Elin wiped back a sniffle. "How does the story end?"

"I'm still waiting on that one."

"Oh." Elin pulled herself together and stood. Landis followed.

"Listen. Remember what I told you about being a puppy tripping over its paws? Well, you've just stubbed your toes and they hurt. But you'll get over it. People do."

"Today we make a Buddha," Tory said. Elin fixed him with a cold stare, said nothing; even though he was in green and red, immune. "This is a higher-level program, integrat­ing all your mental functions and putting them under your conscious control. So it's especially important that you keep your hands to yourself, okay?"

"Rot in hell, you cancer."

"I beg your pardon?"

Elin did not respond, and after a puzzled silence Tory continued: ' 'I'm leaving your sensorium operative, so when I switch you over, I want you to pay attention to your sur­roundings. Okay?"

The second Trojan horse came on. Everything changed.

It wasn't a physical change, not one that could be seen with the eyes. It was more as if the names for everything had gone away. A knee-tall oak grew nearby, very much like the one she had crushed accidentally in New Detroit when she had lost her virginity many years ago. And it meant nothing to her. It was only wood growing out of the ground.

A mole poked its head out of its burrow, nose crinkling, pink eyes weak. It was just a small, biological machine. "Whooh," she said involuntarily. "This is awfully cold."

"Bother you?"

Elin studied him, and there was nothing there. Only a human being, as much an object as the oak, and no more. She felt nothing toward or against him. "No," she said.

"We're getting a good recording." The words meant noth­ing; they were clumsy, devoid of content.

In the grass around her, Elin saw a gray flickering, as if it were all subtly on fire. Logically she knew the flickering was the firing of nerves in the rods and cones of her eyes, but emotionally it was something else: It was time. A gray fire that destroyed the world constantly, eating it away and re­making it again and again.

And it didn't matter.

A great calmness wrapped itself around Elin, an intelligent detachment, cold and impersonal. She found herself identify­ing with it, realizing that existence was simply not important. It was all things, objects.

She could not see Tory's back, was no longer willing to assume it even existed. She could look up and see the near side of the earth. The far side might well not exist, and if it didn't, well that didn't matter either.

She stripped away the world, ignored the externalities. / never realized how dependent I am on sensory input, she thought. And if you ignored it-there was the void. It had no shape or color or position, but it was what underlies the bright interplay of colors that was constantly being destroyed by the gray fires of time. She contemplated the raw stuff of existence.

"Please don't monkey around with your programming," Tory said.

The body was unimportant, too; it was only the focal point for her senses. Ignore them and you could ignore it. Elin could feel herself fading in the presence of the void. It had no material existence, no real being. But neither had the world she had always taken for granted-it was but an echo, a ghost, an image reflected in water.

It was like being a program in a machine and realizing it for the first time.

Landis's voice flooded her. "Donnelly, for God's sake, keep your fingers off the experiment!" The thing was, the underlying nothingness was real-if "real" had any meaning. If meaning had meaning. But beyond real and beyond mean­ing, there is what is. And she had found it.

"Donnelly, you're treading on dangerous ground. You've-" Landis's voice was a distraction, and she shut it off. Elin felt the desire to merge with what was; one simply had to stop the desire for it, she realized, and it was done.

But on this realization, horror collapsed upon her. Flames seared and burned and crisped, and there were snakes among them, great slimy things with disgusting mouths and needle-sharp fangs.

She recoiled in panic, and they were upon her. The flames were drawn up into her lungs, and hot maggots wallowed in her brain tissues. She fled through a mind that writhed in agony, turning things on and off.

Until abruptly she was back in her body, and nothing pursued her. She shivered, and her body responded. It felt wonderful.

"Well, that worked at least," Tory said.

"What-" her voice croaked. She cleared her throat and tried again. "What happened to me?"

"Just what we'd hoped for-when your mind was threat­ened with extinction, it protected itself by reprogramming back down to a normal state. Apparently, keeping your ego cranked up high works."

Elin realized that her eyes were still closed; she opened them now and convulsively closed her hand around the edge of the metal cot. It was solid and real to the touch. Such a good feeling.

"I'll be down in a minute," Tory said. "Just now, you need to rest." He touched a bone inductor, and Elin fell into blackness.

Floating again, every metaphorical nerve on edge, Elin found herself hypersensitive to outside influences, preternatu-rally aware, even suggestible. Still, she suspected-more than sensed-Coral's presence. Go away, she thought. This is my mind now.

I am here, and I am always. You have set foot in my country and are dimly aware of my presence. Later, when you have climbed into the mountains, you will truly know me; and then you will be as I.

Everyone tells me what I'm going to do, Elin thought angrily. Don't I get any say?

The thought that came to her was almost amused: You are only a program caught in a universal web of programming. You will do as your program dictates. To be free of the programs is to be God.

Despite her anger, despite her hurt, despite the cold trickle of fear she tried to keep in the background, Elin was curious. What's it like? she couldn't help asking.

It is golden freedom. The universe is a bubble infinitely large, and we who are God are the film on the bubble's outside. We interact and we program. We make the stars shine and the willows grow. We program what you will want far lunch. The programming flows through us, and we alter it and maintain the universe.

Elin pounced on this last statement. Haven't done a very good job of it, have you?

We do not tamper. When you are one with us, you will understand.

This was, Elin realized, the kind of question-and-answer session Coral must have gone through repeatedly as part of the Star Maker project. She searched for a question that no one else would have asked, one that would be hers alone. And after some thought she found it.

Do you still-personally-love Tory Shostokovich?

At first there was a slight pause, then: The kind of love you mean is characteristic of lower-order programming. Not of program-free intelligence.

A moment later Tory canceled all programming, and she floated to the surface, leaving God behind. But even before then she was acutely aware that she had not received a straight answer.

"Elin, we've got to talk."

She was patched into the outside monitors, staring across Mare Imbrium. It was a straight visual program; she could feel the wetwire leads dangling down her neck, the warm, humid air of Magritte against her skin. "Nothing to talk about," she said.

"Dammit, yes there is! I'm not about to lose you again because of a misunderstanding, a-a matter of semantics."

The thing about Outside was its airless clarity. Rocks and shadows were so preternaturally sharp. From a sensor or the crater's seaward slope, she stared off into Mare Imbrium; it was monotonous but in a comforting sort of way. A little like when she had made a Buddha. There was no meaning out there, nothing to impose itself between her and the surface.