Destination: Void

"Our creature already has a large, fast memory," Bickel said. "It has fixed memory - if you discount our addressing problems, which aren't interfering with function at any rate - and I'll bet this thing has a protected area of memory that's even ready with illusions when they're necessary for self-protection."

"But fear!" Flattery said.

"This is the other side of your coin, Raj. You want it to love us? Okay. Love's a kind of need, eh? I'm willing to give it a need for external program sources - that's us, you understand? I'll leave the necessary gaps in its makeup that only we can fill. It'll have emotions, but that means an unlimited spectrum of emotions, Raj. The spectrum includes fear."

Guilt and fear, Prudence thought. Raj will have to face it. She looked at Bickel, seeing the filmed-over, withdrawn look in his eyes.

"Pleasure and pain," Bickel muttered. He focused on Prudence, the sleeping Timberlake, on Flattery - each in turn. Did they see that the Ox had to be able to reproduce itself, too?

Prudence felt her pulse quickening, tore her attention away from Bickel. She put a hand to her temple, checked the pulse there, related this to her quickened breathing, to body temperature, to hungers, to stage of fatigue and awareness. The chemical experiments on her body were giving her an acute awareness of her bodily functions, and that awareness told her she needed chemical readjustment.

"Well, Raj?" Bickel said.

I must compose myself, Flattery thought, turning back onto his couch. I must appear natural and calm. He kept his eyes away from the false panel on his repeater board. Under that panel lay death and destruction. Bickel was growing exceedingly alert to the tiniest clues. Flattery marked the quiet green of the flashboard, the ticking of relays through the graph counters. Everything about the ship felt soothing and ordinary - all systems functioning.

Yet, deep inside himself, Flattery felt knotted up, like an animal poised at the sound of the hunter.

Pleasure and pain. It could be done, of course: the gradual orientation toward a goal, then denial... interference... removal....rustration... threat of destruction.

"I'm going back to the shop," Bickel said. "The way to do this is pretty clear, isn't it?"

"Perhaps to you," Flattery said.

"There's no stopping," Prudence said, and hoped Flattery heard the implication: There's no stopping him.

"Go ahead," Flattery said. "Assemble your blocks of nerve-net simulators. But let us think long and hard before we tie your system into the full computer." He looked at Bickel. "Do you still contemplate this black box - white box experiment?"

Bickel merely stared at him.

"You know the danger," Flattery said.

Bickel felt elation, a breakthrough in some i

Four-dimensional construction, he reminded himself. We have to construct a net in depth that contains complex world-line tracks. It has to absorb nonsynchronous transmissions. It has to abstract discrete patterns out of the impulse oversend. The important thing is structure - not the material. The important thing is topology. That's the key to the whole damn problem!

"Prue, give me a hand," Bickel said. He glanced at the chronometer beside the Com-central board, looked at Timberlake. Let him sleep; Prue could help. She did neat electronics work - surgical in its exactness, clean and with minimal leads and tight couplings.

"We're going to need a coupling area for each group of multiple blocks," Bickel said, looking at Prudence. "I'm going to turn that job over to you while I build up the major block systems."

As though his words had accumulated in her mind, built up a certain pressure until they spilled over into understanding, she saw what Bickel intended. He was going to feed a continuous data load into an enormously expanded Ox-cum-computer linkup. He was going to project into the computer, like a film projected on a screen...iant spreadout, an almost infinite psychospace.

The array of required co

In the instant of this revelation, she realized that Bickel could not have framed his approach to this solution without using the same mathematical crowbar to lever away the heavy work.

"You used adjacency matrices," she accused.

He nodded. She had seen that he was intruding into a new mathematical conception...alculus of qualities by which he could trace neuron impulses and juggle them within the imbedded psychospaces of the Ox-cum-computer.

Prudence had begun to see what he saw, but the others weren't ready yet for anything more than hints. The possibilities were staggering. The implied methods would permit construction of entirely new computers reduced in size and basic complexity by a factor of at least a thousand. But more important was the understanding this gave him of his own psychospaces and their function in abstraction - the aggregate nerve-cell excitation of his own body and the way this was reduced to recognizable values.

Thinking within this framework, Bickel saw, put him on a threshold. A certain pressure here, a certain application of energy there, and he knew he would be projected into a consciousness that he had never before experienced.

The realization inspired fear and awe and at the same time it lured him. He turned, crossed to the hatch into the shop, opened it, looked back at Flattery.

"Raj," he said. "We're not conscious."

"What? Huh?" It was Timberlake rousing out of his sleep, rubbing his eyes, staring straight out at Bickel.

"We're not awake," Bickel said.

CHAPTER 22

Beyond the senses there are objects; beyond objects there is mind; beyond the mind there is intellect; beyond the intellect there is the Great Self.

"We're not awake."

During Flattery's watch, the words haunted him.

Timberlake had muttered something about, "Damn joker!" and gone off to finish his sleep in quarters.

But Flattery, dividing his attention between the console and the overhead screen that showed the shop with Prudence and Bickel at work there, felt the ship assume a curious identity in his mind.

He felt as though he and the others were merely cells of a larger organism - that the telltales, the dials and gauges and sensors, the omnipresent visual intercom - all these were senses and nerves and organs of something apart from himself.

"We are not awake."

We keep skirting that thought, Flattery reflected.

Bickel's voice talking to Prudence in the shop - "Here's the main trunk to handle negative feedback. Follow the color code and tie it in across there." "Here's the damper circuit; we have to watch we don't introduce reverberating cycles into the random neural paths."

And Prudence, talking half to herself: "The human skull encloses about fifteen thousand million neurons. I've extrapolated from our building blocks and the computer - we're going to wind up with more than twice that number in this... beast."

Their voices were like echoes in Flattery's mind.

Bickel: "Think of a threshold to be overcome. Several kinds of pressure will overcome that threshold. They're the pressures involved in entropy - or the pressures of proliferating variability: call that one life. Entropy on one side, life on the other. Each drives past the threshold at a certain pressure level. When one gets through, that turns on the Consciousness Factor."