He was willing; the spider arms stayed still, like a cradle behind him. He leaned his head back, his feet dangling off the edge of the machinery. For a moment he blurred out again, head resting against the arms, heart still laboring, while the tears leaked from his eyes and the sweat slicked his skin.

“Where is it?” he asked then, meaning the thing that he had birthed. He had some proprietary curiosity; it had cost him so much pain.

“Here,” Kepta said, “here in the machine.”

“You mean you’ll give it a body.”

“No,” Kepta said, and rested a ghostly hand on a large hummock that rose with several others to form the table, the base of several of the arms. “It has one. In here. Do you want to know how it works? Your template of a moment ago exists now. It will never know more than you knew when it was made. Always when I call it up it will be at the same moment.”

Rafe shook his head and shut his eyes, feeling everything slide into chaos, not wanting this.

“So I can always recover that point,” Kepta said, “at need. A point of knowledge—and ignorance.”

Eyes slitted, till Kepta was a golden blur. “You still going to let me go?”

“Oh, yes.” Kepta moved among the machinery, through one lowered metal arm. “You asked about bodies. This one—” Kepta laid a hand on his own insubstantial chest. “You assume there’s some substance to it, somewhere. There’s not. It’s a pattern. You want Jillan? I can call up that template. Or Paul. Or one of several of you.”

Paul One ran, raced into the dark, sobbing at what he had seen: himself; himself possessing Jillan and Rafe and he-himself, watching helplessly from outside—

At last he found Rafe again, his own Rafe, beaconlike in the nowhereland, that shape that was Rafe and not, something blurred and larger, far larger.

“I know what you found,” Rafe said. “I knew you would.” And Rafe himself blurred further, into outlines vast and dark. “I knew it would hurt. Paul—”

“Was it me?” he asked. “Was that my real body?”

“No,” it said. “Only another duplicate.”

There was no more system of reference, nothing human left. It took him in its changing arms, took him to its heart, whispered to him in a voice still human though the rest of it was not.

“You don’t have to be afraid. I won’t hurt you, nothing will ever hurt you while I have you. You can’t trust what you see, that’s the first thing you have to learn. You want to be safe. But I can make you strong. You won’t be afraid of anything. You want to know how this ship works? I’ll tell you. Anything you want to know. That version you just saw? Nothing. Nothing. Another copy off your template. I have to tell you how that works, that next. The templates.”

“I recorded you,” Kepta said, waving a hand past the mounded protrusions beneath all the array of shining spider arms, “not just the outward form, but at every level, in every function and structure—everything. The template’s as like you as if you’d been spun out in bits, down to the state and spin of your particles: that’s how exact it is ... all uncertainties made definite, particulate memory, frozen in the finest definition matter can achieve. We just—play it out again. Call it up in memory and let it integrate. The visible manifestation, the body—a very simple thing: just light, quite apart from the more complex patterns. An image conceived off the template and maintained by quite inelegant means: the computer knows its shape, that’s all, and revises it moment by moment by the direction of the program; but that program that animates it—that’s quite another thing.”

“It reacts,” Rafe said. “It thinks—”

“That’s the elegance. It does.”

“You’ve turned them to machines.”

“No. Contained them in one. They react; they think; they think they move. They’re programs, if you like, smart programs that can learn and change, that get input they interpret in the same way they always did, or they think they do, that eyes work and mouths make speech, and muscles move. The body—is merely light, for passing convenience. It changes in response to signals the programs give. It can’t input. But on other levels, in the purest sense, the programs can input from each other, can imagine, tend to perceive what they expect—like smells and textures. Illusions, if you like. But they aren’t. The programs aren’t. They grow, and change, get experience, change their minds. They stay up and running until someone shuts them down.”

Rafe shook his head. The words writhed past, heard, half-heard. He hung there in the spider arms, looked at the machines, the mocking image of himself. “One large memory,” he said past unresponsive lips, “one hell of a large memory, that thing. Wouldn’t it be?”

“Oh yes, quite large.”

“Runs all the time.”

Kepta lifted his head in a curious way, his own mannerism thrown back at him, half-mocking, half-wary.

“I threaten you,” Rafe said, and found it funny, hanging there, naked, in the steel, unyielding hands. “Do I? Suppose I believe that’s how you do it, suppose I believe it all—There’s still the why of it. You want to tell me why? And you still want to tell me you’re putting me out of here?”

“Why’s not relevant. Say that I wanted the template. That’s all. When I call it up and it talks to me, it won’t know a thing of what we’ve said; won’t know what it is. It’ll be the you that walked in here of his own free will. That’s the one I’ll deal with. Why tell you anything? The template won’t remember. You’d have to tell it what you’ve learned. And you’ll be safe away from it.”

“Why?” he asked again. “Why let me go?”

“I said. It’s easy.—You’re worried, aren’t you? You’re worried about your life, theirs—the whole species. That’s why you don’t really think I’ll turn you out. You think of ships. Military. I understand this concept of yours, this collective of self defense. You think I’ve come to learn all I can; that I’m in advance of others who’ll come to harm all your kind. No. I’m unique.”

“Then come in. Come into some human Port and talk like you’re civilized.”

The mirror-image blinked. “You don’t really want that.”

“No,” he said, thinking again, thinking at once of Endeavor, magnified a hundred-fold, O God, some major port—

“There’ll just be yourself returning,” it said. “The military will check records, put you together with the Endeavor business. You’ll be answering a lot of questions. That’s all right. Tell them anything you like. I’ll be long gone from Paradise.”

“Where? To do what?”

“You’re worrying again.”

“Are you afraid? Afraid of us?”

“ Responsibility.You have this tendency—to make yourself the center, the focus. Jillan and Paul—you’re responsible for them; if your species died, you’d be more responsible than I who killed them. An interesting concept, responsibility—and within your context, yes, you could become that focus. I could wipe out your kind, based on what you know. And on what you don’t. You couldn’t fight me. Your ships can’t catch me; my weapons are beyond you; there’s just no chance, if I were interested. I’m not. So you’re not the center, are you? That’s a great loss to you ... that your kind will live on without your responsibility. Could it even be—that you’re not responsible for other things? Or that your friends are not in your universe at all?”

“What becomes of them?”

“They’re not your responsibility.”

He flung himself to his feet. The arms prevented that.

“You’re not necessary. You go to Paradise. You tell them what you like. Tell them everything you’ve seen. They’ll be interested. Of course they will. You’ll be famous of your kind—in certain ways. Very important. You’ll certainly be the focus then. Won’t you?”

Imagination filled it in—official disclaimers, the military swarming over him and his capsule like bees— Hallucination,they’d say, for general consumption.... “Damn you,” he said to Kepta, shivering.