“Chan. Can you hear me?”

His eyes opened a slit. They were bloodshot and slightly bulging. There was inflammation and some excess pressure inside the skull case, but he was listening. She put her arms around him.

“He’s using us, Chan. Both of us.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks. Chan’s eyes widened, and he reached out a wondering finger to touch the drops of moisture.

“Tatty crying.”

“Oh, Chan, I’d have done anything for him, anything in the world. I thought he was wonderful. I even let myself be marooned out here, because I thought I’d be helping him. But it’s no use. He doesn’t care about us — about anything, except himself. He’s a devil, Chan, crazy and heartless. He’ll destroy you, too, if you let him, the way he’s destroying me. Don’t let him do it.”

“Him?” He was staring at her in stony incomprehension. Tatty fumbled in the overall pocket above her left breast. She took out a thin wallet, removed from it a small holograph, and held the image for Chan to see.

“Him. Look at it, Chan. This is the man who brought us away from home. This is the one who took Leah away from you. See him? This is the person who makes you go into the Stimulator. If you learn your lessons you can get away from here. You can go and find him.”

The bloodshot eyes stared in silence, until at last Chan took a deep, shuddering breath. He reached out to take the hologram, with its smiling face of Esro Mondrian.

Was it imagination, or wishful thinking?

Tatty could not be sure, but she thought that a faint spark of understanding had glowed for a moment behind those innocent, tormented eyes.

The Margrave of Fujitsu paused and lifted his ugly head from the stereo-microscope. “And what, if I might ask, did you expect to see?”

Luther Brachis shrugged. “That’s a hard question. But a lot more than this.” His sweeping gesture took in the whole room, from the grimy skylight window that looked out onto Earth’s surface, to the huge display system that covered a whole wall. “I mean, apart from those special microscopes almost everything here looks like part of a standard computer facility. If you hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t know this is a Needler lab at all.”

“I see.” The Margrave bent again over the microscope and” made a minute adjustment to the setting. He laughed, without looking up. “Of course. You expected to see Needlers, didn’t you — men in white coats, sticking pins into cells. I’m sorry, but you are seven hundred years too late.”

He at last straightened, turned, and lifted a great pile of listings from the desk at his side. “In the earliest days, yes. A strange set of methods was used at one time to stimulate parthenogenetic egg development. Ultraviolet radiation, acid and alkaline solutions, neat, cold, needle puncture, radioactivity — almost everything was tried, and a surprising number of them worked — after a fashion.

“But all those methods produce only exact copies of a parent organism, rather than interesting variations. And even when mutations arise as a side effect of stimulation, they are quite random. As a way of producing an art form it would be quite hopeless, like dropping a block of marble off a cliff, and hoping to find a masterpiece of sculpture when you got to the bottom. Today, everything is planned.” He held out the pile of listings. “With these.”

Brachis took the top few sheets and inspected them. “These don’t mean a thing to me, Margrave.”

“Not Margrave. I am to be called simply Fujitsu. Mine was an Imperial line when most of your under-level braggarts were wearing animal skins and eating their food raw.

“Sorry, Fujitsu. But I don’t see much here. Just page after page of random letters.”

“Ah, yes. Random.” The Margrave stabbed at the top page with a bony index finger. This is random in very much the same way as we are random, you and I, since what you are holding is the complete DNA sequence of a living organism, in its precise and correct order. This output simply indicates the nucleotide bases in each of the chromosomes, letter-coded of course for convenience: A for adenine, C for cytosine, G for guanine, and T for thymine. The whole listing is built up — as we are — from those four letters. Taken together, they constitute the exact blueprint for production of an animal.” He shook his head and stared at Luther Brachis. “I am sorry. You are no innocent and no fool, though you sometimes choose to pretend to be. I will be more specific. This is the blueprint for production of a special animal — a human being.”

“I thought DNA had a coiled spiral structure. There’s no spiral here. And I don’t want to produce a human being.”

“A coiled spiral is topologically equivalent to a straight line, and a straight-line presentation of data is far easier to comprehend and analyze. As for the fact that this is presently a human encoding, do not worry about it. This is only my starting point, the theme from which we will construct sublime variations. Any one of the nucleotides can be changed to any other. We have full chemical control of the whole sequence. The chains can be split, lengthened, shortened, inverted, and modified in any way that I wish.” He tapped the stack, with its endless and apparently random jumble of letters. “You asked me earlier, what is my job? What is it that I actually do. After all, since I am merely evaluating the effects of inserting different DNA fractional chains into this coding, what can I do that is not done better and faster by a computer? “I have been asked that question many times, and still I can answer only by analogy. Do you play chess?”

“Some. It’s required for Level Six education.” Brachis saw no reason to mention that he had once been close to Grand Master level. It was hard to see how that slight misdirection could have future value, but the habit was ingrained.

“Then you probably know that, despite many centuries of work, the best chess-playing programs still fail to beat the best human players. Now, how can that be? The computers can store a million times as many games in memory. They can evaluate all possible moves, far ahead, to see which one is the best. They are tireless, and they never make the foolish errors of fatigue.

“And yet the best humans still win. How? Because they can somehow grasp within the slow, quirky, organic computer of the human brain an overall sense of board and position, in a holistic way that transcends individual moves. The computers play better every year — but so do the humans! The greatest chess players can feel the board, in its entirety, in a way that has never been caught in any computer program.”

The Margrave turned to the display screen, where a long sequence of coded letters was shown. “The same ability is possessed by the best Needlers. In a string of a hundred billion nucleotide bases, random substitution, exchange, or deletions could prove totally disastrous for the organism that it represents. No viable plant or animal would result. But it is my special talent — and I assure you, Commander, that in my field I admit no peers — to sense the final and total impact of changes in the sequences. To grasp the pattern, whole, and more than that, to estimate how different changes will interact with each other. For instance, suppose that I were to invert the order of the section on the middle of the screen, and make no other change of any kind. What would it do? I am not absolutely sure — I have never thought of that variation before, and what I do is more an art than a science — but I believe that it would produce a perfectly formed individual, able to function as usual, but a little more hirsute than the norm. In the large scale of things, that is an amazingly small change. It happens that way because we are all of amazingly robust genetic stock. There is much redundancy in the DNA chain, and it stabilizes against minor copying errors in the genetic codes.”