03. The Maze in the Mirror (29 page)

I knew I looked a mess-I was wearing a surplus uniform jacket over my original clothes, which hadn't been washed or changed, and I was unkempt and unshaven and I itched.

"You look like hell," she greeted me.

"Just fine, and how are you?" I came back. "I see you found a tailor."

She laughed. "It was simple, but I will spare you the details. I take it that Mister Yugarin does not go in for luxurious living."

"You take right, although as usual he lives a lot better than the rest of them." I lowered my voice, and took her to one side. I knew there were observers in the trees and perhaps some snooping gear around, but this was the safest of the places I
was likely to be right off to get the information I hoped she had.

"Whisper," I cautioned her. "The trees have ears. You get what I needed?"

"I think so," she responded, her whisper so low I could barely make it out myself. "I do not understand how you could have known it, though, nor what she has to do with anything."

"Believe me, it's vital."

"Well, all right. His-compound-is an obscenity. He has developed a system similar to my own home, only he has twisted and perverted it and made it ugly and horrible. Everyone, even his on-site security staff, are in thrall to his privately developed and powerful drugs. He treats them all like dirt. He humiliates and degrades people, and there is no question he enjoys it. He has a laboratory in his luxurious complex there with many brilliant minds bent to his will and in which he carries out human experimentations. They have developed a horrible pharmacology in which they can create drugs that do almost anything they wish to the mind, the personality, the attitudes, even change things physically!"

"You actually got in?"

"No," she told me. "Nor did I wish to. But there is enough traffic to and from, particularly among the network security people and couriers, that it was very easy to get a full picture, even a recent one."

I nodded. It was at least as bad as I figured. "And what about her?"

"She is one of his toys, to be kept around and toyed with and humiliated. Altering her mind
would defeat the purpose and deny his pleasure."

"That's a relief. This is gonna be a tough problem to crack, though. No way he'll let me near that place. He may meet me, but like Mancini-in a neutral corner. We may have to figure a way in without the knowledge of the network. It'll be risky, but it's necessary."

Her eyebrows rose. "You would think of doing that? It is impossible. The switch control is on the inside and tightly managed. Besides, even if somehow you got in, what could you do but get caught? No one can be rescued from that place. You take them away from there and they would no longer get their drugs. Even your closest comrade would betray you under those circumstances."

"You should know," I commented, thinking about the confessionals and group sessions of her world. She was right, too, although she didn't bank herself on the twin super powers of love and hate. "All right, then, maybe we can get some messages in. Let me sleep on it and I'll try and figure out a plan. Don't worry, though-this won't get you in trouble with the network, nor betray or harm anybody but him, unless he runs your world secretly as the ultimate party member-and he might."

She stared at me as if I were mad. "You can not be serious."

"Even if he had nothing to do with your world and its development its very nature would attract him like a magnet. Believe me, I know. But if he has perverted your world at the top, and you are repulsed by what he's like at home, then maybe you'll be doing your world a favor as well."

"He is the killer? The one behind this?"

"Maybe. Probably not directly, and certainly not alone, but he almost had to be one of them at the center of it. I beat him before, but never caught him." I sighed and we wandered back towards the wooden building shielding the substation. "The only thing I'm certain about is that he's involved and that he is the only one of the batch of which I can be certain of his side and sympathies. I need something, anything, to help me separate the skunks from the skunk cabbage."

"What?"

"Never mind. Four down, and maybe four or fewer than four to go."

"I checked our messages," she told me. "If you didn't look that way we could probably meet Kanda and Cutler without going back. I think, though, that you need a shower and perhaps a good sleep."

I nodded. "Yeah, I guess I do."

"It is a pity," she said, "that we can not arrange to meet the rest in a group. It would save much time."

I shook my head violently from side to side. "Uh uh. The last thing I want to do in this is save time. In fact, I need all the time I can buy." I paused a minute, then had a couple more questions.

"Any evidence of who our tail is?" I asked her.

"No. Sorry. Definitely not regular security, but surely too lowly a job for a higher-up."

"Sooner or later we're going to have to set a trap for him, if we can. I want to know who he is and who he's working for. Oh-that reminds me, did we lose our chair?"

"I'm afraid someone made off with it," she
responded, laughing a bit, "but I am certain we can requisition another."

I'd known a lot of guys who were nutty over computers, but Dilip Kanda was the first one I'd ever met who lived in one.

He was fairly short, cherubic, with strong East Indian features, maybe far enough east to have some Thai or Cambodian in him. He was dark, wore thick horn-rimmed glasses, and dressed for guests wearing only one of those white cotton diapers like Gandhi used to wear and a threadbare white cotton sleeveless undershirt.

The place was cramped, and I couldn't get a fix as to whether I was in a great building or complex on a world or whether this was entirely built within the Labyrinth medium. At any rate, it was all metal or plastic, with glassy smooth floors and narrow corridors that seemed to go through machinery. I felt sort of like a cross between being in a high-tech auto junkyard doing great business and the Incredible Shrinking Man lost inside an automated telephone exchange.

"My humble pardon for meeting you like this, but I simply can not get away right now," Kanda said, greeting us, in a voice that had that somewhat stilted yet highly cultured Indian accent. He shook hands, and they were rough hands with nasty, long nails. I looked at his toenails and they looked almost like claws. For a moment I wondered if he wasn't some Type One snuck in on us, but I finally realized that the guy simply didn't keep himself up at all. His black hair, without a trace of gray, was so long it was down to his ass and looked like a great "before" example for a "no more tangles" ad.
Human hair grows like three inches a year if not cut or trimmed. At that rate, Kanda had last seen a barber some time in the previous decade. At least he didn't have a big beard. He was, racially or otherwise, one of those guys that had very little facial hair at all.

"That's all right," I responded, looking around. "This is quite a place."

"Indeed," he said with pride. "I believe this to be possibly the finest and most complex computer ever built. It is of my own design, although even I can not understand all of it, nor could the late and lamented Pandross or anyone else who helped construct it. It is far beyond what we originally built. Totally self-contained, totally self-repairing, with the ability to design and create whatever it requires robotically. Much of its own bulk it has designed itself over the years so that even I have no idea how large it is or just what it can do. It is sufficient that it does what I need it to do."

I looked around nervously. "You talk like this thing was alive. Like we were in the belly of a great beast."

"Indeed so, in a way. Not alive as we know life, but certainly it thinks. Our entire operation has depended upon it. Had we not been able to develop it, initially with the unwitting consent of our late Company patron, we would not have been able to accomplish what we have. The security computers and general data banks are but an extension of it, and the parallel network and the rest are maintained and guarded by it. The closest thing to it is the master computer complex on the Company world after which it was based-the rock, as it were, upon which I created this one. But they have
severe limitations and restrictions on their own master computer. Here, there are none."

I got suddenly a little nervous at that. "You mean that it answers your questions because it wants to, not because it has to."

"Basically, yes."

"You kind of wonder why it bothers."

He looked blank for a second, then chuckled. "Oh, yes, I see what you mean. Actually, it needs people, or at least their input. It is clever enough to know that mere data is not the same as truth, and that truth is a subjective concept. It can have the sheer data to know everything about a particular human being, or an entire nation, or even an entire world, but it has no feel for what it is actually like to live that way, to think that way, to
experience
life firsthand. Only by interacting with humans, and even humoring tiny and limited brains like my own, can it get any feel for that, however inadequate, or gain full understanding of why we want to know what we know or why we feel this way or that. I do not pretend to fully understand it, but if your fear is the old one of the computer taking over or wiping out all life, it is a false one."

"Oh, yeah? That's just exactly what I was thinking."

"Well, as for taking over-why? What would it gain? It gains new knowledge, which is all it really has to live for, as it were, by letting us run and observing how stupidly we behave. With so many worlds, and so much variety even among the same cultural groups on any given world, to observe it is never, well, bored, nor with such variety can it feel as if it truly knows us. The limitations on experience prevent that. And even if we became irrelevant to it I doubt if it would so much as notice us, any more than one of the gods would truly care if a monkey fell from a tree. It once said to me that it found the concept of a god that needed to be worshiped a silly one, since the only reason it could think of why a god would do that was if the god itself was either defective or actually had such an inferiority complex that it required constant gratification and sacrifice. I must admit I had no real answer to that one."

"I suppose if we could understand gods or supercomputers we would be gods or supercomputers ourselves," I noted, feeling a little uncomfortable with the subject. I was, however, curious about him. "You are alone here, except for the computer?"

"Oh, yes. Actually, I intend some time or another to go out, find a great feast, get drunk, carouse, and do all the human urges I have denied myself, but somehow I never seem to have the time."

"You've left to attend the committee meetings," I noted.

"Oh, no. They are held here. There is no place more secure than here, and the computer can whip up whatever is required."

I thought about that. "Then-when was the last time you left here?"

He shrugged. "One loses track of time, you know. I suppose I could ask the computer. It would know."

"Don't bother. Years, though, certainly."

Kanda acted like the thought had never really crossed his mind before. "Yes, I suppose you are right. How time does slip away ..."

"Yeah, time does fly when you're having fun. So you were all here when the grand plan was presented and approved."

"Yes, yes. I can show you the meeting area if you wish."

"Not necessary, for now. You worked out the math, right? On the computer?"

He nodded. "Yes, we had the figures and did the best we could."

"I'm curious. Yugarin said he approached Mancini with the plan almost ten years ago. If this great computer of yours is as tremendous as you claim, and if computers really are the world's greatest mathematical counting machines, why did it take you almost a decade to get the answer that worked?"

Kanda looked surprised. "I hadn't realized it was that long. It wasn't all that complicated, you know, although I admit I wouldn't have thought of all the variables and come up with that approach. I truly never gave any thought at all to the amount of time it took to get the answers required. The only supposition I have as to that is that perhaps the computer did not consider it a worthy problem or just did not care to solve it."

"But suddenly it did."

"Well, not that suddenly. It was, after all, basically an academic exercise for the longest time. It was only when Mancini really started pressing, bothering me and interrupting my theoretical work, that I finally begged for the solution just to be rid of the interruptions."

"Really? And how long ago did he get the answer?"

Kanda shrugged. "I will ask." He walked over to
one of the shiny metal walls and put his hands against the wall, palms down, and lowered his head. He looked like a guy spread-eagled after being busted for stealing small change from a Coke machine. Then he straightened up and came back over to us, looking puzzled. "That is very odd," he muttered, more to himself than to us.

"That's it? You just lean against a wall and think at it?" I was simultaneously impressed and unnerved by that.

"Oh, yes. Easier that way, and no possibility of error. The machine claims that it provided the answer a few weeks after the problem was posed to me, as soon as I pressed it to the computer. It says that it answered the question as soon as I remembered to ask it. But could that be right?"

Kanda really didn't have any time sense at all. Yesterday and ten years ago were all the same to him. "Yes, it could indeed," I assured him.

"Then why did it take them ten years to put it into action?" Kanda asked me, thinking about it now for the first time since the problem was posed and answered.

"Ask your great computer," I responded. "I'll even give it a hint."

He stared at me like a little kid waiting for Dad to tell him why the sky was blue. "Yes?"

"It didn't," I said, and wondered if Kanda remembered where the exit was.

9.

Collaboration by Correspondence