COMBWORLD

“The snow is letting up,” he said, poking the fire, looking upwards into the dark clouded sky. 

     “The storm is passing.  Maybe they will come after all.”

     “It wasn’t so bad.  They’ll come.”

     They were sitting in front of the blazing fire, wrapped in furs.  Behind them was a large, crudely built hut which sat at the base of a low rock cliff in the midst of a densely forested mountainside, and in front of them was the steeply sloping side of the hill that ran down to the river.  One could see the fire for miles up and down the river valley, which was now, with the cloud cover and the light of the fire, an impenetrable darkness. 

     A child began to cry inside the hut.  Other voices came, then, in response, a woman’s soft humming and the complainings of other children, and then an angry command from yet another woman.  Stillness and quiet came again.  The two men outside listened, quietly, and when peace was restored, began to talk again.

     “If they were near, don’t you think they’d be helloing to let us know?  I think the snow held them up.  They built shelters and put up for the time.  They’ll set out again tomorrow.  I expect them tomorrow.  What do you think?”

     “If they put up in the valley, we’d see their fire.  We’d know by that, and we could go to sleep.  We see no fire, son.  That means one of two things: either they have not yet reached the valley or they didn’t put up but are moving still, in which case, I expect we’ll see them tonight.”

     “Can it be that by now they haven’t reached the valley?”

     “Not likely.  I expect we’ll see them tonight.”

     The father was a thin, bald and clean-faced man, strong and youthful; the son was a grizzly, long-haired, long-bearded man, hefty, with heavy jowls and a tired round face.  Forgive me for the atmospherics.  I still get emotional when I think of that night.  I was one of the children inside the hut.  That bald, youthful man, so confident and self-assured, was my great grandfather.  My own father was among the travelers our family was impatiently awaiting—the story of his life is a great and inspirational tale, for he was the primemover in so many recovery efforts during those days of demoralization after the collapse.  There are so many stories to tell. 

I am recording, however, at this writing, the story of Bram Meeks.  My great grandfather Jarrold knew some of the story, but the person who knew it best was the man who lived with Bram after the collapse.  This man, a Betan, made first contact with Bram in the microcosm; his name was Aldous Haas.  Before he died, he told his story to another, a much younger hexan, and it was this man, whose name was Thomas Singer, and his family whom my great grandfather and grandfather were expecting to arrive. 

My father had been travelling the line of high and craggy hills, spying out watchfires during the nights, taking note of their locations and visiting them one at a time.  In this way, he had traveled many hundreds of miles, taking a census, recording names, numbers, ages, building up the spirits of those he visited, carrying news of the others, and encouraging those he met to gather at a single place with a view to forming a village.  This was my father’s dream.  He wanted to rebuild, to plan a city, and to gather our people together again, so that we would know each other.  He returned after his first excursion, explaining to Jarrold that hundreds of people lived within a month’s journey, and that he had visited many of them and they were all interested in his proposal, many of them wondering, in fact, why they hadn’t yet done it.

After the collapse and breakup of the combs, there was a mass die-off, as everyone knows.  This was a permanent death.  Outside the microcosm, people had no idea how to live, they had no idea, even, what it meant to live—many didn’t even know how to eat and starved to death in the first weeks.  Others couldn’t orient themselves to the hard, factual, material world, and walked into rivers and drowned, or off cliffs and died in the fall, or fell victim to animal predators, unable to distinguish between projection and reality.  They were helpless, completely lacking as they were in knowledge of the world, even of things so basic as weather.  Many who survived the initial collapse died in the first winter.  I needn’t recount here those first years.  Every child learns of them in school now, and every child has his and her family story of survival.  Each of these is unique, and together they make up an astonishing tale of human fortitude and will and ingenuity.  Oh, the race has been tested, tested to the nth degree, and we are the better for it.  All the generations conceived and born outside the combs look back upon the combworld with awe and dread and draw from it their most important lesson: that the human mind cannot be trusted to live within its own precincts—it needs contact with the earth to keep it disciplined and to keep it honest.

That night, my great grandfather and my grandfather kept the watchfire burning, and we children waited with heavy eyes, our excitement unbearable, our mothers restless with expectation.  Long after the snow let up, my father returned with Thomas Singer and his family.  They were thirty-six people, a group consisting of four hexan women and one other hexan man besides Thomas, the remaining thirty being the children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren of the original six survivors.  They came carrying their provisions and belongings, the first of what would become, over the course of a year, a thriving village of nearly a thousand souls, splendidly constructed along the banks of the river, which the village named the Jarrold after my great grandfather.

There was great rejoicing upon their arrival, and we children could not be restrained, however hard our mothers tried to keep us in bed.  They came in all their strangeness and multitude—thirty-six new souls!—stamping from the cold, helloing billows of vapor.  Marrow soup was prepared and put up in a great cauldron over the fire, and the elders sat and talked.  I took two of their children into my bed, but because of their exhaustion, they fell asleep almost immediately.

When Jarrold learned that night that Thomas knew the story of Bram Meeks, he became grave and sober.  He tested Thomas’ knowledge, probing with a question about this and a question about that, and decided what Thomas knew was too important to be told casually and informally round a fire.  He told Thomas to put his story in order, for when we had gathered into our village those who lived close enough to contact and who wanted to come, he would tell his tale to all.  It would be an occasion, one of the things we would work towards.  What follows is the story I heard Thomas Singer tell, near as I can make it in the manner in which Thomas told it, though the drama of his voice and the punctuation of his gestures must inevitably be lost.  It is a tale which was told to him by Aldous Haas, who lived part of it himself, and to whom Bram told the story of his life.  Thomas began his telling a year after his arrival.  We had built more than two hundred houses by then, had more than a thousand acres under cultivation, and had already erected a water tower into which we hand pumped river water daily.  Looking back upon that year, I am amazed at the skills with which we attacked our tasks.  We had come far in the years since the collapse.  The most astonishing thing of all, however—and I want to take note of this—was the persisting vigor and strength of the surviving hexans, all of whom outlived their great, great grandchildren, and many of whom are still among us.

* * *

The wall glowed a pale gray and then darkened as the image  snapped into shape.  Bram stared at it uncomprehending.  The person who called was an odd-looking stranger.  At least, it was someone Bram could not remember having met before—so odd looking that he certainly would not have forgotten him, though the name was familiar.  The caller had white hair and a white beard and wrinkly, sagging pink skin on his face.  He had arranged himself behind a desk on which sat a pile of books and stacks of paper, a glass jar with numerous pencils and pens in it, and a monitor and keyboard just off to the caller’s right.  The whole image was so incongruous as to make Bram wonder if he should laugh or turn off the wall.  He could not imagine why someone would make himself look like that—hair and beard, white and wispy with age, and aging skin—or show himself behind such an odd collection of things—a desk and books and piles of paper and whatnot, all items of a sort hexans learned about—those who cared to learn, that is—but which had no use in all the virtualities of the microcosm.  He stared open-mouthed for a moment, and then the caller said, “Mr. Meeks, close your mouth.  I have need to talk with you.”  Then the caller rose, and the whole hodge-podge of incongruity that was the desk disappeared.  Bram laughed out loud, then, and said, “Do I know you?” 

     “Not personally,” the caller replied, trying to enter Bram’s hex, but finding his holo blocked.

     “How, then?” Bram returned when, finding himself unable to enter, the caller had not explained further.

     “Some time ago,” he finally continued, running his hand through his wispy hair and scratching his beard, “someone you do know passed your name to me and mentioned mine to you.  Forgive me for being cryptic, I have my reasons.”  He tried to enter again, but again was blocked.  “That name, the one on your caller ID, should be familiar to you.  I’m known by that name among a small group who gather once in a while—for reasons I can’t explain.  Listen,” he said to Bram, “I’m going to sit behind my desk again and when I do, I’m going to hold up a sheet of paper.  I was told you might not admit me, so I prepared for that.  Tonight, at midnight, call me back.”

     The caller did as he said he would and Bram read a call code penciled on the page—401 b 622.  For a moment, Bram held his breath.  Before he could say anything, the wall went gray again.  The caller had closed.  He shut his eyes ever so briefly and the wall solidified.  Two surprises roused his curiosity and made him restless.  He began to pace around the walls of his hex.  The first was the fact that the caller held up a real piece of paper.  Or, alternatively, he had managed to actually write upon a hologram—that is, to alter the holographic signal to include the code on the image of the sheet of paper, a feat just as unlikely as the paper being real.  Whichever, the little demonstration was a revelation, and Bram’s curiosity was whetted. 

The other surprise, which was profounder in its implications, was the symbol between to the two numerical triplets.  Call codes consisted of a series of three three digit numbers.  The caller had changed the call pattern to accommodate the symbol, a feat which was, as far as Bram knew, impossible, for he had shared the knowledge of how to do that with only one person, and that person, much to Bram’s sorrow, was retired only two days later, apparently after botching an attempt to either alter a code or create a new one.  But he saw the symbol, which Bram knew was referred to as the Beta.  He didn’t believe in the existence of the Beta, a secret, or should he say a mythical, society of hexans who, from time immemorial, as the story went, gathered and shared among themselves the esoterica of the microcosm.  He didn’t believe in the Beta for many reasons.  But he didn’t believe anyone had the power to alter holograms, either, nor did he believe in the existence of actual objects like paper.  But he had seen either real paper, an absurdity—barring some slight of hand on the part of the caller—since it disappeared with the rest of the holo when the man rose from the desk; or he had seen an altered hologram, the only other possible explanation; and he had seen the Beta symbol.  It was all a mystery to him.  As was the oddness of the odd fellow.  And he had to wait till midnight for explanations!—if he would get any at all.

     He thought of his friend, Har, being retired.  His grief was deep and persistent, and, illogical as it was,  it was made worse by the fact that he had to pretend he didn’t feel it.  There was no pain involved, of course, but the image of her body disintegrating in the acid filled him with dread.  Her genes would be returned to the Materia Immutata, where they would be held in electroplasmic stasis until such time as they were recombined, and then she would be reborn.  He would never see her again, because when that would happen was left to chance—it could be tomorrow or it could be ten thousand years from now, and, anyway, no memory persisted through the process, so that should they by chance coexist again, they would not know of their former relations. 

     The Beta was a myth, one of those stories that persisted from lifecycle to lifecycle, whose very existence suggested eerie things about the human mind’s capacity to retrieve memories from former incarnations.  Bram, like everyone else, was moved by such stories.  But he didn’t believe them.  His own experience confirmed the superstitious nature of the idea of Beta, for he could find in himself no trace of memory beyond his first moments of consciousness in this particular hex.  Furthermore, it was claimed in some circles that the Betans retained knowledge of the macrocosm from the days before the Combworld, and that, as a group, Betans shared this knowledge with certain recombinants at certain times in the lifecycle to avoid its being lost—this was manifestly an invention, Bram thought, to account for the existence of Beta in the face of universal retirement and memory loss.  It was believed that they, the Betans, would one day leave the combs, hard as it was to imagine such a thing, and that their departure would mark the end of history amid the universal destruction of comblife.  How all this was communicated and passed from one cycle to the next was, of course, what everybody speculated about—everybody who thirsted for knowledge.  It was the great mystery, and Bram didn’t believe any of it. 

But he saw the symbol, and he knew how to incorporate it into the call code; in fact, he believed he was the only person alive who could do it.  But here, suddenly, was another who not only knew how to do it, if the code that he was shown was to be believed, but knew that he, Bram, could also do it.  He paced more frantically, a thrill of fear he had never known before shooting through him.  Was it a trap?  The possibilities raced through his mind: it was too simple to be a trap, too obvious; yet that very simplicity suggested a subtlety that he could only attribute to the guardians.  It was too simple; therefore, it was not simple at all.  On the other hand, it was so obviously a trap that it just couldn’t be one!  A trap would be more deftly disguised, for the guardians were nothing if not subtle.  They could, and regularly did, manipulate the microcosm to create the realities we all take for granted.  They could trap him, if they wanted to, and retire him without his ever being aware of it.  Therefore, the caller and the Beta and the message were real.  On the other hand—on and on, in endless repetition, his logic oscillated until he stood still, caught in a mind-lock from which, after a long while, only his bodily discomfort shook him.  It was the kind of problem that had no solution.  But the Beta!  The symbol was just too risky to be played with.  It was displayed to him for a reason—one that had nothing to do with trapping him.  If he was suspected of doing anything even remotely dangerous, he would have been retired.  The guardians didn’t tolerate risk.  They acted swiftly.  Theirs was too complex a job—the microcosm rested upon their shoulders.

At the thought of the guardians, Bram sat down in his usual place—on the mat in the center of his hex facing the first wall.  He pondered who might have known of his tampering with the wall.  He was quite certain there was no one.  Feeling weak in his stomach, he conjured the image of the odd fellow and thought about his implied message.  He thought about Har, too, and wondered if he wouldn’t be better off retired, anyway.  Ignoring the feeling in his stomach, he shrugged.  “What’s to lose?” he thought.  His curiosity overcoming him, he projected a code, one for a site he customarily went to when he wanted to think, and the first wall came to life, revealing a sunny garden filled with azaleas in full bloom, narcissi and daffodils, waxy leafed rhododendrons with their blossoms opened to the sun, and beds of white-petaled daisies surrounding a birdbath at which bluejays and robins alighted to sip the water and splash their breasts and wings, and, in the sixth wall, an elm, which cast a deep shade over the grass on the left side of the garden.  It was in the peace and serenity of this usually unvisited springtime that everything began.  He entered and walked to the familiar small antique stone bench and sat down, putting his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands.  He could shift his view from the mat in his hex where he had just sat down to the visual field within the garden and back again to the one from his position on the mat, which included, of course, his holographic image in the garden.  But his holographic image there could not see back into the room. 

Concentrating in the normal way, he could shut out his consciousness of himself on the mat in his hex and become totally his virtual self in the garden.  Once that happened, the illusion would become complete, and he could sense the garden’s three-dimensionality; freed from the hex, then, he would be able to explore all six walls of the microcosm.  He could walk around in them and see things that were out of view from his position in the hex. The contents of the garden would acquire the feel of materiality—become palpable, offer resistance to his touch, odors to his sense of smell, sounds to his ears. 

However, this afternoon, he did not concentrate on himself in the garden.  Instead, he concentrated on himself concentrating in the hex, an incredibly difficult thing to do, for our minds are not accustomed to constructing feedback-loops of this kind, forming a state of double-consciousness.  When he failed at the effort, he would experience a sudden cascade of split selves, one inside the other, receding into an infinity of terror-provoking diminishment.  The failure would result in the loss of consciousness, awakening from which he would feel a nausea that stayed with him for hours.  The first time he had achieved the state, though, he was hardly aware of what he was doing.  He had been experimenting with merging realities upon his holo, overlapping them so as to create a montage-like psychic experience, the pleasure of which was simply one of confusion about the midline by which the three dimensions were oriented in each of the realities.  Exhausted from the play, he stepped out of the wall for relief into his hex and sat down inadvertently on the spot he occupied physically on the mat.  Something strange had happened, for he became aware of his own awareness.  He concentrated on himself concentrating, a mental trick not unlike the one he had just been practicing by merging realities, and suddenly he had it—a clarity of perception so sharp it stunned him, a perception in which he perceived himself perceive.  He was amazed, for the feeling that accompanied the double-consciousness was liberating, and it was more liberating still when he found he could not only repeat it but sustain it.  It was a curious experience, one that allowed him to become aware of things that most people never were. 

It was while sustaining a condition of double-consciousness in this very garden that he had discovered how to program, or to reprogram, the call codes, a skill he used sparingly and secretively.  From his position on the bench-mat—the two places being really one—he could clearly see all the technological apparatus by which his hex was connected to the microcosm, and he could see the programming pad which connected his hex to the call system.  It was not unlike the one embedded in the floor of his hex.  All he had to do was walk over to it, being careful not to bump into one of his six walls, the sensation of which would disrupt his state of double-consciousness.  If that happened, he would lose the state, lose his hologram, as well, and he would lose along with them his access to the pad—leaving him to ponder just where the pad was in the first place.  But then he would come to on his mat and have to start all over again. 

Once at the pad, however, he could program a new code into the system, and the guardians would not become aware of it.  By this means, he had worked out a system of call locations that enabled him to reach friends and not have his calls registered.  In this way, he could have unmonitored conversations with them.  At first, it was just fun to have clandestine meetings.  He and those he contacted in this way did and said nothing that they would not have done and said had they called on each other normally.  But then, having the opportunity, he began to express his misgivings to his closest friends, and this led to his confessing his longings, his feelings of dissatisfaction, his unhappiness with the virtual worlds they called the microcosm.  Those with whom he shared these sentiments were alarmed, for the guardians, merciful to a fault, would retire anyone who had such negative feelings.  But gradually they began to share their own experiences.  That was all long ago, now.  More recently, after an intimacy with Har that lasted many years, he dared to teach her how to enter the double-consciousness.  He knew he had taken a step from which there would be no return and which would have consequences.  When she was retired, he expected the same to happen to him, for the guardians could not have but known of their long-standing intimacy, but it never came.  The nights were horrible waiting for it.  After a month of expecting it to happen every night, he began to relax.  It had been six months since Har’s retirement, and now! the whole problem has suddenly exploded and become far more dangerous.

He had no idea how many times he had been reborn—nobody had—and if he had felt the same unhappiness in earlier cycles.  He didn’t know why he felt unhappy.  The retirement of Har increased his unhappiness to the point he felt desperate about it.  But he was always so, as far back as he could remember.  There was an infinite choice of virtual worlds to explore and an endless variety of people with whom to explore them.  Why had he fixated on Har?  Had his curiosity and capacity for enjoyment of novelty been affected by some undetectable damage to his chromosomes?  Perhaps occurring during the acid-bath that concluded a lifecycle?  Leaving him unable anymore to enjoy being alive?  Should he tell the guardians of his condition and let them search out the damage or the defect, correct it, and return him, soon—now—to life?  Or later?—did it make a difference? 

For some reason he couldn’t explain to himself, he dreaded the guardians knowing.  And worse, he valued the feeling of unhappiness, instinctively, and shared it with only his most intimate friends.  It, his unhappiness, was, for reasons he couldn’t fathom, more real and thus more trustworthy—than what?—and he felt it was meaningful, important, important in some ultimate sense.  It confused him, but he trusted in his unhappiness, trusted in it in ways he didn’t trust the wide open virtuality of life in the combs.  “The microcosm is all there is,” they were told early in the lifecycle.  “Your body and your hex are the foundations upon which it rests.  Infinite is its reach, eternal is its duration.  Next to it, everything else is illusion.  Worship the microcosm: Explore.”  The injunction to “explore” filled each hexan with inspiration and joy.  Exploring inspired Bram, too, and he did his share of it.  However, he always wondered what the guardians meant by “Next to it.”

Unlike you who were born outside the combworld, passing through the stages of infancy, childhood, and adolescence, combspeople began a lifecycle with the body of a fourteen-year-old and an incredibly rapid and directionally open neural growth capacity.  It was, therefore, the chance encounters during early exploration that determined the kind of mind and the quality of mind one developed in any particular lifecycle.  This is why exploration was so important.  The education provided by the guardians had little impact on the personality, since it was informational only and confined to the operation of the mind upon the combworld.  This education began, however, as soon as one was placed in one’s hex. 

Virtual teachers carefully introduced the newly reborn hexan to his or her personal history and the history of the combs, taught one how to live and to enjoy the cornucopia of possibilities the combs had to offer, and, at the moment when one showed the first steady signs of independent exploration, terminated contact.  From that point on, one was on one’s own—until retirement. 

There were virtual families, in virtual villages or cities, which the newborn hexan could join.  These most often provided the hexan with his or her initial human contacts out of which would grow in time the vast network of personal relations each hexan sustained in any particular lifecycle.  There were cities in which hexans could become for a while artists, architects, politicians, judges, psychologists, policemen, engineers—an endless array of consciousness-consuming professions and activities; there were wildernesses and adventures of an infinite variety to participate in.  One could spend vast portions of a lifecycle as an astronaut, exploring Mars or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn; one could be a learner—a theologist, for example, or a philosopher—or one could spend one’s entire lifycycle in a single adventure, or within a single family in a village. 

Few people made such confining life choices, however.  Mostly, people explored the possibilities tirelessly.  But there were individuals, especially artists, who joined communities of people who withdrew from the virtual worlds to immerse themselves in intellectual work and become colleagues of the guardians, spending their lives improving the combworld by reprogramming realities to improve holo integration.  They could become, as well, philosophers, mathematicians, musicians, working assiduously and sharing their work with others in the community. When one had participated long enough to satisfy this part of one’s emotional and character structure, one returned to the microcosm at large with renewed zest.  One could even be a hermit, if that life appealed to one.  The guardians encouraged one to be and do what most satisfied one personally.  After a hundred and fifteen years in this cycle of his immortality, having no access to memories of previous existences—knowing only that they were—Bram had come to mistrust the microcosm and had learned to value his unhappiness as a truth from which there was no turning.

Bram had speculated as a child during the time of his education, that, lacking memories of previous cycles, there was no way to prove they had existed, and that what their teachers said about them had to be taken on faith. 

“Why should we believe this?” he asked his teacher, who, as the voice of the guardians, had become quite grave in response.

“Because it is the truth,” the teacher said.

In later years, Bram returned to this moment and contemplated the teacher’s answer with ever growing irony.

He asked the teacher during the years of his early childhood if the whole idea of cycles was nothing more than a preparation of the individual to accept life in the combs.  If one could not remember one’s past lifecycles, then it was moot whether they existed or not.  What did knowledge of them add to the capacity for life that memory of them threatened?  The teacher to whom he put these concerns, always grave and forbearing, responded by telling him that in the past, life with memory had become too oppressive, that immortality was only made tolerable by the removal of memory. 

     “Why not let us die, then?” he had persisted. 

“Because,” the teacher said, his voice unchanged in manner or tone, “existence is preferable to non-existence.  Hexans chose existence, even at the cost of misery.  It was only with the consent of those living at the time that persistence of memory from cycle to cycle was removed from the experience of life.” 

Bram had risen from the bench-mat and strolled carefully to the program pad and encoded the six digits and the Beta symbol in their proper order.  At midnight, the call could be placed, now, and the guardians would be unaware.  More and more in recent years, Bram had spent days on end in his hex.  He would sit on the mat rapt in contemplation.  Dissolving the state of double consciousness now, he left the garden and turned off the wall, sitting once again where he always sat.  When he made love with Har, his holographic self would embrace her hologram, their two physical bodies ecstatic in consciousness-projecting attitudes in their individual hexes, which neither of them had ever physically left since they were brought to consciousness in them. 

No one had any idea of the totality of the combs, how large they were, or where they were located in them relative to others.  They were told that the combs were non-local, that from the view of each hex all points in the combworld were the same point, and that they shouldn’t waste time worrying about their physical selves.  The physical self was a mere foundation, nothing more.  Yet, to Bram, as he thought about it, if he found satisfaction in embracing Har, how much more satisfying would it have been if he could have embraced her actual self, embraced her in her hex?  The problem, he knew, was in the idea of “actual.”  The genes in electroplasmic stasis and the body that was constituted from them in its hex were analogously removed from the experience of life, out of which, alone, emerged all that was meaningful.  Wasn’t it true that when projection was complete, the world became sensuously present to the hologram, “actual,” as far as the word had any meaning?  The body was a means to experience; not, ultimately, identical with it.  Experience brought actuality into being.  Yet his desire was for Har, not her hologram, even though he had never seen her body.  It was an irrational, perhaps, insane desire.  It was a desire for something which, in the nature of things, he could never realize.  This was a source of his increased unhappiness; perhaps the source.  Yet he believed his unhappiness was, in one crucial sense, more real than the vast, intricate microcosm of the comb.  Wrapped as it was in the memory of Har, his unhappiness was sadly, tormentedly, his alone, it was something totally independent of comb life.

Sometimes he would go to the garden, which he kept as a personal domain, blocking others from entering, even if they called while he was there.  After Har’s retirement, he was coming to feel that being alone was all he wanted.  He didn't know what he wanted.   He got little pleasure anymore from the microcosm, and most of his friends had lost patience with his gloominess a long time ago.  Many of them felt early in life, as he did, that because one could enter the infinite and ever-changing microcosm and leave it at will, the lives they lived were empty of meaning and unfulfilling. 

But the guardians explained during the education of every hexan, long before contact was terminated, that this feeling would come, that it was natural to the immature mind, and that in time it would pass.  This, it seems, turned out to be true for everyone but Bram.  He entered one virtuality after another in his melancholic state and took less and less pleasure from each.  In time, he learned how to disguise his feelings, because the guardians, always concerned with human contentment, retired those individuals who had lost the capacity for enjoyment.  They were merciful but they were thorough. 

Har was retired for different reasons, though.  She had been detected doing something that the guardians regarded as an encroachment upon their domain—the organization and order of the structure of the microcosm.  Har had attempted unsuccessfully what Bram had been doing undetected for years.  He was not alone anymore, however, if the caller was real.  Again, a thrill had shot through him, a thrill of fear and excitement.

He still had thirty hours till midnight.  Finding the wait unbearable, he entered the code for sleep.  Beside the second wall, the mat on the floor slid aside, and his bedding rose.  He wrapped himself, swallowed his nutrition tablets, and dropped off instantly.  When he woke, he exercised and took a walk in the garden.  Then he called up his toilet and bathed, returning it when he was done and refreshed.  Then he sat again at his accustomed place in front of the first wall and prepared to call on the odd fellow. 

The wall turned pale and glowed, darkened and came to life.  He saw what appeared to be a large, cavernous room, dark and forbidding, glowing incandescently at its center, where numerous people were huddled together around a small lamp.  The odd fellow was seated amid them, and when Bram appeared, he rose and invited Bram to join them.  Bram projected his holo into the wall, shut his eyes for a brief moment, and was suddenly shaking hands with the odd fellow, who began to introduce him to the others.

He was astonished, for they were all, like the odd fellow, gray-haired and aged.  They rose from their deep-cushioned chairs, some of them frail and bent, their hands like claws, the skin and slack muscles of their upper arms hanging and swaying by the motion of their bodies.  Among this group, the odd fellow appeared to be the youngest! 

“I don’t understand,” Bram said, looking at each of them.  “Why do you project yourselves like this?”

“Like old people?” the odd fellow said, a smile on his face.

“Well, yes.  Like the people we were taught about by the guardians.”

“We are not holos,” the odd fellow said, smiling.  “When you touch us, you feel us, but when we touch you, we cannot feel you, for you are a holo.

For a moment, Bram stood open mouthed.  The others, staring back at Bram, waited patiently for the odd fellow to continue. 

“You are Betans, then?” Bram said before the other could begin, the implications of what he was discovering beginning to dawn on him.

“Yes,” the odd fellow said.  “My name is Aldous Haas.  This place we are in is ancient,” he said, gesturing around the huge, dark room.  “It was made by our Betan ancestors many, many lifecycles ago.  The way in is secret, and not all Betans come here.  The person who passed your name to us was Har Jin Lei.  She, too, was a Betan.  She was the one to whom you taught the technique of illusion breaking.”

“Was she. . .?” Bram had begun to say, gesturing towards the others, but stopping short of saying it.

“Yes, she was one of us, and she was very old, more than a normal lifecycle old.  Her loss is painful to us.  Collectively, if you add our ages together, we are seventeen-thousand years old.  At the rate of sixty hours in a day and sixty days in a quarter, we have amassed two and a half billion hours of exploration within the microcosm.”

When the scope and depth of what he had suddenly stepped into began to sink in, Bram became speechless.  He contemplated the numbers for a moment and knew they were beyond his grasp.  He stammered, but Aldous Haas, sympathizing, took has hand and led him to one of the cushioned chairs beside the lamp and sat him down.    

“There is much you need to learn, Bram Meeks.  But before we begin, you have to know what we are about and, knowing that, agree to join us.”

“I loved her,” he said, inconsequentially, “I thought she loved me.”

“Are you talking about Har?” a woman said, seating herself beside him and taking his hand, through which she could not see her own, but which had no materiality to her touch.

“We shared so much, discovered so much together.  I don’t understand. . .”

“Why should you not understand?” the woman said softly.  “Har was just like you, a person capable of needing and being needed, of feeling happy in the happiness she gave to others. . .”

“No,” Bram broke in, “not like me.  Next to her I was a newborn.”  He had shivered and raised his shoulders and begun to wonder if during all that time they spent together, he had been used by her for Betan purposes and was beginning to feel violated.

“Let me tell you why she was retired and what it cost us,” Aldous Haas said.

Bram looked at him and thinking about Har wondered if he could trust anything he was told.  These people were ancient and mysterious, and although they lived within the combworld, they lived independently of it.  They gathered physically!  He wondered how many others he had met and never knew.  He felt out of his depth, dizzy, and lost, and wanted nothing more than to break contact.  Sensing that, Aldous Haas took his shoulder and clumsily shook him, staring into his eyes.
     “Bram Meeks!  Listen to me,” he said urgently, “we risked everything by this invitation.  Don’t let your feelings now cloud your judgment.  In your state, if you break contact, the guardians will detect your agitation, and they can be terrible if their suspicions are up.  Think of Har and what she endured.  She did not betray you.”

“She didn’t,” he said, numbed.  “I expected to be retired.  I waited every night for it.  It was terrible.”  He calmed and sat back in the chair.  At that moment he became transparent and his hand turned invisible to the woman holding it.  She murmured, alarmed, and Aldous shouted Bram’s name over and over.  In his hex, he had begun to break concentration from the turmoil he was feeling, but Aldous’ urgent shouting called him back.

Relieved, Aldous said, shaking his shoulder again, “Listen, Bram, listen carefully.  Using your technique, Har learned how to leave the combworld.  Do you understand what that means?  She is the first hexan ever to step foot in the macrocosm!”  He paused for a moment to let that sink in.  “She saw the sun, Bram, the night sky, she smelled the air!  This is what we have been working for for thousands of years.  The guardians learned of the breech instantly and retired her the night she returned.  If not for her one brief contact with me, we would never have known.  I cannot, dare not, return to my hex now.  I live here and enter the microcosm only clandestinely.  All my needs have to be supplied by the others, and it is a great sacrifice to them.”

“We share the sacrifice, Aldous,” a man said, “We do it gladly.”

Bram looked at the man, not remembering his name.  He was ancient, stooped and trembly and bald with large brown blotches on the skin of his head. 

“We do it,” the old man continued, “in the hope that one day, we too, before we are retired and lose our memories, can stand under the sun and breathe the air of the macrocosm.”

Bram was moved by the old man’s declaration and by the expression of reverence in his face when he spoke the word “macrocosm” and felt, himself, a stirring for that experience, the ultimate experience a hexan could know.  He looked with respect at the old one and said, directing himself as much to the bent, frail figure as to Aldous, “How is it that you don’t know this technique I taught Har?  After all your exploring, you never found that out?”

“What you have learned to do with the technique you taught Har we do with technology.”  He pulled Bram up from the chair, then, in that clumsy way a physical body and a holo interact, and led him to a place outside the glow of light cast by the lamp.  The room was immensely large.  They walked many steps from the light till they came, in complete darkness, to a wall, on which was hung what appeared in the dark to be a carpet.  At the edge of the hanging, Aldous pulled back the material and exposed a doorway, through which they passed.  Inside, a dim light came on, revealing an array of programming pads and, behind them, the huge seven-foot high stacks of processors by which they were networked into the microcosm.  Across from them was a single wall. 

“From here our coming and going is undetectable.  We can program call codes and site codes safely.  Right here,” he said, pointing to the mat in front of the wall, “Har projected herself in the microcosm on those occasions she met with you.  The guardians have never become aware of us here.  Mainly, because we have worked with them over the lifecycles to refine and develop realities and in the process have built in safeguards from detection.  The guardians know we exist.  Their discovery of Har was a blow to us, and they did terrible things to retrieve information from her.  I am afraid Har will never be reborn.”

“Why do you need me?” Bram asked, looking at the pads, so familiar to him from his use of them in the garden that they seemed strange in this setting. 

“Because, although we can do much with our access to the microcosm, we can do no more, ultimately, than circulate within it.  We have explored everything there is to explore.  We can learn nothing new.  The first new thing we have learned in many, many years is your illusion-breaking technique.  Har tried to teach it to us.  Unsuccessfully.  Either we cannot learn it, or she was teaching us wrong.  We hope we can learn it.  If we can, we can manipulate the microcosm in such a way as to make it possible for us to leave and return undetected.  Perhaps, in time, to leave and never return.”

“Have you ever thought,” Bram asked, with a strange expression on his face, an expression Aldous interpreted as one of longing, “of finding the Materia Immutata and recombining and rebirthing yourselves, breaking the memory-loss law, and leaving the microcosm in new, youthful bodies?”

Aldous smiled.  Bram was one of them, all right.  Har was right.  He was a Betan by nature.  She saw that in him from the time of their first excursions together.  It was that in him which attracted her, for he was so young they had little in common.  Breaking the memory loss law was the motive behind the Betan organization.  It was to accomplish this that they worked with the guardians.  But they never came near the Materia Immutata.  Its location was the most closely guarded secret in the microcosm.  The one thing they learned about it, lifecycles ago—a bit of information that was never useful to them—is that it had no location, that, in fact, it didn’t exist in the sense we normally mean by the word.  The Materia Immutata did not have material substance, weight and mass, and was not extended in space and did not persist in time.  The Materia Immutata didn’t exist in the usual sense at all.

In response, when Aldous finished and fell silent, Bram noted, calmly, but pointedly, “But Aldous, I don’t exist either.”  And he took Aldous’ hand and squeezed it, his own hand clenching into a fist inside the older man’s open palm.

“But,” Aldous responded, still smiling,  “the Materia Immutata is a nursery for newborns.  Tens of thousands of us are born into the microcosm every year.  We must begin our lives someWHERE, my friend.  We are not, as you see,” he said, pinching the flesh of his arm, “only our holos.  We have bodies, and these must be gestated.  This must happen in a place.  Find this sanctum sanctorum and you will control the microcosm.  We have learned nothing about it beyond what I have just told you, and that seems to contradict everything we think about it.  How can it be that the physical mass of all gestating hexans exists but does not exist at the same time?” 

Bram had been staring at Aldous as the Betan explained this ultimate mystery, a look of incredulity on his face.

“I know the answer to this puzzle, Aldous,” he said, pointing to the wall.  “I know.” 

Bram turned and, followed by Aldous, walked out of the inner room back to the others, who were sitting in the light talking among each other.  A conspiratorial buzz hung in the air as the two men approached.  When they arrived, Bram said to Aldous, and to all the others, “I must leave.  What I’ve learned amazes me, and I need time to think about it.  But have hope.  I’m certain you will all walk in the macrocosm, and, with luck, may live a long, long time in it.”  With that, he disappeared.

Breaking contact, Bram sat for a while in front of the now solidified first wall.  He felt such a tumultuous range of emotions that he feared being discovered by the guardians, who would necessarily be suspicious of his state, since, unaware of his visit to the Betans, they could not have discerned any reason for it.  Before his visit, he had resigned himself to retirement if the call had been a trap set for him by the guardians.  His curiosity and capacity for pleasure had waned when Har was retired.  But now he was so stimulated by what he had learned that he could barely contain himself.  He practiced breathing for a while, closing his eyes and concentrating on drawing in a breath through his nostrils and exhaling through his open mouth, once, twice, three times, and then repeating, until his mind cleared and his pulse slowed.  Once calmed, he sat upright, squared his shoulders, and concentrated on the sensation of heat rising up his spine, its progress upward bringing an ever-greater sense of self-control and well being.  When he reached the state of absolute rest, he opened his eyes.  Shaking his head to clear his mind of the waking slumber he had achieved, he rose and toed into the floor pad the code for his toilet.  When it came up, he stepped in and looked around.  Instead of taking a bath, he smiled, stepped out, and sat again on his mat, leaving the toilet where it was.

He knew the answer to the problem the Betans could not solve.  He knew it instantly, and along with that knowledge he grasped the true nature of the combworld.  What he didn’t understand was why it was so.  He desired greatly to return to his garden, where he usually went when he wanted to meditate or dream or wonder or just think.

When he entered the garden, instead of going to the little stone bench, he sat beneath the tree, crossing his legs beneath him.  Why couldn’t the Betans realize the truth?  He pondered this mystery first, for it seemed to him more inexplicable than the mystery of the Materia Immutata.  Perhaps, he thought, realization of the truth was barred to them by its sheer monstrousness, a monstrousness so monstrous that the mind turned from it as the answer to the very thing it sought to know. 

Those who quest form a conception of the thing they search for, and this conception not only guides their search but motivates it as well.  If, in fact, the object of their quest turns out to bear no relation whatever to this conception, would they recognize it if it stood before them, open and revealed, though undeclared as such?  He wondered.  If he was right, there was a psychological barrier to the Betans’ recognition of the truth; and, again, if he was right, the guardians must depend upon this barrier. 

He understood now why the guardians let the Betans exist.  For he was certain that this was the case.  How else explain the existence of their cavernous room?  The quest was their pleasure, and the guardians, above all things, wanted hexans to live satisfying lives.  One might say that the guardians were as complicit in the Betan conspiracy as was Har.  She was retired, not for being a Betan, but because she had encroached upon their domain.  He was not altogether certain that leaving the combworld was forbidden, if leaving it brought joy and satisfaction to those who found a way; so long as they returned, so long as they did not, in the process, encroach upon the guardians’ control of the structure of the microcosm itself.  Har had done something else that alarmed the guardians—he was sure of it.  One thing he was not sure of is whether Aldous knew what that something was.  No.  The Betans, he was sure, were no mystery to the guardians. There was only one real mystery in all of this, and that was himself.  As he sat under the tree, he pondered this mystery next.

He could find no answer.  He could not see himself as the guardians saw him.  He had no knowledge of his previous lifecycles, as they had; therefore, he could not know how he differed from himself.  He often concealed his feelings, for he knew these would get him retired if the guardians understood them.  He didn’t know, however, if his unhappiness, which he could trace to his earliest memories, persisted from lifecycle to lifecycle or was unique to this one.  He would have to live with the mystery of himself.  There were no answers he could hold fast to.  Unlike the mystery of the Materia Immutata.

With that, he sat upright.  He had to struggle to keep himself calm.  The implications of the true nature of the Materia Immutata filled him with revulsion and revolutionary ardor.  Aldous had conceived of it as the sanctum sanctorum of the combworld, as, indeed, why should he not?  As he reasoned, gestating hexans in all their multi-thousands had to begin their lives someWHERE.  As the essence of the combworld, the place where its millions of residents were housed in their genetic latency, where they were recombined and reborn, where they were, finally, retired and had their memories erased, the Materia Immutata was not only the locus of the past, the present, and the future, it was also the locus of the physical stuff of combworld existence.  How could it be that it had, as Aldous had learned, no location; had no existence in the ordinary sense of the word? 

The Materia Immutata was not, as Aldous thought it had to be, a place within the combworld, a sanctum sanctorum held apart and guarded for its secrets.  It was the combworld itself!  This recognition came to Bram instantly, and along with it came the realization that, in all his lifecycles, in all the thousands of years of his immortality, he had never left his hex.  He was recombined in it, gestated in it, born in it, and, after living his lifecycle out in it, retired and returned to latency in it.  He was as confined to it as a nut in its shell. No one would ever leave his hex except through the illusion of the microcosm.  Ever.  Bram himself had spent countless hours thinking of those who walked his hex before, sat upon his mat, slept in his bed, projected into the microcosm from his walls, his “first wall” being different from that choice by others in this very hex.  It was the sense of that shared existence that gave meaning to meeting others in the microcosm.  It was all illusion.  How would hexans within the combworld react to the revelation of what their lives really were? 

He knew beyond a doubt what he had to do.  Fading from the garden, he concentrated on himself concentrating and within moments had attained his state of double consciousness.  He programmed a call to Aldous, returned to his mat, came to, and waited for Aldous to open.  When he did, Bram projected into the dark, cavernous room.  He had been gone for several hours, and during that time, the cabal of Betans had dwindled.  There were only some fifteen of them left.

“Did Har leave the combworld from this room?” he asked immediately, knowing before Aldous answered that he would say no.  But he had to clear that up before he acted.  And Aldous said what he expected.

“One other thing, Aldous.  Are you sure no ancestor Betan ever found a way out of the combworld?”  And he knew the answer to this question as well. 

“Yes, Bram.  Har was the first.”

“And she called you when she returned.  You said that your contact was brief.  But in that brief time, Aldous, think carefully and tell me the truth, did she seem tired in any way—in her voice, or her gestures, or in any way you might have noticed?”

Aldous thought for a moment before saying no, he didn’t sense any fatigue or tiredness in her, only excitement.  They spoke for a few moments only.  But no, no tiredness.

“What are you thinking, Bram?” Aldous asked in the moment before Bram faded.

“I’ll return,” Bram said, and as he faded, he flashed a wide grin at Aldous and the others.

He sat on his mat now, in full control of his emotions, preparing himself for what he knew was going to be an arduous and dangerous effort.  He closed his eyes and pulled his legs up, his feet crossed at the ankles and heels tucked into his crotch.  He tried not to think of what would follow, of consequences, of what had happened to Har.  He went inward and felt his heart beating, his pulse throbbing, and his body ever so slightly rocking in response to these internal rhythms, falling into the meditative state from which he derived the energy for prolonged visits to the microcosm, intending on this occasion to follow Har into the macrocosm.

It was then that he heard his name spoken quietly, just above a whisper, “Bram Meeks, Bram Meeks,” and he opened his eyes.  His hex was blocked, no one could enter, and he had heard no call.  For a moment he was disoriented by the voice, and then he shuddered with alarm.  Before him stood a guardian!  He felt his hair rise. 

The guardian stood, looking down at him, his arms folded across his chest, the sleeves of his white robe hanging, his hood hanging upon his back so that his head was clearly visible.  He had black hair, smooth white cheeks, and blue eyes.  He was beautiful to look at.  And Bram knew his death was imminent, for, like Har, he would never be, as Aldous had said, recombined and reborn.

“What are you planning to do, Bram Meeks?”

“Have you been spying on me?” he asked defiantly.

“We are aware of everyone, there is no spying.  You have visited the Betans.  Yes, we know.  We have watched you play with the call codes and the site codes.  These secretive behaviors were one of your many talents, and we even helped you in order to assist your interests.  But we fear now that you are overstepping your privileges and planning something that will affect all of us.”

Bram had squirmed at the revelation that the guardians knew of him all along.  Trying to shift the focus, he asked, “Why did you retire Har?”  He hoped, by getting them to discuss her, he might convince them to recombine and rebirth her for him, but the guardian spoke swiftly at the mention of her.
     “I cannot tell you that.”   Then, speaking more evenly, he said, “I can tell you only what you already know, after your visit to the Betans.  Har was very old and she had accomplished her life’s dream, to step into the macrocosm.  There was no longer any reason to prolong her stay in this lifecycle.  Her visit to the macrocosm nicely rounded her life.  That’s all you need to know.”

“No, that’s not all!” Bram said, controlling his fear and daring the guardian to confront the issue of his planned sedition.  “Har found something out when she escaped into the outside world, something that threatened you.  That’s why you retired her.  You feared her.”

“And you want to know what she found out?”

“Of course.”

“Do you expect me to tell you?”

“Yes.”

“I will say, only, Bram Meeks, what I have come here to say.  What you are doing is dangerous.  People will die, many people will die.  And their deaths will not be like retirement.  Their bodies will rot in the world outside the combs, and their genes decompose.  They will be lost forever.  Do you understand what that means?  Is that what you want?”

“I understand that we do not live,” Bram responded meekly, feeling chastized but not repentant.  “That’s all I understand.  If we do not live, how can we die?”

“What Har wanted to do was monstrous, and what you are thinking is equally monstrous.  You are a criminal, Bram.  We fear you.  Yes.  As we feared Har.  I have come to persuade you to leave the combworld and not come back.”

“Like you did with Har?” he asked.  When the guardian did not answer, he continued, “I will take the Betans.”  He was surprised by the guardian’s willingness to compromise and by his apparent concern for what was best for Bram himself, in spite of what he threatened.

“We expect you to.”

“And if I don’t leave?  What then?”

The guardian stood before Bram, his face hardening into sternness, and said, enunciating each word separately, as though he were announcing some ultimate doom, “I. . .will. . .obliterate. . .you. . .where. . .you. . .sit. . .and. . .shut. . .down. . .this. . .hex. . .for. . .all. . .eternity.”  He had extended his arm and pointed his finger at Bram’s forehead, his eyes gleaming with an inner light.

For a moment the two were silent, the guardian standing and looking down at Bram and Bram sitting looking upwards into the guardian’s face.  Bram felt weak and nauseous with fear as though his life were over.  Leaving the combworld, he knew, meant his death as surely as the guardian meant to take his life now if he misspoke.  Wondering if Har was given the same choice, he said quietly, “Obliterate me,” and bowed his head and waited for the end.

After several minutes, he looked up, expecting to see the guardian in the very act of killing him, but all he saw was an empty hex.  The guardian was gone.  What did it mean?  Recalling the guardian’s eyes all alight filled him with dread.  Was all this just a warning?  Or was it a demonstration of the weakness of the guardians?  No.  Har was retired.  They could have retired him.  But they didn’t.  Why?

It took him a long time to recover from the guardian’s visit.  He sat upright, pulling his heels deeper into his crotch, straightening his spine, and concentrated on the feeling of warmth rising in his body.  When he had put away the fear and returned to his usual equilibrium, he rose and looked across the hex to his toilet, which was still up and waiting for him.  

He stepped into it now and looked around.  This is how Har left her hex.  Why hadn’t it ever occurred to him? 

“Because I never thought about leaving it!” he said to himself. 

He stood in the air dry and the blowers immediately turned on.  Then he stepped out, and the air-dry cycle continued to operate as though he were still standing there.  He waited until it turned off.  Then he stepped into it again, and when it turned on, he stepped out, and then stepped out of the toilet, crossed to the floor pad, toed in the close command, and returned to the toilet.  The instant the air dry turned off, the toilet closed and descended into the floor, with Bram inside.

It never occurred to him that he might be trapped inside, unable from below to tell the toilet to rise again, unable to leave it, to be heard shouting for help.  It was a dangerous thing he did, but it never occurred to him that he would not succeed.  He was so confident of success that when he stepped out, he automatically assumed there would be floor to step onto.  He didn’t even look.  But once out of the toilet, its light turned off.  Able to see nothing in the dark, he stooped and felt the floor with his hand.  It was soil, pebbly and soft.  Digging his nails into it, he lifted a bit and hefted it in the palm of his hand.  This was real sensation, not holo sensation, and he was elated.  He put some into his mouth, spit out the grainy stuff, but kept a pebble to suck on.  It tasted wonderful.  It had a taste that made him swoon with delight.  It was totally dark, and when he rose, he extended his arms and felt around for something, anything.  He came to the toilet, and when he touched it, its light came on, and in this light, he could see the immediate surroundings.  Above his head was a complex of tubes and large cylinders, boxes of many shapes, tracks, and objects with designs and purposes he could not fathom.  Some of these tubes and cylinders were used for recycling wastes from his bath and commode.  But some of them were clearly independent, the largest of the boxes being man size.

“The Materia Immutata,” he thought.  How awful.

He sat down on the floor and let the light turn off.  Har had discovered a way, and he would, too.  He needed to be patient and think his way through the many problems that seemed to bar his way.  Har was physically old, and he was still young.  If she found a way out of the combworld, he could too.  What did she do in the dark?  And as he sat, he felt the answer come unbidden—a stirring of air on his right side!  He turned toward it.  The draft had to come from outside the combworld.  In his excitement, he began to rise, but he got a grip and forced himself to sit again.  Har not only got out, but she returned.  He had to solve this puzzle before he followed the draft.  Did Har just leave it to chance?  Not likely, he thought.  What guided her back?  As he put the question to himself, he leaned against the toilet, and its light came on.  He sat for a moment almost blinded by the glare.  Then he dug into the soil and gathered a deep handful and deposited it on the floor of the toilet.  Leaning away from it then, its light stayed on.

Elated by the simplicity of the solution, he rose and set out in the direction of the draft.  No hexan had any idea of the shape and extent of the combworld, nor had he; where his hex was in relation to any other, he couldn’t tell.  He wished he knew where Har’s hex was.  Thinking of her filled him with longing and with pain and then with an intense admiration.  As he neared other toilets, he touched them and their lights came on.  He imagined the glee Har must have felt as she lit her way out of the combworld.  He stopped, once, in the dark, and turned in the direction from which he had come.  He could still see the light of his toilet.  He could tell he had traveled quite a distance, for it seemed far, far away. 

After several hours, the draft seemed definitely stronger and began to carry unfamiliar scents.  He set his mind to discriminating among these, trying to imagine what they might be.  And then he was out!  He stepped away from the rim of the combworld and looked into the sky.  He saw stars and the bright band of the Milkyway, and they seemed not unlike what he saw in combworld virtual nights.  But the air on his skin, the odors, the vastness of the sky, and, as he turned, the dark obscuring dome of the combworld itself combined to overwhelm him—he tried to shout but found his voice lumped in his throat.  Then, his chest shaking, he began to sob.

Over the next several weeks, he guided all the Betans out of the combworld.  They brought with them as many food tablets as they could carry—this being a major problem, for they had no physical material out of which they could fashion containers and had to carry them in their hands.  But by relaying and returning, the most agile among them managed to carry a substantial ration for each person.  Once out of the combworld, however, they found that their naked bodies were cold in the evenings, and so they needed to learn how to make fire.  During the first weeks, Bram taught them the best kind of wood to gather and how to raise flames from it, and he taught them also how to build shelters into which they could huddle to keep warm.

After much discussion during those first weeks, it was decided that Bram should return with Aldous to the combworld.  Reluctantly, the two men set off to the Betans’ cavernous room, which Bram learned then was made from combining dozens of hexes over a period of thousands of years, and which had, warren-like, many hex portals through which Betans had passed to it over the lifecycles.  Using its holo projection wall, he began to visit places where large numbers of hexans congregated—city centers, village squares, parks, and beaches—and told everyone who would listen of the true nature of comblife and of the Betans’ own exodus. 

But most people would not listen, many were afraid of what he told them, and some were actively hostile, regarding him, as they rightly should, as a threat to their way of life.  As they called upon the guardians to retire him, a great confusion began to settle upon the combworld, for Bram appeared and reappeared with his message, successfully defying the guardians.  It all came to a head and to ruin one fatal combworld night.

In the virtual city of Pangea, hexans were to gather from all over the combworld to celebrate the work of the most important artists of the time.  Artists were a special breed of combspeople who worked with the guardians to develop and refine the virtual realities hexans spent their lives exploring.  They were people of extraordinary sensitivity to sensual life, and their perceptual skills were the basis upon which the subtleties of virtual experience were elaborated.  On this occasion, their own personal visions, developed apart and incorporated into holos by the guardians, were to be displayed.

In the center of Pangea, there was a great park where hexans gathered for the show.  Bram had projected into the park and was standing amid a closely bunched crowd of people, all of whom were discussing the latest exhibit.  Overhead, at mid-building height, was the exhibition space.  This was a vast screen that stretched from one side of the park to the other.  Just now, a series of geometric shapes in undulating colors was scrolling across the screen, igniting the air all around the park in pulsing vibratos of magenta and chromium yellow.  These were accompanied by sets of random numbers, presented as shimmering banners, which added to the unpredictability of the series of shapes and colors.  The combinations of numbers, shapes, and colors saturated the crowd with the wonders of the creative imagination, and their shrieks of delight and astonishment added sound to the aesthetic mix. 

Bram was patiently listening to a man explain to his companions the values of the random numbers and how their uniqueness multiplied the aesthetic geometry of the experience.  He was expatiating with the superior airs of the tastemaker upon the unequalled brilliance of this particular exhibit when the screen suddenly went dead; and in the stilled atmosphere, Bram heard his own voice give an apocalyptic account of the end of the combworld.

“Hexans of the combworld,” he heard himself say in a booming, direful voice, “I have tried to enlighten you in recent weeks to the unlife you call life, and to the undeath you call retirement.  I have tried to offer you a way out of the eternal coffin you call existence.  But all you have done is flee from me screaming.  Some of you have listened, but mostly in fear, and then you returned to your hexes.  I come now to tell you that you are all dead and that you have never lived but that life is waiting for you.  I have not come to offer you a choice.  I have come to force life upon you.  Some of you will suffer terribly.  Some of you will die.  But as of now, the combworld you have known as reality is shutting down.  It will no longer serve you.  When the lights go off, look to your hexes for the means to escape.  Your only necessity is to find your way out.  Look to your floors.  Break through them.  Tear them up.  Once on the ground below, follow the draft.  It is the breath of life.  We will be waiting for you.  Welcome to the macrocosm.”

When the voice had finished, Bram heard a deathly silence throughout the park.  Then, beginning spontaneously in different parts of the mobbed space, a screech and a squeal quickly rose into a crescendo of hysterical shrieking.  In the mayhem of rushing and crying, people began to lose concentration and to disappear, until Bram found himself alone in Pangea.  Then he, too, disappeared, leaving behind a place that could not even be called an emptiness, for it didn’t exist except as impulses in a microorganic neural network that lacked such a thing as simple location.  He met Aldous, then, beneath the cavernous room, and they began the systematic destruction underground of that neural network.  The guardians were helpless to intervene and save the only world they knew from annihilation, for they were projections of the combworld’s internal self-maintenance and self-correction programs, and thus, as holos, were transparent to the clubs wielded by the two men.  These worked feverishly, randomly destroying what was near at hand first, and then radiating outward until they came by chance to the central system.  When this was destroyed, the work was done.  It took days for people to begin to break through their floors, but eventually they succeeded, and they came into the world naked and bewildered. 

Bram organized the first teams of helpers and taught them to guide the freed hexans out into the macrocosm and, once there, teach them how to make fire and to build shelters.  Later, he taught them the necessity of eating and how to gather food and what was good to eat and what was not.  And to the question often put to him in the first days, the question of how he knew all these things, Bram answered only that he knew.  Those who listened to him survived and those who didn’t died.  Only later did it begin to dawn on some that Bram, having been a hexan through all his own lifecycles, could have known these things no better than themselves, and that his knowing was a mystery.  To some, it seems possible that the guardians themselves passed this knowledge to Bram, without, perhaps, his even knowing it, for in the depths of their own self-knowledge, they knew that their own time had come.  Their mission was to sustain life at all costs, as we were all taught in the first days of our lifecycles.  Could the guardians have known all along that their end was coming?

  Somewhere in the great world, exploring, searching, wandering, Bram is following an imperative over which, perhaps, he has no control.  What he is looking for, we don’t know, nor, we suspect, does he.  Someday he will return.  When he does, he will find us grown, both in numbers and in the fairness of our lives.  

* * *

When Thomas Singer had finished his story of Bram Meeks, we all looked around at each other.  There was so much suffering and so many deaths in the first days and weeks and months, the reminder of that time filled many of the first generation to live outside the combworld with sorrow.  There were tears in the eyes of our elders, and we felt that sadness, too.  People hugged each other, and rubbed each other’s backs, and kissed each other on the foreheads.  I don’t know if, at that moment, those who lived as hexans in the combworld mourned the loss of that life, of the immortality it offered, and the incredible variety of experiences it made possible.  I know only that, watching them touch each other, I would not have liked to have been a hexan. 

The younger generation had not heard this tale, though most of us had heard of Bram Meeks, and all of us knew of the combworld.  Some of us have even visited the outer rim of the great domed world, nestled vastly in the dry plains on the other side of the mountains, just to say we have seen it, and some of us have even climbed into it through the floors torn up by their hexan occupants.  But there was nothing to be seen or found within, it all being barren of things and numbingly the same.  Some of us younger ones have learned to raid the combworld for metals out of which we have made tools to till the ground and utensils for eating and hunting with.  The combworld will provide us with a store for many generations to come, and we all welcome that.