Meesemstrebiks Olumbe
Bulegalumbe/Meesemsgalumbe
- 3.3E4

Unknown Regions - How and Why?

        Nobody really knows of course how it is that the peoples of some worlds manage to launch themselves into Space before being Contacted. Since the Torsyne appear so superior in every respect to naturally-originated life in all its forms, surely they would have found a way of saturating the Universe with their monitors, or whatever they use to detect new civilizations, since their Advent. Yet the Universe apparently has nooks and crannies enough to defeat even them.

        These `gaps' most commonly occur in colliding galaxies. Although these are spectacular sights when seen from a distance, the chances of any of the stars within these galaxies actually colliding are minute. All that usually happens is that their motions are deflected so that, when the galaxies finally part, each becomes elongated and extends a projection of stars towards the other. Perhaps the interstellar gases they contain interact sufficiently violently to either drown out whatever communications the Torsyne monitors rely on to report back to their masters, or even fling them out of their assigned areas. The infamous Torsyne ability to build machines that seldom fail may also not apply in such environments, though that seems hard to believe.

        Because of this ultimate inexplicability, some people take an entirely different point of view as to the reasons altogether. They believe the probe gaps have to be deliberate, the Torsyne equivalent of the psychology experiments the dominant consciousnesses of virtually all worlds perform on certain of their more diminutive kinds. A small subset of this group goes even further; they believe the Torsyne deliberately leave some regions of the Universe free of their influence so that the rest of it can see what freedom does to us when we are left on our own.

        If that is their intention, the Unknown Region to which my own world once belonged couldn't have provided a better example. The first of its worlds `emerged' into Space a hundred million years after our galaxy had begun to collide with its neighbor. Being under no restraints, they immediately set about colonizing those higher gravity worlds whose conditions suited their octopedal kind. In successive millennia many lifeforms of various types, including our own human one, evolved into a space-going existence. We all then set about colonizing those worlds which suited our particular physical characteristics and environmental needs. There were no communications between the various races at first since we could not even detect each other's existence. Even when we did become able to, communications were established very slowly because of the different media each had come to use, and then there were the usual all but insuperable language translation difficulties. There was also little economic incentive for contact since we were all so diverse none had anything the other wanted.

        The first explorations made by my world were naturally undertaken using Photonic Spaceships, but we soon replaced these near-useless vessels with Tachyonic Space ones. The whole universe then seemed to be ours for the taking, even if at this stage we could not travel too far in case we accidentally aimed our ships at the wrong stars and became lost. However, we soon came into contact with those species that had preceded us - and found them in a state of war. By this stage communications between the space-going species had developed to the point where each could make themselves clear to most others about simple basic issues like `this is our territory, please respect it'. But they - now we - were hopelessly unable to handle more abstract issues such as our various systems of ethics and morality, even though we would later learn via the Teklanmeh that we actually had much in common in that respect. At that early stage `reasonability' to one species could seem like `willful misrepresentation' to another. And there wasn't always time to discuss finer points. When a species believed, as those octopods I mentioned did, that it was better to `get things done first, then talk about them on the basis of that experience', often there wasn't even time for any kind of negotiation at all.

        But then this is so much like the history of exploration within each of our own worlds. None of us should have been surprised; we should have been much better prepared.

        It was on the question of colonizing newly-discovered worlds that, so far as anybody from any world has been able to gather, the conflict erupted. It had become clear to all that, where any form of Life was possible on a world, it existed. If it was intelligent it could protect itself, or at least try. If it wasn't or it could not protect itself, then it seemed reasonable to most worlds, including ours, that it should not even be visited until it was at least space-going. But, as I say, that was what only most worlds believed. When the few worlds who thought otherwise sought to colonize those innocent worlds, what could we do but attempt to protect them? The wars that resulted became at least as vicious as the Sumal Wars themselves, though our weapons were cruder and more limited in their effects than those of the near-mythical people who fought those long-gone wars. We had no PlanetBuster bombs for instance, nor any other means of genocidal warfare such as planetwide plagues in our armories. Desperation nevertheless drove discovery, and eventually one of our worlds discovered the Nessik Spheres and just what a planar configuration of them could do. This then apparently drew the attention of the Torsyne; the Iskurahi were alerted to our existence via the Teklanmeh.

        In spite of their ferocity and the huge numbers of dead, there is only one comment I wish to make about the battles we fought; they are after all recorded in some depth elsewhere in the Teklanmeh. I notice entire subcultures in the wider Universe we are now a part of enjoy watching War 3D's and even re-enacting original battles through Virtual Realities or using modified military hardware. But they can never simulate what it is like to die not only violently, but uselessly. For that you have to have led a real life beforehand, one that leads up to that death, even if it is only a decade or two long. Perhaps if they could somehow experience that, then they would not continue to play at their wars with such silly enthusiasm.
 

Tgush Aebobas Rerza
Bozoayash/Ibzeorequio
+ 1010

The Bethian Dilemma

        There was one thing all worlds - and probably all worlds in all Mansions - no doubt had in common before they Contacted: all the pharmaceutical drugs they ever developed had side-effects to some degree or another.

        The eventual selection and use of a drug in a medical armory in most of those worlds would have come about only after a careful assessment of the benefits versus the risks. An analgesic for minor illnesses was expected to have virtually no side effects whatsoever, while those for severe conditions might have several, just so long as they kept a patient alive or even provided a cure. Working out the benefit-penalty balance could sometimes take years, especially once a world had experienced its first inevitable pharmaceutical disaster, an epidemic of children deformed or crippled in mind or body for instance.

        With the psychotropic medicines, psychiatric side-effects had to be watched for and assessed as well. For instance, a drug might only be effective until the subject built up a resistance to it. Then that subject might find herself with an addiction that was itself hard to cure. Or the drug might only be effective when tested on subjects in the confined and protected world of an institution. But since trials of these drugs could not be carried out on animals, at least not for their psychotropic effects, the only way was the hard way, with volunteers or, less reliably, people found to owe a debt to their society.

        The third category of drugs, the sociotropics, were often not recognized or even suspected on many worlds. These would have little or no effect on individuals, only on groups who had ingested them. They would operate by inducing certain subtle changes in their interactions. People might for instance come to trust each other excessively, rather in the way alcohol allows but without that drug's other more obvious effects. Confidences might then be breached so that, when the drug wore off, conflicts would suddenly develop and even result in violence.

        Just testing for the presence of a natural sociotropic would be extremely difficult however, let alone trying to create an artificial one and testing it in a standard Double Blind Trial. Changes within any test group could arise through normal sociodynamic processes; testing for increased susceptibility to `propaganda' for instance would depend very much on individual personalities, including those of the researchers conducting the tests. Then, if it could be demonstrated that any changes were being caused by the drug, would they disappear even if all traces of the drug could be eliminated from the subject's bodies once the experiment was concluded?

        And what use would such drugs be, even if they could be isolated? Military applications seemed to many to be the most obvious, but on most worlds the Military were wise enough to realize that even if control problems could be overcome, outcomes would be unpredictable. How for instance would it be possible to tell if an entire country had gone just slightly insane? How would you know your own hadn't become so to even consider using such a drug on another country in the first place?

        One possibility that crossed many minds as soon as the concept of 'sociotropic' arose was that a natural one might already be producing a harmful effect on a society somewhere on one's world. One could go looking for possible evidence of this, even though any trail would doubtless be covered in false scents and could all too easily lead nowhere. Such a drug could be present in literally anything, a food additive or coloring agent, a trace byproduct of some industrial microbiological production process, even a side-effect of bacterial contamination during food-handling.

        Or it could be simply a product of one's imagination.
 

        Such were the thoughts that had occupied the mind of Sun Past Klaipeda, a seedy-looking biologist from the then Unknown World of Bethia, for some thirty years.

        Then one day he stumbled on possible evidence of a natural sociotropic while on holiday with his sociologist daughter Rimeka on the near-continent size island of Prenda Gna; this rode high in Bethia's Southern Hemisphere like a rampant toewi. Normally the culture of a single society containing over six million people would be expected to have a Gaussian Distribution of personality types ranging from the very coarse and basic to the most highly refined and sophisticated. But for Klaipeda the culture of Prenda Gna - or just `The Gna' as its citizens themselves invariably called it - came across to him as being the social equivalent of what happens when the higher frequencies are filtered out of an audio or video transmission, music sounds `dead' and a picture lacks that fine detail that would make it come alive. In its approximately two hundred year long history, The Gna had produced very little art, science, technology, architecture, or indeed anything involving abstract concepts of any depth. That which had been produced had been done so mostly by immigrants of only a few years standing. Then they too joined the tooth-and-claw social life and indulged in the sport, booze, the tough talk, all-night politics, and rough-and-tumble sex.

        But then these very same characteristics had also been a powerful driving force behind the Gna's economics and business. It had become one of the richest countries for its population size in a world already rich compared to the other nine in the group it belonged to. Nor did its citizens appear to suffer in any way, indeed they were unable to leave their country for any length of time without getting quickly bored with `all those boring little countries' that made up the rest of Bethia. Yet their robust cheerfulness made them quite popular in many of those countries, at least amongst their working people. A few members of the intelligentsia did admire them though for `refusing to succumb to the cultural pretensions of so much of the civilized world'.

        Klaipeda had also noticed while he was in the Gna that it consumed virtually all the food it produced, and since the tastes of its population tended towards the simple, if not crude, it imported very little. He then began to look for common factors in its production. He did not take long to discover that the sole source of the fertilizer used to produce the food was a guano island called Heiteipei lying right on the equator a thousand kilometers to the north-east of The Gna.

        When he told Rimeka about all this, her own professional instincts were immediately aroused and she offered whatever assistance she could provide.

        It was clear from the start that Heiteipei was something of a freak. Barely ten kilometers long and eight wide, it was composed almost entirely of guano that had been piling up ever since the jassien that produced it had become capable of long-distance ocean flight. The plantlife that had reached the island, almost certainly in the guts of these birds since both could be traced to the same distant continental source, had been able to adapt itself to survive, then thrive, in its different soil and climate.

        However, in doing so, one plant species, the atsinwan, had also changed the nature of its berries. These had not only changed from a light blue to a lustrous purple, but had apparently become more than just an additional source of food for the birds. The jassien appeared to have become so highly addicted to them they fed on them exclusively.

        But weirdest of all, this addiction then drove one of the strangest biological cycles Kleipeda had ever heard of let alone actually come across. The digestive tracts of the jassien contained a certain bacterial species essential to the bird's digestion. The juices of the atsinwan berries enabled these bacteria, when excreted along with new guano, to alter the surface chemistry of the existing guano, aided by the solar ultraviolet. This change allowed the atsinwan to grow even larger and more vigorously, producing even vaster numbers of berries. The numbers of jassien rose as did the quantities of bacteria-laced guano they produced... and this bizarre biological engine quickly picked up and ran with its throttle wide open, fueled by the sun and limited in its power only by the surface area of the underlying atoll. Every few hundred years or so the island would `calve' like an iceberg, dropping great shards of its substance into the sea.

        So there would always be enough to ensure The Gna would remain in its state of well-fed cultural catalepsy for millennia to come.
 

        That, however, was about as close as Sun Past Klaipeda or his daughter would ever come to finding the sociotropic agent they were looking for or, for that matter, anything else again. The computer security at Klaipeda's university was a little too lax to prevent a student from breaking into his records and stealing all that was there. But this was no ordinary student doing a little hacking for the fun of it. He was there like many other such spies in all of Bethia's universities and research centers, and all were in the employ of the leader of the poorest world of the group of then Unknown Worlds to which Bethia belonged.
 

        Sociological Narcotics...? the Aesmeol could smell the Evil in that as soon as he heard the phrase. Science was not supposed to be like that. Science was as much about human values as elucidating the nature of Reality. It must be pursued for the good of all man, not for the perverted delights of a few. His resolve once more stiffened that His People, all 4,000 million of them that he had so dedicatedly ensured were educated in all the Sciences, would never learn of the existence of such a grossly immoral horror. This knowledge must be eradicated immediately, before it could be turned into the obscene weapon all Perverted Science of that kind inevitable gave birth to.

        "And that is just one more in a torrent of Scientific Perversions Bethia has been pouring into all Our Worlds since its Industrial Revolution," he shared his views with his People on his worldwide People's Public Oratory television network. "If it kept them to itself that might be tolerable. But we know its compulsion to spread its Evil to Our Worlds... And since the Science of those Worlds is not so advanced, how can they in their innocence be expected to Judge, to Discriminate? This will be the very last Act of Evil Bethia will ever perform."

        Whatever else the Aesmeol's experts may have been, their expertise in genetic manipulation were probably unrivaled in the entire Universe before or since. (It was unfortunate in that respect that the Diursuel would never be able to uncover it, for the Aesmeol's world would perish in a cataclysm of its own making just five years before the human world of Neassioi in the group were finally Contacted). "Perhaps," as one of its very few off-world survivors would later remark, "Sun Past Klaipeda would have done better to have looked for his agent on my world rather than on that little island on his own world."

        First the Aesmeol all but emptied his nuclear arsenal onto Bethia, including the most ancient and dirtiest of its bombs. The only survivors were those that happened to be visiting other worlds at the time, nearly fifty thousand in all. But it was with the 512 females that had been abducted by Aesmeol's agents before `The Autoclaving' that the insanity really began. Especially selected for their beauty, their intelligence, their personalities, only two would retain these for long when they saw what they gave birth to seven months after their insemination. Indeed it seemed almost a cruelty to release the women alive and otherwise unharmed back onto Bethia, which was now totally barren. But then the Aesmeol did not believe in euthanasia.
 

        When the Iskurahi made its Contact with Neassioi, its new human members expressed the view to their Contact Team that the interests of the new Bethians might best be served by asking the Touziel to euthanase them as quickly as possible. Although Bethia was not now technically advanced enough to be itself Contacted, when the Contact Team examined it along with the nine remaining worlds in the group, they considered it along with other possibilities. They eventually decided `in the meantime' to bring Bethia into the Human Universe. After all, its new inhabitants had once been human, and most of the other worlds readily admitted that they had built much of their own science on the foundations laid for them by the original Bethians.

        A huge number of bombs must have struck Bethia's surface, for it was now almost entirely flat as far as one could see wherever one stood on it. It was also exceptionally marshy, that was all that remained of Bethia's oceans. Yet there was virtually no remaining radioactivity, either on the surface or in the air. Evidence was then found that self-replicating nanotechnology had been used to clear this up. But then no doubt the Aesmeol would not have wanted his revenge to mutate into unpredictable directions.

        Nor had his Scientists confined their skills to redesigning Bethia and its inhabitants. The Aesmeol had sent in parties of robots to build exactly 1,048,576 slender, tapered `stulas', each a hundred meters in height, and arranged in circular `villages' of eight spread in a regular geometric pattern right round the planet. The robots had then sown the planet's marshes in a special species of grass that would become the sole source of the Bethian's new diet. But the Bethians had to do rather more than go out into the fields and graze it. They then had to return to their stulas to regurgitate the resulting braaka into the hoppers of special machines called momeip. Two Bethians stood on opposite sides of each momeip to crank the pair of rollers which then compressed this braaka into thin sheets. This was not to make it physically easier to consume however, it was a vital part of the Bethian digestive process. In a grotesque parody of the Heiteipei Cycle, the Bethian digestive system now also contained a special colony of bacteria that only broke down the braaka if it came into contact with certain enzymes embedded into a momeip's rollers. These were in turn maintained by other organisms within the grass of which the braaka was made.

        The momeip also cut up the thin sheets into what would literally become food `currency notes', embossing them at the same time with a complexly curlicued design in the center of which was the face of the Aesmoel himself.

        And as that wasn't horrendous enough, there was only the one machine to each Stula. It was always located in the cramped space just beneath its peak so there was barely enough space to accommodate the two Bethians needed to crank it and a third to climb the ramp and disgorge his bracha into it. The queue behind him would usually trail, day and night, all the way down the spiral ramp that was the sole internal structure of a Stula to the single door at its bottom.

        Indeed it was all too clear that these buildings had been deliberately designed to be as inappropriate to the Bethian anatomy as they possibly could be. The Iskurahi naturally assumed that the two meter-long lumbering toad-like beings weighing up to two hundred kilograms each would have found low single story structures more comfortable. But when the Iskurahi did erect such buildings, the Bethians simply could not get used to them and soon abandoned them. They had become so used to sitting, lying, or sleeping on their helical ramps that they could only cope with horizontal surfaces at all when they went out into the marshes to `gather' food for their momeip and defecate to provide the fertilizer essential to the marsh grasses. Or give birth to their young.

        The Iskurahi had one notable success however, and that was in how Bethians were to occupy their time - and in that they could be said to be better served than most humans.

        The average Bethian had been just as likely to die of insanity as hunger, indeed it would be hard to conceive of a more boring world for beings to live in who were at least as intelligent and as emotionally sensitive as human beings. Bethia was so mind-numbingly regular in every possible way; the Bethian Punishment had obviously been just as much of the mind as of the body.

        Because of this and their extreme physiological limitations, they had absolutely no means of building up a physical culture that would allow them to express themselves to their fullest possible extent. But the Bethian brian had retained its language centers, the Aesmeol had seen to that. So meditation and other introspective philosophies were all that were possible for them, and they had developed these into a spine-tingling level of sophistication that would quickly become noticed all over the Human Universe. They were all able to debate any point one could throw at them with a delicacy and wit that seemed part and parcel of their being `outsiders' within the Human Mansion. Perhaps this gave them a special detachment that came with not having a vested interest in human affairs.

        By installing specially designed consoles using comparator-computer systems that their users were able to converse with, the Iskurahi had made it possible for the Bethians to reprocess any kind of recorded information, be it old films, videotape, or whatever from the pre-Contact cultures of all the Worlds. They then not only converted them to the Teklanmeh's 3D standards, but re-edited them when they thought it necessary, even `reshooting' scenes by recomposing them digitally to achieve heightened cinematographic effects. In this way they could bring their full talents into play by converting even the tawdriest, soapiest melodramas into works of art that could fascinate all who saw them in the Human Universe.

        One thing they never did however, even though they easily possessed the capability, was to create artificial worlds with artificial actors and scenery.

        The Bethians did have one problem though that had defied solution ever since their existence had become known to the Iskurahi. And here the Aesmoel's Scientists had done their evil work perhaps even better than they knew. The enzymes embedded into the rollers of their momeip had eventually been decoded. Since it was now no problem to reproduce these and all the bacteria involved in their food production cycle, the Bethians could be supplied with any amount of food and in as many varieties as they wanted (though they could only ever get used to three). But the horrendously amplified fecundity the Aesmeol had also inflicted on them as yet another misery had remained unaltered. Originally their populations had been ruthlessly kept in check by the limited numbers and access to their momeip, in fact to manage this they had had to institute a grisly economic system based on those insane foodnotes. When a Bethian female gave birth, her litters invariably contained eight offspring who would reach their full maturity in barely three years if they lived that long. Those Bethians who could gather and regurgitate the most food, crank the momeip the most vigorously, and who had the brightest most cheerful personalities received the largest share of the `money', the right to live and, if they were especially talented, reproduce. Those who were not so talented either starved or had to give birth to their litter in the most remote areas of the marshes they could reach. Their offspring would soon provide more fertilizer for the grasses in yet another obscene parody of the Heiteipei Cycle. More often than not, the mother would then herself die surrounded by countless hectares of food she couldn't quite eat.

        The death rate had been appalling - and still was. The only `improvement' the Iskurahi had so far been able to make here was to select most young by lot for euthanasia as soon as they were born. Contraception had so far turned out to be physically impossible. If a Bethian female did not become pregnant within two years of her own birth and once a year after that, she would die in the most extreme agony. The agony of watching her litter die slowly one by one around her was even greater.
 

        We on our microworld of Bozoayash/Ibzeorequio have been trying to solve this appalling contraception problem, the only impediment Bethia now has to its well-earned bliss. We do not understand why the Diursuel have not solved it - or even the Torsyne themselves. But the Diursuel have told us that there are many factors to be considered beyond the physiological, and that they have decided to leave well alone. They cannot apparently forbid our attempt to help since, if the Bethians agree to it, that is a private relationship between them and ourselves. They did suggest to us however that it would be wise to have many people from `other disciplines' on hand. "Be aware that the Bethians have endured much, including many previous attempts to alleviate their condition, all unsuccessful. They will take failure with the philosophical resignation for which they are so well known, but it would still be a matter for regret. We can only wish you all well."

        And sadly, I have to report, we did fail. And it was very much to our regret. We can only add our own plea for caution and care to that of the Diursuel to those who might seek to follow us.

        "I'm not sure I like this," Barkworth had to say.

        "There is something that's hard to put a finger on," Quincey laughed nervously.

        "You really do have to be prepared to take your life in your hands when you set out to help people, you know," Anna beamed at them with that enthusiasm Barkworth couldn't quite get used to. "We looked at all the possible side-effects we could think of, but, well, it's boots and all in the end. - Isn't it, Day?" she looked indulgently across to him.

        But Day merely smiled at them all with the huge impassive smile of all his kind.

        The oppressive silence of Bethia's humidity, even though Anna's assistants had left to go about their assigned tasks barely moments ago, moved in to beat about their ears like a foam rubber cosh. Although Barkworth knew the leadenly overcast sky diffused somewhere into the infinitudes of Space, it nevertheless gave him a feeling of being closed in he hadn't felt even in Hanging Gardens.

        Nor was the rest of the scene much less tense. The circular landing-pad like area that Eve had put herself down in the exact center of was paved with black and white stone squares only slightly bigger than those of her decking. Although Eve had lined hers up with them, the juxtaposition created an op-art effect that was very distracting. Barkworth found it helpful to keep his eyes within Eve's own visual boundaries as far as possible. But when they did stray beyond as they inevitably did from time to time, he made sure they lifted above the gray molded stone lip a hundred-odd meters away that defined the perimeter of the `pad'. From there a purplish marsh grass unrelieved by tree, shrub or flower stretched perfectly flat in all directions right to the horizon. Equidistantly spaced around this stark skyline however were eight `stulas' that in fact resembled Thai stupa. Since there were no other objects to compare them with, judging their height and distance was impossible. They shaded from ivory at their bases to dark bronze at their peaks; this lent them an illusion of floating in the heavy air like the sound of an immense gong in some half-awake frenzla dream.

        Barkworth couldn't help smiling a little though when he thought about the frantic activity their inhabitants must be indulging in by now.

        "Thanks though for letting us to come along," Quincey said uncertainly to Anna. "You've been working so long on this, we really shouldn't have asked."

        "Do you really think I would have invited you two along if I had felt there was any risk?" Anna reassured her. "Besides, we all wanted to see what Eve was like. Heavens, the last time I even heard of a spaceship was back in the twenties. - What's happened to her by the way? Is she asleep?"

        "No, I'm still here..." Eve said as if she was yawning.

        Barkworth couldn't help laughing, in many ways it really was appropriate. The voyage across from Hanging Gardens had been unusually lengthy, totaling three hours including the 43 minute 41 second Transit itself. Eve had undoubtedly enjoyed it as much as everybody else though. She had turned herself into, of all things, a 1950's style drive-in movie theater. The dozen-odd cars she showed however looked more like highly sculptured freeway galleons than cruisers, the amount of coruscated chrome she put on them would have left Earth's cars of that era for dead. On the screen of this poorly-attended cinema she had shown brief excerpts from the latest batch of 3D's the Bethians had placed in the Teklanmeh. It was just as well the discussion, in which she had participated to everybody's delight, had been lively, for most of the seventeen of Anna's assistants who had elected to travel with her had had to sit on the floor. Since Anna had insisted on `dry' refreshments in response to Eve's offer, tea and biscuits had also been the order of the day. Yet so successful had she been at entertaining her passengers nobody realized the voyage was over until the final few moments of the landing on Bethia itself.

        In spite of his own and Quincey's uneasiness (after all, numerous attempts had been made over the last thousand-odd years by Worlds whose skills must often have exceeded Earth's many times over...), Barkworth had also noticed that Day had not expressed an instant's concern. Elderly, as evidenced by the faintly orangey sheen to his green-brown skin and the flecks of gold in his softly-glowing orange eyes, Day had apparently seen most of his one score years and ten go by in relative contentment for a Bethian. His face, like all Bethian faces, was really more cat-like than toad-like with its vertical pointed ears. There were no whiskers however, only incongruously huge bushy eyebrows which Barkworth could see were now abetting what he had learned from the Teklanmeh was an indulgent smile.

        Perhaps now aware that Barkworth was staring at him, Day shifted his weight slightly. The huge brown pouch on his back that looked like an oversized English private schoolboy's schoolbag moved lumpily as he did so. This contained the Bethian's Pasovir; a large number of straps connected it to a sling of thick highly porous fabric that supported his underside when he flew. Bethians were normally unable to cover more than a small portion of their skin.

        "You know, Quincey," Anna said in that quick way she had when she wanted to be frank about something, "I get the distinct impression from just about everything you've said since Sumie introduced us that Laslo Godel has had a very strong influence on the way you see things. I'm not sure that that's entirely healthy. Now that the others have gone, perhaps we can have a little chat about him - and I suspect Day could make a few constructive comments too," she smiled across to him. "As it happens I was born in Arleberg twelve years before Laslo Godel came to live there. He and my father, who was the Lutheran Minister in the district, often used to have long chats together far into the night - "

        " - You knew him..! Quincey was all ears.

        "Yes, quite well."

        "Deus Meo..." was all Quincey could say.

        "You must have been one of the very few people to get close to him at any stage of his life," Barkworth said. "With all due respect to his actual achievements of course, I've always suspected that as a person he would have been perfectly capable of wiring up umpteen million logic circuits into the functional equivalent of a short piece of copper wire."

        "Barkworth...!" Quincey glanced at him sharply.

        "I think that has to be the most apt description of Godel I have ever heard," Anna's laughter had an edge to it. "That's exactly how he saw all human hopes, dreams, aspirations. Somebody once said that the root of all evil was not so much money as boredom. And Godel must have been one of the most boring people who ever lived."

        For once Quincey was completely speechless. All she could do was stare at her.

        "Sounds interesting..." Day's ears pricked up.

        "There are a number of documentaries in the Teklanmeh about Laslo Godel's life," Eve said, "though most were made after his death. Perhaps I could put some of these together for you, Day. - How much do you know about the theory of artificial consciousness? His whole approach to it tells you a lot about the man."

        "It is in fact a most important part of our training, Eve," Day replied, "We have also found that most of the individuals who make the key realizations about artificial consciousness become highly alienated from their societies. From what you say, your man was not an exception to that rule."

        "He certainly wasn't!" Anna affirmed as she and Barkworth roared with laughter.

        "Some would say that the man who first used Godel's principles in practical devices and went on to build our first artificial consciousnesses was even stranger," Barkworth said, "though in an entirely different way. I think we ought to look at him too at some stage since they had the oddest relationship, even though they never met." He then glanced up and around Eve's architrave to provide her with her cue.

        A rectangular section of floor about three meters wide and two high begin to raise itself up like a large trap-door just inside Eve's two bow most columns; its underside was the pearly white of a 3D screen. Eve could not project 3D's onto her Taurnal Spheres (though what she did project always looked as if it was in 3D). In this case though Barkworth suspected that she did not wish to disturb the sensitive social experiment now taking place, for she had also dimmed her Spheres to reduce the screen's visibility from outside.

        Day however had to move his position to see the screen comfortably. His huge rump came up first, then the forepart of his body as he moved back and sideways in order to stand. He then waddled backwards a little to settle down again at Anna's feet. Barkworth got the odd impression the Bethian would have jumped up onto her lap if he had been of a more appropriate size. His great saucer-like eyes looked up at hers briefly, then rolled round to fasten themselves on Eve's screen.

        A full-face portrait of Laslo Godel limned in white on a background of blue now came up on her screen in mono projection. It showed him as he might have appeared in his early twenties. In spite of his subsequent fame very few photos of him existed, Barkworth suspected that Eve had presented a convincing-looking mockup. It showed him as a then-unbearded fresh-faced young man, even suggesting a slim handsomeness of appearance and dress. His hair, though long, was neatly parted on the left and combed back behind his ears. His very large jutting aquiline nose did not spoil the impression, it just made his eyes appear a little more deep-set and wiser looking than they might otherwise have been. Indeed, the photographer - if there actually was one - had even managed to conceal that pale hazel color with an almost kindly twinkle. Raoul Porline had described his eyes as being a `washed-out blank hazel, like a dead groper staring up at a cathedral.' Many other people had made comments along similar lines.

        This portrait gradually dissolved into the monochrome newspaper photograph that had perhaps more than anything else made Laslo Godel a household name, the so-called `Deathbed Photo'. One could see in strongly foreshortened view the crown of a lank-haired head resting on a very grubby-looking pillow. Above the tiny peak that was all one could see of his nose, rose the enormously distended shape of his stomach that half-hung over the side of that tattered old bed. But the real horror was the way the thin shaft of light streaming through the tiny crossbarred window to the right of the bed caught the two bright globules of urine floating in mid-air beneath the mattress. They were on their way to join the glowing trickle of it running along the bare floorboards towards the doorway through which the photo had been taken. A single vodka bottle stood half-visible by the stark iron foot of the bed.

        "Ah, yes, the so-called Death-bed scene," Quincey said with scorn. "It was probably nothing of the kind. He spent the last three years of his life like that."

        "The photographer himself never called it that," Anna said, "Only the media did."

        "Can't really blame them," Barkworth said. "Would certainly look to most people like a deathbed scene."

        "It was a deathbed scene" Hut said. "He died when he claimed that bottle for his last friend."

        "And I have to say his second-to-last friend was probably me," Anna intoned sadly. "But before I explain why, I think we had better let Eve get on with her presentation so Day can understand too."

        Quincey looked at her shocked, for her own mother had been Godel's partner when he died, and Anna must surely have realized that. But she said nothing, she just redirected her attention to the screen.

        "Laslo Godel was born in Vienna in 1944 in the quiet unpretentious district of Vienna his parents would never leave, even though they would soon be able to afford to," the suitably somber documentary voice said as first a map of Europe appeared on Eve's screen, then of Austria, Vienna, then a faded photo of the modest residence in which the family of three resided. "His Father, also called Laslo, would soon make a considerable fortune from building up a business in household personal hygiene fittings. These would quickly become popular across much of Europe through an increasingly influential American newsmagazine industry and a recently-concluded world-wide war."

        Eve displayed mid-1950's brochures in various European languages displaying baths, showers and toilets both in monochrome and the odd-looking colors and typefaces of the era.

        Barkworth wondered just how much any of this would mean to Day. But then he supposed that Day would have seen a lot of material from similar eras on other worlds and would know how to glean what really mattered.

        "Being the only child of wealthy parents, Laslo had much attention lavished on him by parents and relatives alike. Instead of developing the outgoing personality that is more usual in such circumstances, he became unsociable and withdrawn at a very early age. This is a family photograph taken on the occasion of his first birthday. His parents are seated in the middle of the group."

        Eve then panned across a very long thin photograph that must have contained over 80 souls. They ranged in four rows in what appeared to be a botanical gardens with a giant ferris wheel in the background. His two parents sat in proud solemnity with Laslo an unrecognizable white swaddled bundle in his mother's arms.

        "The boy's extreme cleverness at school from an early age apparently gave his father less joy than it gave his mother. There is evidence that he compelled the boy to play much sport to `help him set himself up properly in life'."

        A photo of a lank-haired little boy with mouth open in a large inverted U and tears streaming out of his eyes as he kicked a football appeared as graphic evidence of that.

        "Indeed this fundamental difference in viewpoint spoiled what might otherwise have been a very happy marriage," the voice-over continued; Barkworth suspected its now-overly somber tones was in fact another sample of Eve's humor. "This is perhaps evidenced by the fact that there were no more childhood photographs of him at all beyond this point except for this one taken of father, mother, and son standing in front of their newly-acquired chalet in Arleberg in 1964."

        The map of Austria appeared again centered on Vienna. It then recentered itself on Arleberg, then faded into a panning shot of the spectacularly steep forested and alpine-pass countryside on the border of the Tyrol and Austria's extreme western province, the Vorarleberg. This then dissolved into the photo of the A-frame chalet itself with the pathetic family standing in front of it, arms around each other's shoulders. Half out of the picture was the huge family car with a large wooden box attached to its rear.

        "The chalet would actually come in time to provide the solution to all their problems, for in later years Laslo would spend more and more of his time there. One of the worst parental rows was over whether or not Laslo should attend university, and in the end he did, but not to an Austrian one. His mother had relatives living in England, so he stayed with them and went to the University of Sussex instead. He dropped out of his computer studies classes though, claiming that `he could learn what he wanted to know by himself.' Such an attitude was not uncommon in 1960's and early seventies England, but he probably developed it independently since he had made no more friends there than he had in his own country. One good friend he did make however was Raoul Porline, soon to become widely known in his own right as a science journalist for England's leading science magazines."

        A slightly out-of-focus photo in faded color of Raoul Porline with his arms around Laslo Godel's shoulder then appeared. A dilapidated official-looking building could be seen in the background.

        "At this time Godel made many visits to student nightspots in Sussex, but it is not thought he fitted in there any better than he had anywhere else. It may have been here that the severe alcoholism that would ultimately claim his life began."

        "How he acquired the other major compulsion in his life, developing and, after nearly twenty years, publishing his ideas on the Internet about what would later become known as artificial consciousness, is not known." Eve put up a few sample pages from PereGaea. "He did however read a great deal, mostly science and science fiction. He was not interested in the humanities, though he is remembered by some as being unusually perceptive about human relations, even though he was almost completely unable to take part in them himself."

        "Not completely true, Eve," Anna said, "but don't let me interrupt you."

        " - It might be worth cutting a long story short," Quincey suggested to Eve, "if you showed us a little of that dramatized documentary Maria Terezhina do Ampara and that silly Brazilian T.V. company made about that visit she paid him. It will give Day a good idea about how the public came to see him when her employer Fiore de Concini made him famous."

        "I was in fact about to do just that", Eve said. "I'll patch up the original rough dubbing into English as I go."

        A paper boat drifting towards a waterfall then appeared. The camera pulled back to reveal that it was in fact the Iguacu Falls, the largest in South America. Barkworth remembered that this was the T.V company's logo.

        `Terezhina-the-Ghastly', as Barkworth had once heard Quincey herself call her, then appeared boarding an Air France SST.

        "I though it time to set things to rights," she breathed in voiceover as she strode along the aircraft's narrow aisle under the title and credits that then appeared. Her business suit accommodated her tall, slender, business-like form quite tastefully. Her quick sharp glance from her deep brown eyes however looked unconvincing under those dreadful butterfly-shaped glasses she wore. The way her long straight hair swished so emphatically as she turned her head also made it seem she was really only there to be Viewed by Millions.

        "Hadn't I, after all, been the one who had started things off by alerting Fiore De Concini to the existence on the Internet of PereGaea in the first place?" she continued huskily over subsequent brief shots of Terezhina in mid-transonic flight, Terezhina hiring a car at the airport in Zurich, then of Terezhina making her way across the border into Austria and up into the alpine pass village of Arlesburg.

        "As I turned that final corner onto the road leading to Godel's chalet, a small knot of people standing there looked at me in a way that gave me a feeling of unease..."

        "My first sight of his home was not of the chalet itself, but of the vodka bottles stacked very neatly by its back door like little glass logs. I have to admit that when he opened the door to me as I approached - he must have been watching for me - he made me feel the word `creep' would need to be completely redefined. Some traces of youth remained on what might otherwise have been the face of a fifty-year old, so I compensated and guessed his age to be closer to forty. He was slightly built, and wore a white knitted jersey and corduroys that looked and smelled as if he had worn them through the entire winter. Sepia colored hair matched his flat, dead sepia eyes that looked at me in that oddly-focused way of his."

        Barkworth had to admit that the lady knew how to send shivers down spines. The actor playing the role of Laslo Godel looked very convincing too.

        "Although I have always accepted that I am somewhat slender, I learned from a very early age to think of myself as `gently sophisticated' in the company of men. Now, for the first time since I was a little girl, I felt like some kind of stick insect."

        Anna and Quincey both roared with laughter at this. Day glanced briefly up at them.

        "As you can see," Terezhina said as the camera obediently panned round the interior of the chalet, "his chalet is no more than a single large room. Its far end is made up entirely of odd little small-paned windows that look down over the deep tree-lined valley through which I had just driven. The carpet is a threadbare green and brown, the couch and armchairs a lumpy mid-1950's faded pink. Astronomical maps fill the left wall of the room on opposite sides of a small window; what look like paintings of stellar constellations, four of them, hang side by side on the opposite wall. A glass case full of paperback science fiction occupies a position by a ridiculously overcarved wooden fireplace, the grate of which is filled with the burned-out remains of something that looks most unpleasant. On a desk with peculiar carved knobs at each corner," the camera glided smoothly to it, "sits a cheap-looking home computer."

        `Laslo' spoke briefly in his all-but-unaccented English about using it to write an Internet novel he was at present half way through. "Like PereGaea, and Nummus before it, it will also be in English to suit my audience."

        "Papers and magazines are stacked in untidy bundles in all sorts of odd places," Terezhina resumed her commentary as the camera homed in on them; Barkworth suspected Eve had put a lot of this in herself for Anna's benefit. "I can see a neatly-kept white plastic rack of assorted hand tools hanging incongruously on the back of an open wardrobe door. An unmade bed is to the left of me just inside the door; on the opposite side is a kitchenette. I can see from the gaps in the paintwork that partitions had once made these into separate rooms.

        "But it is the atmosphere, that indelicate pong of something it would be indelicate of me to mention," she continued in a tone of voice that left no doubt as to what that unmentionable was. "And the way he kept looking at me as he prepared a plate of thin cheese crackers and milk coffee made it hard for me to begin to say what I had come to say."

        `Laslo' dutifully performed these functions as she spoke.

        "In fact I began to wonder if this man was worth bringing into contact with Fiore de Concini in any way, in spite of PereGaea. To me the contrast between him and Fiore could not be more stark. Fiore was rich in ways beyond mere fortune, it was as if he had somehow made the immense network of people he knew a part of himself so that they could draw strength from him when they needed it."

        "But I did my duty," she intoned over a shot of their finally sitting in the armchair and chatting over their coffee. `Laslo' then leaned to his left a little as if to surreptitiously peer up her skirt. "I outlined in my hesitant English what Fiore had been doing and what he planned, and suggested to him that if he were to write to De Concini he may even receive an invitation to join the team as a consultant, even though the thought of that made me shudder. `Wouldn't you like to watch your work come into being?' I said to him. `Perhaps even contribute more directly in some way? You may even be able to revise PereGaea based on the results.'"

        "And that, I noticed, was the only time during my entire visit that his eyes took on a spark of life."

        Terezhina then made a dramatically hurried exit and ran for her car. As she reached for its door handle, she threw up realistically all over its side.

        "I could not stay inide that cabin for an instant longer after that," she explained as this scene faded to another showing her driving back down the road from the chalet. "Of course it cost me my position within the company, but even now I have no regret."

        Credits then rolled as the scene faded to black.

        "That was actually quite restrained for my country's television," Quincey commented sardonically to Day. "Especially in comparison to what they did to Fiore de Concini's role in our development of artificial consciousness. Eve, could you show us that baroque classic Finemina made about his laboratories?"

        "Certainly, Quincey," Eve replied.

        "Computas' four-storied R&D; labs, on the outskirts of Sao Paulo, had been designed by an industrial psychologist so proficient at his art he may have been slightly mad," an even more soberly anonymous voice began as the doco plunged straight into a circling helicopter shot of the infamous building. It looked as if it had been constructed of a huge brightly colored block of Lego plonked into the middle of an otherwise boring light industrial area. It reminded Barkworth now a little of Tonteen.

        "This becomes even more evident as we enter its interior. The first floor is welcoming, even cheerful, with its bright colors reflecting those of its exterior. The furnishings are by the most eminent craftsmen in the land, original works by our best known artists adorn the walls, and many fine sculptures occupy the many niches and corners designed to accommodate them. In fact its reception lounge even won a design award," the voiceover allowed a slight sense of wonderment to creep into his voice.

        Barkworth could see that this was not the actual building itself but a computer reconstruction. He then remembered Quincey had once mentioned that de Concini had laid a complaint against its architect for failing to take reasonable precautions against the theft of the working drawings that enabled this very documentary to be made.

        "This public area here though is very small. The rest of this first floor is given over to the construction of the submechanisms and circuit modules for de Concini's conventional computers and robots. The level of security here is believed to be no more than would normally be found in such a facility."

        "The second floor is where new microchips are designed and built, it contains a complete masking and production facility. A small amount of more fundamental solid state chemistry and physics is also conducted here. Since these are directed towards the more secretive aspects of de Concini's experiments into artificial consciousness, security here is much tighter. The workers here are subliminally reminded of its constant presence as you can see from the unusually narrow corridors and doorways. These interconnect - or fail to interconnect - in ways that are apparently designed to seem illogical. The colors, although more subdued, also seem too oddly matched to be a design lapse. And on top of all this, the floor is divided into sections joined by small lobbies containing security personnel; staff from other sections of this floor and other floors can only meet in these lobbies. You might wonder how any research can be conducted at all in such a place since science has always depended on openness and freedom of communication. De Concini however evidently feels that these risks are outweighed by those of leaks to his competitors. Indeed it is this second floor that has caused the whole building to be called, not entirely jokingly, `The Institute'."

        The stray thought crossed Barkworth's mind that the documentary's existence itself again provided plenty of evidence that there would have been many attempts to breach The Institute's security.

        "The third floor however makes the second look almost cozy. Here the entire floor is divided into large windowless engineering bays. The air conditioning is clearly for the benefit of the hardware, not the people, though the kind of people who work here would probably not resent that. It is here that the modules from the floors below are finally assembled into his most secret machines, believed to be androids, whose design ultimately derives from the ideas Laslo Godel described so vividly in his Internet book PereGaea. These will doubtless come to play a major role in the Automation Wars in which Brazil is already poised to become a leading player."

        "The high ceilings and opulent Old World decor of the fourth floor is in sharp contrast to all the floors below. The only access from the lower floors is via a narrow hard-to-find stair-well and a slow, rumbling goods lift, both of which can only be operated by those whose faces and voices they recognize. Its staff reach this floor directly using their own special lift from a discretely `reserved' area of the carpark in the basement. The staff not only go through the usual security checks when they are hired, but are also carefully interviewed about their attitudes toward Religion and the possibility that they might be about to play God."

        "It isn't only scientists and technicians who work here however - and occasionally live, most including Fiore de Concini himself, have made some provision for overnight stays. A corner office is occupied by two patent attorneys. They are known to be thoroughly versed in their art, everything that can be patented is patented, worldwide. However this is done from a German company owned by the de Concini empire, this enables all Specifications to be presented in German to delay their legal examination by competitors."

        There then followed a nicely sardonic shot of the Artificial Society itself. It was basically nothing more than a simple white cubic cryogenic chamber with rounded corners barely a meter on a side. It stood on a pedestal surrounded by computer consoles monitored by four highly technical-looking people.

        "This, the most important of Fiore de Concini experiments, in fact has little to do with what goes on in the floors below," the voiceover blandly continued. "In fact some people have even suggested that the sole purpose of the rest of The Institute is to act as a `blind', to reduce the risk that his Catholic countrymen might find out what is going on here. Yet, to be fair," the commentator struggled manfully with the words, "several experimenters around the world are known to be building such Artificial Societies."

        The shot of the Cube itself was replaced by a simple diagram showing its main features.

        "No-one quite knows why Fiore de Concini decided to take such an extreme gamble and build his version of that weird `crystal universe' Laslo Godel briefly outlined in the last few pages of Nummus, the self-published on-paper predecessor to PereGaea, now so very rare. Nor has he been willing to explain. De Concini's Artificial Society follows Laslo Godel's description fairly exactly except that the cryogenically cooled quartz crystal sphere he has used is believed to be twenty five centimeters across, and has 24 probe electrodes rather than the four Godel described. The signals passed through the two polar electrodes are exactly the same however as in Godel's fictional experiment."

        `As we now know, the experiment ran more or less as Godel described. The reverberations set up in the crystal by the polar electrodes produced their `Big Bang', resulting in a universe not too unlike our own."

        "The society that this in turn evolved however was very different from the one Laslo Godel envisaged. The only similarity was that here too it lived on a large Jupiter-like high-gravity world with a heavy atmosphere.'

        What looked like a crude animated computer simulation then followed. Barkworth wondered how much of this was in fact in the original doco. Nobody doubted back then that Fiore de Concini had produced a Society, but no `expose' in any media had been able to discover its nature. Perhaps Eve had taken a short cut and put this in herself from what had been learned after Contact when the wraps finally all came off.

        "The beings that inhabited this world were physically very much like our own terrestrial crabs, but their social nature provoked much discussion amongst the staff. Indeed they found themselves deep in a morass of value judgements. In the eyes of some - and apparently in those of Fiore de Concini - the Crab's `culture' was a ruthlessly exploitative one. Each Crab tried to entice his fellows into yielding either food, labor or possessions by offering a program of cleverly designed sensory stimulations in exchange. The rest of the staff wondered however whether the `stimulation' was really any different from the social signals exchanged between the higher species on Earth. `Wasn't it, in the final analysis, much the same kind of stimulations that ultimately drove human beings?' de Concini reportedly said."

        "To de Concini's apparent disgust, Laslo Godel's comment when he was informed of the result of the experiment was that both views were correct, only the words used were different..."

        "Okay Eve, Thanks," Quincey prompted Eve to end the documentary at that point.

        `Now you get the impression from that," she continued, "that Fiore de Concini was some kind of evil genius whose public face was a facade. Fact is he was neither interested in being an evil genius nor in public facades. His Artificial Society was a sideline to his robotics business, not the other way round as those documentary makers would have you believe. His whole intention was to win the Automation Wars the whole planet was falling into at the time to bring Brazil into the forefront of the World's economies. To him that was a more realistic way to help the country's huge numbers of poor than the Land Reforms others had believed for decades were the only way forward. So basically he just wanted to live well and wanted every other Brazilian to become able do the same. That was the real Fiore de Concini."

        "A saint by any other name?" Anna looked at her.

        "He was far more hardheaded and practical than that," Quincey replied. "Perhaps people might have called him one had his program had an opportunity to work. But his Artificial Society experiment brought us our Contact, just three months after he was elected President of Brazil."

        "If he was so hard-headed and practical, then why on Earth did he ever take any notice of Laslo Godel?" Anna asked her. "Even Godel did not pretend PereGaea was anything more than science fiction, or `fictional science' as he put it. Admittedly a few others took it seriously, though most who noticed it at all dismissed it as just too far-fetched for words."

        "Those Automation Wars," Quincey said. "He was willing to try anything, and Terezhina-the-Ghastly just happened to be in the right place at the right time. He wasn't the only one either, we learned later the Japanese had begun experiments based on it too. Contrary to popular opinion, the Japanese were very good at giving odd ideas a go because they'd made quite a few work, things like the transistor and quality control for instance. As De Concini said himself, `the only way to achieve anything is to take the occasional risk, else no deals get done, no ideas get tried, and all progress is subsumed by stagnation.' He saw PereGaea as very simple and elegant, and `how can anything so simple and elegant be completely wrong?' as he himself put it. And we know now of course that if he and all the others had been able to continue, they would eventually have found a way to create other forms of artificial consciousness if Contact had not intervened."

        "He must have had some enemies though," Day said. "Often a politician's supporters can be his worst."

        "Apart from his political opponents - and they wouldn't have been doing their job if they hadn't been - no, very few," Quincey said. "He was a good Catholic and a devout family man, something which is still very highly thought of in my country."

        "Too bad about his daughter though."

        Anna had apparently still failed to realize that Fiore de Concini's daughter Isobel was Quincey's mother.

        "Nobody could have seen that coming," Quincey looked at her sharply. "Sure, that finishing school she was sent to was only a hundred kilometers away from Godel's chalet, but who would have thought she would go straight to him instead? And that he would give her that dreadful disease? - You said earlier that you were Godel's last friend," Quincey saw her opportunity. "Just what did you mean by that?"

        "Godel became friendly with my father, who happened to be one of Europe's better-known theologians," she peered at Quincey as if she was totally incapable of taking affront and could not therefore be offended. "Godel was hardly religious as you well know, but even I could appreciate at my early age that he could put up arguments about the nature of Life and Existence that made my father's seem sentimental by comparison. Yet even though my father knew this, he never disparaged Godel for them. I used to visit Godel myself from time to time as I grew older, and we were indeed friends, in spite of the rumors about his mental illness and so on. - Can rumors incidentally be rumors if they are true? Nobody doubts now he was seriously mentally ill. Even when he plumbed the depths of alcoholism, even when he married that poor Brazilian girl and so nearly ruined her life in that horrible way, we could still talk in the way we had always had, right up to the end. I don't know if he was attracted to me in any special way, he certainly never acted as if he was. I naturally heard stories about his evil, especially with some of the women in his University days in England - he had to have picked up that dreadful disease from somewhere - but I never saw any actual evidence of it until Isobel arrived. And what happened later seemed to be her doing, not Godel's."

        Barkworth thought it was now more than time to step in.

        "I have to tell you, Anna, that Isobel was in fact Quincey's mother - by her second marriage. - Sorry."

        "Good God, I am sorry," Anna breathed as she looked at Quincey, clearly deeply shocked. "You must think now that I'm the most appalling person you have ever met. How - horrible - for you." With that she began to rise from her chair.

        But Quincey quickly shushed her down. "It's all right, I know many people believed that - what you said - but it simply isn't true. My mother told us that she had gone to Godel because she was curious about him after what she had heard her father say about him and his book, - perhaps just as you were after listening to the conversations between him and your father. There was one vital difference however. As she explained it herself, she was as devout and as earnest a Catholic girl as it was possible for her to become. She was also very attractive, indeed looking at her photograph taken at around that time I can see why she was described even then as voluptuous. Years later she came to learn from Godel himself that as a young man he had had a friendship going back into his childhood with a girl who was extremely religious. She was however seduced by an older man, then turned round and laughed at Godel for not seducing her himself. He himself traces his changes in his personality to that event."

        "To put it mildly..." Barkworth said. He had never heard that story before, not even from Quincey.

        "But it gets worse," Quincey continued. "He sought the company of prostitutes until he acquired that new strain of genital herpes that had just begun to displace even AIDS as the new sexual horror. Then he immediately went about seducing and infecting every religious female he could find."

        "Not that there would have been very many back then in that Age of Knowingness," Anna tried to hide her disgust behind that observation. "So of course when Isobel arrived he couldn't help himself. He was too frightened that if he let her walk out the door, sooner or later she would just get seduced by someone else. I once heard him say that the worse thing about Evil was the compulsion it gives you to spread it. Now I know exactly what he meant by that."

        Quincey looked hard at her.

        "Do you think that that was why Godel wanted to get as far away from human emotion as he could and explore Artificial Intelligence?" Day asked her.

        "No, I don't," Quincey replied. "He hated being human, there was no doubt about that. To his mind emotions were no different from the effects of narcotics. Yet he makes it clear in his book that emotion was part and parcel of consciousness, natural or artificial. Raoul Porline described `that little incongruity', as he called it, as being `loyal to consciousness rather than humanity'. Yet my mother always had the impression that he had been interested in what we then knew as Artificial Intelligence long before his `emotional emasculation' shall we say. All we can say is that that experience is what may well have driven him to turn a few vague ideas into the extraordinary work that PereGaea became, even more so for the fact that he did the drawings himself and wrote the script in English. Who knows how these things ultimately originate?"

        "Perhaps it was his interest in artificial consciousness which cost him his first female friend," Day suggested.

        "I simply cannot say," Anna looked at him.

        "So artificial consciousness on your world was the child of Saint and Sinner?" Day observed. "That's not unusual."

        Barkworth couldn't help laughing at that, he hoped Day had meant it to be amusing. "You know, like most cultures anywhere in the universe we had our religions that believed that their God or his Agent would someday return to rescue his believers and take them to a higher state of being, to `Paradise' as we called it. One of the most powerful on our world, the Christians, believed that theirs would return at the end of the millennium that began with his birth. He didn't come back then but, as it happened, our Contact did around ten years after the end of the following millennium, nearly fifty years ago now. Some people naturally tried to make the old prediction fit, that the Torsyne Universe was indeed Paradise. They also tried to fit Godel and de Concini into the roles of Christ and Antichrist - their two supreme polar opposites, but none of it was very convincing. They couldn't even decide which was which. Most Christians to their credit thought it was blasphemous at best, a load of rubbish at worst."

        "Just as well," Day said. "All the other religions on your planet would doubtless have raised objections".

        "But then most cultures anywhere try to turn even their mildly-interesting characters into hoary old legends after Contact, don't they?" Barkworth said. "Its another link to a supposedly innocent cultural childhood, no matter how violent and poverty-stricken it may actually have been. And Brazil was certainly no exception to that. In any case, can a capitalist-businessman-President become a Saint?"

        "Its not unknown on some worlds," Day said. "Its only rare because people are more used to seeing sainthood in religious contexts rather than economic ones. Yet if significantly improving a people's lot at no cost to anybody else isn't saintliness, what is?"

        "In that case could a benevolent dictator become a saint?" Quincey then asked him.

        " - Help..!"

        That far-off sounding voice Eve had relayed to them made the blood curdle in Barkworth's ears.

        "What is it, Esther?" Anna tried to sound cool, calm and collected.

        But all one could hear was a high-pitched babble of frightened incoherence. Barkworth could not make out a single word, perhaps Esther was panicking in Hebrew.

        " - Look..!" Quincey shouted, pointing to the stulas to her left.

        Huge numbers of Bethians were now shooting out of their stulas and crossing over to others, many passing directly overhead. The entire population of the Bethian village appeared to be airborne. The collision avoidance systems in their Pasovirs must have given them an eyeball-juggling ride.

        "I'm sorry, I really must go now," Day said quietly. Barkworth then heard him bark a stream of commands to his Pasovir. Without so much as a backward glance, the Bethian rose slightly, then shot straight up into the air. His webbed feet splayed out from his body in bizarre silhouette for an instant against the white leaden sky, then he zoomed off towards the stupa directly ahead of Eve's bow.

        " - Freddy..! Freddy..! Esther, get Freddy for me, will you!" Anna shouted. "Don't panic girl, just get him! - Just what exactly is going on, Eve?" she lowered her voice as she tried uselessly to look up and around her.

        "I have been monitoring your team's conversation. Your experiment appears to have been completely successful," Eve replied.

        "Successful?" Quincey shouted her surprise. "How could they know so quickly?" she looked at Anna.

        "The onset of pain occurs very quickly if something interferes with the reproductive process," Anna replied. " - I don't know if it was deliberately designed that way, but I have to say it made our experiments a lot easier to conduct," she added with a mixture of wryness and sorrow.

        " - Oh Meus Deo..!" Quincey jumped up out of her chair. "Now there's thousands of them coming out of their stulas towards us! On foot! - What are those purplish ruff-like things around their necks?"

        "That is in fact their money, Quincey," Anna looked at her bemused. "It is attached to a ring of sticky pads around their necks especially designed for the purpose. I think they are walking over here to publicly thank us for what we have done for them."

        "What are we supposed to do..? Quincey asked her. "And do with all that money? Eat it like they do?"

        "Anna, I have just been able to establish contact with Freddy for you," Eve said to her.