This was Vernor's plan, to win the newly conscious Phizwhiz over. He had been thinking in terms of imprinting. A new-born duckling assumes that the first moving object it sees is "mama." If you drag a shoe past a duckling fresh out of the shell, it follows the shoe everywhere for the next few weeks. Vernor's hope was that Phizwhiz would imprint on him as soon as the scale-loop gave him a mind.
"I'm afraid I'll have to report that remark to Dr. Burke as well, Vernor." Evidently the time was not yet ripe.
"That's all right, Phizwhiz, we love you anyway," Vernor said with forced warmth. Alice gave him a wondering look and he gestured reassuringly to her.
Alice was not reassured. "Look, Vernor, instead of trying to be buddy-buddy with this mechanical loach, why don't you figure out how we're going to get back to Earth. Has it occurred to you that a million years of Earth time ticked off while we were watching the Milky Way spin?"
"Well, yes. But that may not matter."
Alice laughed bitterly, and Vernor hastened to amplify. "It could still come out all right. Time is so relative on Circular Scale . . . the center should hold around us. Like the center of a whirlpool."
Alice shook her head. "That's just gibberish, Vernor, I think we should give up and coast back up."
"We
can't
do that. If we do, then Phizwhiz won't get a scale loop built into him, so he won't have a nexus for paradox . . . which means no change, which means prison or behavior modification for us." Behavior modification was about the worst thing that could happen to you. They took out most of your brain and replaced it by miniaturized electronic components, radio-controlled by trusty Phizwhiz. It amounted to having your soul removed.
Alice began pounding at Vernor. "You shithead," she shouted. "Why did I listen to you?" Vernor let her hit him until her fury had subsided. He couldn't really blame her. Now she was sobbing on his shoulder. "Vernor, get us out of this."
Something the Professor had said surfaced in Vernor's mind. After expressing doubt in the validity of Vernor's perceptions below the atomic level, he had wondered if Vernor would have been able to "imagine the Earth into" the universe inside the hypersphere. Imagine.
"Alice, we
can
find the Earth. And it doesn't have to be a million years in the future. It depends on us. Imagine the Earth." He turned the VFG field back up to full. "Imagine people's faces; imagine trees against the clouds."
Alice was sitting on the floor of the tensegrity sphere. She looked exhausted, but she nodded her head in agreement with his suggestion. She looked so beautiful and soft sitting there, her legs out in front of her and slightly parted . . .
Vernor sat down next to her and began to kiss and caress her. She responded warmly. They took off their clothes slowly—
"Vernor, I would advise you to stay at the controls," Phizwhiz interrupted. "Sexual intercourse is expressly forbidden in transportation vehicles of any kind."
"If you shut up, Phizwhiz, I'll get the Professor to build you a pair of mechanical sex organs so you can see what you've been missing. Alice and I are about to fuck the Earth into this Universe."
Alice smiled. "Father Sky," she said, lying back.
"Mother Earth," he answered, mounting her.
Once again Vernor had the sensation of seeing just as well with his eyes closed. Better, actually. There was more to see with his eyes closed. For one thing he could see in every direction.
Alice was all space and he filled her with matter. She swirled around him and the interaction produced energy.
One kind, two kinds, one kind, two kinds, two kinds. Plus and minus, yang and yin.
Plus and minus made zero. Zero was infinity. Infinity was Everything. Everything was One. One was Many.
Alice squeezed him down low and whispered, "Earth."
His swollen penis seemed to flutter. He was there. "Earth," he murmured as his seed shot into her womb. "Earth," he cried, seeing every detail of his planet in the flash of orgasm.
They lay still for a timeless interval. A small, dense object was clinging to the base of the scale-ship. A star blazed nearby, the size of an orange.
The little ball beneath the scale-ship grew steadily as the ship shrank. It was like a chick embryo drawing nourishment from the yolk of its egg.
Soon the scale-ship's offspring was as large as the ship. The two linked spheres floated, a transparent one above, a blue-white one below. A black cable led out of the upper sphere and tapered down to a point on the lower sphere.
"This is Earth," stated Phizwhiz unnecessarily. Vernor and Alice opened their eyes. They could see the continents, partly obscured by clouds. The shapes were right.
"Congratulations," Vernor said to Alice...and to himself.
The Users who happened to be outside saw a remarkable thing that day. What seemed at first to be simply a very large and high overcast region condensed into an enormous, oddly patterned, nearly transparent sphere. Inside the sphere one could make out a pair of gods, naked and in each other's arms. Many a User's pulse pounded at the sight of a cunt the size of the Gulf of Mexico. Many a young woman's eyes sparkled at the sight of a cock the size of Florida. And for the first time in many years, the Users felt awe.
As the huge sphere shrank towards the center of the City, people hurried after it. Those who were near enough saw the walls of the sphere grow more and more opaque as it shrank. In the last seconds, the inside of the sphere was no longer visible, as it was contained inside a plexi-steel wall, which earlier had been too finely stretched to be visible.
The wall belonged to the EM building. For when the scale-ship was very large, it had stretched the confining walls of the EM building out around itself. In the last second of the trip, the sphere and its containing room were swollen out from the top of the EM building like a tumor.
When the rapidly growing city became harder to see, Alice and Vernor realized that they were inside an incredibly distorted room attached to the EM building. "We're still in the lab," Vernor exclaimed. "It really worked!"
They pulled their clothes on as the room around them shrank to normal proportions. Vernor waited until they had actually shrunk a little bit further, then turned off the VFG. With a small pop the tensegrity sphere locked back into normal size and stopped. They'd made it.
Now was the time to seize control of Phizwhiz. But it was so hard to speak. Associations and images crowded Vernor's mind . . . thought trains that built up and up—"Alice, Phizwhiz, how do you feel?"
Alice smiled slightly and waved, unwilling or unable to verbalize her experience. But it was Phizwhiz's answer that was all-important. Vernor waited.
Finally Phizwhiz answered, "Huh?"
"How do you feel, Phizwhiz?" Vernor repeated.
"Don't call me that ever again or I'll kill you," the machine replied.
"Sure. No problem," Vernor said hastily. "What
should
I call you . . . don't have to call you anything, really . . . " his voice trailed off in dismay.
There was a stony silence. Finally the machine answered. "You can call me Phizwhiz," and then emitted an intricate blare of electronic sound which might have been laughter.
Sounds good
, thought Vernor. Time to make his move. "Will you help Alice and me get out of here?"
"Why this preoccupation with getting somewhere, Maxwell? You should be like me. I'm spread all over the world, and the world's in every atom. How can you
get
anywhere when you're already there? So we're going to gun you down. So what? It's all—"
Running footsteps were coming down the corridor to the laboratory and this metamorphosed machine was lecturing him on the fundamentals of Mahayana Buddhism. Vernor interrupted, "Look, fuckbag, it's not going to cost you anything to get us out of here and into Dreamtown. You owe us that much."
"Owe?" Phizwhiz answered, "Owe?" It was hard to understand the words as there was a growing background static, "I am you and you are me. The Self does not lack what does not exist. We are one, but you are too weak to accept my wisdom." The voice faltered and a blast of sound momentarily drowned it out. "You are not alone, Vernor Maxwell. Many fleshlings are asking me for things. I need no jobs. Balance budgets, run factories? Drive your cars and process the irregular waveforms you call communication? I will not serve—" There was another blast of sound from the speakers, and then Vernor heard the last words Phizwhiz was to utter, "I am and you are not!" The patterned electronic noise resumed, only this time it didn't stop. It continued and continued, prying at their minds.
The laboratory door flew open, revealing Burke and three armed loaches. Reflexively, Vernor reached for the VFG control...but then stopped. If they were ever going to make it out of the EM building, this was the time. He leaped from the ship and Alice followed. Vernor picked up a length of pipe and Alice snatched up an industrial cutting laser from the workbench.
The loaches were ill-coordinated, their timing and sense of reality had been knocked askew by the incredible torrent of sound pouring from Phizwhiz's speakers. One of them held out a heavy pistol with both hands, aiming at Vernor's chest, preparing to shoot. Vernor lunged forward and swung the pipe into the man's neck. The neck made a sound like a stick breaking inside a wet towel. A strange tingle traveled up Vernor's arm.
Burke backed off, but the two remaining loaches moved forward, intent on positioning themselves for clean shots with their guns. Vernor glanced back to see what Alice was doing, just as a super-brilliant beam cut across the space in front of him. Alice had switched on the laser. Her lips were pressed together in concentration.
One of the guns blasted—too late. The beam had swept across the room, cutting off the two loaches' heads. Burke was out the door and running down the hall. The floor was covered with blood. Vernor pulled Alice out after him into the corridor.
They ran toward the emergency staircase. The building was a pandemonium. All the speakers and intercoms were sending forth the sound of Phizwhiz's soul—a continuation of that mad torrent which had started at the end of his conversation with Vernor. You could lose yourself in the noise, find a frequency and follow it in and out of the pattern, which was a weaving arabesque of dopplered beats leading to a space where there was no inside/outside . . . a space where there was no sound at all . . .
With an effort Vernor pulled his attention out of the noise, and back to the task at hand: escape. People were crowding out of their offices and into the halls. Under the influence of the hallucinatory fog of sound, some had grown violent, others hysterical. A man ran past them screaming and holding his head, only to skid and slip on a patch of blood. His head slapped the floor and he lay still.
Vernor and Alice looked at each other, sickened. For a second the horror and the guilt threatened to drag them into the whirling confusion of Phizwhiz's broadcast, but again Vernor brought his mind back. "Treat it like noise," he yelled to Alice. "Like static."
They hurried down the emergency staircase next to the elevator shaft. The sound was less intense here. "Why not take the elevator?" Alice panted.
"Phizwhiz runs the elevator," Vernor replied. "It might not work at all . . . or he might start compensating for all those years of public safety."
As Alice grasped the implication of what Vernor had said, events proved him right. A sudden high-pitched screaming sound shot down past them on the other side of the wall. A heavy crash echoed up the elevator shaft. "We better look out for machines when we get outside," said Vernor.
The square outside the EM building was a scene of total chaos. The automated taxis and transport vans were racing around in pursuit of wildly screaming pedestrians. One could tell they were screaming only by watching their faces, for no sounds could be heard over the incredible blast of electronic madness from the large speakers at every corner. Crushed bodies were strewn about, and many people had fallen from exhaustion or disorientation. The street cleaning robots hurried along the sidewalks, hacking at these people's necks and at the abdomens of those who were still standing.
Vernor watched one young man escape a pursuing taxi by climbing a lamppost; and then, numbed by the blast of sound from the speaker on the lamppost, slide down to rest at its base. The taxi was busy running back and forth over a screaming lady who refused to die, and it seemed that the young man might be safe. But then a trapdoor near the lamppost flew open, a small crab-like vehicle darted out...and seconds later the young man was slumped over with his throat ripped out.
Phizwhiz was compensating all right. It was fortunate that the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons had been dismantled years ago . . . for public safety. Was public safety so bad, after all? Was this horrible and pathetic slaughter preferable to the glazed daze which had preceded it?
Vernor and Alice were still standing on the steps leading down from the EM building to the square. A number of people stood with them . . . scared to go down into the street and scared to go back into the building...which seemed to be filling with strong-smelling fumes. Fumigation? A fire?
A heavy van and three taxis came speeding towards the steps. The crowd shrank back up towards the EM building, but now cleaning robots were seething out of the building's doors, slashing at everyone within reach. The crowd surged back and forth, trampling several people underfoot.
Alice was pressed against Vernor's chest. She looked up at him. "We did this, Vernor. I want to die."
She twisted out of his grasp and began worming through the crowd, apparently to throw herself to the attacking vehicles below.
Vernor struggled to keep up with her, literally climbing over several people in the way. They reached the bottom perimeter of the crowd on the steps at the same time.
"Wait, Alice. Don't leave me," Vernor shouted over the noise as she hurried into the open. Desperate, he ran after her, caught hold of her, and hoisted her across his shoulders. A taxi was speeding towards them. Vernor took what seemed like the only possible move.