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sufferance."
Burning heard the voice of experience and wondered what
Quant's story was.
"If they think you're gaining cachet or the press is going to stay on your
side for a while, they'll try to siphon off some of your reflected celebrity.
Let them, but remain uncommitted except to Haven, I suppose."
Burning absorbed it. "Anything else?"
"Be careful about casual invitations and watch for bugs. Stick with the food
and drink the caterers provide and don't sample anybody's high. Or
anybody's sex adjuncts bio or techno. Under no circumstances "
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He stopped, listening to his closed earcup. Whatever he heard made him glance
off in the direction of the superstructure, where
Regis T. Hall was in plain view. Then, wholly impersonal once more, Quant took
a step back.
"No further questions. I'm to require your imminent departure in Hierarch
Haven's aircar. Before you leave, however, you'll command your personnel
by direct order not to stray outside the designated boundaries." He
about-faced and left them there.
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Eight
The displeasure of the assembled Aggregate members hit Piper like a
violent storm front as she stepped out of the security lock into the interior
of Habitat. The air of the nest was charged with the constituents' hostile
scentspeech and resentful kinesigns.
Granted, she had been delayed in returning to Habitat, but the
Aggregate was not scheduled to perform its tech presentation at the Lyceum
ball for several hours to come and all the preparations had been made.
So what had incensed them?
She did not need voicetalk from them to make their antagonism more
emphatic. She recognized an anger whose olfactory nuances were as
familiar and intimate as her own. The
constituents were cuing from Byron Sarz, the nexus of their
interconnected consciousness, and if Byron was irate with Piper to such a
pitch of estrangement and antipathy, it would be like
God turning his face away. She had to curb her own scent-speech to keep from
tainting the air with fear.
In the despair that settled on her Piper had a torturous but vivid
epiphany. This was what it felt like to be an Alone any of the sundered and
hermetically isolated conventional human beings walking the face of
Periapt and the other
Homo sapiens worlds.
Family members, lovers, boon companions any contact an
Alone had with another could only be a sad and wretched pretense
compared to the rich, heady medium in which the
Aggregate lived.
Byron's rule against letting the Alones grasp that difference was a
wise one, and no one knew that better than Piper, who had just returned from a
rare solo foray among them. Unconscious of their own scentspeech and the
rest of their Othertalk, Alones poured out their emotions, phobias,
and venalities. Far more tragically, they barely heard one another.
They were almost completely insensate to the sea of Alltalk in which they
swam.
If the Alones knew how harmonious the shared life of the
Aggregate was, surely they would go completely mad with jealousy and
wipe the Aggregate out of existence.
She had known Byron was standing off to one side of the group, for
she had been tasting his disapproval since she had arrived. He stood
out from the score of young men and women who made up the constituency.
Gray-haired and somewhat overfleshed, he was bigger than any of them
and, at forty-eight baseline years, more than twice the age of the eldest.
Piper gazed at him and waited meekly for him to open a dialogue, but
his
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Othertalk was mostly that of shutout, of withholding.
His voicetalk much less its Alltalk context would have been
incomprehensible to an Alone. Aggregate phonetics, abetted by elisions,
aphereses, surd words, and similar shortcuts, was too rapid for Alones.
When he finally relented to speak, he was unsparing in his condemnation
of her for having absented herself from the communal nest without his
permission.
Piper wasn't permitted a moment to explain that the Hierarch laboratory that
monitored the Aggregate's research and self-modification activities had
demanded a tissue sample or that she'd decided to make the delivery herself
merely to spare Byron and her fellow constituents another distasteful
invasion by
Alones.
As she showed her contrition in Othertalk, she became aware that Byron was
concealing the true source of his ire. She couldn't avoid All-Auding the
fact that she was being excluded from something. It ran counter to the
group's whole reason for being.
Yet she saw nothing out of place in all the tech clutter. Her
hearing picked up no discrepancies, and her olfaction the most sensitive in
Habitat brought her no trace of an accident or
mishap that could have provoked Byron so.
A small, fragile-looking young woman to begin with, Piper shrank in on
herself. She knew all too well that she had the look of a perpetual victim:
huge and wounded gamine eyes, a head that seemed too big for her body, a
spray of freckles across a snub uptilted nose, lips so full that they
seemed to weight her mouth away from her lower face.
Byron made a kinesign that told the rest to resume what they'd been doing, and
they dispersed at once to finish preparations for the Lyceum ball performance.
Piper looked pleadingly to Byron, her mentor, lover, and more, the one
who had created her, who had elevated her from an Alone foundling to a
constituent in the new order of the human race. But Byron only showed
her a blankness she had never seen in a constituent, certainly not in him.
At that moment she no longer knew him, and he no longer knew her.
Scrolling furiously through recent events in an effort to determine
what else she might have done to bring about this waking nightmare,
she could come up with only one transgression. That very morning a
confidential commo had briefly called Byron away from Habitat. He had
been speaking into a shielded screen, but Piper had caught a
fragment of the conversation: "Quantum College."
Had her inadvertent eavesdropping caused the change in him?
she wondered. She was about to ask as much when Habitat's
roof-landing platform nav system chirped and issued a burst of voice
commo. The Peace Warrantor airvan that was to take them to Empyraeum was on
final approach.
She saw, tasted, and almost felt Byron's anger escalate, though his
expression, kines, and aromas provided no clues why. The
Aggregate took up his unease like microwave repeaters as Byron opened a link
to the airvan.
"Public Safety, you're early by nearly an hour," he told the pilot
of the airvan. "We're not ready. Return at twenty hundred hours."
"Wasn't a request, fleshware
. Schedule's been moved up. Get up here and board or we'll get you aboard." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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