Kenmuir nodded. “Yes, that’s approximately what we’re trying for.”
“I’ve gathered you’re a student of history,” Venator said. “Tell me, with how many governments of the past would that calculation have been rational?”
Surprised, Kenmuir stood wordless before he muttered, “I don’t know. Perhaps none.”
“Correct. You’d have been dead by now, unless we chose to torture you first. If our secret got released, we’d put down the restless Lunarians by force, exterminating them if necessary. We’d tell people that the revelation was a falsehood concocted by you evildoers. We’d go on to tell the people, at considerable and emotional length, what a service we had done them, suppressing these enemies of the state. But most of the propaganda we wouldn’t issue ourselves. Plenty of journalists and intellectuals would be eager to curry favor by manufacturing and disseminating it. Many among them would be sincere.”
“Yes ,. .”
“As it is, you are safe, while Tam runs loose because we did not expect that major weapons of war would ever be needed again. You have the cybercosm to thank, Kenmuir. You might show some trust, some gratitude.”
“But you violated the Covenant!” the spaceman protested. “And—and—“ And what? How horrible an offense, really, was the hiding of a piece of information?
“Exigencies arise,” Venator said. “My hope is to convince you of that, before it is too late.”
“Suppose you do,” Kenmuir retorted wildly. “How can I convince Aleka?” Any passwords or the like could have been drugged or brainphased out of him. Any image of him could be an artifact, in this world where so much reality was virtual.Venator hesitated. When he spoke, it was slowly, and did the thin face draw into lines of want? “She ought to listen to you and have faith in you, ought she not? As for how she shall know that it is in truth you—“ He looked away, as if he wished to see through the metal to stars and Earth. “My intuition is that you two are lovers. All the little intimacies, body language unique to the pair of you, incidents forgotten by one until the other reminds of them, the wholeness arisen in even as brief a time as you’ve had—if we wrung that quantity of data out of you, the process would leave you a vegetable. And could we write an adequate program to use it with a generated image? Perhaps the Teramind could. Perhaps not. I daresay it could reprogram your brain, so that you would become its worshipper and ardently do, of your own volition, whatever it wished.”
He lifted a hand. “Have no fears,” he said. “Besides the morality of destroying a mind, we are barred by the fact that we haven’t time enough, neither to make a convincing imitation of you nor to make you over. You are not electrophotonic, you are organic, with the inertia of all material things. Molecular interactions go at rates constrained by the laws of the universe, and the Teramind did not write those.”
His fists clenched at his sides. “Explain that to your Aleka. She will’know you by what you share, everything that I have denied myself.”
He smiled and finished lightly, “Ironic, isn’t it, that at this final .hour the cybercosm must appeal to the oldest, most primitive force in sentient life?”
Kenmuir ran a tongue gone dry across his lips. “If you can indeed recruit me.”
Venator gazed straight at him and answered, “/ can’t. I am bringing you to the Teramind.” A vast and duskful space—a chamber? Sight did not reach to the heights and ends of it. Glowing lines arched aloft and down again, some close together, some meters apart. Seen over a distance, they merged in an intricacy, a hieroglyph unknown to Kenmuir.
The air was without heat or cold or scent or sound.
He had woken here after falling asleep in the room at Central to which Venator brought him. Unwarned but somehow unsurprised, he saw himself stretched half reclining in a web from which a number of attachments made contact with feet, hands, brow, temples. His skin and clothes were either illuminated or faintly, whitely shining. A mighty calm was upon him,, yet he had never felt this aware and alert, wholly in command of mind and body. He sensed as it were every least flow through blood vessels, nerves, and brain. Solemnly he awaited that which was to happen.