Brain Ships

by Anne McCaffrey

  "If you're nice to me," Alpha added, "I'll promise to kill you before the Ganglicide eats out your brains. No human being should have to die like that."

  "Oh, I'll be nice to you," Polyon said. His voice was still even; he thrust off from the control panel with two fingers and floated across the room. As he came closer, Alpha recognized the look in his eyes. Not frightened. Wary. Like a hunter waiting for his quarry to burst from cover. And as he reached out to encircle her wrist with strong, blunt fingers, the look changed to a light of triumph. "I think we can be very nice to one another, lovely Alpha. It's so kind of you to take an interest in my career." His voice changed on the last words, mocking, savagely amused. "But enough about me. Tell us about yourself, why don't you?" He gestured towards Darnell and Fassa, floating through the open door to join them. "We'd all like to hear about your interrupted research. And why one of the school's brightest young medical researchers chose to donate five years of public service to an obscure clinic on Bahati. You're too modest, Alpha."

  Alpha tossed her head and tried to pull away from Polyon, but he was too strong for her. "There's nothing to tell, really. I was tired—wanted a change of scene. That's all."

  "Is it?" Polyon murmured. "Funny. The way I heard it, there were some other people who wanted to change your scene. The newsnibblers never beamed the story, did they? Can't have scandals about a High Families girl going out as entertainment bytes. But I fancy our friends on board here would find the story very entertaining."

  Alpha stared up at Polyon, looking for a hint of compassion in the sharp planes of his face and the ice-blue eyes that had seemed so attractive a moment ago. "I did nothing to be ashamed of," she whispered. "The tradition of scientific experiments—"

  "Does not include testing Ganglicide on unwitting subjects." His voice was so low the others could not hear it.

  "Charity cases," Alpha defended herself. "Street bums. Some of them were so far gone on Blissto they didn't even know what was happening to them. They were incurable—nothing but an expense to the state as long as they lived. I did them a favor, making sure their lives ended for some purpose."

  "Somehow," Polyon murmured, "I don't think the court would have seen it that way. But then, you never did come to trial, did you? Hezra clan and Fong tribe wouldn't let that happen. Private settlement in the med school offices, records sealed."

  "How—did you find out?" Alpha gasped. He was very close to her now, his voice the subtlest vibration of sound from lips that almost brushed her cheek. The raw power of his will and his anger wrapped about her. She felt weak from the spine out. His smile made her shiver.

  "That's my little secret," he told her, still smiling. His face and gestures might have been those of a courtship; Alpha realized that the others in the room might imagine they were flirting. That was a relief. Anything was preferable to having her humiliation made public before these people who were to be her constant companions for the next two weeks—having them see her as the disgraced failure she was, instead of the successful young researcher with a social conscience she pretended to be. "You were lucky to get off with five years of community service on Bahati, weren't you?" Polyon commented, stroking her cheek with his free hand. "A commoner would have been doing time. Hard time. Who knows, gorgeous, you might even have wound up on Shemali—getting a chance to check out Ganglicide at first hand, so to speak. Wouldn't our innocent little friends love to hear the story?"

  But he was still speaking in a low voice, head partially turned away from Fassa and Blaize and Darnell, who had grouped together in the far corner of the cabin and were pretending deep interest in a round of SPACED OUT.

  "What—do you want?"

  "Cooperation," Polyon said. "Only a little—cooperation."

  Blindly, drowning in a sea of air that somehow gave her nothing to breathe, Alpha turned her face up to meet Polyon's parted lips.

  "Not that sort of cooperation," Polyon told her, laughing gently, "not yet." His eyes measured her with a cold glance that made her more afraid than ever—and, somehow, more excited too. "Maybe later, if you're a good girl. You were too uppity before, you know that, Alpha? Now you're the way I like my women. Quiet. And respectful. Stay that way, and we won't have to discuss any—ah—painful subjects with the others. Come with me and follow my lead. That's all I expect of you—for now."

  Submissive, head bowed, Alpha drifted towards the three SPACED OUT gamers in Polyon's wake. They were still pretending to be totally involved in the game, but she felt sure they had avidly witnessed her humiliation.

  She would pay them back. That was certain, she vowed. Fassa, Darnell, Blaize—they would all learn not to laugh at her.

  She didn't even think of retaliating against Polyon.

  * * *

  Nancia quietly transferred the recording of the scene she'd just witnessed to an offline storage hedron. Having those bits in her system made her feel . . . dirty. As if she were somehow implicated in Polyon's sadistic games.

  Perhaps she should have interfered. But how . . . and why? Alpha was just as bad as Polyon, worse even, to judge from what he'd revealed of her unauthorized medical experiments. The two of them deserved each other. Blaize was the only one of the bunch she would care to talk to. The little redhead reminded her of Flix—and unlike the others, he didn't seem to have anything wrong with him that a few years away from family pressures wouldn't cure.

  And what, exactly, will you say if you do interrupt? Nancia couldn't answer her own question. She was a Courier Service Ship, not a diplomat! She wasn't supposed to interfere with her passengers! She should have had a brawn on board—an experienced brawn—to break up nasty scenes like the one she'd just witnessed, to keep these spoiled young passengers happy and away from one another's throats for the two weeks of the trip. It's not fair! Not on my very first voyage!

  But there was nobody to hear her plaint. They were still five days away from Singularity and the decomposition into Vega subspace.

  At least I can keep evidence recordings going, Nancia thought grimly. If one of the little brats drives another over the edge, there'll be plenty of datahedra to show what happened. But at the moment, the five passengers seemed to be getting along reasonably well. Perhaps his sadistic games with Alpha had momentarily satiated Polyon's need for command and control; he had taken a play icon and seemed absorbed in that silly role-playing game. Nancia relaxed . . . but she kept her datacorders running.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  "Why can't I get past the Wingdrake of Wisdom?" Darnell griped. He had chosen Bonecrush again, but his mighty-thewed play icon was backed into a corner where a winged serpent hissed menacingly at him every time he tried to move.

  "You should have bought some intelligence for Bonecrush at the Little Shop of Spiritual Enlightenment," Polyon commented. His fingers flicked carelessly at the screen as he spoke, sending Thingberry the Martian Mage to spin an apparently pointless web in the night sky above Asteroid 66.

  "I didn't know you could buy intelligence." Darnell's lower lip protruded in a definite pout. "That wasn't in the rule book."

  "A lot of things aren't in the rule book," Polyon said, "including most of what you need to survive. And information is always for sale . . . if you know the right price. Anything from the secrets of Singularity to the origins of planet names."

  "Oh. Encyclopedias. Libraries. Anybody can buy the Galactic Datasource on fast-hedra," Darnell whined. "But who has time to read all that crud?"

  "The price of some kinds of information," Polyon said, "is more than the cost of a book and the time to read it. I could print out the rules of Singularity math for you, but you haven't paid the price of understanding it—the years of space transformation algebra and the intelligence to move the theories into multiple dimensions."

  "Oh, come on," Blaize challenged him. "It's not that complicated. Even I know Baykowski's Theorem."

  "A continuum C is said to be locally shrinkable in M if, and only if, for each epsilon greater than zero and each
open set D containing C, there is a homeomorphism h of M onto M which takes C onto a set of diameter less than epsilon and which is the identity on M – D," Polyon recited rapidly. "And it's not a theorem, it's a definition."

  Nancia quietly followed the discussion with mild interest. The mathematics of Singularity was nothing new to her, but at least when her brat passengers were talking mathematics they weren't trying to drive each other crazy. And she was impressed that Polyon had retained enough Singularity theory to be able to recite Baykowski's Definition from memory; common gossip among the brainships in training was that no softperson could really understand multidimensional decompositions.

  "The real basis for decom theory," Polyon lectured his audience, "is what follows that definition. Namely, Zerlion's Lemma: that our universe can be considered as a collection of locally shrinkable continua each containing at least one non-degenerating element."

  Fassa del Parma pouted and jabbed her play icon across the display screen in a series of short, jerky moves. "Very useful information, I'm sure," she said in a sarcastic voice, "but do the rest of us have to pay the price of listening to it? All this theoretical mathematics makes my head hurt. And it's not as if it were good for anything, like stress analysis or materials testing."

  "It's good for getting us to the Nyota system in two weeks instead of six months, my dove," Polyon told her. "And it's really quite simple. In layman's terms, Singularity theory just shows us how to decompose two widely separated subspace areas into a sequence of compacted dimensionalities sharing one non-degenerating element. When the subspaces become singular they will appear to intersect at that element—and when we expand from the decomposition, pop! out of Central subspace and into Vega space we go."

  Nancia felt grateful that she'd resisted her impulse to join in the conversation. Her Lab Schools classmates had been right about softpersons. Polyon knew all the right words for Singularity mathematics, but he'd gotten the basic theory hopelessly scrambled. And clearly he didn't understand the computational problems underlying that theory. Pure topological theory might prove the existence of a decomposition series, but actually forcing a ship through that series required massive linear programming optimizations, all performed in realtime with no second chances for mistakes. No wonder softpersons weren't trusted to pilot a ship through Singularity!

  "I agree with you," Alpha told Fassa. "Bo-ring. Even the history of Nyota is better than studying mathematics."

  "You'd think so, of course," Fassa said, "seeing that it was discovered and named by your people." The small grin on her face told Nancia that this was a jab of some sort at Alpha. Hastily she scanned her data notes on the Nyota system, but nothing there explained why the Hezra-Fong family should take a particular interest in it.

  "Swahili is a slave language," Alpha said haughtily. "It has nothing to do with the Fong tribe. My people come from the other side of the continent—and we were never enslaved!"

  "Will somebody give me a map of this conversation?" Darnell said plaintively. "I'm more lost than I was during Polyon's math lecture."

  "This particular information," Alpha told him, "is free." She drew herself up to her full height, several inches taller than Fassa, and favored the top of her sleek, dark head with a withering glare. "The system we're going to was discovered by a Black descendant of the American slaves. In a burst of misguided enthusiasm, he decided to give the star and all the planets names from an African language. Unfortunately, he was so poorly educated that the only such language he knew was Swahili, a trade language spread along the east coast of Africa by Arab slavers. He called the sun Nyota ya Jaha—Lucky Star. The planets' names are fairly accurate descriptions, too. Bahati means Fortune, and it's a reasonably decent place to live—green, mild climate, lots of nice scenery that stays put. Shemali means North Wind."

  Polyon groaned appreciatively. "I know. Unlike some of us, I did read up on my destination. The place is called North Wind because that's what you get for thirteen months out of the year."

  "Thirteen months you have in the year? Oh—I get it! Longer rotation period, right?" Darnell beamed with pride at his own cleverness.

  "Shorter, as it happens," Polyon said. His voice sounded remarkably hollow. "Shemali has a year of three hundred days, divided into ten months for convenience. I was being sarcastic about the fact that there is no good season."

  "Never mind," Alpha told him almost kindly, "it's better than Angalia. Actually the full name is Angalia! with an exclamation point at the end. It means Watch out!"

  "Dare I ask what that means?" Blaize inquired.

  "It means," Alpha told him, "that the scenery—unlike that of Bahati—doesn't stay put."

  Blaize and Polyon stared at one another, briefly companions in misery.

  Polyon was the first to recover himself. "Oh, well," he said, turning back to the game screen, "you see the value of information, Darnell—and the fact that it isn't always in the Galactic Datasource. And some of the information that isn't—ah—publicly available—is the most valuable of all." With delicate gestures he nudged the joyball while the fingers of his left hand tapped out codes to enlarge and strengthen Thingberry's magical net. "You need to think of ways to trade for that kind of information. For instance, your shipping company—such as it is—could offer discreet transport for parcels that don't get on the cargo list, or that go by a slightly misleading name—in some cases, disinformation or the lack of information is as valuable as actual data."

  "Who'd want that?" Darnell objected. "And who cares, anyway? Can't we just play the game?"

  Polyon favored him with a dazzling smile. "Dear boy, this is the game—and a far more rewarding one than SPACED OUT. Why, I can think of any number of people who might want a—suitably discreet—cargo carrier service. Myself, for starters."

  "Why you?"

  "Let's just say that not all the metachips going off Shemali are going to be in the SUM rationing board's records," Polyon said.

  "So? What's it worth to me to oblige you?"

  "I could pay you back with Net contacts. I can work the Net like no hacker since the days of the first virus breeders. It's an unsecured hedron to me. How soon could you rebuild OG Shipping if you knew ahead of time about every big contract about to be let in Vega subspace . . . and what your opponents' sealed bids were?"

  Darnell's pout vanished to be replaced by a look of stunned calculation. "I could be rich again in five years!"

  "But not, I fancy, as rich as I could be from selling metachips," Polyon murmured. Thingberry's web glistened on the screen above him, strings of jeweled light looping and floating above the play icons on the surface of Asteroid 66. "What would you say to a friendly wager? The five of us to meet and compare notes, once a year—to see how we're each doing at making lemonade out of the lemons of assignments our dear families have landed us with? Winner to take a twenty-five percent share in each of the losers' operations—business, goods, or cold credits?"

  "When do we decide to stop and make the final evaluation?" Darnell asked.

  "Five years—that's the end of most of our tours of duty, isn't it?"

  "You know it is," said Alpha quickly. "Standard tour. And," she went on under Polyon's firm gaze, "I think it's a marvelous idea. I've got my own plans, you know."

  "What?" Darnell demanded.

  Alpha gave him a slow, lazy smile. "Wouldn't you like to know?"

  "I'm sure we would all like to know," Polyon put in. A deft twist of the joyball set Thingberry's jeweled web spinning over the top half of the display screen. "Will you enlighten them, Alpha, or shall I—er—contribute my own scraps of information?" He crooked his finger, beckoning to her, and she moved closer to his control chair.

  "Nothing much," Alpha said. "But . . . Summerlands is a double clinic. One side for the paying customers—mostly VIPs—and one side for charity cases, to improve their SUM rating. I've got some ideas for an improvement on Blissto—something we can give addicts in controlled doses. They won't get locked into
a cycle of craving and ever-increasing hits of street drugs."

  "Hey, I like Blissto," Darnell protested, "and I don't get into that cycle."

  "Good," Alpha told him. "You're not an addictive personality. Some people aren't that lucky. You've seen Blissed-Out cases? Big enough doses, over a long enough period of time, until their nervous systems look like shredded wheat? My version won't do that. We'll be able to take Blissed-Out cases out of the hospital and send them out to do useful work as long as they stay on their meds. And I'm the one who did all the preliminary design work on this drug. Actually, it was a side-effect of my work on—well, there's no need to discuss all the boring details of my research," she concluded with a sidelong glance at Polyon. "What matters is that I've got the formulas and all the lab notes on hedra."

  "But won't Central Meds hold the patent, if you did the work there?"

  "When—and if—it's patented," Alpha agreed.

  "And you can't sell it until it's passed the trials and been patented—so it's no good to you!"

  Alpha's eyes met Polyon's over Darnell's head. "Quite true," she agreed gravely, "but I think I may find a way to profit from the situation anyway."

  "What about you, Fassa?" Polyon asked. The girl had been very quiet since her jab about the slave names of the Nyota system. "You going to take this boondocks construction company Daddy handed you lying down?" His tone invested the question with a wealth of obscene possibilities.