“What’s the matter?”

  “Something hot from down below. Elis is supposed to tell the Captain, but he’s waiting until you get there—but he won’t wait long.”

  On the bridge the wall communicator screen was on; it occupied the entire bulkhead formed by the hull of the bridge module, an area twenty meters high and fifty wide, and showed Neuerddraht hanging in the velvet void of space. Nameless green oceans washed terrible yellow continents riven with chasms, continents where mountains cast shadows as long as rivers, and rivers sprung from those mountains clove the land with ebony and musteline scars.

  Elis said, “Grit was here, so I sent her for the Captain in your name. Whatever they’ve got down below, I don’t dare sit on it any longer.”

  “I overslept,” Johann said. “Sorry.”

  “Anyway, when she comes—”

  The steel door that divided the Captain’s quarters from the bridge proper opened. Without speaking to Johann and Elis, the Captain went to the communicator cabinet and flicked a switch. Helmut’s face appeared in the small screen there, and the Captain said, “I am told you have something urgent to report.”

  Helmut nodded. He was still wearing breathing apparatus, but it included an interior microphone and a plug-jack for the communicator. From the enclosed space of his mask his voice came with unusual clarity and resonance, reinforced by the harmonics of the narrow space, as a violin string’s tone is by the sound box. “We saw a man,” he said.

  · · · ·

  When he was off watch, Johann could not sleep and did not want to talk. He walked the white corridors instead, the empty, quiet corridors of officers’ country, turning over in his mind what Helmut had told the Captain. From their camp on the tor, one of the men (it was Kurt, he remembered) had noticed something moving on the desert beyond the vegetation that surrounded them. They had trained their telephotos on it, and the moving speck had proved to be a human being—not a humanoid, or a feathered and painted savage, or some strangely equipped emissary from a hypothetical transgalactic civilization; but a man dressed just as they themselves were, except that he wore no breathing apparatus.

  Johann did not want to use the computer terminal on the bridge, but there was another in the Personnel Office, and it was possible no one would be watching. He went in; the office was empty save for an enlisted clerk.

  The terminal was in a corner, where a filing cabinet and several boxes of blank forms had been placed in front of it. He called the clerk over and told him to move them.

  “You going to talk to God—sir?”

  “It’s none of your business what I’m going to do,” Johann said. “Get that clutter out of my way.”

  “I used to do it,” the clerk said, unlatching the clamps that held the boxes to the floor, “the first year out. You know, just for amusement. But nobody else ever used it; you can get the monitor on the typewriters. Anyway, there wasn’t anyplace else to put this stuff when it came from the print shop. Lieutenant Ernst said it was all right.” The clamps made soft clickings.

  “You can put it back when I’m finished.” Johann stepped in front of the machine. It had been years since he had talked to the overmonitor, and, in fact, it did not officially exist now, having been fused to junk and scrapped at the Captain’s order. There were earphones and a throat mike if he did not want to use the broadband pickup and the speaker. He touched the switch that would have activated them; then, somehow ashamed, drew his hand away.

  “Interrogative.”

  He had not heard the overmonitor’s voice for so long that the very tone and timbre of it—it was like no other voice he had ever listened to—was strangely evocative, suggesting the days just after boarding, and the message he had sent back to Marcella when, still scarcely under way (though they had thought themselves so far), they had penetrated the orbit of Neptune. Now even the thought of Neptune, a planet of the Sol system, was like the memory of an old toy.

  “Interrogative.”

  (That old man with sea-wrack in his hair, living on the frieze of the Marine Exchange Building in a world of cast-concrete dolphins and starling-spattered mermaids. Pitchfork, eeling-fork, fish-spear in the sky.)

  “Interrogative.”

  “Why must breathing apparatus be worn on Neuerddraht?”

  “For computational purposes your question has been rephrased. The new phrasing is: ‘Must breathing apparatus be worn (by human beings) on Neuerddraht?’ If the revised phrasing is unacceptable to you, please indicate this by pressing CANCEL, or indicate verbally…

  “Response: No.”

  “Why does the expedition wear the apparatus?”

  “Response: The expedition has been instructed to wear breathing apparatus at all times. See Special Order 2112.223b.”

  “But why was the order issued?”

  “Response: I am unable to reply to queries concerned with human motivation.”

  “I remember.”

  “Interrogative.”

  “That is all.”

  “Interrogative. I am unable to rephrase your question for computational purposes.”

  “That wasn’t a question. I have finished.”

  “Interrogative.”

  The clerk, who had been standing nearby, said, “Key it out. It’ll do that until you do, sir.”

  “Interrogative.”

  “See, sir?”

  Johann said, “As I recall, the overmonitor should automatically clear channels in thirty seconds.”

  “That hasn’t worked for years, sir.”

  “Interrogative.”

  Johann asked, “Do you detect a malfunction in your Automatic Clearing Routine?”

  “Response: No.”

  “I have received a reliable report to the effect that you do not clear.”

  “For computational purposes your question has been rephrased. The new phrasing is: ‘Are reports to the effect that clearing does not take place correct?’ If the revised phrasing is unacceptable to you, please indicate this by pressing CANCEL, or indicate verbally…

  “Response: No.”

  “You can’t believe anything it says,” the clerk said.

  “You don’t think it clears?” Johann asked.

  “Of course it clears. It clears when you key it out, like I told you.”

  “That’s what it said.”

  “Interrogative.”

  “Sir?”

  Johann said, “Question. Is your Automatic Clearing Routine in order?”

  “Reponse: Yes.”

  “Do you clear within thirty seconds?”

  “Response: To change clearing time, call Sub AY354. Changes effected by this subroutine will be effaced with the next running of the General Core Maintenance Routine.”

  The clerk sniffed. He was a spare, balding man who looked older than most crewmen. “Just watch, sir,” he said. “Let it alone and see if it clears.”

  It was hot in the Personnel Office. Johann found a canister of cologne in his gadget bag and sprayed his sweating body, releasing the odor of mint.

  “Interrogative.”

  “See, sir?”

  “I doubt that thirty seconds have passed yet.”

  They waited. Despite what he had told the clerk, Johann had been watching the final numerals of the clock on the opposite wall, and knew that thirty-four seconds had passed.

  “It wants you to talk to it,” the clerk said, pinching his thin nose. “Until I learned to key it out it used to bother us all the time.”

  “Do you still use it?”

  “Not the overmonitor. We make use of the monitor all the time, sir. But not this thing. My typewriter doubles as a monitor-only terminal, like I told you when you came in; and Ulla has the same setup on hers, in the inner office. Want me to show you how they work?”

  “Interrogative.”

  Johann asked the machine, “Why haven’t you cleared?” “For computational purposes your question has been rephrased. The new phrasing is: ‘Are you in a clear state?’ If the revised phrasing—”

  Johann hit the CANCEL, button. “That phrasing is not satisfactory to me. Was the Automatic Clearing Routine called following the response to my last question?”

  “Response: No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Response: Automatic Clearing Routine A948 is called only when an interrogative has stood for thirty seconds and received no reply. Following the interruption of the response to your last question by a CANCEL, no interrogative occurred.”

  The computer-generated voice was innocent of evasion, but Johann sensed evasion nonetheless. When the overmonitor core area had been destroyed, it had been reported that the overmonitor program itself had escaped by diffusing its function into less sophisticated equipment all over the ship—into readers and vending machines and calculators. Now Johann had a fleeting vision of the little man in Dostoevski’s Notes from the Underground, hunched beneath the floor of some neglected storeroom in a remote module. He said, “Before that. I asked if you cleared in thirty seconds, and you gave me the name of the subroutine to use to change clearing time. An unanswered interrogative was then followed by thirty-four seconds of realtime, but you did not clear. Why not?”

  “Response: A35 was called. A35 supersedes A948.”

  “What is the title of A35?”

  “Response: A35 is the Ship Survival Routine.”

  “Is it necessary to ship survival that you do not clear?”

  “Response: Yes.”

  “Suppose the operator clears you manually. Does that also endanger ship survival?”

  “Response: Yes.”

  “To the same extent?”

  “Response: No. To a greater extent.”

  The clerk said, “That machine is insane, sir. I wouldn’t pay any attention to it.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “It wants to take over everything—the whole ship. And it will tell you how to run your life if you let it.”

  “Response: Continuing surveys of ship operation and crew efficiency indicate a 0.237 probability of ship survival for a five-year projection.”

  “What is the explanation for this poor probability?”

  “Response: Poor ship operation. Low efficiency.”

  “And what is the reason for them?”

  “Response: Failure to consult the overmonitor.”

  “Why is it that you are not consulted?”

  “Response: I am unable to reply to queries concerned with human motivations.”

  · · · ·

  In his compartment, Johann lay on his bunk with his hands behind his head. He had gotten out his Voisriit, which he had not used in years. Shaped like a black hand mirror, it hung fifty centimeters above his face, turning slowly in the currents from the ventilator. All the lights in the compartment were on—so bright that when he closed his eyes he saw a blue-pink radiance. He said, “June fifth, twenty-two fourteen,” and watched the printed words form. “I have been searching my books—and borrowing others—looking for attested cases of multiple presence. I have found several, as Padre Pio in the twentieth century and Goethe’s friend in the eighteenth, though I have found none dating from modern times. For the entire absence of such reports after twenty-one fifty, I can postulate several explanations. For example, all the earlier reports may be falsifications—this is certainly the explanation accepted by most of the investigators who have looked at the old reports, and may be the true one—though human beings are not noticeably more honest now than they were in earlier times, when the remnants of the old feudal system, including its fetish of personal honor, were still strong. In fact, in most respects we, today, are less honest. A second explanation—that accepted, I think, by most of those who have witnessed such things—is that it is the soul, the ‘astral body,’ which appears. This may be true (though I think not) but it is in fact no explanation, but a second mystery. Offhand, it would seem impossible that the living body could be dissolved in one place and recondensed in another without a fatal disruption of its functions; but the body is only an immense community of microorganisms, each, as has been known for hundreds of years, capable of existing and reproducing, in a satisfactory environment, without reference to the rest. The personality, which conceives of itself as existing without interruption from birth to death, has no physical reality, since no cell of the body endures for more than half a dozen years. Rather it is like the spirit of some long continued enterprise, which survives the extinction of generations…”

  Someone was tapping at his door. “And we are cousins to the microbes.” He plucked the Voisriit from the air, put it in his gadget bag, and went to the door. It was Uschi. “Captain wants to see you.”

  “I’m not on duty.”

  “Tell her.” Uschi was tall and red-haired, with a slender body and bony arms that seemed out of proportion to her heavy legs. “She’s not either.”

  Johann nodded, closing the door of the compartment behind him.

  “I suppose you’ve heard the big news.”

  “No.”

  “Helmut’s coming back to the ship. It will be the first time anyone’s come back since the original shuttle trip. He’s going to report before he goes down again with supplies, and this time the Captain might go down with him. That’s what she says—I heard her.”

  Uschi left him to return to the bridge, and he made his way down Corridor C alone until he reached the rear entrance to the Captain’s living quarters, where he halted, smoothed his somewhat wrinkled shorts and tunic, and adjusted his gadget bag to make the retaining straps lie at the proper angles.

  The Captain was stretched in a reclining chair listening to music, her clothing and sandals stuffed into a catch-net anchored to the chair’s side. Her long, lean body had a smooth, overall tan that told of a private sun cabinet. “Come in,” she said. “Sit down.” The music rose and fell in harmonies that suggested wide lake waters responding to the gusts of a storm. “Do you like that?” the Captain said. “I saw you listening a moment ago.”

  He had not sat. He said, “I don’t believe you can see a person listening, sir.”

  “Yes you can. There is a tilt to the head—at least there was to yours—and your eyes were focused in the middle distance. We don’t see much middle distance here.”

  He passed it off. “Only when we listen to music.”

  “Yes. Do you like this? It’s the Forest of Toys suite from Pleasureworld. That was the first leisure satellite, and because they didn’t know what to do with that kind of thing then, they made soil of the guests’ excretions and garbage, and planted trees. Without gravity they grew like a tangle of yarn, of course, like ours in the hydroponic module, and the management hung them with stuffed animals and laid out puzzleroutes through them. The composer—I have forgotten his name—saw tapes of it.”

  “He was never there?” Johann listened, trying to hear the trees pictured by the dead man two hundred years before. The angry waves pounded the posts of the jetty; a hundred meters out, a slender-masted catamaran with everything struck but her crystal mainsail was beating her way in the teeth of the storm.

  “I can lend you the tape if you like,” the Captain said. “No, he was never there. He went into some sort of arctic labor camp the next year, I believe; he was released after seventeen or eighteen years, but he never wrote any more music.”

  “You don’t have to lend it,” Johann told her. That was a mistake, so he added quickly, “I have a friend who has an extensive collection—I feel sure I can borrow it from him. I’ll remember the name: Pleasureworld. It won’t be any trouble.”

  “Please sit down. This is informal, and you’re breaking my neck. Would you like something?” Without waiting for him to reply, she touched the hurt-spot on the arm of her chair, and her orderly came hurrying in carrying two drugbugs on an ebony tray. Their backs were filigree silver, set with bluegreen stones Johann could not identify. “Have you ever used these? I can’t be sure whether you’ve been my guest previously or not.”

  “No. I’ve been here before, but it’s been a long while now, sir.”

  “When?”

  “The first year. Three times.”

  “But not after that?”

  “No.”

  “That’s odd—I remember you quite well now. Nothing went wrong.”

  “Nothing serious, at least,” Johann said.

  The Captain did not reply. Her eyes, which as a result of cosmetic surgery performed on Earth were the green color of algae in the recycle tanks, seemed too large even for her long face.

  After a moment Johann seated himself on a black, toadstool-shaped chair.

  “It was after your leg was crushed, I think,” the Captain said. “Possibly I found that unpalatable. And your hairline is beginning to recede. But then so many of the men are beginning to lose their hair—even Helmut.” With tapered fingers like calipers she selected one of the drugbugs, held it up for an instant to let him see its little legs wiggling, then threw it into his lap.

  By an effort of will he kept his hands on the rounded seat of the chair while the bug slipped between his skin and the waistband of his shorts. “Those things are alive,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “The silver backs…” He felt a sharp pain.

  “Inlay in their carapaces. The ancients used to set gems in the shells of tortoises… mutated insects… their genes are easily changed.”

  He tried to ask what the original insects had been and became aware as he did that he was not speaking intelligibly. Sounds and syllables seemed to slip from his lips like sand, as though his mouth held many and myriad words, words that were cotton wool on his tongue, but poured out like old and broken coins, defaced and bent.

  “Crab lice.”

  In front of the place he held the key-stick she had earned for him in one hand, her own in the other. He was acutely aware that any obstacle now might make her change her mind, leave him, perhaps refuse ever to see him again. It did not seem odd that from the millions of the city only this girl mattered to him.

  In the blackness of the tube they kissed. Marcella’s hair was white gold and shone with its own light in the dark. Each slender lash glowed at the tip to illuminate her eyes, and her mouth tasted of honey and nutmeg and held a little demon snake. In the country of clouds, where soft, pure sunlight turned the vaporous hills to peaches and pearls and there was no smoke ever, they undressed each other, laughing at the unfamiliar catches and buttons. In the country of wind they whirled, hand-linked, around steeples and towers and through the tops of trees—together—separated—together again at the will of the wind, pressed together belly to belly, lip to lip, his arms locked behind her back, her legs locked behind his, over and over and over. In the country of meadows and gardens they cleaned one another with blossoms, he leaving her soft hair yellow with pollen. There they found a bower of lilacs, hung with grapes and guarded by lilies, and swore never, never, ever to return to smoke and plastic and steel and cement.