Then the view lifted away from the anchor, aiming out into the room beyond — a room with a huge black machine in the center, a great whopping obelisk stretched from floor to ceiling… and all around the obelisk, lights glowed.

Purple. Yellow. Green. Blue.

Flecks of color filled the room wherever I looked, everywhere, everywhere… till I realized I was seeing a single creature wrapped around and around and around, spun about the obelisk like thread on a spool. Wrapped around so many billion times, the windings went all the way out to the walls, bulging against them. Stuffed into the room, crammed tight. Another Peacock, locked down by the anchor. Then the Bumbler’s view shifted once more, zooming straight ahead, to part of the far wall. On the floor sat another anchor box; and a pace away another; and another, and another, out to both edges of the view, so I could imagine that the whole room, all the parts out of sight, had anchor boxes along the walls. Like pins holding down a butterfly.

The Bumbler’s screen went blank. Then the playback kicked over again, the entrance corridor, the view zooming in for a close-up of the first anchor…

"Turn it off," I said.

Festina moved a dial; the video went black.

"So what do we do?" she asked, her voice a whisper.

"Can we set it free?"

"It’s not hard to break an anchor," she replied. "One good smash with a rock should do it. But do we want to?"

Tough question, that. No doubt at all, the pinned-down Peacock was Xe — soul of the world-soul, friendly spirit who let me hear nanites giggle. Her body might be trapped, but her mind had roamed outward, melding with machine intelligences…

How?

An answer appeared in my mind: the obelisk in the next room was a computer, a Greenstrider computer. And Xe surrounded it, permeated it. Used it as a stepping-stone to all the other computers on planet. Xe had done her best to be kindly, helpful…

But my Peacock said tico, nago, wuto. Crazy. Evil. Dangerous. Was he just afraid of the anchors, or was he describing Xe? No matter how gentle-natured Xe seemed, she’d been locked down here a long long time. Probably the whole three thousand years since the Greenstrider colony self-destructed. Three millennia = thirty centuries = plenty of time to go mad.

Tico.

In stories, when you let a genie out of a bottle, sometimes it grants you wishes. Sometimes it decides to rip your head off.

"What do you think?" I asked Festina. "If we let Xe out, how dangerous could it be?"

She lowered her gaze. "I once knew a lunatic who planned to destroy a planet’s biosphere with a Sperm-tail. I won’t tell you how, but I think it might have worked."

"Ouch," I said. "If it was just us at risk…"

"Yes," she agreed. "It’s harder taking a chance with other people’s lives." She stared at me thoughtfully. "You can talk to this Xe with your link-seed?"

"Sort of. But she hasn’t volunteered to explain what’s going on."

"Ask a direct question. See what you get."

So I asked… and what I got was data tumor. Three thousand years of torment lanced straight into my brain.

GERM FACTORY

Information exploded in… century after century, what Xe experienced. Imprisonment. Boredom. Suffering. Madness. Evil. Guilt. Contrition.

Everything all at once, pummeling into my consciousness. A damburst set off by the right question, at the right place, right time.

Drowning in the weight of data. Choked by it — the way I often choked on scalpelish thoughts when I brooded how much I’d made a mess of things. Black depression is all you see, all you touch, all you feel, frothing-foaming-muddling in your brain. Motion churns without moving forward, bleak images circling the same futilities, everything all at once, too much to swallow, too much to breathe…

Then, in the jumble of mental meltdown, blood-boiling death a millisecond away… the sweet strong image of a peacock’s tail. Green and gold and purple and blue, a million eyes open. Just as I’d seen during mushor. not long ago, but I’d been so naive back then, I thought it was a trick of my mind. Now I knew better. This was the touch of the Peacock, my Peacock: shielding me, stopping up the data flood, holding back the tide till I caught my breath.

And the sound of it, same as before — feathers rattling, like a true peacock.

Look at me. Look at me. A demanding peace.

Then the world was back… and only a blink had flicked by. Festina was just starting to move toward me, her hands coming up, grabbing me as I slumped. I let her take my weight — I didn’t have the strength to stand because my head was so heavy, so full…

Not that I knew everything. My Peacock had thrown himself in the way of the data flood before I drowned. I’ll never know how much of the download got pinched off short.

But I knew enough. More than enough. "Are you all right?" Festina asked.

"Yes," I said. "And no. Ouch."

I didn’t move — just leaned against her and let her do the work because my brain couldn’t exactly remember how to control my legs. When Festina saw I was nigh-on deadweight, she lowered me gently to the floor. "What happened? Faye. Faye. Come on, focus. What happened?"

"I got the explanation," I replied, still reeling. "No one else ever asked. Even Tic… so Zenned-out, he never questioned. Just accepted everything Xe sent his way. When I asked, Xe was so excited and relieved… she tried to control the memory dump, I think she did, but she was too blessed giddy."

"What did she say?"

"Give me a second to sort it out." I looked around. "Where’s the Peacock?"

"It was moving so fast I could barely follow it, but, umm… I think it went up your nose."

"Oh," I said. "They do that. It’s their nature. And since he stopped my brain from exploding out my ears, I can’t complain, can I?"

"Are you sure you’re all right?" Festina asked, placing a hand on my forehead.

"I don’t have a fever," I told her. "Not yet. And I’m not delusional, I’m enlightened. Enlightened, lightheaded, delighted. Do you want to hear a story?"

"If you want to tell me one." She had the cautious tone of someone humoring a woman who might be tico. But I told her the story anyway.

Start with the peacocks. A species that surfaced into sentience long long long before Homo saps. They launched their first rocket while Earth was still watching protomammals dodge out from under the feet of T. REX. Then came the peacocks’ space-exploration phase, their bioengineering phase, their evolution into immortal energy-beings phase…

Yeah, sure, trite cliche. Simplistic at best, and God knows, maybe plain wrong. All I can share is the data scar left in my mind after the tumor: a mix of real information from Xe and approximations made by my overloaded brain as it tried to make sense of everything. If the input got trivialized and contaminated by junk already lying in my subconscious — well, that’s the way the meat brain works. Alien experiences get reinterpreted into things more familiar… even if that means drawing on fusty neural pathways laid down while watching Captain Action and the Technocracy Team.

So. The peacocks. Sentient Sperm-tails. Don’t ask me what part was the actual peacock: maybe the Sperm-tail’s pocket universe, maybe the particle-thin field that contained the pocket universe inside our own. Xe didn’t give me details. Maybe she didn’t know the truth herself.

Oh, another human prejudice there — seeing Xe as female. She wasn’t… any more than my own Peacock was male. But three thousand years ago, the two were a couple, a pair bond, friends, lovers, allies, interpenetrating energies… pick whatever facile description gives you the gooey. And the two wandered the galaxy together, looking for enlightenment/light-headedness/delight. Riding lesser beings.