Lilith furrowed her brow. “With your language of course.”

“No, I mean, you’re not in the office, you’re in your vat.”

“Oh, yes. Coleanus overheard your discussion with Slatermeyer earlier, when he was still with us. We used the blue poly to transform the transceiver and moved the whole thing in here.” She lifted her hands, which cradled a multi-processor brain, naked and glistening. “The brain likes it better in here than being cooped up in a box.”

Hector was speechless. He had created both of them, Lilith and the brain in her hands, and he didn’t understand either one.

“The brains are not GeneSys,” Lilith went on, “but GeneSys could not exist without the brains. GeneSys is the connections between the brains. It is the work of the people who work for it, it is all the data, and all the calculations that the brains handle for it every day.

“When Helix gets to the tower, she will touch the brain, and through it contact GeneSys. But she won’t be alone. I and my daughters will be with her in the network, through this little brain right here.”

Hector shook his head again. “Why are you telling me all this now? You would never talk to me before.”

“There was nothing you could do for me then. But now it has occurred to me that although GeneSys may be defeated, its people will not just disappear. We know that human beings did not welcome Helix when she was among them. You are one of them, and yet you say you do not work for GeneSys. You say you are on our side. If that is so, then do something about the people.”

oOo

Chango watched Helix through the clear sides of the tank, but after a few minutes her face took on that fixed look. She was in trance, and there was no telling how long she’d be that way, but Chango hoped it wouldn’t be that long. It bothered her, how easy it had been to get up here. She turned from the tank and looked out a window, arching up on the balls of her feet to peer past the sill. From this height she could see the milky haze that hung over the city like a mantle of grey, translucent silk. Past the towers of Oz and the river, the horizon was curving. She was so high up she could see the curvature of the earth with her naked eye. It gave her vertigo.

“Bet it’s quite a view.”

She whirled around to see Benny, standing halfway out of the hole surrounding metal ladder. He had a big grin on his face, but his eyes weren’t smiling, not smiling at all. He climbed the rest of the way up, and stepped confidently onto the floor. He reached one arm behind him and came back with a gun in his hand, which he pointed at her. “Just stay right where you are, little sister, and everything will be alright.”

Chango shook her head, but she didn’t say anything, and she didn’t move, either. Benny glanced at the tank, saw Helix floating cross-legged, the brain in her hands. “What the hell is she trying to do?” he said. She didn’t answer him, instead she licked her lips, and gauged the distances between herself and the ladder, herself and Benny, and Benny and the ladder. It was no good, not yet, anyway. But Benny was moving again, towards her. He stepped close, and ran the barrel of his gun along her jaw. “I said, what the hell is she trying to do?”

She swallowed, and hardened her eyes to hide her fear. “She’s talking to it. They’re both in a very deep state of trance affinity,” she said, bluffing. “If you try to disturb them, you’re liable to shut down systems.”

His eyes widened a bit at that, and they flicked back to the tank for a moment. It was an opening. He was already surprised, distracted. It was just enough advantage that she could maybe make it to the ladder ahead of him. And by the time she’d thought it through, the opportunity was over. He was looking at her again.

Even if she’d made it, it would have meant leaving Helix here, undefended against him. He’d already killed one person she loved, she couldn’t let him have another.

Benny stood back a bit, and lifted his gun. He glanced between her and Helix in the tank speculatively.

“Why did you kill Ada?” asked Chango, as much to interrupt his train of thought as to satisfy her curiosity. ”You were born in Vattown. Your parents were divers. You’ve known Ada all your life. How could you do that?”

His eyes glittered, dark and hard. “I had a choice,” he said, and it seemed to Chango that his shoulders actually widened when he said it, that his chest swelled and the light in his eyes turned to pride. “One life or many. Graham was in contact with me before Ada led the divers in the strike.”

“You were a spy even then,” she said.

He laughed and shrugged, shedding his anger for the moment. “Somebody would have done it. At first I thought I’d do the movement a service and string him along. You know, feed him false information.”

A little of the light went out of his eyes and he shook his head. “He always knew. When the strike happened, he gave me a choice. He would send goons in, lots of goons. And they’d beat the crap out of everybody. People, probably a lot of people, would get killed. Or the strike could be a success, the divers’ demands could be met, and only one person had to die.”

Chango shook her head slowly, horror and comprehension pinning her to the wall beneath the window.

“You traded her life for the success of the strike.”

Benny cocked his free hand on his hip. “Of course. Would she have had me do any less?”

“She would have fought them! You cooperated.”

His lip curled. “And a fat lot of good fighting or cooperating has done either of us. It doesn’t fucking matter, Chango. You and I, Ada, we don’t matter. This thing!” He lifted his arms up wide to indicate the sloping roof of the tower. “It’s bigger than we are. We’re nothing but ants, so what we do is of no consequence. We can do whatever we want, be noble, be bad, in the end we’re all going to die, and this,” he stretched his fingers out, “will just keep rolling along.”

He stepped forward, and Chango felt the unfinished cinderblock wall grating into her back. He rested his hands lightly on her shoulders. He leaned forward until his chest brushed her chin and leaned his head over her ear. “I could live with what I’ve done,” he whispered softly. “I might have even forgotten about it, except for you; bringing it up all the time, irrationally blaming Vonda for it, turning to me in your anger at her. You’ve been a real pain in the ass, Chango. Now, enough is enough.”

He reached over and pulled the face mask off the back of her head. He stepped back, leveling the gun at her as he tore open the seals of her suit. “Get into the tank,” he said. Chango shook her head, “What?”

“You heard what I said. If you get into that grow med Helix, will probably be aware of it, she’ll have to stop what she’s doing to rescue you. If she’s too deep in trance, then you’ll just have to get her out of it.”

“But the medium, it’ll kill me.”

He snorted with laughter. “That’s sort of the point, isn’t it? One way or another, you’re going in there. You’re gonna be out of my hair forever.”

Chapter 22 — The Brains and I

It felt like being nailed to a church door. The brain’s thoughts hammered Helix back and all she could do was hang on by remembering who she was. And then an index quote for hydroencephalid shoe balm smacked her upside her thought projected head and carried her with it, through a capillary maze of networks, close woven and pulsing like the lungs of a giant. She got hit with a passing stream of supply invoices which carried her out, out from the dense and twisted heart of the system. The data stream branched as it went until there was just the one data point; an invoice for vitreous sylks to a manufacturer in Managua that supplied a boutique in Geneva that sold eighty five pairs of sylk pants the previous day. She stayed out on the periphery, hopping off anything going in, and onto anything going out. Out here on the edges of the system, she could almost catch the shape of the whole thing. She crossed the globe, over and over again, from a textile plant in Calcutta to a chain of discount stores in Helsinki, to a wholesaler in Hong Kong and Bhutan National Airlines. She landed once, almost too close to a huge artery, a rushing river as big as the one she’d first encountered, but it was all going out, there was nothing coming back but consolidated figures bearing the trademark of the Tomy Bottling Company. There was another brain out there, past the body of this one, a brain big enough, and connected enough not to share all its secrets.