Genre Performing Arts. Page - 5

es. Only one seat, that of Nonan, remained empty. The old man had died of a chill that had left him bedridden and coughing for three weeks. No new elder had yet been selected but everyone expected the blacksmith Grado to take the seat. He was well liked and keen.

Severn was addressing the four old men stringing out lines of formality and false respect that left the four men baffled and confused. For four years Severn had asked the elders to open the old mines deeper in the hills but so far the elders declined. More salt mining required more salt miners. Enlarging the village was not desirable and most knew that Severn only desired wealth and a seat on the council of elders. He had been blocked for ten years.

"Uncle, I must speak," said Ca'daan. Severn scowled at him. Gauve looked at him and frowned.

"You may speak when it is your turn," he said. Severn cleared his throat to begin.

"Fena Set has burned," said Ca'daan. All eyes turned to him. Each face revealed either shock, anger, c

ill be most pleased as she ships you off to the state hospital at Osawatomie!"

Buddy took a few steps back from the camera and shifted the Strat into playing position. "That's all the sign says, but I'll repeat the address in a while in case nobody's listening right now." He looked up and around, as if watching an airplane cross the sky. "Seems like I'm in a big glass bubble, and I can't tell where the light's coming from. It's a little chilly, and I sure hope I don't have to be here long. In the meantime, here's one for your family audience, Mr. Sullivan." He struck a hard chord and began singing "Oh, Boy!" in a wild shout.

I remote-controlled the Sony into blank-screened silence. Poor Buddy. He had seemed to be surrounded by nothing worse than stars and shadows, but I remembered enough from my Introductory Astronomy course to know better. Ganymede was an immense ice ball strewn with occasional patches of meteoric rock, and its surface was constantly bombarded by vicious streams of protons and

Call him Cobb Anderson2. Cobb2 didn't drink. Cobb envied him. He hadn't had a completely sober day since he had the operation and left his wife.

"How did you get here?"

The robot waved a hand palm up. Cobb liked the way the gesture looked on someone else. "I can't tell you," the machine said. "You know how most people feel about us."

Cobb chuckled his agreement. He should know. At first the public had been delighted that Cobb's moon-robots had evolved into intelligent boppers. That had been before Ralph Numbers had led the 2001 revolt. After the revolt, Cobb had been tried for treason. He focused back on the present.

"If you're a bopper, then how can you be... here?" Cobb waved his hand in a vague circle, taking in the hot sand and the setting sun. "It's too hot. All the boppers I know of are based on supercooled circuits. Do you have a refrigeration unit hidden in your stomach?"

Anderson2 made another familiar hand-gesture. "I'm not going to tell you yet, Cobb. Later you'

not monsters. That one was just trying to protect itself."

"What was that silver stuff? It looked alive!"

"Dad told me about that one time. The mothers protect themselves with it. He said the stuff goes towards whatever's wettest. He said he saw somebody get covered with it once; he died, but the stuff was still on him, so they got it off by dropping the body in a horse trough."

Emmy shuddered. "That was an awful chance. Don't do anything like that again, hear?"

The excitement was over, and the rest of the crowd began to disperse. "Come, let's get you cleaned up," she said, towing him in the direction of the kitchens.

As they were rounding the reflecting pool, Jordan heard the sudden thunder of hooves, saw the dust fountaining up from them. They were headed straight for him.

"Look out!" He whirled, pushing Emmy out of the way. She shrieked and fell in the pool.

The sound vanished; the dust blinked out of existence.

There were no horses. The courtyard was

ti, which is intouch with each one of the four globes and a part of it. Thesame is true of any aggregation of prakriti--of the earth itselfand of all things in it, including man. As there are fouratoms in each one, so there are four earths, four globes,consubstantial, one for each of the four elements, and in touchwith it. One is formed of prakritic atoms--the globe we know;another, of the ether forming their envelopes; another, of theprana envelopes of ether, and a fourth of the manasa around thepranic atom. They are not "skins"; they are consubstantial.And what is true of atoms or globes is true of animals. Each hasfour "material" bodies, with each body on the corresponding globe--whether of the earth or of the Universe. This is the physicalbasis of the famous "chain of seven globes" that is such astumbling-block in Hindu metaphysics. The spirit passes throughfour to get in and three to get out--seven in all. The Hinduunderstands without explanation. He understands his physics.

He was so angry I thought he was going to pop. You know I said I'd only seen him lose his cool rarely? That night, he lost it more than he ever had.

"You wouldn't believe it. This cop, he was like eighteen years old and he kept saying, 'But sir, why were you in Berkeley yesterday if your client is in Mountain View?' I kept explaining to him that I teach at Berkeley and then he'd say, 'I thought you were a consultant,' and we'd start over again. It was like some kind of sitcom where the cops have been taken over by the stupidity ray.

"What's worse was he kept insisting that I'd been in Berkeley today as well, and I kept saying no, I hadn't been, and he said I had been. Then he showed me my FasTrak billing and it said I'd driven the San Mateo bridge three times that day!

"That's not all," he said, and drew in a breath that let me know he was really steamed. "They had information about where I'd been, places that didn't have a toll plaza. They'd been polling my pass just on the street, at random. And it was wrong! Holy crap, I mean, they're spying on us all and they're not even competent!"

ele-1983, but external conditions caused the `temporary' freeze to become permanent.

The AI Lab culture had been hit hard in the late 1970s by funding cuts and the resulting administrative decision to use vendor-supported hardware and software instead of homebrew whenever possible. At MIT, most AI work had turned to dedicated LISP Machines. At the same time, the commercialization of AI technology lured some of the AI Lab's best and brightest away to startups along the Route 128 strip in Massachusetts and out West in Silicon Valley. The startups built LISP machines for MIT; the central MIT-AI computer became a [45]TWENEX system rather than a host for the AI hackers' beloved [46]ITS.

The Stanford AI Lab had effectively ceased to exist by 1980, although the SAIL computer continued as a Computer Science Department resource until 1991. Stanford became a major [47]TWENEX site, at one point operating more than a dozen TOPS-20 systems; but by the mid-1980s most of the interesting software work was being

who will investigate and send us word of the situation before we get involved. That way, we appear concerned with our neighbors but not foolhardy. I suggest we hire delvers. They will move across the countryside far faster than any of us. They can assess the situation and make first contact with those needing the greatest help."

"Yes, yes," Consprite said quickly. He turned a pen in his fingers. "This is very true. We would not waste time or effort in the less lucrative areas. Any delver worth his salt would surely give us a great advantage." He looked up with a nod of acceptance. "I heartily approve."

"I oppose the measure," Cofort said sullenly. "I do not trust delvers. They always require large payments and no one can ever really tell if they do what they say they do. No one can follow them, no one can check up on them."

"I realize that delvers are expensive," Consprite admitted candidly, "but that's because no one can do the job they can do. I realize that it is difficult to check on

equences of early theory. Pilots didn't go back in time, didn't show up younger than a twin brother. The ship simply became invisible as it moved faster than the light around it.

It was just a matter of propulsion. Find a way to increase energy and you keep breaking speed records. That was the key to the Boscon Prop.

Ironically, Boscon's basic principles dated back to the invention of the wheel. In watching a simple spinning disk, Boscon understood that the number of rotations was the constant while the speed upon the same surface was variable. He applied this reasoning for matter spinning about the nucleus of an atom.

He theorized that if it were possible to expand an electron's orbit around the nucleus without searing it off, the speed at the outer edge would exceed the speed near the center; the speed of light would be surpassed. With a few adaptations, like making the fuel more efficient, and concentrating the density of the charge, interstellar travel became as common as solar system

dded at Sandon, a gesture Sandon politely returned.

He had only ever seen the younger Ka Vail boy from a distance. Up close, Jarid Ka Vail had much of his father's looks: the hooded gray eyes, the high cheekbones, and the thin lips. His mouth betrayed a slight arrogance. Sandon graced him with a polite smile.

"So, what news? How are the preparations going?" asked Ka Vail, looking back up at his son.

"We've started to pull in the groundcars from the farms and the communications networks are ready to be shut down. Preparations for line of sight are in progress. Data backup is already under way, but Markis is handling most of that. I've been helping out where I can, but I think we might be in for a difficult time. The Kallathik have been gathering again."

The Guildmaster passed a hand across his brow. "Why does it never change? Every Storm Season it's the same damned thing. What is it this time?"

"There have been mutterings about conditions in the mines, but most of that's thir