Soulminder

by Timothy Zahn

  “Am I?” Sommer countered. “You really think potential underwriters will want their names and corporations associated with us after that?”

  For a moment Sands was silent. “Maybe we can get some guarantees from him up front,” she said at last. “A written promise not to release any of the data without our permission. Westmont more or less offered that, you know.”

  “Westmont also all but said that contracts were made to be broken,” Sommer countered. “What do we do if he reneges? Sue him for breach? It would be a useless gesture—the damage to Soulminder would already have been done.”

  Sands looked him straight in the eye. “Five million dollars is a lot of money, Adrian,” she said softly. “A hell of a lot of money.”

  “No.”

  For a long moment they just stared at each other. Then, reluctantly, Sands broke the contact. “All right,” she said. “I guess I understand. Well … ” Getting to her feet, she headed for the door. “I guess I’ll go back to the hospital and pick up the trap.”

  “I thought Dr. Samuels had another volunteer patient lined up for the room.”

  “He does, but the prognosis gives her another two to four weeks to live, and I thought I’d see what else I could do with the trap. Maybe boost the range or focus—it’s got to be one of those that we’re missing out on. See you later.”

  She left, and Sommer turned his attention back to the two Mullner traces spread out on the desk. Somewhere here was the evidence they needed to bring fresh money into Soulminder.

  Five million dollars.

  Tears blurred his eyes, and he sank down wearily into his well-worn chair. Five million dollars. Five million filthy dollars. From a filthy little man with a filthy little mind.

  And Sands was probably on her way right now to get it for them.

  “Damn!” he swore viciously, uselessly, to the empty room. Sands didn’t care a burned-out diode for his vision of Soulminder. Only for Soulminder itself. Coldly determined to make Soulminder work, willing to sell her own mother to see it work.

  An iron-ringed, single-minded goal … without which, Sommer knew full well, she would long ago have left him to carry the burden alone.

  He sighed, hearing defeat in the sound of rushing air. Sands would sell their data to Barnswell—if not today, then tomorrow or the next day. And there was nothing he could do to stop her. Even if he’d had the strength of will left to fight her; even if she didn’t really have as much right of ownership to the data as he did. She would sell out, and Barnswell would give her his assurances … and as soon as her back was turned he would do what he damn well pleased anyway.

  His eyes drifted to the file cabinet where the hard copies of their precious Mullner traces were stored. Little more than complex curlicues of ink on paper, as people themselves were little more than a collection of exotic chemicals. Each trace—somehow—the record of an entire life. The life of someone who’d allowed him to share in the very private moment of death … and had trusted him to respect that privacy.

  Sommer clenched his hands into fists and took a deep breath. “All right,” he said aloud, getting to his feet. It would probably make Sands furious when she found out—and was almost certainly unethical to boot—but right now his tacit promise to the souls he’d traced mattered a lot more than either consideration.

  The project took nearly an hour to complete. Repeating the operation on the duplicate computer files was considerably easier, taking less than a quarter of that time, and when he was done he sat back in his chair in vaguely guilty satisfaction. Barnswell could now have the data, and if he misused it he, and not Soulminder, would be the one to suffer most.

  Or so Sommer hoped. At the very least, the individuals who’d let him take their soul-traces would be unaffected—

  He paused in mid-thought as something suddenly occurred to him. Something so obvious that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before.

  For a long moment he just sat there, gazing off into space, feeling an old fire he thought he’d lost forever begin to burn again within him. Leaning forward, he attacked the computer keyboard.

  A minute was all it took to hit the first wall. Muttering under his breath, he scooped up the phone and punched for Sands’s cell.

  She answered on the third ring. “Hello?”

  “Listen, do you remember where the data on the Mullner trace recognition pattern is stored?” Sommer asked.

  “Uh … try a file called FITTER.CV,” she suggested. “Or something like that—I’m sure FITTER is part of it. What do you want it for?”

  “I think it’s time we took another shot at that approach,” he told her, struggling to keep his voice calm.

  “What, you mean tailoring the trap to the individual soul? I thought we proved way back when that even a supercomputer wouldn’t be fast enough to record the Mullner trace and configure the trap fields in the time available.”

  “Right,” Sommer agreed, “if we wait until the moment of death to take the reading. What if we instead take the initial trace beforehand, like I did last night.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “I don’t know,” Sands said at last, slowly. “It’s not exactly the way we wanted Soulminder to work—you plug your average accident victim into the Mullner and you’re likely to kill him right there and then. You saw what it did to you.”

  “So find a way to modify the Mullner,” Sommer ground out, beginning to be annoyed at Sands’s attitude. “Make it gentler but still able to take the entire trace. At least it’s something to try.”

  “I agree,” Sands said. “I’ll see what I can do when I get back. Meanwhile, you might call Dr. Samuels and see if he can scare us up a guinea pig. Best bet is probably someone who’s reasonably healthy right now but needs some risky surgery.”

  “Uh … right,” Sommer managed, thrown off-balance a bit by her abrupt switch to his side of the argument. “I’ll do that. See you later.”

  “’Bye.”

  They worked late into the night, Sommer on the computer software and Sands on the trap itself, until a throbbing headache forced Sommer to call it quits. Sands remained behind, and when he arrived the next morning there was a note from her telling him that, as of five-thirty a.m., the hardware modifications to the trap were complete. The note wished him luck with the software, and suggested he not expect her in too early.

  Sommer got to work, but before he did so he took a moment to check the flag he’d planted in the Mullner-trace computer files.

  The files had indeed been copied, just after he’d left the evening before.

  Not unexpected, though it still hurt that Sands would go behind his back and against his wishes like that. But, oddly enough, even such duplicity was unable to dampen the growing enthusiasm within him, the gut-level sense that this time they were indeed on the right track. With any luck, Barnswell’s money would take them far enough along that track that they would never again have to deal with him or his kind.

  It took four more days to finish the software modifications, and another two after that to complete their limited repertoire of simulation tests. At that point, there was nothing to do but wait for Dr. Samuels to locate a likely patient.

  Three days later, he did.

  “You have to understand,” Dr. Dian Janecki said gently, “that with this type of operation the chances of success are directly proportional to the immediate risk involved. The more of the medulloblastoma we can clean out of your son’s cerebellum, the better his long-term chances of survival. At the same time, the deeper we go and the longer we stay there, the greater the dangers of the operation itself.”

  “We know that, Doctor,” Peter Coleman said impatiently, the strain of his son’s long illness etched on both his and his wife’s faces. “If you’re going to suggest more chemical treatments, don’t bother. All they do is make Danny sick, and they aren’t
helping him a damn.”

  Janecki nodded her agreement. “I know that. And my colleagues and I agree that we can’t put off surgery any longer.” Her eyes flicked to Sommer. “What I’m going to offer you is—well, maybe it’s an unexpected bit of hope. Dr. Sommer, if you and Dr. Sands would care to explain your proposal?”

  Sommer mentally braced himself. “What we have, Mr. and Mrs. Coleman, is—maybe—a way to give Dr. Janecki that extra time she wants while still minimizing the risks of the surgery itself.”

  They listened in stony silence while he explained how Soulminder could—in theory, at least—hold their son’s soul in safety while the surgeons removed the cancer and gave his body time to recover. He finished, and for a long moment both parents were silent. Sommer held his breath …

  Coleman shook his head. “No,” he said firmly. “Out of the question.”

  Huddled beside him, his wife threw him a startled look. “Peter—?”

  “Out of the question, Angie,” he repeated, more emphatically this time. “It’s unnatural, it’s unworkable”—he threw Sommer a suspicious glare—“and I’m not sure that it’s not downright blasphemous right along with it.”

  “All surgery is unnatural,” Sands pointed out calmly. “So is all medical treatment, if you want to come down to it. As for unworkable; yes, we freely admit that we can’t guarantee success. But if we don’t keep trying, we’ll never succeed.”

  Coleman sent her the same glare he’d just given Sommer. “You are not going to experiment on my son,” he growled.

  Angie’s hand tightened its grip on her husband’s. “Peter, if there’s even a chance it might help, why not try it?”

  He looked down at her. “Why? I’ll tell you why.” He looked back at Sommer. “Tell me, Doctor, what happens if your Soulminder gizmo works but winds up damaging Danny’s soul in the process? Or what if you can’t get it back into Danny’s body afterwards? Or can’t get it out at all?”

  They were, Sommer had to admit, good questions. “I don’t know,” he conceded. “Releasing the soul from the trap shouldn’t be a problem—shutting off the power will do that much. But as to the rest of it, we just don’t have any answers yet.”

  “They can’t hurt Danny’s soul,” Angie said, a new trace of firmness creeping into her voice. “There’s nothing this world can do to a person that God won’t heal in the next life.”

  “And what if God rejects Danny because he was part of something blasphemous?” Coleman countered. “What makes you people think you can stuff a human soul into a machine, anyway?”

  “You could argue that the human body is nothing but a biomechanical machine,” Sands pointed out. “Yet it manages to hold onto the soul quite adequately.”

  Coleman visibly clenched his teeth, shifting his eyes to Janecki. “What’s your opinion of this, Doctor?” he demanded. “You really believe they can do it?”

  “I don’t know,” Janecki told him. “All I can say is that in my lifetime I’ve seen a lot of medical advances, some of which sounded a lot less plausible than this one. It’s your decision, of course … but in my opinion I don’t see any reason not to give it a try.”

  “So that you can go in as deep as you want?” Coleman snapped. “Is that it? So you can play with your scalpel and hope that this half-baked idea will cover any mistakes you make in there—?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Angie spoke up, with a sudden strength in her voice that made her husband pause and look at her. “Dr. Janecki is going to try to get as much of the tumor out as she can, whether we use Soulminder or not.” She blinked tears from her eyes as she looked at her husband. “Danny’s going to be healed thoroughly,” she said quietly, “or he’s going to die. Right here, right now.”

  Coleman licked his lips, concern replacing the antagonism in his face. “You don’t mean that, Angie. Where there’s life there’s always hope.”

  “Not any more, Peter,” she said, an infinite weariness in her voice. “Not for me. Not for Danny. Can’t you see that he’s been through enough hell already?” She looked at Janecki. “He’s not going to spend the next five years of his life in and out of hospitals, Doctor, and then die anyway,” she said. “Heal him completely … or let him go on to God.”

  Janecki nodded, her own eyes a little moist. “I understand, Mrs. Coleman. I’ll do everything I can.” She glanced at Sommer. “About Dr. Sommer’s proposal, then … ?”

  Angie looked up at her husband. Coleman’s face was tight … but when he broke from her gaze and looked at Sommer there was no resistance left. Only resignation. “Go ahead, Doctor,” he said.

  Sommer nodded, a swirl of sympathetic pain and dark memory tightening his stomach and throat. “Thank you,” he said quietly. The newly reworked Soulminder’s first trial run … with a five-year-old boy as its subject.

  Unbidden, David’s face rose up accusingly before his eyes, and the ache in his stomach grew worse. A five-year-old boy, he thought morosely. God, why did it have to be a five-year-old boy? “We’ll have to do a tracing to map the Kirlian and Mullner patterns of his soul,” he forced himself to say. “With your permission, I’ll go ahead and set up for that right away.” He got to his feet, wondering how he was ever going to face the boy in there—

  “I’ll handle that,” Sands put in smoothly, standing up beside him. “You can go with Dr. Janecki and start setting up the equipment in the operating room. Mr. and Mrs. Coleman, perhaps you’d like to come and watch me—the procedure’s completely painless, but I imagine Danny would like your reassurance of that.”

  They nodded. Getting silently to their feet, they followed Sands from the lounge.

  “I hope, Doctor,” Janecki commented into the silence, “that you’re right about all this.”

  Sommer took a deep breath. “I do, too. I know what they’re going through, Dr. Janecki. I lost a son myself eleven years ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” Janecki said, her eyes locking onto his. “What I meant was that I hope you’re right about Soulminder not doing any … damage.”

  Sommer felt his stomach tighten. “I hope so, too,” he said quietly.

  The boy’s face was painfully thin, a thinness that his shaved head and the size of the operating table beneath him only served to emphasize. Watching the small monitor screen as they prepared him, Sommer felt a fresh ache in his heart. Danny was so young … just as David had been. If I should die before I wake …

  “Adrian?” Sands’s voice came from the speakerphone beside him. “Things underway there yet?”

  With an effort, Sommer forced the memories back. “They’re just getting ready to start,” he told her. “You getting everything all right?”

  “Coming in clear and clean,” she assured him. “The trap here is set and running.”

  “Same here,” Sommer said, wondering if this particular elaboration had really been necessary. If the trap set up beneath the operating table failed to catch Danny’s soul, after all, there was virtually no chance that the backup duplicate Sands had going in their lab would be able to do so. But on the other hand, distance might not be the significant factor, and the more sophisticated computer back there might be able to feed Sands’s trap a better Mullner trace than could the portable machine humming along at Sommer’s side.

  Besides which, it was probably better that Sommer be here alone. Already he could tell that it was going to be a morning filled with thoughts of David, and Sands’s presence would only be an intrusion. “Kirlian and Mullner both look strong,” he added.

  “Same here,” Sands confirmed. “By the way, I noticed a few minutes ago that the trap software was doing a continual scan of the entire Mullner-trace file. Is it supposed to be doing that?”

  Sommer cursed under his breath. “Not really. I put that in as a secondary system in case the primary targeting flag got confused and lost hold of its target trace. I guess it did.”

 
; “Fixable?”

  “Not now,” he sighed. “I’ll have to tear the targeting software apart and completely rebuild it. Damn—I knew we were going to have trouble with that.”

  “Well, no harm done,” Sands assured him. “This is only here for backup anyway, remember. As long as it doesn’t latch onto one of the already departed and yank them back from heaven, that is.”

  “Not funny, Jessica,” Sommer growled.

  “Sorry. They started there yet?”

  He peered at the scene. “Looks like they’ve just finished putting him under,” he told her.

  “Good. Be sure and keep a close watch on the EEG trace—if something starts to go wrong, we’ll want as much warning as possible.”

  “Sure,” he said between stiff lips. There was an odd note of anticipation in Sands’s voice, a quiet eagerness that sent an unpleasant shiver up his back. On some level, he realized, she was actually hoping Danny would die this morning.

  The operation began.

  For Sommer, it was an exercise in tense boredom. The camera had been positioned with convenience rather than a clinical view in mind, and it was rare when he got even a glimpse of the operating field beyond the wall of green surgical gowns. The surgeons’ voices, when he was able to hear them over the beeping of monitoring instruments, were calm and businesslike: the voices of people accustomed to holding human lives in their hands. Beside the TV monitor the bank of repeater instruments punctuated the minutes with the monotonous constancy of a steady heartbeat. The minutes stretched into an hour; into an hour and a half; into an hour and three-quarters.

  And precisely an hour and fifty-two minutes into the operation, it abruptly fell apart.

  “Adrian!” Sands snapped over the phone.

  “I see it,” Sommer gritted, fists clenched in agonized helplessness. If I should die before I wake … “Looks like neurogenic shock—no blood’s getting to his tissues. The EEG … God, Jessica, they’re losing him.”

  “Steady, Adrian,” she said tightly. “This is going to work. Everything reading ready?”