“I appreciate your coming, Father,” Tapi said. “Your partials were growing tired of me.”

“I doubt that,” Olmy said.

“I kept testing them to see if they matched you.”

“Did they?”

“Yes, but I irritated them…”

“You should always be polite to a partial. They carry tales, you know.”

“You haven’t accessed their memories?”

“Not yet. I wanted to see you fresh.”

Tapi projected a haze of body plans for Olmy’s approval. The young man’s body would be self-contained, but without the reliance on Talsit parts and other maintenance items in short supply. His design would not be able to exist so long without maintenance and nutrition, but for these times it was a better design than Olmy’s. It was certainly more practical. “What do you think?”

“It’s very good. You’ve earned council approval?”

“Provisional.”

“You’ll get it. Elegant adaptation,” Olmy said, and meant it. He almost wished he could apply for reincarnation and try it out. Still, he had lived with Talsit parts for so long…

“Do you think they’ll re-open the Way?”

Olmy gave him the mental equivalent of a grimace. “Don’t race ahead,” he said. “I haven’t got more than a few memory hours, and I don’t want to spend them discussing politics. I want my son to teach me all he’s learned.”

Tapi’s enthusiasm was electric. “Wonderful things, Father! Did you ever study Mersauvin structures?”

Olmy had, but only briefly, finding them tedious. He didn’t tell his son this.

“I’ve made the most remarkable correlations,” Tapi continued. “At first I thought they were tedious abstractions, but then I plugged them into analysis of synthetic situation and found the most incredible judgments. They allow the most complex predictive modeling. They act as self-adapting algorithms for social scaling and planning…they even model individual interactions!”

Tapi moved them into a private buffer. “I decorated this myself,” he said. “Nobody’s seen fit to overwrite yet. I think that’s a compliment from my crèche mates…”

It certainly was. Private buffer decors in the crèche were usually as vulnerable and fleeting as ice in a fire. The decor, to Olmy’s view an exhausting array of mental tests and demonstrated algorithms, was far more complex and accomplished than anything he could have done.

“I took some liberties with my formal lessons,” Tapi continued. “I applied the Mersauvin structures to external events.”

“Oh? What did you learn?”

Tapi displayed a jagged and discontinuous curve. “Many breaks. The Hexamon is under severe strain. We’re not a happy society any more. We were once, I think; in the Way. I compared the present dissatisfaction with psychological profiles of nostalgia for previous stages of life in natural-born homorphs. The small mimics the large. The algorithms show that the Hexamon wants to return to the Way. My teachers haven’t graded me very well on this, I’m afraid. They say the results lack rigor.”