"There always are," said Molly.

  "Number 1," recited Idho.

  THE FORM-FIELDS MUST BE GIVEN NEW ORGANISMS TO INSPIRE.

  Tex shuddered at this echo of the Bishop's horrible Voice. "What does he mean, inspire?"

  "The Worm is not a he," Idho reminded him. "Inspire means to inspirit. Look it up. Number 2."

  A HOME MUST BE MADE FOR THEM—A SANCTUARY.

  "Great," said Tex. "Like what, I'm supposed to invest heavily in virgin forest?"

  "Number 3," said Idho.

  YOU HAVEN'T GOT ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD.

  Idho cast a smug look over them. "You weren't required to get in over your head like this," she said. "You could have just rotted and been reabsorbed like everyone else. But no: you had to play Make a Wish at the doorstep of Death. You had to summon your feeble deities. Now live with the destiny you have invoked."

  What destiny? Molly started to ask. But it was too late. Where Idho had been—what Idho had been—there was bow only a clutch of withered black berries. Molly crossed the room and picked them up and rolled them gently between her fingers. Tex came over and put a hand on her Moulder, rubbed the muscles there, or the place where physical muscles would have been. It felt wonderful. "What now, Raven?" he asked her.

  Molly cupped the berries in her hand. "I think I'm going to plant her," she said.

  "I'd like to see her

  trapped in a

  little pot."

  or

  "am I stuck with this bear

  for life?"

  * * *

  Gene Deere demanded. He followed close on Ludi's heels as she tromped down the gangway to the foredeck of the Linear Bee.

  "Stuck?" said Ludi, not looking back at him. "You've given your life over to being this corporate drone working in a metal can on an Air Force base and now you're whining about being stuck!"

  The thump of their footsteps, then the clamor of their voices, jarred Tex and Molly from a midday doze in the sunshine of the flying bridge.

  "What's going on?" muttered Tex, sleepily.

  Molly stuck her head out over the open hatch. Gene and Ludi were passing through the living quarters now. She listened while they clattered aftward, toward the galley. The houseboat rocked with the shifting of body masses.

  "We've been boarded, it sounds like," Molly said.

  "By pirates?" Tex was smiling at her, his eyes narrowed to little slits, as though he were stoned.

  "Let's go see," said Molly.

  Down in the galley Ludi leaned into the open door of the refrigerator. Gene stood behind her, examining the assortment of magnets holding up magazine clippings and recipes and photographs there. He removed one item for closer examination: a touristy snapshot of a young woman with long brown hair smiling beneath a sign that read:

  WELCOME

  to JEROME, ARIZONA

  "You can tell a lot about someone this way," said Gene.

  "Yeah?" Ludi replied from somewhere around the hydrator. "So, what's your take on Tex and Molly?"

  "Typical leftist ditzes," he said. "Earth Firsters. Mother Jones types. I could probably draw you a picture of what the two of them looked like."

  "Look like," said Ludi, straightening up to face him. "Okay—so draw. There's paper on that shelf over there."

  "I can't draw," he said. "I was just saying—"

  "I know what you were saying." She went back to her rummaging among the vegetables.

  "What are you looking for?" said Gene.

  "Nothing in particular. Something to make a sandwich out of. I haven't been eating all that well lately. I've had a bunch of stuff to deal with."

  "Like what?"

  (Molly's question exactly.)

  Ludi closed the refrigerator door. She was holding a stab of mystery cheese from the I.G.A. deli section and a mostly empty jar of brown mustard. "None of your business," she told him lightly, pirouetting to face the counter.

  The galley was so tiny that even this minor adjustment of position required Gene to back up a step. Even so, Ludi's elbow rubbed his stomach. Laying the food down, she gave him a glance across the shoulder that Molly read as appreciation of his taut youthful abs. Gene was oblivious.

  The mystery of the cheese had deepened with age. Gouda? Gruyere? Something hormone-enhanced from Wisconsin? Ludi cleavered off a thick chunk upon which she lavished the remains of the mustard.

  "Doesn't smell very appetizing," said Gene.

  "You had your chance," said Ludi, "to take me out to breakfast. Now suffer."

  "I had other things on my mind," he said. "I didn't expect to get, you know—caught up in everything."

  Ludi took a large bite of cheese and chewed it thoughtfully. When her mouth was clear she said, "Caught up? In what? You mean like, taking an interest in a fellow human being? I can see how that would be unfamiliar to you."

  "I was trying," said Gene, sounding irked, "to be helpful."

  "Yeah, well. You certainly helped get me confused. And I was confused enough to begin with."

  "About what?"

  "None of your business."

  Which now, on second hearing, Molly understood to mean: Guillermo. Ludi was trying to avoid Guillermo. She was ducking his calls and even keeping away from her own apartment. Hence, she was not eating too well.

  Which explained, Molly figured, at least in part, Ludi's frequent visits to the Linear Bee.

  But what explained Gene Deere?

  Obviously, thought Molly, I've got some catching up to do.

  QUESTS AND QUESTIONS

  "Bear," she said. Nudging Tex, who had drifted off in the sunshine. He moaned. He covered his head with a pillow.

  "Bear," she repeated. "Don't you wonder what Ludi is doing here on the Bee? And why she's brought Green Gene along?"

  Tex got an eye open long enough to say: "I figure it's not our problem."

  "But it's our boat."

  "But we're dead."

  "Not that dead. You heard what the yew tree person said. We're on a Quest. You and I. Together."

  Tex shook his head. "She wasn't talking about a quest into other people's lives."

  Molly could not argue. And yet in her heart, or someplace, she knew that these matters were all tangled up. Everything connected with everything else. "All movement arises from the Field."

  Tex gave a slight jerk. "What's that from?"

  "Listen," said Molly. "You've got this friend who's an oak tree, right?"

  "Not exactly." He propped himself up. "He's a, some kind of field of potential form, I don't know. A dryad."

  "Exactly. So you've got to figure out something about trees if you're going to help him. Right? Now, who knows all about trees?"

  "Who knows all about trees?" said Tex: compliant now.

  "A botanist," pronounced Molly. "And right now, for reasons we do not know, we've got a botanist standing in our galley."

  "Yeah?" said Tex. He studied her face, like trying to figure where she was going with this.

  "So don't you wonder," she said, choosing her words with a certain precision, "why Green Gene is following Ludi around, and why they are now aboard our boat?"

  "Yes," he said. "Definitely."

  She waited. He was as thick as a stump sometimes. "Then why don't you ask me?" she said.

  "What?"

  "Why don't you ask me, Why is Gene Deere following—"

  "Ah!" Tex brightened. His little earrings jangled as energy seemed to flow out from him. "You want me to ask you, so you can do that vision thing."

  She patted his hand. "That's a good Bear," she said.

  THE PAST OF THE PRESENT

  Thistle Herne, the formerly naked teenage girl, had a facility for making herself quite at home in virtually no time under any circumstances. After inhabiting the inglenook of Gene's bungalow for a day and a half, she settled herself in the passenger seat of the Range Rover as though she expected to be living there for at least a month. First she plumped up Gene's brushed-cotton cricket sweater to make a pillow; then she rotated sideways so that her legs were on the seat beside her, the knees jutting up an at angle that no one over the age of 25 would have found tolerable; and then she rested her head on one hand, supported by a skinny elbow, and began browsing through a stack of magazines, trade paperbacks, and CD liner notes that she had assembled for the voyage.

  "Okay," she said to Gene, who was watching with interest from the driver's seat. "I'm ready now."

  As though he had been waiting for this.

  Which he had, of course.

  Among the items she had borrowed (Gene hoped this was not a euphemism, but he was too weary to make a contest of it) were:

  Bang on a Can LIVE, Volumes 1-3

  Ada

  SimAnt

  Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music by Esquivel

  Typical Emergent Patterns in Artificial Life (Xeroxed monograph)

  How the Leopard Changed Its Spots: The evolution of complexity

  Archie McPhee (mail-order catalog)

  Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 2

  CRI American Masters Series: Lou Harrison

  As Gene drove, she reprogrammed the buttons on his radio.

  "You shouldn't listen to public broadcasting," she told him. "No one should. Not till you're my dad's age. Then I guess you need it."

  "How old is your father?" said Gene.

  "I haven't got a family," she said. "Remember?"

  Gene shifted up. "Don't lose that damn Archie McPhee," he told her: sternly, in loco parentis.

  "Trust me," she said, favoring him with an angelic smile.

  The sight of her long thin legs speckled with sun-bleached hairs annoyed him. He knew that you were not supposed to fixate on things like this—she was young enough to be thought of as somebody's daughter—but there was a definite aesthetic perfection about the way she looked, a quality of idealized form-in-development that he found beautiful from a standpoint that he hoped (and would have argued) was more scientific than sexual.

  Probably he was correct. It was his business, after all, to unravel the mysteries of morphogenesis, or the creation of forms. One of the oldest and still most perplexing of these mysteries is the matter of sameness within diversity. That is, the phenomenon whereby all growing limbs—human or horse or salamander—can be seen to resemble this particular (slender, slightly pink-toned) limb, to such an extent and in such fine detail that you really have to suppose a universal principle to be at work. And yet the effort of nearly two centuries to assign this similarity of form to a branching tree of common ancestors had failed to yield the smoking Adam. The old hope of explaining such parallels of morphology through strict Darwinian analysis—random small-scale variation followed by natural selection followed by further variation, ad exhaustio—now seemed doomed to failure. Not that any of Gene's professors had been quite prepared to admit it. You had to be young, he guessed, and uncommitted to the reigning orthodoxy. Or at least not worried about tenure.

  The fact was that this perfect limb of the teenager on the seat beside him told (as did all limbs, growing from every kind of creature) a kind of story: a story that Nature repeated again and again, following the same sequence of plot twists, the same unfolding of themes, adapting it to an infinite variety of protagonists. And whatever the reasons Nature loved this story so well—whether they were rooted in hard physics or (as Einstein liked to say) the mind of God—they did not seem to arise from a local context. They were not, in other words, determined by an individual's genes. No: the moral of this old and ever-beguiling story, "How Thistle Got Her Leg," had to be sought in the broadest possible context: the context of Nature itself. Or Herself, as the case may be.

  Gene liked to think of himself as open-minded. Not to the extent of entertaining heretical views like Sheldrake's theory of Morphic Resonance (whereby Thistle's leg was shaped this way because many previous teenage legs had been shaped this way). But enough to feel that there was something important that was not yet known, something just out of reach, waiting to be grasped. Something unthought-of and astonishing.

  Thistle had spun the dial hard left, to WURS.

  "I saw my father's head explode," she chanted.

  "What?" said Gene.

  Thistle looked at him, then out the window. "Take a right here," she said.

  "Where?" said Gene. "I don't see a road."

  "There isn't a road. This is a Rover, right? What are you worried about?"

  The place where they turned was a muddy track about one arm-span wide, designated only by a blaze orange placard hand-lettered with a black permanent Magic Marker to read:

  YOU ARE ENTERING

  FREE TERRITORY

  Cops, Feds, Tax Assessors,

  Animal Rights Activists—

  TAKE NOTE

  "This is completely Master Ninja," said Thistle. St slapped her bare thighs.

  It was a good design, Gene thought. After all these millions of years, it still gets the job done.

  SPIRALS (2)

  "You live out here?" Gene asked her, deep enough in the woods to be down in first gear, slogging from one mudhole to the next. "In the middle of nowhere?"

  Thistle gave this careful and, it seemed to Gene, unnecessarily prolonged consideration. Finally she said very seriously, "I don't really live anywhere."

  "Ah, yes. I forgot."

  "And I don't think," she continued, looking back out the window, "you would really call this the middle of nowhere, would you? I mean, wouldn't that be somewhere up in International Paper territory?"

  Gene chuckled. Perverse exactitude was a quality he could relate to. "Have you been up that far?" he asked her.

  "I've been everywhere," she said.

  In her lap lay a Xeroxed pen & ink graphic labeled:

  Fig 12. Emergent spiral formed in the Beloussov-Zhabotinsky

  reaction, compared with meristem (typified) in juvenile

  Liquidambar styraciflua

  She stared at this for a while and then wondered aloud, "What are these things all about?"

  He could not be sure whether she seriously wanted an answer. It was dangerous to think and drive.

  "I swear to God," he said, "I thought I saw a wolf back there. Right in that stand of birch trees—just staring at us."

  "Probably," said Thistle.

  Her disinterest appealed to him, somehow. He tapped the drawing at the top of the page, which looked like this:

  He told her, "The Beloussov-Zhabotinsky reaction is a self-organizing pattern that arises when you mix a certain combination of organic and inorganic chemicals in a petri dish. It's cited there as an example of the spontaneous emergence of order out of chaos."

  Thistle nodded. Gene tapped the picture at the bottom of the page:

  Angle of divergence between successive leaf buds = 137.5°

  "And here," he said, "you've got the same distinctive spiral—it's drawn differently, but it's got the exact same angle of divergence, 137.5 degrees—shown by the meristem of a sweet gum tree. But that's an arbitrary choice. You could walk out into your backyard and find the same thing almost anywhere. Spiral phyllotaxis is the most common pattern of growth in higher plants, and this particular angle is the most stable of the spiral forms that occur."

  Thistle nodded again. She turned the paper sideways, then upside down. The patterns were no more or less apparent from any angle. After a while she asked him: "What about maples? Red maples?"

  "Well, no," he said. "They display a different pattern, if that's what you mean. They're said to be whorled."

  "How about lawn grass?"

  "Um, no, I don't think—"

  "Then you won't find it in our backyard," she said. "Because that's all we've got. And some crappy yews around the foundation."

  Gene was mystified. "Out here!" he said. "You've got nothing but maples and lawn grass?"

  "No," she said. "Back home." And she turned the page, and that seemed to be the end of it.

  The woods were as magnificent as the road was godawful. Tulip poplars soared like classical columns, their side branches so high that they were hidden by beeches and maples. The trunks themselves were intricate vertical landscapes, deeply channeled and fissured, bristling with a hairy lichen called old-man's beard. Except for some huge and exotically colonized boulders, the ground was completely hidden beneath a miniature jungle of bright green ferns, as luminous as stained glass in the sunlight. Gene was slipping into a (strictly professional) reverie, when Thistle said: "So what's it mean? What's the connection between a sweet gum and a bunch of chemicals in a petri dish? Is this some kind of stupid science trick?"

  Gene suppressed his immediate reaction. It was actually a more interesting question that it seemed to be. "Not a science trick, exactly," he said. "That's the point, more or less. Actually it's a trick that has thus far eluded science. The point is, there is no connection between a growing Liquidambar and a bunch of chemicals reacting in a petri dish. They're unrelated in almost every way. Living versus nonliving. Spatial versus flat. Naturally occurring versus artificially created. That's what makes the pattern so fascinating. You see? Because there's no obvious reason, as far as our current level of understanding goes, why this precise spiral should emerge, as opposed to some other pattern. Or no pattern at all."

  "So what are you saying?" said Thistle.

  "I'm not sure I'm saying anything," he said. "What the author of the paper is saying is: genes don't govern everything, after all. The conventional view, you see, is that everything about the structure of a sweet gum tree, or any other living thing, is written into a set of assembly instructions, encoded in the DNA. And if we only knew how to decode it, we could learn how you put together this tree. But the author argues that this is not, in fact, a proven scientific principle. It is merely a belief. An act of faith—like religious faith, except here the belief is in an unknown molecular mechanism. The picture shows that an identical form has arisen spontaneously from an assortment of chemicals mixed together and left undisturbed in a laboratory, where there is no DNA present. No program of any kind. Except whatever program might be said to exist implicitly in Nature itself—in the fundamental structure of the Universe."