodbath must have featured five hundred corpses and Twelve went on to watch the next vid.” Data flickered in midair. Ubu peered at it. “We don’t have a fastlearn, but we’ve got a recorded lecture on Greek drama. Whatever Greek is.”

“On cartridge or in the database?”

“It’s in the database. I think the holocomputer came with it and a bunch of other old vids nobody ever watches— I bet nobody’s ever used it.”

Beautiful Maria looked at him. “Should we check the text?”

Ubu thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t see any reason to. I don’t think the hype had anything to do with it. I think Twelve’s sick.”

Maria’s look was bleak. “I think you’re right.”

Ubu took off his lap belt, pushed off the couch, stretched his muscles. The whole thing had been a waste of time. The vid’s bizarre choral rhythms keened in his memory. He looked at Twelve, then at Maria. A sudden thought jolted him.

“Hey,” he said. “Maybe it was the music in the vid. Maybe the drums were beating the wrong rhythm. What if the vid used the rhythm Beloved uses when she tells Twelve to go to sleep?”

Maria was startled. “You think so?”

“I’ll get a sizer. You wait here.”

Ubu turned, his feet touched a castoff bar, and he rocketed into the corridor. He returned with the sizer and jacked it into the ship’s power source.

Beloved’s varied rhythms came drumming into his consciousness. There was one pattern that Beloved had used more than the others during the negotiating sessions. He programmed that one into the synthesizer and triggered it. Drumbeats rattled in the little room.

Ubu watched Twelve. Frustration gnawed him.

The drumbeat went on.

An hour later, Twelve began to stir.

*

Beloved. Warm reassurance began to whisper in Twelve. Awareness filtered slowly into his mind.

Horror! Blasphemy! The memory came as a shock. His body jolted. “Warning!” he found himself shouting aloud. “Danger to Beloved!”

“Hey! Wake up! Speak Melange, will you?” An enemy voice, harsh, a clattering language.

“Danger! Danger!” Twelve felt enemy hands upon him and lashed out while crying his warnings. His blows were absorbed by a soft tangle of enemy restraints.

“Hey! Stop that! We’re friends, damn it!”

Vision returned. Twelve saw metal walls, chairs, lights that glowed at him like hostile eyes. Twelve realized he was caught in a harness of some sort. He stopped thrashing and tried to focus his mind.

“Help,” he said. “Danger to Beloved.”

“Look at my holos, Twelve. Read the translation of what I’m saying. Maria, where the fuck’s his keyboard?”

Awareness began to turn in Twelve’s mind. Ubu floated over him, out of range of Twelve’s frantic paws. Maria shot across the room, his keyboard and transmitter in her hands.

A surge of memory left Twelve helpless. “Horrible,” he said. He remembered to speak the humans’ language. “Danger to Beloved.”

“Danger? Where?”

Twelve understood the words before he read the golden graphic rolling over Ubu’s head. Twelve pointed a feeble hand at the comm board.

“Pollution. Evil thoughts. Hype.” Ubu and Beautiful Maria stared at him. Twelve realized he was speaking his own language again. In a frenzy, Twelve reached through the harness webbing, snatched his deck from Maria’s hands, his inner fingers typing furiously beneath his big hands.

“Must protect. The Libation Bearers is evil. The hype is thought pollution of the worst type.”

The act of forcing his thoughts into the constrictions of an alien language calmed him. Phrases burst from his fingers in torrents. “Insane servants conspire to kill their parent. No one stops them. An evil design.” At the very thought of it, Twelve felt himself falling into withdrawal again. With a surge of will he dragged himself from oblivion.

“It was just a hype!” Ubu’s voice was loud. “It never happened!”

Twelve banged the keyboard on his knees in a fury of negation. “That doesn’t matter! Some thoughts are not permissible!!!!!!!!!” He held down the exclamation key for a long time in frantic emphasis.

Ubu and Beautiful Maria looked at each other. “One of us better read the text,” Ubu said.

“You’re the one who won’t forget it.”

Ubu’s mouth twitched. “What if I want to?”

“You’ve seen the hype. I haven’t.”

Ubu sighed and turned to Twelve. “I’m going to learn something about the play now,” he said. “I should be able to answer most of your questions.”

Anger and fear burned through Twelve. His inner fingers hammered on keys. “I have asked no questions, reverend bossrider.”

Ubu thought about this for a moment. “Maybe I’ll be able to answer my questions, then.” Ubu belted himself into the next couch, put on a headset, tapped keys, leaned back.

Twelve found his anger ebbing slightly under the influence of Beloved’s calm, thoughtful drumbeats, and then with a snapping whipcrack realization he remembered that Beloved was far away. He glanced over the room in alarm, focused on the speakers.

“What is that sound?” he demanded.

Maria’s voice was soothing. “Ubu programmed an AI to sound like Beloved. He hoped it would help you recover.”

After an initial surge of indignation—an artificial Beloved!— Twelve contemplated this notion. It sounded, on further consideration, quite attractive. “Would it be possible for me to learn to use this machine?” he asked.

“Of course.”

Twelve warmed at the thought of Beloved’s homelike throbbing comforting him in this horrid metal-walled room. “I humbly petition for instruction,” he said.

“Use it all you like.”

“Thank you, Beautiful Maria.”

“No wrack.” She gave a sudden laugh. “Where did you learn that expression anyway? I haven’t heard it in years.”

“I learned the word in the first hype. Was the expression incorrect?”

“No. Just a little out of date.”

Ubu sat up in his couch and removed the headset. “Okay,” he said. “Now I know who the Greeks were.” He rubbed his forehead. “Do you know the word cybernetic comes from the old Greek language? It means someone who steers a boat.”

Maria looked at him. “What have boats got to do with AIs?”

“I don’t know. The database didn’t go into that.”

“Shows you what the Greeks knew.”

Ubu looked at Twelve. “The play that you saw is something called a tragedy. That’s a play in which awful things happen.”

Twelve’s indignation returned. Inner fingers rattled on his keyboard. “Awful and forbidden things, reverend bossrider.”

“The play was the middle part of a trilogy, Twelve. You didn’t watch the first part. Please understand, Twelve, it was terrible that these children killed their mother. But she’d done a terrible thing before, in the earlier play, because she killed her husband.”

Twelve thought for a moment. “What was terrible about that?” he asked.

Ubu and Maria looked at each other. “People aren’t supposed to kill their relatives,” Ubu said.

“She was the procreator, was she not? So it was her right to kill any of her servants.”

“Her husband was as much a procreator as she was.” Ubu turned to Maria. “Haven’t we made this clear?”

Annoyance burned through Twelve. His inner fingers could scarcely keep up with the rush of his passionate thought. “The husband may be the custodian of certain desirable genetic material, reverend bossrider, but that does not detract from the holy character of motherhood. Nor the right of the mother to choose her servants by their appropriate characteristics, or to dispose of others that are no longer useful.”

Maria’s laughter rang in the room. “Got you there, Ubu,” she said. Twelve, annoyed at her disrespect, shifted a pair of eyes to follow her.

“Holy character of motherhood,” Ubu repeated. “Right.” He thought for a moment. “The children’s actions were prompted by a god. By Apollo. He gave a holy character, as you put it, to his orders.”

Twelve considered for a moment the notion of godhood. A god, his vocabulary told him, was a superbeing, particularly one conceived as the embodiment of some attribute of reality... The word had other definitions, some of which were contradictory.

“Have you ever met a god?” he asked.

Both laughed. Twelve shifted his eyes from one to the other in rising indignation. “Neither of us has met a god,” Ubu said. “I don’t believe they exist, though many people do. But the writer of the play believed that Apollo existed.”

Twelve began to grow agitated again. “Either gods exist, or they don’t.”

“They do not,” Maria interrupted, “in our experience exist.”

“But if gods order servants to kill their Beloved,” Twelve insisted, “then they are evil gods and should be destroyed.”

Ubu gave a long sibilant “ahhh” sound which his computer declined to translate. “Kill their Beloved. I see your point.” He looked at Maria. “He’s worried about Beloved being in danger.”

Maria nodded her head, then turned to Twelve. “No god will ever put Beloved in danger. I can say that with certainty.”

Twelve thought for a moment. “I am reassured, Beautiful Maria,” he wrote. “But cannot Apollo be hunted down and destroyed?”

“No one has seen Apollo in thousands of years,” Ubu said. “I don’t think he’s any danger to anyone.”

“His polluting thought remains, reverend bossrider Ubu Roy.”

Ubu looked at Maria, then back at Twelve. “Shall I erase the hype, Twelve?”

Twelve’s hearts exulted. His hands made fists. “Destroy the contaminating thought! Yes, reverend bossrider!”

“Very well.” Ubu turned to the comm board and tapped the keyboard for a moment. He turned back to Twelve.

“I’ve erased it.”

“Thank you, reverend bossrider.”

Twelve thought about the hype again and shuddered. He felt triumph that he had participated in erasing such an evil from the world. But still something troubled him.

“Reverend bossrider,” he said, “why did the others not prevent this insane act?”

“Which others?”

“The others in the hype. The female humans who sang and beat drums. Were they not akin to the woman who was killed?”

“They were the chorus, Twelve. They do not affect the action, they only offer comment.”

Twelve thought about this. “Then they were wicked, too. They should have intervened.”

“The—the chorus represents the ordinary people. Ordinary people cannot prevent all the evil in the world.”

“The killing occurred right in front of them. They were evil not to try to prevent it.”

There was a little silence.

“Twelve,” Ubu said, “I think you should not look at hype again.”

“Agreed. My thoughts might become contaminated by evil gods.”

“Listen to music next time.”

“Very well, reverend bossrider. I shall obey your wishes.”

They left Twelve to his thoughts. Grim satisfaction filled him at the thought that he had helped to destroy contamination.

Beloved, he felt sure, would be pleased.

“Never thought I’d spend hours arguing with an alien about theology and ethics,” Ubu said. “Jesus Rice!”

“The holy character of motherhood,” Maria said. “I liked that.”

Ubu removed his headset and holo projector, stretched his neck and arms. “Now I’ve got all this data about classical Mudville drama read into my brain. What am I gonna do with stuff like that?”

“At least our passenger hasn’t died.”

“I want to know what happens if he figures out we’ve been infected by Apollo’s thought. What if he decides our brains are a danger to Beloved?” He finished his climb down the fuge ladder and dropped off onto the blue plastic pad below. A new tear in the plastic scratched his bare foot. He stepped back and rubbed his sole.

“Shit,” he said. “Gotta fix that.”

Beautiful Maria dropped down the ladder. She reached behind her neck, took her long braid, began undoing it.

Ubu moved toward the command cage. “I’ll check our position fix,” he said. “Then we should get some sleep before the next shoot.”

“No hurry.”

Ubu could feel annoyance leaping under his skin. “I wanna get it over with,” he said. He walked to the nav station, looked at the plot. Runaway was that much closer to civilization.

Maria padded quietly up behind him. He sensed her shaking out her hair and thought about the dark warmth of it spilling over her shoulders, down her back. Maria turned and walked away, toward the lounge.

Things change, he thought. Damn it all anyway.