Scott called his dad.
    "Oh, you got the message that I sent for you?" Jeffrey asked.
    "Which one?"
    "That someone stole some of the research on how your central processors worked?"
    "Oh, yes. I'll explain that to you later."
    "But that's been handled?"
    "Yeah, that's been handled. Being bisected hurts."
    "I would say so, what happened?" Jeffrey asked, concerned.
    "I was about halfway through when the force field went up."
    Dr. Scott made a sound of sympathy. "Ow. I assume you're all right?"
    "I will be."
    "The system reabsorbed itself?" he pressed.
    "Yes."
    "Then it should just take you a couple of days for all of your internal processors to reset."
    "Oddly enough, one of the relatively equally sized hunks of me was sentient and the other one was lying there, although I don't know if it was just so shocked it hadn't come back online yet."
    "Hm. We could do further experiments with that, but...."
    "I'd far rather not," he understated.
    "Did you experience a loss of cognitive facilities?"
    "Yes." It had been rather odd, not being as smart as usual.
    "Okay, we're not experimenting in that direction, ever."
    After speaking to his father, Scott spent the remainder of the night restfully, starting with the final volume of the Secret Journals of the Honest Man Formerly Known As the Black Whip. There was a lot of boring stuff about the business. About halfway through, though, it was pretty clear that the writer was coming unhinged. Might have been stress; he wasn't really cut out for what he was trying to do with his life, it was just that he had a product no one else could duplicate and was completely unwilling to give up full control. A lot of secretaries and vice presidents came and went; there was the conviction that people were plotting against him; and of course the 'crimes that would not die.' "Despite the fact that I thought I had a clean slate," he wrote, "it's obvious that I do not. I am being haunted by those that I have stolen from, those that I have wronged." He'd set up foundations to return money to those he had stolen from. He'd given money for veterans' groups, convinced that certain battles had taken their course because of his ballistic cloth, which the Nazis had stolen. The money was never enough; he remained convinced that the families of the slain hated him.
    Depressing reading. Scott wondered if he'd started losing it and Bouros used him, or if Bouros had somehow set him up to lose it.
    Oddly enough, however, there was no mention of Bouros by name in the journal; Clark referred only to "the architect," and himself claimed credit for much of the building's design. By the time the house was being built his paranoia was in full stride, and the people around him had lost their names, as if it was too much effort for him to distinguish a person from their role.
    He did mention that it was the architect and the construction firm's owner who had provided him with "the ultimate means" that he needed. That now that he had this, he would be safe forever. Presumably that referred to the gem, although the journal then meandered off into trivialities. Scott put down the notebook and did some checking into Fairlawn Construction; David Wilson had been the owner at the time.
    So. He considered all of this, and turned his attention to Patricia Hoagland's book, Holding Up the Sky. It was, as she had said, a fictionalized account, from the view of a variety of "people on the street" all over the world, of the Plovian invasion. He had to give her credit for a sharp writing style; the book was very readable, approaching lyricism, and she conveyed the different cultures and mindsets of the characters well.
    It was also clear that she didn't like variants. Over the course of the book, the importance of the human characters, each of whom was somehow connected into the networks the Host had given warning through, diminished steadily. Then the invasion itself, humanity helpless before the threat while the variants came to higher and higher prominence. In the final scenes, President Reagan stood with members of Ground Zero, and the viewpoint character didn't even realize the president was there. The variants were in power, because humanity could no longer defend itself, and the latter could only hope to be allowed to continue going about their day-to-day affairs. There was virtually no mention of the Plovian viewpoint until the very end, when the world's variants informed the UN that they would be placing the aliens in Antarctica, and there was nothing they needed to worry about—which was not exactly how it had happened, Scott knew; it had been a UN decision, not something handed down by any variant organization, though it might have looked that way to some.
    It was all very well done; there was nothing one could point to and claim bigotry, but at the end of the book a human reader might well be left uneasy about how it had all worked out. Scott was troubled himself.
    
    After the requisite fussing from Candi and Dawn, Phoenix Talon slept the sleep of the just.

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