"That's why the number of waterfalls in operation varies."

Now Coral sat down on the rocks. Her feet and knees were dirty. She did not move. Elin wanted to shy a rock at her to see if she would react.

What now? Elin wondered. She had seen the sights, all that Magritte had to offer, and they were all tiresome, disappoint­ing. Even-no, make that especially-God. And she still had almost a month to kill.

"Keeping the crater tempered is a regular balancing act," the agtech said.

"Oh, shut up." Elin took out her briefcase and called Father Landis. "I'm bored," she said, when the hologram had stablized.

Landis hardly glanced up from her work. "So get a job," she snapped.

Magritte had begun as a mining colony, back when it was still profitable to process the undifferentiated melange soil. The miners were gone now, and the crater was owned by a consortium of operations legally debarred from locating Earthside.

From the fifteenth terrace Elin stared down at the patch­work clusters of open-air laboratories and offices, some sepa­rated by long stretches of undeveloped field, others crammed together in the hope of synergistic effect. Germ-warfare corpo­rations mingled with nuclear-waste engineering firms. The Mid-Asian Population Control Project had half a terrace to itself, and it swarmed with guards. There were a few off-Swiss banking operations.

"You realize," Tory said, "that I'm not going to be at all happy about this development." He stood, face impassive in red and green, watching a rigger bolt together a cot and wire in the surgical equipment.

"You hired me yourself," Elin reminded him.

"Yes, but I'm wired into professional mode at the mo­ment." The rigger packed up his tools, walked off. "Looks like wevre almost ready."

"Good." Elin flung herself down on the cot and lay back, hands folded across her chest. "Hey, I feel like I should be holding a lily!"

"I'm going to hook you into the project intercom so you don't get too bored between episodes." The air about her flickered, and a clutch of images overlaid her vision. Ghosts walked through the air, stared at her from deep within the ground. "Now we'll shut off the external senses." The world went away, but the illusory people remained, each within a separate hexagonal field of vision. It was like seeing through the eyes of a fly.

There was a sudden, overwhelming sense of Tory's pres­ence, and a sourceless voice said to her, "This will take a minute. Amuse yourself by calling up a few friends." Then he was gone.

Elin floated, free of body, free of sensation, almost godlike in her detachment. She idly riffled through the images, stopped at a chubby little man drawing a black line across his fore­head. Hello, Hans, she thought.

He looked up and winked. "How's it hanging, kid?"

Not so bad. What're you up to?

"My job. I'm the black-box monitor this shift." He added an orange starburst to the band, surveyed the job critically in a pocket mirror. "I sit here with my finger on the button"- one hand disappeared below his terminal-"and if I get the word, I push. That sets off explosives in the condenser units and blows the dome. Pfffft. Out goes the air."

She considered it: a sudden volcano of oxygen spouting up and across the lunar plains. Human bodies thrown up from the surface, scattering, bursting under explosive decompression.

That's grotesque, Hans.

"Oh, it's safe. The button doesn't connect unless I'm wetwired into my job."

Even so.

"Just a precaution; a lot of the research that goes on here wouldn't be allowed without this kind of security. Relax-I haven't lost a dome yet."

The intercom cut out, and again Elin felt Tory's presence. "We're trying a Trojan horse program this time-inserting you into the desired mental states instead of making you the states. We've encapsulated your surface identity and routed the experimental programs through a secondary level. So with this series, rather than identifying with the programs, you'll perceive them all indirectly."

Tory, you have got to be the most jargon-ridden human being in existence. How about repeating that in English?

"I'll show you."

Suddenly Elin was englobed in a sphere of branching crimson lines, dark and dull, that throbbed slowly. Lacy and organic, it looked the way she imagined the veins in her forehead to be like when she had a headache.

"That was anger," Tory said. "Your mind shunted it off into visual imagery because it didn't identify the anger with itself."

That's what you're going to do then-program me into the God-state so that 1 can see it but not experience it?

"Ultimately. Though I doubt you'll be able to come up with pictures. More likely, you'll feel that you're in the presence of God." He withdrew for a moment, leaving her more than alone, almost nonexistent. Then he was back. "We start slowly, though. The first session runs you up to the basic metaprogramming level, integrates all your mental processes, and puts you in low-level control of them. The nontechnical term for this is making the Christ. Don't fool around with anything you see or sense."

His voice faded, she was alone, and then everything changed.

She was in the presence of someone wonderful.

Elin felt that someone near at hand, and struggled to open the eyes she no longer possessed; she had to see. Her exis­tence opened, and people began appearing before her.

"Careful," Tory said. "You've switched on the intercom again."

/ want to see!

"There's nobody to see. That's just your own mind. But if you want, you can keep the intercom on."

Oh. It was disappointing. She was surrounded by love, by a crazily happy sense that the universe was holy, by wisdom deeper than the world. By all rights, it had to come from a source greater than herself.

Reason was not sufficiently strong to override emotion. She riffled through the intercom, bringing up image after image and discarding them all, searching.

When she had run through the entire project staff, she began hungrily scanning the crater's public monitors.

Agtechs in the trellis farms were harvesting strawberries and sweet peas. Elin could taste them on her tongue. Somebody was seining up algae from the inner lake, and she felt the weight of the net in callused hands. Not far from where she lay, a couple was making love in a grove of saplings and-

Tory, I don't think I can take this. It's too intense.

"You're the test pilot."

Dammit, Tory!

Donna Landis materialized on the intercom. "She's right, Shostakovich. You haven't buffered her enough."

"It didn't seem wise to risk dissociative effects by cranking her ego up too high."

"Who's paying for all this, hah?"

Tory grumbled something inaudible and dissolved the world.

Elin floated in blackness, soothing and relaxing. She felt good. She had needed this little vacation from the tensions and pressures of her new personality. Taking the job had been the right thing to do, even if it did momentarily displease Tory.

Tory… She smiled mentally. He was exasperating at times, but still she was coming to rely on having him around. She was beginning to think she was in love with him.

A lesser love, perhaps. Certainly not the love that is the Christ.

Well, maybe so. Still, on a human level, Tory filled needs in her she hadn't known existed. It was too much effort to argue with herself, though. Her thoughts drifted away into a wordless, luxurious reveling in the bodiless state, free from distractions, carefree and disconnected.

Nothing is disconnected. All the universe is a vast net of intermeshing programs. Elin was amused at herself. That had sounded like something Tory would say. She'd have to watch it; she might love the man, but she didn't want to end up talking like him.

You worry needlessly. The voice of God is subtle, but it is not your own.