Laneff’s plunge carried her into the exact spot where she had once stood while her name had been inscribed on this very monument, the Monument to the Last Berserker.

The memory of that day rose crystal-clear, and the wrenching thrum of her oath to be the Last Berserker seared through the veil of insanity. She found herself standing, cold, in the midst of the plaza, unaware of how she'd come there save that this was the moment her life had been focused on, the moment of the Last Berserker.

The long run under augmentation had sharpened her need to the pitch it had held at First Need. There were Gens about, alarmed now by the sudden appearance of a haggard Sime gypsy. One or two of them were Donors, aware of her need and moving automatically to her aid.

No! No matter what, I won't kill! No matter how much I want it—I won’t. But she was only a renSime. Her resolve meant nothing before the relentless onslaught of physiology. A woman cannot resolve not to give birth; a renSime cannot resolve not to kill.

The swarm of pursuers boiled from the outlet of the street she'd raced down a moment before. With an anguished cry, she seized up one of the scaffold cables, yanked its looped end free of a bossing, grabbed up the padlock and with desperate, clumsy movements passed the cable around the narrow end of one of the star points that touched the ground. She wrapped the cable around her own body, twisted it through its own loop, and fastened the two grommets together with the padlock, ramming it home with a thundering snap. With her waning strength, and in the disorganized insanity of attrition, there was no way she could get loose to attack a Gen.

Safe.

She surrendered.

CHAPTER 12

RENSIME!

Laneff fell into the sun, blinded by brilliance until all seemed black.

And after a long time, far in the distance, a tiny light blossomed. Instantly, like fireworks, echoes of colored reflections exploded all about the glimmer. She took heart in her aloneness and wanted to glow like the little light. She ached and yearned—and was kindled.

She felt the surge of will brighten within her, a smile. And then dots of brilliance danced all about her, herself reflected back a billion times a billion times. Dazzled, she twisted away, only to find more and more dizzying reflections.

In self-defense, she fixed on just one of those dots. It loomed larger and larger, took on individual characteristics, face, hair, peculiar little nose, wistful smile in a round face.

Jarmi!

She twisted away. Another face: red-blond hair, mustache, beetling eyebrows, sunburned nose, fierce joy. Yuan!

She fled. Azevedo! Another direction. Shanlun! A twist away. Digen! And again. Mairis!

She was surrounded in every plane not by just one Jarmi and one

'Shanlun, but by thousands of them, spinning around and around, shouting a babel of languages at her. She clenched her fists over her ears, squeezing her eyes shut, and dove into the black silence within her.

But it was a cubical house that twisted through another dimension; a tesseract within the soul. She sped by the light of herself into a cubical room walled round with mirrors. And she was a zone of quantum mechanical incandescence, converting the essence of eternity from one form to another, emitting excess energy in every plane and dimension.

Her emissions dopplered back at her as they reached the ends of reality. She saw herself reflected back at herself in a globe that was bigger inside than out. All alone, she thought she'd go mad. She ran and ran off to the wall at the end of the universe.

But she couldn't get there. She smashed into an invisible plate of mirror which reflected herself back at herself and reflected all that was behind her, making it seem infinity was ahead of her.

She pivoted and ran to the nether end of the universe. And again smashed into a clear wall and confronted herself—guardian of eternity that would not let her pass.

What do you want of me! she wailed. Let me out!

Look at me, was the answer.

She resisted forever. And after that, she looked.

Jarmi!

She looked into a mirror, and someone else looked back. But it wasn't someone else. It was the Gen who lurked inside of herself, buried but not dead, buried and eternal. It was like using a dental mirror to look at the back of a tooth in another mirror. She knew it was the inside of her own self, a self she could never see directly.

If I'd been born Gen, I'd have been Jarmi. I'd have done the same. Jarmi had considered herself a crippled Donor, and had spent her whole life limping, favoring that crippled side of herself so that when she finally did lean on it, it buckled under her.

The truth of self-knowledge was so painful that Laneff wrenched free of the fascination and fled, only to fling herself against yet another barrier. She looked at herself in this mirror and saw Digen. Or was it Mairis? Ferociously dedicated to a Cause: however necessary the Cause might be, however laudable the capacity for total dedication, the ferocity betrayed the true motive: escape from self-knowledge. There's only one way to be safe from self-knowledge, and that's never to look closely at the people around you. Digen had looked only at people's virtues; Laneff looked only to eliminating their faults.

Eliminate the kill and cure what's wrong with humanity. But what about what's wrong with myself?

She had to flee from that, to run forever, until she crashed stunningly into another barricade across infinity that was infinity.

Yuan!

Yuan hated the Diet for hating Simes, for fearing the kill when it was really themselves who were committing suicide. There is no such thing as the kill; it's only that Gens commit suicide. That was the basic tenet of Distect philosophy. The ultimate crime in the Distect was to use a Sime to commit suicide. But a self-destructive Gen just naturally ended up doing that. So the ultimate crime that Yuan hated was self-destruction. And she had never met a more self-destructive person than Yuan Sirat Tiernan ambrov Rior. The hate itself had turned on him and compelled him, like a junct in need, to destroy everything he'd built.

True, he never blamed anyone else for his misfortunes. But he couldn't quite see for himself that he himself was actually to blame. So he came out to squash self-destruction with the same ferocious dedication she herself pitted against eradicating berserkers.

I hate berserkers the same way he hates the Diet; I hate because I am a berserker.

Surrounded by herself in many guises, she understood herself and became one with herself, seeing her own face superimposed thinly over the faces of others and knowing that they saw themselves in her and were at one with her. Keeping herself company, she was not alone.

A tremendous feeling of belonging, of Unity, overcame her, more powerful than pledging a Householding. We are the same yet individual.

And all of us are junct. She toured the walls of her prison, greeting the multitudes gathered at infinity, channels, Donors, donor Gens, and nondonor Gens, and renSimes. All junct, all dedicated ferociously to self-destruction.

Junctedness, then, is not a property of renSimeness. Self-destruction is a human preoccupation, and the kill is our way of cooperatively doing that.

She relived the four kills that she had made, and from this new perspective of being the Gen while also being the Sime, she saw herself ripping savagely at her very substance to satisfy an inner lack that really couldn't be reached that way: like a hungry wolf gnawing chunks out of its own leg!

She looked out of the mirror at herself, long canine jaws dripping blood that plumed selyn in a mist about the drops.