Forbidden Knowledge (41 page)

Off balance, she sprawled backward into the stream from the san.

For some reason, he kicked her bare foot. He may have wondered if she would react to the blow. But she didn’t. Instead she lay as limp as a woman with a broken neck. Water trickled into the corner of her open mouth.

“I thought you were done hurting me,” he whispered because he knew she couldn’t hear him. “It looks like I was wrong.”

In disgust, he tossed her control into one of the lockers and strode out of the cabin.

The door closed after him.

He didn’t neglect to lock it.

As if of their own accord, the streams from the san stopped. Someone on the bridge must have shut off her cabin’s pumps and plumbing.

Only the water in Morn’s mouth prevented her from laughing hysterically.

She jerked her head up, spat out the water, climbed to her feet as fast as she could. As if she feared that her black box would vanish into the gap of her nightmares, she rushed to pick it up. But it was real in her hands, tangible and true. Her fingers cupped its familiar outlines lovingly; her respiration shuddered as she studied its transcendent possibilities.

Now.

Trembling, she tapped the buttons which sent a low wash of energy and strength along her nerves. Then she closed her eyes and spent a moment simply treasuring the artificial bliss of the sensation.

But it wasn’t enough. She needed to soften her hurts. There. She needed better reflexes, better concentration. There. Soon she would need a lot more strength, but for now a slight increase was sufficient. There.

Fundamental hungers eased in her. The anguish of her limits sloughed off her shoulders. The ship’s atmosphere became cleaner, sharper. She felt that she was restored to herself, that she was Morn Hyland again at last.

That, too, was a form of insanity. Nevertheless she embraced it like a lover.

She didn’t realize that she’d actually damaged her cheeks until a drop of blood fell onto her hands.

Oops. She clenched her teeth to suppress a giggle.

Carefully quiet, because catatonics made no noise, she went to the san to look at herself in the mirror.

At the sight, she lost her impulse to laugh.

Her eyes were deeply sunken, bruised by abuse and withdrawal. New lines marked her face, as if she’d been scowling for months. Drying vomit stained one side of her mouth. Her skin was pallid, the color of illness, and the way it sagged against her bones seemed to indicate that she’d lost a lot of weight.

Against her paleness, the oozing welts on her cheeks resembled a grotesque parody of Nick’s scars.

Her zone implant didn’t free her from her limitations. It merely gave her the capacity to push herself past the boundaries of her own survival.

That’s enough, she thought in a tone of cold certitude. That’s all I need.

She turned away from the mirror.

All right. No more maundering. She’d recovered her black box. Her next problem was to find a way out of her cabin.

But now she began to falter.

For some reason, her zone implant eroded her sureness as it filled her with strength, with capability. It blocked her connection to the part of her that understood everything and revealed nothing.
How
could she get out of her cabin? At one point, she’d known the answer; she’d prepared herself for it. Now it eluded her.

Strength: that must be it. Her zone implant made her strong—and gave her nothing else which could possibly be of any use here. No quickness of thought or action would free her from her prison. But if she applied enough strength—

The door had been designed to withstand pressure at right angles to its surface—decompression or battering—not in the direction of its own movement. The servo-mechanisms which opened and closed it would reverse themselves if they sensed an obstacle. So the problem was one of force and traction; of pushing hard enough in the right direction to engage the feedback circuits. Then the door would open itself.

And an obstruction alarm would tell the bridge exactly what was happening. Nick would come himself to stop her. Or he would send his people with guns—

No, she couldn’t afford to be concerned about that. One thing at a time. First she had to get out of her cabin. Then she could worry about how to evade capture.

Standing at the door, she set her artificial strength as high as it would go—so high that the rush of endorphins and dopamine in her brain seemed to make a sound like a high wind, and her chest heaved because she couldn’t take in enough air to support that much adrenaline. Then she planted her palms on the door, braced her body against the bulkhead, and shoved.

Shoved.

Pressure rose in her until her ears were full of wind and her eyes started to go blind. Her arms shuddered like cables with too much tension on them: she was probably strong enough to break her own bones. Small pains like vessels bursting mounted in her lungs.

Abruptly the skin of her palms tore. Slick with blood, her hands skidded across the door.

Helpless to catch herself, she lurched forward and cracked her head against the opposite bulkhead. From there, she fell to the floor.

The imposed neural storm was too intense: if she didn’t diminish it, her synapses would fail like overburdened circuit breakers. Apparently locking the door deactivated its feedback sensors. Trembling on the verge of a seizure, she grasped her black box and reduced its emissions.

Her hands left blood on the keys.

So much for getting out of her cabin.

Hunched over her torn palms, she began to cry without realizing it. Possession of her zone implant control wasn’t enough: she needed something to hope for—and there was nothing. Some limits were absolute. No matter what she did to herself, she couldn’t make her body pass through the solid door. Quickness, strength, concentration, freedom from pain—none of those advantages was of any use to her.

The part of her that understood hadn’t planned for this.

Or it wasn’t able to reach her through the effects of her zone implant.

Yet it kept her from crying loud enough to be heard over the intercom.

How much time did she have left? Blinking back her tears, she glanced at the cabin chronometer. Less than six hours. Was that all? She’d lost two or three hours somewhere. But it made no difference. Six hours or six hundred were the same.

She couldn’t get out of her cabin.

She couldn’t do anything to help Davies. He was lost. The next time she saw him—if she ever saw him again—he would be an Amnioni. He would remember nothing of their brief importance to each other. Unless he was given the same kind of mutagen which had transformed Marc Vestabule. Then he would be able to use his memories against her—and the UMCP—and all human space. By giving him birth, she’d betrayed him and her entire species; and there was nothing she could do about it.

She didn’t know how to bear it.

But—the idea came with a jolt like an electric shock—she could kill Nick.

Eventually he would come to check on her; perhaps to turn off her supposed catatonia. He wouldn’t expect to find her awake and charged with violence. If she hit him fast enough, hard enough, she might get past his defenses. All she needed was to land one blow—

All she needed was to drive the nail file through his throat.

She got up, went to the san, and unwedged the file from the head.

Her hands were sticky with blood, but they didn’t hurt; her bruised head didn’t hurt. Her zone implant stifled those pains. Gripping the nail file, she returned to the door and tried to compose herself for more waiting.

To kill Nick. To exact at least that one little piece of retribution for her long anguish.

But she couldn’t wait; not when she was primed with so much energy. Her muscles and her mind were incapable of stillness. She needed decisions, action; bloodshed.

Like her door, that was a conundrum she couldn’t shove aside. She could wait: of course she could. All she had to do was reset the functions of her black box, put herself into a state of rest. Yet if she did that she wouldn’t be able to react when Nick came. For him, she needed this harsh, compulsory keenness—and she didn’t know when he would come. She meant to kill him: therefore she had to wait for him. But she couldn’t wait without imposing an unnatural calm which would make killing him impossible.

There was no way out. The gap between what she needed and what she could do was impassable.

She was on the floor again, huddled among scattered shipsuits and sodden bedding. Unable to stop, she kept on crying uselessly.

But it didn’t have to be this way. She’d lost herself somehow when she’d turned on her zone implant. Before that, a lunatic and cunning part of herself had known what to do. She needed to recover that. She needed to restore her link to the part of her which revealed nothing.

There was only one way.

She had to face the remaining six or six hundred hours without artificial support.

No, she couldn’t do it. It was too grievous to be borne. The bare idea set up a keening wail in her heart. Only her zone implant kept her alive: nothing but its emissions protected her from the consequences of rape and gap-sickness, treason and bereavement. She couldn’t give that up. If she turned off her black box, she would be left defenseless in the face of what she’d become.

But she had no choice. There was no other way across the gap.

In silent grief, as if she’d come to the end of herself, she began to cancel the functions of her black box, one at a time.

She did it slowly, to minimize the stress of transition. One function after another, she reduced their intensity by minor increments until their sensations were lost: one function after another, she switched them off only when she’d had time to accustom herself to the loss.

In that way, she surrendered herself to despair.

The cabin became dim around her, not because the light—or her vision—failed, but because it no longer mattered. It was simply the outward sign of an inward imprisonment; a tangible manifestation of her irreducible mortality. Such limits were absolute. They couldn’t be overcome or outflanked or avoided by hope—or by neural chicanery. In a plain test of power, Nick Succorso had beaten her, despite all the lies she’d told him, all the secrets she’d used against him. Her son, and her humanity, had been betrayed by her inability to ever be more than she was.

The part of her that understood everything refused to reveal its intentions. In the end, there was nothing left for her except the aggrieved and restless serenity of madness.

But be
quiet
about it. Go ahead, lose your mind. Just do it
quietly
.

Ignoring the blood that crusted her hands, she began to play slowly with locks of her hair. For a while she curled them around and around her fingers, wrapping them into delicate Möbius strips; endless metaphors. Later she separated them into finer and finer strands. When they were fine enough to take hold of one hair at a time, she started pulling them out.

In that way, she sank through the bottom of her despair into an autistic peace.

Like her cabin, which imprisoned her; and her body, which had brought her so much anguish; and all other external hindrances, which had demonstrated her futility: like those things, time itself lost its meaning. It passed her by, unregarded. Her hands and eventually her scalp hurt; but pain, too, was meaningless.

She had no idea what was happening when her door opened. Nothing was revealed to her.

Furtive and frightened, as if he sought to hide from a host of furies, Sib Mackern came into the room and closed the door.

CHAPTER       
21

M
orn.
” Mackern’s whisper was as acute as a cry. “
Oh, God.
”

She regarded him dully, as if she had no idea who he was.

“
Morn
.” Sweat beaded on his pale face, darkened his thin mustache. “Get up.” He panted unsteadily, not in exertion, but in fear. “You haven’t got much time.” The way his eyes flinched away from her and returned, around the cabin and back again, evoked the beating wings of his furies. “Oh, God, what has he done to you?”

She felt a nameless agitation. The cabin was cluttered with disaster. When his gaze flinched, the whites of his eyes caught the light and gleamed sickly. She didn’t shift her position; she hardly seemed to breathe. Her face was as haggard as madness. But the rhythm of her fingers in her hair accelerated. She pulled out the strands with a hint of vehemence.

“Listen.”

He dropped to his knees in front of her as if he were falling. Now his face was level with hers.

“You haven’t got much time.”

She looked at him flatly, like a woman who’d gone blind.

Tentatively, nearly wincing, his hands moved toward her shoulders. He touched her—and jerked back as if she were hot enough to scald him. His gaze dropped to his knees; his mouth clenched crookedly. With an effort, he raised his eyes. Then he took hold of her arms.

“He doesn’t know I’m here. It’s not my watch. I waited until everyone was busy, so nobody would see me. But before I left the bridge, I deactivated his door control command circuits. The only thing his board shows is that you’re still locked. He won’t notice what I’ve done unless he tries to open your door.”

She blinked at the data first with blind, uncaring incomprehension. Everything he said sounded as familiar and indecipherable as the gap.

“You can get out.” Desperation mounted in him. “Morn, you’ve got to hear me. I don’t know what he did to you, but you’ve got to hear me. You can get out.”

That reached her. Something stirred in the dark core of her silence.
You can get out.
The lost or buried part of her that understood everything emitted a precise shiver of recognition.
Get out.

Faster and faster, she curled hair around her fingers and pulled it out.

“Oh, Morn.”

The sweat on his face looked like tears. He wasn’t a courageous man—or perhaps he simply didn’t think he was—but he was frantic. Convulsively he snatched back one of his hands and slapped her face. Then he winced and bit his lips, terrified that he’d hurt her.

She let go of her hair, lifted the tips of her fingers to her stinging cheek. Soft as a dying breeze, she breathed, “He can hear you. On the intercom.”

Mackern gasped. In panic he looked up at the intercom.

When he lowered his eyes again, they were haunted with strain. “It’s off,” he whispered. “He isn’t listening.”

She inhaled like a shudder.

Hints of his urgency glinted through her. What had he said? She’d already forgotten. Something—Had he said she could get out of her cabin?

Had he said she didn’t have much time?

She couldn’t remember his name.

Distress knotted in her guts. Her mouth stretched wide, as if she were about to wail.

“Morn, please,” Mackern begged. “He’ll kill me when he finds out. Don’t waste it. Don’t let it be for nothing.”

She heard him. By degrees, her alarm subsided. Intelligence rose to her in slow bubbles from the depths. She swallowed, and her eyes lost some of their blindness.

“‘Time,’” she murmured. “You said ‘time.’”

“Yes!” he urged at once, encouraged and febrile at her response. “We’re almost alongside that warship,
Tranquil Hegemony
—twelve hours out of Billingate. He promised them an exact launch time. You’ve got”—he flung a glance at the cabin chronometer—“twenty-six minutes.”

Once again his words slipped away from her. Billingate?
Tranquil Hegemony
? They were familiar, but she’d lost their meaning. Why was he talking about being killed? She still had twenty-six minutes left.

Deliberately she brought his name back from the place where she’d mislaid it. “Sib Mackern. What’re you doing here?” Pieces fit as she articulated them. “He’ll kill you for this.”

“I just can’t stand it,” he replied as if he suddenly understood her, knew what she needed; as if his fear enabled him to follow her struggle out of despair. She needed words she could recognize, words that might restore her connection to sanity.

“When he sold your son the first time,” he explained, “back on Enablement—I was ready to mutiny then. If I hadn’t been alone. If I weren’t such a coward.” His image of himself held no room for courage. “Since I joined him, we’ve done things that made me sick. They gave me nightmares and made me wake up screaming. But nothing like that. Nothing like selling a human being to the Amnion.

“I’ve
seen
them, Morn,” he insisted as if he were the only witness. “Those mutagens are evil. What they do is—” His whole body shivered with revulsion. No language sufficed for his abhorrence. “You were right. Any one of us could be next.

“I thought then that I couldn’t stand it. I had to do something about it, even if I
was
alone, and he killed me for it.

“But you saved me. You saved my life, Morn.” He was telling her the truth about himself: she could see that. The sweat on his face and the hunted fright in his eyes made his honesty unmistakable. “You rescued Davies yourself.

“After that I was ready to do anything for you, anything at all, all you had to do was ask. But I didn’t get a chance. He let you out. He acted—you both acted like you’d planned it together, like it was all just an elaborate trick, a ruse, to get away from Enablement. You confused me so badly, I didn’t know whether to be grateful or appalled.”

Grimly he kept his voice at a whisper. “I wanted to be grateful. You gave me a reason to keep working for him. You made me think he had limits, there were some crimes he wouldn’t commit. But I was afraid that
this
was the real trick, that acting like you planned it together was the real ruse. That he didn’t have limits. And if he didn’t, you must be paying a terrible price to protect yourself and Davies.

“When we came in range of that warship, I learned the truth.

“I can’t stand it. That’s all. I just can’t stand it.

“I want to help you,” he finished. “This is the only thing I can do.”

It was working: as he spoke, he created links for her, spans across the vast space of her loss. More knowledge came up from the depths, new pieces of understanding. Nevertheless his presence in her cabin still refused to make sense.

“Why?” she asked again. “What good will it do me when he kills you?”

“
Morn.
” Dismay twisted his face. “Have you forgotten? Did he hurt you so badly that you can’t remember?

“He’s going to give them your son. He’s going to launch Davies to them in an ejection pod in”—his eyes jerked to the chronometer and back again—“twenty-one minutes.”

That was it: the keystone; the piece she needed. When it slotted into place, she was restored.

For the first time her eyes came fully into focus on her rescuer.

Stay calm, counseled the part of her that understood. Don’t rush it. You’ve got enough time. Don’t make any mistakes.

Intensely quiet in a way that left no doubt of what she meant, she asked, “Where is he?”

Mackern wasn’t calm. “They took him to the pod, oh, twenty minutes ago.” She seemed to see the time draining from his face. “I had to wait for that. Liete guarded this hall until they moved him. She said she didn’t trust you to stay locked up. I couldn’t risk coming here until she reported he was in the pod.

“She said—” He swallowed hard to make his throat work. “She said, ‘He didn’t give us any trouble. He seems to be in some kind of shock. Like he knows what we’re doing to him, but he’s too demoralized to fight it.’”

Nineteen minutes.

She didn’t think about Davies. She didn’t need to. He was already the reason for everything. Instead she focused one last question on Sib Mackern.

“Has he changed his priority codes?”

The data first shook his head. “He hasn’t had time.”

No, of course not. And why bother? The only person who might dare use those codes in his place was safely imprisoned, out of her mind.

That answer fit everything she’d planned and prepared without knowing it.

With an effort that made her joints ache, she climbed to her feet. “Go back to your cabin,” she told Sib as she took out her zone implant control. “You’re braver than you think.”

Blood and injury had stiffened her palms. Her fingertips were sore. But none of that mattered.

One function started to fill her limbs with strength.

“If either of us survives this, we’ll owe it to you.”

Another steadied her nerves, restored her reflexes.

“I’ll do whatever I can to protect you.”

Another enabled her to move her damaged hands as if they were supple.

“Be sure to relock this cabin.”

Sixteen minutes.

There was nothing she could do here to protect him. His life depended on his own precautions. Nodding her thanks, she keyed her door and moved into the corridor at a steady run.

“Good luck!” Sib hissed after her softly. “Don’t worry about me!”

She left him behind as if he’d ceased to exist.

The corridor was empty. Good. Already she felt full of force, charged like matter cannon. She would kill anybody who got in her way.

At any rate, she would try. But she didn’t want that. She wanted no more blood on her hands. Her own was enough.

Silent on bare feet, she reached the lift and hit the call button.

Stay calm.

She was calm. Nevertheless she braced herself to attack anyone who might be using the lift.

No one was. The lift answered her almost immediately, as empty as the corridor.

She got in and ascended toward the ship’s core—toward engineering and the auxiliary bridge.

If Nick were watching for her, he would have no trouble keeping track of where she was. The maintenance computer could tell him which doors opened and closed, which lifts were used; it could analyze the gradient drain on the air processing to tell him how many people occupied which corridors or rooms. But it wouldn’t do any of those things unless he asked—and he wouldn’t ask unless he were suspicious.

If Sib hadn’t betrayed himself in some way—

If
Tranquil Hegemony
and the preparations for launch kept Nick occupied—

Fifteen minutes.

The lift stopped. The door opened.

Mikka Vasaczk stood there.

The command second stared at Morn in surprise.

No, not her, Morn couldn’t attack
her.
She was the one who’d captured Morn for Nick. Yet Morn was in her debt, for courtesy and silence if not for active help. Someone else would have captured Morn eventually, if Mikka hadn’t done it.

But Davies was helpless; he couldn’t defend himself. If Morn didn’t fight for him, he would go to the Amnion.

Coiled with the quickness of her zone implant, she sprang at Mikka just as Mikka backed away and raised her hands, palms outward to show that she was unarmed.

Morn stopped herself in midstride.

Stay calm. You’ve got enough time.

Still holding up her hands, Mikka retreated to the wall. A scowl clamped her features, ungiving and austere.

“This is strange,” she articulated harshly. “I could have sworn he said you were helpless. Things have gotten pretty bad when the captain of a ship like this can’t be trusted to turn on a radioelectrode.”

“Don’t interfere,” Morn breathed through her teeth. “I’m not your enemy.”

A sneer lifted Mikka’s lip. The bleakness of her face was complete. In the same tone, she said, “Did you know that Pup is my brother? When our parents died, he didn’t have anywhere else to go. In any case, they were too poor to leave him any good choices. I got him this job so I could keep an eye on him.

“He can’t be more than a couple of years older than Davies.

“You told me the truth once when I needed it. You took the chance that I might betray you. It’s too bad I didn’t see you down here. If I did, I could have tried to hit you again.”

Fourteen minutes.

Morn had no time to feel gratitude. Her heart labored too hard in her chest. The settings on her black box must have been too high: she could hardly get enough air to support them.

She turned and ran for the auxiliary bridge.

It wasn’t far: partway down the length of the ship; partway around the core. The deck became an upward curve when she turned: she paid no attention to that. She only noticed the doors she passed—the ones which she knew were safe; the ones which might open on trouble.

The door to the engineering console room and the drive space stood wide. That was the one she needed. The primary circuits for the ejection pods were there. Another failsafe: if all other systems died, the lifeboats could still be launched from the engineering console.