Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - VII

by Hal Colebatch, Mark O Martin, Gregory Benford, Paul Chafe

  Carol had seen evidence of this horror herself, with poor Bruno.

  The full AI computers were initially very useful, but always shut down after a few months, producing an extremely expensive piece of junk. Unusable for even straight calculations. Carol felt that this observation should have been hint enough to the brain-computer interface researchers in Luna to leave well enough alone. Yet again and again, humans were entered into full Linkage with high-level computers.

  The Linkers also shut down, just like their pure silicon cousins, after a certain period of time. But what could cause catatonia in both machine and mind?

  No one knew.

  With this in mind, Carol did her best as captain of the Sun-Tzu to minimize Bruno’s full Linkage time. It was useful to have the pilot be part of the ship, of course; but he was needed, whole and sane, when Dolittle made its first and final run on the Wunderland system. Bruno would do that piloting in full Linkage, for as long as necessary.

  It would surely drive him insane, Carol knew sadly, no matter how different Bruno’s hybrid brain might be from that of other Linkers. And yet it was all part of the mission of the Sun-Tzu, to which all of the crew—including Carol and Bruno—had agreed. Volunteered.

  Carol would meet her own fate at that time, too. It didn’t concern her too much. She had seen enough battle action during the Third Wave, lost enough comrades, to know about sacrifices. She didn’t want to die, no, but Carol knew what humanity had at stake in the war against the ratcats. Humanity should be ready to try anything.

  Even Project Cherubim.

  She watched odd expressions flit across Bruno’s twitching face as the Linkage proceeded toward its symbiotic conclusion. His muscles seemed to bunch and move differently under Bruno’s skin in odd ways, reflecting the changing biotelemetry displayed in the holoscreen window. Bruno’s fingers quested blindly within their restraints, twitching and moving in patterns that seemed somehow inhuman to Carol.

  Carol thought that Bruno’s eyes were the worst part. They stared, bulged, rolled up to show the whites and impossibly wide pupils. She wanted to stroke Bruno’s face, but knew it was too early in the process to touch him. Not that he would even feel it. Sweat beaded out of his pores as he twitched, leaping from his skin in fine droplets, floating around the navigation deck in freefall.

  When they had first had sex, Carol swore to herself that she was not in love with this sad little man with the bumpy, scarred cranium. The voyage was long, and it was doubtful that any of them would live through even its early stages. Years spent aboard an experimental spacecraft, followed by a suicide mission. Everyone on board Sun-Tzu, asleep or awake, knew the score displayed on that particular chip.

  Carol had told herself that what she was starting to feel for Bruno was only the relief of tension, or at best its afterglow. She was an independent woman, after all. A pilot of a Shrike singleship against the Second Wave the ratcats had sent against Sol. Later, Carol had commanded several squadrons during the Third Wave, and had the shipsuit patches to prove it. Defending Sol had become her life. Carol did not have time for romantic entanglements, particularly with a chipheaded dwarf of a Flatlander like Bruno Takagama.

  Yet she had fallen in love with him, with his moods and quirky sense of humor. Bruno Takagama was both child and man, and somehow neither. The plastic and electronics within his half-healed skull gave him a perspective and manner of thinking different from anyone Carol had ever known in the Belt.

  She had found that very attractive.

  Bruno was the family Carol had never really had, and she knew that he felt the same about her. The dour Neo-Amish Belters who had raised Carol after her parents’ ore-carrier had blown out into high vacuum had a grudging praise for people like Bruno: His heart was as big as his soul.

  It stung Carol deeply to see the man she loved become slowly inhuman, tied to the cold metal and silicon of a passionless machine. Yet, when she thought about it, it was ironic: Project Cherubim was not so very different for her, was it? Was Early’s plan not to turn Carol, and the coldsleep crew, into something just as inhuman with the virus in the cryovial? Her lips thinned.

  The main computer hummed an attention tone, and Carol dragged her thoughts back to the present.

  “Carol? I am ready to begin work.”

  Bruno’s voice was higher, oddly cadenced. The correct inflections were still there, peppering words and syllables, yet the nuances were almost too studied. It was as if he was trying to sound human.

  She looked over at Bruno. The restraints had soundlessly retracted back into his crash couch. His eyes, still slightly wide, turned toward her, pupils black and enormous. She held back a familiar look of distaste and pain at that gaze.

  The eyes were only part of it, Carol thought. His face was almost completely slack, like a poorly fitted mask. During Linkage, Bruno had other cool concerns than operating his facial musculature.

  He sat calmly in the crash couch, the thick interface cable connecting his mind to the Sun-Tzu’s computers slowly waving in the microgravity like a marine creature. She felt the usual conflicting emotions: love for Bruno, and discomfort at this alien Linked self.

  Her hand reached over to touch his face, hovered, withdrew. “I assume the Linkage is complete?” Her tone was cool and professional, and each calm syllable cost her dearly.

  “Yes,” Bruno replied. “I can see again,”

  While Bruno was Linked, he could see across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, using Sun-Tzu’s complex and powerful sensory array. She knew that Bruno’s sensorium was completely different from the minor chipping-in that any Belter pilot used from time to time for convenience. This was no mere telemetric readout of drive parameters or navigation control via the optic nerve.

  Bruno in the fully Linked state perceived everything, all at once. The torrent of data fed directly into his brain and mind.

  He called it the All. She had no more chance of understanding her lover’s computer-augmented perceptions than an earthworm could understand a rainbow.

  She turned away, pretending to study the holoscreen status reports. Even for someone as tough as Carol knew herself to be, as familiar as this scenario had become, the situation was almost unbearably painful.

  Carol knew that Bruno’s mental state was getting worse. And the process would continue inexorably. More and more, flashes of the cybernetic Bruno peered out from behind his eyes, even in his un-Linked state.

  It was an inevitable process. The Linked Bruno was not human. The computer left more of itself behind with every full Linkage Bruno experienced. Each time he emerged from the autodoc after severing himself from the computer, there was less and less remaining of the Bruno she loved. His personality was slowly leaching away into a sea of silicon.

  And yet he wanted Linkage, craved it.

  Carol made a face. Perhaps she was being unfair. She wondered how she would feel and act, after conversion by the virus in the cryovial, with the odd name. Tree-of-Life. She knew that her feelings about full Linkage were a little irrational because, at least for now, Bruno could un-Link.

  There would be no such return to humanity for Carol, once the Sun-Tzu reached Wunderlander space. Not once she awakened the crew in coldsleep, opened the cryovial in the sealed compartment of Dolittle, and initiated Project Cherubim.

  She squared her shoulders. The trick, Carol knew from long experience, was to dissociate her command self from her personal self. She looked at Bruno and said coolly, “So, Tacky, do you still think that your ghost blip is actually a kzin ship?”

  Bruno continued to stare directly at her, hardly moving, his pupils expanded to turn his normally grayish eyes into pools of blackness. It made Carol very nervous.

  “Well?” she persisted, ignoring the creeping sensation crawling up and down her spine.

  “Interesting,” Bruno said, with a ghastly imitation of an un-Linked smile. “You keep your feelings from your voice. Or nearly so. But I can read your tones and stress patterns perfectly. You
r facial gestures are quite clear when compared with contour bitmaps of earlier visual records. Biotelemetry is also accessed; your skin conductance and pupillary action concur with my conclusion.” The alien smile faded. “I make you nervous.”

  Carol kept her own face stiff, in counterpoint to his own slack features. “Yes,” she said evenly, barely keeping the sarcasm from her tone. “It certainly takes an incredible intellect in full Linkage to conclude that fact.”

  She watched Bruno for a moment, who said nothing.

  “Humor, I would assume,” he finally said flatly.

  Carol tried again. “You certainly do make me nervous. You make everyone nervous when you’re Linked. All Linkers do. This can’t be the first time you’ve noticed.”

  His face became completely immobile—mimicking her? “Quite correct; I apologize. But do recall that I am still partly the Bruno you know, and that portion of my Whole cares very much what you think and feel.”

  Carol blinked at his odd terms and changing syntax. Still, she found his strange words reassuring: even while Linked, part of the Bruno-machine chimera remained the Bruno she loved.

  “Thank you,” she replied calmly, trying to focus. “But now it is time to get to work. Could you please look at the holoscreen, access the relevant data, and tell me what our putatively feline friends are doing, now that we have shut down the drive?”

  Bruno chuckled slightly, too studied and deliberate. “You seem to forget—or refuse to accept—the properties of Linkage,” he told her without rebuke. “In multitasking mode I do not require my optic nerves to read or interpret data.”

  This was true, Carol knew. Data was pouring back and forth furiously through the interface cable, directly between Bruno’s chipped-in hybrid brain and the main computers of the Sun-Tzu. It was still a little disconcerting to Carol to realize that a full Linker had his or her attention in many places, simultaneously.

  And still more disconcerting to know that the Linked Bruno spoke to her with only an infinitesimal portion of his Transcended consciousness. The rest of him was…elsewhere. Everywhere.

  “So why are you looking at me, ummm?” she murmured, a little curious despite herself.

  “Because I enjoy watching you, Carol, Linked or un-linked. It accesses many pleasant memories and associations in the human portion of my larger Self. But I can encompass much more about you while I am Transcended.” He paused, then moved his head to face the holoscreen. “I perceive that you are still disturbed by my actions. I will face forward.”

  “Well, I…” She felt vaguely uncomfortable, as if she had insulted Bruno at a cocktail party.

  “To answer your question more directly, the signals we have been discussing almost certainly emanate from three kzin warships of the Raptor class, stealthed. Probability equals zero point nine nine eight. Third Fleet, I would predict; there are no improvements over that design detectable.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Carol asked him quickly. She and the un-Linked Bruno had examined the data carefully; there was certainly nothing as straightforward as the Linked Bruno’s answer would suggest.

  Carol remained a bit suspicious of the black-magic aspects of Linkage.

  Bruno paused a moment, then spoke flatly. “Please define for me in objective, nonhuman-oriented terms the tastes ‘sweet,’ then ‘sour,’ please.”

  “Uh, well…”

  His cheek twitched as he stared intently at the blinking red blur on the upper portion of the holoscreen. Was it a smile? A stray emotion filtering past his machine consciousness?

  “Sensoria are usually difficult to describe in precise terminology without experiential referents,” he continued. “Even for simplistic intelligent system networks. Suffice it to say that the anomalous signals ‘taste’ like three kzin warcraft to me, again, little different from the Third Wave warcraft in our databases.”

  Carol decided to take his word for it. Taste. After all, this was why Bruno had been selected as pilot of the Sun-Tzu in the first place. If Carol didn’t trust Bruno’s Linked observations, why was he aboard?

  It still stank of black magic to her. Would she see reality as differently as the computer-Linked Bruno did, once she was converted by the virus in Dolittle?

  Carol pursed her lips and thought a moment. “So you would have no objections,” she asked carefully, “if we point the antimatter reaction chamber toward them and see what they do?”

  “On the contrary, I very much wish to verify my…intuition…”

  “Make it so,” she ordered formally. A schematic of the Sun-Tzu appeared in the main holoscreen window, with x-y-z coordinates in glittering red. Attitude jets flared on the schematic, slowly turning the spacecraft, and Carol felt the straps of her crash couch tightening as the attitude of Sun-Tzu matched that of its schematic.

  After a few moments, the straps loosened once more, and the line diagram of the Sun-Tzu vanished from the holoscreen. Bruno closed his eyes as another hypodermic from his crash couch hissed against his neck.

  “Reorientation complete,” he reported crisply. “Now we must wait until the presumptive warcraft detect our change in attitude.”

  They waited together. Seven light-minutes translated to 120 million kilometers. Fifteen minutes, roughly, until the light-speed-limited responses of the mystery signal, if any, arrived back at Sun-Tzu. Carol ordered Bruno to train the long-range sensor array at maximum sensitivity, to electronically sniff at the Deep surrounding them.

  He smiled that thin, inhuman smile and informed Carol that he was doing that at all times, in any event. Along with many other things, of course.

  Carol wanted to ask many questions of the augmented Bruno. What did the superintelligence sitting next to her, limp in his crash couch, think of their chances of success at Wunderland? What did he think of unaugmented humanity?

  Could he still love?

  Carol had never asked such questions of Bruno during full Linkage. Afraid of the answers, perhaps. But she feared something else more.

  Would she see and feel as Bruno did under full Linkage, after Project Cherubim was complete, and she had been changed? Or would her own situation be worse still? The records from the Black Vault had been heavily censored, even to the crew of the Sun-Tzu.

  There was so much she did not know.

  Carol looked over at her lover, lying bonelessly in his crash couch, eyes now closed, the thick interface cable at his neck. What must it be like, she mused, to have one’s mind encompass so much, all at once?

  Perhaps she would know for herself, if the Sun-Tzu ever reached Wunderland.

  Bruno, while Linked, had once told Carol that there was little of free will in what actions he took while Transcended. It was as if knowing the best solution to a problem removed freedom of choice—unless he intentionally chose an improper solution. Connected to a computer’s vast silicon mind, Bruno had told Carol that he was driven to choose the best solution to a given problem; therefore, free will as she understood it did not exist for him.

  Carol mulled that over for a few moments. What if, she thought, the basic nature of free will was the freedom to make mistakes?

  The holoscreen flashed brightly in alert, and the buzzing electronic tones of the Battle Stations alarm broke her from her reverie.

  “Pardon me,” Bruno told her calmly, eyes still closed, “but when I am part of the alarm system, I must act like the relevant component.” The alarm tone halted without Carol having to deactivate it.

  “No matter. Give me a status report.” Carol’s fingers tensed on the edges of the console before her. The dataglove and keypads were clipped impotently to the side of the console. With Bruno in full Linkage, her commands were far too slow and crude.

  The main holoscreen window cleared, and quickly drew three separate blips, moving rapidly outward from the center of the screen, in different directions. She looked over at Bruno, whose eyes were still closed, facing forward.

  “It appears,” he said, “that we have hit the jackpot, so to spe
ak.” Not waiting for orders, he displayed the observational information, data windows opening and keeping pace with the tiny red sparks, highlighting and scrolling numbers in agreement with his statements.

  “The mystery blip,” he continued, “did not wait for our change in attitude, Carol.” Abruptly he cackled with very unmachinelike glee, a false mirth animating his slack muscles. “Mystery, mystery!”

  She jerked back at this sudden change. His face went limp as the hypospray hissed at his neck again. The flat voice came, sibilant and precise, as though driven by air leaking out of a balloon. “It presumably became aware of our engine shutdown seven and a half minutes ago. The single blip then split into three distinct signals. Inference: three ships, previously moving in close convoy, stealthed.”

  “Finagle damn! One we might handle. But three?”

  The holoscreen windows showed relevant data as marching columns of glowing numbers and glittering diagrams. “The stealthing apparently does not stand up well to high-gee maneuvers, and I obtained an excellent remote data acquisition download. I was easily able to correct for what electronic countermeasures the targets were able to activate under high acceleration.”

  “Well?” Alien vessels for sure, Carol nodded to herself. Her hands gripped the arms of her crash couch until her knuckles turned white with the pressure. Were they ratcat ships, though? They had to be.

  “As I predicted,” Bruno replied, not even the pretense of emotion in his voice. “Three Raptor-class kzin warcraft.” As he spoke, a larger window opened on the holoscreen, displaying comparisons between the unidentified craft and the standard Raptor-class kzin warbird. “Engine emissions,” he continued, “are consonant with slightly damaged and refurbished Third Wave kzinti space vessels. At the time our engine shutdown registered on their instruments, the convoy immediately broke up, each spacecraft moving in different directions at two hundred gees, which is the limit for Raptor-class war-craft.”