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Authors: Phyllis Gotlieb

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BOOK: Mindworlds
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Is this manifestation of an alien Mind actual or some mental dysfunction?
The Lyhhrt answered the unspoken thought: “It is actual.”
“Could that possibly be the alien who created the ship?”
“I don't know what its nature is, Archivist. You are the one that seems to have caught its attention.”
The door-chime sounded.
“A young woman we do not know,” the Lyhhrt said. For some reason the words added to the dread Hasso was already feeling.
“Come in,” he called, and when the door slid open the young woman stood there smiling.
“I'm Officer Dritta,” she said. “My Supervisor Tharma has requested that I guard the lady Ekket while she travels to her friends in Port Dewpoint—”
The Lyhhrt could not keep his young impulsive mind from whispering, (
:she has an Other
:) … and Hasso thought his heart would explode—
“—and that she hoped both of you would join us on the train tomorrow to make a safer company for everyone.”
Hasso's heart
beat
and
beat
—
The Lyhhrt said quickly, “We would be very glad to join you, Officer.”
“Good.” At the door she turned for a moment to say to Hasso, “You are Hasso the Archivist, are you not?”
Hasso swallowed hard. “Yes.”
“We studied much of your work in our Records courses. My Supervisor Tharma greatly respects you.”
Hasso saw that her young face was full of joy. “Thank you, Officer … and thank your Supervisor for me.”
After the door shut, Hasso said nothing for a few moments. Then, “You told me that you would never leave while that Lyhhrt was here.”
“I don't believe he will be much longer. The Isthmuses group has been accusing Gorodek of threatening their shores and Tharma has ordered him to leave. They will be on the same train and the same ship up to the Equatorial River. I will keep good track of that one.”
“Our whole mission has strangely dissolved itself.”
“Not mine.”
Once again Hasso had no answer, and looked out at the deep sky and its noon stars.
Being, take care how you use me, for your glass may crack and shatter.
Fthel IV, Bonzador:
Stirring
 
Rrengha had taken to running at night: her ancestors had been nocturnal, and running stilled the nightmares. No one saw her run, her red fur vanished in darkness. Sometimes her mind reached Ned's along with a scent, a sound, a stray thought she had picked up in the tracts of brush she was traversing among the five camps.
Looking, esping, listening for trouble.
One night Ruah, the Meshar woman, crept into Ned's tent. She had been barracked with Rrengha on the presumption that because both had fur they would get on together. She curled up against Ned's back like a cat, or the local animal his people called a cat, for there were no world-grown ones. More like a cat than fierce Rrengha.
She whispered in Ned's ear, “When the Big One was here I couldn't bear to be with her, now she's not here I don't want to be alone.” Her breath smelled like cloves, but her canines were as long as her claws and her ears high and pointed. In daylight her eyes were like black seeds swimming
in red membrane. She wrapped her black arrow of a tail around Ned's hip and he felt only his daily fear and fell asleep while she murmured of her love for her fiercely storm-beaten world. In the morning she was gone, either to another camp or perhaps teleported to somewhere else entirely.
Yawning, he asked Rrengha,
What have you found?:
But she was asleep by then and made sure no one roused her.
When she woke she said, “Watch Spartakos.”
“Whatsit?”
“Look.” She raised a forefoot, he followed the direction and saw Spartakos herding a score of O'e to breakfast in straight ranks and files with others running to join them, and Azzah skipping along the lines to keep them in order. She was laughing.
“First time I've seen her laughing,” Ned said.
“That is not what I mean.”
“Yeh.”
“There are more O'e here than there were when we come. They move from other camps to be with Spartakos. They persuade others to fill their places.” There were head-counts but no roll-calls in the camps.
“Eh, the screws here will think it's a challenge?”
“What do you think?” Rrengha asked, wanting to know.
Ned thought so, and went to stand in the breakfast line with Spartakos. “Not too military, friend, or you'll be mistaken for the real original.”
“What do you mean, Ned? This is our friend Azzah leading all her people together.”
Ned clenched his teeth, but there were no watchers nearby; the wind was licking up thick clouds from the east and there was a flurry to crowd into the mess tent. “I know that, Spartakos, but you don't want our employers to think we're building a private army.”
“It may be that we will need one,” Spartakos said.
Ned stared at him for an instant before the first fat raindrops
spattered down hard and all the rigid lines broke up.
I wonder if you've heard from your Maker?
He did not want to know the answer, and robots are not telepaths. He watched Lek trying to make conversation with Azzah, and Azzah trying to decide if he was genuine or not. Ned did not know that either. But he turned back to Spartakos before he joined the breakfast line. He did not want to know the answer but asked anyway: “Did your Maker tell you he was coming back here?”
“No, but he had promised before that he would never desert us,” Spartakos said quietly, subdued now.
The reply sounded cooked and packaged to Ned; still, he believed it. Spartakos could choose to lie, but the lie would nullify his esthetic purity, and that of Lyhhr too.
Not much use for that in these surroundings.
Two tendays
, the Lyhhrt had said …
Maybe seventeen days left
…
Spartakos said, as if he had read Ned's mind, “The
Zarandu of Thanamar
is in orbit around Fthel Five.”
“You heard—?”
“The
Zarandu
computer told me one-half chron ago. It always connects with me when we are in range.”
As far as Ned knew a chron could be a day, an hour or a minute. “You could call for help!” He had traveled to Khagodis on the
Zarandu
, its first destination on the way to deeper reaches of the Galaxy.
“It is a machine with limited duties, not a person. And my call out of here would be intercepted. That is what the watchtower is for.”
Ned grunted. “I wonder how they can afford to ship on that.” The
Zarandu
was the greatest ship Ned knew of.
“The ore carrier
Raghavendra
will be riding it—”
“Heh, put us in a container? Thought they'd do it on the cheap.”
 
 
The rain stopped in mid-morning, leaving the sky overcast and the ground covered with the scummy clay mud that comes up fast when thick growth eats loam.
In early afternoon Ned was going for lunch, pulling off work gloves after a morning practicing guerilla tactics in the brush, followed by the usual session of cutting brush, when a gaunt man named Cawdor, whom Ned had met in the aircar on the way down, drove up in a tractor and pulled up by the mess tent splashing, stunner on shoulder and yelling, “You there!”
Ned turned. Cawdor was pointing with a shaking finger at a group of O'e. “I mean that one there, that little fucker that's trying to skin off! What the hell's he doing here, he's supposed to be in my camp! He stole my comm!” Jumping out running to grab the skinny O'e by the shirtfront, ripping the paper, “Where is it! You got it here somewhere!” Whacking him across the face forehand and backhand, Spartakos in mighty organ voice calling “STOP!” surging forward—
Ned yelled, “Stop, Spartakos!” He'd been through this kind of thing once before and ended up with a badly bruised kidney.
Cawdor yelled back at him, “You fucking better keep hold of Tin Man, Gattes!”
“He's a citizen, Cawdor, he does what he wants.”
Spartakos stood still, and spoke calmly. “If he stole your comm, you will have it back.”
The O'e clutched his shirt about him and cried in a thin wail, “I stole nothing! I have nothing!”
Cawdor rounded on Spartakos, snarling, “You got all them coming here to hang around with you! What you think this is, a playground? I want everybody belongs in my camp in my camp an' if I don't get that comm back you don't know the trouble you'll get!”
Behind Ned the other O'e were clamoring in their high thin voices and he began to be afraid that Azzah might lead
them into battle. Gretorix pushed through them yelling for order. “Your comm isn't here, now get back where you belong, Cawdor!”
Cawdor opened his mouth and—Rrengha appeared from among the forest of legs and looked him up and down. “You give your comm to the Bengtvadi woman in your camp that you smoke the ge'inn with after dinner.”
Cawdor closed his mouth. Blood rose into his rawboned face like wine poured into a pitcher. Without a word he jumped on his tractor and sheared off.
The beaten O'e, half Cawdor's size, was bleeding from his bruised mouth, thin pink blood. “I'll get you first-aid for that, soldier,” Gretorix said, and took him by the shoulder.
Spartakos seemed about to follow, and Ned said, “Wait.”
Spartakos turned half of his body by a hundred and eighty degrees. “Yes, Ned?”
Ned said very carefully, “Please, send your O'e friends back to their own camps tonight, Spartakos. They're becoming a target, and if they ever do move out of line they'll be hammered twice as hard.”
“They need me.”
“You don't want them hurt. If they march around with you leading them it looks to those chukkers like they're being threatened, and it's just too hard to protect each one. If they need you so much they'll do what you ask.”
Azzah cried, “How are we going to live together in this place if we're treated like that? And you say we mustn't defend ourselves.”
“Not yet. Not by marching in straight lines. I don't like the way things are going here, and I think we will have to defend ourselves, but in the meantime don't ever forget we're dependent on the enemy for food and water, they're armed and they can get out of here whenever they want and we can't, and even if we could we'd have a damned long way to walk.”
The O'e muttered among themselves for a few moments until Spartakos waved his hands and they dispersed. Ned broke into a sweat and ran off to get lunch before anybody picked a fight with him.
The afternoon passed with weapons drills and more brush-cutting, and after dinner the camps were quiet enough with recruits playing zodostix or skambi for not much stakes, telling hard luck stories of seventeen worlds, and boasting of old conquests made only in the imagination.
But Ned's mind was running and running around the possibilities: they were a closed perimeter. Spartakos could break through fences, but only in one place at a time; Rrengha could control minds, but only a few at once. The big powerful Dabiri had a cyber hindquarter that did not work very well. The O'e were stronger than they looked, but no stronger than anyone else here.
“Spartakos,” he whispered, “can you disrupt the electronics in any of those weapons they carry here?”
“Some. Most of the long-arms you train with are mechanical, except for their sighting mechanisms.” After a moment he added, “I will use weapons to defend you and others but only to disable, not kill.”
“I've never killed anyone yet, except once by accident. But you can't create an army and then tell the troops not to kill anybody.”
Spartakos had nothing to answer.
 
 
 
Montador City:
Bait
 
Tyloe said, “You want us to go out there in that wilderness and let him catch us. What will you do if we refuse?”
“Not what I will do, it's what he will do,” the Lyhhrt said. “Perhaps something like using your body for his workshell.”
At this point Lorrice ran for the bathroom to throw up. “That will let him move freely without being noticed. Or he can split and make two of himself quite easily. They will be much younger versions but quite as evil. I could have done that myself when he murdered my Other, but that one would not be
other
, and though we might like to believe that we are all the same person, your friend here has realized that there are differences, there are identities, and we need them.”
“And you could do to us what you say he—the non-Other can—”
“No! He has lost his sense of sin because he is so alone. I have not, yet. That's one point of difference.”
“Maybe, but you're still asking us to let ourselves be killed.”
“I did not cause you to be in this situation, and I am certain that you could not have escaped for long with the plans you made.”
“I'm not so sure of that,” Tyloe said sharply. “He'd have had no way to track us.”
“Whatever he would have done, I have found you now,” the Lyhhrt said. “It is better than being found by the police and the government, and I will do everything in my power to keep you safe. I have only a few days to find that one and only a few more to take care of some others.”
Lorrice had come back into the room, looking pale and dabbing at her mouth. “What have we got to do?”
The Lyhhrt held out the gold leaves: “Stay here tonight, then take this money, go out into the city and do as you were doing, but keep the money with you. I will give you some of my own to spend. I'll stay out of sight but always within five spans of you, you will sense it with your telepathy. Likely he will find us all at the same time, but he will be much more interested in me.”
BOOK: Mindworlds
10.7Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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