The hype file, she saw, was still up. Maria reversed herself, hooked her feet into the straps beneath the board, and checked the index for any hypes that had been run in the last few hours. Bloodbath in Building Four, it said, and The Libation Bearers. Both had been played to their conclusion.

  Ubu appeared, followed by Maxim, who bounded slowly and gently about the room, interested in the stranger but keeping his distance. Ubu tried to awaken Twelve, first with a call, then by prodding and nudging. He looked at Maria. “What was he doing?”

  “Watching a couple of hypes.”

  “Which ones?”

  Maria told him. He frowned. “I saw that first one,” he said, then drifted to the comm board and looked up The Libation Bearers. “This one’s old,” he said. “It’s been in the comp since the ship was built. ‘An adaptation of the classic drama by Aeschylus,’ it says. Jesus Rice. No wonder I’ve never looked at it.”

  “Who’s Aeschylus?”

  “I’m still working on libation.” Ubu looked at Twelve, gnawed his lip. “All we can do is keep a watch on him and hope he comes out of it. Don’t want to start filling him full of human medication.”

  “We could watch the hypes. See if we could figure out what set him off.”

  “It might not be the hypes. He might be sick. Maybe we infected him.”

  “Let’s hope it’s not mutual.”

  “Let’s.” He thought for a moment. “It wasn’t the shoot, right? He was okay after the first shoot?”

  “I guess. He talked to me. He used some old slang I hadn’t heard in years.”

  Ubu sighed. “I’ll bring a sleeping harness up here. One of us should stay with him.”

  Maxim, bored, drifted away.

  Maria looked at Twelve and was startled to see him move, shift slightly in his webbing. Her heart lifted. She waited for his eyes to focus, for his body to come to attention. In vain.

  He had made himself a little more comfortable, that was all. It offered at least a little hope that something in there was still responding.

  They waited for him to regain consciousness. Waited for hours.

  *

  Ubu put the headset down, the final staves of The Libation Bearers still ringing through his mind. He had watched it through the stim set rather than risk driving Twelve further into shock by playing the thing out loud again. The drama had been bewildering and frustration flittered in Ubu like the hype’s pursuing Furies.

  He shook his head. “Weird,” he said.

  “What was it about?”

  “A bunch of old-time people living in Mudville. The mother kills the father before the story starts, so the son and daughter team up with a god to kill the mother and her boyfriend. The whole thing was—I guess it was poetry. And there was this weird... bunch of women... who wandered through the play, singing and dancing while beating cymbals and drums. And there were demons as well as the god. I guess they were demons.” He shrugged. Undirected anger shivered through him. “Pretty strange. I don’t know what to make of it.”

  “Have we got a fastlearn on it?”

  “I doubt it.” His hands started tapping keys. “I don’t think the vid is what upset Twelve,” he said. “There wasn’t even any violence on camera. It all happened somewhere else. Bloodbath must have featured five hundred corpses and Twelve went on to watch the next vid.” Data flickered in midair. Ubu peered at it. “We don’t have a fastlearn, but we’ve got a recorded lecture on Greek drama. Whatever Greek is.”

  “On cartridge or in the database?”

  “It’s in the database. I think the holocomputer came with it and a bunch of other old vids nobody ever watches— I bet nobody’s ever used it.”

  Beautiful Maria looked at him. “Should we check the text?”

  Ubu thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t see any reason to. I don’t think the hype had anything to do with it. I think Twelve’s sick.”

  Maria’s look was bleak. “I think you’re right.”

  Ubu took off his lap belt, pushed off the couch, stretched his muscles. The whole thing had been a waste of time. The vid’s bizarre choral rhythms keened in his memory. He looked at Twelve, then at Maria. A sudden thought jolted him.

  “Hey,” he said. “Maybe it was the music in the vid. Maybe the drums were beating the wrong rhythm. What if the vid used the rhythm Beloved uses when she tells Twelve to go to sleep?”

  Maria was startled. “You think so?”

  “I’ll get a sizer. You wait here.”

  Ubu turned, his feet touched a castoff bar, and he rocketed into the corridor. He returned with the sizer and jacked it into the ship’s power source.

  Beloved’s varied rhythms came drumming into his consciousness. There was one pattern that Beloved had used more than the others during the negotiating sessions. He programmed that one into the synthesizer and triggered it. Drumbeats rattled in the little room.

  Ubu watched Twelve. Frustration gnawed him.

  The drumbeat went on.

  An hour later, Twelve began to stir.

  *

  Beloved. Warm reassurance began to whisper in Twelve. Awareness filtered slowly into his mind.

  Horror! Blasphemy! The memory came as a shock. His body jolted. “Warning!” he found himself shouting aloud. “Danger to Beloved!”

  “Hey! Wake up! Speak Melange, will you?” An enemy voice, harsh, a clattering language.

  “Danger! Danger!” Twelve felt enemy hands upon him and lashed out while crying his warnings. His blows were absorbed by a soft tangle of enemy restraints.

  “Hey! Stop that! We’re friends, damn it!”

  Vision returned. Twelve saw metal walls, chairs, lights that glowed at him like hostile eyes. Twelve realized he was caught in a harness of some sort. He stopped thrashing and tried to focus his mind.

  “Help,” he said. “Danger to Beloved.”

  “Look at my holos, Twelve. Read the translation of what I’m saying. Maria, where the fuck’s his keyboard?”

  Awareness began to turn in Twelve’s mind. Ubu floated over him, out of range of Twelve’s frantic paws. Maria shot across the room, his keyboard and transmitter in her hands.

  A surge of memory left Twelve helpless. “Horrible,” he said. He remembered to speak the humans’ language. “Danger to Beloved.”

  “Danger? Where?”

  Twelve understood the words before he read the golden graphic rolling over Ubu’s head. Twelve pointed a feeble hand at the comm board.

  “Pollution. Evil thoughts. Hype.” Ubu and Beautiful Maria stared at him. Twelve realized he was speaking his own language again. In a frenzy, Twelve reached through the harness webbing, snatched his deck from Maria’s hands, his inner fingers typing furiously beneath his big hands.

  “Must protect. The Libation Bearers is evil. The hype is thought pollution of the worst type.”

  The act of forcing his thoughts into the constrictions of an alien language calmed him. Phrases burst from his fingers in torrents. “Insane servants conspire to kill their parent. No one stops them. An evil design.” At the very thought of it, Twelve felt himself falling into withdrawal again. With a surge of will he dragged himself from oblivion.

  “It was just a hype!” Ubu’s voice was loud. “It never happened!”

  Twelve banged the keyboard on his knees in a fury of negation. “That doesn’t matter! Some thoughts are not permissible!!!!!!!!!” He held down the exclamation key for a long time in frantic emphasis.

  Ubu and Beautiful Maria looked at each other. “One of us better read the text,” Ubu said.

  “You’re the one who won’t forget it.”

  Ubu’s mouth twitched. “What if I want to?”

  “You’ve seen the hype. I haven’t.”

  Ubu sighed and turned to Twelve. “I’m going to learn something about the play now,” he said. “I should be able to answer most of your questions.”

  Anger and fear burned through Twelve. His inner fingers hammered on keys. “I have asked no questions, reverend bossrider.”

  Ubu thought about this for a moment. “Maybe I’ll be able to answer my questions, then.” Ubu belted himself into the next couch, put on a headset, tapped keys, leaned back.

  Twelve found his anger ebbing slightly under the influence of Beloved’s calm, thoughtful drumbeats, and then with a snapping whipcrack realization he remembered that Beloved was far away. He glanced over the room in alarm, focused on the speakers.

  “What is that sound?” he demanded.

  Maria’s voice was soothing. “Ubu programmed an AI to sound like Beloved. He hoped it would help you recover.”

  After an initial surge of indignation—an artificial Beloved!— Twelve contemplated this notion. It sounded, on further consideration, quite attractive. “Would it be possible for me to learn to use this machine?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  Twelve warmed at the thought of Beloved’s homelike throbbing comforting him in this horrid metal-walled room. “I humbly petition for instruction,” he said.

  “Use it all you like.”

  “Thank you, Beautiful Maria.”

  “No wrack.” She gave a sudden laugh. “Where did you learn that expression anyway? I haven’t heard it in years.”

  “I learned the word in the first hype. Was the expression incorrect?”

  “No. Just a little out of date.”

  Ubu sat up in his couch and removed the headset. “Okay,” he said. “Now I know who the Greeks were.” He rubbed his forehead. “Do you know the word cybernetic comes from the old Greek language? It means someone who steers a boat.”

  Maria looked at him. “What have boats got to do with AIs?”

  “I don’t know. The database didn’t go into that.”

  “Shows you what the Greeks knew.”

  Ubu looked at Twelve. “The play that you saw is something called a tragedy. That’s a play in which awful things happen.”

  Twelve’s indignation returned. Inner fingers rattled on his keyboard. “Awful and forbidden things, reverend bossrider.”

  “The play was the middle part of a trilogy, Twelve. You didn’t watch the first part. Please understand, Twelve, it was terrible that these children killed their mother. But she’d done a terrible thing before, in the earlier play, because she killed her husband.”

  Twelve thought for a moment. “What was terrible about that?” he asked.

  Ubu and Maria looked at each other. “People aren’t supposed to kill their relatives,” Ubu said.

  “She was the procreator, was she not? So it was her right to kill any of her servants.”

  “Her husband was as much a procreator as she was.” Ubu turned to Maria. “Haven’t we made this clear?”

  Annoyance burned through Twelve. His inner fingers could scarcely keep up with the rush of his passionate thought. “The husband may be the custodian of certain desirable genetic material, reverend bossrider, but that does not detract from the holy character of motherhood. Nor the right of the mother to choose her servants by their appropriate characteristics, or to dispose of others that are no longer useful.”

  Maria’s laughter rang in the room. “Got you there, Ubu,” she said. Twelve, annoyed at her disrespect, shifted a pair of eyes to follow her.

  “Holy character of motherhood,” Ubu repeated. “Right.” He thought for a moment. “The children’s actions were prompted by a god. By Apollo. He gave a holy character, as you put it, to his orders.”

  Twelve considered for a moment the notion of godhood. A god, his vocabulary told him, was a superbeing, particularly one conceived as the embodiment of some attribute of reality... The word had other definitions, some of which were contradictory.

  “Have you ever met a god?” he asked.

  Both laughed. Twelve shifted his eyes from one to the other in rising indignation. “Neither of us has met a god,” Ubu said. “I don’t believe they exist, though many people do. But the writer of the play believed that Apollo existed.”

  Twelve began to grow agitated again. “Either gods exist, or they don’t.”

  “They do not,” Maria interrupted, “in our experience exist.”

  “But if gods order servants to kill their Beloved,” Twelve insisted, “then they are evil gods and should be destroyed.”

  Ubu gave a long sibilant “ahhh” sound which his computer declined to translate. “Kill their Beloved. I see your point.” He looked at Maria. “He’s worried about Beloved being in danger.”

  Maria nodded her head, then turned to Twelve. “No god will ever put Beloved in danger. I can say that with certainty.”

  Twelve thought for a moment. “I am reassured, Beautiful Maria,” he wrote. “But cannot Apollo be hunted down and destroyed?”

  “No one has seen Apollo in thousands of years,” Ubu said. “I don’t think he’s any danger to anyone.”

  “His polluting thought remains, reverend bossrider Ubu Roy.”

  Ubu looked at Maria, then back at Twelve. “Shall I erase the hype, Twelve?”

  Twelve’s hearts exulted. His hands made fists. “Destroy the contaminating thought! Yes, reverend bossrider!”

  “Very well.” Ubu turned to the comm board and tapped the keyboard for a moment. He turned back to Twelve.

  “I’ve erased it.”

  “Thank you, reverend bossrider.”

  Twelve thought about the hype again and shuddered. He felt triumph that he had participated in erasing such an evil from the world. But still something troubled him.

  “Reverend bossrider,” he said, “why did the others not prevent this insane act?”

  “Which others?”

  “The others in the hype. The female humans who sang and beat drums. Were they not akin to the woman who was killed?”

  “They were the chorus, Twelve. They do not affect the action, they only offer comment.”

  Twelve thought about this. “Then they were wicked, too. They should have intervened.”

  “The—the chorus represents the ordinary people. Ordinary people cannot prevent all the evil in the world.”

  “The killing occurred right in front of them. They were evil not to try to prevent it.”

  There was a little silence.

  “Twelve,” Ubu said, “I think you should not look at hype again.”

  “Agreed. My thoughts might become contaminated by evil gods.”

  “Listen to music next time.”

  “Very well, reverend bossrider. I shall obey your wishes.”

  They left Twelve to his thoughts. Grim satisfaction filled him at the thought that he had helped to destroy contamination.

  Beloved, he felt sure, would be pleased.

  “Never thought I’d spend hours arguing with an alien about theology and ethics,” Ubu said. “Jesus Rice!”

  “The holy character of motherhood,” Maria said. “I liked that.”

  Ubu removed his headset and holo projector, stretched his neck and arms. “Now I’ve got all this data about classical Mudville drama read into my brain. What am I gonna do with stuff like that?”

  “At least our passenger hasn’t died.”

  “I want to know what happens if he figures out we’ve been infected by Apollo’s thought. What if he decides our brains are a danger to Beloved?” He finished his climb down the fuge ladder and dropped off onto the blue plastic pad below. A new tear in the plastic scratched his bare foot. He stepped back and rubbed his sole.

  “Shit,” he said. “Gotta fix that.”

  Beautiful Maria dropped down the ladder. She reached behind her neck, took her long braid, began undoing it.

  Ubu moved toward the command cage. “I’ll check our position fix,” he said. “Then we should get some sleep before the next shoot.”

  “No hurry.”

  Ubu could feel annoyance leaping under his skin. “I wanna get it over with,” he said. He walked to the nav station, looked at the plot. Runaway was that much closer to civilization.

  Maria padded quietly up behind him. He sensed her shaking out her hair and thought about the dark warmth of it spilling over her shoulders, down her back. Maria turned and walked away, toward the lounge.

  Things change, he thought. Damn it all anyway.

  CHAPTER 15

  Runaway’s carnivore singularity devoured the light-years with one ferocious gulp after another. With each swallow of the black hole Ubu felt his own restlessness increase, as if each jump infused him with another dose of angry, undirected hornet energy.

  He hardly ever seemed to need sleep. He roamed Runaway with a bag of tools, repairing anything that needed it, fixing equipment that hadn’t functioned in decades. He patched the broken plastic at the bottom of the fuge ladder, and checked the computer newsfax for lists of successful lawyers in Bezel System. Twice he heard his father’s voice ranting from one part of the ship or another. He ignored it.

  Runaway was diving deeper into human space this time, leaping past Angelica and the frontier toward the nearest commercial major hub, Bezel. At Bezel Station the compounds could be unloaded at the best price, the legal problems would be settled quickly in a standing Admiralty Court instead of waiting for the circuit judge, and, if everything went wrong, Ubu and Maria would be imprisoned on a Mudville inhabited for a dozen generations rather than on a newly settled, half-civilized place like Angelica.

  Ubu didn’t spend much time with Twelve, but when passing through the weightless parts of the ship he could hear the sizer beating out different rhythms, different tempos of Beloved’s thought and comfort. Sometimes he heard human music as well. Twelve seemed to favor syncopation and a driving rhythm section.

  From Beautiful Maria, who spent more time with Twelve, Ubu heard more about their guest. Twelve had wanted to know the cat’s function, and on being told Maxim had none, was upset at the idea of the cat’s parasitic nature until Maria reconsidered and told him Maxim’s function was to provide pleasure to humans, at which Twelve seemed satisfied. Pleasure, Maria gathered, was something Twelve got from someone else, not something he generated himself: Maxim became in Twelve’s mind a kind of ambulatory reward that offered itself to humans when they had done something particularly useful.