Brain Ships

by Anne McCaffrey

  "There you are, then," Forister told Micaya. "You need me. And I—need to do this."

  "You need this assignment like I need another prosthesis," Micaya muttered, but she sat down again with the air of one who'd given up argument. "And just how do you happen to be qualified for the new chipships, anyway? You've been CenDip for—"

  "More years than either of us chooses to specify," Forister interrupted her. "And the term is brainships, Mic, not 'chipships.' Let's not offend our lady."

  "Its all right," Nancia cut in. "I'm not offended. Really."

  "But I am," said Forister. He took a deep breath and straightened. Nancia could almost see him pushing the pain he felt deep inside, replacing his diplomat's mask. When he turned his head to speak directly to her, he looked almost untroubled—if you didn't focus your sensors on the tiny lines of strain and worry around his eyes. "You are my lady now, Nancia, at least for the duration of this mission. And no one speaks casually of my brainship."

  Micaya blew out her pursed lips with an exasperated sigh. "You never answered my question. How come you're qualified for the newest models of brainships, when you've been out of the brawn service for . . . years?"

  "I read a lot," Forister said with an airy wave of one hand. "Ancient guerrilla wars, new compunav systems, it's all grist to my mill. I'm a twentieth century man at heart," he told Micaya, referring to the Age of the First Information Explosion. "A man of many interests and unguessed-at talents. And I like to keep current in my field—all my fields."

  "A man of unguessed-at bullshit, anyway," Micaya retorted. "Okay. You're in. At least I'll have someone to beat at tri-chess on the way over to Angalia."

  Forister snorted. "You mean someone to beat you. Your ego has increased out of all proportion to your skill, General. Set 'em up!"

  Nancia watched with curiosity as General Questar-Benn drew a palm-sized card from her pocket. Forister grinned. "Brought your portable game board, I see."

  The general tapped the slight indentations on the surface of the card and it projected a hologram of a partitioned cube, shimmering with rainbow light at the edges. Another series of taps produced the translucent images of playing pieces aligned at two opposing edges of the cube. Nancia twiddled with her sensor magnification and focus until she could make out the details. Yes, those were the standard tri-chess pieces: she recognized the age-old triple ordering. Pawns in the first and lowest rank; above them, the King and Queen with their Bishops and Knights and Castles. Above them the highest rank was poised to swoop down over the gamecube, the Brainship and Brawn with their supporting pieces, the Scouts and Hovercraft and Satellites. The images were blurred and kept flickering in and out, giving Nancia a sensation of tight bands pulled across her sensor connections if she tried to look at them for any length of time.

  "Pawn to Brain's Scout 4,2," Forister grunted a standardized opening move.

  Nothing happened.

  "My portable set isn't equipped with voice recognition," Micaya apologized. "You'll have to tap in the code."

  As she indicated the row of fingertip-sized indentations, Nancia hummed softly—her substitute for the rasps and hawks of "throat-clearing" with which softshells began an unscheduled interruption. Both players looked up, and after a startled moment Forister inclined his head to Nancia's titanium column.

  "Yes, Nancia?"

  "If you'll give me a moment to study the configuration," Nancia suggested, "I believe I can replicate your play-holo with a somewhat clearer display. And I, of course, can supply the voice recognition processing."

  Even as she spoke, she assigned a virtual memory space and a graphics co-processor to the problem. Before the sound of her voice had died away, a new and much clearer holographic projection shimmered beside the original one. Forister exclaimed in delight at the perfect detailing of the miniaturized pieces; Micaya put out her hand as if to touch a perfectly shaped little Satellite with its three living and storage globes, complete with tiny access doors and linking spacetubes.

  "Beautiful," Forister sighed in delight. "But won't this take too much processing capability, Nancia?"

  "Not when we're just sitting dirtside," Nancia told him. "I don't even use that processor when we're doing regular navigation. Might have to shut down briefly when we're in Singularity, that does take some concentration, but—"

  Forister closed his eyes briefly. "That's perfectly all right, Nancia. To tell you the truth, it never occurred to me to play tri-chess in Singularity anyway."

  "Me either," said Micaya, looking slightly green at the very thought. "You don't want to think about spatial relationships at a moment like that."

  "I do," said Nancia cheerfully.

  * * *

  Less than two Central Standard Hours later, Sev interrupted the first tri-chess game to deliver a subdued Darnell Glaxely-Overton for transport to Central. "He broke when I showed him the hedron of Hopkirk's evidence," he told the others after Darnell had been confined in a cabin. "Funny—almost as if he'd expected somebody to come after him one of these days. Spent most of the flyer trip back telling all he knows about the other three. Here's the recording."

  "Four," Nancia corrected Sev as he slid a datacard into her reader.

  "Three," Sev said again. "Fassa. Alpha. And . . . Blaize." He carefully avoided looking at Forister as he pronounced the last name.

  "Neither of them has said anything implicating Polyon de Gras-Waldheim?" Nancia couldn't believe this.

  Sev shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe there isn't anything to say. You never know, there could be one good apple in this barrel of rotten ones."

  Not Polyon. But Nancia refrained from voicing her protest. After the conversations she'd heard on her maiden voyage, she was convinced that Polyon de Gras-Waldheim was completely amoral. But would it be ethical to reveal those conversations? Caleb had been so adamantly against anything that even suggested spying, she'd never even thought of telling him.

  But that had been five years ago. She had changed; she now saw shades of gray instead of the neat black and white of CS rules. Even Caleb might have changed; after all, he'd consented to this undercover mission.

  Under protest.

  He might feel doubly betrayed if she chose to violate his ethical code when he wasn't even here to censure her for it.

  Perhaps she could put off the decision for a little longer. "It might be worth going by Shemali anyway," Nancia suggested. "You never know. We might find some evidence linking de Gras-Waldheim with the rest of the crew." We'd have that evidence already, if they weren't all terrified to say a word against him.

  "Possibly," Sev agreed. "Meet me there, after Angalia?"

  "I thought you were coming with us!" Micaya Questar-Benn half rose from her seat, putting one hand right through Nancia's tri-chess hologram.

  "I was," Sev agreed. "I am. I'll meet you on Shemali. Something's come up."

  He was gone before any of them could question him, taking the stairs three at a time and whistling as he went. Nancia briefly considered slamming her lower doors on him and holding him until he explained exactly what he was up to.

  She wouldn't do that, of course. It would be an unethical and unconscionable abuse of her abilities, the sort of bullying she'd been warned against in the ethics classes that were part of every shellperson's training.

  But it was a sore temptation.

  "Something," Micaya said thoughtfully, "has made that young man extremely happy. I wonder what it was. Nancia, is there anything earth-shaking in that datacard of Darnell Overton-Glaxely's testimony?"

  Nancia had started scanning just before Micaya spoke. "There isn't even anything interesting," she said, "unless a sordid record of petty bribes and corruption and bullying fascinates you."

  "Ah. Overton-Glaxely did strike me as the cheap sort."

  "You might want to examine his statement yourself," Nancia suggested. "You may see something I've overlooked."

  Micaya nodded. "I'll do that. But I doubt I'll find anything. Bryley said there
wasn't any evidence against de Gras-Waldheim, so whatever is taking him to Shemali, it can't be our business. Damn that boy! Oh, well, I suppose we'll find out when we reach Shemali."

  "But first," Forister said, "we have a task to complete at Angalia." His face was gray and still again; the momentary animation brought on by the tri-chess game had vanished. He looks like a man with a deadly disease. Is family honor so important to him? Nancia wondered how she'd feel if her sister Jinevra were found to have corrupted her branch of PTA and embezzled the department's funds.

  Impossible even to imagine such a thing. Well, then, what if Flix—she couldn't think what Flix might do, either, but what if he had got in with the wrong crowd—like Blaize—and had done something that would force her to hunt him down, arrest him, send him to Central for years of prison without his beloved music?

  The pain of that thought shook Nancia so deeply that for a moment the even hum of the air stabilizers was broken and the co-processor handling the tri-chess hologram faltered. The gamecube image shivered, broke apart in rainbow fractures, then solidified again as Nancia gained control of herself and her systems.

  If even imagining Flix in trouble hurt her so deeply, how could Forister face the reality of Blaize's crime? He couldn't, she decided, and it was up to her and Micaya to distract him whenever possible.

  "General Questar-Benn, it's your move," she said.

  "What? Oh—Scout to Queen's Bishop 3,3," Micaya said. The move took one of Forister's Satellites and left a probability path to his Brainship. Nancia calculated the possible moves without conscious effort.

  "You have only two moves that will not put your Brainship in check within the next five-move sequence," she warned Forister.

  "Two?" Forister's eyebrows shot up and he bent over the gamecube. "I saw only one."

  "Foul!" Micaya complained. "I challenged the brawn, not the brain."

  "We work as a team," Nancia told her.

  She certainly hoped that was true. For Forister's sake—for both their sakes. He didn't need to get through this grief alone; she was there to steady him.

  "Ah. I see what you mean." Forister bent over the board and surprised Nancia with a third move, one so apparently disastrous that she had not even considered it in her initial calculations.

  With a subdued whoop of glee, Micaya Questar-Benn took Forister's second Satellite—and watched dumbfounded as he proceeded to shift an unconsidered knight from the second rank and place her Brainship in check.

  "Thank you for the hint, Nancia," Forister said. "Until you forced me to consider the alternative move, I hadn't even thought of using the Jigo Kanaka advance in this situation."

  "I . . . ah . . . you're quite welcome," Nancia managed to tell him between the three subsequent moves that brought the game to its slashing conclusion, with Micaya's forces immobilized, her Brawn taken and her Brainship checkmated.

  Perhaps Forister didn't need quite so much help as she'd anticipated.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Nancia's landing on Angalia was one of the worst she'd ever executed. The planet took her completely by surprise.

  Initial navigation maneuvers went normally. It wasn't until she was in visual range of the landing field that she became confused. The green terraced cliffs behind the mesa and the grassy basin surrounding it looked nothing at all like her memories of the landing five years ago. Could she possibly have miscalculated, come down in some hitherto unknown section of the planet?

  Nancia called up her files from that first landing and superimposed the stored images on the green paradise below her. Yes, this had to be the Angalia landing field. The topographical features were a perfect match with her internal map. And there, at the edge of the mesa, was the plastifilm prefab hut with its sagging awning of woven grass, looking if anything slightly more derelict and tottering than it had appeared five years ago.

  Intent on her image comparison, Nancia drained computing power from the navigation processor, forgot to monitor the approach, and came embarrassingly close to making a new crater on Angalia's landing field. She corrected the descent, hopped into mid-air, and came down more slowly the second time. Her auditory sensors picked up a variety of crashes, groans, and complaints from the cabins where Micaya and the three prisoners were housed.

  "Apologies for the rough landing," she began, but Forister cut off her speakers for a moment and overrode her. "Local turbulence," he said. "Nancia recovered superbly, but even a brainship can't compensate for all the freak conditions on Angalia."

  He swept his open hand over the palmpad with a caressing gesture, restoring speaker control to Nancia, and smiled at her benignly.

  "I didn't need you to cover for me," Nancia transmitted a vibrant whisper through the main cabin speakers.

  "Didn't you? I thought we were a team. If you can help me play tri-chess, I certainly have the right to preserve you from apologizing to those overindulged brats."

  "I—well, thank you," Nancia conceded.

  "Think nothing of it. By the way, what did happen just now?"

  "I was distracted. This place doesn't look the way it did last time I landed." Nancia switched all her screens to external mode. Forister gazed appreciatively at the triple-screen display of a grassy paradise ringed by flowering terraces.

  "What on earth is that?" Fassa cried from her cabin. Darnell and Alpha joined her exclamations of surprise.

  Nancia was gratified by this response. The screens in the passenger cabins weren't as dramatic as her central cabin's display walls, but at least they showed enough of Angalia to confirm that she wasn't losing her mind—or if she was, she wasn't alone. None of the prisoners had been expecting Angalia to look like the Garden of Eden.

  "Do I take it," she asked mildly, "that the planet has changed since your last visit?"

  "It certainly has," Fassa said. "Are you sure it's the same place? Only last year—oh, I see."

  A prolonged silence followed. For once in her life Nancia longed for a softperson's physical extrusions. It would be enormously satisfying to take Fassa by the shoulders and shake her out of the trance in which she had fallen. Why couldn't softpersons keep transmitting datastreams while they were processing?

  She had to content herself with blinking Fassa's cabin lights and assaulting her with raucous bursts of music from Flix's latest sonohedron.

  "Do I take it," she inquired when satisfied that she had the girl's attention, "that you recognize some salient features?"

  "Yes . . . I think so, anyway." Of course, Fassa would have no control over the visual detail, not to mention the accuracy, of whatever images she'd stored from her previous visit. She would be dependent on whatever her non-enhanced biological memory could provide. Recognizing this, Nancia didn't count on learning much.

  "Those gardens on the side of the mountain," Fassa said. "He had the terraces in place a year ago, but nothing was planted. I thought it was something to do with the mine."

  Nancia switched the signals going to Fassa's display screen to show the mine entrance. Blue-uniformed figures moved in and out, pushing wagons on railings that curved around the side of the mountain. A magnified display showed that the figures were shambling Angalia natives, neatly dressed in blue shorts and shirts and working together with the precision of a choreographed dance. One native heaved a sack from the mine entrance and tossed it over his head; another casually moved into place just in time to catch it; by the time he'd turned, a third native had backed his wagon down the rail system and into place to receive the load.

  "Amazing," Nancia commented. "I thought the Angalians couldn't be trained."

  "Blaize," Forister said hollowly, "has certainly been a busy little boy."

  "It doesn't look all that bad so far," Nancia pointed out. "Fassa, do you—or the others—recognize anything else?"

  She let the display screens sweep over a panoramic view of the mesa and the surrounding countryside. Suddenly Fassa gave a cry of recognition. "Oh, God, he's left the volcano!"

  Nanci
a halted the display and studied it. An evil-looking bubble of brown and green mud heaved and burst and formed again, roiling continuously in the midst of the tall grass covering the rest of the basin.

  "I don't suppose planting flowers would do much to disguise it," she agreed.

  "You don't understand." Fassa sounded close to tears. "That's how he controls them—how he makes them do things for them. If the Loosies don't please him, he cooks them alive in that boiling mud! I saw it done last time—I'll never forget those screams."

  "Alpha? Darnell?" Nancia queried the other two.

  "That's right," Darnell told her. "Revolting."

  Alpha nodded silently, the movement barely visible to Nancia's visual sensors.

  She could think of no more encouraging words for Forister.

  * * *

  Micaya persuaded Forister to let her confront Blaize initially. "I'll wear a contact button," she promised him. "You and Nancia can see and hear everything that goes on."

  "It's my duty—" Forister began.

  "Mine too," Micaya interrupted him. "The young man is more likely to confess if he doesn't think he can bring family influence to bear."

  "He can't," Forister said grimly. "I'm not here to intercede for him."

  "Yes, but he doesn't know that," Micaya pointed out.

  Nancia kept all her external sensors trained on Micaya as the general picked her way along a path of rounded volcanic stones to the door of the permalloy hut. On both sides of the path, feathery grasses and blazing tropical flowers grew in exuberant, uncontrolled patterning, throwing up their seed-heads and blooms above Micaya's crisp silver-sprinkled hair. Nancia recognized Old Earth species mixed with Denebian starflowers and the singing grasses of Fomalhaut II, a joyous blaze of pink and orange and purple flowers.

  Micaya entered the hut and Nancia's field of vision contracted to the half-circle covered by the contact button. In the shadowy hut, stacked high with papers and bits of machinery, Blaize's red head glowed like a burning ember before the computer screen that held his attention.

  "Blaize Armontillado-Perez y Medoc," Micaya said formally.