Griffin's Egg

"Don't be ridiculous."  Hiro swept an arm southward, toward Ptolemaeus.  "There!"  The crater wall caught the sun, while the lowest parts of the surrounding land were still in shadow.  The gentle slopes seemed to tower; the crater itself was a cathedral, blazing white.

"Where is your camera?" Krishna asked.

"Don't need one.  I'll just take the data down on my helmet."

"I'm not too clear on this mosaic project of yours," Gunther said.  "Explain to me one more time how it's supposed to work."

"Anya came up with it.  She's renting an assembler to cut hexagonal floor tiles in black, white and fourteen intermediate shades of grey.  I  provide the pictures.  We choose the one we like best, scan it in black and white, screen for values of intensity, and then have the assembler lay the floor, one tile per pixel.  It'll look great--come by tomorrow and see."

"Yeah, I'll do that."

Chattering like a squirrel, Hiro led them away from the edge of the  mine.  They bounded westward, across the slope.

Krishna's voice came over Gunther's trance chip.  It was an old ground-rat trick.  The chips had an effective transmission radius of fifteen yards--you could turn off the radio and talk chip-to-chip, if you were close enough.  "You sound troubled, my friend."

He listened for a second carrier tone, heard nothing.  Hiro was out of range.  "It's Izmailova.  I sort of--"

"Fell in love with her."

"How'd you know that?"

They were spaced out across the rising slope, Hiro in the lead.  For a time neither spoke.  There was a calm, confidential quality to that shared silence, like the anonymous stillness of the confessional.  "Please don't take this wrong," Krishna said.

"Take what wrong?"

"Gunther, if you take two sexually compatible people, place them in close proximity, isolate them and scare the hell out of them, they will fall in love.  That's a given.  It's a survival mechanism, something that was wired into your basic makeup long before you were born.  When billions of years of evolution say it's bonding time, your brain doesn't have much choice but to obey."

"Hey, come on over here!" Hiro cried over the radio.  "You've got to  see this."

"We're coming," Gunther said.  Then, over his chip, "You make me out to be one of Sally Chang's machines."

"In some ways we are machines.  That's not so bad.  We feel thirsty when we need water, adrenalin pumps into the bloodstream when we need an extra boost of aggressive energy.  You can't fight your own nature.  What would be the point of it?"

"Yeah, but ..."

"Is this great or what?" Hiro was clambering over a boulder field.  "It just goes on and on.  And look up there!"  Upslope, they saw that what they were climbing over was the spillage from a narrow cleft entirely filled with boulders.  They were huge, as big as hoppers, some of them large as prefab oxysheds.  "Hey, Krishna, I been meaning to ask you--just what is it that you do out there at the Center?"

"I can't talk about it."

"Aw, come on."  Hiro lifted a rock the size of his head to his shoulder and shoved it away, like a shot-putter.  The rock soared slowly, landed far downslope in a white explosion of dust.  "You're among friends here.  You can trust us."

Krishna shook his head.  Sunlight flashed from the visor.  "You don't know what you're asking."

Hiro hoisted a second rock, bigger than the first.  Gunther knew him in this mood, nasty-faced and gri

"You don't understand.  The Center for Self-Replicating Technologies is here for a reason.  The lab work could be done back on Earth for a fraction of what a lunar facility costs.  Our sponsors only move projects here that they're genuinely afraid of."

"So what can you tell us about?  Just the open stuff, the video magazine stuff.  Nothing secret."

"Well ... okay."  Now it was Krishna's turn.  He picked up a small rock, wound up like a baseball player and threw.  It dwindled and disappeared in the distance.  A puff of white sprouted from the surface.  "You know Sally Chang?  She has just finished mapping the neurotransmitter functions."

They waited.  When Krishna added nothing further, Hiro dryly said, "Wow."

"Details, Kreesh.  Some of us aren't so fast to see the universe in a grain of sand as you are."

"It should be obvious.  We've had a complete genetic map of the brain for almost a decade.  Now add to that Sally Chang's chemical map, and it's analogous to being given the keys to the library.  No, better than that.  Imagine that you've spent your entire life within an enormous library filled with books in a language you neither read nor speak, and that you've just found the dictionary and a picture reader."

"So what are you saying?  That we'll have complete understanding of how the brain operates?"

"We'll have complete control over how the brain operates.  With chemical therapy, it will be possible to make anyone think or feel anything we want.  We will have an immediate cure for all nontraumatic mental  illness.  We'll be able to fine-tune aggression, passion, creativity--bring them up, damp them down, it'll be all the same.  You can see why our sponsors are so afraid of what our research might produce."

"Not really, no.  The world could use more sanity," Gunther said.

"I agree.  But who defines sanity?  Many governments consider political dissent grounds for mental incarceration.  This would open the doors of the brain, allowing it to be examined from the outside.  For the first time, it would be possible to discover unexpressed rebellion.  Modes of thought could be outlawed.  The potential for abuse is not inconsiderable.

"Consider also the military applications.  This knowledge combined with some of the new nanoweaponry might produce a berserker gas, allowing you to turn the enemy's armies upon their own populace.  Or, easier, to throw them into a psychotic frenzy and let them turn on themselves.  Cities could be pacified by rendering the citizenry catatonic.  A secondary, internal reality could then be created, allowing the conqueror to use the masses as slave labor.  The possibilities are endless."

They digested this in silence.  At last Hiro said, "Jeeze, Krishna, if that's the open goods, what the hell kind of stuff do you have to hide?"

"I can't tell you."

A minute later, Hiro was haring off again.  At the foot of a nearby hill he found an immense boulder standing atilt on its small end.  He danced about, trying to get good shots past it without catching his own footprints in them.

"So what's the problem?" Krishna said over his chip.

"The problem is, I can't arrange to see her.  Ekatarina.  I've left  messages, but she won't answer them.  And you know how it is in Bootstrap--it takes a real effort to avoid somebody who wants to see you.  But she's managed it."

Krishna said nothing.

"All I want to know is, just what's going on here?"

"She's avoiding you."

"But why?  I fell in love and she didn't, is that what you're telling me?  I mean, is that a crock or what?"

"Without hearing her side of the story, I can't really say how she feels.  But the odds are excellent she fell every bit as hard as you did.  The difference is that you think it's a good idea, and she doesn't.  So of course she's avoiding you.  Contact would just make it more difficult for her to master her feelings for you."

"Shit!"

An unexpected touch of wryness entered Krishna's voice.  "What do you want?  A minute ago you were complaining that Sally Chang thinks you're a machine.  Now you're unhappy that Izmailova thinks she's not."

"Hey, you guys!  Come over here.  I've found the perfect shot.  You've got to see this."