The Mind Pool

Chapter 18

“Who dared to give such an order?” Mondrian’s voice was weak in volume but strong in authority. “Were you insane enough to do it yourself, without thinking of the consequences?”

The technician standing by the bedside recoiled and looked at Tatty for support. She stepped forward.

“I gave the directive,” she said. These people were only following orders.”

Mondrian had been trying to sit up. Now he sank back on the pillow. “You? You have no authority here. Why would people even listen to you?”

“No problem. I gave the orders in writing, and I used the seal of your own office.” Tatty sat down on the edge of the bed. “If you expect me to say I’m sorry, forget it. And if you claim I did the wrong thing, I’ll have you sent back for more scans of your head.”

The medical technician stared at her in horror, then up to the ceiling as though expecting a lightning bolt.

“Don’t fret and fume, Esro,” went on Tatty calmly. “The medical opinions were unanimous. You could have died. Your chances of full recovery went up dramatically if you remained in bed and under full sedation for a week. So that’s what I authorized. The week’s up, and you’re doing well.”

Mondrian shook his head, then gasped at the pain it produced. “A week! My God, Tatty, you make me unconscious for a whole week, and act as though it’s nothing. In a week the whole system could go to hell.”

“It could. But it didn’t. Commander Brachis took care of everything in your absence.”

“Brachis! You think that’s going to make me feel better?” Mondrian made another attempt to sit upright. “He had a free hand to do what he liked with my operations and my staff, and you encouraged it?”

“Correct. He knew you would be worried by that, and he told me to give you a message. He assumes that the arrangement is on that you talked about before the attempt to kill you, and he will try to gain the ear of Ambassador MacDougal as you suggested. His main worry is that you won’t remember anything about the conversation. The doctors warned of amnesia.”

“I remember everything. Too much!” Mondrian put his hand to a forehead still coated with synthetic skin. “How did he escape injury? I know he was shielding you and Godiva.”

“He was injured, too. But his wounds could all be treated with local anesthetics. He refused painkillers, said they’d blur his mind. He must be made of iron.”

“Iron and ice. Or he used to be. Now he’s besotted with Godiva. I don’t know what he’s like any more. How is she?”

“Calm as ever. Didn’t get a scratch. Don’t ask me how — everybody else was peppered with metal fragments.” Tatty adjusted the line of the bandage around Mondrian’s head. “You know the Godiva Bird, she just floats over everything and comes out fine.”

Mondrian leaned back on his pillow under pressure from Tatty’s hand. “You didn’t detect any changes in her, then — before the bomb went off?”

“Before the bomb?” Tatty frowned down at him.

“Yes. I’m a bit fuzzy about those final few minutes, but something certainly seemed odd about her. You knew Godiva better than I did down on Earth, and you were very surprised when she came up here with Luther Brachis. So I wondered, when you were with her before dinner and Brachis and I were talking, if she seemed … well, different at all.”

Tatty sat thoughtful, while Mondrian lay back and stared at her through half-open eyes.

“I think I know what you mean,” she said at last. “She looks the same, and mostly she acts the same, but there’s at least one difference. Whenever I met Godiva down on Earth she was always very conscious of money. Not stingy, exactly, but she talked all the time about her need to earn more. She must have had a fortune stashed away somewhere, because she was the highest-priced escort on the planet and yet she always lived cheaply — simple food, simple clothes. She couldn’t have been spending anywhere near her income, and still she always seemed to want more. The other night, though, she never mentioned money for a moment. That’s a change, if anything is.”

“I agree. And here’s something for you to think about. According to Luther Brachis, Godiva didn’t have a cent when he brought her up from Earth — no money, no possessions other than her clothes.” Mondrian turned to the medical technician, who had been listening with open interest. “Don’t you have any other patients? How soon can I get out of here?”

“Two more days. And visitors have to be restricted to one hour a day.’

“That won’t do.” Mondrian pushed back the covers and swung his legs out of bed. “I have work to do. Bring me my uniform — at once.”

The technician looked to Tatty, found no encouragement there, and shook his head. “I am sorry, sir. I lack the authority to release you.”

“Fine. Go get somebody who does.”

As the technician scurried away Mondrian turned back to Tatty. “I suppose I’m going to have a fight with you, too.”

“Not at all.” As Mondrian rose from the bed, Tatty’s manner changed. She smiled coldly at him. “I looked after you when you were too sick to make your own decisions. I’d do the same for anyone. Now you are clearly getting better, and you can go to hell in your own fashion. I’m leaving Ceres. I already have my exit approval.”

“Using my office seal? Where are you going.”

“Home. Back to Earth. I’ve had all I can stand of Horus and Ceres.” Tatty stood up. “I suppose you ought to thank me for looking after you while you were unconscious, but I know better than to expect that. Anyway, it’s not appropriate. It was all my fault in the first place.’ “The bombing? What are you talking about?”

“That’s the other reason I wanted to be here when you woke up — to tell you that I was responsible for the attempt to assassinate you.”

“Tatty, you’re out of your mind. You didn’t do the bombing any more than I did. We were both victims of it. You were injured, too — I can see the scars still on your arm.”

“I didn’t do the bombing — but I caused it to be done.”

Mondrian reached out to take Tatty’s arm, pulling her back to the bedside. His grip was much stronger than she expected.

“Princess, you can’t make a wild statement like that and say nothing more. Are you saying you arranged for that bomb?”

“No.”

“So what are you saying? That you know who tried to kill us?”

“No one tried to kill us. It was Chan Dalton, and he tried to kill you. The rest of us just happened to be there.”

“Tatty, you’re gibbering. What are you getting at?”

She hesitated and evaded, but under constant prodding from Mondrian she told the whole story; of the long days on Horus, of her loneliness, of her growing despair with Chan and hatred for Mondrian; finally, of her use of Mondrian’s picture as an object for Chan to hate.

Mondrian listened quietly and sympathetically. At the conclusion he sprawled full-length on the bed and shook his head.

“Wrong, Princess. Totally wrong.”

“Prove it.”

“I can’t — but I’ll wager on it. Look at a few facts. First, whoever that waiter was, he wasn’t Chan Dalton.”

“He wasn’t a real waiter. At the restaurant they don’t know who he was.”

“Well, he was certainly dressed like the waiters at that restaurant. But waiter or not, my point is that he wasn’t Chan. Which means that Chan would have had to bribe him. Now, did you tell Chan beforehand where we were going to have dinner?”

“No. He didn’t know in advance — he says he just mindlessly followed us there.”

“So you’re telling me that Chan, who didn’t know where we were going, could in just a few minutes persuade a man dressed like a waiter to deliver a bomb to our table. That sort of thing requires careful preparation and planning. Where would Chan even find a bomb? He’s a recent arrival on Ceres, and he hardly knows anyone. He may look like a twenty-year-old, but in terms of adult contact with the world he s only a few weeks old.”

“He’s a super-fast learner now.”

“It makes no difference. Chan is a newcomer here. No matter how intelligent he is, he couldn’t get the materials and the knowledge in such a short time. You say Chan doesn’t remember what he was doing at the time of the bombing. I’ll accept that. His brain’s still sorting itself out inside his head. But amnesia isn’t a crime. I don’t believe that he had anything at all to do with the explosion.” Mondrian sat up and stared at Tatty. “Give me ten minutes to talk to him, and I guarantee that I can prove he had nothing to do with it — prove it to your satisfaction as well as mine.”

“I can’t.” Tatty looked stricken. “Can’t bring him to you, I mean.”

“Why not?”

“He s not here any more — not on Ceres.”

“Of course he is. You just have to track him down.”

“No. You don’t understand. When Chan told me about his blackout, I told him what happened at the restaurant. We talked, and we agreed. He must have done the bombing, without having control of his actions. He didn’t know what to do. So I helped him — helped him to escape.”

“But he couldn’t possibly get away from here. For one thing, he’d need a travel permit.”

“Esro, you still don’t understand. He already had a travel permit.”

“Who was insane enough to issue one to him? I’ll have their carcass.”

“You were insane enough. Remember, you issued it in advance, so it would be ready when he went off for pursuit team training and you would collect on your bet with Luther Brachis as soon as possible. All I did was ask Captain Flammarion to give Chan the rest of his tests at once. He passed them all, easily. He was ready for the next phase.”

“So where is he?”

“He’s on Barchan. As you planned. Ready to start pursuit team training.”

Tatty’s statement was not quite correct. Chan was certainly in pursuit team training, but he was not actually on Barchan. When Tatty spoke those words he was flying four thousand meters above the planet’s surface in a Security aircar, receiving his final lesson on its operation and handling.

“Don’t you forget now,” said the pilot cheerfully. “Once you drop me off you’re on your own. No collections, no deliveries, you pick your own nose and do your own laundry. And don’t bother to send a message unless you’ve destroyed the ’Fact — or given up trying.”

She laughed, as though her last suggestion was out of the question. The pilot was small and tubby, with sleepy-looking brown eyes. When she was at the controls the car seemed to glide effortlessly through the buffeting winds of Barchan. Only when Chan took over himself did he learn that Barchan’s air currents were strong and unpredictable. Level flight called for constant attention, and landing and take-off on the desert planet was always dangerous.

Chan dipped the car’s nose and started to drop off height. At a thousand meters he began to circle, making his visual search for their landing target. The updrafts were stronger here, and it took all his efforts to maintain a constant altitude.

“Has anyone ever done that?” he said. “I mean, just given up trying to destroy a Simulation of the Construct, and asked to be taken back?”

“You better believe it.” The pilot chuckled and slouched back in her seat, but her eyes missed nothing and her hands were never more than a couple of inches away from the duplicate set of controls.

“You’re the fifth pursuit team training group we’ve had in here,” she went on. “And so far we’ve had just one that graduated.”

“What happened to the others?”

“Bunches of stuff. Funny thing is, the first group that we had went dead smooth. I dropped the four of them off at the training camp, one at a time. Human, Pipe-Rilla, Tinker, Angel. They found they could work together, no problem. They organized the search for the ’Fact, found it in three days, and destroyed it. End of story, still no problem. They linked off to Dembricot for their final preparations, and last I heard they were heading off to tackle the real thing, the Construct itself.”

“That was Leah Rainbow’s team?” Chan had spotted the landing area, and he was lining up for final approach.

“Know her, do you? It sure was. Smart woman, that. Anyway, the first one went so smooth I thought all the rest would be the same and we’d slide right through like Angel sap. Was I wrong!

“Second team came in, I dropped ’em off. Didn’t hear a squeak for a week, then the Pipe-Rilla called me, solo. Asked to be picked up, she was leaving the team. No explanation. That team’s still waiting for another Pipe-Rilla to replace the first one.

“Team Three — your alignment’s fine, by the way, but you’ll land a lot smoother if you drop the speed another couple of points. That’s it. Spot on, and hold it there. Anyway, Team Three arrived all right, seemed to get on well together. They searched around and found their ’Fact. But they didn’t get it. It got them .”

“It killed them?”

“Hell, no.” The pilot leaned back and closed her eyes all the way. The car touched down, light as a feather. “A ’Fact won’t actually kill a team — they were designed not to. But it can give you a pretty bad time. This one roughed ’em up so bad, they decided they’d had it with being a Pursuit Team. They split up. I picked ’em up one by one, and they all went home. So there we were, one out of three.”

The pilot glanced out of the window and nodded approvingly. They had come to rest at the exact center of the landing circle. “Want to hear about Team Four?”

“Of course. Maybe I can learn by their experience.”

“They were the worst of all. They got themselves organized, searched for their ’Fact, found it, and were all ready to blow it to bits. Well, that’s when the Pipe-Rilla decided it couldn’t go through with it. Couldn’t stand the idea of killing something, even if it was only an Artefact.”

“So they had to quit?”

“Not quite. The human on the team — big fat blond feller, looked like he’d not harm a fly — got so mad with the Pipe-Rilla, wasting all his time, he was all set to blow her full of holes in place of the ’Fact. Might have done it, too, if the Tinker hadn’t swarmed him.

“I got ’em all out in one piece, but the whole thing convinced the other Stellar Groups — again! — that humans are crazy killers. And if you think that didn’t create an interstellar incident and make things worse here …”

She opened the door of the car. A wave of dry heat like dragon’s breath wafted into the cabin. “Phew! Welcome to sunny Barchan. This car’s all yours now, until you get your Fact. Good hunting.”

As she started onto the steps Chan leaned out after her. “You’ve seen them all. What do you think our chances are?”

The pilot paused with the door half-closed, and the car’s air conditioner went into overdrive. “Your chances? Well, if you believe it’s a random process, past history says you’re one in four. But I don’t believe it’s that random. Mind if I ask you a question?”

“I’ve been asking you plenty.”

“Well, I’ve looked you over pretty hard these past few days. You don’t fit this job, not at all. With your face and body, you’re an entertainment natural — public, or one-on-one. There’s fifty billion women would like a piece of you. So how come you’re on a Pursuit Team, out here at the ass-end of the universe?”

Chan hesitated. Had Leah talked about him, so the pilot was just prodding for more details? The waves of arid heat coming in through the open door produced floods of sweat on his face and neck that dried the moment they appeared, but the pilot seemed oblivious to outside conditions. She was waiting patiently, and her face gave him no clues. He decided that her question reflected no more than a genuine interest.

“I was born on Earth. I was a commoner, with a contract. This gave me a way out, and when it’s over I’ll be free to do as I like.”

It was close to the truth, and the pilot was nodding sympathetically. “Ah, I’ve heard about Earth. Everything’s relative. Maybe after that, Barchan don’t seem so much like the ass-end of the universe. I know that Leah Rainbow seemed pleased enough to be here. Did you get recruited the same way she did?”

“Pretty much. We were both recruited by Commander Mondrian.”

“Good enough. You’ve answered my questions, now I’ll answer yours. I’ll up your odds of success from one in four to fifty-fifty. Mondrian’s as hard as Tinker-shit and cold as Angel-heart, but he’s one sharp son of a bitch. And he don’t pick losers.” She swung the door closed and grinned at him through the window. “I mean, usually,” she shouted. “But there’s exceptions to everything. Fifty-fifty! Good luck!”

She gave him a wave and set off for the cluster of service buildings. Chan sat quietly in the car, inspecting the landscape around him. They were in Barchan’s low polar regions, where winter temperature would allow a human to survive without a suit except around noon. The vegetation, such as it was, was deep-rooted and covered in waxy blue-green foliage. At the pole itself it would grow in Barchan’s half-g surface gravity to fifty meters or more; here it sat low to the ground, tight-wrapped to conserve moisture. The soil beneath the plants was dry, dark,” and basaltic, rising in slow, brooding folds away from the landing area. Gusty surface winds lifted the top layer of soil up and about the parked aircar in twisting dust-devils of dark grey. Near the equator that sand layer was hundreds of feet deep. The constant winds blew it into the miles-long crescent-shaped barchan dunes that gave the planet its name.

Eta Cassiopeiae’s twin suns hung close to the horizon. They lit the scene with orange, dust-filtered light. This dour landscape, according to Chan’s briefings, was the most attractive part of the planet.

He wondered where the Artefact might be hiding. According to those same briefings, it would have no trouble living anywhere on Barchan — even in the scorching equatorial regions where only micro-organisms survived.

The three service buildings stood a kilometer away from the parked aircar. As Chan watched, a swirling veil of dark purple emerged from one of the buildings and blew like a rolling cloud of dust towards the car. When it was fifty yards away Chan opened the door. The individual components of the cloud could now be resolved. They were purple-black winged creatures, all identical and each about as big as his finger. They approached with a whirring of wings. In less than thirty seconds every one of them had entered the aircar door and settled all over the rear of the main cabin.

Chan closed the door and turned to watch. He had seen the next phase in briefing displays, but this was his first exposure to the real thing.

It began with one component — an apparently arbitrary one — hovering in mid air with its purple-and-black body vertical. A ring of pale green eyes on the head stared all around, as though assessing the situation, while the wings fluttered too fast to see. After a moment another component flew in to attach at the head end, and a third one settled into position beneath. Thin, whiplike antennae reached out and connected heads to tails. The triplet hovered, wines vibrating. A fourth and fifth element new over to join the nucleus of the group.

After that the aggregation grew too fast for Chan to watch individual connections. As new components were added the Composite extended outward and downwards, to make contact with and derive support from the cabin floor. Within a minute the main body was complete. To Chan’s surprise — something not pointed out in the briefings — most of the individual components still remained unattached. Of the total who had entered the cabin, maybe a fifth were now connected to form a compact mass; the remainder stood tail-first on the cabin floor or hung singly from the walls using the small claws on the front of their shiny leather-like wings.

The mass of the Tinker Composite began to form a funnel-like opening in its topmost extremity. From that aperture came an experimental hollow wheeze. “Ohhh-anhh-gggghh. Hharr-ehh-looo,” it said. Then, in an oddly accented variety of solar speech, “Har-e-loo. Hal-loo.”

Kubo Flammarion had warned that this was inevitable. “Imagine,” he said, “that somebody took you apart every night and put you back together every morning. Don’t you think it would take a little while to get your act together? So make allowances for the Tinkers.”

Chan couldn’t imagine it. But he suspected that the little captain, a long-time alcoholic and a recent Paradox addict, knew that morning-after where’s-the-rest-of-me feeling rather too well.

“Hello,” he said, in response to the Tinker’s greeting. “Hello.”

As he had been advised to do, he waited.

“We-ee arre-eh,” said a whistling voice. There was a substantial pause, then, “We are … Shikari.”

“Hello. You should call me Chan.”

This time it was the Tinker who waited expectantly. “Shikari is an old Earth word,” it said at last when Chan did not respond. “It means hunter. We think that it is appropriate. And perhaps also amusing? But you did not laugh.’

“I’m sorry. I never heard the word before.”

“Yes.” The funnel buzzed briefly. “You see, we were making a joke. We do not think that you are amused. You do not look it.”

Look it. Chan wondered if the Tinker could actually see him. The individual components had in total many thousands of eyes, but how were they used for vision by the Composite? He gestured to the myriad of components still scattered around the cabin.

“Are all of you Shikari? Or only the ones who are connected?”

There was a buzzing pause. An indication of contusion? “We think that we understand your question, but we are not sure. We all in past time have been Shikari. We all in future time will be Shikari; and we all in now-time can be Shikari. But in now-time we are not all Shikari.”

“I understand. But why are you not all Shikari now? Don’t you think better when you are all connected?”

The Tinker had taken on- a roughly human outline, with arms, legs, and head. When it moved forward in the cabin it was propelled by two different actions, the turning of body connections and the movement of thousands of component wings.

“Chan, you ask a many-questions-in-one question,” said the whistling voice. “Listen carefully. First, if we wish we can join all together at any time.”

“And you have more brainpower when you do it?”

“Yes, and no. When we join we certainly have more thinking material available — which you may call brainpower. But we are also less efficient. We are slower. We have a much longer integration time — the time it takes for us to complete a thought and reach a decision. That time grows fast-as-growth-itself — as you say, exponentially — with the number of components. When there is much, much time available, and the problem is large, we combine more units in us. More join, to make one body. But then the integration time can become so long that individual components begin to starve. We cannot, when connected, search for food. So components must leave, or die.

“What you see now is the most effective form, our preferred compromise between speed of thought and depth of thought. The free components that you see now will eat, rest, and mate. When the right time comes there will be exchange. Rested-and-fed-of-us will take the place of tired-and-hungry-of-us.”

Chan had a score more questions, although they were already late for take-off. How did a Composite decide when and how to form? Was it adopting a human shape only for his convenience? How intelligent were the components, if at all? (He had the feeling that question had been answered during his early briefings on Horus, but anything told to him before the Tolkov Stimulator worked its miracle felt vague and unreliable.) How did the components know whether to join the Composite or stay away? Most important of all, if a Tinker was varying its composition all the time, how could there possibly be a single self-awareness and a specific personality? Shikari had all that, and claimed a sense of humor, too.

So many questions, and every one of them surely vital to the Pursuit Team’s success — not to mention Chan’s personal curiosity. But they would have to wait until the rendezvous with the other team members.

Chan prepared to take off, then decided he ought to consult Shikari. After all, if they were to be called a team, they ought to act as one.

“Shikari, are you ready to go?”

“We are very ready.

“Then would you like to move up front? If you want to study the landscape, you’d be better off sitting” — ( Could a Tinker sit?) — “next to me.”

“That will be very good.” The Tinker changed shape. It came slithering forward like a giant purple-black pancake, over and around the back of the passenger seat and around Chan’s legs. The speaking funnel emerged briefly from the center.

“And perhaps when we are on our way,” Shikari said, “we can talk some more. When opportunity arises, we have innumerable questions concerning the strange form and functions of humans.”