Brain Ships

by Anne McCaffrey

  They'd all caught on to the rhythm of the transformation loop by now; the wait through three distorted subspaces was becoming part of normal conversational style.

  "—control of the universe," he finished on the next pass through normspace. Blaize had come closer yet; stupid little runt, trying to move during transformations.

  "And we'll be your loyal lieutenants?" Blaize asked.

  "I know how to reward service," Polyon said noncommittally. Into a Ganglicide vat with you, troublemaker, as soon as I have the power.

  "Not if I know it," Blaize mouthed as normspace slid away into the first distortion. He swung a fist at Polyon, but before it landed his hand had shrunk to the size of a walnut, and on the next dip through normspace Polyon was ready for him with a return blow that sent Blaize to the deck. By the time he landed, it was soft as quicksand, a pool in which Blaize swirled, too dizzy to rise immediately.

  "Stop me," Polyon said to the other two as normspace passed through, "and you die here, in Singularity, because nobody else can get us out of it. Try to stop me and fail," and he smiled again, very sweetly, "and you'll wish you had died here. Are you with me?"

  Before they could answer, a new element entered the game; a hissing cloud of gas, invisible in normspace, dearly delineated as a pink-rimmed flood of rosy light in the first transformational space. It engulfed Blaize and he stopped twitching, lay like one dead in the yielding transformations of the deck.

  Sleepgas. And he couldn't shout through the loop to warn them. Polyon clapped both hands over his mouth and nose, saw that Fassa did the same, jerked his head towards the central cabin. That door too was half open. He made for it, staggering through mud and quicksand, swimming through air gone thick as water, lungs aching and burning for a breath. Fell through, someone pushing behind him, Fassa, and Darnell after her. Forget Blaize, the traitor, and Alpha, by now sleepgassed in her cabin. Polyon gasped and with his first burning breath called, "General lock!"

  The control cabin door irised shut with a strange jerky motion, as if it were fighting its own mechanism, and Polyon found his feet and surveyed his new territory.

  Not bad. The only passenger he'd been seriously worried about was Sev Bryley-Sorensen. But Bryley wasn't here. Good. He was locked out, then, with Alpha and Blaize; probably sleepgassed, like them. The other two were bent over their consoles, probably still trying to figure out why doors were opening and closing without their command, trying to flood the passenger areas with sleepgas—well, they'd succeeded there, but much good it would do them now! Through the transitions he saw them turning in their seats, open mouths stretching like taffy in the second subspace, then shrinking to round dots in the third. Normspace showed the cyborg freak making a move that wasn't part of the transformation illusion, right arm darting towards her belt. Polyon snapped out a command and the freak's prosthetic arm and leg danced in their sockets, twisting away from the joining point; her flesh-and-blood torso followed the agonizing pull of the synthetic limbs and she rotated half out of her seat. Another command, and the prostheses dropped lifeless and heavy to the floor, dragging the body down with them. Her head cracked against the support pillar under the seat. Polyon stepped forward to take the needler before she recovered. Space stretched away from him, but his arm stretched with it, and the solid heavy feel of the needler reassured him that his fingers, even if they momentarily resembled tentacles, had firm hold of the weapon.

  With the next normspace pass he was erect again, holding the needler on Forister. "Over there." With a jerk of his head he indicated the central column. Somewhere behind there the brain of the ship floated within a titanium shell, a shrunken malformed body kept alive by tubes and wires and nutrient systems. Polyon shuddered at the thought; he'd never understood why Central insisted on keeping these monsters alive, even giving them responsible positions that could have been filled by real people like himself. Well, the brain would be mad by now, between sense deprivation and the stimuli he'd ordered its own hyperchips to throw at it; killing it would be a merciful release. And it would be appropriate to kill the brawn at the foot of the column.

  But not yet. Polyon was all too aware that he didn't know everything there was to know about navigating a brainship. He would need full support from both computers and brawn if he was to get them out of this transition loop alive.

  He studied the needler controls, spun the wheel with his thumb, glanced at Darnell and Fassa. Which of them dared he trust? Neither, for choice; well, then, which was more afraid of him? Fassa had been showing an uppity streak, asking him questions when she should have been listening. Darnell was still green-faced but appeared to be through vomiting. Polyon tossed him the needler; it floated through normspace and Darnell caught it reflexively just before the transition shrunk it to a gleaming line of permalloy.

  "If either of them makes a move," Polyon said pleasantly, "needle them. I've set it to kill . . . slowly." In fact he'd left the needler as Micaya had it, set to deliver a paralyzing but not lethal dose of paravenin; but there was no need to reassure his captives overmuch. "Now . . ." He removed his uniform jacket, draped it neatly over the swivelseat where Micaya had been sitting, and sat down in Forister's chair before the command console. Transitions exaggerated the slight flourish of his wrists into a great ballooning gesture, spun out his sleeves into white clouds of fabric that floated over and dwarfed the other occupants of the cabin.

  "What do you think you're doing?" Forister cried. His voice squeaked through the fourth transition space and fell with a thud on the last word.

  Polyon smiled. He could see his own teeth and hair gleaming, white and gold, in the mirror-bright panel. "I," he said gently, "am going to get us out of Singularity. Don't you think it's time somebody did it?"

  His reflection narrowed, gave him a squashed face like a bug, dulled the bright gold of his hair and turned his teeth to green rotting stumps. The control panel shrank under his hands, then swelled and heaved like a storm-tossed sea. As normspace approached Polyon darted in, tapping out one set of staccato commands with his right hand, passing the left over the palmpad to call up Nancia's mathematics coprocessors, rattling out the verbal commands that would bring the whole ship around, responsive to his commands and ready to sail the subspaces out of this Singularity.

  She was sluggish as any water-going vessel lacking a rudder and taking in water, half the engines obeying his commands, the other half canceling them. The mathematics co-processors came online and then disappeared before he'd entered the necessary calculations, shrieking gibberish and sliding away in a jumble of meaningless symbols. The moment of normspace passed and Polyon ground his teeth in frustration. In the second transformation the teeth felt like squishy, rotting vegetables inside his mouth, then in the third they became needles that drew blood, and by the time normspace returned he had learned not to give way to emotion.

  He made two more attempts at controlling the ship, waited out three complete transition loops, before he pushed the pilot's chair back from the control panel.

  "Your brainship is fighting me," he told Forister on the next pass through normspace.

  "Good for her!" Forister raised his voice slightly. "Nancia, girl, can you hear me? Keep it up!"

  "Don't be a fool, Forister," Polyon said tiredly. "If your brainship were conscious and coherent, she'd have brought us out of Singularity herself."

  He used the remaining seconds in normspace to tap out one more command. The singing tones of Nancia's access code rang through the room. Forister's face went gray. Then the transition spaces whirled about them, monstrously transforming the cabin and everything in it, and Polyon could not tell which of the distorted images before him showed the opening of Nancia's titanium column.

  On the next pass through normal space he saw that the column was still closed. Transition must have garbled the last sounds in the access sequence. He typed in the command again; again the musical tones rang out without their accompanying syllables; again nothing happened.

  "Y
ou'd better tell me the rest of the code," he said to Forister on the next normspace pass.

  Forister smiled—briefly; something in the expression reminded Polyon of his own ironic laughter. "What makes you think I have it, boy? The two parts are kept separate. I didn't even know how to access the tone sequence from Nancia's memory banks. The syllables probably aren't encoded in her at all; they'll be on file at Central."

  "Brawns are supposed to know the spoken half of the code," Polyon snapped in frustration.

  "I asked to have it changed just before this run," Forister claimed. "Security reasons. With so many prisoners on board, I feared a takeover attempt—and with good reason, it seems."

  "I do hope you're lying," Polyon said. He clamped his mouth shut and waited through the transition loop, marshaling his arguments. "Because if Central's the only source for the rest of the code, we're all dead. I can't tap the Net and hack into the Courier Service database from Singularity—and I can't get us out of Singularity without neutralizing the brain."

  "You mean, without killing Nancia," Forister said in a voice emptied of feeling. His eyes flickered once to the cabin console. Polyon followed the man's gaze and felt a moment of fear. A delicate solido stood above the control panels, the image of a lovely young woman with an impish smile and clustering curls of red hair.

  Polyon had heard of brawns who developed an emotional fixation on their brainship, even to the point of having a solido made from the brainship's genotype that would show how the freakish body might have matured without its fatal defects. He hadn't guessed that Forister was the sentimental type, or that he'd have had time to grow so attached to Nancia. The idiot might actually think that he'd rather die than kill his brainship.

  "There's no need to clutter the problem with emotionalism," Polyon told him. How could he jolt Forister out of his sentimental fixation? "With partial control of the ship to me and partial control to Nancia, neither of us can navigate out of Singularity."

  Damn the transition loop! Forister had caught on to the rhythm by now; and the necessary wait while three distorted subspaces composed and decomposed around them gave him time to think.

  "I've a better suggestion," the brawn said. "You say you can navigate us out; well, we all know Nancia can. Restore full control to her, and—"

  "And what? You'll drop charges, let me go back to running a prison factory? I've got a better career plan than that now."

  "I wasn't," said Forister mildly, "planning to make that offer."

  The rhythm of collapsing and composing subspaces was becoming natural to them all; the necessary pauses in their conversation no longer bothered Polyon.

  "I had something like your own offer in mind," Forister continued at the next opportunity. "Release Nancia's hyperchip-enhanced computer systems, and she'll get us out of Singularity—and you'll live."

  "How did you guess?"

  Forister looked surprised. "Logical deduction. You designed the hyperchips; you tricked me into running a program that did something peculiar to Nancia's computer systems; the failure reports I read just before you came in showed precisely the areas where she has had hyperchips installed, the lower deck sensors and the navigation system; you've since exercised voice control on Micaya's hyperchip-enhanced prostheses. Clearly your hyperchip design includes a back door by which you can personally control any installation that uses your chips."

  "Clever," Polyon said. "But not clever enough to get you out of Singularity. I assure you I'm not going to restore full computing power to a brainship who is probably mad by now."

  "What makes you think that?"

  Polyon raised his brows. "We all know what sensory deprivation does to shellpersons, Forister. Need I go into the details?"

  "Take more than a few minutes in the dark to upset my Nancia," Forister said levelly.

  Polyon bared his teeth. "By now, old man, she's had considerably more than that to deal with. The first thing my hyperchip worm does is to strike at any intelligence linked to the computers in which it finds itself. The sensory barrage would make any human break the link at once. I'm afraid that 'your' Nancia, not being able to escape the link that way, will have gone quite mad by now. So—I think—if you want to live—you'll tell me, now, the rest of the access code."

  "I think not," Forister said calmly. "You've made a fatal error in your calculations."

  The transition loop stifled all talk for the endless winding, looping moments of passage through shrinking and distorting spaces. Polyon ignored the sensory tricks of spatial transformations and thought furiously. When normspace returned, he reached up from his chair to grasp the solido of Nancia as a young woman. Deliberately, watching Forister's face, he dropped the solido on the deck and ground the fragile material to shards under his boot-heel.

  "That's what's left of 'your' Nancia, old man," he said. "Are you going to let your love for a woman who never lived kill us all?"

  Forister's face was lined with pain, but he spoke as evenly as always. "My—feelings—for Nancia have nothing to do with the matter. Your error is much more basic. You think I'd rather set you free with the universe in your control than die here in Singularity. This is incorrect."

  He spoke so calmly that it took Polyon a moment to understand the words, and in that moment the transition loop warped the room and disguised the movements in it. When they passed through normspace again, Fassa del Parma was standing between Forister and Darnell, as if she thought she could shield the brawn from a direct needler spray.

  "He's right," she said. "I didn't have time to think before. You're a monster."

  Polyon laughed without humor. "Fassa, 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."

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

  Darnell's fingers were twitching. Polyon nodded. Slowly, too slowly, Darnell raised the needler. He gave Forister ample time to grasp Fassa 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 Fassa 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 far 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 bloody seas; Polyon watched a bubble the size of a small pond float inexorably toward him, settle around him with a clammy grip, then shrink to a bright button-sized stain on his shirt front.

  Fassa 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 ship's systems are failing? What do 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 needler 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, Fassa, 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 discussed. But if I'd threaten you with flaying alive for cheating me over a factory, Fassa, just think for a moment what I'll do to you for interfering with me now."

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

  "Go on, Fassa," Forister urged when normal speech was 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, I'll do it; you keep the needler on Fassa, 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 ship'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, struggling 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 ship's computer that Polyon controlled to transmit new, overriding instructions to the hyperchips controlling Micaya's internal organ replacements. The changes had the full duration of a transition loop to take effect. When they returned to normspace, 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?"