“We have wondered about matters of elimination,” Maria said. “There is a toilet cubicle in the corner, but we’re uncertain whether or not you are compatible with it.”

  “I excrete pellets and a small amount of fluid from a valve between my legs,” Twelve said. Maria and Ubu looked at each other.

  “Sounds familiar,” Ubu said. “Guess the toilet’ll work.”

  Twelve received instruction in the zero-gee toilet and the acceleration couches. Beautiful Maria then produced a small boxlike object, a cheerful bright red in color.

  “This is a multichannel recorder,” she said. “When turned on, it will record any sound in the room. When you want to practice speaking, you can record our speech on one channel and your own speech on the other. You can compare your speech to ours and refine your pronunciation.”

  Twelve was overwhelmed. “Many thanks, reverend bossrider. I shall treasure the recorder and guard it well.”

  Twelve took the recorder. The red surface was some kind of soft resinous material, grained like the skin of a nonvolitional loader. Maria demonstrated the machine’s use. Twelve practiced briefly, producing sounds from his voder, recording them on Channel One and playing them back. He set the machine to record the rest of this conversation on Channel Two.

  Ubu hooked one foot under one of the bars of the command cage. He pointed to each of the five couches. “Each acceleration couch is placed at a different post. Navigation, pilot’s station, shooter’s station, communications, ship systems... We ask you not to use any of the equipment unless you have been instructed and have asked permission.”

  “Of course, reverend bossrider.”

  “We would like to show you how to use the communications board. From here you can speak to us if you are in need, or call up music or hype to aid you in learning our language.”

  “I thank you, reverend bossrider.”

  Maria gracefully twisted herself in air, planted her feet on a wall, pushed off gently, and caught the padded bar above the comm board. She slid easily through the bars of the command cage and floated above the board. Maria looked at Twelve and showed her white teeth—a “smile,” Twelve knew, a gesture which he was slowly learning to think of as reassuring. “Are you familiar with the concept of a hype?” she asked.

  “A recorded drama, usually of a sensationalist nature.” Twelve’s recitation was from memory.

  “You understand that a hype is fiction? That it never happened?”

  Twelve contemplated this notion—though the word was in his vocabulary, he’d never had to think about it till now— and he restrained a delicate shudder. “It is a recording of a lie, then?”

  Ubu and Maria looked at each other, then at Twelve. “Yes,” Maria said. “In a sense.”

  Twelve trembled as two instincts warred in him. He did not wish to pollute his mind with untruth; but neither did he wish to offend his hosts.

  “Hypes are dramas about fictional people and—” Beautiful Maria fell silent for a moment, looked at Ubu, looked back. “They’re the sort of thing that can happen, but usually don’t, and they’re arranged so as to leave out all the boring parts. All the parts that don’t matter.”

  Twelve gazed at her. Suddenly he was very lonely. “I will consider this, Beautiful Maria.”

  “Dramas,” Ubu interjected, his voice loud, “are full of hypothetical action. They are things that might happen, and they explore... the ways in which humans might respond to things that. . . might happen to them. Jesus Rice. I’m repeating myself. But—” He looked at Maria and performed a complex gesture that rippled his shoulders.

  “We don’t want you to take them too seriously,” Maria said “Some of them are very violent, and I don’t want you to believe that humans are normally as violent as this. But humans find violence interesting and they dramatize it a lot.”

  Twelve worked through this slowly. “Hypes are based upon hypothetical action?”

  “Yes.” Maria’s hair drifted before her face and she shook it out of the way. What was it for? Twelve wondered. At some appropriate moment he would ask.

  “So hypes are instructive in nature?” Twelve asked. “They demonstrate how humans should act in certain circumstances? As with the simulations of singularity shots in your AI?”

  “Yes,” said Ubu.

  “No,” said Maria.

  Shock exploded in Twelve at the realization that Beautiful Maria had just contradicted the bossrider. A thrill of agony ran through him in anticipation of Ubu Roy’s revenge. Would he order her dissolution immediately? Or would he simply kill her now and take her head?

  To Twelve’s amazement Ubu had no reaction. He just looked at Maria without any discernible expression. “Yes and no,” Maria corrected. “The range of behavior in hypes is both positive and negative. It demonstrates the range of human behavior rather than any single—rather than what is necessarily correct.”

  Ubu looked at Twelve. “Maria is right,” he said.

  Twelve froze in astonishment. The reverend bossrider had not only permitted himself to be contradicted, but had allowed his opinion to be swayed by that of his servant.

  Twelve felt weak. He was well out of his depth.

  Docilely, he allowed himself to be instructed in the use of the comm board. Ubu and Beautiful Maria took their leave, saying that they had to prepare for Runaway’s departure. They would signal him when they were ready for acceleration.

  Twelve used the toilet and, without waiting for the signal, webbed himself into the acceleration couch in front of the comm board. His mind was in turmoil.

  The air was horribly dry and thick. The yellow light seared his vision. A small white quadruped floated through the door, stared at him for a long moment as it drifted across the room, said nothing, touched the far wall, and sprang out in haste. Twelve’s mind wailed for a taste of Beloved. He ordered his recorder to play Channel Two.

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  Horrible. Evil. Blasphemy.

  Yes/No, his mind danced. No/Yes.

  They were all mad. They entertained themselves with lies and contradicted their superiors without fear of obliteration. He was trapped here. Panic keened in his veins.

  The signal for acceleration came. Was he ready? Maria asked.

  Yes/No, he thought. His graceful inner fingers typed an affirmative answer.

  The cage gimbaled as acceleration came, gentle at first, then with a hideous rumbling intensity. Gravity compressed his flesh, dropped ballast on his hearts. It became hard to breathe. His mind swam. Twelve squeezed his eyes shut and gave himself up to terror, to death.

  The horror seemed to go on forever.

  Then, suddenly, it was over. The rumbling ceased and Twelve floated free in his webbing. His hearts surged as if to make up for lost time.

  Beloved! he wailed.

  Yes, he thought. No.

  *

  Beautiful Maria’s soft hair drifted against Ubu’s face, offered a warm blanketing touch. He stroked his cheek against it. Maria leaned closer, kissed his throat, thrust her hips against Ubu, swallowing him.

  Ubu was anchored by his upper set of arms from a padded castoff bar set in the ceiling of his compartment. The centrifuge had been locked down prior to acceleration, and he held himself in place by fingertips alone, his lower arms holding Maria’s hips, giving her the freedom to move as inspiration took her.

  Maria kissed him, tasted his salt skin. He hung motionless as Maria danced against his body. She dusted his smooth muscles with her fingertips, brushed the tips of her breasts against his chest, slowly turned her head from side to side in order to draw her hair’s caress across his face and neck.

  Ubu released the castoff bar and the two bobbed around the room, their slow trajectory altered in minor ways as their mass reacted to their movements. They finished in Ubu’s rack, strapped together in his webbing, Ubu’s four arms tangled in the polymer harness, his arm and shoulder muscles flexing as he sought leverage, traction, advantage...

  Maria’s pleasure receded slowly. She stretched herself, infusing her muscles with blood. Her skin seemed a complex organic sensor set to receive radiations of pleasure, striations of happiness, coded signals of joy from the electron world that wove its nets about her, as complicated as the tangle of harness webbing in which she lay... She opened her eyes, saw her view obstructed by clouds of drifting hair, pulled it behind her head. Ubu’s body hung in the webbing a few heartbeats away. His eyes were distant.

  “I wonder what our passenger would think of this,” Maria said.

  Ubu took a moment to process this comment. “He’d probably think we’re fusing. Like him with Beloved.”

  “That’s what we were doing.”

  He grinned. “I think we’re a little better than that.”

  “Probably. It doesn’t look like much fun for him.”

  “I wonder if he knows what fun is.”

  She drew her hair away again. “Will you braid my hair? Be weightless for a while yet, and it’ll just get in my way.”

  “Sure.”

  Maria turned over. Ubu sat astride her and held her between the strong muscles of his thighs while his four arms worked the plait with care and precision. He finished and she stretched again, hanging content in the webbing.

  “I don’t want to go back,” Ubu said. The tone in his voice made her look at him over her shoulder.

  “I’ll be ready,” she said. “I’d like to get on Angel’s Fringe again.” She grinned. “See some old friends. Play some blackhole. It could be fun now the stakes don’t matter.”

  “The Fringe is dying,” Ubu said. “We can’t stop that. No matter how successful we are.” He looked away. “I don’t want to have to watch it go.”

  She frowned at him. Something had changed. “What’s the matter? What happened?”

  He shrugged. “It occurred to me that right now we’re winners. We’ve got sole knowledge of an alien civilization, a cargo hold worth tens of millions, our freedom... and if things go well, all we can do is keep what we’ve already got. And if things don’t go well, we lose it.”

  We lose each other. That, she knew, was what he meant. She rolled over, faced him.

  “There’s nothing we can do, right?” she said. “We can’t hide out here forever.”

  “No.”

  “And we’ve got our plans. Your plans. Prefabricated ships, stations...”

  “Yeah.” He gave a halfhearted grin. “Lots of plans. But right now we’re ahead, and I’ve never been ahead before, and I just wish we could quit.”

  She sighed, let herself drift among the polymer straps. “I don’t know what you want, Ubu,” she said.

  “Just what I’ve got now. Nothing more, not really.”

  Maria put her arms around his neck, looked level into his eyes. “Hey. Things change.”

  “Yeah.” Suddenly his eyes were hard—brittle chips of blue glass. He reached for the webbing, began taking it down, untangling himself.

  Maria’s pulse beat a little quicker. “Where are you going?”

  “Time to get ready for the shoot.” His voice was sharp. He was angry, and Maria couldn’t tell why. “And we should show Twelve how to use the fuge elevator before we have to do it under gravity. If he isn’t used to the setup he may break something.”

  Sadness wafted over her. She didn’t know how this had started, how to end it, what it meant.

  “Okay,” she said. “If that’s what you want.”

  After learning how to enter the centrifuge hub and ride the little elevator to the primary control stations on the lower level of the fuge, Twelve returned to auxcontrol and strapped himself into his couch. He remained there during the shoot, frozen with terror. He’d never been conscious during a shoot and was afraid it would be as horrible as the breakaway acceleration from the bluegreen giant. He listened to the automated countdown while his fingers gripped the arms of the chair, and then—there wasn’t even a blink in his consciousness —it was over. Amazement flowed through him, then joy. He had survived with body and mind intact.

  He opened his food locker, ate, drank water from the tap—no one had shown him how to use the cup dispenser—and then used the toilet. He played with the recorder. “We would like to sshow you how to usze the communicationz board,” he repeated, trying to get Maria’s inflection right. He kept making accidental, incidental buzzing sounds, and he had a hard time working with the sibilants. “From here you can zbeak to uzz if you are in need, or call up muszic or hype to aid you in learning our language.”

  Hype. Twelve tried not to think about it.

  He ran the recorder forward, repeating the words, fixing them in his mind; but before long the conversation wandered into disturbing areas and Twelve decided not to face the problem of human contradiction just yet.

  Twelve listened to the first part of the conversation several times and repeated the words aloud, playing them back, until he could do a presentable imitation of Ubu and Maria, not just their words and inflections but the voices themselves. He tried inventing sentences using these same words in a different order, but the mixture of Ubu’s and Maria’s voices sounded odd, and for this he had to invent another voice, a kind of modulation of the first two. He worked hard at it.

  Time passed. He ate and drank again.

  He found himself looking at the comm board.

  Hype.

  His hearts beat faster. Twelve bent to the comm board, called up the index, chose one title from the hundreds available, and started his recorder.

  The title of the chosen hype was Bloodbath in Building Four, which suggested to Twelve’s hopeful mind that the subject matter might have to do with genetics. Unfortunately the title proved misleading.

  The hype’s action was complex and left much to ponder. It seemed to concern a struggle for supremacy among a number of human clans. The main character, Ahmad, was an “agent” for one clan, and had somehow been inserted into another clan for the purpose of discovering their intentions— the precise mechanism of this insertion, which Twelve would have found interesting, was regrettably left unclear. Twelve understood how useful it would be to be able to pass one’s own servants off as those of someone else; but Twelve had never heard of any way in which genetic markers could pass undetected. Still, here Ahmad was, operating among his enemies, without their smelling out his origins. Possibly, Twelve noted, Beloved could purchase this ability from the humans and make herself and her servants nearly invincible. Twelve would inquire.

  Twelve observed that much of human communication seemed to be transmitted via facial “expression,” primarily through the constant motion of “eyebrows,” which were forever wigwagging up and down, in and out. Twelve began to categorize these positions but gave up the task as hopeless—there were too many, and he did not yet understand enough context.

  Ahmad’s task was quite soon complicated by the appearance of an enemy female, Kirstie, whose profession was described as “rughunter,” a word not available in Twelve’s vocabulary but apparently meaning someone engaged in the detection of the agents of enemy clans. Instead of avoiding Kirstie, Ahmad seemed inexplicably attracted to her. Twelve could not at first understand this perversity, but later deduced that Kirstie’s type possessed valuable hereditary traits which Ahmad’s clan was anxious to acquire. Kirstie, not surprisingly, was suspicious of his approaches and pressed her mouth and nose to his body frequently in a presumed attempt to detect his alien genetics. Ahmad demonstrated his confidence in his own masking abilities by permitting this.

  There were complicated intrigues going on at the same time—in the absence of Kirstie’s clan head, who oddly enough was never shown or referred to, various servants conflicted as to the interpretations of clan policy and began killing one another in a perfect frenzy. Kirstie was involved in this slaughter and Ahmad persuaded her to join with the forces of his own clan in restoring order. Though this was not made explicit, it would appear that his price for assistance was possession of Kirstie and her valuable genetics, for after a long combat, in which the forces of Kirstie’s clan were almost entirely destroyed, she returned without protest to Ahmad’s clan.

  Reflecting on the drama afterward, Twelve concluded that despite Maria’s insistence that hypes were not necessarily didactic, this particular hype had nevertheless an instructive message, namely that lines of authority had to be firmly established. If Kirstie’s clan head, in her absence, had merely indicated which of her servants was to give orders and which to obey, none of the self-destructive attempts to dictate policy would have ever been initiated, and the clan wouldn’t have suffered civil disorder and destruction.

  Twelve used his recorder to play bits of the dialogue back, and he added to his repertoire of words and phrases. During this process, Beautiful Maria appeared and asked him if he was well. Twelve used his voder in response.

  “Got nothing to wrack about,” he said, a favorite phrase of Ahmad’s.

  “Interesting,” Maria said, after a pause. She informed Twelve that there would be another shoot within an hour or so, and that after she and Ubu had rested they and Twelve would be able to talk if Twelve so wished. Twelve indicated his readiness.

  Maria left and Twelve called up the directory of hypes. He decided to look for something less violent if possible and chose a drama called The Libation Bearers, a title that seemed pacific enough. He strapped himself into the chair, turned on his recorder, and waited for enlightenment.

  Hours later, after two shoots in a row, Maria found Twelve catatonic in his acceleration couch. He was lying on his left side in a slightly curled posture. His eyes gazed unfocused in four different directions, like carelessly dropped marbles. Mouth branches floated in and out with steady breaths. His keyboard transmitter had slipped its strap and floated over his head.

  He would not respond. Beautiful Maria hung on to the castoff bar at the top of Twelve’s couch. She hoped Twelve was asleep, that this behavior was something normal. Anxiety skittered under her skin. Twelve’s steady breathing continued unabated. Tiny drops of drool were flung by the mouth branches into the weightless room. With a push of her fingers Maria moved to the comm board and called Ubu.