By the light of the moon

he'd been given more time to
analyze it. 'You were not just furious at those evil bastards...
but at evil itself, at the fact that evil exists, infuriated by the
very idea of evil allowed to go unresisted, unchecked.'
    'Good God, you've been inside my head, or I've been in
yours.'
    'Neither,' Dylan said. 'But tell me this... In the church, you
understood the danger?'
    'Oh, yeah.'
    'You knew that you might be shot, crippled for life, killed
– but you did what had to be done.'
    'There was nothing else to do.'
    'There's always something else to do,' he disagreed. 'Run, for
one thing. Give up, go away. Did you think about doing that?'
    'Of course.'
    'But was there one moment, even one brief moment in the church,
when you could have run?'
    'Oh, man,' she said, and shuddered as she began to recognize the
burden coming, the weight that they would never be able to put down
until they were in the grave. 'Yeah, I could've run. Hell, yeah, I
could've. I almost did.'
    'All right, so maybe you could've. Maybe we still can run. But
here's the thing... Was there one moment, even one brief moment,
when you could have turned your back on your responsibility to save
those people – and still lived with yourself? '
    She stared at him.
    He met her stare.
    Finally she said, 'This sucks.'
    'Well, it does and it doesn't.'
    She thought about that for a moment, smiled shakily, and agreed:
'It does and it doesn't.'
    'The new connections, the new neural pathways engineered by the
nanomachines, have given us some clairvoyance, an imperfect talent
for premonitions, the folding. But those aren't the only changes
we've gone through.'
    'Sort of wish they were the only changes.'
    'Me too. But this righteous anger seems always to lead to an
irresistible compulsion to act.'
    'Irresistible,' she agreed. 'Compulsion, obsession, or something
we don't have a term for.'
    'And not merely a compulsion to act, but...'
    He hesitated to add the last five words, which would express the
truth that would shape the course of their lives.
    'Okay,' said Shep.
    'Okay, buddy?'
    Gazing out of the tower shade toward the blazing land, the kid
said, 'Okay. Shep isn't afraid.'
    'Okay then. Dylan isn't afraid, either.' He took a deep breath
and finished what must be said: 'The righteous anger always leads
to an all but irresistible compulsion to act regardless of the
risks, and not merely a compulsion to act, but to do the right
thing . We can exercise free will and turn away – but only
at a cost in self-respect that's intolerable.'
    'That couldn't have been what Lincoln Proctor expected,' Jilly
said. 'The last thing a man like him would want was to be the
father of a generation of do-gooders.'
    'You'll get no argument from me. The man was slime. His visions
were of an amoral master race that might make a more orderly world
by cracking the whip on the rest of humanity.'
    'Then why have we become... what we've become?'
    'Maybe when we're born, all of us, our brains are already wired
to know the right thing, to know always what we ought to do.'
    'That's sure what my mama taught me,' Jilly said.
    'So maybe the nanomachines just made some improvements in that
existing circuit, redesigned it for less resistance, until now
we're wired to do the right thing no matter what our preferences,
no matter what our desires, regardless of the consequences to us, at any cost .'
    Working her mind through it, formulating a final understanding
of the code by which she was henceforth fated to live, Jilly said,
'From here on, every time I get a vision of violence or
disaster—'
    'And every time a psychic spoor reveals to me that someone is in
trouble or up to no good—'
    '—we'll be compelled—'
    '—to save the day,' he finished, putting it in those words
because he thought they might wring another smile from her, even if
a feeble one.
    He needed to see her smile.
    Maybe her expression was what a smile might look like in the
twisting influence of a funhouse mirror, but the sight of it didn't
cheer him.
    'I can't stop the visions,' she said. 'But you can wear
gloves.'
    He shook his head. 'Oh, I imagine I could go so far as to buy a
pair. But putting them on to avoid learning about the plans of evil
people or the troubles of good people? That would be the wrong thing to do, wouldn't it? I suppose I could buy the
gloves, but I don't think I'd be able to put them on.'
    'Wow,' said Shepherd, perhaps as a comment about all that they
had said, perhaps as a comment on the desert heat, or maybe