“Oh,” I said.

The thing moved a little in its tray. I looked away. Miri saw, of course. She sees everything.

She said quietly, “We’re getting closer. That’s what it means. Ever since the breakthrough with the bacteriorhodopsin, we’re getting much closer.”

I made myself look at the thing again. Faint capillaries pulsed below the surface. The pale, damp shapes in my mind crawled, like maggots over rock.

Miri said, “If we pour a nutrient mixture into the tray, Drew, it can select and absorb what it needs and break it down for energy.”

“What kind of nutrient mixture?” I had learned enough on my last visit to be able to ask this question.

Miri made a face. “Glucose-protein, mostly. There’s still a way to go.”

“Have you solved the problem of getting nitrogen directly from the air?” I had memorized this question. It made a tinny, hollow shape in my mind. But Miri smiled her luminous smile.

“Yes and no. We’ve engineered the microorganisms, but tissue receptivity is still foundering on the Tollers-Hilbert factor, especially in the epidermal fibrils. And on the nitrogen receptor-mediated endocytosis problem — no progress.”

“Oh,” I said.

“We’ll solve it,” Miri said, a quarter beat too slow. “It’s just a matter of designing the right enzymes.”

Sara said, “We call the thing Galwat.” She and Jon laughed.

Miri said quickly, “For Galatea, you know. And Erin Galway. And John Gait, that fictional character who wanted to stop the motor of the world. And, of course, Worthington’s transference equations…”

“Of course,” I said. I had never heard of Galatea or Erin Galway or John Gait or Worthington.

“Galatea’s from a Greek myth. A sculptor—”

“Let me see my performance stats now,” I said. Sara and Jon glanced at each other. I smiled and held out my hand to Miri. She grasped it hard, and I felt hers tremble.

(Quick, fluttery shapes filled my mind, fine as paper. A dozen molecular levels thick. They settled on a rock, rough and hard and old as the earth. The fluttering grew faster and faster, the fine light paper grew red hot, and the rock shattered. At its heart was frozen milky whiteness, pulsing with faint veins.)

Miri said, “Don’t you want to see Nikos’ and Allen’s latest work on the Cell Cleaner? It’s coming along much faster than this! And Christy and Toshio have had a real breakthrough in error-checking protein-assembler programming—”

I said, “Let me see the performance stats now.”

She nodded once, twice, four times. “The stats look good, Drew. But there’s a funny jag in the data in the second movement of your concert. Terry says you need to change direction there. It’s rather complicated.”

“Then you’ll explain it to me,” I said evenly.

Her smile was dazzling. Again Sara and Jon glanced at each other, and said nothing.

The first time Miri showed me how the Supers communicated with each other, I couldn’t believe it. It was thirteen years ago, right after they came down from Sanctuary. She had led me into a room with twenty-seven holostages on twenty-seven terminal desks. Each had been programmed to “speak” a different language, based on English but modified to the thought strings of its owner. Miri, sixteen years old, had explained one of her own thought strings to me.

“Suppose you say a sentence to me. Any single sentence.”

“You have beautiful breasts.”

She blushed, a maroon mottling of her dark skin. She did have beautiful breasts, and beautiful hair. They offset a little the big head, knobby chin, awkward gait. She wasn’t pretty, and she was too intelligent not to know it. I wanted to make her feel pretty.

She said, “Pick another sentence.”

“No. Use that sentence.”

She did. She spoke it to the computer, and the holostage began to form a three-dimensional shape of words, images, and symbols linked to each other by glowing green lines.

“See, it brings out the associations my mind makes, based on its store of past thought strings and on algorithms for the way I think. From just a few words it extrapolates, and predicts, and mirrors. The programming is called ‘mind mirroring,’ in fact. It captures about ninety-seven percent of my thoughts about ninety-two percent of the time, and then I can add the rest. And the best part is—”

“You think like this for every sentence? Every single sentence?” Some of the associations were obvious: “breasts” linked to a nursing baby, for instance. But why was the baby linked to something called “Hubble’s constant,” and why was the Sistine chapel in that string? And a name I didn’t recognize: Chidiock Tichbourne?

“Yes,” Miri said. “But the best part—”

“You all think this way? All the Supers?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “Although Terry and Jon and Ludie think mostly in mathematics. They’re younger than the rest of us, you know — they represent the next cycle of IQ reengineering.”

I looked at the complex pattern of Miri’s thoughts and reactions. “You have beautiful breasts.”

I would never know what my words actually meant to her, in all their layers. Not any of my words. Ever.

“Does this scare you, Drew?”

She looked levelly at me. I could feel her fear, and her resolution. The moment was important. It grew and grew in my mind, a looming white wall to which nothing could adhere, until I found the right answer.

“I think in shapes for every sentence.”

Her smile changed her whole face, opening and lighting it. I had said the right thing. I looked at the glowing green complexity of the holostage, a slowly turning three-dimensional globe jammed with tiny images and equations and, most of all, words. So many complicated words.

“We’re the same, then,” Miri said joyfully. And I didn’t correct her.

“The best part,” Miri had burbled on, completely at ease now, “is that after the extrapolated thought string forms and is adjusted as necessary, the master program translates it into everybody else’s thought patterns and it appears that way on their holostage. On all twenty-seven terminals simultaneously. So we can bypass words and get the full ideas we’re each thinking across to each other more efficiently. Well, not the full ideas. There’s always something lost in translation, especially to Terry and Jon and Ludie. But it’s so much better than just speech, Drew. The way your concerts are better than just unassisted daydreaming.”

Daydreaming. The only kind of dreaming SuperSleepless knew anything about. Until me.

When a Sleepless went into the lucid dreaming trance, the result was different from when a Liver did. Or even a donkey. Livers and donkeys can dream at night. They have that connection with their unconscious, and I direct and intensify it in ways that feel good to them: peaceful and stimulated both. While lucid dreaming, they feel — sometimes for the first time in their lives — whole. I take them farther along the road into their true selves, deeper behind the waking veil. And I direct the dreams to the sweetest of the many things waiting there.

But Sleepless don’t have night dreams. Their road to the unconscious has been genetically severed. When Sleepless go into a lucid dreaming trance, Miri told me, they see “insights” they wouldn’t have seen before. They climb around their endless jungle of words, and come out of the trance with intuitive solutions to intellectual problems. Geniuses have often done that during sleep, Miri said. She gave me examples of great scientists. I have forgotten the names.

Looking at the complex verbal design on her holostage, I could feel it in my mind. It made a shape like a featureless pale stone, cool with regret. Miri would never see this shape in my mind. Worse, she would never know she didn’t see it. She thought, because we both saw differently from donkeys, that we were alike.

I had wanted to be part of what was happening at Huevos Verdes. Already, even then, I could see that the project would change the world. Anyone not an actor in the project could only be acted on.