Part 6 (2/2)

The families were being incredibly two-faced. 'Just curious,' I said. 'What's it going to cost us?, 'In the long term? That's right,' he said, as if the reason for my surliness had finally been solved. 'You're financial manager for the Ice Pit. I'm sorry; I'm a bit slow. Believe me, we're interested in this as a research project, If we perfect our techniques here, we can market the medical applications all over the Triple and beyond. We're charging you expenses and nothing else, Mickey. This is platinum opportunity., 'Does it work?' I asked, still sullen.

He thumped the case. 'Data right here. We're checking it with history on Earth. I'd say it works, yes. Talking with the dead - I don't think anybody's done that before!'

'Who was it?' I asked.

'One of the three unknowns. Rho decided we'd work with them first, to help solve the mystery. Please go right in, Mickey. Nernst has designed a very nice facility. Ask questions, see what they're doing. They're working on unknown number two right now.'

'Thanks,' I said, wondering what distortion of protocol could lead this man to invite me into my own BM's facility. 'I'm glad it's working.'

'AU right,' the man said, with a short intake of breath. 'Must be off. Check this individual out, correlate ... on our own nickel, Mickey. Good to have met you.'

I stopped at the white line and queried. 'G.o.dd.a.m.n it, yes!' William's voice roared from the speaker. 'It's open. just cross the G.o.dd.a.m.n line and stop bothering me.'

'It's me, Mickey,' I said.

'Well then, come on in and join the party! Everybody else is here.'

William had locked himself in the laboratory. Three Onnes and Cailetet techs were on the bridge, standing well away from the force disorder pumps, chatting and eating lunch. I pa.s.sed them by with casual nods.

William sounded in no mood for visitors - this time of day was usually his phase of most intense activity. I swung on to the lift and descended to Rho's facility, twenty feet below the laboratory. The Ice Pit echoed with voices from above and below; the sounds seemed to come from all directions as I descended in the open lift, first to the right, then the left, cancelled, returned, grew soft, then immediate. Rho came through the hatch at the top of the chamber and rushed forward excitedly. 'William's p.i.s.sed off, but we're leaving him alone, mostly, so it will pa.s.s.' She fairly brewed over with enthusiasm. 'Oh, Mickey' She threw her arms around me.

'Yes?'

'Did you hear upstairs? We tuned in to a head! It works! Come on in. We're working on the second head now.'

'An unknown,' I said with polite interest, her enthusiasm not infecting me. (How much could I blame her for these problems?) 'Yes. Another unknown. I still can't get a response from the StarTime trustees. Do you think they've lost all their back-up records? That would be something, wouldn't it?' She ushered me down the hatch into the chamber. Within the chamber, all was quiet but for a faint song of electronics and the low hiss of refrigerants.

I recognized Armand Cailetet-Davis, the balding, slightfigured powerhouse of Cailetet research. Beside him stood Irma s...o...b..rt of Onnes, a reputed lunar-born superwhiz whom I had heard of but never met: thirty or thirty-five, tall tall and thin with reddish brown hair and chocolate skin. They stood beside a tripod-mounted piece of equipment, three horizontal cylinders strapped together, pointed at the face of one of the forty stainless-steel boxes mounted in the racks. and thin with reddish brown hair and chocolate skin. They stood beside a tripod-mounted piece of equipment, three horizontal cylinders strapped together, pointed at the face of one of the forty stainless-steel boxes mounted in the racks.

Rho introduced me to Cailetet-Davis and s...o...b..rt. I felt a little thrill of something - a realization of what was actually going on here - penetrating my dark mood.

'We're selecting one of the seventy-three known natural mind languages,' Armand explained, pointing at a thinker prism in Irma s...o...b..rt's hands. She smiled, quick glance at me, at Armand, distracted, then continued to work on her thinker, which was about a tenth the size of William's QL, easily portable. 'We'll test some uploaded data for patterns.-'

'Patterns from the head,' I said, stating the obvious.

'Yes. A masculine individual, age sixty-five at death, apparently in good condition considering the medical standards of the time. Very little deterioration.'

'Have you looked inside?' I asked.

Rho lifted her brows. 'Brother, n.o.body looks inside. Not by actually opening the box. We don't care what they look like.' She laughed nervously. 'It's not the head, it's what's locked up in the brain.'

A soul, still. Now I was s.h.i.+vering from fatigue, as well as something like superst.i.tious awe. 'Sorry,' I said to n.o.body in particular. They ignored me, concentrating on their work.

'We find northern Europeans tend to cl.u.s.ter in these three program areas,' s...o...b..rt explained. She showed me a slate screen on which a diagram had been sketched. The diagram showed twelve different rectangles, each labelled with a cultural-ethnic group. Her finger underlined three boxes: Finn, Scand, Teut. 'Mind memory-storage languages are among the genetic traits most rigidly adhered to. We think they change very little across thousands of years. That makes sense, considering the necessity of immediate infant adaptation to its milieu.'

'Indeed,' Rho said, smiling at me, squeezing my arm again gently. 'So he's of northern European stock?'

'He's definitely not Levantine, African or Oriental,' Irma s...o...b..rt said. I watched her curiously, focusing on her face, lean and intent, with lovely, skeptical brown eyes.

'Have you spoken with your syndics?' I asked out of the blue, startling even myself.

Armand had clearly earned his position in Cailetet through quick thinking and adaptability. With no hesitation whatsoever, he said, 'We work here until somebody tells us to leave. n.o.body has yet. Maybe you administrators can work it all out in the council.'

You administrator. That put us in our place. Paper pushers, bureaucrats, politicians. Cut the politics. We were the ones who stood in the way of the scientist's goal of unrestrained research and intellection.

'I see a fourteen Penrose cipher trace algorithm in the cerebral cortex,' Irma said. 'Definitely northern European.' Rho looked troubled, examined my face for signs. With a tug of my ear and a gesture up into the air I indicated we should talk. She drew me aside. 'Are you tired?' she asked.

'Dead on my feet,' I said. 'I'm an idiot, Rho, and maybe I've augured this whole thing right into a rille.'

'I have faith in the family. We'll make it. I have faith in you, Micko,' she said, grasping my arm. I felt vaguely sick, seeing her expression of support, her trust. 'I'd like you to stay and watch ... this is really something ... if you're up to it?' 'Wouldn't miss it,' I said.

'It's almost religious, isn't it?' she whispered in my ear.

'All right,' Armand said. 'We have the locale. Let's take a picture, upload into the translator, and see if we can draw a name from the file.'

Armand adjusted the position on the triple cylinders and tuned his slate to their output, getting a picture of a vague grey ma.s.s suspended by a thin sling in a sharp black square - the head resting in its cubicle and cradle within the larger box. 'We're centred,' he said. 'Irma, if you could ...'

'Field guide on,' she said, flipping a switch on a tiny disk taped to the box.

'Recording,' Armand said nonchalantly. There was no noise, no visible or audible sign that anything was happening. Squares appeared on Armand's slate in the upper right-hand portion of the ma.s.s. I was able to make out that the head had slumped to one side, whether facing us or not, I could not tell. I kept staring at the image, the squares flas.h.i.+ng one by one in sequence around the cranium, and I realized with a gruesome tingle that the head was misshapen, that during its decades in storage it had deformed in the presence of Earth gravity, nestling deeper into its sling like a frozen melon.

'Got it,' Armand said. 'One more - the third unknown and we'll call it a session.'

For Rho's sake, I stayed to watch the third head being scanned and its neural states and patterns recorded. I kissed Rho's cheek, congratulated her and took the lift to the bridge. Again, the voices flowed around me, soft technical chatter from the chamber below, the technicians on the bridge above.

I went to my water tank room and collapsed. Strangely enough, I slept well.

Rho came into my room and woke me up at twelve hundred, eight hours after I'd dropped on to my bed. Obviously, she had not slept at all; her hair was matted with finger-tugs and rearrangement, her face s.h.i.+ny with long hours.

'We got a name on the number one unknown,' she said. 'It's a female, not a male, we think. But we haven't done chromosome check through their sensors. Irma located a few minutes of pre-death short-term memory and translated it into sound. We heard...' She suddenly wrinkled her face, as if about to cry, and then lifted her head and laughed. 'Micko, we heard a voice, it must have been a doctor, a voice speaking out loud, 'Inchmore, can you hear me? Evelyn? We need your permission ...'

'That's...' I couldn't find a good word.

'Yeah, amen,' Rho said, sitting on the edge of the bed, 'Evelyn Inchmore. I've sent a query to StarTime's trustees on Earth. Evelyn Inchmore, Evelyn Inchmore...' She spoke the name out loud several more times, her voice dropping in exhaustion and wonder. 'Do you know what this means, Micko?'

'Congratulations,' I said.

'It's the first time anybody has ever communicated with a corpsicle,' Rho said distantly.

'She hasn't answered back,' I said. 'You've just accessed her memories.' I shrugged my shoulders. 'She's still dead.' 'Yeah,' Rho said. 'Just accessed her memories. Wait a minute.' She looked up at me, startled by some inner realization. 'Maybe it's a male, after all. We thought the name was female... But didn't Evelyn used to be a male's name Wasn't there a male author centuries ago named Evelyn?'

'Evelyn Waugh,' I said. 'Long E.'

'We could have it all wrong again,' she said, too tired to build up much concern. 'I hope we can straighten it out before this goes to the press.'

<script>