Griffin's Egg

"Stand back."  Ekatarina took two quick steps backward.  Edgily, she added, "I don't mean to be difficult.  But we're going to sort this all out, and until we do, I don't want anybody too close to me.  That includes you too, Gunther."

Flicks began gathering.  By ones and twos they wandered up the lawn, and then by the dozen.  By the time it was clear that Ekatarina had called them up via the CMP, Krishna, Chang and Hamilton were separated from her and Gunther by a wall of people.

Chang stood very still.  Somewhere behind her unseen face, she was revising her theories to include this new event.  Suddenly, her hands slapped at her suit, grabbing for the missing canisters.   She looked at Krishna and with a trill of horror said, "You're one of them!"

"Of course I'm not--" Krishna began.  But she was turning, stumbling, fleeing back up the steps.

"Let her go," Ekatarina ordered.  "We've got more serious things to talk about."  Two flicks scurried up, lugging a small industrial kiln between them.  They set it down, and a third plugged in an electric cable.  The interior began to glow.  "This canister is all you've got, isn't it?  If I were to autoclave it, there wouldn't be any hope of replacing its contents."

"Izmailova, listen," Krishna said.

"I am listening.  Talk."

Krishna explained, while Izmailova listened with arms folded and shoulders tilted skeptically.  When he was done, she shook her head.  "It's a noble folly, but folly is all it is.  You want to reshape our minds into something alien to the course of human evolution.  To turn the seat of thought into a jet pilot's couch.  This is your idea of a solution?  Forget it.  Once this particular box is opened, there'll be no putting its contents back in again.  And you haven't advanced any convincing arguments for opening it."

"But the people in Bootstrap!" Gunther objected.  "They--"

She cut him off.  "Gunther, nobody likes what's happened to them.  But if the rest of us must give up our humanity to pay for a speculative and ethically dubious rehabilitation ... Well, the price is simply too high.  Mad or not, they're at least human now."

"Am I inhuman?" Krishna asked.  "If you tickle me, do I not laugh?"

"You're in no position to judge.  You've rewired your neurons and you're stoned on the novelty.  What tests have you run on yourself?  How thoroughly have you mapped out your deviations from human norms?  Where are your figures?"  These were purely rhetorical questions; the kind of analyses she meant took weeks to run.  "Even if you check out completely human--and I don't concede you will!--who's to say what the long-range consequences are?  What's to stop us from drifting, step by incremental step, into madness?  Who decides what madness is?  Who programs the programmers?  No, this is impossible.  I won't gamble with our minds."  Defensively, almost angrily, she repeated, "I won't gamble with our minds."

"Ekatarina," Gunther said gently, "how long have you been up?  Listen to yourself.  The wire is doing your thinking for you."

She waved a hand dismissively, without responding.

"Just as a practical matter," Hamilton said, "how do you expect to run Bootstrap without it?  The setup now is turning us all into baby fascists.  You say you're worried about madness--what will we be like a year from now?"

"The CMP assures me--"

"The CMP is only a program!" Hamilton cried.  "No matter how much interactivity it has, it's not flexible.  It has no hope.  It ca

Abruptly Ekatarina snapped.  "Get out of my face!" she screamed.  "Stop it, stop it, stop it!  I won't listen to any more."

"Ekatarina--" Gunther began.

But her hand had tightened on the canister.  Her knees bent as she began a slow genuflection to the kiln.  Gunther could see that she had stopped listening.  Drugs and responsibility had done this to her, speeding her up and bewildering her with conflicting demands, until she stood trembling on the brink of collapse.  A good night's sleep might have restored her, made her capable of being reasoned with.  But there was no time.  Words would not stop her now.  And she was too far distant for him to reach before she destroyed the engines.  In that instant he felt such a strong outwelling of emotion toward her as would be impossible to describe.

"Ekatarina," he said.  "I love you."

She half-turned her head toward him and in a distracted, somewhat irritated tone said, "What are you--"

He lifted the bolt gun from his work harness, leveled it, and fired.

Ekatarina's helmet shattered.

She fell.

"I should have shot to just breach the helmet.  That would have stopped her.  But I didn't think I was a good enough shot.  I aimed right for the center of her head."

"Hush," Hamilton said.  "You did what you had to.  Stop tormenting yourself.  Talk about more practical things."

He shook his head, still groggy.  For the longest time, he had been kept on beta endorphins, unable to feel a thing, unable to care.  It was like being swathed in cotton batting.  Nothing could reach him.  Nothing could hurt him.  "How long have I been out of it?"

"A day."

"A day!"  He looked about the austere room.  Bland rock walls and laboratory equipment with smooth, noncommital surfaces.  To the far end, Krishna and Chang were hunched over a swipeboard, arguing happily and impatiently overwriting each other's scrawls.  A Swiss spacejack came in and spoke to their backs.  Krishna nodded distractedly, not looking up.  "I thought it was much longer."

"Long enough.  We've already salvaged everyone co

He shook his head, feeling dead.  "I don't think I'll bother, Beth.  I just don't have the stomach for it."

"We'll give you the stomach."

"Naw, I don't ..."  He felt a black nausea come welling up again.  It was cyclic; it returned every time he was begi

"We don't want that either."  Posner led a delegation of seven into the lab.  Krishna and Chang rose to face them, and the group broke into swirling halves.  "There's been enough of that.  It's time we all started taking responsibility for the consequences of--"  Everyone was talking at once.  Hamilton made a face.

"Started taking responsibility for--"

Voices rose.

"We can't talk here," she said.  "Take me out on the surface."

They drove with the cabin pressurized, due west on the Seething Bay road.  Ahead, the sun was almost touching the weary walls of Sommering crater.  Shadow crept down from the mountains and cratertops, yearning toward the radiantly lit Sinus Medii.  Gunther found it achingly beautiful.  He did not want to respond to it, but the harsh lines echoed the lonely hurt within him in a way that he found oddly comforting.

Hamilton touched her peecee. Putting on the Ritz filled their heads.

"What if Ekatarina was right?" he said sadly.  "What if we're giving up everything that makes us human?  The prospect of being turned into some kind of big-domed emotionless superman doesn't appeal to me much."

Hamilton shook her head.  "I asked Krishna about that, and he said No.  He said it was like ... Were you ever nearsighted?"

"Sure, as a kid."

"Then you'll understand.  He said it was like the first time you came out of the doctor's office after being lased.  How everything seemed clear and vivid and distinct.  What had once been a blur that you called 'tree' resolved itself into a thousand individual and distinct leaves.  The world was filled with unexpected detail.  There were things on the horizon that you'd never seen before.  Like that."