The difference—
The deacon had neglected to establish whether Lady Cybelle’s soul chips contained a complete and consistent dump of her neural state. Or whether the two soul chips even agreed about her state of mind at the moment of death. (He also failed to pay attention to a number of subtle issues relating to initializing a new brain—there is more to it than simply pumping a hundred million bloated metaneurocytes into a skull and flicking the “on” switch—but these paled into insignificance compared to his other errors.) As it happens, Lady Cybelle’s soul chips had not come through the accident unscathed. And the neural connectome of a brain is not an all-or-nothing proposition, like a program in an archaic formal language: It will work even with considerable errors present. But an error-riddled one won’t work properly. There will be glitches, memory holes, dyskinesias, personality changes, emotional upsets. And if one attempts to merge two different error-riddled connectomes, one doesn’t necessarily improve the situation. Consequently, the Lady Priestess’s higher cognitive functions were, shall we say, not yet bedded in: the error-prone soul chips were in place, but her personality and memories had not yet annealed. And that’s not the worst part of what Dennett had failed to do: He had ignored the implications of loading faulty brain dumps into a body that had not yet finished assimilating and indenturing a huge influx of raw, free-market mechanocytes.
Normally, the recipient’s techné would indoctrinate the new ’cytes as they circulated, assigning them a role and a nutrient credit balance and dispatching them to whatever tissue type was most in need, and all would run smoothly. But techné in a ferment of tissue replacement is techné that needs vastly more energy than normal. Deacon Dennett was in a hurry. He sent me to round up the vital nutrients but did not wait for me to return with them before he turned up the heat under Cybelle’s marrow, pushing her metabolism into cytological inflation.
So, of course, it was nobody but his own fault when Lady Cybelle’s etiolated body sat up inside the sarcophagus, looked around blankly, unplugged itself from the various pipes, tubes, and cables to which she was fastened, and climbed out of the hatch in search of food.
I say “Lady Cybelle’s body,” not “Lady Cybelle.” Brains consume energy—a disproportionate amount of one’s intake. And unlike the Fragile, people like us have the ability to handle famine efficiently; to shut down unnecessary organs and higher functions, to enter estivation if necessary, and to take extraordinary actions to satiate our needs in event of an emergency. Even the best of us lose our minds if subjected to extreme privations: A Fragile would simply die, but we stop thinking and temporarily become less than human—raw survival machines, bent on maintaining life by any means necessary. Monitor cameras witnessed what happened, of course. They saw the woman, naked and lean as any of the mummified servitors, her skin the unnatural white of pigment-depleted chromatophores, clamber clumsily through the circular hatch two-thirds of the way up the bell of the Soyuz. Deacon Dennett had his back turned to her, for he had returned to the organ pit to fuss over the engine controls (in a futile attempt to wring some extra thrust from the motors and postpone the inevitable reckoning with the approaching pirates). Leaning over his keyboards, fingers dancing across white and black keys and occasionally darting forward to pull or push the stops, he was so enthralled by his virtuoso performance that he failed to see Cybelle’s head twitch round, blank-eyed and empty of expression, attracted by his movements. Movements that singled him out as the nearest available source of energy and nutrients.
Cybelle did not scream, or shout, or even (contra the urban legends surrounding the state of those unfortunates who shared her present degraded state) groan “brainssss.” She simply leapt from the top of the sarcophagus, conserving her energy—a single bound that, in a hundredth of a gee, took her the entire width of the nave, across the screen, over the altar, and down into the organ crypt.
The strength of the famished is notorious, and in no way exaggerated: Someone whose higher functions have been sidelined by starvation will, without hesitation, exert themselves to the point of dislocating joints and delaminating motor-tissue bundles if they are in sight of food. Had Dennett not hunched forward over his keyboard without warning, Cybelle would have landed on his back and sunk her fangs into his throat on the way down. But by luck or happenstance, Dennett removed himself from the target of her slow-motion leap. Overshooting, Cybelle crashed against the imposing array of pipes and tubes jutting from the top of the commander’s console: Dennett, looking up in surprise, caught a foot in his face and squawked loudly as he recoiled.
“Muh— Your Grace?” He tumbled backward from the bench seat as Cybelle turned.
Behind her, the valve work sputtered and hissed, deliquescing under her touch as hungry skin ’cytes pumped corrosive digestive fluid against everything they touched. Nothing of intelligence showed in her slitted emerald eyes as she looked around, searching for further food. “Ssssss—”
Dennett clapped one hand to his damaged cheek, mouthing in pain as he realized his predicament. Then he hurled himself at the nearest exit in a dash for life, a split second ahead of Cybelle’s whiplash pursuit.
Cybelle rebounded from the floor: By the time she recovered, she was alone in the vaulted space of the chapel. She looked around, hissing mindlessly: There was nothing to eat here. And so she gathered her strength and sprang once more in pursuit of her target. She had no choice, even had she mind enough to consider her options: For if she didn’t find nutrition soon, her still-starving techné would declare her identity bankrupt; tear her brain to pieces; then secede from her body in a ravenous tide of solitary micromechanical predators.
And so the wild hunt began.
* * *
The stalker explored the darkened corridors of the chapel carefully, skulking from shadow to crypt, sending her knives ahead in brief whirring stabs of exploration.
Her wake-up call had come days ago, when the chapel commenced acceleration. Opening her eyes in the frigid darkness, she knew—for even the unconscious have mechanisms for reasoning—that the denizens of the mission would not expect an intruder at this late date. Nevertheless, she took pains over the air lock, investigating it with fingers and cunning tools, searching for sensors that might alert the occupants, then listening (with her head pressed against the wall) for any vibration that might betray the presence of a guard before she finally rotated the lock compartment round into the light and warmth and air of the interior.
The interior of the vehicle had proven challenging for the stalker. She had been designed and trained to operate in certain types of environments: Had she found her target aboard a passenger liner or a beacon station, her behavioral repertoire would have sufficed to deal with the situation. But the mission planners had not anticipated that Krina would outrun the stalker for this long, much less that she would hide in the anonymity of poverty or work her passage as a lay crew member aboard a religious mission. It was easy enough for the stalker to blend in with the dense, anonymous population of a commercial hub or a city, or to casually impersonate her target among near strangers; but a dimly lit chapel occupied for the most part by silently toiling skeletons was an entirely different matter. So when she fell back on another preprogrammed behavior, her attempts at misdirection and camouflage were not entirely successful.
The second time she resumed her active hunt, the chapel’s acceleration had increased. Not by much—it was barely a thousandth of a gee—but it was a significant change. Increased acceleration was an indication of urgency, energetically expensive. That made it an anomaly, and anomalies frequently presaged opportunities, or at least useful distractions for potential witnesses. Had she been capable of introspection, the stalker would have been smacking her lips with anticipation as she gathered her knives and stealthily retrieved her external monitor to review its memory.
The tiny camera had spent the past week and a half clinging inconspicuously to the door of the cell the stal
ker had selected for a home. It awakened to capture an image whenever anyone passed by. Eleven motorized skeletons had clattered slowly along the passage, dusting and polishing. Twice on other occasions, a dark-robed figure had passed: and three times, a slightly built female similar enough to be the stalker’s long-lost sib, this one carefully checking the lights and ventilation ducts as she went.
The stalker tensed when she recognized her prey. It wasn’t a high-resolution recording (the camera was the size of a pinhead), but it was good enough; in particular, the motion kinematics were intimately familiar, burned into the stalker’s memory. Krina had passed this way, attending to her chores, barely a day ago. Moreover, judging by her speed, she was in slowtime, metabolic rate and reflex speed lowered considerably. Excellent. The probability of a rapid kill and successful substitution had risen considerably. And so the stalker made some small adjustments to her appearance—bringing her hair and facial appearance closer into line with her target’s—then opened the door and slithered out into the darkness of the graveyard shift.
She made her way through avenues of bones, along lightless ducts, through burnished metal docking nodes and flag-floored chambers. She charted her course by sound and memory: the distant creaking and groaning of wood and stone in flight, the pings and ticks of expanding and contracting metal, and the distant sigh of air rushing through ventilation ducts. Somewhere beyond the walls of the companionways, creatures scuttled in the darkness: cleaner worms, perhaps, or smaller quadrupedal hangers-on. They were of no significance to her. Only people were of interest to the stalker—and her knives, hovering quietly and alternately darting ahead of her, then falling behind to take up the rear.
Quite by accident, the target came to the stalker. “Hello?” it piped, tumbling out of a side passage right in front of the stalker as she worked on a hatch, preparing to expand her search pattern to take in another ring of access tubes. Something was clearly wrong: The target’s metabolic rate was high, her activity frenetic.
The stalker, surprised, looked up. The target was completely unafraid. “Who are you?” it asked. “Have you seen Cook?”
There was no program for this. But the stalker had to be sure. “What is your name?” she demanded, reaching for her assault dagger.
“Got to run! Bye!” As the target turned, the stalker aimed her knife and braced for the throw—but the target somersaulted and bounced down the corridor with reckless, manic abandon and heedless haste, almost as if she realized what the stalker intended for her.
The stalker kicked off in pursuit, but the target ran without hesitation—then it reached the next internode and slammed the hatch shut behind. A rattling clang of catches notified the stalker that she was locked out. Worse: The target now knew she was pursued.
A human hunter would have become upset and angry at this point. But the stalker merely paused, then turned and rapidly made her way back to the next internode. The target could have made her way in five different directions; but she was still trapped aboard the chapel. The stalker would resume her search pattern. Sooner or later, she would come upon the target again and put an end to this stage of the mission.
* * *
After Cook’s departure, the Gravid Mother’s mood began to fall. She was clearly unhappy with me for some reason—perhaps it was the news I carried, or perhaps it was simply that my arrival had interrupted her recreational fornication—so after reassembling her bed-web, she retreated into it, muttering darkly to herself and occasionally glancing in my direction, as if wondering why I was still there. And after an hour, so was I.
In times of stress, I attempt to distract myself by enumerating repeating features of my environment: I find the contemplation of figures soothing. Unfortunately, there were few items to count in her room and nothing germane to this account. Also, I think, she became disturbed by my hand gestures. I tried to conceal them, but—“What are you doing?” she demanded.
“Counting.” I held up both hands. “Did you know there are seventy-six strands in your bed?”
“Did I—how do you know that?”
I stared at my fingers. “That’s seventy-six. Isn’t it obvious?”
“But you don’t have seventy-six fingers!”
“Of course not; I have six on each hand. But that’s enough to count to four thousand and ninety-six, in binary. Without even using my toes.”
She squinted at me. “You’re mad.”
“No: I’m numerate.” I started counting the cushions again, for the eighteenth time. “How long do you think Cook should take?”
“What? To round up”—Her Gravidity muttered under her breath: After a moment, I realized she was counting aloud—“about half an hour. Why?”
“I haven’t heard any alarms. And he’s been gone fifty-eight minutes already. Shouldn’t he be back here by now?”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be silly, child. I’ll call him.” With which she raised one wrist to her cheek, and cooed, “Cookie, sweet cookie? My delectable cookie? Where are you?” She frowned impatiently as seconds ticked by, the silence lengthening. “Willard, are you there?” Her confident facade began to sag, like lime plaster undermined by the water of uncertainty slowly dripping down a wall.
“You have a voice communicator?” I asked, fascinated. “Like a telephone?” I kicked myself mentally for not having thought to ask for such a thing earlier: It would have made life simpler.
She didn’t reply. Instead, all at once she turned on me. “This is all your fault! You and your horrid story, frightening us with pirates and crazies!” She heaved up against her bed restraints and began unhooking them: “You want to kill us all, don’t you? You wheedled your way on board by sweet-talking the deacon and brought your pirate associates along and now you’re trying to get me to go out and follow Willard!” She finished unstrapping herself from the bed, still fulminating: “I’m not a fool, you know! I stay here and I watch everything that’s going on outside my room and I know things. I know exactly what you are!” She grabbed my ankles. “Go on, call your accomplices! Tell them I’ve got you! They’re going to send Willard back to me, and he’d better be fine, because if he isn’t, I’m going to send you back to them in lots of tiny little pieces—”
I started to struggle, but the Gravid Mother was surprisingly strong: She was taller and more massive than I, which gave her an unfair advantage of leverage and reach. “Let me go!” I demanded, shoving clumsily at her head.
“Oh no you don’t,” she crooned. “I’m not going to let you go! I’m going to keep you here with me until your friends come, then I’m going to show them what I can do—” She bundled me into a quilt and balled it up, knotting it around my neck to deny me leverage. “This is all your fault.” I cowered in the makeshift sack as she raised her wrist again: “Willard, are you there? Anyone, is anyone there? Deacon, your holiness?” But nobody answered. “This is all your fault!” she repeated as she cried, punching me with her meaty fists.
I don’t know what she intended, but punching a person you have just wrapped in a padded quilt is certainly not an effective way of harming them. Instead, I drifted across the room, quite out of her reach, which gave me time to fumble the knot loose and tumble out into the air. She snarled at me and shuffled around in her web, but I rebounded from the far wall and kicked off for the hatch. She swung toward me indecisively and finally jumped as I fumbled with the lock, but I had the advantage of leverage and caught her with a clumsy swipe that sent her spinning. The hatch clicked open as she fetched up against the far wall and rebounded toward me—but she was too late. I slipped into the twilight beyond the hatch and pulled it closed behind me. Not that I relished the idea of being at large aboard the chapel with a murderous stowaway on board, but the Gravid Mother had given me cause for concern with her increasing paranoia: If one must choose which space to share with a possibly homicidal lunatic, then one should pick the one with the most hiding places.
* * *
Willard the Cook slowly made his way toward the crypt through the warren of cadaver-lined companionways that surrounded the ground-level hub of the chapel. “Deacon? Yer holiness? I’ve got yer recuss fluids! An’ yer tubespam! And the rest of yer orders. Feeling a wee bit peckish?” He pushed a bulky cargo net before him, full of sloshing demijohns of perfusion fluid and fat, rolled Fragile liverwurst. “Where are you?”
It is not possible at this remove for me to tell what was passing through his mind. Perhaps he was seething with resentment at the small, colorless person who had interrupted his afternoon’s entertainment in the Gravid One’s web—a very fetching spider in the eyes of this particular fly—and possibly also some mild apprehension at the incongruous talk of pirates and emergency procedures. But that is just my guess.
Nor is it possible at this time to tell of the location of Deacon Dennett, for that worthy had legged it at panic speed as soon as he realized that Her Ladyship was out and about and on the prowl for snacks. One might point the finger of reproach at Dennett, for, unlike me, he was equipped with a shipboard phone and certainly knew how to use it to alert everyone aboard the chapel to the situation; but he wasn’t entirely in his right mind at the time, or even that of his badly burned brethren. With full and perfect hindsight, I think it is fair to say that Dennett was, in his own way, as unfit for command as Lady Cybelle.
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