Vernor Vinge
TRUE NAMES
10/29/2000

Table Of Contents

TRUE NAMES "The story is a
marvelous mixture of hard-science SF and sword-and-sorcery imagery. Vinge
positsthat in a direct neurocybernetic interface, the information would be
analogized by the brain intosymbols it is comfortable with. The "place"
in which the Coven "meets," for example, is or seems to bea castle,
guarded by a program which manifests itself as a firebreathing dragon, sitting
in a magmamoat, wear- ing an asbestos T-shirt. Fail to satisfy it, and it will
"kill" you, dumping you back into thereal world--a fate most Wizards
seem to regard as very little better than death.

"Vinge set himself about fifteen challenges in this story,
any one of which might have wrecked alesser writer, and pulled them all off
with appalling ease. No point in listing them all--but the mostimportant one to
my mind is this: he succeeded in making me feel, for over an hour, what it is
like to bemore than human. That is one of SF's major challenges, and it is
bloody hard to do.

"Do not miss this ingenious and truly original story--it is
one of those that, when you're done, youwish the author were present so you
could applaud..

Analog Magazine To my sister, Patricia Vinge, with Love.

In the once upon a time days of the First Age of Magic, the
prudent sorcerer regarded his own truename as his most valued possession but
also the greatest threat to his continued good health, for--thestories go--once
an enemy, even a weak unskilled enemy, learned the sorcerer's true name, then
rou-tine and widely known spells could destroy or enslave even the most
powerful. As times passed, andwe graduated to the Age of Reason and thence to
the first and second industrial revolutions, suchnotions were discredited. Now
it seems that the Wheel has turned full circle (even if there never reallywas a
First Age) and we are back to worrying about true names again: The first hint
Mr. Slippery had that his own True Name might be known--and, for that
matter,known to the Great Enemy--came with the appearance of two black Lincolns
humming up the long dirtdriveway that stretched through the dripping pine
forest down to Road 29. Roger Pollack was in hisgarden weeding, had been there
nearly the whole morning, enjoying the barely perceptible drizzle andthe
overcast, and trying to find the initiative to go inside and do work that
actually makes money. Helooked up the mo- ment the intruders turned, wheels
squealing, into his driveway. Thirty secondspassed, and the cars came out of
the third-generation forest to pull up beside and behind Pollack'sHonda. Four
heavy-set men and a hard-looking female piled out, started purposefully across
his well-tended cabbage patch, crushing ten- der young plants with a disregard
which told Roger that this wasno social call.

Pollack looked wildly around, considered making a break for the
woods, but the others had spreadout and he was grabbed and frog-marched back to
his house. (Fortunately the door had been leftunlocked. Roger had the feeling
that they might have knocked it down rather than ask him for the key.)He was
shoved abruptly into a chair. Two of the heaviest and least collegiate-looking
of his visitorsstood on either side of him. Pollack's protests--now just being
voiced-- brought no response. Thewoman and an older man poked around among his
sets. "Hey, I remember this, Al: It's the script for1965. See?" The
woman spoke as she flipped through the holo-scenes that decorated the interior
wall.

The older man nodded. "I told you. He's written more popular
games than any three men and evenmore than some agencies. Roger Pollack is
some- thing of a genius..

They're novels, damn you, not games! Old irritation flashed
unbidden into Roger's mind. Aloud:"Yeah, but most of my fans aren't as
persistent as you all..

"Most of your fans don't know that you are a criminal, Mr.
Pollack..

"Criminal? I'm no criminal--but I do know my rights. You FBI
types must identify yourselves, giveme a phone call, and--.

The woman smiled for the first time. It was not a nice smile. She
was about thirty-five, hatchet-faced, her hair drawn back in the single braid
favored by military types. Even so it could have been anicer smile. Pollack
felt a chill start up his spine. "Perhaps that would be true, if we were
the FBI or ifyou were not the scum you are. But this is a Welfare Depart- ment
bust, Pollack, and you aresuspected--putting it kindly--of interference with
the instrumentalities of National and individualsurvival..

She sounded like something out of one of those asinine scripts he
occasionally had to work on forgovernment contracts. Only now there was nothing
to laugh about, and the cold between hisshoulder- blades spread. Outside the
drizzle had become a misty rain sweeping across the NorthernCalifornia forests.
Normally he found that rain a comfort, but now it just added to the gloom.
Still, ifthere was any chance he could wriggle out of this, it would be worth
the effort. "Okay, so you havelicense to hassle innocents, but sooner or
later you're going to discover that I am innocent and thenyou'll find out what
hostile media coverage can really be like." And thank God I backed up my
fileslast night. With luck, all they'll find is some out-of-date stock-market
schemes.

"You're no innocent, Pollack. An honest citizen is content
with an ordinary data set like yoursthere." She pointed across the living
room at the forty-by- fifty-centimeter data set. It was the great-grandchild of
the old CRTs. With color and twenty-line-per- millimeter resolution, it was the
standardof govern- ment offices and the more conservative industries. There was
a visible layer of dust onPollack's model. The femcop moved quickly across the
living room and poked into the drawers underthe picture window. Her maroon
business suit revealed a thin and angu- lar figure. "An honest
citizenwould settle for a stan- dard processor and a few thousand megabytes of
fast storage." With somesuperior intuition she pulled open the center
drawer--right under the marijuana plants to reveal at leastfive hundred cubic
centimeters of optical memory, neatly racked and threaded through to the
nextdrawer which held correspondingly power- ful CPUs. Even so, it was nothing
compared to the gear hehad buried under the house.

She drifted out into the kitchen and was back in a moment. The
house was a typical airdroppedbunga- low, small and easy to search. Pollack had
spent most of his money on the land and his ...

hobbies. "And finally,"
she said, a note of triumph in her voice, "an honest citizen does not need
oneof these!" She had finally spotted the Other World gate. She waved the
electrodes in Pollack's face.

"Look, in spite of what you may want, all this is still
legal. In fact, that gadget is scarcely morepower- ful than an ordinary games
interface." That should be a good explanation, considering that hewas a
novelist.

The older man spoke almost apologetically, "I'm afraid
Virginia has a tendency to play cat andmouse, Mr. Pollack. You see, we know
that in the Other World you are Mr. Slippery..

"Oh..

There was a long silence. Even "Virginia" kept her mouth
shut. This had been, of course, RogerPollack's great fear. They had discovered
Mr. Slippery's True Name and it was Roger Andrew PollackTIN/SSAN 0959-34-2861,
and no amount of evasion, tricky programming, or robot sources could everagain
pro- tect him from them. "How did you find out?.

A third cop, a technician type, spoke up. "It wasn't easy. We
wanted to get our hands on someonewho was really good, not a trivial
vandal--what your Cov- en would call a lesser warlock." Theyounger man
seemed to know the jargon, but you could pick that up just by watching the daily
paper.

"For the last three months, DoW
has been trying to find the iden- tity of someone of the caliber ofyourself or
Robin Hood, or Erythrina, or the Slimey Limey. We were having no luck at all
until weturned the problem around and began watching artists and novelists. We
figured at least a fraction ofthem must be attracted to vandal activities. And
they would have the talent to be good at it. Yourparticipation novels are the
best in the world." There was genuine admiration in his voice. One meetsfans
in the oddest places, "so you were one of the first people we looked at.
Once we suspected you,it was just a matter of time before we had the evidence..

It was what he had always worried about. A suc- cessful warlock
cannot afford to be successful inthe real world. He had been greedy; he loved
both realms too much.

The older cop continued the technician's almost diffident
approach. "In any case, Mr. Pollack, Ithink you realize that if the
Federal government wants to concentrate all its resources on theapprehension of
a single vandal, we can do it. The vandals' power comes from their numbers
ratherthan their power as individuals..

Pollack repressed a smile. That was a common belief--or
faith--within government. He had snoopedon enough secret memos to realize that
the Feds really believed it, but it was very far from true. He wasnot nearly as
clever as someone like Erythrina. He could only devote fifteen or twenty hours
a week toSIG activities. Some of the others must be on welfare, so complete was
their presence on the OtherPlane. The cops had nailed him simply because he was
a relatively easy catch.

"So you have something besides jail planned for me?.

"Mr. Pollack, have you ever heard of the Mailman?.

"You mean on the Other Plane?.

"Certainly. He has had no notoriety in the, uh, real world as
yet..

For the moment there was no use lying. They must know that no
member of a SIG or coven wouldever give his True Name to another member. There
was no way he could betray any of the others--hehoped.

"Yeah, he's the weirdest of the werebots..

"Werebots?.

"Were-robots, like werewolves--get it? They don't really mesh
with coven imagery. They wantsome new mythos, and this notion that they are
humans who can turn into machines seems to suitthem. It's too dry for me. This
Mailman, for instance, never uses real time communication. If you wantanything
from him, you usually have to wait a day or two for each response--just like
the old-timehardcopy mail service." "That's the fellow. How impressed
are you by him?" "Oh, we've been aware ofhim for a couple years, but
he's so slow that for a long time we thought he was some clown on asimple data
set. Lately, though, he's pulled some really--" Pollack stopped short, re-
membering justwho he was gossiping with.

"--some really tuppin stunts, eh, Pollack?" The ferncop
"Virginia" was back in the conversation.

She pulled up one of the roller
chairs, till her knees were almost touching his, and stabbed a finger athis
chest. "You may not know just how tuppin. You vandals have caused Social
Security Recordsenormous prob- lems, and Robin Hood cut IRS revenues by three
percent last year. You and yourfriends are a greater threat than any foreign
enemy. Yet you're nothing compared to this Mailman..

Pollack was rocked back. It must be that he had seen only a small
fraction of the Mailman's japes.

"You're actually scared of
him," he said mildly.

Virginia's face began to take on the color of her suit. Before she
could reply, the older cop spoke.

"Yes, we are scared. We can
scarcely cope with the Robin Hoods and the Mr. Slipperys of the world.

Fortunately, most vandals are
interested in personal gain or in proving their cleverness. They realizethat if
they cause too much trouble, they could no doubt be identified. I suspect that
tens ofthousands of cases of Welfare and Tax fraud are undetected, com- mitted
by little people with simpleequipment who succeed because they don't steal
much--perhaps just their own income tax liability--and don't wish the notoriety
which you, uh, warlocks go after. If it weren't for their petty
individualism,they would be a greater threat than the nuclear terrorists.

"But the Mailman is different: he appears to be ideologically
motivated. He is very knowledgeable,very powerful. Vandalism is not enough for
him; he wants control..." The Feds had no idea how long ithad been going
on, at least a year. It never would have been discovered but for a few
departments inthe Federal Screw Standards Commission which kept their principal
copy records on paper.

Discrepancies showed up between
those records and the decisions rendered in the name of the FSSC.

Inquiries were made; computer
records were found at variance with the hardcopy. More inquiries. Byluck more
than anything else, the investigators discovered that deci- sion modules as
well as datawere different from the hardcopy backups. For thirty years
government had depended on automatedcentral planning, shifting more and more
from legal descriptions of decision algorithms to programrepresentations that
could work directly with data bases to allocate resources, suggest
legislation,outline military strategy.

The take-over had been subtle, and its extent was unknown. That
was the horror of it. It was noteven clear just what groups within the Nation
(or without) were benefitting from the changedinterpretations of Federal law
and resource allocation. Only the deci- sion modules in the olderdepartments
could be di- rectly checked, and some thirty percent of them showed tampering.
"...andthat percentage scares us as much as anything, Mr. Pollack. It
would take a large team of techniciansand lawyers months to suc- cessfully make
just the changes that we have de- tected..

"What about the military?" Pollack thought of the Finger
of God installations and the thousands ofmis- siles pointed at virtually every
country on Earth. If Mr. Slippery had ever desired to take over theworld, that
is what he would have gone for. To hell with pussy-footing around with Social
Securitychecks.

"No. No penetration there. In fact, it was his at- tempt to infiltrate--"
the older cop glancedhesitantly at Virginia, and Pollack realized who was the
boss of this operation, "--NSA that revealedthe culprit to be the Mailman.
Before that it was anonymous, totally without the ego-flaunting we seein big-time
vandals. But the military and NSA have their own systems. Impractical though
that is, itpaid off this time." Pollack nodded. The SIG steered clear of
the military, and especially of NSA.

"But if he was able to slide through DoW and Department of
Justice defenses so easy, you reallydon't know how much a matter of luck it was
that he didn't also succeed with his first try on NSA .... Ithink I understand
now. You need help. You hope to get some member of the Coven to work on
thisfrom the inside..

"It's not a hope, Pollack," said Virginia. "It's a
certainty. Forget about going to jail. Oh, we couldput you away forever on the
basis of some of Mr. Slippery's pranks. But even if we don't do that, wecan
take away your license to operate. You know what that means..

It was not a question, but Pollack knew the answer nevertheless:
ninety-eight percent of the jobsin mod- em society involved some use of a data
set. Without a license, he was virtually unemployable--and that left Welfare,
the prospect of sitting in some urbapt count- ing flowers on the wall.
Virginiamust have seen the defeat in his eyes. "Frankly, I am not as
confident as Ray that you are all thatsharp. But you are the best we could
catch. NSA thinks we have a chance of finding the Mailman'strue identity if we
can get an agent into your coven. We want you to continue to attend
covenmeetings, but now your chief goal is not mischief but the gathering of
information about the Mailman.

You are to recruit any help you can
without revealing that you are working for the government-- youmight even make
up the story that you suspect the Mailman of being a government plot. (I'm sure
yousee he has some of the characteristics of a Fed- eral agent working off a
conventional data set.) Aboveall, you are to remain alert to contact from us,
and give us your instant cooperation in anything we re-quire of you. Is all
this perfectly clear, Mr. Pollack?.

He found it difficult to meet her gaze. He had never really been
exposed to extortion before. Therewas something ... dehumanizing about being
used so. "Yeah," he finally said.

"Good." She stood up, and so did the others. "If
you behave, this is the last time you'll see us inperson..

Pollack stood too. "And afterward, if you're... satis- fied
with my performance?" Virginia grinned,and he knew he wasn't going to like
her answer. "Afterward, we can come back to considering yourcrimes. If you
do a good job, I would have no objection to your retaining a standard data set,
maybesome of your interactive graphics. But I'll tell you, if it weren't for
the Mailman, nabbing Mr. Slipperywould make my month. There is no way I'd risk
your continuing to abuse the System..

Three minutes later, their sinister black Lincolns were halfway
down the drive, disappearing intothe pines. Pollack stood in the drizzle
watching till long after their sound had faded to nothing. He wasbarely aware
of the cold wet across his shoulders and down his back. He looked up suddenly,
feelingthe rain in his face, wondering if the Feds were so clever that they had
taken the day into account: themilitary's recon satellites could no doubt
monitor their cars, but the civilian satellites the SIG hadaccess to could not
penetrate these clouds. Even if some other member of the SIG did know Mr.

Slippery's True Name, they would not
know that the Feds had paid him a visit.

Pollack looked across the yard at his garden. What a difference an
hour can make.

By late afternoon, the overcast was gone. Sunlight glinted off
millions of waterdrop jewels in thetrees. Pollack waited till the sun was
behind the tree line, till all that was left of its passage was a goldband
across the taller trees to the east of his bungalow. Then he sat down before
his equipment andprepared to ascend to the Other Plane. What he was undertak-
ing was trickier than anything he hadtried before, and he wanted to take as
much time as the Feds would tolerate. A week of thought andresearch would have
suited him more, but Virginia and her pals were clearly too impatient for that.

He powered up his processors, settled back in his favorite chair,
and carefully attached the Portal'sfive sucker electrodes to his scalp. For
long minutes noth- ing happened: a certain amount of self-denial--or at least
self-hypnosis--was necessary to make the ascent. Some experts recommended drugsor
sensory isola- tion to heighten the user's sensitivity to the faint, ambiguous
signals that could beread from the Portal. Pollack, who was certainly more
experienced than any of the pop experts, hadfound that he could make it simply
by staring out into the trees and listening to the wind-surf thatswept through
their upper branches.

And just as a daydreamer forgets his actual sur- roundings and
sees other realities, so Pollackdrifted, detached, his subconscious
interpreting the status of the West Coast communication and dataservices as a
vague thicket for his conscious mind to inspect, inter- rogate for the safest
path to anintermediate haven. Like most exurb data-commuters, Pollack rented
the standard optical links: Bell,Boeing, Nippon Electric. Those, together with
the local West Coast data companies, gave him morethan enough paths to proceed
with little chance of detection to any accept- ing processor on Earth.
Inminutes, he had traced through three changes of carrier and found a place to
do his intermediatecomputing. The comsats rented processor time almost as
cheaply as ground stations, and anautomatic payment transaction (through sev-
eral dummy accounts set up over the last several years)gave him sole control of
a large data space within milliseconds of his request. The whole process
wasalmost at a subconscious level--the proper func- tioning of numerous
routines he and others had de-vised over the last four years. Mr. Slippery (the
other name was avoided now, even in his thoughts)had achieved the fringes of
the Other Plane. He took a quick peek through the eyes of a
low-resolutionweather satellite, saw the North American continent spread out
below, the terminator sweepingthrough the West, most of the plains clouded
over. One never knew when some apparently irrelevantinformation might help--and
though it could all be done automati- cally through subconscious access,Mr.
Slippery had always been a romantic about spaceflight.

He rested for a few moments, checking that his indirect
communication links were working and thatthe encryption routines appeared
healthy, untampered with. (Like most folks, honest citizens orwarlocks, he had
no trust for the government standard encryp- tion routines, but preferred
theschemes that had leaked out of academia--over NSA's petulant objec-
tions-during the last fifteenyears.) Protected now against traceback, Mr.
Slippery set out for the Coven itself. He quickly pickedup the trail, but this
was never an easy trip, for the SIG members had no interest in being bothered
bythe unskilled.

In particular, the traveler must be able to take advantage of
subtle sensory indications, and see inthem the environment originally imagined
by the SIG. The correct path had the aspect of a narrow rowof stones cutting
through a gray-greenish swamp. The air was cold but very moist. Weird,
toweringplants dripped audibly onto the faintly iridescent water and the broad
lilies. The subconscious knewwhat the stones represented, handled the chaining
of routines from one information net to another,but it was the conscious mind
of the skilled traveler that must make the decisions that could lead tothe
gates of the Coven, or to the symbolic "death" of a dump back to the
real world. The basic gamewas a distant relative of the ancient Adventure that
had been played on computer systems for morethan forty years, and a nearer
rela- tive of the participation novels that are still widely sold. There
weretwo great differences, though. This game was more serious, and was played
at a level of complexityimpossible without the use of the EEG input/output that
the warlocks and the popular data basescalled Portals.

There was much misinformation and misunder- standing about the
Portals. Oh, responsible databases like the LA Times and the CBS News made it
clear that there was nothing supernatural aboutthem or about the Other Plane,
that the magical jargon was at best a romantic convenience and atworst
obscuran- tism. But even so, their articles often missed the point and were
both tooconservative and too extrava- gant. You might think that to convey the
full sense imagery of theswamp, some immense bandwidth would be necessary. In
fact, that was not so (and if it were, the Fedswould have quickly been able to
spot warlock and werebot operations). A typical Portal link wasaround fifty
thousand baud, far narrower than even a flat video channel. Mr. Slippery could
feel thedamp seeping through his leather boots, could feel the sweat starting
on his skin even in the cold air,but this was the response of Mr. Slippery's
imagina- tion and subconscious to the cues that wereactually being presented
through the Portal's electrodes. The interpretation could not be arbitrary orhe
would be dumped back to reality and would never find the Coven; to the traveler
on the OtherPlane, the detail was there as long as the cues were there. And
there is nothing new about thissituation. Even a poor writer if he has a
sympathetic reader and an engag- ing plot--can evokecomplete internal imagery
with a few dozen words of description. The difference now is that theimagery
has interactive significance, just as sensations in the real world do.
Ultimately, the magicjargon was perhaps the closest fit in the vocab- ulary of
millenium Man.

The stones were spaced more widely now, and it took all Mr.
Slippery's skill to avoid falling intothe noisome waters that surrounded him.
Fortunately, after another hundred meters or so, the trail roseout of the
water, and he was walking on shallow mud. The trees and brush grew in close
around him,and large spider webs glistened across the trail and be- tween some
of the trees along the side.

Like a yo-yo from some branch high above him, a red-banded spider
the size of a man's fistdescended into the space right before the traveler's
face. "Beware, beware," the tiny voice issued fromdripping mandibles.
"Beware, beware," the words were repeated, and the creature swung
back andforth, nearer and farther from Mr. Slippery's face. He looked carefully
at the spider's banded abdomen.

There were many species of
deathspider here, and each required a different response if a traveler wasto
survive. Finally he raised the back of his hand and held it level so that the
spider could crawl ontoit. The creature raced up the damp fabric of his jacket
to the open neck. There it whispered somethingvery quietly.

Mr. Slippery listened, then grabbed the animal be- fore it could
repeat the message and threw it tothe left, at the same time racing off into
the tangle of webs and branches on the other side of the trail.

Something heavy and wet slapped into
the space where he had been, but he was already gone--racingat top speed up the
incline that suddenly appeared before him.

He stopped when he reached the crest of the hill. Beyond it, he
could see the solemn, massivefortress that was the Coven's haven. It was not
more than five hundred meters away, illuminated asthe swamp had been by a vague
and indistinct light that came only partly from the sky. The trailleading down
to it was much more open than the swamp had been, but the traveler proceeded
asslowly as before: the sprites the warlocks set to keep eternal guard here had
the nasty--thoughpreprogrammed habit of changing the rules in new and deadly
ways.

The trail descended, then began a rocky, winding climb toward the
stone and iron gates of thecastle. The ground was drier here, the vegetation
sparse. Leathery snapping of wings sounded abovehim, but Mr. Slippery knew
better than to look up. Thirty meters from the moat, the heat became morethan
uncomfortable. He could hear the lava popping and hissing, could see occasional
dollops of firesplatter up from the liquid to scorch what vegetation still
lived. A pair of glowing eyes set in a coal-black head rose briefly from the
moat. A second later, the rest of the creature came surging into view,cascading
sparks and lava down upon the traveler. Mr. Slippery raised his hand just so,
and the lethalspray separated over his head to land harmlessly on either side
of him. He watched with apparent calmas the creature descended ancient stone
steps to confront him.

Alan--that was the elemental's favorite name-- peered
nearsightedly, his head weaving faintly fromside to side as he tried to
recognize the traveler. "Ah, I do believe we are honored with the presence
ofMr. Slippery, is it not so?" he finally said. He smiled, an open grin
revealing the glowing interior of hismouth. His breath did not show flame but
did have the penetrating heat of an open kiln. He rubbed hisclawed hands
against his asbestos T-shirt as though anxious to be proved wrong. Away from
hismagma moat, the dead black of his flesh lightened, trying to contain his
body heat. Now he lookedalmost reptilian.

"Indeed it is. And come to bring my favorite little
gifts." Mr. Slippery threw a leaden slug into theair and watched the
elemental grab it with his mouth, his eyes slitted with
pleasure--melt-in-your-mouth pleasure. They traded conversation, spells, and
coun- terspells for several minutes. Alan'sprincipal job was to determine that
the visitor was a known member of the Coven, and he ordinarily didthis with little
tests of skill (the magma bath he had tried to give Mr. Slippery) and by asking
the visitorquestions about previous activities within the castle. Alan was a
per- sonality simulator, of course.

Mr. Slippery was sure that there had
never been a living operator behind that toothless, glowing smile.

But he was certainly one of the
best, probably the product of many hun- dreds of blocks of psylispprogramming,
and certainly superior to the little "companionship" programs you can
buy nowadays,which generally become repeti- tive after a few hours of
conversation, which don't grow, and whichare unable to counter weird re-
sponses. Alan had been with the Coven and the cas- tle since beforeMr. Slippery
had become a member, and no one would admit to his creation (though Wi- ley J.
wassuspected). He hadn't even had a name until this year, when Erythrina had
given him that asbestosAlan Turing T-shirt.

Mr. Slippery played the game with good humor, but care. To
"die" at the hands of Alan would be apainful experience that would
probably wipe a lot of unbacked memory he could ill afford to lose. Suchdeath
had claimed many petitioners at this gate, folk who would not soon be seen on
this plane again.

Satisfied, Alan waved a clawed fist at the watchers in the tower,
and the gate--ceramic bound inwol- fram clasps--was rapidly lowered for the
visitor. Mr. Slippery walked quickly across, trying toignore the spitting and
bubbling that he heard below him. Alan-- now all respectful--waited till he
wasin the castle courtyard before doing an immense belly-flop back into his
magma swimming hole.

Most of the others, with the notable exception of Erythrina, had
already arrived. Robin Hood,dressed in green and looking like Errol Flynn, sat
across the hall in very close conversation with aremarkably good-looking female
(but then they could all be re- markably good-looking here) whoseemed unsure
whether to project blonde or brunette. By the fireplace, Wiley J. Bastard, the
SlimeyLimey, and DON.MAC were in animated discussion over a pile of maps. And
in the comer, shadedfrom the fireplace and appar- ently unused, sat a classic
remote printing terminal. Mr. Slippery tried toignore that teleprinter as he
crossed the hall.

"Ah, it's Slip." DON.MAC looked up from the maps and
gestured him closer. "Take a look here atwhat the Limey has been up to..

"Hmm?" Mr. Slippery nodded at the others, then leaned
over to study the top map. The margins ofthe paper were aging vellum, but the
"map" itself hung in three dimensions, half sunk into the paper. Itwas
a typical banking defense and cash-flow plot--that is, typical for the SIG.
Most banks had no suchclever ways of visualizing the automated protection of
their assets. (For that matter, Mr. Slipperysuspected that most banks still
looked wistfully back to the days of credit cards and COBOL.) Thiswas the sort
of thing Robin Hood had developed, and it was surprising to see the Limey
involved in it.

He looked up question- ingly.
"What's the jape?.

"It's a reg'lar double-slam, Slip. Look at this careful, an'
you'll see it's no ord'n'ry protection map.

Seems like what you blokes call the
Mafia has taken over this banking net in the Maritime states. Theymust be usin'
Portals to do it so slick. Took me a devil of a time to figure out it was them
as done it. Haha! but now that I have... look here, you'll see how they've been
launderin' funds, embezzlin' fromstraight accounts.

"They're ever so clever, but not so clever as to know about
Slimey." He poked a finger into themap and a trace gleamed red through the
maze. "If they're lucky, they'll discover this tap next autumn,when they
find themselves maybe three billion dollars short, and not a single sign of
where it alldisappeared to..

The others nodded. There were many covens and SIGs throughout this
plane. Theirs, The Coven,was widely known, had pulled off some of the most
publi- cized pranks of the century. Many of theothers were scarcely more than
social clubs. But some were old- style criminal organizations whichused this
plane for their own purely pragmatic and opportunistic reasons. Usually such
groupsweren't too difficult for the war- locks to victimize, but it was the
Slimey Limey who seemed tospecialize in doing so.

"But, geez, Slimey, these guys play rough, even rougher than
the Great Enemy." That is, the Feds.

"If they ever figure out who
you really are, you'll die the True Death for sure..

"I may be slimy, but I ain't crazy. There's no way I could
absorb three billion dollars--or even threemillion--without being discovered.
But I played it like Robin over there: the money got spread aroundthree million
ordinary accounts here and in Europe, one of which just happens to be mine..

Mr. Slippery's ears perked up. "Three million accounts, you
say? Each with a sudden little surplus.

I'll bet I could come close to
finding your True Name from that much, Slimey..

The Limey made a faffling gesture. "It's actually a wee bit
more complicated. Face it, chums, noneof you has ever come close to sightin'
me, an' you know more than any Mafia..

That was true. They all spent a good deal of their time in this
plane trying to determine the others'True Names. It was not an empty game, for
the knowledge of another's True Name effectively madehim your slave--as Mr.
Slippery had already discovered in an unpleasantly firsthand way. So
thewarlocks constantly probed one another, devised immense pro- grams to sieve
government-personnelrecords for the idiosyncracies that they detected in each
other. At first glance, the Limey should havebeen one of the easiest to
discover: he had plenty of mannerisms. His Brit accent was dated and brokedown
every so often into North American. Of all the warlocks, he was the only one
neither handsomenor grotesque. His face was, in fact, so ordinary and real that
Mr. Slippery had suspected that it mightbe his true appearance and had spent
several months devising a scheme that searched secret and USand common Europe
photo files for just that appearance. It had been for nothing, and they had
alleventually reached the conclusion that the Limey must be doubly or triply
deceptive.

Wiley J. Bastard grinned, not too impressed. "It's nice
enough, and I agree that the risks areprobably small, Slimey. But what do you
really get? An ego boost and a little money. But we," hegestured inclusively,
"are worth more than that. With a little cooperation, we could be the
mostpowerful people in the real world. Right, DON?.

DON.MAC nodded, smirking. His face was really the only part of him
that looked human or hadmuch flexibility of expression--and even it was steely
gray. The rest of DON's body was modeled afterthe stan- dard Plessey-Mercedes
all-weather robot.

Mr. Slippery recognized the reference. "So you're working
with the Mailman now, too, Wiley?" Heglanced briefly at the teleprinter.
"Yup..

"And you still won't give us any clue what it's all about?.

Wiley shook his head. "Not unless you're serious about
throwing in with us. But you all know this:DON was the first to work with the
Mailman, and he's richer than Croesus now..

DON.MAC nodded again, that silly smile still on his face.

"Hmmm." It was easy to get rich. In principle, the Limey
could have made three billion dollars offthe Mob in his latest caper. The
problem was to become that rich and avoid detection and retribution.

Even Robin Hood hadn't mastered that
trick--but appar- ently DON and Wiley thought the Mailmanhad done that and
more. After his chat with Virginia, he was willing to believe it. Mr. Slippery
turnedto look more closely at the teleprinter. It was humming faintly, and as
usual it had a good supply ofpaper. The paper was torn neatly off at the top,
so that the only mes- sage visible was the Mailman'sasterisk prompt. It was the
only way they ever communicated with this most mysterious of theirmembers: type
a message on the device, and in an hour or a week the machine would rattle and
beat,and a response of up to several thousand words would appear. In the
beginning, it had not been verypopular--the idea was cute, but the delays made
conversation just too damn dull. He could rememberseeing meters of Mailman
output lying sloppily on the stone floor, mostly unread. But now, every oneof
the Mailman's golden words was eagerly sopped up by his new apprentices, who
very carefullyremoved every piece of output, leaving no clues for the rest of
them to work with.

"Ery!" He looked toward the broad stone stairs that led
down from the courtyard. It was Erythrina,the Red Witch. She swept down the
stairs, her costume shimmering, now revealing, now obscuring.

She had a spectacular figure and an
excellent sense of design, but of course that was not what wasremarkable about
her. Erythrina was the sort of person who knew much more than she ever said,
eventhough she always seemed easy to talk to. Some of her adventures--though
unadvertised--were in aclass with Robin Hood's. Mr. Slippery had known her well
for a year; she was certainly the mostinteresting personality on this plane.
She made him wish that all the secrets were unnecessary, thatTrue Names could
be traded as openly as phone numbers. What was she really.

Erythrina nodded to Robin Hood, then proceeded down the hall to
DON.MAC, who had originallyshouted greetings and now continued, "We've
just been trying to convince Slimey and Slip that theyare wasting their time on
pranks when they could have real power and real wealth..

She glanced sharply at Wiley, who seemed strangely irritated that
she had been drawn into theconversation. "'We' meaning you and Wiley and
the Mailman?.

Wiley nodded. "I just started working with them last week,
Ery," as if to say, and you can't stopme.

"You may have something, DON. We all started out as amateurs,
doing our best to make theSystem just a little bit uncomfortable for its
bureaucratic masters. But we are experts now. Weprobably under- stand the System
better than anyone on Earth. That should equate to power." It wasthe same
thing the other two had been saying, but she could make it much more
persuasive. Before hisencounter with the Feds, he might have bought it (even
though he always knew that the day he gotserious about Coven activities and
went after real gain would also be the day it ceased to be anenjoyable game and
became an all-consuming job that would suck time away from the projects
thatmade life entertaining).

Erythrina looked from Mr. Slippery to the Limey and then back. The
Limey was an easygoing sort,but just now he was a bit miffed at the way his own
pet project had been dismissed. "Not for me,thanky," he said shortly
and began to gather up his maps.

She turned her green, faintly oriental eyes upon Mr. Slippery.
"How about you, Slip? Have yousigned up with the Mailman?.

He hesitated. Maybe I should. It seemed clear that the Mailman's
confederates were being let in onat least part of his schemes. In a few hours,
he might be able to learn enough to get Virginia off hisback. And perhaps
destroy his friends to boot; it was a hell of a bargain. God in Heaven, why did
theyhave to get mixed up in this? Don't they realize what the Govern- ment will
do to them, if they reallytry to take over, if they ever try to play at being
more than vandals? "Not... not yet," he said finally.

"I'm awfully tempted, though..

She grinned, regular white teeth flashing against her dark,
faintly green face. "I, too. What do yousay we talk it over, just the two
of us?" She reached out a slim, dark hand to grasp his elbow.
"Excuseus, gentlemen; hopefully, when we get back, you'll have a couple of
new allies." And Mr. Slippery felthimself gently propelled toward the dark
and musty stairs that led to Erythrina's private haunts.

Her torch burned and glowed, but there was no smoke. The
flickering yellow lit their path for scantmeters ahead. The stairs were steep
and gently curving. He had the feeling that they must do acomplete circle every
few hundred steps: this was an immense spiral cut deep into the heart of
theliving rock. And it was alive. As the smell of mildew and rot increased, as
the dripping from the ceilinggrew subtly louder and the puddles in the worn
steps deeper, the walls high above their heads tookon shapes, and those shapes
changed and flowed to follow them. Erythrina protected her part of thecastle as
thoroughly as the castle itself was guarded against the outside world. Mr.
Slippery had nodoubt that if she wished, she could trap him permanently here,
along with the lizards and the rocksprites. (Of course he could always
"escape" simply by falling back into the real world, but until
sherelented or he saw through her spells, he would not be able to access any
other portion of the castle.)Working on some of their projects, he had visited
her underground halls, but never anything thisdeep.

He watched her shapely form preceding him down, down, down. Of all
the Coven (with thepossible exception of Robin Hood, and of course the
Mailman), she was the most powerful. Hesuspected that she was one of the original
founders. If only there were some way of convincing her(without revealing the
source of his knowledge) that the Mailman was a threat. If only there was
someway of getting her cooperation in nailing down the Mailman's True Name.

Erythrina stopped short and he bumped pleasantly into her. Over
her shoulder, a high door endedthe passage. She moved her hand in a pattern
hidden from Mr. Slippery and muttered some unlockingspell. The door split
horizontally, its halves pulling apart with oiled and massive precision.
Beyond, hehad the impression of spots and lines of red breaking a fur- ther
darkness.

"Mind your step," she said and hopped over a murky
puddle that stood before the high sill of thedoorway.

As the door slid shut behind them, Erythrina changed the torch to
a single searing spot of whitelight, like some old-time incandescent bulb. The
room was bright-lit now. Comfortable black leatherchairs sat on black tile. Red
engraving, faintly glowing, was worked into the tile and the obsidian ofthe
walls. In contrast to the stairway, the air was fresh and clean-- though still.

She waved him to a chair that faced away from the light, then sat
on the edge of a broad desk. Thepoint light glinted off her eyes, making them
unreadable. Erythrina's face was slim and fine-boned,almost Asian except for
the pointed ears. But the skin was dark, and her long hair had the reddishtones
unique to some North American blacks. She was barely smiling now, and Mr.
Slippery wishedagain he had some way of getting her help.

"Slip, I'm scared," she said finally, the smile gone.

You're scared! For a moment, he couldn't quite believe his ears.
"The Mailman?" he asked, hoping.

She nodded. "This is the first time in my life I've felt
outgunned. I need help. Robin Hood may bethe most competent, but he's basically
a narcissist; I don't think I could interest him in anythingbeyond his
immediate gratifications. That leaves you and the Limey. And I think there's
somethingspecial about you. We've done a couple things together," she
couldn't help herself, and grinnedremembering. "They weren't real
impressive, but somehow I have a feeling about you: I think youunderstand what
things up here are silly games and what things are really important. If you
thinksomething is really important, you can be trusted to stick with it even if
the going gets a little...

bloody..

Coming from someone like Ery, the words had special meaning. It
was strange, to feel both flatteredand frightened. Mr. Slippery stuttered for a
moment, inarticulate. "What about Wiley J? Seems to meyou have special...
influence over him..

"You knew... ?.

"Suspected..

"Yes, he's my thrall. Has been for almost six months. Poor
Wiley tums out to be a life-insurancesalesman from Peoria. Like a lot of
warlocks, he's rather a Thurberesque fellow in real life: timid, alwaysdream-
ing of heroic adventures and grandiose thefts. Only nowadays people like that
can realize theirdreams .... Anyway, he doesn't have the background, or the
time, or the skill that I do, and I found hisTrue Name. I enjoy the chase more
than the extortion, so I haven't leaned on him too hard; now I wishI had. Since
he's taken up with the Mailman, he's been giving me the finger. Somehow Wiley
thinksthat what they have planned will keep him safe even if I give his True
Name to the cops!.

"So the Mailman actually has some scheme for winning
political power in the real world?.

She smiled. "That's what Wiley thinks. You see, poor Wiley
doesn't know that there are more usesfor True Names than simple blackmail. I
know every- thing he sends over the data links, everything hehas been told by
the Mailman..

"So what are they up to?" It was hard to conceal his
eagerness. Perhaps this will be enough tosatisfy Virginia and her goons.

Erythrina seemed frozen for a moment, and he realized that she too
must be using the low-altitudesatellite net for preliminary processing: her
task had just been handed off from one comsat to a nearerbird. Ordinarily it
was easy to disguise the hesitation. She must be truly upset.

And when she finally replied, it wasn't really with an answer.
"You know what convinced Wileythat the Mailman could deliver on his
promises? It was DON.MAC--and the revolution in Venezuela.

Appar- ently DON and the Mailman had
been working on that for several months before Wiley joinedthem. It was to be
the Mailman's first demonstration that con- trolling data and information
servicescould be used to take permanent political control of a state. And
Venezuela, they claimed, was perfect:it has enormous data-processing facilities--all
just a bit obsolete, since they were bought when thecountry was at the peak of
its boom time..

"But that was clearly an internal coup. The present leaders
are local--.

"Nevertheless, DON is supposedly down there now, the real
Jefe, for the first time in his life able tolive in the physical world the way
we do in this plane. If you have your own country, you are nolonger small fry
that must guard his True Name. You don't have to settle for crumbs..

"You said 'supposedly'..

"Slip, have you noticed anything strange about DON lately?.

Mr. Slippery thought back. DON.MAC had always been the most
extreme of the werebots--afterthe Mailman. He was not an especially talented
fellow, but he did go to great lengths to sustain theimage that he was both machine
and human. His persona was always present in this plane, though atleast part of
the time it was a simulator like Alan out in the magma moat. The simulation was
fairlygood, but no one had yet produced a program that could really pass the
Turing test: that is, fool a realhuman for any extended time. Mr. Slippery
remembered the silly smile that seemed pasted on DON'sface and the faintly
repetitive tone of his lobbying for the Mailman. "You think the real
person behindDON is gone, that we have a zombie up there?.

"Slip, I think the real DON is dead, and I mean the True
Death..

"Maybe he just found the real world more delight- ful than
this, now that he owns such a big hunkof it?.

"I don't think he owns anything. It's just barely possible
that the Mailman had something to dowith that coup; there are a number of
coincidences be- tween what they told Wiley beforehand andwhat actually
happened. But I've spent a lot of time float- ing through the Venezuelan data
bases, andI think I'd know if an outsider were on the scene, directing the new
order.

"I think the Mailman is taking us on one at a time, starting
with the weakest, drawing us in farenough to learn our True Names--and then
destroying us. So far he has only done it to one of us. I'vebeen watch- ing
DON.MAC both directly and automatically since the coup, and there has never
beena real person behind that facade, not once in two thousand hours. Wiley is
next. The poor slob hasn'teven been told yet what country his kingdom is to
be--evidence that the Mailman doesn't really havethe power he claims-- but even
so, he's ready to do practically anything for the Mailman, and againstus.

"Slip, we have got to identify this thing, this Mailman,
before he can get us..

She was even more upset than Virginia and the Feds. And she was
right. For the first time, he feltmore afraid of the Mailman than the
government agents. He held up his hands. "I'm convinced. Butwhat should we
do? You've got the best angle in Wiley. The Mailman doesn't know you've got a
tapthrough him, does he?.

She shook her head. "Wiley is too chicken to tell him, and
doesn't realize that I can do this with hisTrue Name. But I'm already doing
everything I can with that. I want to pool information, guesses, withyou. Between
us maybe we can see something new." "Well for starters, it's obvious
that theMailman's queer communication style--those long time delays--is a ploy.
I know that fellow is listeningall the time to what's going on in the Coven
meeting hall. And he commands a number of sprites in realtime." Mr.
Slippery remembered the day the Mailman-- or at least his teleprinter--had
arrived. Theimage of an American Van Lines truck had pulled up at the edge of
the moat, nearly intimidating Alan.

The driver and loader were
simulators, though good ones. They had answered all of Alan's
questionscorrectly, then hauled the shipping crate down to the meeting hall.
They hadn't left till the warlockssigned for the shipment and promised to
"wire a wall outlet" for the device. This enemy definitelyknew how to
arouse the curios- ity of his victims. Whoever controlled that printer seemed
perfectlycapable of normal behavior. Perhaps it's someone we already know, like
in the mysteries where themurderer masquerades as one of the victims. Robin
Hood.

"I know. In fact, he can do many things faster than I. He
must control some powerful processors.

But you're partly wrong: the living
part of him that's behind it all really does operate with at least aone-hour
turnaround time. All the quick stuff is programmed..

Mr. Slippery started to protest, then realized that she could be
right. "My God, what could thatmean? Why would he deliberately saddle
himself with that disadvantage?.

Erythrina smiled with some satisfaction. "I'm con- vinced
that if we knew that, we'd have this guysighted. I agree it's too great a
disadvantage to be a simple red herring. I think he must have sometime- delay
problem to begin with, and--.

"--and he has exaggerated it?" But even if the Mailman
were an Australian, the low satellite netmade delays so short that he would
probably be indis- tinguishable from a European or a Japanese.

There was no place on Earth where...
but there are places off Earth! The mass-transmit satellites werein syn-
chronous orbit 120 milliseconds out. There were about two hundred people there.
And furtherout, at L5, there were at least another four hundred. Some were
near-permanent residents. A strangeidea, but still a possibility.

"I don't think he has exaggerated. Slip, I think the
Mailman--not his processors and simulators, youunderstand--is at least a
half-hour out from Earth, probably in the asteroid belt..

She smiled suddenly, and Mr. Slippery realized that his jaw must
be resting on his chest. Except forthe Joint Mars Recon, no human had been
anywhere near that far out. No human. Mr. Slippery felt hisordinary, everyday
world disintegrating into sheer sci- ence fiction. This was ridiculous.

"I know you don't believe; it took me a while to. He's not so
obvious that he doesn't add in sometime delay to disguise the cyclic variation
in our relative positions. But it is a consistent explanationfor the delay.
These last few weeks I've been sniffing around the classified reports on our
asteroidprobes; there are definitely some mysterious things out there..

"Okay. It's consistent. But you're talking about an
interstellar invasion. Even if NASA had thefunding, it would take them decades
to put the smallest inter- stellar probe together--and decadesmore for the
flight. Trying to invade anyone with those logistics would be impossible. And if
thesealiens have a decent stardrive, why do they bother with deception? They
could just move in andbrush us aside..

"Ah, that's the point, Slip. The invasion I'm think- ing of
doesn't need any "stardrive," and it worksfine against any race at
exactly our point of development. Right: most likely interstellar war is
afantastically expensive business, with decade lead times. What better policy
for an imperialistic, highlytechnological race than to lie doggo listening for
evidence of young- er civilizations? When theydetect such, they send only one
ship. When it arrives in the victims' solar system, the Computer Ageis in full
bloom there. We in the Coven know how fragile the present system is; it is only
fear ofexposure that prevents some war- locks from trying to take over. Just
think how appeal- ing ournaivete must be to an older civilization that has
thousands of years of experience at managing datasystems. Their small crew of
agents moves in as close as local military surveillance permits and grad-ually
insinuates itself into the victims' system. They eliminate what sharp
individuals they detect inthat system--people like us--and then they go after
the bureaucracies and the military. In ten or twentyyears, another fiefdom is
ready for the arrival of the master race..

She lapsed into silence, and for a long moment they stared at each
other. It did all hang togetherwith a weird sort of logic. "What can we
do, then?.

"That's the question." She shook her head sadly, came
across the room to sit beside him. Now thatshe had said her piece, the fire had
gone out of her. For the first time since he had known her,Erythrina looked
depressed. "We could just forsake this plane and stay in the real world.
The Mailmanmight still be able to track us down, but we'd be of no more
interest to him than anyone else. If wewere lucky, we might have years before
he takes over." She straightened. "I'll tell you this: if we wantto
live as warlocks, we have to stop him soon--within days at most. After he gets
Wiley, he may dropthe con tac- tics for something more direct.

"If I'm right about the Mailman, then our best bet would be
to discover his communication link.

That would be his Achilles' heel;
there's no way you can hide in the crowd when you're beaming fromthat far away.
We've got to take some real chances now, do things we'd never risk before. I
figure thatif we work together, maybe we can lessen the risk that either of us
is identified..

He nodded. Ordinarily a prudent warlock used only limited
bandwidth and so was confined to akind of linear, personal perception. If they
grabbed a few hundred megahertz of comm space, and abigger share of rented
processors, they could manipulate and search files in a way that would
boggleVirginia the femcop. Of course, they would be much more easily
identifiable. With two of them,though, they might be able to keep it up safely
for a brief time, confusing the government and theMailman with a multiplicity
of clues. "Frankly, I don't buy the alien part. But the rest of what you
saymakes sense, and that's what counts. Like you say, we're going to have to
take some chances..

"Right!" She smiled and reached behind his neck to draw
his face to hers. She was a very goodkisser. (Not everyone was. It was one
thing just to look gorgeous, and another to project and respondto the many
sensory cues in something as interactive as kissing.) He was just warming to
this exerciseof their mutual abilities when she broke off. "And the best
time to start is right now. The others thinkwe're sealed away down here. If strange
things happen during the next few hours, it's less likely theMail- man will
suspect us." She reached up to catch the light point in her hand. For an
instant, bladesof harsh white slipped out from between her fingers; then all
was dark. He felt faint air motion as herhands moved through another spell.
There were words, distorted and unidentifiable. Then the lightwas back, but as
a torch again, and a door--a second door--had opened in the far wall.

He followed her up the passage that stretched straight and gently
rising as far as the torchlightshone. They were walking a path that could not
be--or at least that no one in the Coven could havebelieved. The castle was
basically a logical structure "fleshed" out with the sensory cues
that allowedthe warlocks to move about it as one would a physical structure.
Its moats and walls were part of thatlogical structure, and though they had no
physical reality outside of the varying potentials inwhatever processors were
running the program, they were proof against the movement of the
equally"unreal" perceptions of the inhabitants of the plane.
Erythrina and Mr. Slippery could have escapedthe deep room simply by falling
back into the real world, but in doing so, they would have left a chainof
unclosed processor links. Their departure would have been detected by every
Coven member, evenby Alan, even by the sprites. An or- derly departure scheme,
such as represented by this tunnel,could only mean that Erythrina was far too
clever to need his help, or that she had been one of theoriginal builders of
the castle some four years earlier (lost in the Mists of Time, as the Limey put
it).

They were wild dogs now, large enough so as not likely to be
bothered, small enough to bemistaken for the amateur users that are seen more and
more in the Other Plane as the price of Portalsdeclines and the skill of the
public increases. Mr. Slippery followed Erythrina down narrow paths,deeper and
deeper into the swamp that represented commercial and govern- ment data space.

Occasionally he was aware of sprites
or simulators watching them with hostile eyes from nests off tothe sides of the
trail. These were idle creations in many cases--program units designed to
infuriate oramuse later visitors to the plane. But many of them guarded
information caches, or peep- holes intoother folks' affairs, or meeting places
of other SIGs. The Coven might be the most sophisti- catedgroup of users on
this plane, but they were far from being alone.

The brush got taller, bending over the trail to drip on their backs.
But the water was clear here,spread in quiet ponds on either side of their
path. Light came from the water itself, a pearlyluminescence that shone upward
on the trunks of the waterbound trees and sparkled faintly in thedroplets of
water in their moss and leaves. That light was the representa- tion of the
really huge databases run by the govern- ment and the largest companies. It did
not correspond to a specificgeographical location, but rather to the main
East/West net that stretches through selectedinstallations from Honolulu to
Oxford, taking advan- tage of the time zones to spread the user load.

"Just a little bit farther," Erythrina said over her
shoulder, speaking in the beast language(encipher- ment) that they had chosen
with their forms.

Minutes later, they shrank into the brush, out of the way of two
armored hackers that proceededimpla- cably up the trail. The pair drove in
single file, the impossibly large eight-cylinder engines ontheir bikes belching
fire and smoke and noise. The one bringing up the rear carried an
old-stylerecoilless rifle decor- ated with swastikas and chrome. Dim fires
glowed through their blackened faceplates. The two dogs eyed the bikers
timidly, as befitted their present disguise, but Mr. Slippery hadthe feeling he
was looking at a couple of amateurs who were imaging beyond their station in
life: thebikes' tires didn't always touch the ground, and the tracks they left
didn't quite match the texture of themuck. Anyone could put on a heroic image
in this plane, or appear as some dreadful monster. Theproblem was that there
were always skilled users who were willing to cut such pretenders down
tosize--perhaps even to destroy their access. It befitted the less experienced
to appear small andinconspicuous, and to stay out of others' way.

(Mr. Slippery had often speculated just how the simple notion of
using high-resolution EEGs asinput/output devices had caused the development of
the "magical world" representation of dataspace. The Limey and
Erythrina argued that sprites, reincarnation, spells, and castles were the
naturaltools here, more natural than the atomistic twentieth-century notions of
data structures, programs,files, and communica- tions protocols. It was, they
argued, just more conve- nient for the mind to usethe global ideas of magic as
the tokens to manipulate this new environment. They had a point; in fact,it was
likely that the govern- ments of the world hadn't caught up to the skills of
the better warlockssimply because they refused to indulge in the foolish imaginings
of fantasy. Mr. Slip- pery lookeddown at the reflection in the pool beside him
and saw the huge canine face and lolling tongue lookingup at him; he winked at
the image. He knew that despite all his friends' high intellectual
arguments,there was another reason for the present state of affairs, a reason
that went back to the Moon Landerand Adventure games at the "dawn of
time": it was simply a hell of a lot of fun to live in a world asmalleable
as the human imagination.) Once the riders were out of sight, Erythrina moved
back across the path to the edge of the pondand peered long and hard down
between the lilies, into the limpid depths. "Okay, let's do some
cross-correla- tion. You take the JPL data base, and I'll take the Harvard
Multispectral Patrol. Start with datacoming off space probes out to ten AUs. I
have a suspicion the easiest way for the Mailman todisguise his trans- missions
is to play trojan horse with data from a NASA spacecraft..

Mr. Slippery nodded. One way or another, they should resolve her
alien invasion theory first.

"It should take me about half an hour to get in place. After
that, we can set up for the correlation.

Hmmm ... if something goes wrong,
let's agree to meet at Mass Transmit 3," and she gave a passwordscheme.
Clearly that would be an emergency situation. If they weren't back in the
castle within three orfour hours, the others would certainly guess the
existence of her secret exit.

Erythrina tensed, then dived into the water. There was a small
splash, and the lilies bobbed gentlyin the expanding ring waves. Mr. Slippery
looked deep, but as expected, there was no further sign ofher. He padded around
the side of the pool, trying to identify the special glow of the JPL data base.

There was thrashing near one of the larger lilies, one that he
recognized as obscuring the NSAconnec- tions with the East/West net. A large
bullfrog scram- bled out of the water onto the pad andturned to look at him.
"Aha! Gotcha, you sonofabitch!.

It was Virginia; the voice was the same, even if the body was
different. "Shhhhhh!" said Mr.

Slippery, and looked wildly about
for signs of eavesdroppers. There were none, but that did not meanthey were
safe. He spread his best privacy spell over her and crawled to the point
closest to the lily.

They sat glaring at each other like
some characters out of La Fontaine: The Tale of the Frog and Dog.

How dearly he would love to leap
across the water and bite off that fat little head. Unfortunately thevictory
would be a bit temporary. "How did you find me?" Mr. Slippery
growled. If people asinexperienced as the Feds could trace him down in his
disguise, he was hardly safe from the Mailman.

"You forget," the frog puffed smugly. "We know your
Name. It's simple to monitor your homeproces- sor and follow your every move..

Mr. Slippery whined deep in his throat. In thrall to a frog. Even
Wiley has done better than that.

"Okay, so you found me. Now
what do you want?.

"To let you know that we want results, and to get a progress
report..

He lowered his muzzle till his eyes were even with Virginia's.
"Heh heh. I'll give you a progressreport, but you're not going to like
it." And he proceeded to explain Erythrina's theory that theMailman was an
alien invasion.

"Rubbish," spoke the frog afterward. "Sheer
fantasy! You're going to have to do better than that,Pol er, Mister..

He shuddered. She had almost spoken his Name. Was that a
calculated threat or was she simply asstupid as she seemed? Nevertheless, he
persisted. "Well then, what about Venezuela?" He related theevidence
Ery had that the coup in that country was the Mailman's work.

This time the frog did not reply. Its eyes glazed over with
apparent shock, and he realized that Vir-ginia must be consulting people at the
other end. Almost fifteen minutes passed. When the frog'seyes cleared, it was
much more subdued. "We'll check on that one. What you say is possible.
Justbarely possible. If true... well, if it's true, this is the biggest threat
we've had to face this century..

And you see that I am perhaps the only one who can bail you out.
Mr. Slippery relaxed slightly. Ifthey only realized it, they were thralled to
him as much as the reverse--at least for the moment. Then here- membered
Erythrina's plan to grab as much power as they could for a brief time and try
to use thatadvan- tage to flush the Mailman out. With the Feds on their side,
they could do more than Ery hadever imagined. He said as much to Virginia.

The frog croaked, "You ... want ... us ... to give you carte
blanche in the Federal data system.

Maybe you'd like to be President and
Chair of the JCS, to boot?.

"Hey, that's not what I said. I know it's an extraor- dinary
suggestion, but this is an extraordinarysituation. And in any case, you know my
Name. There's no way I can get around that..

The frog went glassy-eyed again, but this time for only a couple
of minutes. "We'll get back to youon that. We've got a lot of checking to
do on the rest of your theories before we commit ourselves toanything. Till
further notice, though, you're grounded..

"Wait!" What would Ery do when he didn't show? If he
wasn't back in the castle in three or fourhours, the others would surely know
about the secret exit.

The frog was implacable. "I said, you're grounded, Mister. We
want you back in the real worldimmedi- ately. And you'll stay grounded till you
hear from us. Got it?.

The dog slumped. "Yeah..

"Okay." The frog clambered heavily to the edge of the
sagging lily and dumped itself ungracefullyinto the water. After a few seconds,
Mr. Slippery followed.

Coming back was much like waking from a deep daydream; only here
it was the middle of the night.

Roger Pollack stood, stretching, trying to get the kinks out of
his muscles. Almost four hours hehad been gone, longer than ever before.
Normally his concentration began to fail after two or threehours. Since he
didn't like the thought of drugging up, this put a definite limit on his
endurance in theOther Plane.

Beyond the bungalow's picture window, the pines stood silhouetted
against the Milky Way. Hecranked open a pane and listened to the night birds
trilling out there in the trees. It was near the end ofspring; he liked to
imagine he could see dim polar twilight to the north. More likely it was just
CrescentCity. Pol- lack' leaned close to the window and looked high into the
sky, where Mars sat close toJupiter. It was hard to think of a threat to his
own life from as far away as that.

Pollack backed up the spells acquired during this last session,
powered down his system, andstumbled off to bed.

The following morning and afternoon seemed the longest of Roger
Pollack's life. How would theyget in touch with him? Another visit of goons and
black Lincolns? What had Erythrina done when hedidn't make contact? Was she all
right.

And there was just no way of checking. He paced back and forth
across his tiny living room, thenovel- plots that were his normal work
forgotten. Ah, but there is a way. He looked at his old data setwith dawning
recognition. Virginia had said to stay out of the Other Plane. But how could
they objectto his using a simple data set, no more efficient than mil- lions
used by office workers all over theworld.

He sat down at the set, scraped the dust from the handpads and
screen. He awkwardly enteredlong- unused call symbols and watched the flow of
news across the screen. A few queries and hediscovered that no great disasters
had occurred overnight, that the insurgency in Indonesia seemedtemporarily
abated. (Wiley J. was not to be king just yet.) There were no reports of
big-time datavandals biting the dust.

Pollack grunted. He had forgotten how tedious it was to see the
world through a data set, evenwith audio entry. In the Other Plane, he could
pick up this sort of information in seconds, as casuallyas an ordi- nary mortal
might glance out the window to see if it is raining. He dumped the last
twenty-four hours of the world bulletin board into his home memory space and
began checking through it.

The bulletin board was ideal for
untraceable reception of messages: any- one on Earth could leave
amessage--indexed by subject, target audience, and source. If a user copied the
entire board, and thensearched it, there was no outside record of exactly what
information he was interested in. There werealso simple ways to make nearly
untraceable entries on the board.

As usual, there were about a dozen messages for Mr. Slippery. Most
of them were from fans; theCov- en had greater notoriety than any other vandal
SIG. A few were for other Mr. Slipperys. Withfive billion people in the world,
that wasn't surprising.

And one of the memos was from the Mailman; that's what it said in
the source field. Pollackpunched the message up on the screen. It was in caps,
with no color or sound. Like all messagesdirectly from the Mailman, it looked
as if it came off some incredibly ancient I/O device: YOU COULD HAVE BEEN RICH.
YOU COULD HAVE RULED. INSTEAD YOU CONSPIRED AGAINST ME. I KNOW ABOUT THE SECRET
EXIT. I KNOW ABOUT YOUR DOGGY DE- PARTURE. YOU AND THE RED ONE ARE DEAD NOW. IF
YOU EVER SNEAK BACK ONTO THIS PLANE, IT WILL BE THE TRUE DEATH--I AM THAT CLOSE
TO KNOWING YOUR NAMES.

.

.

.

.

.

WATCH FOR ME IN THE NEWS, SUCKER.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Bluff, thought Roger. He wouldn't be sending out warnings if he
has that kind of power. Still,there was a dropping sensation in his stomach.
The Mail- man shouldn't have known about the dogdisguise. Was he onto Mr.
Slippery's connection with the Feds? If so, he might really be able to
findSlippery's True Name. And what sort of danger was Ery in? What had she done
when he missed therendezvous at Mass Transmit 3.

A quick search showed no messages from Erythrina. Either she was
looking for him in the OtherPlane, or she was as thoroughly grounded as he.

He was still stewing on this when the phone rang. He said,
"Accept, no video send." His data setcleared to an even gray: the
caller was not sending video either.

"You're still there? Good." It was Virginia. Her voice
sounded a bit odd, subdued and tense.

Perhaps it was just the effect of
the scrambling algorithms. He prayed she would not trust thatscrambling. He had
never bothered to make his phone any more secure than average. (And he hadseen
the schemes Wiley J. and Robin Hood had devised to decrypt thousands of
commercial phonemessages in real- time and monitor for key phrases, signaling
them when anything interesting wasdetected. They couldn't use the technique
very effectively, since it took an enormous amount ofprocessor space, but the
Mail- man was probably not so limited.) Virginia continued, "No names,
okay? We checked out what you told us and... it looks like you'reright. We
can't be sure about your theory about his origin, but what you said about the
internationalsituation was verified." So the Venezuela coup had been an
outside take-over. "Furthermore, we thinkhe has in- filtrated us much more
than we thought. It may be that the evidence we had of unsuccessfulmeddling was
just a red herring." Pollack recognized the fear in her voice now.
Apparently the Fedssaw that they were up against something catastrophic. They
were caught with their countermeasuresdown, and their only hope lay with
unreliables like Pollack.

"Anyway, we're going ahead with what you sug- gested. We'll
provide you two with the resourcesyou requested. We want you in the Other ...
place as soon as possible. We can talk more there..

"I'm on my way. I'll check with my friend and get back to you
there." He cut the connection withoutwaiting for a reply. Pollack sat
back, trying to savor this triumph and the near-pleading in the cop'svoice.
Somehow, he couldn't. He knew what a hard case she was; anything that could
make her crawlwas more hellish than anything he wanted to face.

His first stop was Mass Transmit 3. Physically, MT3 was a
two-thousand-tonne satellite insynchro- nous orbit over the Indian Ocean. The
Mass Trans- mits handled most of the planet'snoninteractive communications (and
in fact that included a lot of transmission that most peopleregarded as
interactive-- such as human/human and the simpler human/com- puter
conversations).

Bandwidth and processor space was
cheaper on the Mass Transmits because of the 240- to 900-millisecond time
delays that were involved.

As such, it was a nice out-of-the-way meeting place, and in the
Other Plane it was represented as afive- meter-wide ledge near the top of a
mountain that rose from the forests and swamps that stood forthe lower
satellite layer and the ground-based nets. In the distance were two similar
peaks, clear inpale sky.

Mr. Slippery leaned out into the chill breeze that swept the face
of the mountain and looked downpast the timberline, past the evergreen forests.
Through the unnatural mists that blanketed thoserealms, he thought he could see
the Coven's castle.

Perhaps he should go there, or down to the swamps. There was no
sign of Erythrina. Only spritesin the forms of bats and tiny griffins were to
be seen here. They sailed back and forth over him,sometimes soar- ing far
higher, toward the uttermost peak itself.

Mr. Slippery himself was in an extravagant winged man form, one
that subtly projected amateurism,one that he hoped would pass the inspection of
the enemy's eyes and ears. He fluttered clumsilyacross the ledge toward a small
cave that provided some shelter from the whistling wind. Fine, wind-dropped
snow lay in a small bank before the entrance. The insects he found in the cave
were no morethan what they seemed-- amateur transponders.

He turned and started back toward the drop-off; he was going to
have to face this alone. But as hepassed the snowbank, the wind swirled it up
and tiny crys- tals stung his face and hands and nose.

Trap! He jumped backward, his
fastest escape spell coming to his lips, at the same time cursinghimself for
not establishing the spell before. The time delay was just too long; the trap
lived here atMT3 and could react faster than he. The little snow-devil dragged
the crys- tals up into a swirlingcolumn of singing motes that chimed in
near-unison, "W-w-wait-t-t!.

The sound matched deep-set recognition patterns; this was
Erythrina's work. Three hundredmillisec- onds passed, and the wind suddenly
picked up the rest of the snow and whirled into a moresubstantial, taller
column. Mr. Slippery realized that the trap had been more of an alarm, set to
bringEry if he should be recognized here. But her arrival was so quick that she
must already have been atwork somewhere in this plane.

"Where have you been-n-n!" The snow-devil's chime was a
combination of rage and concern.

Mr. Slippery threw a second spell over the one he recognized she
had cast. There was no help forit: he would have to tell her that the Feds had
his Name. And with that news, Virginia's confirmationabout Venezuela and the
Feds' offer to help.

Erythrina didn't respond immediately--and only part of the delay
was light lag. Then the swirlingsnow flecks that represented her gusted up
around him. "So you lose no matter how this comes out,eh? I'm sorry,
Slip..

Mr. Slippery's wings drooped. "Yeah. But I'm begin- ning to
believe it will be the True Death for usall if we don't stop the Mailman. He
really means to take over ... everything. Can you imagine what itwould be like
if all the governments' wee megalomaniacs got replaced by one big one?.

The usual pause. The snow-devil seemed to shud- der in on itself.
"You're right; we've got to stophim even if it means working for Sammy
Sugar and the entire DoW." She chuckled, a near-inaudiblechiming.
"Even if it means that they have to work for us." She could laugh;
the Feds didn't know herName. "How did your Federal Friends say we could
plug into their system?" Her form was changingagain--to a solid, winged
form, an albino eagle. The only red she al- lowed herself was in the eyes,which
gleamed with inner light.

"At the Laurel end of the old arpa net. We'll get something
near carte blanche on that and on theDoJ domestic intelligence files, but we
have to enter through one physical location and with just thepass- word scheme
they specify." He and Erythrina would have more power than any vandals
inhistory, but they would be on a short leash, nevertheless.

His wings beat briefly, and he rose into the air. After the usual
pause, the eagle followed. Theyflew almost to the mountain's peak, then began
the long, slow glide toward the marshes below, thechill air whistling around
them. In principle, they could have made the transfer to the Laurel
terminusvirtually instantaneously. But it was not mere romanticism that made
them move so cautiously--asmany a nov- ice had discovered the hard way. What
appeared to the conscious mind as a search forair currents and clear lanes
through the scattered clouds was a mani- festation of the almost-subconscious
working of pro- grams that gradually transferred processing from rented space
on MT3to low satellite and ground- based stations. The game was tricky and
time- consuming, but it made itvirtually impossible for others to trace their
origin. The greatest danger of detection would probablyoccur at Laurel, where
they would be forced to access the system through a sin- gle input device.

The sky glowed momentarily; seconds passed, and an airborne fist
slammed into them frombehind. The shock wave sent them tumbling taft over wing
toward the forests below. Mr. Slipperystraightened his cha- otic flailing into
a head-first dive. Looking back which was easy to do in hispresent attitude he
saw the peak that had been MT3 glowing red, steam rising over descendingavalanches
of lava. Even at this distance, he could see tiny motes swirling above the
inferno.

(Attackers looking for the prey that
had fled?) Had it come just a few seconds earlier, they would havehad most of
their processing still locked into MT3 and the disaster--whatever it really
was--wouldhave knocked them out of this plane. It wouldn't have been the True
Death, but it might well havegrounded them for days.

On his right, he glimpsed the white eagle in a controlled dive;
they had had just enough communi-cations established off MT3 to survive. As
they fell deeper into the humid air of the lowlands, Mr.

Slip- pery dipped into the news
channels: word was al- ready coming over the LA Times of the flukeaccident in
which the Hokkaido aerospace launching laser had somehow shone on MT3's optics.
Thelaser had shone for microseconds and at reduced power; the damage had been
nothing like a Finger ofGod, say. No one had been hurt, but wideband communica-
tions would be down. for some time, andseveral hun- dred million dollars of
information traffic was stalled. There would be investigations and alot of very
irate customers.

It had been no accident, Mr. Slippery was sure. The Mailman was
showing his teeth, revealinginfil- tration no one had suspected. He must guess
what his opponents were up to.

They leveled out a dozen meters above the pine forest that
bordered the swamps. The air aroundthem was thick and humid, and the faraway
mountains were almost invisible. Clouds had moved in,and a storm was on the way.
They were now securely locked into the low-level satellite net, butthousands of
new users were clamoring for entry, too. The loss of MT3 would make the Other
Plane aturbulent place for several weeks, as heavy users tried to shift their
traf- fic here.

He swooped low over the swamp, searching for the one particular
pond with the one particularlylarge water lily that marked the only entrance
Virginia would permit them. There! He banked off to theside, Erythrina
following, and looked for signs of the Mail- man or his friends in the mucky
clearingsthat sur- rounded the pond.

But there was little purpose in further caution. Flying about like
this, they would be clearly visibleto any ambushers waiting by the pond. Better
to move fast now that we're committed. He signaled thered- eyed eagle, and they
dived toward the placid water. That surface marked the symbolic transitionto
obser- vation mode. No longer was he aware of a winged form or of water coming
up and aroundhim. Now he was interacting directly with the I/O protocols of a
computing center in the vicinity ofLaurel, Maryland. He sensed Ery poking
around on her own. This wasn't the arpa entrance. He
slipped"sideways" into an old-fashioned government office complex.
The "feel" of the 1990-style data setswas unmistakable. He was
fleetingly aware of memos written and edited, reports hauled in and out
ofstorage. One of the vandals' favorite sports and one that even the moderately
skilled could indulge in--was to infiltrate one of these office complexes and
simulate higher level input to make absurd andimpossible demands on the local
staff.

This was not the time for such games, and this was still not the
entrance. He pulled away from theoffice complex and searched through some old
directories. Arpa went back more than half a century,the first of the serious
data nets, now (figuratively) gathering dust. The number was still
there,though. He sig- naled Erythrina, and the two of them presented them-
selves at the log-in point andprovided just the codes that Virginia had given
him.

... and they were in. They eagerly soaked in the megabytes of
password keys and access data thatVirginia's people had left there. At the same
time, they were aware that this activity was beingmonitored. The Feds were
taking an immense chance leaving this material here, and they were going todo
their best to keep a rein on their temporary vandal allies.

In fifteen seconds, they had learned more about the inner workings
of the Justice Department andDoW than the Coven had in fifteen months. Mr. Slippery
guessed that Erythrina must be busy plot-ting what she would do with all that
data later on. For him, of course, there was no future in it. Theydrifted out
of the arpa "vault" into the larger data spaces that were the
Department of Justice files. Hecould see that there was nothing hidden from
them; random archive retrievals were all being honoredand with a speed that
would have made deception impos- sible. They had subpoena power andclearances
and more.

"Let's go get 'im, Slip." Erythrina's voice seemed
hollow and inhuman in this underimaged realm.

(How long would it be before the
Feds started to make their data perceivable analogically, as on theOther Plane?
It might be a little undignified, but it would revolu- tionize their
operation--which, fromthe Coven's standpoint, might be quite a bad thing.) Mr.
Slippery "nodded." Now they had more than enough power to undertake
the sort of work theyhad planned. In seconds, they had searched all the locally
available files on off-planet transmissions.

Then they dove out of the DoJ net,
Mr. Slippery to Pasadena and the JPL planetary probe archives,Erythrina to Cam-
bridge and the Harvard Multispectral Patrol.

It should take several hours to survey these records, to determine
just what transmissions mightbe cover for the alien invasion that both the Feds
and Erythrina were guessing had begun. But Mr.

Slippery had barely started when he
noticed that there were dozens of processors within reach that hecould just
grab with his new Federal powers. He checked carefully to make sure he wasn't
upsetting airtraffic control or hospital life support, then quietly stole the
computing resources of several hundredunknowing users, whose data sets
automatically switched to other resources. Now he had more powerthan he ever would
have risked taking in the past. On the other side of the continent, he was
awarethat Erythrina had done something similar.

In three minutes, they had sifted through five years'
transmissions far more thoroughly than theyhad origi- nally planned.

"No sign of him," he sighed and "looked" at
Erythrina. They had found plenty of irregular sourcesat Harvard, but there was
no orbital fit. All transmis- sions from the NASA probes checked
outlegitimately.

"Yes." Her face, with its dark skin and slanting eyes,
seemed to hover beside him. Apparently withher new power, she could image even
here. "But you know, we haven't really done much more thanthe Feds
could--given a couple months of data set work .... I know, it's more than we
had planned todo. But we've barely used the resources they've opened to us..

It was true. He looked around, feeling suddenly like a small boy
let loose in a candy shop: hesensed enormous data bases and the power that
would let him use them. Perhaps the cops had notintended them to take advantage
of this, but it was obvious that with these powers, they could do asearch no
enemy could evade. "Okay," he said finally, "let's pig it..

Ery laughed and made a loud snuffling sound. Carefully, quickly,
they grabbed noncritical data-processing facilities along all the East/West
nets. In seconds, they were the biggest users in NorthAmerica. The drain would
be clear to anyone monitoring the System, though a casual user mightnotice only
in- creased delays in turnaround. Modem nets are at least as resilient as
old-time powernets--but like power nets, they have their elastic limit and
their breaking point. So far, at least, he andErythrina were far short of
those.

--but they were experiencing what no human had ever known before,
a sensory bandwidththousands of times normal. For seconds that seemed without
end, their minds were filled with a jumbleverging on pain, data that was not
information and information that was not knowledge. To hear tenmillion simulta-
neous phone conversations, to see the continent's entire video output, should
havebeen a white noise. Instead it was a tidal wave of detail rammed through
the tiny aperture of theirminds. The pain increased, and Mr. Slippery panicked.
This could be the True Death, some kind ofsensory burnout-- Erythrina's voice
was faint against the roar, "Use everything, not just the inputs!"
And he had justenough sense left to see what she meant. He con- trolled more
than raw data now; if he could masterthem, the continent's computers could
process this avalanche, much the way parts of the human brainpreprocess their
input. More seconds passed, but now with a sense of time, as he struggled
todistribute his very consciousness through the System.

Then it was over, and he had control once more. But things would
never be the same: the humanthat had been Mr. Slippery was an insect wandering
in the cathedral his mind had become. Theresimply was more there than before.
No sparrow could fall without his knowledge, via air traffic control;no check
could be cashed without his noticing over the bank communication net. More than
threehundred mil- lion lives swept before what his senses had become.

Around and through him, he felt the other occu- pant--Erythrina,
now equally grown. They lookedat each other for an unending fraction of a
second, their communication more kinesthetic than verbal.

Finally she smiled, the old smile
now deep with meanings she could never image before. "Pity the poorMail-
man now!.

Again they searched, but now it was through all the civil data
bases, a search that could only bedreamed of by mortals. The signs were there,
a near invisible system of manipulations hidden amongmore routine crimes and
vandalisms. Someone had been at work within the Venezuelan system, at leastat
the North American end. The trail was tricky to follow-- their enemy seemed to
have at least some oftheir own powers--but they saw it lead back into the laby-
rinths of the Federal bureaucracy: resourcesdiverted, individuals promoted or
transferred, not quite accord- ing to the automatic regulations thatshould
govern. These were changes so small they were never guessed at by ordinary
employees andonly just sensed by the cops. But over the months, they added up
to an instability that neither of thetwo searchers could quite understand except
to know that it was planned and that it did the statusquo no good.

"He's still too sharp for us, Slip. We're all over the civil
nets and we haven't seen any living sign ofhim; yet we know he does heavy
processing on Earth or in low orbit..

"So he's either off North America, or else he has penetrated
the ... military..

"I bet it's a little of both. The point is, we're going to
have to follow him..

And that meant taking over at least part of the US military
system. Even if that was possible, itcertainly went far beyond what Virginia
and her friends had intended. As far as the cops wereconcerned, it would mean
that the threat against the government was tripled. So far he hadn't
detectedany objections to their searching, but he was aware of Virginia and her
superiors deep in some kind ofbunker at Langley, intently watching a whole wall
full of monitors, trying to figure out just what hewas up to and if it was time
to pull the plug on him.

Erythrina was aware of his objections almost as fast as he could
bring them to mind. "We don'thave any choice, Slip. We have to take
control. The Feds aren't the only thing watching us. If we don'tget the Mailman
on this try, he is sure as hell going to get US..

That was easy for her to say. None of her enemies yet knew her
True Name. Mr. Slippery hadsomehow to survive two enemies. On the other hand,
he sus- pected that the deadlier of thoseenemies was the Mailman. "Only
one way to go and that's up, huh? Okay, I'll play..

They settled into a game that was familiar now, grabbing more and
more computing facilities, butnow from common Europe and Asia. At the same
time, they attacked the harder problem--infiltratingthe various North American
military nets. Both pro- jects were beyond normal humans or any group ofnormal
humans, but by now their powers were greater than any single civil entity in
the world.

The foreign data centers yielded easily, scarcely more than
minutes' work. The military was a differ-ent story. The Feds had spent many
years and hun- dreds of billions of dollars to make the militarycommand and
control system secure. But they had not counted on the attack from all
directions thatthey faced now; in moments more, the two searchers found
themselves on the inside of the NSAcontrol system- -and under attack! Impressions
of a dozen sleek, deadly forms converging on them, and suddenloss of control
over many of the processors he depended on. He and Erythrina flailed out
wildly,clumsy giants hacking at fast-moving hawks. There was imagery here, as
detailed as on the OtherPlane. They were fighting people with some of the
skills the warlocks had developed--and a lot morepower. But it was still an
uneven contest. He and Erythrina had too much experience and too muchsheer
processing mass be- hind them. One by one, the fighters flashed into
incandescent destruction.

He realized almost instantly that these were not the Mailman's
tools. They were powerful, but theyfought as only moderately skilled warlocks
might. In fact, they had encountered the most secretdefense the government had
for its military command and control. The civilian bureaucracies hadstuck with
obsolete data sets and old-fashioned dp languages, but the cutting edge of the
military isalways more willing to experiment. They had developed something like
the warlocks' system. Perhapsthey didn't use magical jargon to describe their
computer/human symbiosis, but the techniques andthe attitudes were the same.
These swift-moving fighters flew against a background imagery that waslike an
olive drab Other Plane.

Compared to his present power, they were nothing. Even as he and
Erythrina swept the defendersout of the "sky," he could feel his
consciousness expanding further as more and more of the militarysystem was
absorbed into their pattern. Every piece of space junk out to one million
kilometers floatedin crystal detail before his attention; in a fraction of a
second he sorted through it all, searching forsome evidence of alien
intelligence. No sign of the Mailman.

The military and diplomatic communications of the preceding fifty
years showed before the light oftheir minds. At the same time as they surveyed
the satel- lite data, Mr. Slippery and Erythrina sweptthrough these
bureaucratic communications, looking carefully but with flickering speed at
everyrequisition for toilet paper, every "declaration" of secret war,
every travel voucher, every one of thetrillions of pieces of "paper"
that made it possible for the machinery of state to creak forward. Andhere the
signs were much clearer: large sections were subtly changed, giving the same
feeling theeye's blind spot gives, the feeling that nothing is really obscured
but that some things are simplygone. Some of the distortions were immense.
Under their microscopic yet global scrutiny, it wasobvious that all of
Venezuela, large parts of Alaska, and most of the economic base for the
lowsatellite net were all controlled by some single interest that had little
connection with the properowners. Who their enemy was was still a mystery, but
his works loomed larger and larger around them.

In a distant corner of what his mind had become, tiny insects
buzzed with homicidal fury, tinyinsects who knew Mr. Slippery's True Name. They
knew what he and Erythrina had done, and rightnow they were more scared of the
two warlocks than they had ever been of the Mailman. As he andEry continued
their search, he listened to the signals coming from the Langley command
post,followed the helicopter gunships that were dispatched toward a single
rural bungalow in NorthernCalifornia--and changed their encrypted commands so
that the sortie dumped its load of death on anuninhabited stretch of the
Pacific.

Still with a tiny fraction of his attention, Mr. Slippery noticed
that Virginia--actually her superiors,who had long since taken over the
operation--knew of this defense. They were still receiving real-timepictures
from military satellites.

He signaled a pause to Erythrina. For a few seconds, she would
work alone while he dealt withthese per- sistent antagonists. He felt like a
man attacked by several puppies: they were annoying andcould cause substantial
damage unless he took more trouble than they were worth. They had to bestopped
without causing themselves injury.

He should freeze the West Coast military and any launch complexes
that could reach his body.

Beyond that, it would be a good idea
to block recon satellite transmission of the California area. Andof course,
he'd better deal with the Finger of God installations that were above the
California horizon.

Already he felt one of those heavy
lasers, sweeping along in its ten-thousand-kilometer orbit, go intoaiming mode
and begin charging. He still had plenty of time--at least two or three
seconds--before theweapons laser reached its lowest discharge threshold. Still,
this was the most immediate threat. Mr.

Slippery sent a ten- dril of
consciousness into the tiny processor aboard the Finger of God satellite--
--and withdrew, bloodied. Someone was already there. Not Erythrina and not the
little militarywarlocks. Someone too great for even him to overpower.

"Ery! I've found him!" It came out a scream. The laser's
bore was centered on a spot thousands ofkilometers below, a tiny house that in
less than a second would become an expanding ball of plasma atthe end of a
columnar explosion descending through the atmosphere.

Over and over in that last second, Mr. Slippery threw himself
against the barrier he felt around thetiny military processor--with no success.
He traced its control to the lower satellite net, to biggerproces- sors that
were equally shielded. Now he had a feel for the nature of his opponent. It was
notthe direct imagery he was used to on the Other Plane; this was more like
fighting blindfolded. He couldsense the other's style. The enemy was not
revealing any more of himself than was necessary to keepcontrol of the Finger
of God for another few hundred milliseconds.

Mr. Slippery slashed, trying to cut the enemy's communications.
But his opponent was strong,much stronger--he now realized--than himself. He
was vaguely aware of the other's connections to thecom- puting power in those
blind-spot areas he and Eryth- rina had discovered. But for all that power,he
was almost the enemy's equal. There was something miss- ing from the other,
some critical elementof imagina- tion or originality. If Erythrina would only
come, they might be able to stop him.

Milliseconds separated him from the
True Death. He looked desperately around. Where is she.

Military Status announced the discharge of an Or- bital Weapons
Laser. He cowered even as hisquick- ened perceptions counted the microseconds
that remained till his certain destruction, even ashe no- ticed a ball of
glowing plasma expanding about what had been a Finger of God--the Finger
thathad been aimed at him.

He could see now what had happened. While he and the other had
been fighting, Erythrina hadcommandeered another of the weapons satellites, one
already very near discharge threshold, anddestroyed the threat to him.

Even as he realized this, the enemy was on him again, this time
attacking conventionally, trying todestroy Mr. Slippery's communications and
process- ing space. But now that enemy had to fight bothErythrina and Mr.
Slippery. The other's lack of imagi- nation and creativity was beginning to
tell, andeven with his greater strength, they could feel him slowly, slowly
losing resources to his weakeropponents. There was something familiar about
this enemy, something Mr. Slippery was sure he couldsee, given time.

Abruptly the enemy pulled away. For a long mo- ment, they held
each other's sole attention, likecats waiting for the smallest sign of weakness
to launch back into combat--only here the new attackcould come from any of ten
thousand different directions, from any of the communications nodes thatformed
their bodies and their minds.

From beside him, he felt Erythrina move forward, as though to lock
the other in her green-eyedgaze. "You know who we have here, Slip?"
He could tell that all her concentration was on this enemy,that she almost
vibrated with the effort. "This is our old friend DON.MAC grown up to
super size, anddoing his best to disguise himself..

The other seemed to tense and move even further in upon himself.
But after a moment, he beganimaging. There stood DON.MAC, his face and Plessey-
Mercedes body the same as ever. DON.MAC,the first of the Mailman's converts,
the one Erythrina was sure had been killed and replaced with asimulator.
"And all the time he's been the Mailman. The last person we would suspect,
the Mailman'sfirst victim..

DON rolled forward half a meter, his motors keening, his hydraulic
fists raised. But he did not denywhat Mr. Slippery said. After a moment he
seemed to relax. "You are very ... clever. But then, you twohave had help;
I never thought you and the cops would cooperate. That was the one combination
thathad any chance against the 'Mailman.'" He smiled, a familiar automatic
twitch. "But don't you see? It'sa combination with lethal genes. We three
have much more in common than you and the government.

"Look around you. If we were warlocks before, we are gods
now. Look!" Without letting the centerof their attention wander, the two
followed his gaze. As before, the myriad aspects of the lives ofbillions spread
out before them. But now, many things were changed. In their struggle, the
three hadusurped virtually all of the connected processing power of the human
race. Video and phonecommunications were frozen. The public data bases had
lasted long enough to notice that somethinghad gone terribly, terribly wrong.
Their last headlines, generated a second be- fore the climax of thebattle, were
huge banners announcing GREATEST DATA OUTAGE OF ALL TIME. Nearly a
billionpeople watched blank data sets, feeling more panicked than any simple
power blackout could evermake them. Already the accumu- lation of lost data and
work time would cause a major recession.

"They are lucky the old arms race is over, or else
independent military units would probably haveal- ready started a war. Even if
we hand back control this instant, it would take them more than a yearto get their
affairs in order." DON.MAC smirked, the same expression they had seen the
day beforewhen he was bragging to the Limey. "There have been few deaths
yet. Hospitals and aircraft havesome stand- alone capability..

Even so ... Mr. Slippery could see thousands of aircraft stacked
up over major airports fromLondon to Christchurch. Local computing could never
coordi- nate the safe landing of them all beforesome ran out of fuel.

"We caused all that--with just the fallout of our
battle," continued DON. "If we chose to do themharm, I have no doubt
we could exterminate the human race." He detonated three warheads in
theirsilos in Utah just to emphasize his point. With doz- ens of video eyes, in
orbit and on the ground, Mr.

Slippery and Erythrina watched the
destruction sweep across the launch sites. "Consider: how are wediffer-
ent from the gods of myth? And like the gods of myth, we can rule and prosper,
just so long aswe don't fight among ourselves." He looked expectantly from
Mr. Slippery to Erythrina. There was afrown on the Red One's dark face; she
seemed to be concen- trating on their opponent just as fiercelyas ever.

DON.MAC turned back to Mr. Slippery. "Slip, you especially
should see that we have no choicebut to cooperate. They know your True Name. Of
the three of us, your life is the most fragile,depending on protecting your
body from a government that now considers you a traitor. You wouldhave died a
dozen times over during the last thousand seconds if you hadn't used your new
powers.

"And you can't go back. Even if you play Boy Scout, destroy
me, and return all obedient--eventhen they will kill you. They know how
dangerous you are, perhaps even more dangerous than I. Theycan't afford to let
you exist..

And megalomania aside, that made perfect and chilling sense. As
they were talking, a fraction ofMr. Slippery's attention was devoted to
confusing and obstructing the small infantry group that hadbeen air-dropped
into the Arcata region just before the government lost all control. Their
superiorshad real- ized how easily he could countermand their orders, and so
the troops were instructed toignore all outside direction until they had
destroyed a certain Roger Pollack. Fortunately they weredepending on city di-
rectories and orbit-fed street maps, and he had been keeping them going
incircles for some time now. It was a nuisance, and sooner or later he would
have to decide on a morepermanent solution.

But what was a simple nuisance in his present state would be
near-instant death if he returned tohis normal self. He looked at Erythrina.
Was there any way around DON's arguments.

Her eyes were almost shut, and the frown had deepened. He sensed
that more and more of herresources were involved in some pattern analysis. He
wondered if she had even heard whatDON.MAC said. But after a moment her eyes
came open, and she looked at the two of them. Therewas triumph in that look.
"You know, Slip, I don't think I have ever been fooled by a
personalitysimulator, at least not for more than a few minutes..

Mr. Slippery nodded, puzzled by this sudden change in topic.
"Sure. If you talk to a simulator longenough, you eventually begin to
notice little inflexibilities. I don't think we'll ever be able to write
aprogram that could pass the Turing test..

"Yes, little inflexibilities, a certain lack of imagina-
tion. It always seems to be the tipoff. Of courseDON here has always pretended
to be a program, so it was hard to tell. But I was sure that for the lastfew
months there has been no living being behind his mask...

"... and furthermore, I don't think there is any- body there
even now." Mr. Slippery's attentionsnapped back to DON.MAC. The other
smirked at the accusa- tion. Somehow it was not the rightreaction. Mr. Slippery
remembered the strange, artificial flavor of DON's combat style. In this short
anencounter, there could be no really hard evidence for her theory. She was
using her intuition andwhatever deep analysis she had been doing these last few
seconds. "But that means we still haven'tfound the Mailman."
"Right. This is just his best tool. I'll bet the Mail- man simply used the
pattern hestole from the mur- dered DON.MAC as the basis for this automatic
defense system we've beenfighting. The Mailman's time lag is a very real thing,
not a red herring at all. Somehow it is the wholesecret of who he really is.

"In any case, it makes our present situation a lot
easier." She smiled at DON.MAC as though hewere a real person. Usually it
was easier to behave that way toward simulators; in this case, there wasa good deal
of triumph in her smile. "You almost won for your master, DON. You almost
had usconvinced. But now that we know what we are dealing with, it will be easy
to--.

Her image flicked out of existence, and Mr. Slip- pery felt DON
grab for the resources Erycontrolled. All through near-Earth space, they fought
for the weapon systems she had held till aninstant before.

And alone, Mr. Slippery could not win. Slowly, slowly, he felt
himself bending before the other'sforce, like some wrestler whose bones were
breaking one by one under a murderous opponent. It wasall he could do to
prevent the DON construct from blast- hag his home; and to do that, he had to
giveup progressively more computing power.

Erythrina was gone, gone as though she had never been. Or was she?
He gave a sliver of hisattention to a search, a sliver that was still many
times more powerful than any mere warlock. That tinypiece of consciousness
quickly noticed a power failure in south- ern Rhode Island. Many powerfailures
had devel- oped during the last few minutes, consequent to the data failure.
But this one wasstrange. In addition to power, comm lines were down and even
his interven- tion could not bring themto life. It was about as thoroughly
blacked out as a place could be. This could scarcely be an accident.

... and there was a voice, barely telephone quality and almost
lost in the mass of other data he wasprocessing. Erythrina! She had, via some
incredibly tortuous detour, retained a communication pathto the outside.

His gaze swept the blacked-out Providence suburb. It consisted of
new urbapts, perhaps onehundred thousand units in all. Somewhere in there lived
the human that was Erythrina. While she hadbeen con- centrating on DON.MAC, he
must have been work- ing equally hard to find her True Name.

Even now, DON did not know precisely
who she was, only enough to black out the area she lived in.

It was getting hard to think; DON.MAC was sys- tematically
dismantling him. The lethal intent wasclear: as soon as Mr. Slippery was
sufficiently reduced, the Orbital Lasers would be turned on hisbody, and then
on Erythrina's. And then the Mailman's faithful servant would have a
planetarykingdom to turn over to his mysterious master.

He listened to the tiny voice that still leaked out of Providence.
It didn't make too much sense. Shesounded hysterical, panicked. He was
surprised that she could speak at all; she had just suffered--inlosing all her
computer connections--something roughly analogous to a massive stroke. To her,
theworld was now seen through a keyhole, incomplete, unknown and dark.

"There is a chance; we still have a chance," the voice
went on, hurried and slurred. "An oldmilitary communication tower north of
here. Damn. I don't know the number or grid, but I can see itfrom where I'm
sitting. With it you could punch through to the roof antenna ... has plenty
ofbandwidth, and I've got some battery power here... but hurry..

She didn't have to tell him that; he was the guy who was being
eaten alive. He was almost immobi-lized now, the other's attack squeezing and
stifling where it could not cut and tear. He spasmedagainst DON's strength and
briefly contacted the comm tow- ers north of Providence. Only one ofthem was in
line of sight with the blacked-out area. Its steerable an- tenna was very, very
narrowbeam.

"Ery, I'm going to need your house number, maybe even your
antenna id..

A second passed, two--a hellish eon for Mr. Slippery. In effect,
he had asked her for her TrueName--he who was already known to the Feds. Once
he re- turned to the real world, there would be noway he could mask this
information from them. He could imagine her thoughts: never again to be free.

In her place, he would have paused
too, but-- "Ery! It's the True Death for both of us if you don't. He's got
me!.

This time she barely hesitated. "D-Debby Charteris, 4448
Grosvenor Row. Cut off like this, I don'tknow the antenna id. Is my name and
house enough?.

"Yes. Get ready!.

Even before he spoke, he had already matched the name with an
antenna rental and aligned themilitary antenna on it. Return contact came as he
turned his attention back to DON.MAC. With luck,the enemy was not aware of
their conversation. Now he must be distracted.

Mr. Slippery surged against the other, breaking communications
nodes that served them both.

DON shuddered, reorganizing around
the resources that were left, then moved in on Mr. Slipperyagain. Since DON had
greater strength to begin with, the maneu- ver had cost Mr.
Slipperyproportionately more. The enemy had been momentarily thrown off
balance, but now the end wouldcome very quickly.

The spaces around him, once so rich with detail and colors beyond
color, were fading now,replaced by the sensations of his true body straining
with animal fear in its little house in California.

Contact with the greater world was
almost gone. He was scarcely aware of it when DON turned theFinger of God back
upon him-- Consciousness, the superhuman consciousness of before, returned
almost unsensed,unrecognized till awareness brought surprise. Like a strangling
victim back from oblivion, Mr. Slipperylooked around dazedly, not quite
realizing that the struggle continued.

But now the roles were reversed. DON.MAC had been caught by
surprise, in the act of finishingoff what he thought was his only remaining
enemy. Erythrina had used that surprise to goodadvantage, coming in upon her
opponent from a Japanese data center, destroying much of Don'shigher reasoning
centers before the other was even aware of her. Large, unclaimed processing
unitslay all about, and as DON and Erythrina continued their struggle, Mr.
Slippery quietly absorbedeverything in reach.

Even now, DON could have won against either one of them alone, but
when Mr. Slippery threwhimself back into the battle, they had the advantage.
DON.- MAC sensed this too, and with abrazenness that was either mindless or
genius, returned to his original appeal. "There is still time! TheMailman
will still forgive you..

Mr. Slippery and Erythrina ripped at their enemy from both sides,
disconnec.ting vast blocks ofcommu- nications, processing and data resources.
They de- nied the Mass Transmits to him, and oneby one put the low-level
satellites out of synch with his data accesses. DON was confined to landlines,
tied into a single military net that stretched from Washington to Denver. He
was flailing,randomly using whatever instruments of destruction were still
available. All across the midsection ofthe US, silo missiles deto- nated, ABM
lasers swept back and forth across the sky. The world hadbeen stopped short by
the begin- ning of their struggle, but the ending could tear it to pieces.

The damage to Mr. Slippery and Erythrina was slight, the risk that
the random strokes would seri-ously damage them small. They ignored occasional
slashing losses and concentrated single-mindedlyon dismantling DON.MAC. They
discovered the object code for the simulator that was DON, andzeroed it.
DON--or his creator--was clever and had planted many copies, and a new one
awakenedevery time they destroyed the running copy. But as the minutes passed,
the simulator found itselfwith less and less to work with. Now it was barely
more than it had been back in the Coven.

"Fools! The Mailman is your natural ally. The Feds will kill
you! Don't you underst--.

The voice stopped in midshriek, as Erythrina ze- roed the
currently running simulator. No othertook up the task. There was a silence, an
... absence ... throughout. Erythrina glanced at Mr. Slippery,and the two
continued their search through the enemy's territory. This data space was big,
and therecould be many more copies of DON hidden in it. But without the
resources they presently held, thesimulator could have no power. It was clear
to both of them that no effective ambush could be hiddenin these unmoving
ruins.

And they had complete copies of DON.MAC to study. It was easy to
trace the exact extent of hisinfection of the system. The two moved
systematically, changing what they found so that it wouldbehave as its original
programmers had intended. Their work was so thorough that the Feds mightnever
realize just how extensively the Mailman and his henchman had infiltrated them,
just how closehe had come to total control.

Most of the areas they searched were only slightly altered and
required only small changes. Butdeep within the military net, there were
hundreds of tril- lions of bytes of program that seemed to haveno intelligible
function yet were clearly connected with DON's activities. It was apparently
objectcode, but it was so huge and so ill organized that even they couldn't
decide if it was more than hashnow. There was no possibility that it had any
legitimate function; after a few moments' consideration,they randomized it.

At last it was over. Mr. Slippery and Erythrma stood alone. They
controlled all connectedprocessing facilities in near-Earth space. There was no
place within that volume that any furtherenemies could be lurking. And there
was no evidence that there had ever been interference frombeyond.

It was the first time since they had reached this level that they
had been able to survey the worldwithout fear. (He scarcely noticed the
continuing, pitiful attempts of the American military to kill hisreal body.)
Mr. Slippery looked around him, using all his millions of perceptors. The Earth
floatedserene. Viewed in the visible, it looked like a thousand pic- tures he
had seen as a human. But in theultraviolet, he could follow its hydrogen aura
out many thou- sands of kilometers. And the high-energy detectors on satellites
at all levels perceived the radiation belts in thousands of energy
levels,oscillating in the solar wind. Across the oceans of the world, he could
feel the warmth of the currents,see just how fast they were moving. And all the
while, he monitored the millions of tiny voices thatwere now coming back to
life as he and Erythrina carefully set the human race's communicationsystem
back on its feet and gently prodded it into function. Every ship in the seas,
every aircraft nowmaking for safe landing, ev- ery one of the loans, the
payments, the meals of an entire race registeredclearly on some part of his
consciousness. With perception came power; almost everything he saw, hecould
alter, destroy, or enhance. By the analogical rules of the covens, there was
only one valid wordfor themselves in their present state: they were gods.

"... we could rule," Erythrina's voice was hushed,
self-frightened. "It might be tricky at first,assuring our bodies
protection, but we could rule..

"There's still the Mailman--.

She seemed to wave a hand, dismissingly. "Maybe, maybe not.
It's true we still are no closer toknowing who he is, but we do know that we
have destroyed all his processing power. We would haveplenty of warn- ing if he
ever tries to reinsinuate himself into the System." She stared at him
intently,and it wasn't until some time later that he recognized the faint clues
in her behavior and realized thatshe was hold- ing something back.

What she said was all so clearly true; for as long as their bodies
lived, they could rule. And whatDON.- MAC had said also seemed true: they were
the great- est threat the "forces of law and order.

had ever faced, and that included
the Mailman. How could the Feds afford to let them be free, howcould they even
afford to let them live, if the two of them gave up the power they had now?
But--"Alot of people would have to die if we took over. There are enough
inde- pendent military entities lefton Earth that we'd have to use a good deal
of nuclear blackmail, at least at first..

"Yeah," her voice was even smaller than before, and the
image of her face was downcast: "Duringthe last few seconds I've done some
simulating on that. We'd have to take out four, maybe six, majorcities. If
there are any command centers hidden from us, it could be a lot worse than
that. And we'dhave to develop our own human secret-police forces as folks began
to operate outside our system ....

Damn. We'd end up being worse than
the human-based govern- ment..

She saw the same conclusion in his face and grinned lopsidedly.
"You can't do it and neither can I.

So the State wins again..

He nodded, "reached" out to touch her briefly. They took
one last glorious minute to soak in thehigher reality. Then, silently, they
parted, each to seek his own way downward.

It was not an instantaneous descent to ordinary humanity. Mr.
Slippery was careful to prepare asafe exit. He created a complex set of
misdirections for the army unit that was trying to close in on hisphysical
body; it would take them several hours to find him, far longer than necessary
for the govern-ment to call them off. He set up preliminary negotia- tions with
the Federal programs that had beendoing their best to knock him out of power,
telling them of his determination to surrender if grantedsafe pas- sage and
safety for his body. In a matter of seconds he would be talking to humans
again,perhaps even Virginia, but by then a lot of the basic ground rules would
be automatically in operation.

As per their temporary agreements, he closed off first one and
then another of the capabilities thathe had so recently acquired. It was like
stopping one's ears, then blinding one's eyes, but somehowmuch worse since his
very ability to think was being deliber- ately given up. He was like
somelobotomy patient (victim) who only vaguely realizes now what he has lost.
Behind him the Federalforces were doing their best to close off the areas he had
left, to protect themselves from any changeof heart he might have.

Far away now, he could sense Erythrina going through a similar
procedure, but more slowly. Thatwas strange; he couldn't be sure with his
present faculties, but somehow it seemed that she was delib-erately lagging
behind and doing something more complicated than was strictly necessary to
returnsafely to normal humanity. And then he remembered that strange look she
had given him while sayingthat they had not figured out who the Mailman was.

One could rule as easily as two.

The panic was sudden and overwhelming, all the more terrible for
the feeling of being betrayed byone so trusted. He struck out against the
barriers he had so recently allowed to close in about him, butit was too late. He
was already weaker than the Feds. Mr. Slippery looked helplessly back into
thegathering dimness, and saw...

... Ery coming down toward the real world with him, giving up the
advantage she had held all alone.

Whatever problems had slowed her
must have had nothing to do with treachery. And somehow hisfeel- ing of relief
went beyond the mere fact of death avoided--Ery was still what he had
alwaysthought her.

.

.

.

He was seeing a lot of Virginia lately, though of course not
socially. Her crew had set up offices inArcata, and twice a week she and one of
her goons would come up to the house. No doubt it was oneof the few government
operations carried out face-to- face. She or her superiors seemed to realize
thatanything done over the phone might be subject to trickery. (Which was true,
of course. Given severalweeks to himself, Pollack could have put together a
robot phone connection and--using false ids andpri- ority permits--been on a
plane to Djakarta.) There were a lot of superficial similarities between these
meetings and that first encounter theprevious spring: Pollack stepped to the
door and watched the black Lincoln pulling up the drive. As always, thevehicle
came right into the carport. As always, the driver got out quickly, eyes
flickering coldly acrossPollack. As always, Virginia moved with military
precision (in fact, he had discovered, she had beenpromoted out of the Army to
her present job in DoW intelligence). The two walked purposefullytoward the
bungalow, ignor- ing the summer sunlight and the deep wet green of the lawn and
pines.

He held the door open for them, and
they entered with silent arrogance. As always.

He smiled to himself. In one sense nothing had changed. They still
had the power of life and deathover him. They could still cut him off from
every- thing he loved. But in another sense ...

"Got an easy one for you today, Pollack," she said as
she put her briefcase on the coffee table andenabled its data set. "But I
don't think you're going to like it..

"Oh?" He sat down and watched her expectantly.

"The last couple of months, we've had you destroy- ing what
remains of the Mailman and gettingthe National program and data bases back in
operation..

Behind everything, there still stood the threat of the Mailman.
Ten weeks after the battle--the War,as Virginia called it--the public didn't
know any more than that there had been a massive vandalism ofthe System. Like
most major wars, this had left ruination in everyone's camp. The US government
andthe economy of the entire world had slid far toward chaos in the months
after that battle. (In fact,without his work and Erythrina's, he doubted if the
US bureau- cracies could have survived theMailman War. He didn't know whether
this made them the saviors or the betrayers of America.) Butwhat of the enemy?
His power was almost certainly destroyed. In the last three weeks Mr.
Slipperyhad found only one copy of the program kernel that had been DON.MAC,
and that had been innonexecutable form. But the man--or the beings--behind the
Mailman was just as anony- mous asever. In that, Virginia, the government, and
Pollack were just as ignorant as the general public.

"Now," Virginia continued, "we've got some smaller
problems--mopping-up action, you might callit. For nearly two decades, we've
had to live with the tuppin vandalism of irresponsible individualswho put their
petty self-interest ahead of the public's. Now that we've got you, we intend to
put a stopto that: "We want the True Names of all abusers currently on the
System, in particular the members of thisso-called coven you used to be a part
of..

He had known that the demand would eventually come, but the
knowledge made this moment noless unpleasant. "I'm sorry, I can't..

"Can't? Or won't? See here, Pollack, the price of your
freedom is that you play things our way.

You've broken enough laws to justify
putting you away forever. And we both know that you are sodangerous that you
ought to be put away. There are people who feel even more strongly than
that,Pollack, people who are not as soft in the head as I am. They simply want
you and your girl friend inProvidence safely dead." The speech was
delivered with characteristic flat bluntness, but she didn'tquite meet his eyes
as she spoke. Ever since he had returned from the battle, there had been a
faintdiffidence behind her bluster.

She covered it well, but it was clear to Pollack that she didn't
know if she should fear him or respecthim--or both. In any case, she seemed to
recognize a basic mystery in him; she had more imaginationthan he had originally
thought. It was a bit amusing, for there was very little special about
RogerPollack, the man. He went from day to day feeling a husk of what he had
once been and trying toimagine what he could barely remember.

Roger smiled almost sympathetically. "I can't and I won't,
Virginia. And I don't think you will harmme for it--Let me finish. The only
thing that frightens your bosses more than Erythrina and me is thepossi- bility
that there may be other unknown persons-- maybe even the Mailman, back from
whereverhe has disappeared to--who might be equally powerful. She and I are
your only real experts on thistype of subversion. I bet that even if they
could, your people wouldn't train their own clean-cut,braided types as
replacements for us. The more paranoid a security organization is, the less
likely it isto trust anyone with this sort of power. Mr. Slippery and Erythrina
are the known factors, the expertswho turned back from the brink. Our restraint
was the only thing that stood between the Powers ThatBe and the Powers That
Would Be..

Virginia was speechless for a moment, and Pollack could see that
this was the crux of her changedattitude toward him. All her life she had been
taught that the individual is corrupted by power: shebog- gled at the notion
that he had been offered mastery of all mankind--and had refused it.

Finally she smiled, a quick smile that was gone almost before he
noticed it. "Okay. I'll pass on whatyou say. You may be right. The vandals
are a long- range threat to our basic American freedoms, butday to day, they
are a mere annoyance. My superiors-- the Department of Welfare--are
probablywilling to fight them as we have in the past. They'll tolerate your,
uh, disobedience in this singlematter as long as you and Erythrina loyally
protect us against the superhuman threats..

Pollack felt a great sense of relief. He had been so afraid DoW
would be willing to destroy him forthis refusal. And since the Feds would never
be free of their fear of the Mailman, he and DebbyCharteris-- Erythrina--would
never be forced to betray their friends.

"But," continued the cop, "that doesn't mean you
get to ignore the covens. The most likely placefor superhuman threats to
resurface is from within them. The vandals are the people with the most realexperi-
ence on the System--even the Army is beginning to see that. And if a superhuman
typeoriginates outside the covens, we figure his ego will still make him show
off to them, just as with theMailman.

"In addition to your other jobs, we want you to spend a
couple of hours a week with each of themajor covens. You'll be one of the
'boys'--only now you're under responsible control, watching for anysign of
Mailman-type influence..

"I'll get to see Ery again!.

"No. That rule still stands. And you should be grateful. I
don't think we could tolerate your exis-tence if there weren't two of you. With
only one in the Other Plane at a time, we'll always have aweapon in reserve.
And as long as we can keep you from meeting there, we can keep you fromscheming
against us. This is serious, Roger: if we catch you two or your surrogates
playing around inthe Other Plane, it will be the end..

"Hmm..

She looked hard at him for a moment, then ap- peared to take that
for acquiescence. The next half-hour was devoted to the details of this week's
assign- ments. (It would have been easier to feed him allthis when he was in
the Other Plane, but Virginia--or at least DoW--seemed wedded to the past.)
Hewas to continue the work on Social Security Records and the surveillance of
the South American datanets. There was an enormous amount of work to be done,
at least with the limited powers the Fedswere willing to give him. It would
likely be October before the welfare machinery was working properlyagain. But
that would be in time for the elections.

Then, late in the week, they wanted him to visit the Coven. Roger
knew he would count the hours;it had been so long.

Virginia was her usual self, intense and all business, until she
and her driver were ready to leave.

Standing in the carport, she said
almost shyly, "I ran your Anne Boleyn last week... It's really verygood..

"You sound surprised..

"No. I mean yes, maybe I was. Actually I've run it several
times, usually with the viewpointcharacter set to Anne. There seems to be a lot
more depth to it than other participation games I'veread. I've got the feeling
that if I am clever enough, someday I'll stop Henry and keep my head !.

Pollack grinned. He could imagine Virginia, the hard-eyed cop,
reading Anne to study thepsychology of her client-prisoner--then gradually
getting caught up in the action of the novel. "It ispossible..

In fact, it was possible she might turn into a rather nice human
being someday.

But by the time Pollack was starting back up the walk to his
house, Virginia was no longer on hismind. He was going back to the Coven.

A chill mist that was almost rain blew across the hillside and
obscured the far distance in shiftingpatches. But even from here, on the ridge
above the swamp, the castle looked different: heavier,stronger, darker.

Mr. Slippery started down the familiar slope. The frog on his
shoulder seemed to sense his uneaseand its clawlets bit tighter into the
leather of his jacket. Its beady yellow eyes turned this way andthat, re-
cording everything. (Altogether, that frog was much improved--almost out of
amateur statusnowadays.) The traps were different. In just the ten weeks since
the War, the Coven had changed them morethan in the previous two years. Every
so often, he shook the gathering droplets of water from his faceand peered more
closely at a bush or boulder by the side of the path. His advance was
slow,circuitous, and interrupted by invocations of voice and hand.

Finally he stood before the towers. A figure of black and glowing
red climbed out of the magmamoat to meet him. Even Alan had changed: he no
longer had his asbestos T-shirt, and there was nohumor in his sparring with the
visitor. Mr. Slippery had to stare upward to look directly at his massivehead.
The elemental splashed molten rock down on them, and the frog scampered between
his neckand collar, its skin cold and slimy against his own. The passwords were
different, the questioningmore hostile, but Mr. Slippery was a match for the
tests and in a matter of minutes Alan retreatedsullenly to his steam- ing pool,
and the drawbridge was lowered for their entrance.

The hall was almost the same as before: perhaps a bit drier, more
brightly lit. There were certainlymore people. And they were all looking at him
as he stood in the entranceway. Mr. Slippery gave histraveling jacket and hat
to a liveried servant and started down the steps, trying to recognize the
faces,trying to under- stand the tension and hostility that hung in the air.

"Slimey!" The Limey stepped forward from the crowd, a
familiar grin splitting his bearded face.

"Slip! Is that really
you?" (Not entirely a rhetorical question, under the circumstances.) Mr.
Slippery nodded, and after a moment, the other did, too. The Limey almost ran
across thespace that separated them, stuck out his hand, and clapped the other
on the shoulder. "Come on,come on! We have rather a lot to talk about !.

As if on cue, the others turned back to their conver- sations and
ignored the two friends as theywalked to one of the sitting rooms that opened
off the main hall. Mr. Slippery felt like a man returningto his old school ten
years after graduation. Almost all the faces were different, and he had the
feelingthat he could never belong here again. But this was only ten weeks, not
ten years.

The Slimey Limey shut the heavy door, and the sounds from the main
room were muted. He wavedSlip to a chair and made a show of mixing them some
drinks. "They're all simulators, aren't they?" Slipsaid quietly.
"Uh?" The Limey broke off his stream of chatter and shook his head
glumly. "Not all. I'verecruited four or five apprentices. They do their
best to make the place look thriving and occupied.

You may have noticed various
improvements in our security..

"It looks stronger, but it's more appearance than fact..

Slimey shrugged. "I really didn't expect it to fool the likes
of you..

Mr. Slippery leaned forward. "Who's left from the old group,
Slimey?.

"DON's gone. The Mailman is gone. Wiley J. Bas- tard shows up
a couple of times a month, buthe's not much fun anymore. I think Erythrina's
still on the System, but she hasn't come by. I thoughtyou were gone until
today..

"What about Robin Hood?.

"Gone..

That accounted for all the top talents. Virginia the Frog hadn't
been giving away all that muchwhen she excused him from betraying the Coven.
Slip won- dered if there was any hint of smugness inthe frog's fixed and
lipless smile. "What happened?.

The other sighed. "There's a depression on down in the real
world, in case you hadn't noticed; andit's being blamed on us vandals.

"--I know, that could scarcely explain Robin's disap-
pearance, only the lesser ones. Slip, I thinkmost of our old friends are either
dead Truly Dead--or very frightened that if they come back into thisPlane, they
will become Truly Dead..

This felt very much like history repeating itself. "How do
you mean?.

The Limey leaned forward. "Slip, it's quite obvious the
government's feeding us lies about whatcaused the depression. They say it was a
combination of programming errors and the work of'vandals.' We know that can't
be true. No ordinary vandals could cause that sort of damage. Rightafter the
crash, I looked at what was left of the Feds' data bases. What- ever ripped
things up wasmore powerful than any vandal. ... And I've spoken with--p'raps I
should say interrogated Wiley. Ithink what we see in the real world and on this
plane is in fact the wreckage of a bloody major war..

"Between?.

"Creatures as far above me as I am above a chimp. The names
we know them by are the Mailman,Erythrina... and just possibly Mr. Slippery..

"Me?" Slip tensed and sent out probes along the
communications links which he perceived hadcre- ated the image before him. Even
though on a leash, Mr. Slippery was far more powerful than anynormal warlock,
and it should have been easy to measure the power of this potential opponent.
Butthe Limey was a diffuse, almost nebulous presence. Slip couldn't tell if he
were facing an opponent inthe same class as himself; in fact, he had no clear
idea of the other's strength, which was even moreominous.

The Limey didn't seem to notice. "That's what I thought. Now
I doubt it. I wager you were used likeWiley and possibly DON--by the other
combatants. And I see that now you're in someone's thrall..

His finger stabbed at the
yellow-eyed frog on Mr. Slippery's shoulder, and a sparkle of whiskey flewinto
the creature's face. Virginia--or whoever was controlling the beast--didn't
know what to do, andthe frog froze momentarily, then recovered its wits and
emitted a pale burst of flame.

The Limey laughed. "But it's no one very competent. The Feds
is my guess. What happened? Didthey sight your True Name, or did you just sell
out?.

"The creature's my familiar, Slimey. We all have our
apprentices. If you really believe we're theFeds, why did you let us in?.

The other shrugged. "Because there are enemies and enemies,
Slip. Beforetime, we called thegovern- ment the Great Enemy. Now I'd say they
are just one in a pantheon of nasties. Those of uswho survived the crash are a
lot tougher, a lot less frivolous. We don't think of this as all a wry gameanymore.
And we're teaching our apprentices a lot more systematically. It's not near so
much fun. Nowwhen we talk of traitors in the Coven, we mean real,
life-and-death treachery.

"But it's necessary. When it comes to it, if we little people
don't protect ourselves, we're going tobe eaten up by the government or...
certain other creatures I fear even more..

The frog shifted restively on Mr. Slippery's shoulder, and he
could imagine Virginia getting readyto de- liver some speech on the virtue of
obeying the laws of society in order to reap its protection. Hereached across
to pat its cold and pimply back; now was not the time for such debate.

"You had one of the straightest heads around here, Slip. Even
if you aren't one of us anymore, Idon't reckon you're an absolute enemy: You
and your ... friend may have certain interests in commonwith us. There are
things you should know about--if you don't already. An' p'raps there'll be
timesyou'll help us similarly..

Slip felt the Federal tether loosen. Virginia must have convinced
her superiors that there wasactually help to be had here. "Okay. You're
right. There was a war. The Mailman was the enemy. Helost and now we're trying
to put things back together..

"Ah, that's just it, old man. I don't think the war is over.
True, all that remains of the Mailman'scon- structs are 'craterfields' spread
through the govern- ment's program space. But something like himis still very
much alive." He saw the disbelief in Mr. Slippery's face. "I know,
you an' your friends aremore powerful than any of us. But there are many of
us--not just in the Coven--and we have learned alot these past ten weeks. There
are signs, so light an' fickle you might call 'em atmosphere, that tell
ussomething like the Mailman is still alive. It doesn't quite have the tex-
ture of the Mailman, but it'sthere..

Mr. Slippery nodded. He didn't need any special explanations of
the feeling. Damn! If I weren't ona leash, I would have seen all this weeks
ago, instead of finding it out secondhand. He thought backto those last minutes
of their descent from godhood and felt a chill. He knew what he must ask
now,and he had a bad feeling about what the answer might be. Some- how he had
to prevent Virginia fromhearing that answer. It would be a great risk, but he
still had a few tricks he didn't think DoW knew of.

He probed back along the links that
went to Arcata and D.C., feeling the interconnections and theredundancy checks.
If he was lucky, he would not have to alter more than a few hundred bits of
theinformation that would flow down to them in the next few seconds. "So
who do you think is behindit?.

"For a while, I thought it might be you. Now I've seen you
and, uh, done some tests, I know you'remore powerful than in the old days and
probably more powerful than I am now, but you're nosuperman.

"Maybe I'm in disguise..

"Maybe, but I doubt it." The Limey was coming closer to
the critical words that must be disguised.

Slip began to alter the redundancy
bits transmitted through the construct of the frog. He would haveto fake the
record both before and after those words if the deception was to escape
detectioncompletely. "No, there's a certain style to this presence. A
style that reminds me of our old friend,REorbyitnh rHio- noad." The name
he said, and the name Mr. Slippery heard, was "Erythrina." Thename
blended impercep- tibly in its place, the name the frog heard, and reported,
was "Robin Hood..

"Hmm, possible. He always seemed to be power hungry."
The Limey's eyebrows went upfractionally at the pronoun "he." Besides,
Robin had been a fan- tastically clever vandal, not a powergrabber. Slimey's
eyes flickered toward the frog, and Mr. Slippery prayed that he would play
along.

"Do you really think this is as
great a threat as the Mailman?.

"Who knows? The presence isn't as widespread as the
Mailman's, and since the crash no more ofus have disappeared. Also, I'm not
sure that... he... is the only such creature left. Perhaps the originalMail-
man is still around..

And you can't decide who it is that I'm really trying to fool, can
you.

The discussion continued for another half-hour, a weird three-way
fencing match with just twoactive players. On the one hand, he and the Limey
were trying to communicate past the frog, and onthe other, the Slimey Limey was
trying to decide if per- haps Slip was the real enemy and the frog apotential
ally. The hell of it was, Mr. Slippery wasn't sure himself of the answer to
that puzzle.

Slimey walked him out to the drawbridge. For a few moments, they
stood on the graven ceramicplat- ing and spoke. Below them, Alan paddled back
and forth, looking up at them uneasily. The mistwas a light rain now, and a
constant sizzling came from the molten rock.

Finally Slip said, "You're right in a way, Slimey. I am
someone's thrall. But I will look for RobinHood. If you're right, you've got a
couple of new allies. If he's too strong for us, this might be the lastyou see
of me..

The Slimey Limey nodded, and Slip hoped he had gotten the real
message: He would take on Eryall by himself. "Well then, let's hope this
ain't good-bye, old man." Slip walked back down into thevalley, aware of
the Limey's not unsympathetic gaze on his back.

How to find her, how to speak with her? And survive the
experience, that is. Virginia had forbid-den him--literally on pain of death--from
meeting with Ery on this plane. Even if he could do so, itwould be a deadly
risk for other reasons. What had Ery been doing in those minutes she dallied,
whenshe had fooled him into descending back to the hu- man plane before her? At
the time, he had feared itwas a betrayal. Yet he had lived and had forgotten
the mystery. Now he wondered again. It wasimpossible for him to understand the
complexity of those minutes. Perhaps she had weakened herselfat the beginning
to gull him into starting the descent, and perhaps then she hadn't been quite
strongenough to take over. Was that possible? And now she was slowly, secretly
building back her powers,just as the Mail- man had done? He didn't want to
believe it, and he knew if Virginia heard hissuspicions, the Feds would kill
her immediately. There would be no trial, no deep investigation.

Somehow he must get past Virginia and confront Ery--confront her
in such a way that he could de-stroy her if she were a new Mailman. And there
is a way! He almost laughed: it was absurd andabsurdly simple, and it was the
only thing that might work. All eyes were on this plane, where magicand power
flowed easily to the participants. He would attack from beneath, from the lowly
magiclessreal world.

But there was one final act of magic he must slip past Virginia,
something absolutely necessary fora real world confrontation with Erythrina.

He had reached the far ridge and was starting down the hillside
that led to the swamps. Evenpreoccupied, he had given the right signs flawlessly.
The guardian sprites were not nearly so vigilantto- ward contructs moving away
from the castle. As the wet brush closed in about them, the familiarred and
black spider--or its cousin--swung down from above.

"Beware, beware," came the tiny voice. From the flecks
of gold across its abdomen, he knew theright response: left hand up and flick
the spider away. Instead Slip raised his right hand and struck atthe creature.

The spider hoisted itself upward, screeching faintly, then dropped
toward Slip's neck--to landsquarely on the frog. A free-for-all erupted as the
two scrambled across the back of his neck, paleflame jousting against venom.
Even as he moved to save the frog, Mr. Slip- pery melted part of hisattention
into a data line that fed a sporting goods store in Montreal. An order was
placed and laterthat day a certain very special pack- age would be in the mail
to the Boston International Rail Terminal.

Slip made a great show of dispatching the spider, and as the frog
settled back on his shoulder, hesaw that he had probably fooled Virginia. That
he had expected. Fooling Ery would be much thedeadlier, chancier thing.

If this afternoon were typical, then July in Provi- dence must be
a close approximation to Hell.

Roger Pollack left the tube as it passed
the urbapt block and had to walk nearly four hundred meters toget to the tower
he sought. His shirt was soaked with sweat from just below the belt line right
up tohis neck. The contents of the package he had picked up at the airport
train station sat heavily in hisright coat pocket, tapping against his hip with
every step, reminding him that this was high noon inmore ways than one.

Pollack quickly crossed the blazing concrete plaza and walked
along the edge of the shadow thatwas all the tower cast in the noonday sun. All
around him the locals swarmed, all ages, seeminglyunfazed by the still, moist,
hot air. Apparently you could get used to practically anything.

Even an urbapt in summer in Providence. Pollack had expected the
buildings to be moredepressing. Workers who had any resources became data com-
muters and lived outside the cities. Ofcourse, some of the people here were
data-set users too and so could be characterized as datacommuters. Many of them
worked as far away from home as any exurb dweller. The difference wasthat they
made so little money (when they had a job at all) that they were forced to take
advantage ofthe economies of scale the urbapts provided.

Pollack saw the elevator ahead but had to detour around a number
of children playing stickball inthe plaza. The elevator was only half-full, so
a wave from him was all it took to keep it grounded till hecould get aboard.

No one followed him on, and the faces around him were
disinterested and entirely ordinary. Pollackwas not fooled. He hadn't violated
the letter of Virginia's law; he wasn't trying to see Erythrina on thedata net.
But he was going to see Debby Charteris, which came close to being the same
thing. Heimagined the Feds debating with themselves, finally deciding it would
be safe to let the two godlingsget together if it were on this plane where the
State was still the ultimate, all-knowing god. He andDebby would be observed.
Even so, he would somehow discover if she were the threat the Limey saw.

If not, the Feds would never know of
his suspicions. But if Ery had betrayed them all and meant to setherself up in
place of--or in league with--the Mailman, then in the next few minutes one of
them woulddie.

The express slid to a stop with a deceptive gentle- ness that
barely gave a feeling of lightness.

Pollack paid and got off.

Floor 25 was mainly shopping mall. He would have to find the
stairs to the residential apts betweenFloors 25 and 35. Pollack drifted through
the mall. He was beginning to feel better about the wholething. I'm still
alive, aren't I? If Ery had really become what the Limey and Slip feared, then
heprobably would have had a little "accident" before now. All the way
across the continent he sat withhis guts frozen, thinking how easy it would be
for someone with the Mailman's power to destroy an airtransport, even without
resort- ing to the military's lasers. A tiny change in naviga- tion or
traffic-control directions, and any number of fatal incidents could be
arranged. But nothing had happened,which meant that either Ery was innocent or
that she hadn't noticed him. (And that second possibilitywas unlikely if she
were a new Mailman. One impression that remained stronger than any other
fromhis short time as godling was the omniscience of it all.) It turned out the
stairs were on the other side of the mall, marked by a battered sign
reminiscent ofold-time highway markers: FOOTS > 26-30. The place wasn't
really too bad, he supposed, eyeing thestained but durable carpet that covered
the stairs. And the hallways coming off each landing remindedhim of the motels
he had known as a child, before the turn of the century. There was very little
trashvisible, the people moving around him weren't poorly dressed, and there
was only the faintest spice ofdisinfectant in the air. Apt module 28355, where
Debbie Charteris lived, might be high-class. It didhave an exterior view, he
knew that. Maybe Erythrina--Debbie--liked living with all these other people.

Surely, now that the government was
so interested in her, she could move anywhere she wished.

But when he reached it, he found floor 28 no different from the
others he had seen: carpeted hall-way stretching away forever beneath dim
lights that showed identical module doorways dwindling inperspective. What was
Debbie/Erythrina like that she would choose to live here.

"Hold it." Three teenagers stepped from behind the slant
of the stairs. Pollack's hand edged towardhis coat pocket. He had heard of the
gangs. These three looked like heavies, but they were well andconserva- tively
dressed, and the small one actually had his hair in a braid. They wanted very
much tobe thought part of the establishment.

The short one flashed something silver at him. "Building
Police." And Pollack remembered thenews stories about Federal Urban
Support paying young- sters for urbapt security: "A project thatsaves
money and staff, while at the same time giving our urban youth an opportunity
for responsiblecitizenship..

Pollack swallowed. Best to treat them like real cops. He showed
them his id. "I'm from out of state.

I'm just visiting..

The other two closed in, and the short one laughed. "That's
sure. Fact, Mr. Pollack, Sammy's littlegadget says you're in violation of
Building Ordinance." The one on Pollack's left waved a faintlybuzzing cylinder
across Pollack's jacket, then pushed a hand into the jacket and withdrew
Pollack'spistol, a lightweight ceramic slug-gun perfect for hunting hikes--and
which should have been perfectfor getting past a building's weapon detectors.

Sammy smiled down at the weapon, and the short one continued,
"Thing you didn't know, Mr.

Pollack, is Federal law requires a
metal tag in the butt of these cram guns. Makes 'em easy to detect..

Until the tag was removed. Pollack
suspected that some- how this incident might never be reported.

The three stepped back, leaving the
way clear for Pollack. "That's all? I can go?.

The young cop grinned. "Sure. You're out-of-towner. How could
you know?.

Pollack continued down the hall. The others did not follow.
Pollack was fleetingly surprised: maybethe FUS project actually worked. Before
the turn of the century, goons like those three would have atleast robbed him.
Instead they behaved something like real cops.

Or maybe--and he almost stumbled at this new thought--they all
work for Ery now. That might bethe first symptom of conquest: the new god would
simply become the government. And he--the lastthreat to the new order--was
being granted one last audience with the victor.

Pollack straightened and walked on more quickly. There was no
turning back now, and he wasdamned if he would show any more fear. Besides, he
thought with a sudden surge of relief, it was outof his control now. If Ery was
a monster, there was nothing he could do about it; he would not have totry to
kill her. If she were not, then his own survival would be proof, and he need
think of nocomplicated tests of her innocence.

He was almost hurrying now. He had always wanted to know what the
human being beyondErythrina was like; sooner or later he would have had to do
this anyway. Weeks ago he had lookedthrough all the official directories for
the state of Rhode Island, but there wasn't much to find: Lindaand Deborah
Charteris lived at 28355 Place on 4448 Grosvenor Row. The public directory
didn't evenshow their "interests and occupations..

28313, 315, 317 ....

His mind had gone in circles, generating all the things Debby
Charteris might turn out to be. Shewould not be the exotic beauty she projected
in the Other Plane. That was too much to hope for; butthe other possibilities
vied in his mind. He had lived with each, trying to believe that he could
acceptwhatever turned out to be the case: Most likely, she was a perfectly
ordinary looking person who lived in an urbapt to save enoughmoney to buy
high-quality processing equipment and rent dense comm lines. Maybe she
wasn'tgood-looking, and that was why the directory listing was relatively
secretive.

Almost as likely, she was massively handicapped. He had seen that
fairly often among thewarlocks whose True Names he knew. They had extra medical
welfare and used all their free money forequipment that worked around whatever
their problem might be--paraplegia, quadriplegia, multiplesense loss. As such,
they were perfectly competitive on the job market, yet old prejudices often
keptthem out of normal society. Many of these types retreated into the Other
Plane, where one couldcompletely control one's appearance.

And then, since the beginning of time, there had been the people
who simply did not like reality,who wanted another world, and if given half a chance
would live there forever. Pollack suspected thatsome of the best warlocks might
be of this type. Such people were content to live in an urbapt, tospend all
their money on processing and life-support equipment, to spend days at a time
in the OtherPlane, never moving, never exercising their real world bodies. They
grew more and more adept, moreand more knowledge- able--while their bodies
slowly wasted. Pollack could imagine such a personbecoming an evil thing and
taking over the Mailman's role. It would be like a spider sitting in its
web,its victims all humanity. He remembered Ery's contemptuous attitude on
learning he never used drugsto maintain concentration and so stay longer in the
Other Plane. He shuddered.

And there, finally, and yet too soon, the numbers 28355 stood on
the wall before him, the faint halllight glistening off their bronze finish.
For a long moment, he balanced between the fear and the wish.

Finally he reached forward and
tapped the door buzzer.

Fifteen seconds passed. There was no one nearby in the hall. From
the corner of his eye, he couldsee the "cops" lounging by the stairs.
About a hundred meters the other way, an argument was goingon. The contenders
rounded the faraway corner and their voices quieted, leaving him in near silence.

There was a click, and a small section of the door became
transparent, a window (more likely aholo) on the interior of the apt. And the
person beyond that view would be either Deborah or LindaCharteris.

"Yes?" The voice was faint, cracking with age. Pollack
saw a woman barely tall enough to come upto the pickup on the other side. Her
hair was white, visibly thin on top, especially from the angle hewas viewing.

"I'm... I'm looking for Deborah Charteris..

"My granddaughter. She's out shopping. Down- stairs in the
mall, I think." The head bobbed, afaintly distracted nod.

"Oh. Can you tell me--" Deborah, Debby. It sud- denly
struck him what an old-fashioned name thatwas, more the name of a grandmother
than a grand- daughter. He took a quick step to the door andlooked down through
the pane so that he could see most of the other's body. The woman wore an
old-fashioned skirt and blouse combination of some brilliant red material.

Pollack pushed his hand against the immovable plastic of the door.
"Ery, please. Let me in..

The pane blanked as he spoke, but after a moment the door slowly
opened. "Okay." Her voice wastired, defeated. Not the voice of a god
boasting victory.

The interior was decorated cheaply and with what might have been
good taste except for thegarish excesses of red on red. Pollack remembered
reading somewhere that as you age, colorsensitivity decreases. This room might
seem only mildly bright to the per- son Erythrina had turnedout to be.

The woman walked slowly across the tiny apt and gestured for him
to sit. She was frail, her backcurved in a permanent stoop, her every step
considered yet tremulous. Under the apt's window, henoticed an elaborate GE
processor system. Pollack sat and found himself looking slightly upward intoher
face.

"Slip--or maybe I should call you Roger here--you always were
a bit of a romantic fool." Shepaused for breath, or perhaps her mind
wandered. "I was begin- ning to think you had more sensethan to come out
here, that you could leave well enough alone..

"You ... you mean, you didn't know I was coming?" The
knowledge was a great loosening in hischest.

"Not until you were in the building." She turned and sat
carefully upon the sofa.

"I had to see who you really are," and that was
certainly the truth. "After this spring, there is noone the likes of us in
the whole world..

Her face cracked in a little smile. "And now you see how
different we are. I had hoped you neverwould and that someday they would let us
back to- gether on the Other Plane .... But in the end, itdoesn't really
matter." She paused, brushed at her temple, and frowned as though
forgettingsomething, or remembering something else.

"I never did look much like the Erythrina you know. I was
never tall, of course, and my hair wasnever red. But I didn't spend my whole
life selling life insurance in Peoria, like poor Wiley..

"You... you must go all the way back to the begin- ning of
computing..

She smiled again, and nodded just so, a manner- ism Pollack had
often seen on the Other Plane.

"Almost, almost. Out of high
school, I was a keypunch operator. You know what a keypunch is?.

He nodded hesitantly, visions of some sort of ma- chine press in
his mind.

"It was a dead-end job, and in those days they'd keep you in
it forever if you didn't get out underyour own power. I got out of it and into
college quick as I could, but at least I can say I was in thebusiness during
the stone age. After college, I never looked back; there was always so
muchhappening. In the Nasty Nineties, I was on the design of the ABM and FoG
control programs. Thewhole team, the whole of DoD for that matter, was trying
to program the thing with procedurallanguages; it would take 'em a thou- sand
years and a couple of wars to do it that way, and they werebeginning to realize
as much. I was respon- sible for getting them away from CRTs, for getting
intoreally interactive EEG programming--what they call portal programming
nowadays. Sometimes ...

sometimes when my ego needs a little
help, I like to think that if I had never been born, hundreds ofmillions more
would have died back then, and our cities would be glassy ponds today.

"... And along the way there was a marriage ..." her
voice trailed off again, and she sat smiling atmemories Pollack could not see.

He looked around the apt. Except for the processor and a fairly
complete kitchenette, there was nospe- cial luxury. What money she had must go
into her equipment, and perhaps in getting a room witha real exterior view.
Beyond the rising towers of the Grosve- nor complex, he could see the nest
ofcomm towers that had been their last-second salvation that spring. When he
looked back at her, hesaw that she was watching him with an intent and faintly
amused ex- pression that was very familiar.

"I'll bet you wonder how anyone so daydreamy could be the
Erythrina you knew in the OtherPlane." "Why, no," he lied.
"You seem perfectly lucid to me..

"Lucid, yes. I am still that, thank God. But I know-- and no
one has to tell me--that I can't support atrain of thought like I could before.
These last two or three years, I've found that my mind can wander,can drop into
reminiscence, at the most inconvenient times. I've had one stroke, and about
all 'themiracles of modern medicine' can do for me is predict that it will not
be the last one.

"But in the Other Plane, I can compensate. It's easy for the
EEG to detect failure of attention. I'vewritten a package that keeps a
thirty-second backup; when distraction is detected, it forces attentionand
reloads my short-term memory. Most of the time, this gives me better
concentration than I've everhad in my life. And when there is a really serious
wandering of attention, the package can interpolatefor a num- ber of seconds.
You may have noticed that, though perhaps you mistook it for poorcommunications
coordination..

She reached a thin, blue-veined hand toward him. He took it in his
own. It felt so light and dry, butit returned his squeeze. "It really is
me--Ery--inside, Slip..

He nodded, feeling a lump in his throat.

"When I was a kid, there was this song, something about us
all being aging children. And it's sovery, very true. Inside I still feel like
a youngster. But on this plane, no one else can see....

"But I know, Ery. We knew each other on the Other Plane, and
I know what you truly are. Both ofus are so much more there than we could ever
be here." This was all true: even with the restrictionsthey put on him
now, he had a hard time understand- ing all he did on the Other Plane. What he
hadbecome since the spring was a fuzzy dream to him when he was down in the physical
world. Some-times he felt like a fish trying to imagine what a man in an
airplane might be feeling. He never spoke ofit like this to Virginia and her
friends: they would be sure he had finally gone crazy. It was far beyondwhat he
had known as a warlock. And what they had been those brief minutes last spring
had beenequally far beyond that.

"Yes, I think you do know me, Slip. And we'll be ... friends
as long as this body lasts. And when I'mgone--.

"I'll remember; I'll always remember you, Ery." She
smiled and squeezed his hand again. "Thanks.

But that's not what I was getting
at.... " Her gaze drifted off again. "I figured out who the Mailman
wasand I wanted to tell you..

Pollack could imagine Virginia and the other DoW eavesdroppers
hunkering down to their spyequipment. "I hoped you knew something."
He went on to tell her about the Slimey Limey's detectionof Mailman- like
operations still on the System. He spoke carefully, knowing that he had
twoaudiences.

Ery--even now he couldn't think of her as Debby-- nodded.
"I've been watching the Coven.

They've grown, these last months. I
think they take them- selves more seriously now. In the old days,they never
would have noticed what the Limey warned you about. But it's not the Mailman he
saw,Slip..

"How can you be sure, Ery? We never killed more than his
service programs and his simulators--like DON.MAC. We never found his True
Name. We don't even know if he's human or some science-fictional alien..

"You're wrong, Slip. I know what the Limey saw, and I know
who the Mailman is--or was," shespoke quietly, but with certainty.
"It turns out the Mailman was the greatest cliche of the ComputerAge,
maybe of the entire Age of Science..

"Huh?.

"You've seen plenty of personality simulators in the Other
Plane. DON.MAC--at least as he wasrewrit- ten by the Mailman--was good enough
to fool normal warlocks. Even Alan, the Coven'selemental, shows plenty of human
emotion and cunning." Pollack thought of the new Alan, soferocious and
intimidating. The Turing T-shirt was beneath his dignity now. "Even so,
Slip, I don'tthink you've ever believed you could be permanently fooled by a
simulation, have you?.

"Wait. Are you trying to tell me that the Mailman was just
another simulator? That the time lag wasjust to obscure the fact that he was a
simulator? That's ridiculous. You know his powers were morethan human, almost
as great as ours became." "But do you think you could ever be
fooled?" "Frankly,no. If you talk to one of those things long enough,
they display a repetitiveness, an inflexibility that'sa giveaway. I don't know;
maybe someday there'll be programs that can pass the Turing test. Butwhat- ever
it is that makes a person a person is terribly complicated. Simulation is the
wrong way toget at it, because being a person is more than symptoms. A program
that was a person would useenormous data bases, and if the processors running
it were the sort we have now, you certainlycouldn't expect real-time
interaction with the outside world." And Pollack sud- denly had a glimmer ofwhat
she was thinking.

"That's the critical point, Slip: if you want real- time
interaction. But the Mailman--the sentient,con- versational part--never did
operate real time. We thought the lag was a communications delaythat showed the
operator was off-planet, but really he was here all the time. It just took him
hours ofprocessing time to sustain seconds of self-awareness..

Pollack opened his mouth, but nothing came out. It went against
all his intuition, almost againstwhat religion he had, but it might just barely
be possible. The Mailman had controlled immenseresources. All his quick time
reactions could have been the work of ordinary programs and simulatorslike
DON.MAC. The only evidence they had for his humanity were those teleprinter
conversationswhere his responses were spread over hours.

"Okay, for the sake of argument, let's say it's possible.
Someone, somewhere had to write the origi-nal Mailman. Who was that?.

"Who would you guess? The government, of course. About ten
years ago. It was an NSA teamtrying to automate system protection. Some
brilliant people, but they could never really get it off theground. They wrote
a developmental kernel that by itself was not especially effective or aware. It
wasdesigned to live within large systems and gradually grow in power and
awareness, independent ofwhat policies or mis- takes the operators of the
system might make.

"The program managers saw the Frankenstein analogy--or at
least they saw a threat to their per-sonal power--and quashed the project. In
any case, it was very expensive. The program executedslowly and gobbled
incredible data space..

"And you're saying that someone conveniently left a copy
running all unknown?.

She seemed to miss the sarcasm. "It's not that unlikely.
Research types are fairly careless--outsideof their immediate focus. When I was
in FoG, we lost thousands of megabytes 'between the cracks' ofour data bases.
And back then, that was a lot of memory. The development kernel is not very
large.

My guess is a copy was left in the
system. Remember, the kernel was designed to live untended if itever started
executing. Over the years it slowly grew--both be- cause of its natural
tendencies andbecause of the increased power of the nets it lived in..

Pollack sat back on the sofa. Her voice was tiny and frail, so
unlike the warm, rich tones he remem-bered from the Other Plane. But she spoke
with the same authority.

Debby's--Erythrina's--pale eyes stared off beyond the walls of the
apt, dreaming. "You know, theyare right to be afraid," she said
finally. "Their world is ending. Even without us, there would still be
theLimey, the Coven--and someday most of the human race..

Damn. Pollack was momentarily tongue-tied, trying desperately to
think of something to mollify thethreat implicit in Ery's words. Doesn't she
understand that DoW would never let us talk unbugged.

Doesn't she know how trigger-happy
scared the top Feds must be by now.

But before he could say anything, Ery glanced at him, saw the
consternation in his face, andsmiled. The tiny hand patted his. "Don't
worry, Slip. The Feds are listening, but what they're hearing istearful
chitchat--you overcome to find me what I am, and me trying to console the both
of us. Theywill never know what I really tell you here. They will never know
about the gun the local boys took offyou..

"What?.

"You see, I lied a little. I know why you really came. I know
you thought that I might be the newmonster. But I don't want to lie to you
anymore. You risked your life to find out the truth, when youcould have just
told the Feds what you guessed." She went on, taking advantage of his
stupefiedsilence. "Did you ever wonder what I did in those last minutes
this spring, after we surrendered--whenI lagged behind you in the Other Plane.

"It's true, we really did destroy the Mailman; that's what
all that unintelligible data space weplowed up was. I'm sure there are copies
of the kernel hidden here and there, like little cancers in theSystem, but we
can control them one by one as they appear.

"I guessed what had happened when I saw all that space, and I
had plenty of time to study whatwas left, even to trace back to the original
research project. Poor little Mailman, like the monsters offiction he was only
doing what he had been designed to do. He was taking over the System,protecting
it from everyone--even its owners. I suspect he would have announced himself in
the endand used some sort of nuclear blackmail to bring the rest of the world
into line. But even though hisprograms had been run- ning for several years, he
had only had fifteen or twenty hours of human typeself-awareness when we did
him in. His personality programs were that slow. He never attained thelevel of
consciousness you and I had on the System.

"But he really was self-aware, and that was the triumph of it
all. And in those few minutes, I figuredout how I could adapt the basic kernel
to accept any input personality. ... That is what I really wantedto tell you..

"Then what the Limey saw was--.

She nodded. "Me ....

She was grinning now, an open though conspirato- rial grin that
was very familiar. "When BertrandRus- sell was very old, and probably as
dotty as I am now, he talked of spreading his interests andattention out to the
greater world and away from his own body, so that when that body died he wouldscarcely
notice it, his whole consciousness would be so diluted through the outside
world.

"For him, it was wishful thinking, of course. But not for me.
My kernel is out there in the System.

Every time I'm there, I transfer a
little more of myself. The kernel is growing into a true Erythrina, whois also
truly me. When this body dies," she squeezed his hand with hers,
"when this body dies, I willstill be, and you can still talk to me..

"Like the Mailman?.

"Slow like the Mailman. At least till I design faster
processors....

"... So in a way, I am everything you and the Limey were
afraid of. You could probably still stop me,Slip." And he sensed that she
was awaiting his judgment, the last judgment any mere human wouldever be allowed
to levy upon her.

Slip shook his head and smiled at her, thinking of the slow-moving
guardian angel that she wouldbecome. Every race must arrive at this point in
its history, he suddenly realized. A few years ordecades in which its future
slavery or greatness rests on the goodwill of one or two persons. It couldhave
been the Mailman. Thank God it was Ery instead.

And beyond those years or decades... for an instant, Pollack came
near to understanding thingsthat had once been obvious. Processors kept getting
faster, memories larger. What now took aplanet's resources would someday be
possessed by everyone. Including himself.

Beyond those years or decades... were millennia. And Ery.

Vernor Vinge San Diego June 1979-January 1980 Afterword, by Marvin
Minsky.

.

eBook Info

Creator:

Vernor Vinge

Title:

TRUE NAMES

Date:

10/29/2000