4. Marise

Marise damped the Stratodart's engines as it came to a halt across the tarmac from the car waiting to pick Block up. She saw Dareze Dillon lounging by the car, fleetingly flashing herself in Dareze's place. She could see Block and Dillon dissolving in the mists, engaged in some unimaginable adventure, entwining with each other in hazy puzzles, doing indescribable things to each other that would, she was sure, bring them unspeakable torrents of bliss.

She let the formless thoughts dissolve. She'd spent an entire night with Block with the results she always had, which meant nada, nothing, a total blank. It was like there was a sheet of Plexi-glas between her and men, or more apt, a set of invisible handcuffs which shackled her mind, and thus her actions. She couldn't initiate acts that might lead to whatever pleasure awaited on the other side of the barrier.

She got up and stepped out of the cockpit as Block was prepar-ing to leave the cabin. The Chairman gave her the opportunity of going on a project with Block, then snatched it away by requiring her to inspect this guy Jarred's Amazonian project. The best she could hope was to get that inspection over quickly and get back in time to pick Block up before he finished in Trieste.

She waited for Block to clear the steps, retracted them, shut the door, and reentered the cockpit, throttling the engines out of idyll, enjoying the brute force of the machine quivering at her slightest touch. The Stratodart roared into action as she directed it away from the loading area of the tarmac, then shot it down the runway into a demonstrable climb that pushed her firmly back into the contoured chair.

She checked her course, made sure everything was pro-grammed, and picked up the notepad she'd been toying with during the flight from India. She'd written down and crossed off such words as genetic, atomic, nuclear, molecular, even itsy bitsy, and still failed to come up with a description of what she was dealing with.

The broadcast frequency she used to neutralize the rat's be-havior was very small. She captured one of the carrier emissions the Iridium network used and retransmitted it, varying it until it canceled out the frequency causing the rats to act erratically. She'd taken it down to smaller and smaller frequencies until she started thinking of them as microemissions.

She added "microemissions" to her list, looking at it for a sec-ond, allowing it to roll around in her mind. She could envision the part dealing with micro, but how it connected with the rat's brain puzzled her. She crossed out "emissions" and wrote "flows" above it. She scribbled that out and wrote "micro" below the crossed-out list adding flows, currents, and streams.

They'll all do, she thought, although she was partial to flows. The next question was, what was going on with the Philbrook Ef-fect? The Chairman used the term to describe what he thought was causing a series of disastrous events affecting what he considered the future operators of The Representative World Government. Without them, he felt the geographic and nationalistic groupings, whose only purpose was to perpetuate their narrow individual in-terests, would lead to a world where the bloody mists of war would blow to and fro across the face of the planet, favoring the hot hand, the people producers, the weapons rich, the vicious and rabid few.

The Philbrook Effect was a speculative answer to the appar-ently nonrandom incidents he'd picked up with his probability pro-gram, students running rampant in schools at disparate locations throughout the world. Of course, students had been running rampant in schools forever, but not to the point of rape and murder.

Even when she was in school, her mind drifted, sex was ram-pant. She hadn't participated. The idea of a man sticking something into her was repulsive. When she was invited to watch movies showing people having sex of various types with each other, she restrained herself from giggling.

The summer after her sixth grade, the summer she entered pu-berty, her breasts started growing. It was only then, looking at her body in a mirror, she drew the connection. Sensation was the in-ducement to let someone do the sticking. It was nature's way of duplicating itself.

And, she thought, there must be some sort of similar induce-ment for the guy. But the first inducement, she thought, as she looked first in the mirror and then at the pictures of the women modeling underwear in the magazine propped up next to the mirror, was something she didn't possess. The chubby outlines of her body staring at her from the mirror, the newly forming breasts seeming to be just so much more fat, were nowhere near the neat, trim lines of the models staring back at her from the pages of the maga-zine.

The process of comparison affected her. She'd never felt there was anything wrong with her body. Her father's nickname of But-terball seemed cute all the years she'd been growing up. Now it seemed, as she stared at the actual butterball staring back at her from the mirror, like an obscene piece of child abuse.

As soon as her gaze dropped to the propped-up magazine, with its sleek, blemish free forms smiling out from some mystical land of perfection, she felt a sinking in the pit of her stomach she hadn't felt since the first time she realized her parents might catch her playing with herself at night.

If she took her eyes away from the picture in the magazine, the sinking sensation vanished. If she looked at the picture, it returned.

If she pursued it long enough, the sinking sensation turned into anger. She felt like grabbing the magazine and tearing the pictures out.

If she closed the magazine and just looked at herself in the mir-ror, images of the women in the movies would swim into view, with their thin waists, their ample breasts, their tight buttocks, their flat stomachs.

It got so bad, she avoided looking in the mirror. At night, she intermingled the sensations within herself with images of her being beautiful like the models in the pictures, and as she developed sen-sations in her breasts, the images took on more of a body tone. But the images began to conflict with her images of reality, her chubby body, her chubby breasts, her chubby face, they'd eat away at her pleasure As a result, she separated the sensations from the im-ages, floating herself in a space of pleasure. During the daylight hours, she was blind to the connection between her interactions with others and the sensations others could produce in her body.

The images in the magazines were destroying her sense of self-identity at the same time her sexuality was learning how to relate to others. She wanted her sexuality to merge with her identity of self so she could become a full sexual women, something she in-stinctively knew was her entitlement. But her images of women as sexual beings were so conflicted with her image of herself in the mirror that her self-identity shattered, leaving her in danger of disliking herself, seeing herself as something other than what she was, holding herself in low esteem.

At night, she'd explore herself, knowing she was a full sexual being. Everything worked, and worked well, delivering to her body and mind the sensations they were designed to deliver. What was it about the daytime that made her look upon herself as something less than she was?

If she looked like the women in the pictures, would everything work in the daytime the way they did in the darkness? Would she be able to merge her sexual identity into her physical identity so she could face the day confident she was whole?

Clothes didn't do the trick. No matter how hard she tried, no matter how many hours she spent in store after store in fruitless searches for a style that'd turn her body into the form she visual-ized, what would result? If she had the ideal figure capable of drawing endless gazes from those around her, those, she asked herself, who were those, would they sweep her away into a world of ecstasy she knew existed for those living up to the standards of the pictures. Could she merge the pleasure of her nights into her daylight self?

If the clothes didn't fit her body, she decided, it'd be necessary for her body to fit the clothes. Just as the models that appeared in the pictures had bodies embodying sexual desire, their dress sizes must be the body size that'd bring total sexual fulfillment. All she had to do was determine what the proper body size was and force her own to match it.

How?

Starve herself until she fit the mold.

She went on a diet.

Before long, the long ago conflict that arose when, for fear of discovery, she'd made a daylight decision not to touch herself at night and then lay awake thinking about what it'd be like to touch herself, reappeared in the day with respect to her diet. The satis-faction of her normal bodily needs for pleasure allowed her mind and body to pursue other activities. The satisfaction of her normal bodily needs for food also allowed her mind and body to pursue other activities. Denying herself pleasure drove her to think of it and do it. The same applied to food. Breaking her diet would not only remove the promised sexual nirvana from her grasp, it would wound her mental self-esteem, demonstrating her inability to con-trol herself. She decided to eat all she wanted, then stick her finger down her throat to get it out before it could do any harm.

So, with the compact body image from the magazines as her campaign flag in the march for the victory of self-identity over her feelings of inadequacy, she sallied forth to the bathroom after each meal to barf herself totally senseless. And, she noted with pleas-ure, the weight began to disappear. The only problem was, some infernal sculptor was doing the remodeling, producing a body that wasn't related to the models in the pictures.

Even without the weight, she didn't conform.

And worse, when she sought out her nighttime companion, she found her friend more and more elusive as her weight disappeared until she no longer had the desire to seek, let alone the ability to respond.

One night, lying in bed with tears streaming down her cheeks, unable to retrieve the pleasure she sought, a thought clarified in her mind. Who was she trying to please? If it was herself, she was doing a pretty poor job of it because she could no longer arouse herself and felt miserable throwing up all the time. If her self-esteem didn't depend on what she thought about herself, what did it depend on? Satisfying a bunch of people she didn't even know and probably had no chance of ever meeting?

Even if it was someone she was going to meet and wanted to be-come sexual with, what the heck good would it be to have someone to be sexual with if she couldn't feel the sex as a result. The sexual response with someone else would have to be at least equal to the sexual response she got from herself, and the sexual response she was getting from herself was no sexual response at all.

She decided to stop throwing up and get herself back in shape.

An hour after her first meal, she knew she was in trouble.

The conflict that'd visited her when she'd tried to deny herself sex, the same conflict that'd visited her when she'd tried to deny herself food, came back when she tried to deny herself throwing up. What at first was horrible had become an urge needing satisfaction, and its denial set up the impossible conflict inexorably driving her to do exactly what she'd set her mind not to do. Her very determi-nation set her on a course of denial that undermined her determina-tion.

She was determined to overcome it, to break out of the de-scending cycle she was caught in. Every time she felt the urge to stick her finger down her throat, she substituted it with the mental image of her finger touching the sensitive nubbin of flesh that'd transport her back into her body, away from the amorphous world she found herself in.

Slowly the misdirected finger returned home, and Marise's body returned to normal, with bigger breasts to boot. However, she was exactly where she'd been, so she quit looking in the mirror, ignored the pictures in fashion magazines, and resolved to live her life with the body she had, however unfortunate it was. She may have to look at her face when she brushed her teeth, but her face had the advantage of being just plain, rather than particularly ugly.

Marise entered middle school with a series of loose fitting smocks and a desire to determine what made people see things the way they did. If they saw something that wasn't there, or if they didn't see something that was, either their eyes weren't seeing what was in front of them or their brain was, in some way, refus-ing to recognize what was directly in front of their eyes.

One day, coming home from school, she was locked out. She looked for her key, which was always placed just so in her orderly purse. It wasn't there. She went next door for the emergency key. The neighbors weren't home either, so she sat down and waited for someone to come home.

As she sat there, she wondered where her key was. "I left my key at work," her father said the night before. "I have to go out. Can I borrow someone's?" Marise lent her father her key and her father forgot to give it back.

No. She'd forgotten to get it back. When she left for school, she left with the assumption the key was in her purse.

After beating herself over the head for forgetting to look in her purse before she left, and vowing never to walk out the door again without checking to make sure she had her key in its proper place, she wondered, where had the knowledge she didn't have the key been when she walked out the door without the key?

The question made her pause. What exactly was she asking? Was she wondering where thoughts she wasn't thinking were when she wasn't thinking them? Where did thoughts exist in her brain when they weren't in her mind? She let the thought hang for a mo-ment, wondering whether thoughts existing in the brain could in-terfere with the thoughts actually going through her mind. If, say, she were addicted to sex, would the addictive thoughts color eve-rything she thought with sexual overtones.

She shuddered at the thought of her father catching her playing with herself, so that fear must reside somewhere in her brain. When she started playing with herself, she had to banish the thought to enjoy the play. Where did it go?

What if her brain was filled with religious injunctions against playing with herself? How did those unthought thoughts act to re-strict actions? Did brains ignore the injunctions once play started?

"A person can't do anything if she doesn't have a clear picture of herself doing it," she said out loud. "Unless, of course, you're just reacting to something, you have to be able to formulate an ac-tion in your mind before you can carry out the action."

Her thoughts were interrupted when her mother drove into the driveway. "Your father called when he realized he'd forgotten to give your key back," she said.

Marise went to her room and attacked the Internet, looking for an explanation for where thoughts went when they weren't being thought. All she got was an amazing load of crap, most of it meta-physical, hardly any of it on topic, and none of it useful.

The next day, she dumped class and went straight to the library where she asked the clerk how to find a book that would tell her where thoughts went when they weren't there.

"Look under fantasy," the librarian replied.

She did, and realized immediately fantasy wasn't the correct category.

She went back to the librarian. "I want a book showing me the part of the mind that stores thoughts I'm not thinking," she re-phrased her request.

"Look under mystery," the librarian replied.

She did, and realized immediately this wasn't the correct cate-gory either.

She went back to the librarian once again. "I'm looking for where thoughts go when we're not thinking them," she rephrased once again.

Marise was startled as the women looked like she visualized her father would look if he caught her with her hand between her legs. "Look under Freud." she replied.

"Fraud?"

"E, not A. Freud. Look under F-r-e-u-d," the librarian said, spelling it out for her.

Marise went to the section and started reading pretty much the stuff she'd seen in the fuck movies at her friend's house. What could possibly be sexual about the way the mind operated, she won-dered. It wasn't exposed so parts of it had to be covered up. It did-n't change shape when you rubbed it. What was the analogy?

Marise decided she was having her leg pulled and ambled back to the computer and started searching. She looked up "thought" and was referred to "thinking and thought." She found that and ran down the listings. A good category if you were trying to improve your mind rather than find out how it worked, she thought, as she passed one self-help title after another.

She thought for a second, then looked up "mind." She ran down this list. There were some listings under "mind," but as a whole, they appeared to blend more into the next category, "mind and body," a sort of primer on how to live a healthy life.

Must be "brain," she thought, so she found that heading and started through the titles. Very authoritative, she thought. She'd finally found the books that explained the mind.

She followed the shelves back to the appropriate number and did indeed find several books on the brain and mind. She discarded the oversized picture books once she realized they were a map to the physical brain and told her nothing about how it operated, and moved on to the thick tomes promising to provide more juicy in-formation. It didn't take her long to figure out the thick books of-fered little more in the way of understanding than the oversized picture books. One even described the brain as the last frontier, a name indicating it was uncharted territory. Another stated the mind intrigued people from the earliest of times, and continues to do so to this day, although it didn't exist. Still another had pictures of various theories about how the mind worked, all beyond ridiculous.

There was nothing about the real operation of the brain, or the mind, or both, explaining how it did the obvious, obtain, store, re-call, and reshape information, and allow her to know she was a sentient being who could make choices and realize her own exis-tence.

It seemed the librarian was more accurate than she first real-ized. The brain, the mind, was indeed a mystery, with most of the explanations grounded firmly in fantasy.

The shelf holding the books on the brain did, however, provide her with some solid information on how specialized the field of brain research was. If she followed the books back to the left, she passed books on the senses, the skin, and rapidly got to one on get-ting her period, something she was sure wasn't grounded in mys-tery and fantasy. If she followed the titles on the shelf to the right, she passed the eye, another superficial description which provided no information at all, the ear, which was okay until it got to ex-plaining how the brain perceived noise, body type, where did that come in, she wondered, and ended with Women Coming of Age by Jane Fonda.

So the library sandwiched information about the brain between learning about your period, and learning about feminine puberty. Quite a sandwich.

Well, Marise thought, if the librarian was right about the fan-tasy and mystery aspects of her search, maybe she was right about the Freud part. Before long, she was immersed in why people were so obsessed with people doing things to each other without their clothes on. Freud actually had a name for the area of the brain that contained unthought thoughts, the subconscious. And she learned the proof of the subconscious was the proposition we know more than we're consciously aware we know.

The subconscious was loaded with everything we knew but weren't consciously aware of. She was surprised to learn that be-fore Freud popularized the concept of the subconscious, no one even wondered where the thoughts went when they weren't in the mind.

The subconscious was supposed to suppress actions. Was it the subconscious that interfered with how one person saw another per-son, whether they saw beauty or ugliness?

Didn't sound right to her.

When she got into the workings of the repression mechanism, she began to lose touch with reality. The repression, it seemed, was merely the defense mechanism of the ego. The ego was the "I" but it didn't explain what the "I" was other than to indicate it was the part of the mind that focused on the present, on reality. And the defense was a defense against the Id, which was referred to as the neuter "it," the area of the subconscious involved with pleasure.

She didn't know about Freud, but there was no repressing anything, let alone her pleasure, when her "I" put her finger on her "it" and went to work.

Perhaps the answer was in the superego, the location Freud described as the source of morality. It seemed to indicate morality caused the ego to repress pleasure.

That certainly didn't make sense. Why repress pleasure. Mo-rality dealt with prohibitions against delivering pain, not with re-ceiving pleasure. When she found out the superego developed as a result of inner conflicts with her parents in oral, anal, and finally phallic stages, she knew Freud wasn't talking about her. He may have been referring to women who lived in a century the female body was used as a baby factory, but he wasn't talking about a woman whose body was her own to use.

She retreated to the split between the conscious and the sub-conscious. It was incredible something she'd recognized naturally at thirteen hadn't occurred thousands of years ago, let alone hun-dreds. It was obvious thoughts were representations of the world she lived in and it'd be pretty confusing if she had to be constantly aware of all of the thoughts she could have of all the worlds she'd lived in. Therefore, there had to be some way for the mind to store thoughts it didn't presently need.

In the coming afternoons, she came to know Hamlet's soliloquy, to be or not to be. That was the real question on the rare occasions someone tried to understand where unthought thoughts were lo-cated. They transferred the question of how the mind operated to a question of whether the mind existed at all to the absurdity of whether the world the mind perceived actually existed.

Marise believed in reality. If anyone wanted to question reality, she would invite them to bend over, put their head a couple of inches from a wall, and she'd demonstrate the reality of reality with one swift kick.

Marise believed in her own reality. She could prove that sim-ply by bending over in the same position and letting someone give her a swift kick.

She understood she could perceive reality. All she had to do was look at the wall.

She understood she could remember reality. She could close her eyes and reconstruct the wall.

There was, therefore, no question the mind stored what it ex-perienced and was able to recall what it stored.

She started organizing her thoughts around a conscious and a storage area in the brain rather then an unconscious. Her thoughts could either be directed to reality or to storage, the repository of her experiences and conclusions. She could think of a waterfall and easily cycle in a sunset, the icicles from a winter's day or a rain-bow. She could combine some or all together.

When she took science class in high school, the teacher's opening remarks enlivened her. Science, it seemed, was the search for all knowledge. One had to approach science with an open mind, leaving any preconceived notions of how the world ought to be be-hind so the mind was free to consider new points of view.

A basic asset of science was the inquiring mind, the ability to ask questions. The motto of the British Royal Society, which had concerned itself with the collection of practical scientific achieve-ments for over three hundred years, was nullius in verba, or noth-ing in word. Always see for yourself, always question whatever wasn't a fact in front of your face.

Combined with an open and inquiring mind, there had to be the creative mind, the ability of the mind to take two disparate facts or concepts and combine them to come up with something new. In fact, this creative aspect was held in such high regard, it'd been used for many years to separate Homo sapiens from the rest of the animals roaming the Earth. It was only through creativity that knowledge could be advanced. Finally, science required a persistence of mind, a dedication to vocation requiring focus over the extended periods of time it took to develop answers to persistently elusive ques-tions.

Marise took stock of her assets. Science didn't require beauty of face or form, but rather qualities of mind, openness, inquisitive-ness, creativity and persistence, all qualities she'd demonstrated in her search for answers to how the mind worked. She'd asked the questions, sought out opinions in the library, developed her own outlook, and had done so, not only over an extended period of time, but over a period of time that was still continuing. In fact, hearing just how open and free the field of science was to talent, ideas, a desire to work and explore new avenues of approach, gave her new energy to charge forward in search for consistent answers as to who she was and how she worked.

The soft insistent chime of the communicator brought the starless darkness of space into Marise's conscious. She'd been drifting, looking out the canopy of the cockpit as the Stratodart sped across the edge of the atmosphere.

She opened the communicator. "Yes," she said.

"Hi, Marise. Mary Renon here. How are you?"

Marise's mind raced. Mary Renon was the Chancellor of Bay State University in San Francisco. Bay State was The Chairman's image repository. Bitmapped images of every document that had played importantly in history, as well as every document dealing with The Chairman's activities, was housed at Bay State. Mary had held her own job for a short time during which it was rumored she bilked uncountable billions out of the economy during the last ditch attempt by British Operations to thwart currency consolidation. Although her exact position in the affair wasn't clear, it made no difference because she donated the entire amount to the furtherance of education, the visible result being the rapid establishment and immediate dominance of Bay State in the maintenance and manage-ment of the historical record.

While the project to internationalize the Amazon was a joint project among various governments, The Chairman had his own project manager to keep tabs on major international projects in case there was any advantage to be gained. She'd been expecting a call from this project manager. Was Mary Renon that contact?

"Just reminiscing," Marise replied.

"You're lucky. I don't have much luck with that sort of stuff. Live for the present. The Chairman said you needed a layout of Jarazonia."

"You keep things like that?" Marise asked.

"One of The Chairman's companies built the place, as well as the settlement for the Lake Maracaibo project. I see you're receiv-ing. Hold on, I'll send the plans."

Marise watched the computer screen as the lines sliced into view.

"Jarazonia was built across a branch of the river delta," Mary continued. "Of course, the delta encompasses a lot of terri-tory, but it's situated so it appears to be actually on a river while still having a view of Atlantic sunsets. As you can see, the area affected is extensive, covering almost everything north of fifteen degrees, and running into the Ecuadorian and Columbian Amazon. The shaded areas are where the rain forests have been destroyed and encompass the reclamation project so it has a chance to rees-tablish itself.

"The solid colored area is the existing rain forest and plains, and is inhabited only by the Yanomami. There should be any number of surveying and exploration teams roaming around, but they're all registered and accessible to you under the project file."

Marise watched as the picture dissolved beneath the emerging site plan.

"This is the layout of Jarazonia," Mary said.

"I thought we were trying to preserve the Amazon, not turn it into a feudal estate," Marise note wryly.

"Jarred's got the bucks, he got environmental clearance, so he can live as he pleases. It's kind of lavish," Mary chuckled. "I won-der what he'd be like in bed."

"He looks pretty oily to me," Marise remarked.

"Variety, variety, and more variety. Anyway," Mary pointed out, "the circular bubble over the river is Jarred's recreation room."

"Recreation room?" Marise said, quizzically.

"Jarred enjoys the company of the fair sex, although from what I can make out from the files on the women he favors, they're all drearily the same. He always has at least five on hand. Current ones are Ralisse, Renell, Ronay, Reline, and Reanne, all R's, and all two syllables. I wonder if the names are the only thing that's per-manent, with the girls changing from year to year as they wear out, or whatever girls do in the Amazon. Anyway, I've seen art-ist's pictures of the Jaracuzi, as he calls the place. It looks like a wonderful place to spend a few days engaged in sex. You can make out the main house, of course. And the villas surrounding it are for guests, with the rectangles for the help."

"Yanomami?" Marise asked.

"Goodness no. At least I hope not, violation of Council guide-lines. It used to be the death knell when a group of people was tar-geted for protection. It was like painting a bull's eye on them for the economic hunters of the world. But now, touching a protected people gets a bull's eye for the toucher. No, I assume Jarred im-ports whatever help he needs."

"Probably gets a lot of visitors," Marise mused.

"Doubt it. Jarred's rumored to be somewhat of a recluse. Watch," Mary instructed. "I'm going to put a dot on the map be-tween the main building and the Jaracuzi, right at the water's edge."

Marise saw a dot appear on the screen.

"That's where you put down. The dot triggers a digitized code that'll open a hatch to a hidden hanger The Chairman installed. If you want to go incognito, just put the Stratodart in there.

"I don't really know what I'm going in for," Marise said.

"Jarred controls the market in ostrich meat. It's the fastest growing segment of the food industry, with an almost limitless ability to feed the existing population. We assume he does so from all of those excess buildings and villas he's put up down there. He's also supposed to front for the Amazonian project, fielding any problems that arise and putting them in the right hands. As such, he's only a figurehead. He's not supposed to be doing anything pro-active. The internationalization team is established and in place, and the process is ongoing."

"So what's that leave me to look for?" Marise asked.

"Nothing, if that's all that's going on. You just stop by, say hello, and leave," Mary replied.

"Hiding my means of transportation in the process?"

"I would recommend it," Mary said. "We found some sort of transmitter right where you said it might be."

"Underneath where the old throne base was eaten away by the rats?" Marise asked.

"The very spot. Why did you pick it?"

"The fact it was eaten away, for one, the fact Jarred was sit-ting there the longest time for another."

"Pretty smart, that," Mary said, "but then it's a fact The Chairman always picks the smart ones. We tried it out on a few rats and it drove them absolutely crazy. They not only started to eat each other, they started to eat themselves, not to mention the gross indignities, even for rats, they committed on each other. It usually takes several dozen generations in an overcrowded cage to turn rats into such animals, so to speak. That generator, or what-ever you want to call it, did it immediately. It's frightening to think something similar could work on humans."

"So you think Jarred and the Amazonian project are connected somehow to what's happening to the Millennials?" Marise asked. "That's what I'm supposed to be working on with Block."

"I would think it's more the generators and the ostrich farming that might be connected."

"Really?" Marise said, surprised. "How so?"

"We've checked out all of the schools involved in spontaneous irrational behavior on the part of the millennial generation, and among other things in common, such as toilets, and course mate-rial, they all had ostrich on their menus."

"What's unusual about that?" Marise asked. "You just said the ostrich business is the fastest growing food business in the world."

"We checked the marketing penetration in each community in which an incident occurred. In six communities, the school was the only ostrich customer. It could be coincidence, it could be impor-tant. You're more equipped to figure out if there's a connection between ostriches, the generators and the millennial malaise."

"Mary?" Marise asked hesitantly.

"What's that?"

"Is it true you made millions, billions, on that currency con-solidation business?"

Mary laughed. "Now that's a good one. No one has ever asked me that question before. Where in the world did The Chairman get you? They tried to explain to me how you stopped the rats, but it went over my head."

"But, did you make all that money?"

"You know as much about it as I do. All I know is that during the course of a day, I went from broke, to rich, from owning noth-ing to owing half the world, then back to owning nothing. I tell you the truth, though, before it happened I had nothing but what I could get out of some man, now I have everything I want, literally."

"Which is?"

"You work for The Chairman. Do you have anything you want you can't get?"

"You mean other than a man?"

Mary laughed. "I never lacked cock then or now, only now I have it on an assembly line basis. If you're having trouble getting a man, you're going to have to sign up for a teaching stint at Bay State."

"Teaching?" Marise said, with a query in her voice. "I have no classroom experience."

"Who said anything about a classroom. The men occupy the classrooms here. We women run the university and in the process, the men. I've set up the perfect experiment in sex discrimination here at Bay State."

"Sex discrimination is illegal."

"You can't discriminate against the discriminators. We have the healthiest bunch of well-paid professors you'd ever want to find anywhere, with a woman in charge of every department. We've got them young and callow, old and bearded, young and bearded, old and callow, anything you want. And they're very compliant, too, at least if they want to continue to get their paychecks, they are.

"And, of course, all of our administrative assistants and sec-retaries are male, as well as the groundskeepers, the security of-ficers, and the technicians. Oh, we've rooms full of image special-ists that'd just make your mouth water. And while Bay State isn't noted for its sports victories, we select our teams on quite another qualification. We've every grade of football, if you're in the mood for something beefy, or soccer, if you want someone with more agility. We've a hockey team if you like your sex a little rough, a basketball team if you like them lanky, a swimming and diving team if you like them supple, you name it, we've got it. We even keep a chess team around if you want to play with someone who forgets what he's doing but can still do it lightning fast."

"Gee," Marise murmured, "don't you have trouble satisfying all of those men?"

"It's been my experience men are fairly easy to satisfy, both on an intellectual and physical basis. Especially on an intellectual basis. The campus is studded with monitors, and with satellite TV, there's always multiple sports events going on any time of the day or night. For those who can make noises distinguishable from grunts, we've political contests, although we hesitate to introduce any real issues for fear of causing terminal confusion. We've a full variety of wagering pools to satisfy the urge for risk taking. And of course, a man will talk about his last sexual experience forever.

"So we don't have any trouble keeping them mentally occupied.

"Sexually, we simply operate on the next time principle. Just as they spend forever talking about who they just boffed, or who they'd like to boff, when they boffing, they're doing the same thing. We give them a little variety, and they never know whether they're coming or going."

"Sounds like you're just using them," Marise observed.

"What else are they good for? They have their interests, we have ours. They have their needs based mainly on the ego gratifi-cation they get sticking it in a woman. They're not physically built to make much of a job out of it, I mean, whoever heard off one man satisfying a bunch of women. Women need a little more than one man has to offer, so I've just organized my institution so they can perform their natural function with a modicum of success."

"What about looks? Do you have an ideal of how a man should look?" Marise asked.

"There's an objective standard of beauty, you know."

"There is?"

"Sure. Everyone has one. That's why we have such diversity. But, we do have a campus cutie, the one man on campus who repre-sents the ideal."

"If beauty is subjective rather than objective, how can you pick one man that represents the ideal?"

"All women focus on the sexual characteristics of men, nice buns, the ability to fill his pants, good thighs, nice chest, broad shoulders, good hair," Mary replied. "We just pick someone with the best of all the things we like to focus on when we're banging them, kind of trying to pick the closest representation to a group fantasy as possible."

"Still sounds a little unfair to me," Marise insisted.

"Unfair to who? The little darlings love it. Staff gets paid and the students hopefully learn something so when they go out into the real world, they'll be able to carry out their duties. I mean its al-right to talk incessantly about who you'd like to boff, but you got to get off the barstool once in awhile and do some boffing if you don't want you're stories to go stale. We try to instill a sense of duty in our young men.

"You listen up," Mary instructed. "When you finish finding out what this guy Jarred is up to and get Block off your back, where I'm sure he's already been, you come out and visit with me. You'll have a ball. Besides, you have a curriculum to design for me."

Block on my back, Marise thought, signing off. Fat chance, with him drinking in the back of the plane the whole way to Trieste. She refused to form an image of her formless body. She hadn't even seen herself in a mirror since she'd determined eating was better than starving. She'd developed so many mannerisms to keep from seeing her image, she was incorporeal in her mind, a plain face floating above an amorphous impenetrable cloudbank. The thought of being with men who would have to service her gave her a thrill.

She never fantasized when massaging her friend because fanta-sies weren't necessary to imbue her body with pleasure. The mere activity was sufficient to get a full ripple of sensations moving back and forth throughout her nervous system. The thought of ex-periencing the sensations in the presence of a man was new, brought on by the possibility offered by Mary's Open University.

Of course, possibilities never worked out for her. She'd spent her entire high school attempting to find someone willing to discuss the mind's operation. Then she saw a short article in the school newspaper written by the science teacher. Under the heading "The Mechanism of Memory" the teacher discussed Hebb's rule of law, which, he said, showed how permanent memory worked. She made an appointment to see him.

"What mechanism could possibly be discrete enough to recall a single bit of information from a stockpile of trillions, and be able to use that bit to go in and retrieve a related piece," she asked.

"Say what?" Mr. Broadbent asked.

"You had that article in The Citizen about how the mind remem-bers. There are a zillion things in the mind and I was just wondering what the mechanism was that allowed recall to discriminate among those zillion things."

"What do you mean recall?" he asked.

"Moving memories from storage into the conscious mind," Ma-rise answered.

"There's no storage area in the bran," Mr. Broadbent replied sarcastically. "What do you think, the mind has closets? Don't be ridiculous."

"No," Marise said, keeping an even keel, "I'm talking about where the mind sees something, and then is able to later recall what it's seen."

Mr. Broadbent rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. "That's the trouble," he said to empty space, "of fulfilling your obligations by writing something idiots might read." He returned his focus to Ma-rise, a distasteful wrinkle on his nose. "You don't know the first thing about how the mind operates."

"Well actually, I do . . ."

"You do nothing of the kind, young lady," he replied sternly. "When you don't know anything, you shouldn't pretend you do. Now, for your information, it's been conclusively proven what you like to call recall is nothing more than the patterns established among the neurons of the brain as a result of external sensations. I long ago learned idiot students who ask silly questions make me form a picture of cow dung in my mind. It's nothing personal. It's just the association established among my many neurons the first time it happened. Now every time it reoccurs, the same set of neurons fire up, and the same picture of cow dung forms in my mind."

Marise felt the direction of the conversational ground tilt in her direction, but she still wondered how Mr. Broadbent recalled cow dung out of all the conceivable types of dung available.

Mr. Broadbent's eyes visited the ceiling once again. "Recognize, not recall. We're dealing with pattern recognition here. Once the neurons have lit up in a specific sequence in response to external sensations, the same sensations will always cause them to light up in the same way. When I saw my first scientific experiment, ball bearings rolling down an inclined plane, certain neurons made a Hebb connection, and that connection occurs every time I roll the balls down an inclined plane. Nothing is recalled. The pattern cre-ated by the connections is what the brain recognizes. The mind is only a concept to describe the brain's operation."

"The way I look at it is," Marise persisted, "we have con-scious thoughts, and all the thoughts in our memory are stored waiting to be recalled." She drew a picture of the mind, a little cir-cle in the middle of a bigger circle, the brain, and showed it to him.

Mr. Broadbent took the paper, looking at it blankly. "What's this?" he asked.

"Just something representing what I'm trying to find out," Marise replied. "What can make a memory stored in the bigger cir-cle move into the smaller circle?"

"But memories don't move anywhere," Mr. Broadbent groaned. "They don't exist anywhere. They're a product of seeing something that creates the same pattern that's been created before. Hebb's law, girlie, Hebb's law. Laws are just that, laws. You want to talk about God, go to church."

Marise realized the conversation was going down hill now that the tilt was definitely in her direction.

"Pattern recognition," she said confidently, "is that what you called it, can't be all there is because there has to be something to recognize when the patterns match. If memory were a bunch of lights flashing on and off, you aren't accounting for who's watching the lights. Patterns don't explain how decisions are made."

"Listen you fucking dumb little bitch, get the hell out of my of-fice."

She hadn't realized how steep the tilt had become.

"But all we're doing is talking concepts," she replied, feeling a little like Jill tumbling down the hill.

Mr. Broadbent jumped from his chair, moving on Marise, tow-ering over her. "You're on report," he screamed.

"For what?"

"Insubordination."

"Don't be ridiculous," she laughed. "They don't have insubor-dination in high school."

Little did she know.

At the conference, which escalated to the office of the Princi-ple, Mr. Broadbent had it all his way. When she tried to focus the conversation on the actual dispute, the words coming out of her mouth had the authority of a fat little girl trying to graduate high school. Dr. Broadbent's comments on neural nets, dendrites, syn-apses and the like had the authority of the printed word in The Citi-zen behind them.

Marise was forced to write an apology to Mr. Broadbent for using the word ridiculous, although she was sure she'd only called his charges foolish.

And by the time the charges were settled, she lost sight of what they were, apologizing to get her diploma. She needed it to get to college and gain access to its library. When asked what she was going to pursue in college, she thought of Dr. Broadbent's balls rolling down his inclined planes lighting up his mind and said science.

She figured following in his footsteps would allow her to obtain a meeting of the minds when it came to disagreeing with what she was becoming to think of as the opposition's thought on the mind's working process. The first thing she found pursuing this phase of her education, all of her questions were answered with laws.

What made the balls roll down the inclined plane? Gravity.

What was gravity? A property of mass.

No, not what was it a property of. What was it?

It was what held you to the face of the Earth. It was what made things fall.

I know. But that's the question, not the answer. What makes things fall?

Gravity.

What is gravity? It's a property of matter.

Marise thought of the children's game: What's life? It's a magazine. How much does it cost? Three bucks. That's life. What's life? A magazine.

The sort of circular nonsense children used to amuse them-selves on the playground was being used to avoid displaying igno-rance with respect to one of the most basic phenomena of nature. If she pressed the game, gravity became the universal law of gravi-tation that accounted for the way the planets move in their orbits.

Marise thought about this for a minute, then asked if gravity was the force that made objects drop in a straight line toward the surface of the Earth, how can a force that only acts over a straight line make planets orbit the sun?

Well, gravity doesn't keep the planets orbiting the sun, it keeps the planets from escaping from orbiting the sun.

"I didn't ask whether it kept the planets from escaping from orbiting the sun, I asked, if gravity accounts for the motion of the planets in the solar system, how does it make the planets orbit if it only acts to make objects drop in a straight line?"

The planets orbit because energy is neither created nor de-stroyed, and thus the motion of a closed system is conserved.

The what is what, Marise wanted to know. And she continued asking the questions, hoping she could get the attention of at least one professor. She was very glad when she finally found one that actually talked some sense.

"Actually," Dr. Fellows pointed out, "Newton had an imperfect notion of space and time, so his description of the operation of the solar system, while uncannily accurate and perfectly understand-able, lacked certain qualities of finesse modern technology pro-vide."

"What are those qualities?" Marise asked.

"Rubber sheets. Newton had the iron balls, but he didn't have the rubber sheets that would provide conclusive proof of the exis-tence of the space time continuum which clarifies the descriptive nature of Newtonian Mechanics."

"A rubber sheet?" Marise asked incredulously.

"Yes. One has to think of the sun as an iron ball on a rubber sheet. Now what happens to an iron ball placed on a stretched out rubber sheet?"

Marise thought for a minute. "Gee," she replied, "I don't know."

Dr. Fellows was pleased. "It'd cause a dent in the sheet where it rested. The rubber would give way and sag under the weight of the ball."

"Yes it would," Marise agreed.

"And what would happen if you took another iron ball, a smaller one, and rolled it around on the sheet?" Dr. Fellows asked.

"It'd fall into the dent?" Marise answered with a question.

"Well, eventually. But first, it'd go around the iron ball in the center of the sheet. The iron ball is the mass that warps the sheet which is space causing the planet to orbit around it. See how simple it is?"

"Indeed I do," Marise said agreeably.

Marise always assumed time and space were concepts the mind developed to measure the interval between events, and the place in which those events occurred. She'd long since given up the game of playing what's outside the biggest sphere you can think of, or what comes after the last second in all time, or for that matter, what came before.

Time and space were simply the product of the existence of matter occupying nonexistence and certainly weren't worth building anything, other than possibly a religion, out of. They certainly couldn't be quantified and used to describe the physical phenomena she'd been exploring the last two years.

So here she was, after two years, without a clue why an ob-ject dropped to the face of the Earth, why the Earth rotated on its axis, and why it orbited around the sun. The fact this is what oc-curred was as obvious as the sun coming up in the morning. It seemed inconceivable to her that a science that'd produced a rocket that could take people to the moon was incapable of providing an answer to a question so obvious as why the moon was orbiting the Earth in the first place. There was obviously no connection between a theory unable to explain why the moon was where it was and the ability to get a rocket on its surface.

All that was necessary to get the rocket on its surface was the knowledge the moon would be where it was expected to be when the rocket got there, and that could be determined by measuring its historical motion. But the science she was being taught was claim-ing validity based on a technology with no roots in the science it-self. It didn't provide reasonable answers to the most obvious of questions and yet, as technology provided wonder on top of wonder, science sat back and took the credit, even though the wonders were not related to the science.

She thought back to the conversation between Mr. Broadbent and the Principal and her parents. What Mr. Broadbent said was so much mumbo jumbo, but because her parents and the Principal had no basis for questioning either her interpretation of mental opera-tion, or Mr. Broadbent's, the field went to Broadbent.

Here, in the absence of any answers, the field went to the ones who could spin the most elaborate fairytales. When there was no one to gainsay the fairytales, to put the bricks to the massive in-tellectual fraud that could be committed when the only policemen were the participants, the field was wide open to wild speculation clothed in seemingly mechanical reasoning.

It was difficult to come up with answers. Not being able to provide clear answers to the obvious, it became necessary to kill the goat, drag out its entrails, toss them in the fire, and claim an-swers in the smoke, with mass, space, time, black holes and grav-ity warps, with the klieg lights blinding the searcher from the obvi-ous ignorance as to why matter moves in space.

Marise, staring attentively into Dr. Fellows smiling eyes, wondered just what other obviousness was being overlooked.

What, she wondered, was even more obvious than the sun coming up every morning?

Being able to see the sun come up.

What was Dr. Fellow's explanation for the sun's burning?

"The force of the fusion process as the sun burns from its cen-ter to its outside counterbalances the force of gravity allowing the sun to burn."

"The sun burns on the inside?" Marise asked, keeping her tone even.

"Most certainly."

"How do you know that?" she asked.

"The gravitational forces build up so that the matter toward the center of the sun comes under increasing compression, which results in its undergoing nuclear fusion. The sun is a great oven synthesizing complex atoms out of simple atoms," Dr. Fellows said smugly.

"If gravity is proportional to mass, then each particle of mat-ter causes a force of attraction to be exerted on every other parti-cle of matter, doesn't it?" Marise asked.

"Certainly, my dear."

"And the sun is a sphere?"

"It certainly is," Dr. Fellows replied.

"In a sphere, by definition, any particle would have another particle located in exactly the same place on the opposite side of the sphere. I'm standing on matter. There's a place on the other side of the Earth with the same amount of matter. Isn't this the situa-tion?"

"Hmmm. There would seem to always be a particle opposite every particle in a sphere. That's if the sphere were a uniform solid," Dr. Fellows replied.

"Then following the mass gravity concept, the center of the sphere would be the only place where there'd be no gravity because the effect of every particle at this point would be canceled out by the effect of its opposite particle in the sphere," Marise said.

"Sure. Matter at the center of the sphere would be weight-less."

"How then could it be undergoing the fusion process as a result of compression?"

"Because of the tremendous pressure that it's under," Dr. Fellows said.

"But if the matter at the center is weightless, it's not under any pressure," Marise insisted.

"Listen, if you were to jump out this window, you'd be crushed, wouldn't you?"

"What does that . . ."

"And even if you weren't crushed, if the building fell on you, you'd be crushed wouldn't you?"

Dr. Fellows was out of his chair, brushing student disserta-tions off the windowsill and tugging at the metal latches between him and the open air.

"I'm sorry I'm only three stories up, but I'll be glad to throw something down on top of you," he said.

"But all we're talking about is concepts . . ."

Dr. Fellow's hand slipped and caught him under the chin. He turned on Marise, his eyes red coals, flecks of phlegm dotting the thin stream of blood slithering down his chin. "Listen, you fucking dumb little bitch, get out of my office," he cried.

Marise beat a hasty retreat, a fat little girl attempting to avoid the storm. After regaining her equilibrium, she realized she'd come a long way from trying to find out how the mind retrieved information. She was losing sight of the reason she was interested in this, the ability of the mind to see what wasn't there and the in-ability of it to see what was there.

So far, she'd only seen the principle in operation, with people actually believing they had answers to questions when they weren't even asking the correct questions. The amazing thing was, there was no conscious knowledge on the part of the believers they were exercising anything more taxing than simple belief.

She'd heard references to people being fooled into believing that the Earth was the center of the solar system, that the sun traveled in an orbit around the Earth rather than the Earth traveling in an orbit around the sun. Looking into it she found, given the knowledge of the day, it was a reasonable belief. First, the sun did come up every morning, travel across the sky, and sink on the other side in the evening. It looked like it was going around a sta-tionary Earth. It still did for that matter.

Next, there was no practical reason to say that it didn't go around the Earth. What difference did it make as long as the misin-formation didn't cause ships to collide on the open sea. It'd obvi-ously be beneficial to know what the facts were so there'd be an accurate description of physical phenomena, but if it didn't cause death and destruction, what difference did it make?

It took her a while to figure out what the difference was.

If the Earth was the center of the universe, then all forces must be directed toward the Earth. People couldn't fall off the Earth if it were the center of everything. Everything fell toward the center, the Earth. People felt safe from being hurtled into the great abyss above the safety of the Earth. If the Earth weren't the center of the universe, if it was hurtling in some sort of orbit madly rac-ing around the sun, then, plain and simple, people weren't safe, they might fall off, and in the process be consigned to the dread-fully unknowable void.

It wasn't a question of religion, or the sanctity of ancient thought that prevented people from believing the Earth traveled around the sun, it was the fear of falling off a moving Earth not lo-cated at the center of the universe that caused intelligent men to light the fires under the heralds of the new facts.

Marise knew it couldn't have been a pleasant experience when Galileo pointed his telescope at Jupiter and showed the Earth wasn't the center of the universe by visually demonstrating a miniature solar system. People were no longer held to the surface of the Earth because it was the center of the universe. The proposition that a rock dropped to the surface of the Earth because it was trav-eling on the way to the center of the universe was no longer valid.

People were forced out of their homes in their skivvies, and the door had been shut behind them. They were shivering in the cold of the unknown. The only thing that could save them was some sort of belief making it possible to feel safe again so they could go about their daily lives without the fear of falling off the surface of the planet.

Geometry, the endless drawing of concentric circles on top of each other's circumferences, kept the Ptolemaic solar system alive in the minds of men for centuries past its observational viability. Newton invented calculus to weave a series of half-baked assump-tions and misbegotten conclusions into a cloth spun of such bril-liance, it forever blinded the viewer's awareness to its absence.

The conclusion was mercifully the same. People would never have to worry about falling off the face of the Earth into the deep void. Instead of matter falling toward the center of the universe, matter fell toward matter because it was inherent in the matter itself, rather than in the location of the matter at the center of the universe. Therefore, it didn't matter that the Earth was traveling through space, it carried with it the property that caused matter to fall toward its center, therefore people were now safe and could sleep soundly in their beds assured they wouldn't fall off the Earth.

From things falling because the center of the universe was the center of the Earth to things falling because falling was a property of the Earth. Quite an intellectual stride forward, Marise thought, and one likely to be with us for many years to come if her educa-tional experiences so far was any indication. Surely there was a field where the use of the human mind, with its ability to construct concepts and deal with reality though those concepts, could come into play.

Marise spent the rest of the day trying to match her credits with the fields of study that looked promising. The winner was computer science. At this point, she really didn't know what sci-ence was, or what was involved in its pursuit, so she had to con-clude with the definition of knowledge. Science dealt with certain things in the real world, and the science of something was the col-lection of facts, the knowledge associated with the field.

Thus, computer science would be the knowledge surrounding the construction and operation of computers. What could be more objective than computers? They operated totally on machine logic, with the information coming out totally dependent on the informa-tion going in and the method the information was processed while it was in. But what could mechanical operation have of benefit to someone who was trying to sort out how thoughts were formed, stored, and exchanged for other thoughts.

She knew thoughts existed even when they weren't being thought.

The conclusion was inescapable. There was some place in the mind capable of doing the thinking. Thoughts were brought to the mind in some manner, and the mind was able to act on those thoughts so they became a pretty good representation of reality. If she'd seen a tree, and stored that tree in memory, then she had the ability to bring that tree back into memory even if the tree wasn't present in front of her.

She'd analogized the process to a computer years before when she started on the search. Was she going right back to where she'd started?

Probably. But there was no other place to go. All she had to do was be careful not to get anybody upset, and perhaps she could get through college, get a diploma, and find something interesting to do with it.

She quickly learned she couldn't compare the mind's operation to the computer so she decided to modify the computer to match the mind's operation. The mind seemed to work using some sort of units that contained all the information about the picture much like, she realized, a gene must carry the complete construction plans for a human being. Marise didn't know how these, what could she call them, memory units, memes, formed, how they were transported, stored or recalled. But she liked the idea of a computer processing information in this way. The idea was so radical, however, she had no intention of presenting it in some sort of official paper for one of her classes. She knew she was just a fat little girl, the image she carried around of herself, the image that filtered all her thoughts. She could live with that image, but she wanted to avoid having dumb added to it and end up a fat dumb little girl.

She decided to use the university humor magazine as an outlet for her creativity, packaging her idea of a genetic processor in the form of a parable. In the parable, the kingdom of endless bytes was being threatened by a glob from space. As the glob seeped over the kingdom's walls and began to absorb the individual bytes, the head byte, the big K, called all his assistant bytes together in order to come up with a plan of defense.

Each byte was different from every other byte, their diver-sity stretching from "a" to "Z" with "#"'s and "}"s in between. Every time one got up to present a solution, all of the others started jumping up and down, shouting things such as "@>>%%&*+" and "(&%$!" *%&". No one byte could suffer the opinion of any other byte, and as they argued, the blob seeped fur-ther and further into the kingdom, absorbing byte after byte, their meaningless screams being lost in the din of the dispute in the pal-ace.

As the blob got closer and closer, the deputes became more and more clamorous until the bytes began to assault each other and break each other down into smaller bytes, with half an "A" floun-dering around here in the path of a flying "f" coming from over there.

The blob kept coming, however, and the broken bytes realized they'd better get it together or all was lost. As the parts that'd made up the original bytes were all separated from each other in the confusion, parts of one byte began to combine with parts from another byte. The big K watched in amazement as the resulting bytes combined and broke apart to recombine into other bytes as they began to work together to solve the problem of the blob.

It didn't take long before they assembled a picture of the blob out of various parts of bytes. The big K was astounded to see it only took a few of the broken bytes, taking up less than a hundred bytes all together. Once they'd formed a duplicate blob, it was easy to direct all of the bytes trying to escape from the blob into imita-tions of the blob. The blob itself, seeing duplicates of itself all around, couldn't figure out who it was and exploded, drenching the imaginary copies of itself with its real protoplasm.

As a moral, Marise added that the physical animus that derives from theoretical disputes was probably the primary retardant to technological progress. She pointed out if we didn't want to find ourselves processing information on the basis of Stone Age princi-ples, we should abandon efforts to make paths shorter or parallel because it'd only facilitate the invasion of the blob. We should spend out efforts exploring the form used for storing and retrieving in-formation.

The editor accepted it, commenting it was a precious depiction of university/community relations, although Marise believed the students were as reluctant to admit they didn't understand some-thing as the professors were to admit they their understanding was wrong. However, before the magazine hit the stands, she was summoned to appear before the Dean.

She'd never been to the Dean's office before, had never met her. She was not totally clueless as to the reason, figuring the Dean received an advance copy and was polishing up her own version of you fucking dumb little bitch speech. Sure enough, the Dean's office was in a state of excitement, with secretaries, assistants, stu-dents and a various assortment of administrative types milling around gesticulating, talking rapidly, generally creating the mael-strom her blob caused the big K's kingdom.

One thing they all had in common was a copy of the as yet un-distributed magazine, apparently obtained from a large stack on the secretary's desk. Marise went over and introduced herself. The girl jumped up and yelled, "Dean, Oh Dean, she's here. Over here," waving wildly at the same time.

All heads turned in her direction. She felt like crawling under the secretary's desk, but held her ground as the Dean came over and introduced herself.

"I have a very important visitor who wants to meet you right away," she said, taking her by the arm.

"But . . ." Marise started to say.

"No buts about it. We don't get a chance to host somebody like this very often. He wants to talk to you. I've turned my office over to him for the interview. Don't fuck it up."

Marise was startled. "Don't, uh, mess what . . .

"The Chairman wants to talk to you." She opened the door to her office. "Go talk, and for God's sake, be respectful."

Marise went into an office the size of several classrooms, ma-hogany liberally positioned on plush carpets. Across the room, back to her, hands clasped behind him, staring out the window at the campus, a man who, from her vantage, appeared in his sixties, turned at the sound of the door closing. As he moved out of the light frame, she saw he was older than his bearing, but she couldn't tell by how much.

He smiled, gesturing for her to take a seat on the couch.

"I would offer you a glass of wine, but I think it's against uni-versity rules."

"I'm not twenty-one yet."

"Yes, well that's only law. We don't want to violate university rules. In any event, I'll refresh mine." He walked over to the bar, refilling his glass. "That's quite a little story you worked up for The Jibber," he said, walking over and taking a seat in a chair fac-ing the couch.

Marise's mind was racing. She figured she was talking to the Chairman of the Board of Regents, and concluded her image of her-self as a fat little girl was going to have to be expanded to include dumb and possibly other equally derogatory appellations.

"If you're going to toss me out of school, you don't have to call me in here to do it," she said.

"Toss you out of school?" The Chairman laughed. "I want to take you out of school. But I don't have the ability to toss you out of school. I don't have anything to do with the school. I'm just a pri-vate employer looking for an assistant."

Marise ran the face, the designation chairman, over in her mind and drew a blank.

"If you're talking about my story, that hasn't even been pub-lished on campus yet, although there's a pile of them outside. How did you find out about it?" she asked.

"Let's just say," The Chairman replied, "that I have an inter-est in certain people who appear promising to everyone's common interests. I prefer to let the processes of life take their course, and usually approach potential prospects on a more relaxed basis, but events seem to be catching up with us. Do I read your story right? Are you hypothesizing a method of information processing that in-volves changing the way information is formatted, stored and re-trieved?"

"It certainly does," Marise replied, startled, but launched into a detailed account of her mental processes since the day on the step when she'd inadvertently been locked out as a result of absent-mindedness.

The Chairman listened silently, sipping his wine, nodding, qui-etly getting up and refilling his glass as Marise traveled though al-most a decade of her solitary search for answers to the seemingly simple question of where thoughts go when they weren't being thought. She finally let her mouth stop, the resulting silence making her aware how much she'd been filling it with her silly musings.

"What I'd like you to do," The Chairman said slowly into the silence "is to become my personal assistant. That'll involve taking care of my interests, but I guarantee, in the process you'll have a free rein to pursue your own interests."

"How do I graduate? How much will it pay? Where will I work? What will I be doing?" she asked, bewildered.

"You'll automatically receive a diploma, it pays whatever you want, you'll work wherever I am, which could be anywhere in the world, and up to a point, you'll do what I ask you to do."

"What if I don't want to do what you want me to do?" she asked.

The Chairman was momentarily nonplussed. "It's never hap-pened," he replied. "Take my word for it, you'll like everything you do"

"How can I automatically get a diploma?" she continued.

"That's no problem. However, to carry on your education, you can design the curriculum for Bay State in California, but for now I need your mind, your thoughts, I need you as my assistant."

The Chairman stood up before her, a presence she somehow found irresistible. "Do you accept?"

"Why not?"

And why not indeed, as with The Chairman, it turned out, all things were possible. It was as if she'd been shot out of a slingshot to places she'd never heard of doing things she'd never envisioned doing. The Chairman had been right about her never refusing his requests. He was so magnetic, she wished he'd ask her to do some of the things he did to everybody else who came willingly into his bed.

And here she was, after what seemed an incredibly short time, piloting a Stratodart into the wilds of the Amazon looking for in-formation on one of the best known and wealthiest individuals in the world, a piker, as it turned out, when compared to The Chairman.

The soft warning light in the cabin blotted out the blackness of the night sky. She was just coming into daylight as she took her position, several hundred kilometers east of fifty degrees longitude directly over the equator. She started dropping into the atmos-phere, slowing her speed considerably. She checked to ensure her status was still "acknowledged to ignore" which would put her on the screens of air traffic controllers but would make her otherwise invisible to any unseemly inquiries.

She punched up the picture of Jarazonia on the computer screen and started to plan how to make her entrance. She could land on the front lawn and knock on the front door or she could sneak in the back door and try to get a peek on her own. The first course sounded sensible, the second exciting. She knew, working for The Chairman, she was untouchable. She realized, with this being her first trip on her own, she wasn't important enough to touch. She could, however, pretend it was and see what happened, get some experience with the feeling.

By the time she'd dropped to a hundred feet, the sun was burning the mist off the expanses of water branching out at the mouth of the Amazon. She took a satellite fix on her location and superimposed it on the image of Jarazonia, watching as the map miniaturized itself so it could accommodate both locations. She was coming in from the southeast and was within two kilometers of the hidden hanger.

She stopped the Stratodart, letting it idyll silently in the clearing morning air. How, she wondered, would she be able to sneak in unseen?

She decided to circle around and come in from the west, with the rising sun behind her. She watched the screen as the Stratodart and Jarazonia changed relative positions. When she was half a kilo-meter due west, she dropped the Stratodart until it was at treetop level. She was startled by the silver and gold spires slipping out of the mist. The needles of Jarazonia, she realized, mingling among the treetops.

Treetops! The designers would camouflage a hidden entrance. She punched up landing instructions and found the landing site was sending out a directional beam. She selected land and watched out the window as a narrow path appeared in the trees and the Strato-dart quietly settled below the treeline, sinking silently into the darkness of the forest floor as it closed above her.

The engine automatically shifted into neutral and artificial lighting sprung up around the canopy covering the cockpit.

Marise sighed.

In her apparent nonchalance, she hadn't realized how tense she'd been.

She flipped the door switch, walked down the steps, and looked around for an instruction booklet, half laughing at the thought. She could've saved the effort because there was one posted on the wall of the hanger. The Chairman's people constructed this place and she doubted they'd tell Jared about all the access tunnels. She looked at the map carefully, memorizing the entrances and exits in relation to both Jarazonia and its annex, Jaracuzi. Through a complex net-work of tunnels, she had access to anywhere she wanted to go. She decided to make a frontal approach, coming out at the entranceway.

She looked around to get her bearings, located the proper por-tal and entered it, noting the lighting went on ahead of her as it turned off behind her. It was only a short walk before she came to a corridor on the left labeled porch and one on the right label hallway. She decided on the hallway and after several steps, slipped into a well-lighted foyer. She turned around and saw her bodiless head staring back from a mirror. She put her hand out. It was for real. She started to wonder how it was done when the mirror reflected a flash of red appearing in a doorway.

"Hi," the woman said as Marise turned to face one of the most flawlessly beautiful women she'd ever seen outside the pages of a magazine. "I'm Ralisse. Girls?" Four women, equally breathtaking, each dressed in a different style of red, popped out behind Ralisse one after another.

"Hello," Marise said. She watched somewhat apprehensively as the five proceeded to move closer to her, intensely examining her from the tip of her somewhat disheveled hair to the rather shabby pumps she was wearing. The mirror was behind her, but under the intense scrutiny, her body began to reappear beneath her rather plain face, the fat little girl of her mind naked before the five pair of devouring eyes.

"Oh goodness," Ralisse said, "do you need a makeover."

"But what a makeover," Renell said.

"Oh yes," Ronay echoed.

"She has perfect skin," Renell said.

"Creamy," Ronay responded.

"And the palate of her face," Reline chimed in.

"It could make a classic beauty," Renell agreed.

"Excuse me." Reline took her hand and pressed it flat under the material billowing under Marise's chin. "Just as I thought," she said.

"Flat stomach," Ronay agreed.

"Those breasts must be magnificent," Renell added. She turned to Marise. "Do you mind?" she asked, moving her hand up to Ma-rise's breasts without waiting for an answer.

"Magnificent, absolutely perfect," Ronay exclaimed delight-fully.

"We have to start getting to work on her right away," Reline cried excitedly.

"We should get her over to the Jarrecuzi," Reanne suggested.

"Right away, yes, right away," Ralisse said, repeating Ronay's breast request while following the same process. "Oh my God, they're glorious."

"I'll bet she has a fabulous ass," Renell commented, following the same procedure. "Girls, you wouldn't believe it, it's unbeliev-able, unbelievable."

"With hips like those, I can't wait to see her thighs," Ronay noted, but didn't make the tactile exploration.

All this happened in such a short period, Marise could only think how to react instead of reacting.

Ralisse put her hand on Marise's shoulder. "As you can see, my dear, we've been expecting you. I rather thought Jarred'd be here to welcome you personally, but he's been detained and won't be in until later today. In the meantime, it's up to us to get you looking as beautiful as your potential. Jarred's uncanny in spotting potential. There's a lot of pleasure in you."

Marise allowed Ralisse to steer her across the room and through the door the five women entered. She was biding her time, trying to catch up with what was going on around her. One thing stood out, Jarred was not yet there, so she had time to make a plan of action.

That thought, however, was lost in the growing realization of the conversation going on around her, a conversation intimately about her. It began to dawn on her these women were complimenting her looks, even her body, and at first, the compliments didn't reg-ister. How in the world could anybody compliment a body her father compared to a turkey?

But, and she looked at the five women for confirmation as they walked around her, these women must know what they were talking about. They were all perfectly shaped, stunningly adorned, star-tlingly beautiful. Compliments from them would have to be sincere.

But, no, Marise thought, they must know who she was and were just pulling one of her fat legs. They were setting her up for the slaughter. She had the urge to bolt and run. She saw they were coming up to the passage leading to the Jaracuzi. She knew there was a hidden passageway leading back to the hanger.

She didn't, however, know how to access it from this side.

Settle down, she told herself. What could happen? She tuned into the girl's chatter, still showering compliments on her, and re-alized they weren't laying plans to torture her, but rather setting forth the alternatives for making her over into what they referred to as a goddess.

Her, Marise, a goddess? Impossible. The thought passed her mind, if she were a goddess, Block would've spent less time in the back of the Stratodart, or perhaps she'd have spent more.

A goddess?

A goddess of the Amazon.

That would be something to see, no, not to see, to be.

She followed the five women into the passageway, a soaring structure made of clear plastic arcing over the forest near where she'd hidden the Stratodart. The passage made her feel like she was soaring over the rain forest, with the mist rising and dissipating around her as the sun rose higher in the sky.

As they reached the end of the passage, Marise could see the rationale for the Jarrecuzi's construction. It was a piece of heaven created over the Amazon River, which flowed about a hundred feet below the clear plastic floor on which they stood. All that could be seen was the rain forest around them, with the fantasy like spires of Jarazonia peeking through the foliage. With the river below and the sky above, Marise felt she was suspended in space, transported back to a time before humans walked the face of the Earth, an Earth reserved for fairy princesses living in impossible castles made out of gold and silver.

The impression was enduring, actually making her feel like a princess. She watched with detachment as Ralisse moved her hand on the side of a panel of sky. A mirror opened. The mechanism, she thought. So simple, and from the inside of the tunnel system, acti-vated in the same way as the lights, by presence. She accidentally on purpose moved toward the door so it slid quietly open in front of her.

Fitting for a princess of the realm, she thought, as she was ushered into a mirrored room eliminating the outside world, sepa-rating her from the reality of the rain forest, immersing her in the images around her, images of herself. She noticed the absence of her own body mingled in the reflections of the perfect forms around her, but she wasn't displeased because the shifting images moved perfect forms under the image of her own face, reinforcing her continuing image of being a princess.

"Strip her," she heard Reline say.

"No, do the hair first," Renell said. "It'll be lustrous."

"We always have to start from scratch," Ralisse said authoritatively. "She has to be nude. We have to see the totality of what we're working with." She took her hand, still on Marise's shoulder, and turned her around so she had access to her back.

Marise watched Ralisse's reflection as she began to unbutton the loose fitting frock flowing out beneath her chin, billowing to the floor. She was helpless to protest as Renell and Ronay each took a shoulder and pulled it forward from her body as the buttons came apart behind her.

"Holy cow," she heard Reanne exclaim as the dress fell in front of her, leaving her bare from the waste up.

"I should be so well endowed," Reline said. "What in the world is holding them up? Has she had surgery?"

"No," Reline replied, "They're the real thing."

"Are they ever," Ralisse said, moving to one side so she could get the full view of her reflection. "Take your panties off," she ordered, "and lose those pumps."

Marise felt like she was in a trance. As they'd been talking, her formless reflection started to materialize in the mirror. To her surprise, the form was blessed with an incredibly flat stomach way back under her protruding breasts. The breasts themselves, which she'd considered simple fat, appeared an engineering feat. Seeing her flat stomach, she had no idea what was supporting their for-ward thrust. They seemed to defy gravity.

She was dazed, thinking it a trick of the magic mirrors and slid her panties down over a still formless set of hips and thighs, kick-ing them, along with her pumps, effortlessly across the room. The movement focused her eyes on heart shaped hips, buttocks, which, like her breasts, seemed to defy gravity, and thighs and legs per-fectly tapered to her delicate ankles and feet.

Marise looked around in confusion, trying to figure out which of the women's bodies had become connected to her plain face. Finding all five were still dressed in red only added to her confu-sion.

Could the body in the mirror actually be connected to her head?

"Absolutely perfect," emerged from the buzzing of approving voices as the women circled her, seeking out any blemish, finding none.

Marise quickly looked, as they took her by the arms and led her over to a deep chaise chair in an alcove of individual mirrors, for the fat little girl who had to be standing where she'd been standing only moments before. She felt like she was in two places at once, the princess in her moving before her, the fat little girl behind her waving goodbye.

They quietly reclined her in the chaise, its soft covering reaching up and caressing her newfound flesh.

"I'll get the first lick in," Ralisse said. "It's going to take a lot of work."

She grunted from the effort.

Marise felt the blinding pain shoot through her head, her lips thinned over her teeth, her eyes watered, a tiny screech broke her vocal chords as a thousand hair roots were jerked against her scalp.

"Agh, agh, agh," she said in uncontrollable rhythm as Ralisse made stroke after stoke with the brush. After a few minutes, she tired and turned the job over to Renell, whose strokes, while more loving, were vigorous nonetheless.

The tears started to dry on Marise's cheeks as she adjusted herself to the pain.

"We all have to go though it," Ralisse said soothingly. "Yours was almost beyond repair."

"Yes," agreed Ronay, as she took the brush over from Renell. "We all have to experience the pain."

Marise would've classified the hair repair experience as a test of endurance except for the sensation of disembodiment the strok-ing evoked as she accustomed herself to the pain. Before long, the rhythmic strokes throughout her hair became a pattern with the rhythm blending with the noise of the strokes and the background murmur as the five girls chatted among themselves.

Eventually it stopped, leaving her head feeling like it was trav-eling forward in space. She felt bigger than the room.

"I'll get the lights," she heard Reline say. "You take care of the music."

"Sure," Ronay responded.

She heard Ralisse's voice close to her ear. "I'm going to put some pads on you eyes. You'll be able to see some light coming in, but it'll be sepulchral, easing into your mind.

"We want you as relaxed as possible. Renell's going to bathe you in some soft scents while Reanne is going to message your shoulders. I'm going to massage your feet while you lean back in the chair. You'll feel warm air coming through the material. If it gets the least bit hot, tell me and I'll turn it down."

Marise opened her eyes to a soft rosy glow coming through the gauze pads. She became aware of soft music with a quiet but insis-tent beat. A pleasant, watery scent rose in wafts from the warm air caressing her body. She felt Reanne's silky fingers begin to move over her shoulders, and the firm pressure of Ralisse's hands on her feet.

She sat back and watched as a picture of a beautiful woman, rising out of an open oyster, a pearl in sea spray, formed before her. The wind picked up the spray and, with it, the vision of loveli-ness, and wafted it over the waves, barely kissing her flesh, transporting her to a large flower strewn bed settling into and be-coming a part of the top of the waves.

She looked closely and realized it was her face, still plain, at-tached to a body that turned the models in the glossy pictures of fashion magazines into waifs. She was on a bed, lying on one side, leaning on an elbow, her breasts impossible appendages, their roundness echoing the roundness of her hip as it rose out of her waste, wasp thin, prominent in its recession from the incredible nipples, long and firm, that provided the perfect center for each of her glorious globes.

She looked like she was waiting for someone and realized she was waiting for Block to come and take her, to begin the long proc-ess of satisfying her deep need for an intimacy she didn't know she had.

As she watched, her perspective changed, she became a part of herself in the vision, merging herself for the first time with an actual picture of herself. She felt the sexual power of her body, the skin stretched over muscle and bone waiting to be touched, ca-ressed, kissed. As she became a part of herself, she felt her nip-ples grow, extend themselves out as if reaching for a bare chest to push against. The firmness of her stomach became a reality housing an intense burning desire pulsing down between her legs, making her buttocks tense in anticipation.

She longed to have Block enter the vision, to move quietly upon the bed, the smell of his nakedness strong, the excitement of his presence sending streaks of uncontrollability throughout her body. He moved quietly up beside her, never touching her body, gently reaching around behind her head and taking it from where she was supporting it on her arm, allowing her arm to fall onto his shoulder to feel his strong, smooth muscles. He leaned forward impercepti-bly, his forward motion matching her own as their lips slowly moved closer and closer until, hesitating to heighten the expecta-tion of the inevitable, they touched, the electricity shooting through her lips, leaping directly into her mind as it passed through every fiber of her body.

The kiss lasted forever in a timeless world, with each becom-ing accustomed to the temperature, the smell, the anticipation of the other as tiny parts of their lips quivered independently from their overall embrace. After she became comfortable with his lips, she became bold, teasing him with her tongue darting out, touching him here and there on his lips until he gave her a small opening to dart in. trembling in response, shooting his tongue into her waiting opening, sending torrents of pleasure deep into her breasts.

She inhaled deeply and used the opportunity to adjust her posi-tion, moving her hardened nipples across his upper forearm as he dropped it to secure his hold on her. She moved her right hand up and brought it firmly around the back of his neck, pulling his head toward her as she dropped her own, forcing him to roll over, bringing his chest into tight contact with her breasts, squashing them tightly between them.

Block, feeling her nipples pressing into his own, reared back, taking a deep breath. His eyes dropped from her face to her breasts As his gaze reached them, his eyes widened, drinking in their full-ness, and Marise felt the power of her body surge out from its skin, visualized it encompassing him, weakening him, giving her his strength.

She focused that strength in her nipples, willing him to move his mouth down and take them fully between his lips. In response to her silent signal, he lowered his head and began to nibble on her ear, sending tiny darts of delight down her neck. He followed the darts with his lips, his tongue trailing a sliver of thrill as he let it peek between his lips.

She almost broke her back arching into him as his lips moved over her clavicle and started the long rise up the side of her breast. She resisted grabbing his head to hurry him on to her straining nip-ple, reveling instead in the total anticipation his inevitable motion was raising in the knots of blood and nerves it contained as he traced a line up her breast.

When his tongue reached her nipple, she almost blacked out from the pleasure. She was swimming in it, trying to concentrate on it, lost concentration, let herself be swept over unexpected falls, dropping, dropping, only to find herself once again at the top, starting her descent of delight once again. His lips closed firmly around first one nipple, then the other, gently sucking, caressing, teasing, his teeth touching without warning, giving her a thrill of danger from their sharpness, heightening the overall sensations pouring through her body.

To keep her arched back from breaking, she twisted first one way, then the other, each change thrusting herself anew into his eager, pleasure giving mouth. With each twist, her hand, which had risen to the top of Block's head as he moved down to accommodate her desires, began to slide down his back. The sensations entering her palm forced it to slide around to his stomach, exploring the rip-ples in his chest and stomach.

His reaction was violent, forcing him to restrain involuntary movements that otherwise would've dragged him away from the primary sources of her present pleasure. A devilish feeling came over her. She joined hands, moving them over him wherever their investment would bring the most return, seeing if she could force him to give up what he clearly didn't want to abandon, knowing at the same time doing so would bring a temporary halt to her ec-stasy.

She couldn't help herself, though, because the playfulness cre-ated a different set of desires and set them free to course merci-lessly through her body, making the nipple play pale in comparison to her potential satisfaction. After seeing herself arching her back to the pleasure, then twisting to and fro under him, she now felt her whole body straining to rise off the bed and encompass his, pull his into her's, make him her's completely.

Block sensed the change and instead of resisting the uncontrol-lable fluctuations she was raising in his body, dropped his face onto her stomach, burying his nose in her belly button so he couldn't do any damage with teeth aching to grasp onto something solid to steady him from the waves of desire reaming his stomach.

Marise felt between his legs and was physically shocked at the size of the image the touch created in her mind. She became a little girl again, too little to accommodate it. Fear blended with desire, creating doubt. She froze slightly, putting her hand behind his head, pushing herself prone, planning to compose herself, prepare herself for the inevitable. She felt no sensation between her decision to move and her finishing the move. One instant she was holding him in her hand, the next he was inside her, pressing against her so hard, she thought her pelvic bone was going to break.

"Just relax," Reanne whispered, reaching around and pushing her back down into the lounge.

"I can't see. I . . ."

Her mind was instantly flooded with the soft pink light. It made the red outfits the five girls were still wearing under their smocks a deeper, almost maroon, even blood color. She shook her head, forgetting she was sitting in a chair being made over by five women who worked for the man she'd come to get a fix on, knocking the eye pads off. She wondered what was going on. It was only mo-ments, how many moments, before she'd instructed the Stratodart to make an automatic landing in the hidden hanger.

How did she get here?

Better, what was she doing here?

What was this dream about a new body?

She started to lift herself out of the chair, but Reanne's hand was still on her stomach and Ralisse was still holding one of her feet, looking up at her expectantly.

"Just try and relax," Reanne said, soothingly. "We're going to start working on your face. We're just trying to relax all the lines out of it so we can start with its natural contours. You'll be just fine. You're stunning."

Marise looked down at her body. In her position on the lounge, she could see between her breasts, which, while still firm, had parted slightly as gravity pulled them to either side. She was amazed at Reanne's hand. Where had her stomach gone? Had she had a stomach? She never looked at it except from above, and then all she saw was the tops of her breasts. She always assumed they were lying on her stomach.

And her hips. She realized with a thrill, were perfect, the up-per part of a heart formed by gently tapering thighs. For the first time, she could feel the power of her pelvis.

If she'd always been here, where had her eyes been?

She'd never looked at herself.

And she'd never looked at herself because she knew what she looked like, and she didn't like it.

But she hadn't really seen because she hadn't really looked.

Or had she ignored what she didn't expect to see?

Marise leaned her head back and closed her eyes again. She felt the pads being placed gently back in place.

"See," Ralisse murmured to the others. "She's in the trance. She's disoriented and confused." She stroked Marise's face. "We'll towel you off in just a second and get to work on that face of yours. What a marvelous canvas that is. We're going to paint as pretty a picture as you'll ever see. Ronay, you want to scrounge up a dress for our new companion. What shall we call you?"

"My name is Marise."

"Excellent. You'll be Risa. You're in a trance, aren't you?"

"I feel disoriented and confused," Marise mumbled.

"Good. That's the way you should feel. You're on your way to being reborn in Jarred's image," Ralisse said.

"Jarred's image?"

"Jarred has an image of what a women should be, and we try to conform his women to that image," she replied.

"Yes," Reline said. "We usually have to do a lot to conform them."

"Cut their breasts open," Reanne remarked.

"Stick stuffing in them," Renell added.

"Suck fat and tissue out of them," Ronay addended.

"Loosen their teeth."

"Break their noses."

"Burn their skin off."

Ralisse shushed what was becoming a round robin. "But you, my dear, don't need any of those things. You're perfect as you are. We just have to put a little base on your face to neutralize your color with the lighting and add some highlights to turn you into the very epitome of beauty."

"But why," Marise said, trying to keep the dreamy quality to her voice.

"I don't think she's in a trance," Reline observed.

"Don't be silly," Ralisse responded. "She has to be. We did eve-rything that we're supposed to do."

"We didn't draw blood," Ronay said.

"Combing her hair was a substitute. She quite clearly never had such a vigorous cleansing. She's becoming Risa, rest assured."

"Becoming Risa. But why?" Marise repeated.

"To please Jarred. If you're going to become one of his girls, you have to conform to his image of women. We all went through it. We all conform. We all obtain benefits from being Jarred's."

Reanne moved behind Marise, removed the pads, and held her head steady as Ralisse worked the base into the skin of her face. Marise watched in the mirror as her plain face disappeared, the contours giving it definition flattened into oblivion by the dull light absorbing grease.

"What, blufp, benefits?" she asked through Ralisse's firm mas-saging of her cheeks and chin.

"Why, by being tied down by him, of course." Renell said.

"Being tied dow flupv oun by him? What's tha laph at?"

Ralisse blushed, looking at Reanne.

"She'll learn soon enough," Reanne said, looking in turn to Ronay who had returned with a red miniskirt that didn't look like it'd fit a toy doll.

"This should be perfect," she said. "Just the type Jarred likes."

Ralisse finished applying the base and moved back, hands on hips, admiring her work.

"What does being tied down mean?" Marise asked again, closing her eyes under Ralisse's steady gaze to divert attention from the fact this was the second time she'd asked.

"When we get the desire to, you know, be with Jarred, it be-comes pretty strong," Ralisse replied.

"You better believe it," Renell said. "It's overwhelming. We have to be satisfied."

"Right," Reline added, "and Jarred's the only one who can really satisfy us."

"And he always does," Ronay said. "But if we haven't been good, then he may wait to satisfy us, and the desire becomes horri-ble. We just go crazy with anticipation. When he relents and goes to work on us, we go into another world, we start zoning, flying, dropping into subspace."

"You always want to please dear Jarred, because if you do, he'll please you, and you'll always be happy," Ralisse chorused.

"And if you don't please him?" Marise asked.

"Oh, then he ignores us and we become totally depressed. It's horrible. We get the desire to do things to ourselves, cut ourselves, but if we did that, then Jarred'd never relent and we'd be de-pressed to death."

"Or he'll start to work on us, but keep us from dropping out." Reline added. "Instead of bringing us past our pain level so we can fly, he'll keep us just below it for hours and hours. It's agonizing. I can't remember much about it, except I don't want it to happen. That's why we're as good as we can be. We want to have him work on us, we're driven to it, but we want to go from the start to zon-ing out as fast as possible."

"Right," Reanne said. "That's why we always want to look our absolute best for him. It lowers the chance of him punishing us."

"Always be in the best of moods."

"Yes. Cheerful, with a smile on our faces."

"Pleasing. Ready to do anything, jumping at his slightest whim."

"Anticipating his every desire."

"Always ready to do anything he wants us to do, whenever, wherever, and however, never asking why, never questioning."

"And if we do, he is always willing to tie us down, and give us satisfaction."

"And if we don't, then we deserve to wait, imprisoned in our misery until we've expiated our sins against him, and he conde-scends to take us out of our depression and deliver us to ecstasy."

Marise opened her eyes. The five women were working them-selves into a frenzy. Ralisse, still examining her handiwork, real-ized things were getting out of hand. "Now, now, girls. Let's not start thinking about the bliss Jarred'll be providing Risa. Let's not get jealous, or Jarred won't tie us down in our turn and then we'll be in just the fix we're getting ourselves in, and Jarred isn't even here yet."

"Right," Ronay agreed, putting the miniskirt carefully on a golden hanger and placing it on a bar hidden by one of the alcove's mirrors.

"We have to get her ready for Jarred when he does come home," Reanne said. "He'll want to tie her down right away."

"Right away," Reline added.

"How does Jarred tie you down?" Marise asked, reclosing her eyes.

"How do you tie anybody down?" Ralisse asked, moving a cam-era into position as Renell opened a computer screen on the makeup table.

"With a rope?" Marise asked.

"With a golden rope," Reline clarified.

"A beautiful golden rope on a delightful sling," Ronay agreed.

"And what does he do when he has you, uh, tied down with a beautiful golden rope?" Marise asked.

"He takes a beautiful golden hanger."

"And twists it into different shapes."

"And then sticks it in us."

"Yes."

"In you?" Marise asked, startled.

"Wherever he wants."

"Oh," Ralisse let go the camera so her trembling wouldn't dis-rupt the scanning process.

"That sounds like it'd hurt," Marise observed, restraining her urge to get up and run.

"Oh, no, it couldn't possibly hurt. And he takes silver clamps and connects them all over, our breasts, our nipples, our lips, our thighs, between our legs, especially after he's used the hanger down there."

"Yes, and they're connected to a generator. He has pumps that enlarge our nipples, clits and cunts to make them more sensitive."

"And he sticks little needles in us that send shocks all over our body."

"Yes. He's brilliant thinking up variations."

"But all of those things sound like they'd hurt," Marise said. "You sound like it feels good."

"It must feel good," Reanne replied.

"They have to," Ronay agreed.

"Otherwise we wouldn't enjoy them so much."

"And we really enjoy them. We look like we're in ecstasy while he's doing them to us, and we're begging, pleading, screaming for more. We've all seen each other in ecstasy."

"You look like you're in ecstasy?" Marise asked. "Don't you know? Because you're there. I mean, it's you that he's pinching, poking and shocking, isn't it?"

"It's our bodies. We've seen him working on us."

"I can see you watching others, but how do you see him doing it to yourself?"

"He digitizes it and shows it to us afterwards, sometimes to get us in the mood, sometimes to punish us when we've been bad by getting us in the mood and then leaving us hanging."

"You only know about this from the video tapes?" Marise asked.

"How else would we know about it? We're flying in heaven."

"Because you're there, physically, I mean." Marise repeated, starting to feel she was going around in circles.

The five women looked at each other.

"You've never zoned out, started flying?" Ronay asked. She turned to the other girls. "She's a virgin when it comes to ecstasy. How exciting."

The screen behind Ralisse lined in the green scan and the picture was going on hold while the computer computed the blandness of Marise's face in full color.

"What were your childhoods like?" Marise asked.

"That's interesting," Ralisse replied, "we've talked about what we can remember."

"Not good," Reanne said.

"We didn't always look like this, you know," Reline added.

"I was depressed," Renell said, "and I guess most of us were, although I think Ralisse just had low self-esteem."

"I was a cutter," Ralisse said, "so I don't know whether that's an admission of being depressed or not."

"What happens when you get aroused?" she asked, taking a dif-ferent tack. "When do you know you, ah, want to be tied down?"

"I think we might feel the black dog creeping in, and we know Jarred can take it away, make us happy again. But once Jarred starts, we're so excited, we don't even feel it, let alone remember it. The only thing I know for sure is we have orgasms during it, a lot of them."

"So you only know what happens to you by watching movies?"

"More to the point, we know we have a defense when the black dog appears on the horizon."

Marise's face came up on the screen. Ralisse pushed a key and various shades of lipstick, eye makeup, blush, and coloring began to appear on her face as the program cycled through its database looking for the optimum configuration.

"What's that matching to?" Marise asked.

"Jarred's cynosure," Ralisse replied.

"Jarred's cynosure being . . ."

"The ultimate of everything of beauty anyone could want in a women."

"And you expect to get me to look like that?" Marise said, laughing.

"I expect you'll be a perfect match," Ralisse said seriously.

They all watched as the cycling continued.

"So, if you're there in body," Marise went back to her original question, "you're not there in mind. You don't remember anything about what's being done to you while you're tied down."

"All I remember is having a strong urge coming over my body," Ronay said.

"Yes," Renell agreed. "Like everything had to stop until some-thing else happened."

"And then?"

Reanne shrugged her shoulders. "I start to go under, realize who I really am, how insignificant I am, then, as the sensations from Jarred's work distorts my body, I start flying, sailing into bliss. When it's over, I feel so warm and comfortable in the em-brace of Jarred's approval."

"See," Ralisse said triumphantly as the computer stopped cy-cling and filled the proper coloration on Marise's face. She punched a key and the screen split, moving Marise's image to the left, forming a second image, the twin of the first. "The image on the right is the cynosure, the one on the left, you, Risa, after I apply a little coloring here and there. Pretty impressive, no? Identical. Now close your eyes and rest while I finish the job."

Marise had trouble taking her eyes off the screen. It was her, but it wasn't her. She couldn't believe she looked like the image created by the computer, but she could see her lines, her inherent plainness, underneath the polished beauty staring back.

She sighed and shut her eyes at Ralisse's instruction. No mat-ter how much she tried to know, she thought, she could never know a fraction of what was immediately around her.

How could she know anything if she didn't even know what she looked like, whether she was good looking or not, whether she was smart or not, whether she was even here or not.

No.

She was here.

There was no question about that.

And the five women working on her were here also.

There was no question about that.

She had her old proof always with her. Stick your head two inches from the wall and bend over. The inevitable kick with the resulting head bang against the wall constituted irrefutable proof reality existed, and she existed within that reality.

The question was not whether she existed, or whether reality existed, or whether she existed in reality, or even whether the five women she was with existed in that same reality. The real question was, where did those women exist when they were being overcome by the urge, as they so delicately put it, to have this guy Jarred tie them down, and where were they when he did tie them down and inflict all sorts of painful procedures on their bodies.

They were clearly one person when they were in their present frame of mind and another when they were under the urge.

"What if Jarred killed girls during this time?"

"He has," Ralisse answered.

Marise opened her eyes. She hadn't realized she'd spoken her thought.

"Jarred has killed one of you," she said, incredulous.

"Oh, more than one," Ronay replied.

"How do you know?"

"He's shown us the tapes. It's no different than any others. The girl just stops breathing is all. They're put out in the river for food when that happens."

"But it's not them, its you," Marise insisted. "Doesn't that bother you?"

"I don't know," Ralisse said thoughtfully as she used her thumb to smudge a little rouge on Marise's cheek. "The way we look at it is, as soon as we get the urge, somebody else takes us over. It's not us lying on that table. It's just our bodies getting satisfied. When we wake up, it's us back, satisfied. If we don't wake up, we weren't there when we died."

"'If I should die before I wake,'" Marise repeated part of a common prayer.

"Can you think of a better way to go?" Ralisse asked.

"Maybe not just as soon. And don't you feel sorry for . . . no, you think whoever is occupying your body is in bliss, so why feel sorry. Listen," she asked, "have you ever thought of Jarred's sexual needs?"

"Oh Jarred would never want us to worry about his sexual needs," Renell cried.

"No, never." Ronay agreed.

"That would never do," Reanne said.

"Jarred says he submerges his sexual needs so he can have the energy to satisfy ours," Reline added.

"Jarred is a very unselfish man," Ralisse said, finishing up Marise's other cheek with the same thumb. "Get the dress off the hanger, Ronay, please."

"Well, I know you wouldn't want to do anything Jarred didn't want you to do," Marise continued, "but if he wanted to be sexu-ally satisfied, would you do it?"

"Without a doubt."

"Certainly."

"In a second."

"Did you ever think he might've edited out screwing you while you were tied down?" Marise asked.

"No."

"I never did."

"Is that possible?"

Ralisse was looking at Marise's face, her mind on Jarred. "That would be something we'd want to do. I never thought he might need it like we do."

"If you had the chance to satisfy him, how would you do it?"

Ralisse blushed.

"We've talked about it" Ronay answered.

"It'd be beautiful," Renell added.

"We do have all of those video tapes," Reanne pointed out.

"And a fully stocked room."

"And he has parts to work on we don't."

"We'd love to give him a sexual treat."

"Yes, we would," Ralisse sighed. "And the sexual treat is Risa, here. You couldn't be more perfect."

Reline and Reanne helped her out of the chair as Ronay brought the red miniskirt over and the three helped her into it.

Marise looked at her many reflections. She was flawless, a three-dimensional idealization of the two-dimensional pictures in the glossy fashion magazines.

"Am I finished?" she asked, knowing the answer in advance.

"All done. Just don't mess it up before Jarred gets back."

"When is that?"

"Sometime after noon. Well this afternoon. You can look around in the meantime."

Marise looked at her reflection, and then at the reflection of the other five women. She could look around indeed, if there were-n't any restrictions on where these five could move. She was a carbon copy, although more like the original than the copy.

"Where can I look around?"

"Anywhere. You're one of us now, or at least you might as well be. There's no way out of here. Jarred let's us go wherever we want."

"Just hang around, stay as you are, we'll touch you up you need it."

Marise wasted no time. She hadn't realized Jarred wouldn't be present and his girls would provide her with the perfect camouflage to move about Jarazonia. She used her hand as Ralisse had to open the mirrored door, but hesitated as it slid silently open. She re-membered an exit into the tunnel system where the Jaracuzi en-tered the tunnel connecting it with Jarazonia and realized access had been programmed for her when she instructed the computer to take over the landing process of the Stratodart.

As she came to the walkway, she used the same opening proce-dure on the mirror covering the area of the diagram she'd memo-rized, and slipped through as it silently opened. She walked quickly through the tunnel, down the incline into the hanger, skipping up the steps to the Stratodart. Once in the cockpit, she programmed the computer to relay any incoming information from the site to her control relay in the satellite network system, and set the com-puter's modem to receive on a narrow broadcast frequency. She took out her transmitter, adjusted its frequency to the frequency of the modem, and sailed back down the stairs, checked the diagram again, and reentered Jarazonia in a room directly across the hall from the doorway she'd used to follow the girls over to the Jaracuzi.

This was designed as the study, but she knew from the regular plans Mary had flashed to her that Jarred had a second study carved out of the original, and that the wall behind the massive desk Jarred used to discuss business was actually a fake wall, with the real study behind the wall. The door, actually a false bookcase, was open.

Marise now understood Jarred's confidence. That must've been what upset The Chairman at Mahmudabad, although she was begin-ning to see something more here than just the casual detection of an attitude. Someone who goes to the trouble to build a secret study, then casually leaves it open, allowing his girlfriends free access, was counting on security measures that transcended the ordinary.

She entered the study through the bookcase door and found something more in the nature of a comfortable den than a functional study. She moved over to his computer, attaching her transmitter. All the files she designated would be automatically transmitted to the Stratodart and relayed to her control in the Iridium Network of satellites positioned in stationary orbits at precise interstices around the Earth.

She typed in a code activating the relay, which informed her transmission was operating on an error free basis. She then plunged into exploring the files. The first one that caught her eye was titled "Corporate Business Plan." Couldn't be more specific than that. She absorbed the information, then deciphered the rest of the file structure. There were three main directories, one dealing with the allocation of markets for ostrich meat in accordance with the school structures within each market. If ostrich meat was already being marketed in a particular locale, any schools in that market had to be brought on board. This was done through school dieticians, health aides, and even the principals, if there was resistance at lower levels.

Next, in markets that had no penetration for ostrich meat, the schools had to be used as the focal point to introduce ostrich meat into the diet. At first glance, this seemed to be just sound market-ing strategy. Marise knew from her own experience that ostrich, on the basis of price and nutritional content, was rapidly replacing more traditional meats, especially fish as the fruit of the oceans began to dry up. However, there was a great deal of resistance to biting down on what was considered basically an oversized bird, ranging from three to four hundred and fifty pounds that laid over-sized eggs. The jokes about having a hernia making a wish on an ostrich wishbone were endless, not to mention who gets the head if its always buried in the ground.

To market to the young so in a single generation, eating ostrich would become as second nature as eating chicken, seemed only a smart thing to do. That was until she saw the contents of the second directory. This involved the massive culturing of brain cells ob-tained from someone called Philbrook. The Chairman had mentioned Philbrook, and after reading his medical profile, she realized the cells being cultured were the cells associated with the uncontrolla-ble rages Philbrook experienced.

The relationship between Block's project to find out what was causing the incidents among the millennial school children and these Philbrook cells was clear to her before she came upon the detailed planning documents setting forth the process for injecting these cells into the very ostrich meat sold into the school system. She immediately typed in her Security Alert Code.

She suspected the contents of the directory titled "Genera-tors" before she opened it. She already knew from Mary's comment about the generator found in the rat gnawed throne stand at Mah-mudabad on which Jarred sat contemplating, apparently, the de-struction of children all over the world. The generators were being manufactured to produce the very frequency calling forth the cells imbedded in the neurons from Philbrook's brain. A millennial that consumed ostrich meat containing Philbrook's cells would fly into an uncontrollable rage if one of the generators were operated in close proximity.

Marise began to search the files, looking for the way the gen-erators were introduced into the millennial's environment. She was typing in the file name "DE . . ." when a voice made her jump, doing a hasty quit.

"A lovely with a letch for computers."

Marise looked up to see Jarred moving toward her through the bookcase doors.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

He came over behind her, his eyes caught on the protrusions front and back, the curves blending into curves on the side, his eyes dizzy.

"Ralisse said I would be pleased with you, and I can only agree. I'm going to have a lot of fun playing with you."

Marise watched as his tongue moved rapidly over his lips like a snake. The analogy made her drop her eyes to his pointed toe shoes, then to the library door as two burly women dressed in military fatigues entered.

"Take her and tie her down," Jarred ordered. "I'll be in after I take care of a little business."

The women came over and took Marise firmly by either arm, marching her to door at the other end of the room.

Marise had no illusions about what was behind it.

"Get some rest, Risa," Jarred said quietly, "I'm going to keep you awake for a good long time when I'm free."