“Dawn, it isn’t bad to want to help, to want to work, to seize history,” Luciente said, getting up to caress her. “But to want to do it alone is less good. To hand history to someone like a cake you baked.”

Connie looked across the table at Bee, meeting his gaze for the first time. “Are you really in danger?”

“Yes.” His big head nodded in cordial agreement. “You may fail us.”

“Me? How?”

“You of your time. You individually may fail to understand us or to struggle in your own life and time. You of your time may fail to struggle together.” His voice was warm, almost teasing, yet his eyes told her he was speaking seriously. “We must fight to come to exist, to remain in existence, to be the future that happens. That’s why we reached you.”

“I may not continue to exist if I don’t check back … . What good can I do? Who could have less power? I’m a prisoner. A patient. I can’t even carry a book of matches or keep my own money. You picked the wrong savior this time!”

“The powerful don’t make revolutions,” Sojourner said with a broad yellow grin.

“Oh, revolution!” She grimaced. “Honchos marching around in imitation uniforms. Big talk and bad‑mouthing everybody else. Noise in the streets and nothing changes.”

“No, Connie! It’s the people who worked out the labor‑and‑land intensive farming we do. It’s all the people who changed how people bought food, raised children, went to school!” Otter was so excited she leaned far forward over the table till one of her fat braids dipped into the yogurt. As she argued Hawk picked Otter’s braid out and wiped it with a cloth napkin without Otter even noticing. Hawk smiled. Her smile still said mother. For a moment her glance rested on Dawn wistfully. “Who made new unions, withheld rent, refused to go to wars, wrote and educated and made speeches.”

“But there was a thirty‑year war that culminated in a revolution that set up what we have. Or else there wasn’t and we don’t exist.” Luciente held her hands up, her eyes big and laughing.

“You’re not talking much this morning,” Connie said warily. Was Luciente sore at her about Bee?

“Oh, grasp, Luciente’s still half buzzy,” Otter said teasingly. “Jackrabbit and I had to go in delegation last night to fetch per home from Treefrog to do cleanup.”

Jackrabbit roused and waved in response, traces of paint and something shiny on his arms as if he had not quite cleaned up.

“Take Connie to the museum,” Luxembourg said. “Then person can understand us and our history better.”

“No!” Luciente woke up. “Guidelines set in grandcil by everyone call for no specific history in this proj.”

“How can a person understand without understanding?”

“That argument belongs to meeting,” Luciente said firmly. “I wait you to raise it there, Luxembourg. Until, no blurring!”

“Zo, you shook Luciente awake,” Jackrabbit said, grinning. “Charging into righteous battle with a grandcil ruling in per teeth.”

Luciente rubbed her cheek, embarrassed. “Maybe we can have coffee this morning? All this talk about it I could use some.”

“Should we send a note of complaint to Diana of Treefrog?” Otter asked, and everybody laughed, enjoying their power to embarrass Luciente.

Dr. Redding had arrived on the ward as she slipped back. Nobody was paying attention to her. I could have stayed longer, she thought regretfully, but things looked interesting. Dr. Redding, Dr. Morgan Acker, the psychologist, Miss Moynihan, the EEG technician, and even the secretary, Patty, and the attendants were gathered around Alice’s bed.

“I want you to pay close and careful attention this morning, and I want you to keep in mind in the ensuing months of this project what you’re going to witness demonstrated. I expect to see immediate effects in a higher level of confidence among staff,” Dr. Redding said coldly.

Dr. Morgan’s ears were red sticking through his pale thin hair. He hunched smaller. Misery rose from him like a stench. It was quiet in the women’s ward.

“Don’t get too sure of yourself, Dr. Ever‑Ready.” Alice grinned under the hill of bandages. “That fat kid doctor there, he scared. He scared of me. Thinking I be fixing to bite it off.” Alice snapped her teeth. Under the sheet she wriggled her long body.

“Behold, Francis,” Dr. Redding said genially. “Patients recognize hesitation. You were reluctant to include Alice in the experiment because of the very violence that makes her a suitable subject. Your fears are groundless. Poor impulse control has brought this subject into repeated scrapes with society. The very lack of control that has stunted her development, we can provide her.”

“You just saying I do what I want. Don’t you wish you just sometime know what you be craving to do? Mr. Beardo there, he poor at controlling impulses too. Making it with Miss White Coat Hot Pants. You all just go have one on me and get this crap out from my head.”

A tremor of embarrassment bent them all, grass in the wind. Then they drew mutual strength, gathered around Alice’s bed, and silently decided to pretend not to hear her. Acker muttered something about “random hostility patterns.” They clustered around a machine that was writing with pens eight at a time on paper that had been heaping up on the floor in accordion piles.

“All that paper,” Alice said, louder. “Running out like toilet paper gone wild. How many trees we use up this morning?”

Redding held out his wrist watch. “Argent and Superintendent Hodges will be here soon. Let us hope. And the camera crew.” Morgan and Moynihan were exclaiming over spikes. All the time the pens kept writing and the paper kept dropping in its neat diarrhea on the floor. Redding came to a decision. “Nurse, time to get off those bandages. Mrs. Valente, bring us coffee and we’ll hang out in the conference room till our guests come to the party, eh?” He sped out, with his staff in pursuit.

The nurse began removing the head bandages. Cautiously Connie and Sybil edged nearer and nearer till Connie called out, “Is it true you got needles stuck in your … head?”

“No he. Electrodes, they call them.”

Connie stared expectantly as the bald scalp emerged from the swathing. Like Bee. “But I don’t see anything!”

“They inside, girl. What you expect, I look like a goddamn pincushion? They stupid, but they not that stupid!”

“Alice, if they’re electrodes, where are the wires?” Sybil asked cautiously.

“You old‑fashion. No wires. They use a little radio, and they stick that inside too!”

“Now, you cut this out,” the nurse said suddenly. “That’s enough. Quiet on the ward. You’re disturbing this patient.”

“I don’t see how we could possibly disturb Alice. It isn’t we who put a radio and electrodes in her head,” Sybil said loftily.

“Quiet down or I’ll give you a shot that will lay you out flat,” the nurse said, hands on her hips.

Back at their own beds, Sybil whispered, “The nurse didn’t contradict us about the electrodes. Could it be true?”

“But what for?”

“Control. To turn us into machines so we obey them,” Sybil whispered.

What nonsense it had to be! They were crazy, they were imagining this. She wished she had stayed in Mattapoisett.

At eleven the staff was back with two more doctors and a video tape crew. One of the newcomers she recognized from the Christmas party of her last commitment as the superintendent of the hospital. Dr. Samuel Hodges was over six feet tall and in his late fifties, with only a circlet of crisp curly gray hair like a laurel wreath around his ruddy dome. The other man was older, with silky white hair, a radiant tan, a fine gray suit, natty but conservatively tailored. Dr. Redding and Dr. Hodges called him Chip, but Dr. Morgan called him Dr. Argent. Dr. Redding asked him how St. Peter’s Island had been, casually throwing at the super that Dr. Argent’s family owned an island off Georgia. Scoring, point‑counting.