“Sentence on Dylan Zhang Kohl is therefore pronounced and ratified,” the judge was saying. “Prisoner will remain in custody and undergo full sentencing as soon as practicable, preferably within the next few hours. Release is set at ten hundred tomorrow morning, at which time she will be released to your custody, Qvvin Zhang.”
I nodded and sat back down.
“Sanda Tyne,” the judge continued, “you shall be judged and locked into the body now possessed by Dylan Kohl. It is further directed that you undergo a process of psychological conditioning at the Borough of Medlams Public Psychology Section as prescribed by this court, and that you be reduced to the status of mendicant. Any employment you might find is restricted to the most menial of Class II occupations, and permanently fixed in the lowest position at the minimum wage prescribed by law. This sentence is to be carried out expeditiously, and not later than ten hundred tomorrow morning. This court is now adjourned. Prisoners will report to chambers for initial judgment.
The thirteen filed out, and a cop came up and escorted the two women through a door to one side of the judge’s dais. Neither of them looked back in my direction.
I was frankly more concerned with Dylan than with Sanda. As head of Hroyasail I could hire her even if I was limited in what I could pay her or do for her, so she wouldn’t face the fate of others in the mendicant class—a free one-way trip to Momrath. I worried, though, if having her around in that body would bother Dylan.
I waited anxiously in the anteroom of the Municipal Holding at ten hundred. I didn’t have long to wait. I soon saw both of my women, looking very much the same, walk out and head toward me. Both were stopped, asked to sign something, and then given their cards.
Dylan, now in Sanda’s slim sandy haired form, was through first and came up to me. “Hi,” she managed weakly.
“Hi, yourself,” I responded, and kissed her. “Was it bad?”
“Not really. I don’t even remember most of it. No, the bad stuffs to come. I can’t believe the sons of bitches actually gave me to you!”
“It’s not a precedent,” I told her, “and not restricted to women, either. It’s also done for Syndicate bosses, it seems, and Laroo. Some of ’em have private harems, male or female. It’s based on their first principle—you own your mind but the state owns all our bodies.”
“Maybe mostly, but they own a little of my mind, too. I don’t think they missed a trick to humiliate me. I can’t cause myself or anyone else physical harm. The way the psychs adjusted my mind, I’ll almost go into heat, like some animal, to get pregnant right on their schedule. I can’t even leave your side without permission, and if I’m left in the apartment I must stay there. I can’t set foot on a boat, even if it’s docked, permission or no. All that sort of shit.”
“I’m so very sorry. I’ll make it as easy on you as I can,” I soothed.
She managed a wan smile. “I know you will. Look, I told you I took the risk freely. We crapped out this time, that’s all. Look on the bright side: you won’t have to worry any more about my getting killed, and those bastards turned me into an adolescent sex fantasy all for you.”
“I didn’t ask for that.”
“I know.” She turned. “Here’s Sanda.”
Our other woman looked really stricken, filled with guilt, a guilt I knew would surface not only every time she looked at Dylan but also every time she looked in a mirror. She had done her idol in, and that was her true punishment.
Dylan grabbed her and hugged her. “Don’t feel so bad! Don’t feel so guilty! No more babies for you, no more prisoner! And we’re still together!” She turned back to me. “You can find a job for her, can’t you?”
I nodded, feeling relieved that that was out of the way. “Sure.” I looked around. “Let’s get out of this place.”
We walked out into the sunshine and sea breeze, and I hailed a cab to take us back to the dock. When we got out, Dylan looked up at Akeba House, out on the promontory. “There is one requirement they made that I have to observe, permission or no,” she told me. “I have to go up to the House in the next few days and, before an assembly of the women there, tell what happened to me and recant my crimes in front of them. That’ll be the hardest thing.”
We entered the old, familiar apartment. “You can set that up now and get it over with,” I noted, gestcring toward the phone.
She went over, took out her card, put it in the slot, and waited. Nothing happened. She sighed and turned to me. “You’ll have to dial for me,” she said wearily. “With no credit of any kind I can’t even make a simple phone call.”
I tried to console her. “I’m going after Laroo and this whole rotten system. You’re gonna be free and on the seas once more someday. I swear it.”
I was going to try as hard as hell to make her believe that, too.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Project Phoenix
Dylan’s luck had gone down the drain, but mine was still holding up. She went up to the House for her obligatory purging, then stayed around a bit, with my blessings, looking up some old friends, getting some consolation and advice, and doing some general talking. Misery loves company, as Sanda pointed out, and deep down, nobody was more miserable than Dylan. Still, when she finally returned, it was with some interesting news. Sanda, after all, had been spending her leave with us and had hardly checked in up there at all.
“There’s a couple of women there under Cloister,” she told me. “New people I never heard of before. Really gorgeous, too.”
“What’s Cloister?”
“It means they’re restricted to the grounds of the House, and they’ve had their cards completely lifted. They can’t leave the place. It’s usually only done by the Syndicate as punishment for offenses, but they don’t seem to be like that at all. In fact you’ll never guess where they come from.”
I shrugged. “What’s the mystery?”
“They’re from Laroo’s Island,” she told me. “They were some of his—what? Courtesans? Harem? Whatever.”
The news piqued my interest for several reasons. “What did they do? Have a falling out with the old bastard? Or did he just get tired of them?”
“They’re not sure. One day—zap! The whole bunch were picked up and shipped to Houses up and down the coast under Cloister. They say they think it’s because of some big deal that Laroo’s using the island for. According to them lots of new faces and equipment were coming in—and have been for the past few months.”
She shook her head negatively. “But one of them saw a name on a stack of boxes—looker boxes.”
Better and better. “What was the name?”
“Project Phoenix.”
I punched up the encyclopedia on the roomvision monitor and checked the word. A legendary bird from ancient Earth cultures that was totally reborn by being completely consumed in names.
“Can you go back up to the House whenever you want?”
“As a Syndicate member, sure.”
“I want you to do just that. Get to know these women. Find out as discreetly as possible everything you can about Laroo and his island and this mysterious project.”
“As you wish,” she responded. “But I should warn you if you have any new schemes in your head. One of the things they psyched into me might foul you up. I cannot tell a lie. Not only not to you, not to anybody.”
I considered that. “Can you not tell the truth? I mean, if somebody asks you a question and you don’t want to give the answer, can you withhold it?”
She thought about it. “Yeah, sure. Otherwise anybody could pump me about you, and that would be illegal.”
“Well, use your common sense, but if anybody asks you a question the answer to which would cause any problems, tell them you aren’t permitted to answer that.”
“As you wish,” she repeated again in that rote tone.
I looked at her. “What’s that ‘as you wish’ stuff?”
“Conditioning. Any order or direction you give me that doesn’t violate Syn
dicate rules or my other conditioning I must obey. Don’t look so upset—you can’t change the rules. You can’t even order me to disregard them, because they thought of that, damn them! I have—a—a compulsion to serve. They have made me a totally passive individual and I will, well, suffer mentally if I’m not ordered about, set to tasks—in a word, dominated. Every time you give me an order and I respond I get—well, a feeling of pleasure, of well-being, of importance. I’m a human robot—I exist to serve you, and you must let me. You must—for me.”
I looked at her strangely. Was this the same Dylan Kohl who only a day before had coolly faced down one of the most horrible monsters of the sea? Was this the independent, gutsy schemer who got out of the motherhood, worked her way to captain, and helped rig a computer? It didn’t seem so. They had certainly done something to her. Something in its own way more horrible than the lobotomies the judge said were no longer civilized. In more than one sense, this was a far crueler thing to do. I didn’t know how to handle it.
“What sort of tasks?” I wanted to know.
“Prepare your meals, clean, run errands. Anything and everything. Qwin, I know this is hard on you, and you must know it’s hard on me, but it’s done. I accept it, and you must, too. Otherwise send me away to the House and forget me.”
“Never—unless you want it.”
“Qwin, I no longer have wants. Wants have been forbidden me. They stripped the wants away and left only a series of needs. I need to serve. I need to do my work as a mother. I want nothing. If you choose to keep me naked constantly scrubbing the apartment, that is what I will do, and what I must do.”
“Damn! There must be some crooked psychs I can pressure into getting this lifted!”
“No. These compulsions are so deep-planted that to remove them other than in the precise manner that they were applied would destroy my mind and make me a permanent vegetable—and that precise manner is stored in the master computer alone. They didn’t even have just one tech do it, but many, one at a time, so it couldn’t be reconstructed; that is the added hold they have. They alone can restore me. As long as I am a good example to the motherhood of what happens if you try and change your lot, I will remain this way. I would be this way even at the House, only subject to the orders of all the women of the motherhood.”
That master computer again! I had to crack Wagant Laroo! I just had to!
I pulled all my strings at Tooker, starting with Sugal, with whom I had a cordial lunch.
“You want something. You always do when you come up,” he told me, sounding not in the least put out.
“What’s Project Phoenix?”
He started. “Where did you hear that name?”
“I heard it. I want to know what it is.”
His voice lowered to a whisper and he grew increasingly nervous. “Man! You’re dealing with high explosives here!”
“Still, Turgan, by hook or by crook I will know about it”
He sighed. “If you heard of it at all, I suppose you will. But not here. In a public place. I’ll get you the information.”
He was as good as his word, although even he really didn’t know what was going on. Nor in fact did I depend entirely on him. I pulled every string and called in any lOUs I had, as well as using the ever-fascinating Tooker computer network, to which I still had access, to build my own picture. The elements, spread out in front of me in my office, gave a story that would emerge only through deduction and analysis.
Item: As I had already known, every single computer expert pulled from Tooker at the start of the last quarter had been expert in some form of organic computering. Most major organic computers and work on them had been banned long ago by the Confederacy, after some of the early creations, centuries ago, became more than human and almost took over humanity. That bitter, bloody, and costly war had made such work feared to this day. Those who dabbled in it were wiped or—sent to Cerberus? From Sugal and other sources I determined that we weren’t the only one tapped for such minds.
Item: A couple, of months earlier than this, major construction began on Laroo’s Island, partly to create a place for shuttle landings to be made in safety there. But a whole hell of a lot more than that was in progress, to judge from the crews and raw materials ordered.
Item: Interfaces between Tooker’s master computer—and other corporations’ master computers—were established on a high and unbreakable scramble, relayed by satellite. The relay system’s other end pointed to Laroo’s Island, although officially it was interconnected to the Lord of the Diamond’s command space station in orbit around Cerberus. That raised an interesting question: if the work was so super-secret, why not the space station? It was almost as large as the island, and if one allowed for the shuttle dock, power plant, and fixed structures on the island, it was a damn sight bigger in usable space.
Item: Interestingly. Hroyasail’s own area for trawling had been increased by almost 50 percent shortly before I took over, something I never would have noticed if it hadn’t been reflected in the quota plan for the quarter, a document I was only now getting to know ultimately. Seaprince of Coborn, about the same distance south of Laroo’s Island as we were north, had an equal increase. A look at corporation affiliates and a check with the previous quarter’s quota plan showed that an entire Tooker trawling operation, Emyasail, was in the previous quarter’s plan but was totally missing now. Its area had been given to Hroyasail, which was natural, and Seaprince, which was most unnatural, since Seaprince was a Comp-world Corporation subsidiary, not one of Tooker’s. You didn’t hand valuable territory to a competitor that close voluntarily, so Compworld had to have given something really major in return and nothing like that showed in the books. In fact records showed that Tooker’s skrit harvest since the quarter began was down sharply, indicating a dip into the reserves by next year. So it wasn’t voluntary, and only the government could force such a move.
These facts alone, put together with what only I really knew of anyone likely to compile them, painted a stark picture.
Item: The only folks anybody knew about now using uncannily human organic computers were our aliens and their spy robots, robots known to have a connection with the Warden Diamond. That was why I was here. But the alien robots were so good that no research project would be really necessary on them—and even if it was, it wouldn’t be carried out here, not on Cerberus or any other Warden world, and certainly not by any of our people, who were definitely behind the aliens in this area.
And yet the conclusion was inescapable: Wagant Laroo had converted his former retreat and resort into an organic computer laboratory, staffed with the best of his own that he could find and supplied by Emyasail’s trawlers. Why trawlers and gunboats and not by air? Well, for one thing it would attract less attention and give the appearance to onlookers of business as usual in Emyasail’s area. Also, there appeared to be some paranoia about many aircraft in the vicinity of Laroo’s Island.
I paced back and forth for several days and also talked the matter over with Dylan, who, having less background in this sort of thing than I did, came up even more of a blank. However, her more parochial outlook gave me the key I was looking for. “Why are you assuming the aliens have anything to do with it?” she asked me. “Why isn’t this just a new scheme by Wagant Laroo?”
That stopped me cold. Suddenly all the pieces fell into place, and I had at least part of the picture. “No,” I told her, “the aliens have everything to do with this—only they don’t know it!”
“Huh?”
I sat down. “Okay, we know that these aliens are able to make facsimiles of people, people with jobs in sensitive places they have to gain access to. We know that these organic robots are so good they fool literally everybody. Not just the machines that check to see who’s who, but everybody. Close friends. Lovers. People they’ve known for years. And they even pass brain scans!” I was getting excited now. “Of coursel Of course! How could I be so blind?”
She looked concerned. “What do
you mean?”
“Okay, so first your agents pick out the person they want to duplicate. They find their records, take holographic pictures, you name it. And from that, our alien friends create an organic robot—grow is a more apt term, if I remember correctly—that is absolutely physically identical to the target. Absolutely. Except, of course, being artificial it has whatever additional characteristics its designers want—eyes that see into infrared and ultraviolet, enormous strength if need be. Since it’s made up of incredibly tough material instead of cells, with a skin more or less grafted on top, and powered perhaps by drawing energy from the fields that surround us—microwaves, magnetic fields, I don’t know what—it can survive even a vacuum. The one that penetrated Military Systems Command seemed to have the power to change its components into other designs—it actually launched itself into space. And yet it fooled everybody! Bled the right blood when it had to, knew all the right answers, duplicated the personality, right down to the littlest habit, of the person it was pretending to be. And there’s only one way it could have done that.”
“All right, how?”
“It was the person it was pretending to be.”
She shook her head in wonder. “You’re not making any sense. Was it a robot or a person?”
“A robot. An absolutely perfect robot whose components could provide it with whatever it needed, either as a mimic or as a device for fulfilling its mission or getting away. An incredible machine made from tiny unicellular computers that can control independently what they are and do—trillions of them, perhaps. But the aliens solved the problem we never did, and never allowed ourselves the research time to do—they discovered how to preprogram the things indelibly, so they’d be free and complete individuals yet never deviate from their programming, which was to spy on us. So now they build them in our images, and—what? They bring them to Cerberus. No, not Cerberus, probably to the space station.”
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