The Mind Pool tmp-1

by Charles Sheffield

Mondrian realized that he had been thinking about the Morgan Construct, and where it might be. But until the Fropper mentioned the “lost something” the thought had been no more than a nagging background worry.

  “The hidden thing. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You certainly do. But not at any conscious level. That is why it is hidden.”

  “Could it be the source of my nightmares — the reason why I wake up terrified every night?”

  “Of course it is.” Skrynol’s voice held no uncertainty. “You did not need me to answer that question, did you? You could answer it very easily for yourself. So now we are agreed, we must begin the search for the hidden thing. Because we must certainly find it, before we can hope to get rid of it. I say again, relax.”

  “I am in your hands.” And Mondrian was relaxing, more than he would have thought possible. Only his fingers were restless, turning and twisting the fire-opal at his collar. He thought he noticed a faint smell in the air, a trace of an odor like over-ripe peaches. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Remain completely still. I am about to attach a few more electrodes.” Again came the cold touches, this time on Mondrian’s chest and abdomen. “Very good. Now, let me tell you exactly how we will proceed. We need to explore below the conscious levels, but it is not easy to reach them. Today, we will try for just the first stratum. I will speak certain key words — of people, animals, times, and places — and you may answer however you choose. Do not worry if we seem to be going nowhere, or round in circles.”

  It was standard Fropper technique, outlawed off Earth for centuries and with an uncertain reputation even on this planet. Mondrian nodded to signify his assent. He had been through this a hundred times before, without success. But what alternatives did he have? “I am ready.”

  The questions and answers began. They went on and on, annoying and pointless. Until suddenly, without ever a clear moment of transition, it was no longer a standard Fropper session. Mondrian’s head became oddly muddled inside, flashing through a sequence of vivid yet unfocused images. People, animals, times, places. He was aware that he was talking, cursing, gesturing. About what? And to what? He could not say. After an indefinite period, he heard Skrynol’s voice pushing through into his consciousness.

  “Mondrian. Wake up.”

  “I am awake.”

  “No, you are not. Not yet. Wake up. Do you know what you have been saying to me? Think of it. Think it and live it.”

  Mondrian was struggling back to full consciousness. He realized that he could remember, if he focused hard. “I know. I told you — ”

  People, animals, times, places.

  Memory came spinning back, with terrifying detail. Every mental picture was bright in his mind.

  He was a giant spider, sitting quietly at the center of a great web. The strands shone with their own light, each one visible and running off in all directions. But there was a point beyond which their luminescence faded, or perhaps the strands themselves disappeared. He could see the web, with himself in the middle, and beyond that all was darkness. He watched, and waited, and at last felt a trembling along the glowing strands of the web. He stared out along the fines to see what prey might be caught there, but the disturbing object was too far away. It lay in the dark region. He knew from the delicate vibrations along the gossamer strands that it was moving. The vibrations strengthened. The prey was approaching.

  And suddenly it was no longer prey. It was danger, a force that he could not control, creeping in towards him along the luminous threads. He could not see it, even though it must be getting nearer. And suddenly he realized that he was not waiting at the center of the web, until the right moment arose to go off and seek his victim. He was trapped, bound at the center and unable to flee from whatever was approaching out of the terrifying darkness.

  “Excellent!” It was Skrynol’s calm voice, pulling him free. Mondrian jerked upright on the velvet couch. He was shivering, but lathered with perspiration. “Did you ever encounter that set of images before?”

  “Never.” Mondrian again began fiddling nervously with the fire-opal at his collar. “And I’ll be happy if I never encounter them again.”

  Skrynol laughed, with that high-pitched trill of delight. “Courage, Commander Mondrian! We have penetrated much farther in this first session than I had dared to hope.”

  “The hidden thing. Do you know what it is?”

  “I have no idea. If it were that simple, you would not need the services of a good Fropper. What we found today was a diversion, your own mind’s first level of defense against revealing its fears. The images that you built are at best an analogy for those fears — and the fears themselves stem in turn from a much deeper and earlier hidden experience. We have far to go.”

  Mondrian felt the electrodes being tugged free from his body. “The session is over?”

  “For today.”

  “What do I owe you?”

  “For today? Nothing.” Skrynol paused, a fleshy flipper resting on Mondrian’s chest. “To be more honest with you, I have already received my payment for today. Two of the electrodes that I attached contain small catheters. While you were building your memories, I drew blood through them. Don’t worry — it was just a little, less than a quarter of a liter. You have plenty left, and your body will replace the loss in a very short time.”

  “Nice of you to tell me about it.” Mondrian breathed deep. He had finally stopped shivering, but he was still sweating all over. “Why do you want my blood? For analysis?”

  “No, Commander. For the best, simplest, and most honest of reasons: to drink. My metabolism is not suited to the digestion of most forms of food.”

  Mondrian was being lifted from the velvet seat to a standing position. “I suppose I ought to be thankful that your needs are so modest. Will that be your standard charge for services — or does the price increase as the treatment continues?”

  “You are a strong man, Commander Mondrian. Few can joke at the end of a session.” There was sly humor in Skrynol’s voice as they wound their way back towards the exit. “I will not increase the price. I want you as a regular customer, you see, and if I drained you that would be the end of it.”

  Mondrian felt the bottom of the upward ramp beneath his feet, and Skrynol was no longer holding him.

  “You are safe enough.” The voice came from far above. “Safe, at least, as long as you are still receiving treatment. The time to watch out for is the day that I say you are cured. Because then you will not plan to return, and I will have no incentive to hold back my appetite. But for the moment, you have no need to worry. So until the next time, Commander …”

  Mondrian was not sure of his own feelings as he made the return journey to the upper levels. On the one hand, Skrynol had made more progress in one session than anyone else in dozens. On the other, he could not get the spider web out of his mind. More sessions would surely mean more images, just as disturbing.

  Back at Link entrance level he transferred to the appropriate exit point and made his way wearily to Tatty’s apartment. Without her presence, the living quarters felt cold and depressing. He went through to the inner room, reached up to his collar, and removed the fire-opal. The communicator had been placed in stand-by mode. He changed the setting and called for a scrambled circuit up from Earth. Within a few minutes he was connected with the Border Security facility on Pallas.

  “Hasselblad? This is Mondrian. I have a special job for you. Multiple medium recording, all wavelengths.”

  He was silent for a few seconds, listening to the questions from the other end.

  “Sorry, but I have no idea.” He stared at the fire-opal, weighing it in his hand. “I know you do, but I couldn’t tell what screening might be operating. I just tried every setting. I’ll have this linked up to you in the next hour, and I want you to give it top priority. There might be nothing there at all. But if there is I need it by next week. ”

  Chapter 9

  To the
human observer, nothing had changed. The green balloon of the air-bulb still floated free among a tangle of space flotsam. The overlapping folds on its side suggested an entry point. The guard of the Sargasso Dump who gestured Luther Brachis towards the lock mumbled nothing intelligible.

  But Brachis had been warned by Phoebe Willard. Instead of a suit designed for vacuum or atmosphere, he was wearing a tempered form used in extreme environments. He passed through the four folds of the lock, and found himself immersed in an inviscid fluid. The suit sensors reported the outside temperature: a hundred-and-ninety-six degrees below freezing, seventy-seven above absolute zero. Brachis was floating in a bath of liquid nitrogen.

  He followed a guiding line towards the center of the bulb. In just a few meters he reached a second curved wall, with its own locks. He negotiated them. Inside that, at last, was a spherical chamber with its own atmosphere.

  Brachis glanced again at the sensors. Temperature just a few degrees higher — and pure helium all around him as an atmosphere. He wouldn’t be taking his suit off for a while.

  “Over this way, Commander.” A familiar voice spoke in his ear. He looked to the directional signal recorded by his suit, and saw the figure of Phoebe Willard halfway across the interior of the air-bulb. The lattice-work was still in position, but now at its center sat a new structure, a second bubble of dark green.

  “Not exactly a shirtsleeve working-place.” Brachis floated towards her. “I tried to call you from the Dump’s control room. Why didn’t you answer?”

  “Because I couldn’t hear you. I designed it that way. For the same reason as I built the cold barrier.” She pointed at the outer, liquid nitrogen shell. “I never told you to lose communication ability.”

  “That was just a side effect. No signals can get through that outer wall. You told me you wanted a secure environment. This is it.”

  “Taken to extremes. And beyond them.”

  “I don’t think so. Nor will you, when I tell you what’s going on here. But first, let’s get this out of the way.” She pushed across to a magnetic board clamped to the lattice and lifted from it two cubes like a pair of oversized dice. “You insisted on hand-delivery. I’m hand delivering. This is it. The specification, the best one I’ve been able to derive by putting together information from every fragment.”

  Brachis slipped the data dice into a frost-proof, fireproof pouch in his suit wall. “How complete is it?”

  “For perfectionists like you and me, it’s lousy. There’s functions and neural paths I shouldn’t even have guessed at.”

  “But you did.”

  “Naturally. The whole thing’s a plausible Construct logic to anybody but an expert. In the old words of wisdom, you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, and that’s usually enough to get by.”

  “If you say it s plausible, that’s good enough for me. So what’s the bad news?”

  “I didn’t say there was any. But there is certainly news.” Phoebe took the arm of Luther Brachis’s suit and drifted them both closer to the central green balloon. It loomed over them, and from a few feet away Brachis could see hair-thin and delicate spider filaments running from a computer station into the tough balloon wall. “What’s inside that? More liquid nitrogen?”

  Phoebe nodded. “Nitrogen. And one other thing. Part of a Construct — the one I told you about, with a big chunk of its brain intact.”

  “It had better be only the brain.”

  “Luther, I’ve reviewed the records from Cobweb Station over and over. They’re terrifying. I bet I’m more afraid of the Morgan Constructs than you are. Before I did anything else I took this one completely apart, removed anything that might possibly be a weapon, and isolated the brain. Then I separated the pieces of the brain itself, and ran connections among them that I can interrupt any time from here. And then I put the whole thing in a bath of liquid nitrogen to reduce available energy, cut off all communication channels with anything except the computer over there, and put a communications break between that and everything outside the air-bulb. What more should I have done?’

  “Nothing. You should have done less, not more. I told you I wanted a good Construct specification. I never told you to try and put one back together.”

  “And I haven’t. All that’s sitting in there is a naked brain fragment. Tell me you want me to destroy it, and I’ll do it. You’re the boss.”

  Luther Brachis had eased his way over to the computer console. “Can you talk to it?”

  Phoebe was poised with her fingers on a pair of keys. “Say the word, Commander. Destroy or not destroy?

  Phoebe Willard — Frau Doktor Professor Willard — does it ever occur to you that I really am your boss? Do you ever say to yourself, Phoebe, I report to Commander Brachis?”

  “I might — if you didn’t give me such off-the-wall assignments.”

  “Which you love. Don’t push me too far. You will certainly not destroy your work. I said, can you talk to it?”

  “As much as I want. The real question is, can it talk to me?”

  “And what’s the real answer?”

  “You won’t like it. I don’t know.” Phoebe was at the console, keying in sequences. “I know you won’t take my word for it. Try for yourself. You’re linked in now to the brain.”

  “Vocal circuits?”

  “The original had them, but now they show no response at all. I’ve had to work everything through a computer interface. That introduces its own level of ambiguity, so you’re probably better off avoiding oral inputs.”

  Brachis nodded. He typed in, Who are you?

  “There. You can’t get much more basic than that.”

  But Phoebe Willard was laughing at him. “Commander, don’t you think that was just about the first thing I tried? Let’s see if you get what I did.”

  The response was scrolling already onto the screen. More information must be provided before that question can be answered.

  “That’s it. Nine times out of ten that’s the message — the only message — that comes back.”

  Brachis nodded, frowning at the screen. “Maybe it’s the way the question is phrased. Who are you implies a recognition of self-identity. Let’s try another.” He typed in, Tell me your name.

  More information must be provided before that question can be answered.

  “Damn. What doesn’t get that reply?”

  “Nothing, consistently. I’ve been working with this off and on all day, and I’ve not found any regular pattern.”

  “Did it have a name? Maybe it doesn’t comprehend the idea of names. But Livia Morgan must have had some way of distinguishing one Construct from another.”

  Brachis typed in, Tell me the way that you were described by Livia Morgan.

  More information must be provided before that question can be answered.

  “We already know the identification that Livia Morgan used.” Phoebe was at another console, skipping around inside a hyperdatabase. “This one was called M-26A. It must have been built to respond to that — but maybe it only recognizes M-26A as its whole being. It may not accept an isomorphism between its whole self, and its alone. After all, you wouldn’t say that you and your brain are the same thing.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if we’re even related.” Brachis typed in, Your identification is M-26A. What is your identification?

  The reply was rapid. Identification is M-26A.

  “Progress.”

  “Of a sort.” Phoebe sounded unimpressed. “Ask it exactly the same thing again.”

  “All right.” What is your identification?

  More information must be provided before that question can be answered.

  “Damnation.”

  “I know. I went through the same thing. It must have the information, because we gave it to it. We know it stored it, because it gave it back to us. But ask again, and you get nothing.’

  “Maybe it can only hold data for a few seconds.”

 
; “No. I gave my name, and waited for five minutes. Then I asked my name, and got the answer, Phoebe Willard. Then I asked again — and got that garbage about needing more information.”

  My name is Luther Brachis. What is your name?

  My name is M-26A.

  “See, it can feed something back to me that wasn’t what I just fed in. And it realizes that name and identification are to be treated the same.”

  Brachis typed in again, What is your name?

  More information must be provided before that question can be answered.

  “The hell with it. Here we go again.”

  “I went through the same thing.’

  What is my name?

  More information must be provided before that question can be answered.

  “Damn. You know, this thing could be addictive.” Brachis forced himself to move away from the console. “But I can’t stay here much longer. I’ve agreed to perform a guard review.”

  “The guards here, at Sargasso Dump? That sounds like a barrel of laughs.”

  “Knock it off, Phoebe. These people gave their lives — more than their lives — for System Security. They deserve better than the politicians are willing to give.”

  “Which is nothing. Sorry, Commander. This place gets to me after a while.”

  “So come watch the review.” Brachis was studying her eyes. “How long have you been at it here, without a rest?”

  “All — hmm. Twenty-one hours? Nearly twenty-two.”

  “Then you take a break, and come and watch the review. After that you have a meal and a rest. This time that’s an order, Dr. Willard.”

  “I hear you.”

  Brachis watched as Phoebe Willard went through the sequence to end the interaction with the hidden Construct. As she sealed all access points to the globe filled with liquid nitrogen, it suggested another idea to Luther Brachis.

  “Do you have all your question-and-answer sequences stored?’

  “Commander, what do you think I am? One of your unfortunate guards? Of course I do.”

  “Good. I want a copy to take away with me and study.”