Willy-nilly, Chan and Tatty were swept out farther from the Sun, out to the hive of the Asteroid Belt where a hundred minor planets formed the commercial and political power house of the solar system. From there it was outward again, to the huge industrial bases on Europa, Titan, and Oberon. Equipped with Monitor headsets, Chan and Tatty plunged deep into the icy ammonia slush below the deep atmosphere of Uranus, to the infernal region where the Ergas—the Ergatandro-morph Constructs—worked tirelessly on the fusion plants and the Uranian Link system. The work was still three centuries from completion. Disturbingly, the Erga slaves already gave evidence that they were developing their own complex culture.
With the survey of the old solar system approaching its end, Tatty halted the program and stared at Chan. Nothing. Plants and planets, science and society, all left him equally unmoved. Sighing, she signalled for the lesson to continue.
They leaped a trillion kilometers into the outer darkness. The monstrous bulk of the Oort Harvester was at work here, a world-sized cylinder lumbering along through the hundred billion members of the cometary cloud. Slow and tireless, at home a tenth of a lightyear from Sol, the Harvester was hunting down bodies rich in simple organic molecules, converting them to sugars, fats, and proteins, and Linking the products back to feed the inner system.
A final solar-system leap. Chan and Tatty skipped to the quiet outpost of the Dry Tortugas: arid, volatile-free shards of rock that marked the gravitational boundary of Sol’s domain. Past this point, any matter had to be shared with other stars. Sun itself was a chilly pinprick of light, while temperatures hovered a few degrees above absolute zero. Tatty stared in awe at the billion-year-old metal tetrahedra, enigmatic relics left by a race old before humanity was young.
The lesson halted. “Questions?” said a polite voice.
Tatty glanced at Chan’s impassive face. Again he was studying the hair on his wrist. “No.” She spoke for both of them.
“Then we will continue.”
So far the lesson had been a general one, designed to teach Chan the structure and varied economies of the solar system. Now it would be specific to Pursuit Team training.
The display changed scale again. Far beyond the boundaries of the solar system lay the members of the Stellar Group.
“First, the overview.” The region of accessible space was a knobby and dimpled sphere, fifty-eight lightyears across and centered on Sol. The Perimeter formed a fuzzy outer boundary where the probe ships, limited at best to a tenth of light speed, expanded the accessible region by up to ten lightyears a century.
Humans had never encountered another species possessing the Mattin Link. The Perimeter would remain roughly spherical, unless and until—people had talked of it for centuries—some probe ship at the Perimeter met a ship from a second bubble, blown by another species who had found the secret of the Mattin Link for themselves.
(Humans had written thousands of papers and millions of words, seeking to analyze the outcome of such a meeting, just as in an earlier era, writers had endlessly discussed possible first contact with intelligent aliens. Like those analyses, the new papers were erudite, well-argued, and persuasive—and reached contradictory conclusions.)
In the final segment of the lesson, Chan and Tatty homed in on the home stars of the known intelligent species. The Pipe-Rillas had been found first. They were stellar neighbors, with the binary stars of Eta Cassiopeiae, only eighteen lightyears from Sol, as their home system.
Next came the Tinkers, twenty-three lightyears out. Their home world was Mercantor, circling the star Fomalhaut.
After that, the discovery program had suffered a long dry spell. The Perimeter expanded steadily, reaching a new volume of space that increased quadratically with time, but no new intelligence was discovered; not until a probe reached Capella, forty-five lightyears from Earth, and found the Angels. That had been a century and a half ago. The Angel language, civilization, and thought processes were still an unlocked mystery for humans.
In the final segment of the lesson, images of each species were added to the displays. That was Kubo Flammarion’s brain child. He hoped to make Chan “feel comfortable with the aliens, before he meets them.” Tatty considered that was optimism of the highest order.
The screen first showed the quivering mass of a Tinker Composite, then the enlarged view of individual components from which the Tinker was made. They were fast-flying legless creatures about the size of a humming-bird. Each of them possessed just enough nerve tissue for independent locomotion, sensation, feeding, breeding, and clustering. Each had a ring of eyes on its blunt head, and long antennae to permit coupling into the Composite. The bodies were purple and black, shiny, sticky-looking. Tatty was fascinated. She was sorry when the display moved on to show the arthropod cylinder segments of a Pipe-Rilla, and finally the dull green fronds of an Angel. But at least this ought to interest Chan—it would interest anyone, even a child. She glanced across to see how he was reacting. He was not watching the display at all. He was staring at her.
“Chan!”
But he was grimacing, not in annoyance or boredom but in pain. He reached up to place his hands on the side of his head.
Tatty stood up at once. Chan did this sometimes after a Stimulator session, never before. “What hurts?”
“Head. Hurt bad.” He was mumbling, rubbing his temples and then his eyes. “Picture make me hurt bad.”
Kubo Flammarion had warned of critical points. They often came with headaches and they could lead to fever, nervous degeneration, and rapid death. Tatty went to kneel by Chan’s side and took his head between her hands. “Don’t move, Chan. I have to look.”
She had been told the warning symptoms. Chan sat quietly as she lifted his eyelid and shone a fight on the eyeball. No reddening, no protrusion. The pupils dilated normally with the light on them. Sight, and then hearing, proved normal when she tested them.
Tatty took Chan’s temperature. That was normal, too. So were the brain rhythms of his EEG. Everything was normal. Could Chan possibly be faking it, knowing what came next?
“Do you still hurt?”
“Not bad now. Getting better.”
Tatty sighed—mixed relief and discomfort. She did not have sufficient reason to put off the thing that she most dreaded, the ritual of forcing Chan into one of the “special” sessions with the Tolkov Stimulator.
Might as well get it over with. Tatty stood up. “Come on, Chan.” She took him by the hand and led him through into the next chamber. Amazingly, he did not protest or resist. Could he be faking it the other way round—hurting, and not willing to admit it?
“Chan, are you sure you don’t hurt any more?”
He would not look at her, but he slowly shook his head. “Not hurt.” He sat down in the Stimulator chair and let Tatty strap him in.
Tatty hesitated before she connected the headset. The whole thing was unfair. With no experience, she was forced to make decisions that could kill Chan.
“All right?”
Chan did not speak. Tatty turned on the power. Usually she could not bear to watch the whole session, but today she felt obliged to.
For a few minutes Chan sat quiet, eyes closed. There were frown lines on his forehead, and as he gripped the arm-rests the tendons in his forearms and the backs of his hands sprang up white and prominent.
At last he began to moan, a long, breathless sound high in his throat Tatty knew it well. It was “normal,” if anything about the Tolkov Stimulator could be called normal, a sign that the power build-up was approaching its peak rate. There was nothing to see, but inside Chan’s skull a complex series of fields was being generated in both cerebral hemispheres. Natural patterns of electrical activity were sensed by the Stimulator, modulated, and fed back at increased intensity. At the same time, the body’s own motor control was inhibited. The damping was necessary to prevent Chan from tearing himself to pieces. The jerks, spasms, and writhing of the body were still spectacular, but Flammarion had explained that th
ey were unrelated to what Chan was actually feeling. Chan’s agonies were far worse than that. They arose within the brain itself, as a pain far more intense than anything of physical origin.
The crisis was approaching. Chan’s body jerked from side to side in the chair. His face was blood-red, with veins in neck and forehead like purple cords. Suffused with blood, medication injection points on his bare arms showed as bright patterns of stigmata. At this point in every treatment, Tatty feared that Chan would die of heart failure or apoplexy.
The Stimulator monitor chattered a final burst of activity. As it cut off a high-pitched scream filled the chamber. Chan writhed against his restraining straps. His body shuddered and shook in the chair.
Tatty went terrified to his side. This was not the normal end point of a special treatment session. Chan was usually loose-limbed and flaccid, now he was reacting as though the session were still going on.
As she placed her hands on his shoulders the spasms ended. Tatty glanced at the monitors. Pulse strong, but blood pressure disturbingly high. All Stimulator functions registered as zero. The session was certainly over, and by now Chan ought to be awake and weeping. Then she would take him in her arms, hold him close, and comfort him. According to Kubo Flammarion that psychological support was supremely important if she was to lower the risk of catatonic withdrawal.
Except that today he was flinching at her touch. “Chan. It’s Tatty. Can you hear me?”
The eyes were beginning to open. Long eyelashes flickered. A slit of white was visible, then blue irises rolled slowly down into view. Chan licked his lips and glanced from side to side. Suddenly he stared right at Tatty as though he had never seen her before.
“Chan!”
“Tatty?” The voice was as faint and far-off as starlight.
“It’s me, Chan.” Tatty snapped open the restraining straps so that she could draw Chan’s head forward to her breast. “There, baby. You just rest on me. You’ll be all right in a few minutes.”
“No!” He wrenched away from her and spun out of the chair. Before she could grab him he was running out of the chamber and down the outside corridor. He was screaming, and his voice was echoing from the smooth walls.
Something was different—and terribly wrong. After a special Stimulator session Chan always needed soothing, then he would sleep.
Tatty snatched up the Tracker and her case of anesthetic drugs and started after him through the tunnels of Horus.
Within minutes she realized that he was not following any of his usual paths. The Tracker showed that he was off on some wild new excursion, sometimes far away, sometimes veering in close to her, but always inaccessible. Tatty did her best to follow, and found she was running into blind ends. According to the Tracker, Chan was just on the other side of that well—and there was no way to reach it.
She hurried on, following the Tracker’s memory of each twist and turn. There was no possibility that he could actually escape; Horus was a maximum security facility, and Tatty had hopelessly explored all the possible routes for herself.
But he could certainly do himself damage. She had to find him, and as soon as possible.
It took over three hours. And when Tatty finally reached him she realized that it was no credit to her. Chan was sitting quietly on an old excavating machine, staring at the molecular decomposition nozzles. The corridor behind him was clear. Had he chosen to do so, he could have gone on running.
Tatty approached him warily. She could shoot tranquilizer from as far away as ten yards, but there was little sign that it might be needed.
“Chan.”
“Here, Tatty.”
“Are you all right?” She saw the dried tears on his cheeks.
“No. Anything but all right. I mean . . . I don’t know. If was all right before, then not all right now.”
Tatty’s skin quivered into goosefiesh. The baby-talk overtone was still there, with Chan’s awkward articulation. But the cadence and meaning had changed. It was a stranger talking.
“Chan, how do you feel? Are you hurting?”
His long silence was not the usual blank of indifference. He seemed to be pondering her question, searching for an answer and finding it impossible to reply. Twice he began, and twice he halted before completing a word.
“Feel . . . strange,” he said at last. “Just the same, and not same. All things are . . . mixed. I don’t know more, all same things in my head. But now . . .” He frowned. “Same things, but things not the same. Now I can see them. Before, I didn’t notice.” He stood up, and swayed on his feet. One arm went blindly to the side, to support himself against the excavating machine. “I . . . feel . . . like . . .”
He was falling forward, eyes closing. Tatty stepped forward to support him. For a change she welcomed the weak gravity maintained on Horus. She could carry Chan to his bedroom for examination without too much strain on herself.
All the way back he remained unconscious. But his breathing was regular, and when she laid him on the bed the monitors showed his vital signs as normal. Tatty sat next to him as the monitors completed a more detailed examination. She wanted to talk to Ceres and tell Flammarion what was happening, but it was surely more important to stay here. He seemed all right, but suppose that he suffered another convulsion while she was away? She was the only other person on Horus. More than that, suppose this were the breakthrough point for the Stimulator treatment. Then she had to be there when Chan awoke. Flammarion had emphasized that often enough, without ever explaining how she was supposed to manage it and still tell Ceres exactly what was going on.
Tatty made up her mind. Chan might need her help for the next few nours, and that took priority over everything else.
She ran through into the kitchen, grabbed containers of drink and packaged food, and rushed back to sit beside Chan. He remained unconscious while she ate a makeshift meal, but he was beginning to mutter and whimper in his sleep. Tatty was increasingly reluctant to leave him. She glanced at her watch. It was almost time for Chan’s scheduled sleep. She dimmed the chamber lights and quietly lay down at his side.
Such vigil was no novelty. She had sat often with Chan after a Stimulator session, telling him stories until he was relaxed enough to go to sleep. Soon after their arrival on Horus she had changed his bed for a much broader one, so that she could stretch out beside him and tell simple tales of life on Earth and in the Gallimaufries, stories that drew his attention until the tears ended and exhaustion took over.
Tonight was not much different. Chan drifted toward wakefulness, snuggling up close as he did so. His forehead was a little warm, though not enough to be called a fever.
Tatty closed her own eyes. The significance of the day’s events was coming home to her. Suppose that Chan had made a crucial breakthrough? Then he might be on the road to normal intelligence. That was the finest news in the world—she had grown as fond of Chan as she had ever been of anyone. But there were other implications . . . great implications . . .
If his treatment is ending, I’ll be free! Out of this prison. Free to leave Horus, free to return to my own life on Earth. Less than two months, but I feel as though I’ve been away forever. Can I go back there, now—and what will I do about Esro? Do I want to torment him, as he has tormented me?
“Tatty!” Chan jerked up out of half-sleep.
“Here.” She put her arms around him. “You’re all right. Everything’s all right.”
“No.” He put his arms around her. “It’s not all right. I wish I could go back. It used to be easy, and now it’s hard. It’s . . . what is the word? . . . compli-cated?”
“That’s the real world, Chan.”
“It was the real world before. My real world. Tatty, I don’t like this. I’m scared.”
“Hold on to me, Chan. You’re right, it’s not easy. Being human is never easy. But you have friends. I’ll help you, and I’ll take care of you.”
Chan nodded. But he began to cry again, deep-chested sobs that went on minute after mi
nute. Tatty felt the tears in her own eyes. It had seemed so obvious that Chan would be better if the Stimulator worked, that afterwards everything would be better. Now she sorrowed for the loss of the innocent child. Her baby was gone, and he would never come back.
She cradled him to her, stroking his head and patting his shoulders. She became aware of another change in him, one that filled her with foreboding. Chan was becoming physically aroused, moving his body uneasily against her.
Tatty had been warned of this in the first briefing. Flammarion had told her that Chan’s adult body might announce its presence, and he had emphasized that rejection would be bad for Chan. There could be permanent psychological damage. Tatty had listened and nodded. There were far bigger problems to worry about.
“Tatty!” Chan was frightened. Long past puberty, he had always been blissfully unaware of his own sexuality. Now uncontrollable urges were possessing him, and he had no idea what was happening.
It was the fear in his voice that made Tatty ignore her own worries. “It’s all right, Chan. You’re going to be fine. It’s not a bad thing.”
Not bad for you. Bad for me. It makes no difference. Chan needs me, and no one else cares if I even exist.
Gently, Tatty guided Chan along another critical segment of his rite of passage from child to man. She held him, and at the same time despised herself.
Worst of all was her inability to remain aloof. Two months was a long time—too long. Tatty felt her own growing response and fought against it. She shivered hesitated, resisted, but finally groaned and clutched him to her.
During lovemaking he had begun to weep again, long mournful sobs that shook his body. At the moment of his climax he cried out, “Leah! Oh, Leah.”
At the height of her own passion, Tatty wept also. Her tears were silent. But she thought of Esro Mondrian, and in the final seconds she at last whispered his name.
Chapter 14
Twenty thousand years ago humans had hunted the woolly rhinoceros and fought the sabertooth tiger. Five thousand years ago the quarry was wild boar and bears and hippopotami. One thousand years ago, out on the great plains of Africa and India, the prize kills were lions, elephants, and tigers.
The Mind Pool Page 14
