"You want to go right ahead, eh?" Prudence asked. "You don't think we should wait for Hempstead's trained seals to chew this over?"

  "Whatever hit us came from outside," Bickel said. "That's another problem."

  "John's right," Timberlake rasped. He cleared his throat, unsnapped his action couch, sat up. "I'm bushed."

  "We've just decided," Prudence said, "just like that..." she snapped her fingers, "- that you can go on stirring around in the computer like a wild man?"

  "For Christ's sake!" Bickel said. "Haven't any of you realized yet we were supposed to use the computer as the basic element of attack?"

  Bickel stared around at them - Flattery busy on the board, Timberlake half asleep sitting up at his couch, Prudence glaring at him from her couch.

  "That's no ordinary computer. It has elements we don't even suspect. It was hooked up with an Organic Mental Core for almost six years during the construction and programming of the ship. It has buffers and leads and cross-ties that its own designers may not even know about!"

  "Are you suggesting it's already conscious?" Prudence asked.

  "No, I'm only suggesting that we've come a long way using that computer and our Ox frontal-lobe simulator. We've come further than the UMB project did in twenty years! And we should go on with this. We're cutting a straight line through -"

  "There are no straight lines in nature," Flattery said.

  Bickel sighed. What now? he wondered. "If you've got something to say, spit it out."

  "Consciousness is a type of behavior," Flattery said.

  "Agreed."

  "But the roots of our behavior are buried so far away in the past we can't get at them directly."

  "Emotion again, eh?" Bickel demanded.

  "No," Flattery said.

  "Instinct," Prudence said.

  Flattery nodded. "The kind of genetic imprint that tells a chicken how to crack out of its shell."

  "Emotions or instinct, what's the difference?" Bickel asked. "Emotions are produced by instinct. Are you, still saying we can't bring the Ox to consciousness unless it has instincts-cum-emotions?"

  "You know what I'm saying," Flattery said.

  "It has to love us," Bickel said. He chewed at his upper lip, caught again by the beautiful simplicity of the suggestion. Flattery was right, of course. Here was a loose rein that could satisfy the fail-safe requirements. It controlled without galling.

  "It has to have an autonomic system of emotional reactions," Flattery said. "The system has to respond with a set of physical effects of which the Ox is... aware."

  Emotion, Bickel thought. The characteristic that gives us our sense of person, the thing that summates personal judgments. A process in capsule form that can occur out

  of sequence.

  Here was a break with all machine concepts of time - emotion as process, an audacious way of looking at time.

  "There's nothing of ourselves about which we can be objective," Bickel said, "except our own physical responses. Remember? It's what Dr. Ellers was always saying."

  Flattery thought back to Ellers, UMB's chief of psych. "Bickel is 'purpose,' the force that will give direction to your search," Ellers had said. "You have substitutes, of course. Accidents do happen. But you've nothing honed as fine as Bickel. He's a creative discoverer."

  A "creative discoverer" - the failures of all who went before him... all of those clone-brothers, all was preparation for this assault on the problem. If we succeed we survive, and if we fail...

  And Bickel was thinking: Emotion. How do we symbolize it and program for it? What does the body do? We're inside, in direct contact with whatever the body's doing. That's the only thing we can really be objective about. What does the body...

  "It has to have a completely interfunctioning body," Bickel said, seeing the whole problem and answer as an abrupt revelation. "It has to have a body that's gone through trauma and crises." He stared at Flattery. "Guilt, too, Raj. It has to have guilt."

  "Guilt?" Flattery asked, and wondered why the suggestion made him feel angry and half fearful. He started to object, grew conscious of a rhythmic rasping. He thought at first it was a malfunctioning alarm, realized then it was Timberlake. The life-systems engineer had reclasped himself in his action couch cocoon. He was asleep - snoring.

  "Guilt," Bickel said, holding his attention on Flattery.

  "How?" Prudence asked.

  "In program engineering terms," Bickel said, "we must install trapping functions, inner alarm systems - monitors that interrupt operations according to the functional needs of the entire system."

  "Guilt's an artificial emotion; it has nothing to do with consciousness," Flattery objected.

  "Fear and guilt are parent and child. You can't have guilt without fear."

  "But you can have fear without guilt," Flattery said.

  "Can you?" Bickel asked. And he thought: It's the Cain-and-Abel syndrome. Where'd the race pick that one up?

  "Not so fast," Prudence said. "Are you suggesting we install... . that we make this... Ox afraid?"

  "Yeah."

  "Absolutely not!" Flattery said. He had his couch exerciser going, but shut it off, turned to stare at Bickel.

  "Our creature already has a large, fast memory," Bickel said. "It has fixed memory - if you discount our addressing problems, which aren't interfering with function at any rate - and I'll bet this thing has a protected area of memory that's even ready with illusions when they're necessary for self-protection."

  "But fear!" Flattery said.

  "This is the other side of your coin, Raj. You want it to love us? Okay. Love's a kind of need, eh? I'm willing to give it a need for external program sources - that's us, you understand? I'll leave the necessary gaps in its makeup that only we can fill. It'll have emotions, but that means an unlimited spectrum of emotions, Raj. The spectrum includes fear."

  Guilt and fear, Prudence thought. Raj will have to face it. She looked at Bickel, seeing the filmed-over, withdrawn look in his eyes.

  "Pleasure and pain," Bickel muttered. He focused on Prudence, the sleeping Timberlake, on Flattery - each in turn. Did they see that the Ox had to be able to reproduce itself, too?

  Prudence felt her pulse quickening, tore her attention away from Bickel. She put a hand to her temple, checked the pulse there, related this to her quickened breathing, to body temperature, to hungers, to stage of fatigue and awareness. The chemical experiments on her body were giving her an acute awareness of her bodily functions, and that awareness told her she needed chemical readjustment.

  "Well, Raj?" Bickel said.

  I must compose myself, Flattery thought, turning back onto his couch. I must appear natural and calm. He kept his eyes away from the false panel on his repeater board. Under that panel lay death and destruction. Bickel was growing exceedingly alert to the tiniest clues. Flattery marked the quiet green of the flashboard, the ticking of relays through the graph counters. Everything about the ship felt soothing and ordinary - all systems functioning.

  Yet, deep inside himself, Flattery felt knotted up, like an animal poised at the sound of the hunter.

  Pleasure and pain. It could be done, of course: the gradual orientation toward a goal, then denial... interference... removal....rustration... threat of destruction.

  "I'm going back to the shop," Bickel said. "The way to do this is pretty clear, isn't it?"

  "Perhaps to you," Flattery said.

  "There's no stopping," Prudence said, and hoped Flattery heard the implication: There's no stopping him.

  "Go ahead," Flattery said. "Assemble your blocks of nerve-net simulators. But let us think long and hard before we tie your system into the full computer." He looked at Bickel. "Do you still contemplate this black box - white box experiment?"

  Bickel merely stared at him.

  "You know the danger," Flattery said.

  Bickel felt elation, a breakthrough in some inner factor that had resisted him. The ship - its living organisms, its problems - all were like marionettes and marionette toys. The way out was so clear to him - he'd only hinted at it before - so clear. He could see the necessary schematics stacked in his mind, like transparencies piled one on another.

  Four-dimensional construction, he reminded himself. We have to construct a net in depth that contains complex world-line tracks. It has to absorb nonsynchronous transmissions. It has to abstract discrete patterns out of the impulse oversend. The important thing is structure - not the material. The important thing is topology. That's the key to the whole damn problem!

  "Prue, give me a hand," Bickel said. He glanced at the chronometer beside the Com-central board, looked at Timberlake. Let him sleep; Prue could help. She did neat electronics work - surgical in its exactness, clean and with minimal leads and tight couplings.

  "We're going to need a coupling area for each group of multiple blocks," Bickel said, looking at Prudence. "I'm going to turn that job over to you while I build up the major block systems."

  As though his words had accumulated in her mind, built up a certain pressure until they spilled over into understanding, she saw what Bickel intended. He was going to feed a continuous data load into an enormously expanded Ox-cum-computer linkup. He was going to project into the computer, like a film projected on a screen...iant spreadout, an almost infinite psychospace.

  The array of required connectives set themselves up in her mind with parallel rows of binary numbers, crosslinked, interwoven. And she saw that she could reframe the problem, overlap it with matrix functions, creating a problem-solution array like a multidimensional chessboard.

  In the instant of this revelation, she realized that Bickel could not have framed his approach to this solution without using the same mathematical crowbar to lever away the heavy work.

  "You used adjacency matrices," she accused.

  He nodded. She had seen that he was intruding into a new mathematical conception...alculus of qualities by which he could trace neuron impulses and juggle them within the imbedded psychospaces of the Ox-cum-computer.

  Prudence had begun to see what he saw, but the others weren't ready yet for anything more than hints. The possibilities were staggering. The implied methods would permit construction of entirely new computers reduced in size and basic complexity by a factor of at least a thousand. But more important was the understanding this gave him of his own psychospaces and their function in abstraction - the aggregate nerve-cell excitation of his own body and the way this was reduced to recognizable values.

  Thinking within this framework, Bickel saw, put him on a threshold. A certain pressure here, a certain application of energy there, and he knew he would be projected into a consciousness that he had never before experienced.

  The realization inspired fear and awe and at the same time it lured him. He turned, crossed to the hatch into the shop, opened it, looked back at Flattery.

  "Raj," he said. "We're not conscious."

  "What? Huh?" It was Timberlake rousing out of his sleep, rubbing his eyes, staring straight out at Bickel.

  "We're not awake," Bickel said.

  CHAPTER 22

  Beyond the senses there are objects; beyond objects there is mind; beyond the mind there is intellect; beyond the intellect there is the Great Self.

  - Katha-upanishad, Excerpt for instruction of Chaplain/Psychiatrists

  "We're not awake."

  During Flattery's watch, the words haunted him.

  Timberlake had muttered something about, "Damn joker!" and gone off to finish his sleep in quarters.

  But Flattery, dividing his attention between the console and the overhead screen that showed the shop with Prudence and Bickel at work there, felt the ship assume a curious identity in his mind.

  He felt as though he and the others were merely cells of a larger organism - that the telltales, the dials and gauges and sensors, the omnipresent visual intercom - all these were senses and nerves and organs of something apart from himself.

  "We are not awake."

  We keep skirting that thought, Flattery reflected.

  Bickel's voice talking to Prudence in the shop - "Here's the main trunk to handle negative feedback. Follow the color code and tie it in across there." "Here's the damper circuit; we have to watch we don't introduce reverberating cycles into the random neural paths."

  And Prudence, talking half to herself: "The human skull encloses about fifteen thousand million neurons. I've extrapolated from our building blocks and the computer - we're going to wind up with more than twice that number in this... beast."

  Their voices were like echoes in Flattery's mind.

  Bickel: "Think of a threshold to be overcome. Several kinds of pressure will overcome that threshold. They're the pressures involved in entropy - or the pressures of proliferating variability: call that one life. Entropy on one side, life on the other. Each drives past the threshold at a certain pressure level. When one gets through, that turns on the Consciousness Factor."

  Prudence: "Which is it, homeostat or filter?"

  Bickel: "Both."

  Flattery thought then of the total ship, the great machine whose continued life required a certain optimum organization - an ordering process. That involved entropy, certainly, because the system of a total ship tended to settle into a uniform distribution of its energies.

  As far as the ship is concerned, order is more natural than chaos, Flattery thought. But we're playing the ship as though all its parts were an orchestra and Bickel the director. Bickel alone has the score to achieve the music we want.

  Consciousness.

  Bickel: "I tell you, Prue, consciousness has to be something that flows against the current of time. Time in which it's embedded."

  Prudence: "I don't know. When a cell block fires, that sets up an impulse. The impulse divides and forms a multi-branched structure with a single stem - in the nerve-nets, the embedding space. The stem contains that original firing, of course, and you have transmission shooting out through four-dimensional space - it includes time."

  Bickel: "And consciousness is like a boat breasting that flow."

  Prudence: "Against the flow? You have to include time in the diagram, certainly, but the firing and branching are like a complex solid pushed into time, like the veins in a four-dimensional leaf."

  Bickel: "Think of the ship's AAT system. What's that? The thing takes hundreds of duplicates on a single message - all the duplicates having been transmitted in a single, compressed burst... a single firing - and it slows them down, compares them, breaks off the error stems and passes along to you the translated corrected message."

  Prudence: "But consciousness doesn't enter the picture until the message reaches its human receiver."

  Bickel: "Negative feedback, Prue. Input adjusted to the output. If the system malfunctions, the human operator repairs it, like repairing a dam in a stream so you catch a significant amount of the flow."

  Prudence (looking up from a length of neuron fiber she was feeding into a micro-manipulator): "Consciousness...ind of negative feedback?"

  Bickel: "You ever think, Prue, that negative feedback is the most terrifying perfectionist in the universe? It won't permit failure. It's designed to keep the system running between certain limits no matter what the disturbance."

  Prudence: "But... these Ox circuits... you've deliberately introduced errors that aren't -"

  Bickel: "Why not? All our conventional ideas about feedback imply a certain uniformity of environment. But we live in a nonuniform universe. That place out there isn't completely predictable. We've got to keep it off balance out there... by changing the rules ourselves at random."

  Order opposed to chaos, Flattery thought glancing at the overhead screen. Lord! How that block-upon-block extrusion was spreading out from the computer wall! It had proliferated into two major growths with a jungle of vinelike pseudoneuron sheafs between them and around them and over them.

  Bickel lay on his back working beneath the structure. Loops of the main bus connections hung down just above his knees.

  We are not awake, Flattery thought.

  Oh, God! How easy it'd be to give up right now! He was here in the driver's seat, wasn't he? One of the triggers was at hand. Who'd ever know? The ship would die... the problem end. Let the bastards at UMB try again... with somebody else.

  But that was the real problem: they'd try again, all right, but not with somebody else.

  The same miserable charade - over and over and over!

  Look at Prue down there, he thought. She's stopped her anti-S injections. She's experimenting with her body chemistry. She'll be posturing and twisting in front of Bickel pretty soon. And the only way he sees her is as an expert with the micro-manipulator. She does good work!

  We are not awake.

  Consciousness itself created variety, developed offshoot probabilities. And variety thrived on variety. The very act of playing their own special music produced the unpredictable - produced errors.

  Where does communication break down?

  Bickel (grunting as he squirmed out from beneath the Ox): "The generalized body and the specialized brain, Prue - put 'em together and what've you got? Illusion. That's the buffer, illusion. It's the protective layer that lets virtually incompatible systems get in bed together. Consciousness is a producer of illusions."

  Prudence: "Where'd you store the R4DBd neuron reel?"

  Bickel: "Second rack, left end of the bench. Now, you take the illusion of central position."

  Prudence: "That's the natural result of a baby's helpless dependence on its environment. A baby is the center of the universe. We never lose that memory."

  Bickel: "Well, individual sense impressions are something like pebbles dropped in a four-dimensional pond. Consciousness locks onto the waves created by those pebbles, and gives them a spatial and temporal integration so they can be interpreted. Consciousness has to make sense out of things. But its major tool is illusion."

  Spatio-temporal integration, Flattery thought.