“How are you doing this? Is it the Mist? Or some chemical transfer when you touched me—”

Bale said, “Howdoesn’t matter. Anyhow you’re doing it to yourself. Consciousness is the awareness of self, and self is recorded in memory. You are becoming more conscious, for the quality of your awareness is increasing. Your memories are more precise, and your perception of them is clearer.”

“But I hate it! I see myself better than ever before, but I don’t like what I see. I feel like sticking my fingers in my ears, shutting my eyes, turning away. Distracting myself until I forget.”

Bale’s great-aunt said, “We have all been through it.”

She sighed. “But turning away won’t work anymore, will it?”

“No. But,” Bale said, “would you prefer not to know yourself?”

“Right now, yes!”

That night she lay awake, alone in the dark. She had turned away Bale’s gentle invitations to share his bed.

Even hours after the inquisition she couldn’t stop looking inward, couldn’t stop thinking about herself. She tried to immerse herself in her Witnessing, but right now not even Poole’s antics and endeavors seemed able to distract her.

And anyhow she envied him, she realized reluctantly. Poole had been unusually clear-sighted for his time. But even so he had walked around in a kind of dream. Like every human his memories were imperfectly stored in the biochemical mishmash of his nervous system. And he had endlessly edited the story of his life, unconsciously, to make logic out of illogical situations, to put himself at center stage and in control of events. There were sound reasons for this. A human memory had never been meant to be an objective recording system but a support for ego: without the comforting illusion of control, Poole’s mind might have crumbled in the face of an arbitrary universe.

But all that was different now.

Her consciousness had already been superior to Poole’s, even before she had come to the Rustball. A half-million years of evolution and environment had seen to that. And now the subtle re-engineering initiated by the Campocs, as it gently knit and re-knit her neurones, or whatever it was doing in her head, accentuated the gap. Her memory was as perfect a recording instrument as any technology could deliver. And her self-awareness was so clear, the mists banished, that the comfort of delusion was no longer an option.

Her knowledge of herself was accurate, and utterly pitiless.

She called Reath, in orbit.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It isn’t, ah, permanent. You aren’t stuck with this new self-knowledge, any more than you have yet taken what you call an ‘immortality pill.’ I have brought you here so you can feel how it may be to immerse yourself in this Second Implication. But you have taken no irrevocable step on your road to Transcendence.”

“I can see why it’s necessary,” she said. “This cold self-awareness. You can’t make a super-mind out of a crowd of dreamers.”

“But it’s uncomfortable, isn’t it?”

“You’ve no idea.”

“When you see your sister again, what will you do?”

“Apologize,” she said fervently.

“Perhaps that’s enough. Alia, your time on the Rustball is nearly over.”

“It is?” she asked, surprised.

“The Rusties have only one more development to show you — or rather, to help you discover in yourself. But you must decide if you want to take that final step.”

“Is it up to me?”

“It always has been, child. You should know that by now. Try to get some sleep.”

But try as she might, alone with herself in the dark, sleep didn’t come.

Another day — her last day on the Rustball — and another session in the gloomy room with the Campocs and their extended family.

But today it felt different. She gazed around at their faces, which seemed to glow gently in the soft pink glow of the room. They were all turned to her, all their expressions open. They were looking at her, they were thinking about her, and what she had revealed of herself since coming to this community.

And suddenly she was looking back at herself.

It was a view from many angles, as if the eyes around her had turned to mirrors. She had gone through another sharp transition, another expansion of her awareness, as if a door had opened, admitting light. She quailed, battered.

Bale touched her hand. The shock of physical contact was there, but it was not as it had been before, just one more link in a web of connecting. And besides, since her intimacy with him there was tenderness in his touch.

“Do you feel it?” he asked.

“I think so…” As he held her hand the sense of an extended perspective wavered, but did not collapse.

He said, “Now you can see yourself through my eyes. You can look into the memories, even of yourself, stored in me. The others, too. It is as if we are all one mind, in this room, one nervous system united, memory and thought processes distributed and yet joined. You can look at yourself, not just from within your own head, but through the minds of others.”

This was necessary, she was told, necessary for her mind to grow. If her consciousness was founded on the ability to look into herself, now she could see herself through the eyes of others, too — and so her consciousness was enhanced by an order of magnitude.

“It takes some getting used to,” Denh said.

“You can say that again,” said Seer ruefully.

Alia asked, “How?…”

There was a technology, she was told, or perhaps it was a biology, very ancient, that could link humans on some level deeper than words. Some even said this faculty derived from an alien species long assimilated by mankind. But its origin didn’t matter. The communication was not mind to mind, for that was impossible; mind was only an emergent property of the brain, the body. But it was as if the physical barriers between one nervous system and another became irrelevant.

Bale said, “This is Unmediated Communication. There are no symbolic barriers. You will know what I am thinking as I think it — and I will know your thoughts, too, as if they were my own, as direct as an embrace, or a punch in the mouth.” He hesitated. “It is not yet fully developed in you. Even if you go further you will be able to pull back. Do you want—”

“Yes,” she said, not giving herself time to think. “Do it.”

Suddenly the mirror-minds in the room shone bright — all the barriers between them fell away — and she saw herself, not just in this moment, not just physically, but in the Rusties’ deepest perception. She could sense what they were thinking about her. She rummaged through their memories, of how she had been during her conversations with this group. She could see her body language, her shyness slowly giving way to enthusiasm as she talked — and the times when her words hadn’t contained the whole truth, and she had been evasive, breaking eye contact, turning away, laughing unnecessarily, fiddling with her body fur.

She knew what these people thought of her. It was shocking, bewildering.

But, as she looked at herself through her own eyes and others, the self she saw wasn’t so bad. Yes, she had sometimes been spiteful to her sister, driven by rivalry. But such incidents, spiky in memory, had taken up only a small fraction of their relationship. She was just a kid, promising, flawed, unformed. She hadn’t known any better.

And, she realized to her surprise, she forgave herself. Suddenly she was crying, her vision blurred by tears.

An arm spread around her shoulders: Bale’s great-aunt. “There, there,” she said. “We all go through it. Three steps. You have to see yourself; you have to accept yourself; and you have to learn to forgive yourself. But forgiveness is as hard as blame, isn’t it? There, there; this will pass.”

So it would, Alia realized, even as she wept.