Part 27 (1/2)

Polyon laughed without humor. ”Fa.s.sa, dear, to righteous souls like Forister and General Questar- Benn we're all monsters. I should have remembered how you sucked up to them before, helping them trick me. Did you think that would save you? They'll use you and throw you away like your father did.”

Fa.s.sa went white and still as stone. ”We don't all take such a simple-minded view of the universe,” Forister said. ”But, Fa.s.sa, you can't - ”

Darnell's fingers were twitching. Polyon nodded.

Slowly, too slowly, Darnell raised the needier. He gave Forister ample time to grasp Fa.s.sa by the shoulders and spin her out of danger. As Forister moved, the cabin seemed to lurch and the lights dimmed. Gravity fell to half-normal, then to nothing, and as Fa.s.sa spun into midair the reaction of Forister's thrust pushed him in the opposite direction. The spray of needles went wide, but one bright line on the for edge of the arc stung through Forister's sleeve and bloodied his wrist. The blood danced out across the cabin in bright droplets that the transition loop pulled out into b.l.o.o.d.y seas; Polyon watched a bubble the size of a small pond 296.

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float inexorably toward him, settle around him with a clammy grip, then shrink to a bright b.u.t.ton-sized stain on his shut front.

Fa.s.sa floated back to grasp Forister's flaccid body and cry, ”Why did you do that? I wanted to save you!”

”Wanted him - to kill me,” Forister breathed. The paravenin was fighting the contractions of his chest.

”Without me - no way to get Nancia's code. Trapped here, all of us - better than letting him go? Forgive me?”

”Death before dishonor.” Polyon put a sneering spin on the words, letting the maudlin pair hear what he thought of such brave slogans. ”And it will be death, too. See how the s.h.i.+p's systems are failing? What do i you think will go next? Oxygen? Cabin pressure?”

In the absence of direct commands, gravity and lighting should have been controlled by Nancia's *

autonomic nervous functions. Forister groaned as the meaning of this latest failure came through to him.

”She's dying anyway. With or without your help,”

Polyon drove the point home. ”And you're not dead yet I lied to you. The needier was only set to paralyze.

Now let's have the access code before Nancia stops breathing and kills us all.”

Forister shook his head with slow, painful twitches.

”Come here, Fa.s.sa, dear,” Polyon ordered.

”No. I stay with him.”

”You don't really mean that,” Polyon said pleasantly.

”You know you're far too afraid of me. Remember those shoddy buildings you put up on Shemali? You replaced them free of charge, remember, and I didn't even have to do any of the interesting things we dis- cussed. But if I'd threaten you with flaying alive for cheating me over a factory, Fa.s.sa, just think for a mo- ment what I'll do to you for interfering with me now.”

The transition loop was almost a help; the pauses it forced gave Fa.s.sa time to consider her brave stand.297.

Go on, Fa.s.sa,” Forister urged when normal speech possible again. ”You can't help me now, and I've no wish to see you hurt for my sake.”

Thank you for the information,” Polyon said with a courteous bow. ”Perhaps I'll try that next But I think we'll begin with an older and dearer friend for quick results. Darnell, bring the freak-no, 111 do it; you keep the needier on Fa.s.sa, just in case she gets any silly ideas.”

Holding onto the pilot's chair to keep himself in place, Polyon turned and aimed a loose kick at Micaya Questar-Benn. The cessation of s.h.i.+p's gravity had freed her of the artificially weighted prostheses that held her down, but the arm and leg were still flopping loose, free of her control. She was as good as a cripple - she was a cripple, disgusting sight ”I want Forister to get a good view of this,” he told her politely. ”Lock prostheses.”

This to the computer; a signal to the hyperchips clamped Micaya's artificial arm and leg together.

”Lay a finger on Mic - ” Forister threatened, strug- gling vainly against the effects of the paravenin.

”I won't need to,” Polyon said with a brilliant smile.

”I can do it all from here.”

A series of brisk verbal commands and typed-in codes caused the portion of the s.h.i.+p's computer that Polyon controlled to transmit new, overriding instruc- tions to the hyperchips controlling Micaya's internal organ replacements. The changes had the full dura- tion of a transition loop to take effect. When they returned to norms.p.a.ce, Micaya's face was colorless and beads of sweat dotted her forehead.

”It's amazing how painful a few simple organic changes can be,” Polyon commented gaily. ”Little things like fiddling with the circulation, for instance.

How's that hand, Mic, baby? Bothering you a bit?”

”Come a little closer,” Micaya invited him, ”and find out” But now Polyon had drawn attention to her one 298.

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remaining hand; they could all see ho wit had changed color. The fingernails were almost black, the skin was purplish and swollen.

”Keep it like that for a week,” Polyon said, ”and she'll have a glorious case of gangrene. Of course, we don't have a week. I could trap even more blood in the hand and burst the veins, but that might kill her too fast. So I'll just leave it like that while you think it over, Forister, and maybe we'll start working on the foot as well. Fortunately, the heart's one of her cyborg re- placements, so we don't have to worry about it failing under the increased demands; it'll go on working . . .

as long as I want it to. Want to hear how well it works now?”

A word of command amplified the sound of Micaya's artificial heart beating vehemently, the pulse rate going up to support the demands Polyon was making on the rest of her system. The desperate, ragged double beat echoed through the cabin, droned and drummed and shrilled through a complete transi- tion loop, and no one spoke or moved.

For a heartbeat, no more, Nantia found silence and darkness a welcome relief from the stabbing pain of the input from her rogue sensors. Is this what Sin- gularity is like for softpersons? But no, it was worse than that. In the confused moments before she shut down all conscious functions and disabled her own sensor connections, she had been aware of something much worse than the colors.h.i.+fts and spatial distortions of Singularity; the malevolence of another mind, in- timately entwined with her own, striking at her with deliberate malice.

He means to drive me mad. If I enable my sensors ogam, he'll bleak desperation of die thought came from somewhere iar back in her memories. When, how, had she ever felt so utterly abandoned before? Nantia reached out, un- thinking, to search her memory banks - then stopped before die connection was complete. If sensors could be turned into weapons to use against her, could not memory, too, be infiltrated? Access the computer's memory banks, and she might find herself ”knowing”

whatever this other mind wanted her to believe.

Is it another mind ? Or a part of myself? Perhaps Fm mad already, and this is the first symptom. The flas.h.i.+ng, dis- orienting lights and garbled sounds, the sickening whirling sensations, even the conviction that she was under attack by another mind - weren't all these symptoms of one of those Old Earth illnesses that had ravaged so many people before modern electrostim and drug therapy restored the balance of their tor- tured brains? Nancia longed to scan just one of the encyclopedia articles in her memory banks; but that resource was denied her for the moment. Paranoid schizophrenia, that was it; a splitting off of the mind from reality.

Let's see, now - she reasoned. IfTm mad, then it's safe to look up the symptoms and decide that I'm mad, except that presumably I won't accept the evidence. And ifTm not mad, I daren't check memory to prove it. So we'd better accept the working hypothesis that lam sane, and go on from there. The dry humor of the syllogism did something to restore her emotional balance. Although how long I will remain sane, urtder these circ.u.mstances...

Better not to think about that. Better, too, not to remember Caleb's first partner, who had gone into irre- versible coma rather than face the emptiness that surrounded him after the synaptic connections between his sh.e.l.l and the outside world had been destroyed. As a matter of sanity, as well as survival, Nancia decided, she would make the a.s.sumption that somebody had done this to her, and concentrate on solving the puzzle of who had done it and how they could be stopped.

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A natural first step would be to reopen just one sen- sor, to examine the bursts of energy that had come so dose to disrupting her nervous system.... I can't! the child within her shrieked in near-panic. You can't make me, I won't, I won't, fUstay safe in here forever.

That's not an option, Nancia told herself firmly. She wanted to say it aloud, to rea.s.sure herself with the sound of her own voice; but she was mute as well as deaf and blind and without sensation, floating in an absolute blackness. Somehow she had to conquer that panic within herself.

Poetry sometimes helped. That Old Earth dramatist Sev and Fa.s.sa were so fond of quoting; she had plenty of his speeches stored in her memory banks. On such a night as this . . . Nancia reached unthinking for memory, stopped the impulse just in time. She didn't know that speech; she had stored it in memory. Quite a different thing. Try something else, then. Icouid be bounded in a nut- sh.e.l.l, and count myself king of infinite s.p.a.ce, were it not that 1 have bad dreams.... Not a good choice, under the cir- c.u.mstances. Maybe ... did she know anything else?

What was she, without her memory banks, her sensors, her powerful thrusting engines? Did she even existatall?

That way lies madness. Of course she existed.

Deliberately Nancia filled herself with her own true memories. Scooting around the Laboratory Schools corridors, playing Stall and Power-Seek with her friends. Acing the math finals, from Lobachevski Geometry up through Decomposition Topology, play- ing again, with all the wonderful s.p.a.ce of numbers and planes and points to wander in. Voice training with Ser Vospatrian, the Lab Schools' drama teacher, who'd taught them to modulate their speaker- produced vocalizations through the full range of human speech with all its emotional overtones. That first day they'd all been shy and nervous, hating the recorded playbacks of their own tinny artificial voices; Vospatrian had made them recite limericks and non- sense poems until they broke down in giggles and forgot to be self-conscious. Goodness, she could still remember those silly poems with which he'd started off every session....