We need feedback from outside ourselves. Life consists of interacting pieces, free to jiggle and rearrange themselves. That’s how you make a working system, like an organism, or a culture, or a biosphere.

Or a mind.

Jen entered the well-lit chamber where the Tangoparu team had their resonator. She stopped by the main display to see where Beta was at present. A purple ellipse marked its current orbit — now rising at its highest point all the way past the outer core to the lower mantle, where quicksilver flashes seemed to spark and flare with every lingering apogee. Now Beta was losing mass at each apex — a true milestone — though it would be a while yet before its balance sheet went into debit full time and they could all draw a sigh of relief.

Jen watched the mantle’s flickerings of superconducting electricity, those pent-up energy stores Kenda’s people tapped to drive the gazer effect. One brief, titanic burst had taken place while she was visiting Nelson — triggered in tandem by the Greenland and New Guinea resonators. The next run, scheduled in ten minutes, would unite this African device with New Guinea in an effort to shift Beta’s orbital line of apsides slightly.

At first she and the others had been fearful of the news from headquarters — that the NATO-ANZAC-ASEAN alliances had seized two of the four resonators. Kenda worried that all their work would be in vain. Then came word from George Hutton. Everything was to go on as before. The only difference, apparently, was that new supplies and technicians would flood in to help the effort. Jen had been cynical, it sounded too good to be true.

Sure enough, George went on to add that there would be limits to cooperation with Colonel Spivey. Easter Island and South Africa were to remain independent. He was adamant about that. No newcomers would be allowed at those two sites. Kenda’s team reacted with a mixture of resigned fatigue and relief. They would have loved the help, but understood Hutton’s reasons.

“George isn’t so sure about this association, yet,” Kenda told them all at a meeting several days ago. “And that’s enough for me.”

Jen wondered why there was no word from Alex. Now that they were communicating over secure military bands, completely independent of the World Data Net, shouldn’t the boy feel free to talk openly? Something was wrong, she sensed. More was going on than anyone said.

With a sigh she went to her own station to plug in the subvocal. By now it was almost as easy to calibrate as her home unit, though she still had to do most of it “by hand.”

Only this time, after that conversation with Nelson, she paid a little more attention to the extraneous blips and images that popped in and out of the peripheral screens.

At the upper left, several bars of musical score wrote themselves — an advertising jingle she hadn’t heard in years. Below that, poking from a corner, came the shy face of a young boy… Alex, as she remembered him at age eight or so. No mystery why that image crept in. She was worried about him, and so must have subvocalized unspoken words that the computer picked up. It, in turn, had gone into her personal archive and pulled out some old photo, feeding it then to an off-the-shelf enhancement program to be animated.

To the uninitiated, it might seem as if the computer had read her thoughts. In fact, it was only highlighting the surface bits, those which almost became words. It was like rummaging through your purse and coming up with an envelope of neglected pictures. Only now her “purse” consisted of terabyte sheets of optical memory, extrapolated by a tool kit of powerful subroutines. And you didn’t even have to intend in order to rummage. The mind “below” was doing it all the time.

Jen adjusted the sensitivity level, giving her associations more space to each side… it was a sort of visually amplified form of free association, she realized. Yet another type of feedback. And feedback was the way life-forms learned and avoided error. Gaia used feedback to maintain her delicate balance. Another word for feedback was “criticism.”

A pair of cartoon figures drifted toward each other from opposite screens. The first was her familiar tiger totem… a mascot that had been omnipresent, for some reason, ever since this adventure had begun. The other symbol looked like an envelope… the old-fashioned kind you used to send letters in. The two figures circled round each other, the tiger mewling lowly, the envelope snapping its flap at the cat.

Now why had these manifested when she thought the word “criticism”? As she reflected on the question, written words formed in the tank. The envelope said to the tiger, “YOUR ORANGE STRIPES ARE TOO BRIGHT TO CAMOUFLAGE YOU ON THIS SCREEN! I CAN SEE YOU TOO EASILY!”

“THANK YOU,” the tiger acknowledged, and switched at once to gray tones Jen found blurry and indistinct, “WHAT DO YOU CONTAIN?” the tiger asked the envelope in turn, “IT REALLY IS WRONG FOR ONE PART TO KEEP SECRETS FROM THE WHOLE.”

And a slashing paw ripped open a corner, laying bare a bit of something that sparkled underneath, “what do you contain?” the great cat insisted.

Though amusing in its own way, Jen decided this was accomplishing nothing. “I’ll tell you what it contains,” she muttered, making the words official by saying them aloud. She wiped the screen with a simple tap of one tooth against another. “Just more bleeding metaphors.”

Gathering herself together, Jen concentrated on the matter at hand. Getting ready for the next run of the gravity laser. She’d, gotten to quite enjoy each firing, pretending it was she herself who sent beams of exploration deep into the living world.

Meanwhile, though, a ghostlike striped pattern, like a faint smile, lingered faintly in one corner of the screen, purring softly to itself, watching.

The face in the telephone screen seemed to be changing daily. Logan felt a pang, seeing how grown-up Claire was becoming.

“She doesn’t even think it worth hiding from me!” his daughter complained. Behind her, Logan saw the familiar cane fields and cypresses of Atchafalaya country, with its monumental dikes shading fish farms and lazy bayous. Claire looked frustrated and angry. “I’m no great programmer, but she must think I’m a total baby not to be able to snoop through those pathetic screens between my unit and hers!” Logan shook his head. “Honey, Daisy could hide data from God himself.” He smiled. “Heck, she could even fool Santa Claus if she put her mind to it.”

“I know that!” Claire answered with a furled brow, dismissing his attempt at levity. “Between the house and the outside world, she’s got watchdogs and griffins and the scariest cockatrice programs anyone’s ever seen. Which shows just how much contempt she must have for me, leaving it so easy for me to probe her puzzle palace from my little desk comp down the hall!”