Part 25 (2/2)

Polyon nodded. His look of suffering had not abated.

”Yes, he said that was the story he'd given you. Then I thought-if you didn't know - perhaps I could trade the information for a reduction in my own sentence.”

”What information?*” Forister asked sharply.

Polyon shook his head. ”Never mind. It doesn't mat- ter. I've enough on my conscience already,” he said, raising his head and staring at the wall with a look of n.o.ble resignation that Forister found intensely irritat- ing. ”I won't compound my crimes by informing on a friend. It's all on this minihedron-well, never mind.”

”What,” asked Forister with the last vestiges of his patience, ”what exactly is supposed to be on the mini- hedron?'' He stared at the faceted black shape Polyon held in his hand, dark and baleful like the eye of an alien G.o.d.

”The true records of how Blaize made his fortune,”

Polyon said. ”It's all there - he thought he'd con- cealed his tracks, but there were enough Net links for me to find the records. I'm very good with computers, you know,” he said with a boy's naive pride. ”But when I begged him to tell you the truth, he laughed at me.

Said he had you convinced of his innocence and he saw no reason to change the situation. That was when I thought - but no,” Polyon said, averting his face as he thrust out the minihedron towards Forister, ”I don't want any favors.”

Forister felt as queasy as though they had already entered Singularity. Was this why Blaize had tried so hard to keep him from talking to Polyon? He'd wanted to keep Polyon drugged and unconscious until they reached Central; he'd had that silly story about Polyon using the s.p.a.cED OUT game as a cover for some land of plot But what good would it do to keep Polyon from talking for two weeks, when his evidence - whatever it might be-would come out anyway at the trial?

*Just-you take this. Read it once. Then keep it safe - or wipe it if you want to,” Polyon said,”/ don't care.

I just wanted to hand it over to - to somebody honorable.” His voice broke slighdy on the last word, and Forister thought there was a gleam of moisture in the corners of his eyes. ”G.o.d knows, I can scarcely claim that for myself. You take it. You'll know what to do with the information.”

”What is it?”

Polyon shook his head again. ”I don't - I can't tell you. Go and read it in privacy. Just drop it into any of the s.h.i.+p's reader slots and have a look at the informa- tion. Then I'll leave it up to you to decide what should be done. And I don't,” he said, almost savagely, ”I don't want to profit from it, do you understand? Say you got it from somebody else. Or don't say where you got it Or destroy it. Do what you want - it's off my con- science now, at any rate!”

He dropped back onto the bunk and buried his head in his arms. Overhead, the silvery chime of the first warning bell sounded. ”Five minutes to Sin- gularity,” Nancia announced. ”All pa.s.sengers, please fie down or seat yourselves and secure free-fall straps.

Tablets for Singularity sickness are available in all cabins; if you think you may be adversely affected by the transition, please medicate yourself now. Five minutes to Singularity.”

Polyon fumbled without looking up, caught his free-fall strap and buckled it around himself. ”Sin- gularity,” he said bitterly, ”doesn't make me sick. But what's on that minihedron does.”

280 Forister left the cabin with a sparkling black mini- hedron clutched in his hand, the facets cutting into his palms, his head awhirl with doubts.

”What a magnificent acting job!” Nancia com- mented with a low laugh.

”You think Polyon was lying?”

”I'm certain of it,” she told him. ”You know Polyon.

You know Blaize. Is it credible for an instant that Blake could have committed crimes that would turn Polyon's stomach?”

”I - don't know,” Forister groaned. He dropped into the pilot's chair and stared unseeing at the console before him. Micaya Questar-Benn tactfully pretended to polish the gleaming buckle on her uniform belt.

”Up to now, I'd have said - but I'm biased, you know.”

”Well, I'm not,” Nancia said decisively. ”I don't know what Polyon's going on about, but whatever it is, I don't believe a word of it”

Forister laughed weakly. ”You're biased too, dear Nancia.” He stared at the sparkling surface of the minihedron, the polished opaque facets that gave nothing away, and sighed deeply. ”I suppose I had bet- ter find out what this is.”

”Can't it wait until after Singularity?” Nancia said, but too late. Forister had already dropped the datahedron into the reader slot. Automatically, her mind already on the vortex of mathematical transfor- mations ahead, Nancia absorbed the contents of the minihedron into memory. Something strange there, not like ordinary words, more like a tickle at the back of her head or an improperly positioned synaptic connector - She rode the whirlwind down into Singularity, balanc- ing and coasting along constantly changing equations that defined the collapsing walls of the vortex.

Something was wrong; she sensed it even before she281.

lost her grasp on the mathematical transformations.

She had never experienced a transition like this one.

What was happening? Sounds as slimy as decaying weed whispered and snickered in her ears; colors beyond the edges of human perception rasped at her like fingernails being drawn over a blackboard. The balance of salts and fluids surrounding her shrunken human body swirled crazily, and a dozen alarm sys- tems went off at once: Overload! Overload! Overload!

She couldn't optimize the path; s.p.a.ces decomposed around her and shot off in an infinity of different recompositions, expanding in every path to lights and chaos that could tear her apart. The hyperchip- enhanced mathematics coprocessors returned gibberish. Her brain waves were strung out on the grid of a multi-dimensional matrix. Something was trying to invert the matrix. No computations matched previous results, and all directions held danger.

Nancia shut down all processing at once. The grat- ing colors and stinking noises receded. She hung in blackness, refusing her own sensory inputs, balanced on the point of Singularity where decomposing sub- s.p.a.ces intersected, with no way forward and no way back.283.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

Polyon was pacing the narrow s.p.a.ce of his cabin, too impatient to strap himself in for Singularity, waiting for some sign that Forister had taken the bait, when the air s.h.i.+mmered and thickened around him.

He opened his mouth to curse his luck. The s.h.i.+p had entered Singularity before that thick-headed brawn ambled to a reader slot The air distorted into gla.s.sy waves, then became al- most too thin to breathe. The cabin walls and furnis.h.i.+ngs receded to specks in the distance, then swam around him, huge menacing free-flowing shapes. Polyon's curses became a comical growl en- ding in a squeak.

d.a.m.n Singularity! There was no chance that Forister would drop the datahedron into a reader now, he'd be safely strapped into his pilot's chair like a good little brawn. By now, too, the s.h.i.+p's reader slots would probably be shut down for Singularity - and even if by some miracle he could persuade Nantia to accept the hedron, he still would not be able to enter the Net until the transformations were over and they had returned to normal s.p.a.ce. No, he would have to wait until after the subs.p.a.ce transformation to implement Final Phase - and this transformation would bring the brains.h.i.+p into Central subs.p.a.ce, close to all the aid that Central Worlds and their innumerable fleets could give.

He reminded himself that this made no difference whatsoever. The basic nature of the gamble remained the same. Either his plan had advanced far enough to succeed despite the way they were forcing his hand, or jt hadn't. If it had, then the fleets of Central would be obedient to him and not to their former masters. If it hadn't - well, then, annihilation would be a little quicker than if he'd moved from the remote s.p.a.ces around Nyota, that was all.

He had only to sit and wait. And waiting out a single transformation through Singularity should be noth- ing to him. He had already spent patient years waiting on Shemali, planting his seeds, watching them grow, seeding the universe, ever since he had the flash of brilliance which at once conceived the hyperchip design and saw how it could be twisted to his own ends.

But this waiting was harder than all those years in which he had at least been doing something to further those ends; and it seemed longer; and there was some- thing disturbing about this particular s.h.i.+p's decomposition. Singularity wasn't supposed to be this bad. Polyon breathed and gagged on a sickly swirl of colors and smells and textures, looked down at the wavering distortions of his own limbs and closed his eyes momentarily. That was a mistake; Singularity sickness heaved through his guts. What was the mat- ter? He'd been through plenty of decompositions during his Academy training, not to mention pa.s.sing through this very same Singularity point on die way out to Vega subs.p.a.ce. Had he so completely lost con- ditioning in the five years on Shemali, to be gagging and puking like any new recruit now?

No. Something else was wrong. This decomposition was lasting too long. And some of the visual distortions looked oddly familiar. Polyon fixed his eyes on one small sector of the cabin, where braces supporting an extruded shelf formed a simple dosed curve of permalloy and plas- Ofilm. As he watched, the triangle ofbrace, waU and shelf elongated to a needle-shape with one thin eye, stretched out into an open eye as big as the wall, squeezed into a 284.

fcf 285.

rotating pinpoint of light with absolute blackness at its center, and opened again into the original triangle.

Needle, eye, pinpoint, triangle; needle, eye, pinpoint, tri- angle. They were caught in a subs.p.a.ce loop, perpetually decomposing and reforming in a sequence which preserved topological properties but which made no progress towards the escape sequence leading to Central subs.p.a.ce.

A loop like that couldn't have happened, shouldn't have happened, unless the s.h.i.+p's processors had shut down. Or - a wild hope tantalized him - unless the s.h.i.+p's processors were too busy with some other prob- lem to navigate them out of Singularity.

A problem like a.s.similating a worm program which would turn over all control to a single user, effectively cutting the brain off from her own body and its processing.

Polyon swallowed his unspoken curses and plunged across the cabin. He had some trouble locating the palmpad and holding his hand steady over it, but even- tually he managed to match his shrinking and bending arm with the erratic loop of the ballooning palmpad. He slapped the surface twice. ”Voice control mode!”

His own voice boomed oddly in his ears, the soundwaves distorted by the perpetual twisting of s.p.a.ce around him, but evidently there was something un- changing in the voice patterns which his worm program still recognized. ”Voice control acknowledged,” an un- dulant voice boomed and twittered from the speakers.

”Unlock this cabin door.” The first time the words came out as an unrecognizable squeak; the next, something close to his normal speaking voice emerged and the computer acknowledged the command. But nothing happened. A moment later the quavering vocal signal of the program responded with a shrill squeak that gradually became a groaning boom.

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