Forbidden Knowledge (19 page)

She would die herself when the suit’s air ran out: she would suffocate alone in the vast dark. But at least her death would accomplish something.

It would put a stop to Nick Succorso.

As recently as two or three weeks ago, she might have tried that. She might have been desperate enough.

Now she dismissed it.

She’d changed too much to consider suicide.

Faced with Nick’s ultimatum, she wanted to know what was at stake. Whatever his message to UMCPHQ contained, she was sure it had nothing to do with auctioning. His knowledge of the listening post’s coordinates proved that he’d had dealings with the UMCP for some time—the kind of dealings which required them to remain in contact with each other.

Vector Shaheed had cause to believe the cops themselves were corrupt; treasonous to humankind. If he was right, it implied that Nick was engaged in something worse than simple piracy.

And if she killed herself little Davies Hyland would die with her.

Her desire to save him surprised her. On a conscious level, her claim that she wanted to keep him had been a smoke screen to disguise her real reasons for resisting being sold on Thanatos Minor. But now she saw that the claim was true. Maybe she wanted her son as a way of defying Nick; maybe she wanted him for himself; maybe she was overcome by the desire not to add Davies’ name to the list of her victims; maybe she was under too much pressure to refuse the logic of her hormones: she didn’t know. Whatever the explanation, however, the conclusion was clear: she had become prepared to fight for her baby’s life.

Which meant she had to find a cure for Orn’s virus.

That was the decision she reached. Aware of what she was doing, and galvanized by it, she accepted Nick’s terms, just as she’d once accepted Angus’.

The proposition was absurd on its face. She knew no more about such things than Nick himself did. Where could she start? What could she do that hadn’t already been tried? How far could she push herself before she failed—before Nick forced her to accept defeat?

Nevertheless she put everything she had into the attempt.

Once again she took to carrying her zone implant control with her, regardless of the danger.

She needed it to deal with Nick, of course. Caught up in his anger over her defiance, and perhaps intending to help her fail, he pursued sex with her as mastery rather than pleasure; he took her brutally in unexpected places, at unexpected times, when she needed to concentrate on other things. And yet as always her survival depended on her ability to preserve the illusion that she hungered for him whatever he did, that even rape only made her love him more. Without her black box, she would have been unable to maintain the masque for as much as five minutes—certainly not for all the long days which followed.

But she also needed the control to keep her attention sharp, to suppress her fatigue, to hold her fear at bay. She had to do her job on Mikka’s watch—and she had to respond to Nick whenever he came at her. That left relatively few hours each day in which she could tackle the problem of the virus; too few. As much as possible, she elected to go without sleep.

Alive with artificial energy, she spent virtually all her spare time on the auxiliary bridge poring over
Captain’s Fancy’s
programs: running every available diagnostic test on them; scrutinizing their logic; dividing them into their component parts and dummying each part separately to her board so that she could see how it functioned. When she slept, she did so not because she felt the need, but because she knew her body had limits which her zone implant ignored. Her baby had limits. On some days, however, she forgot about limits and worked continuously. Frequently she neglected to eat. Her mind was like a thruster on full burn, consuming its resources in a white, pure fire that seemed to deny entropy and thermodynamics.

After several days of that, she looked as haggard and gap-eyed as a casualty of war; but she didn’t know it.

A week passed, and part of another week, before she thought of an answer.

When it occurred to her, she spent no time at all wondering why she hadn’t conceived of it earlier—or cursing herself for being so dense. She was too busy.

A datacore time-study.

More accurately, a study of
Captain’s Fancy’s
basic programming as it was recorded over time in the datacore. That would enable her to compare the original programming with its present state. Then a simple comparison test would locate the changes Orn had written into the operating systems.

The job was horrendously complex to prepare, however. A plain one-to-one comparison between the present state of the ship’s data and its state before Orn came aboard would have taken months to run and reported millions of discrepancies, the record of everything
Captain’s Fancy
had seen and done since the starting date of the comparison. So Morn had to write a filter through which she could play back the data so that everything irrelevant to the condition and function of the programming itself would be excluded. Then she had to go over that body of information almost line by line in order to delete anything secondary, anything which would bog down the comparison to no purpose.

All that took most of four days. She could have done it in three if Nick hadn’t insisted on using her so hard.

When she was finished—when she’d run her time-study and obtained its results—she finally felt an emotion so organic and spontaneous that it overwhelmed the zone implant’s emissions. Her artificial burn shut down, leaving her at the mercy of her mortality.

The comparison was conclusive. From the day before Orn came aboard to the present, no substantive changes, elisions, or amendments had been made to
Captain’s Fancy’s
operational programming.

According to her study, there was no virus.

Several moments passed before Morn noticed that she was hunched over the auxiliary data board, sobbing like a bereft child. Caught between physical exhaustion, natural grief, and imposed energy, she couldn’t seem to do anything except cry.

After a time, Vector Shaheed heard her and came to the auxiliary bridge. She had no idea what he was doing as he pulled her to her feet and dragged her out; no idea how much the strain hurt his joints, or where he was taking her. Weeping was all she had in her, and it wouldn’t stop.

He took her to the galley, propped her in a chair at the table, and set a steaming mug of coffee in front of her.

“Don’t worry about burning your mouth,” he instructed. “Burns heal.”

The aroma rose into her face. Obedient to his order—or to an instinct she no longer knew she had—she swallowed her sobs long enough to pick up the mug and drink.

The coffee scalded her tongue and throat. For an instant pain broke through her helplessness.

Between one gulp for air and the next, she stopped crying. The zone implant began to reassert control.

“That’s better.” Vector’s voice seemed to reach her through a veil, as if it were muffled by kindness. “Any minute now you’ll be able to think again. If you don’t fall asleep first. Or just drop dead. You could kill yourself the way you’re going.

“Do you play cards?”

She didn’t react. All she cared about was the black heat of the coffee, the flaming hurt in her mouth.

“I know this seems like an inopportune moment for conversation,” he explained in his mild way, “but I want to reach you while you’re still—still accessible. You’ve been deaf and blind for weeks now. This may be my only chance.

“Do you play cards?”

The retreat of her grief left her exposed to exhaustion. Numbly she nodded. “Poker. A little. In the Academy. I wasn’t good at it.”

Apparently she’d given him some kind of permission. He seated himself, picked up a mug of coffee, and said casually, “It’s interesting how some games endure. Chess, for example. And poker—as a species, we’ve been playing poker practically forever. And then there’s bridge. I’ve seen gaming encyclopedias that don’t even mention whist—which is where bridge came from—but back when I worked for Intertech we used to play bridge for days. Orn was particularly good at it.

“Bridge and poker.” Vector let out a nostalgic sigh. “The only time life is ever pure is when you’re playing games like that. That’s because they’re closed systems. The cards, and the rules—and the ontological implications—are finite.

“But of course poker isn’t really a
card
game. It’s a game of people. The cards are just a tool for playing your opponents. That may be why you weren’t good at it. Bridge comes much closer to direct problem solving—the extrapolation of discrete logical permutations. You can’t ignore who your opponents are, naturally, but you win with your mind more than your guts.

“You’re trying to win this one with your guts, Morn. You need to use your mind.”

Morn drank more coffee. She didn’t say anything: she didn’t have anything to say. Instead she concentrated on the pain in her throat.

“We have a maxim in bridge,” he continued. “If you need a particular card to be in a certain place,
assume
it is. If you need a particular distribution of the cards,
assume
it exists. Plan the rest of your strategy as if you have a right to be sure of that one assumption.

“It doesn’t always work, of course. In fact, you can play for days without it working once. But that’s not the point. The point is, if your assumption is false you were going to fail anyway. That assumption represents the one thing you have to have in order to succeed, so you might as well count on it. Without it, there’s nothing you can do except shrug and go on to the next hand.”

Morn was adrift in a void of exhaustion and overdriven synapses, anchored only by coffee and her burned tongue. Nothing Vector said made any sense. His little lecture sounded oddly purposeless, unmotivated. And yet he delivered it as if it were important somehow; as if he thought she needed it. With an effort, she resisted the impulse to switch off her black box and let herself collapse.

The electrical coercion in her brain seemed unable to master her fatigue. Nevertheless it reduced her numbness a bit. She cleared her throat and murmured thinly, “Whose watch is this? I don’t even know what day it is.”

Vector consulted a chronometer built into the food-vend. “Liete’s on for another hour. Then it’s Nick’s turn.” He hesitated momentarily before adding, “You missed your last watch, but Nick told Mikka to let you stay with what you were doing. He may treat you like shit, but he’s counting on you.”

Treat you like shit.
That touched a sore place in her. A small sting of anger spread outward from the contact. The effect of the zone implant grew stronger. Nick did indeed treat her like shit. She had every intention of making him pay blood for the privilege.

“So your advice”—she was too tired to speak distinctly, but she did her best to articulate every word—“is to just
assume
I can cure this virus.
Assume
there’s something I can do that doesn’t depend on skills or knowledge I haven’t got.”

In response Vector raised his mug like a salute. Smiling gently, he said, “If you heard me say all that, there’s hope for you yet.”

“In that case,” she replied, trying not to mumble, “our entire approach has been wrong from the beginning. We have to assume that everything we’ve done so far is wrong.”

He nodded noncommittally. “Do we? Is that the only assumption that gives us a chance?”

She ignored him. Maybe fatigue was what she needed to take the edge off the zone implant’s effect: maybe she’d been blinded by her own urgency, artificial and otherwise. Now she seemed to feel neurons which had been pushed to the point of shutdown come back on line. She was starting to think again.

“Where’s Mackern?” she asked as if she had a right to expect Vector’s help.

He studied her without adjusting his smile. “He’s on with Nick in an hour.”

So what? If Mikka could do without her, Nick could do without Mackern. “I need him.”

Vector shrugged. Lifting himself stiffly to his feet, he moved to the intercom.

“With your permission, Nick,” he told the intercom, “Morn wants to talk to Sib Mackern. She says she needs him.”

Obliquely Morn realized that she’d never heard Mackern’s first name before.

Nick’s voice came back: “Where?”

“In the galley.”

“I’ll send him.” The intercom clicked off.

The data first arrived only a minute or two after Vector sat down again. He must have been somewhere nearby when he received Nick’s orders.

“You wanted to talk to me?” he asked Morn. The idea appeared to aggravate his uncertainty. Whatever he used instead of self-confidence to keep him going was as nearly invisible as his pale mustache.

She needed time to get her thoughts in order. For a moment she said nothing. Vector urged Sib Mackern to sit down. He offered the data first coffee. Sib preferred to remain standing; he refused the coffee.

Both men watched Morn as if they wanted to witness the exact moment when she fell asleep.

Sleep, she mused. Rest and death. She needed both—not necessarily in that order. But not yet.

“Sib.” She pulled up her attention with a jerk. “What kind of name is that?”

“It’s short for Sibal,” he replied, too nervous to give her anything except a straight answer. “My mother wanted a girl.”

“Oh, well,” Vector sighed. “If you were a girl, she would have wanted a boy. None of us ever win with our mothers.”

“Sib, I need you.” Morn had no energy to spare for Vector’s sense of humor. “Nobody trusts me. Nobody is going to do what I tell them. I haven’t got access or authority. And I’m”—she could hardly hold up her head, despite the zone implant’s emissions—“too tired to do anything myself. I need you.”

He didn’t commit himself. “Nick told me to help you.”

“Sib, you know more about computers than I do.” She brushed aside a demurral he didn’t make. “If you wanted to plant a virus aboard, how would you go about it?”

His gaze flicked to Vector, back to her. “I don’t understand.”

Unable to explain herself better, she repeated, “How would you go about it?”