He saw a gang fight in the derelict suburban wasteland of a city he couldn’t name: young men costumed and painted like crazy fetishists, wielding knives and razors, eyes wild with adrenalin and synthetic ecstasy, living on and by the edge. He watched the vivid blood spurt from wounds, and he winced with sympathy because he knew full well that these would-be savages must be equipped with relatively primitive internal technology, which provided elementary protection against permanent injury but left them horribly vulnerable to pain and the risk of death. He heard their bestial cries, their wordless celebration of their defiance of civilization and all its comforts, all its protective guarantees . . ..

It was as if the virtual aspect of the life of modern man were being condensed into a stream of images. Silas couldn’t help but feel annoyed about the fact that his captors seemed hell-bent on educatinghim, but the process had a curious fascination of its own. Much of the imagery was, of course, “reality-based”—videotapes of actual events reformatted for VE playback, sometimes in 2-D, sometimes in 3-D—but even in the documentary material, reformatted footage was juxtaposed and mingled with synthesized material produced by programmers. Today’s programmers were almost good enough to synthesize lifelike fictions, especially when they used templates borrowed from reality-based footage which could be mechanically animated and subtly changed without losing their photographic appearance.

With only a hood at his disposal, Silas couldn’t obtain the full benefit of such illusions, most of which were designed to provide tactile sensations with the aid of a full-body synthesis suit, but the detachment that was heir to limitation made it all the more difficult to tell the reformatted real from the ersatz.

Silas saw himself standing by Conrad Helier’s side, listening to the older man saying: “We must regard this new plague not as a catastrophe but as a challenge. It is not, as the Gaian Mystics would have us believe, the vengeance of Mother Earth upon her rapists and polluters, and no matter how fast and how far it spreads it cannot and will not destroy the species. Its advent requires a monumental effort from us, but we are capable of making that effort. . . .”

He saw two women, naked and oiled, caressing one another sinuously, engaged in carefully choreographed mutual masturbation, first with fingers and then with tongues, moving ceaselessly, putting on an ingeniously artful and tantalizing display for voyeurs. The soundtrack was soft music, overlaid by heavy breathing and gasps of simulated ecstasy, and the flesh of the two women seemed to be taking on a life of its own, a strange glow. Their faces were changing, exchanging features; they seemed to flow and merge, as though the two were becoming one as the carefully faked climax approached. . . .

Silas recognized this as one of his foster son’s compositions, as crudely and garishly libidinous as one might expect of a youngman’s imagination. He was glad when it was replaced by scenes from a food factory, where tissue cultures were harvested and processed with mechanical efficiency and hygiene by robot knives and robot packagers.

After that there was more Conrad Helier, this time in closeup—which meant that it was probably faked. “We must be sure,” the probably fake Conrad was saying, “that our motives are pure. We must do this not to secure an advantage for ourselves, but for the sake of the world. It is time to set aside, for the last time, the logic of the selfish gene, and to proclaim the triumph of altruistic self-awareness. The first children of the New Utopia must be not the children of an elite; they must be the children of everyman. If we ourselves are to have children we must allocate ourselves the lowest priority, not the highest.”

The viewpoint swung around to bring Eveline Hywood’s face into embarrassingly intimate focus. “It’s the privilege of gods to move in mysterious ways,” she said laconically. “Let’s not tie ourselves down with self-administered commandments that we’ll surely have occasion to break and break again.”

Conrad Helier’s disciples had, in fact, bound themselves with edicts and promises—and had kept them, after a fashion. Silas believed that he had kept them better than most, in spite of the heresies which had crept upon his mind and condemned him, in the end, to confusion. He had kept almost all his promises, if only in order to ensure that whatever else he lost, he would have clean hands.

Now he was looking out at the factory again, at the robot butchers working clinically, tirelessly, and altruistically for the greater good of ambitious humankind. He presumed that the image was meant to be symbolic, but he refused to try to figure out exactly what it was symbolic of, and why it had been laid before him now.

The robot butchers tirelessly plied their gleaming instruments for a few seconds more, and then dissolved into a vision of cars racing through city streets, speeded up until they were little more than colored blurs, racing ceaselessly past.

But it is true, he reflected, that some of those of us who are left over from the old world remain anchored to that world by our habits of mind. Some of the old haven’t yet become accustomed to the new outlook, and perhaps I’m one of them—but we can’t be expected to shed the superficialities of our heritage as easily as a snake sheds its skin. We do evolve—but we can’t do it overnight. Conrad would have understood that. Whoever is using his face must be younger than Conrad, and younger than me—but not as young as Damon. He surely belongs to the new old, not to the true old.

The scene changed again; this time it was an episode of some popular soap opera, but the characters were mercifully silent. As they exchanged insults and bared their overwrought souls they were rendered impotent and absurd by silence. A girl slapped a man across the face; without the sound track there was no telling why, but the blow wasn’t halfhearted. These days, blows rarely were. Nobody pulled their punches for fear of hurting people, because everybody knew that people couldn’t be hurt—even “primitives” had some degree of artificial insulation from actual bodily harm. Hardly anyone went entirely unaugmented in the world, and the prevailing view was that if they wanted to do so, they had to accept the risks.

All the old inhibitions were dying, Silas reminded himself, in an appropriately grim fashion. A radically different spectrum of dos and don’ts was establishing itself in the cities of what would soon be the twenty-third century.

Silas’s head, isolated within its own private pocket universe, took off from the cape, mounted atop a huge sleek rocket. His eyes were looking up into the deepening sky, and the sound which filled his ears was a vast, angry, undeniable roar of pure power, pure might.

It went on, and on, and on. . . .

In the end, Silas couldn’t help but call out to his tormentors, to beg them to answer his questions, even to lecture him like a recalcitrant schoolboy if they felt the need. He knew as he did it that he was proving them right, demonstrating that the limits of his freedom extended far beyond the straps binding him to his ignominy, but he no longer cared. He wanted and needed to know what they were doing to him, and why, and how long it would last.

He wanted, and needed, to understand, no matter what price he had to pay in patience and humility and craven politeness.

Sixteen

T

he message was dumped shortly after you boarded the plane at Kaunakakai,” Rajuder Singh told Damon, when the import of the words displayed on the screen had had time to sink in. “When Karol decided to send you here instead of Los Angeles he couldn’t have foreseen anything as outrageous as this, but it’s better proof than any he couldhave imagined that his instincts were right.”