The water was a hard shock. He floated on his back, rubbing the sting of impact from his face. The water was thready with filaments of algae. A fish nibbled his bare leg beneath his cotton shirt. He knew all too well what it ate. He looked at the cenote walls. No hope there -- they were as smooth as glass, as smooth as if they had been fused with lasers, or fireball-blasted.

Time passed. A white form came plummeting downward, belly-flopping into the water with a lethal smack. They were sacrificing the children.

Something grabbed his foot and pulled him under.

Water filled his nose. He was too busy choking to fight his way free. He was pulled down into the blackness. Water seared his lungs and he passed out.

The spook awoke in a straitjacket and looked up at a ceiling of creamy antiseptic white. He was in a hospital bed. He moved his head on the pillow and realized that his scalp had been shaved.

To his left an antique monitor registered his pulse and breathing. He felt awful. He waited for his computer to whisper something, and realized that it was gone. Rather than feeling its loss, however, he felt, somehow, repulsively whole. His brain ached like an overstuffed stomach.

From his right he heard faint, harsh breathing. He twisted his head to look. Sprawled on a waterbed was a withered, naked old man, cyborged into a medusa complex of life-support machinery. A few locks of colorless hair clung to the old man's age-spotted scalp, and his sunken sharp-nosed face had the look of long-forgotten cruelty.... An EEC registered a few flickers of comatose delta waves from the hindbrain. It was John Augustus Owens.

The sound of sandals on stone. It was the female spook. "Welcome to the Hacienda Maya, Eugene."

He stirred feebly in his straitjacket, trying to pick up her vibrations. It was like trying to swim in air. With growing panic, he realized that his paradigmatic empathy was gone. "What in hell...."

"You're whole again, Eugene. It feels strange, doesn't it? After all those years of being a junkyard of other people's feelings? Can you remember your real name yet? That's an important first step. Try."

"You're a traitor." His head weighed ten tons. He sank back into the pillow, feeling too stupid even to regret his indiscretion. Tattered remnants of his spook training said he ought to flatter her....

"My real name," she said precisely, "was Anatolya Zhukova, and I was sentenced to corrective education by the Brezhnevograd People's Zaibatsery.... You were a dissident or so-called criminal of some kind also, before the Veil robbed you of your personality. Most of our top people here are from orbit, Eugene. We're not the stupid Terran cultists you were led to believe. Who hired you, anyway? Yamato Corporation? Fleisher S.A.?"

"Don't waste your time."

She smiled. "You'll come around. You're human now, and the Resurgence is humanity's brightest hope. Look."

She held up a glass flask. Inside it, something like a threaded cloudy film floated slowly in a yellowish plasma. It seemed to squirm. "We took this out of your head, Eugene."

He gasped. "The Veil."

"Yes, the Veil. It's been riding on the top of your cortex for God knows how long now, breaking you up, keeping you fluid. Robbing you of your personality. You were nothing better than a psychopath in harness."

He closed his eyes, stunned. She said, "We understand Veil technology here, Eugene. We use it ourselves, sometimes, on sacrificial victims. They can emerge from the well, touched by the Gods. Troublemakers turned divinely into saints. It fits in well with the old Mayan traditions of trepanation; a triumph of social engineering, really. They're very competent here. They managed to capture me without knowing anything about the spook apparat but rumors."

"You tried to take them out?"

"Yes. They caught me alive and won me over. And even without the Veil I have enough perception left to tell a spook when I see one." Again, she smiled. "I was faking mania when I attacked you. I only knew you had to be stopped at any cost."

"I could have ripped you apart."

"Then, yes. But now you've lost your maniac phase, and we've killed your implanted weapons. Cloned bacteria producing schizophrenic toxins in your sinuses. Altered sweat glands oozing emotional hormones. Nasty! But you're safe now. You're nothing more or less than a normal human being."

He consulted his interior state. His brain felt like a dinosaur's. "Do people really feel like this?"

She touched his cheek. "You haven't begun to feel. Wait until you've lived with us awhile, seen the plans we've made, in the finest traditions of the Predator Saints...." She looked reverently at the machine-pumped corpse across the room. "Overpopulation, Eugene -- that's what ruined us. The Saints took the moral effort of genocide upon themselves. Now the Resurgents have taken up the challenge of building a stable society -- without the dehumanizing technology that has always, inevitably, been turned against us. The Mayans had the right idea -- a civilization of social stability, ecstatic communion with the Godhead, and a firm appreciation of the cheapness of human life. They simply didn't go far enough. They didn't kill enough people to keep their population in check. With a few small changes in the Mayan theology we have brought the whole system into balance. It's a balance that will outlast the Synthesis by centuries."

"You think primitives armed with stone knives can triumph over the industrialized world?"

She looked at him pityingly. "Don't be naive. Industry really belongs in space, where there's room and raw materials, not in a biosphere. Already the zaibatseries are years ahead of Earth in every major field. The Earth's industrial cartels are so drained of energy and resources trying to clean up the mess they inherited that they can't even handle their own industrial espionage. And the Resurgent elite is armed to the teeth with the weaponry, and the spiritual inheritance, of the Predator Saints. John Augustus Owens dug the cenote of Tikal with a low-yield neutron bomb. And we own stores of twentieth-century binary nerve gas that we could smuggle, if we wanted, into Washington, or Kyoto, or Kiev... No, as long as the elite exists, the Synthetics can't dare to attack us head-on -- and we intend to go on protecting this society until its rivals are driven into space, where they belong. And now you and I, together, can avert the threat of paradigmatic attack."

"There'll be others," he said.

"We've co-opted every attack made upon us. People want to live real lives, Eugene -- to feel and breathe and love and be of simple human worth. They want to be something more than flies in a cybernetic web. They want something realer than empty pleasures in the luxury of a zaibatsu can-world. Listen, Eugene. I'm the only person who has ever put on the spook's Veil and then returned to humanity, to a thinking, feeling, genuine life. We can understand each other."

The spook considered this. It was frightening and bizarre to be rationally thinking on his own, without a computer helping to manage his stream of consciousness. He hadn't realized how stiff and painful thinking was. The weight of consciousness had crushed the intuitive powers that the Veil had once set free. He said incredulously, "You think we could understand each other? By ourselves?"

"Yes!" she said. "You don't know how much I've needed it!"

The spook twitched in his straitjacket. There was a roaring in his head. Half-smothered segments of his mind were flaming, like blown coals, back into blazing life. "Wait!" he shouted. "Wait!" He had remembered his name and, with it, what he was.

Outside Replicon's Washington headquarters, snow was sifting over the altered evergreens. The head of security leaned back in his chair, fiddling with his light pen. "You've changed, Eugene."