Forbidden Knowledge (45 page)

Nevertheless his fear had taught him to hate—and hate gave him strength. He hated Warden Dios; hated everything the UMCP director stood for. He hated cops and law-abiding citizens; hated romantics and idealists. He hated them because they had always hated him.

His hate enabled him to look Warden Dios in the eye.

“You’re wasting time,” he rasped. “The ‘need’ is ‘acute,’ remember?”

“Tell me the truth, Angus,” Warden replied as if he weren’t changing the subject. “Those glitches aren’t scan interrupts.” His gaze was fixed, not on Angus’ face, but on his chest—on the IR emissions of his heart and lungs. “They’re elisions. You edited the evidence against you out of your datacore.”

Because he was already full to the teeth with fear and hate, Angus didn’t flinch; he didn’t so much as drop his eyes. Instead he gaped. “You’re crazy. If I could do a trick like that, I wouldn’t be here at all. I would be sitting someplace like Billingate, making myself
rich
by doing that trick for every illegal ship in human space.”

“No, you wouldn’t.” The director was certain. “You aren’t that kind of man. You hate too much—you hate everybody. You wouldn’t protect people like Nick Succorso, even if it made you rich.”

A moment later he sighed. “But you can calm down. Believe it or not, your secret is safe with me. I won’t ask you how you do it. I can’t afford to know. That ‘trick,’ as you call it, is the most explosive piece of knowledge since Intertech’s immunity drug. I was outplayed then. I don’t propose to be outplayed again. It would be suicide for me to reveal what you know.”

Without transition, as if everything he did were part of a whole, unified by some principle Angus couldn’t grasp, Warden said, “Stasis, Joshua.”

A fire storm of panic had hold of Angus when his zone implants shut him down. Still staring at the UMCP director, he slumped forward until his head rested on the table, displayed like a sacrifice under the light.

“There are two ways to look at this,” Dios remarked as he rose to his feet. “One is that I sent Min away for her own protection.” In one hand he carried a large black box. “If she knew what I’m going to do, she might not be able to hide her relief.” He may have had it in his lap all along. “Sooner or later, she would give herself away.”

Opening the box, he moved around the table. When he was behind Angus, he put the box down and began peeling Angus’ shipsuit off his shoulders.

Although he couldn’t focus his eyes, Angus recognized the box. It was a first aid kit.

“I could probably recover if she made Hashi suspicious enough to figure out what I’m doing. He’s dangerous—not because he comes to the wrong conclusions, but because he gets to the right ones for the wrong reasons. That’s what he did when he suggested using Milos to control you.”

As soon as he reached the sore place between Angus’ shoulder blades, he stopped pulling down the shipsuit. With a jerk, he removed the bandage. His hands were as steady as stones as he took a scalpel from the first aid kit. Quickly he made a new incision. With a swab, he mopped blood away from Angus’ computer.

Angus would have yelled if he’d been in control of his mouth—or his vocal cords.

“It’s Godsen I’m really worried about,” Warden continued, talking to himself. “If Min did anything to make
him
suspicious, she and I would both be finished. From that point of view, I really ought to keep this risk to myself.”

All at once, a strange cold void filled Angus’ mind. The datacore had been unplugged from his computer.

“The other way to look at this is that I’m protecting myself.” Dios dropped the datacore unit on the table and lifted another out of his box. “If Min knew
why
I’m doing this, she’d turn against me herself.” As soon as the new unit was plugged in, Angus felt his programming come back on-line. “I probably wouldn’t live long enough to worry about what happens when Godsen betrays me.”

No hesitation or insecurity slowed Warden’s movements as he pinched the incision closed, sealed it with new tissue plasm. From his first aid kit, he selected a clean bandage and applied it carefully to Angus’ back.

When he’d put the old datacore and bandage away, he pulled Angus’ shipsuit back up and redid its seals. Then he moved.

A few steps took him into Angus’ field of vision. Unable to see clearly, blinking autonomically, Angus watched as the director rounded the end of the table and reentered the light, walking toward the chair where Milos had sat.

Angus lost sight of him for a moment. Then Warden reached across the table and shifted Angus’ posture so that the UMCP director and his newest tool could look at each other.

Dios sat down in Milos’ chair—in the light—as if he wanted to be sure that Angus could see him as accurately as possible. Nevertheless Angus still slumped with his neck exposed like a man in an abattoir.

“Angus,” Warden said distinctly, facing Angus with his tooled jaw and his broken nose, his patch and his human eye, “I’ve replaced your datacore. You know that—your mind is still alert, even if you can’t move. You won’t be able to tell the difference. In any case, most of the changes are extremely subtle. But even if they weren’t, you wouldn’t recognize them because you can’t compare the two programs. As far as you’re concerned, the datacore you have now is the only one that exists.”

Angus blinked because his brain stem decided he should. His heart and lungs continued functioning. Something in Dios’ manner told him that what he was about to hear was crucial, the crux of the whole situation.

“I wonder,” the director continued, musing as if to himself, “if you understand what we’ve done to you. We call the process ‘welding.’ When a man or woman is made a cyborg voluntarily, that’s ‘wedding.’ ‘Welding’ is involuntary.

“Technically, we’ve done you a favor. That’s obvious. You’re stronger now, faster, more capable, effectively more intelligent. Not to mention the fact that you’re still alive, when you should have been executed years ago. And all you’ve had to give up is your freedom of choice.

“But I’m not talking about technical questions. In every other way, we’ve committed a crime against you.” As he spoke, his tone became more and more like his earlier smile—the tone of a man who couldn’t begin to express how intensely he loathed his power, or perhaps his obligation, to inflict condemnation. “In essence, you’re no longer a human being. You’re a
machina infernalis
—an infernal device. We’ve deprived you of choice—and responsibility.

“Angus, we’ve committed a crime against your soul. You may be ‘the slime of the universe,’ as Godsen says, but you don’t deserve this.

“It’s got to stop.” Dios folded his hands together on the table as if he were about to pray. “Crimes like this one—or like withholding the immunity drug. They’ve got to stop.”

Angus went on breathing. His heart went on pumping blood. Occasionally he blinked. Those were the only responses available to him.

Eventually Warden Dios got back to his feet. When he’d picked up his black box and tucked it under his arm, he said, “End stasis, Joshua.”

Then he took Angus out to the docks to join Milos Taverner and Min Donner aboard
Trumpet.

This is the end of
Forbidden Knowledge.
The story continues in
The Gap into Power:
A Dark and Hungry God Arises.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

S
TEPHEN
R. D
ONALDSON
made his writing debut in 1977 with the first Thomas Covenant books; the series quickly became an international bestseller and earned him worldwide critical acclaim. Stephen Donaldson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and currently lives in New Mexico.

READ A PREVIEW OF

A DARK AND HUNGRY
GOD ARISES

THE THIRD VOLUME IN THE GAP CYCLE—

on sale wherever Bantam Books are sold

The intergalactic web of intrigue is cast even wider … At the hands of the United Mining Companies Police, the imprisoned Angus Thermopyle has undergone extensive cybernetic surgery, transformed into a cyborg of nearly infinite powers—kept in check by only a few fragile limitations. Hidden deep in his datacore is a set of instructions for a mission. And that mission will mean the difference between life and death not only for Morn Hyland … but for all of humanity.

A
n hour or two before Angus Thermopyle and Milos Taverner left UMCPHQ aboard
Trumpet
, Holt Fasner visited his mother.

He did this despite the fact that the old harridan had been in a foul temper for decades.

The medical advances that had kept him nearly healthy, relatively strong, almost in his prime for a hundred fifty years had come too late to be comparably effective for her. In fact, they would have failed her thirty years ago if her son hadn’t insisted on plugging her into machines that first pumped blood, then digested food, and eventually breathed for her. She was technically still alive, of course; but now she was only the husk of a woman. Her skin was the blotchy color of rotting linen; she could hardly move her hands; she hadn’t lifted her head from its supports for at least ten years. She no longer knew the difference when tubes brought her sustenance, or carried away waste.

acid, Norna Fasner continued to think long after her body lost its last capacity to do anything.

That was why her son kept her alive. Many years ago she’d given up asking him to let her die. She knew from old, painful experience that he would put her off with a bland chuckle and a vacuous remark: “You know I can’t do without you, Mother.” And shortly afterward she would find yet another video screen installed in the room that she considered her tomb.

She studied the screens, even though she hated them. Their images were all she had to think about. If they were switched off, her brain would almost surely go null; and she didn’t want that: she desired death, not unconsciousness. If even one of her screens had gone blank, she might have wept in frustration and grief. Every image, every word, every passing implication was a hint that might eventually enable her to believe that her son would be destroyed. Without hints—without the possibility that she would receive hints—all her years of paralyzed, unliving existence would come to nothing.

Her son was the United Mining Companies CEO, unquestionably the richest and beyond doubt the most powerful man alive. From his corporate “home office,” his station orbiting Earth half a million kilometers beyond UMCPHQ, he ruled his vast empire: the largest, arguably the most necessary enterprise in human history. His employees were counted in millions; men and women who lived or died by his decisions and policies, in billions. Disguised by the UMC charter and by the public democracy of Governing Council for Earth and Space, he raised and toppled governments, destroyed or enriched competitors, caused potential futures to take on substance or fray away like mist. Behind his back, people who feared him sometimes referred to him as “the Dragon”—and only people who had no idea who he was didn’t fear him.

Nevertheless Holt Fasner visited his mother whenever an opportunity presented itself. He valued her advice too much to let her die.

Although he was sometimes hard-pressed to interpret it. Her wish for his ruin was so palpable that he had to be extraordinarily careful in how he sifted her insights, what valence he assigned to her pronouncements. As a result, his encounters with her were a challenge that he found profoundly satisfying.

In truth, he could almost certainly have afforded to let her die anytime during the past half-century. He liked talking to his mother; he profited from her advice. But he could have done without it. He kept Norna Fasner alive precisely because she wished him ill with such steady virulence; also because he took pleasure in her utter helplessness; and finally because she kept him on his toes. Otherwise he was inclined to forget that he was mortal.

Men who forgot their mortality made mistakes. Holt Fasner had paid blood—not always his own—for his successes; and now that he had them, he didn’t mean to let them go glimmering in the name of a mistake.

So he visited his mother an hour or two before
Trumpet
’s departure. Risks were at work: small risks that might metastasize at any moment. In themselves, Angus Thermopyle, Milos Taverner, Nick Succorso, and Morn Hyland were nothing more than three men and a woman, minor victims of Holt’s larger policies, his grander dreams. But stirred together with Billingate and the Amnion, they might conceivably produce something more volatile, with a lasting impact, like a minor thermonuclear pile that went critical and rendered all its environs uninhabitable for centuries.

Ward was in charge, of course. The risk was of his choosing, not Holt’s: the negative consequences, if any, would be his to clean up. But Holt cherished the well-being of the UMCP as he cherished the health of the whole United Mining Companies. If he’d believed the risks were too great, he would have forbidden them.

He hadn’t done that.

Nor did he dismiss the situation from his mind, however. Instead of trying to second-guess Warden Dios—who had, after all, proven his usefulness and reliability a hundred times over—Holt went to talk to Norna.

The room where he kept her immured was hidden in the obscure recesses of the home office, in a part of the station where no one except men and women with extremely specialized authorizations entered. As usual when her several doctors weren’t examining her, the only illumination in her high sterile sickchamber came from the twenty or so video screens that nearly covered the wall in front of her. That was her choice: the little strength left in her fingers was enough to tap buttons that would raise or lower the lights, adjust her posture, summon assistance—or even turn off the screens. Holt allowed her that freedom because he trusted the use she would make of it.

Stark and garish in the phosphor gleam, her face looked like that of a mummy painted to appear ghastly under UV lamps. Incessantly her thin lips and toothless gums chewed food she hadn’t tasted for decades. At intervals she drooled unselfconsciously; a fretwork of wrinkles spread the excess saliva into a sheen across her chin. She didn’t glance at her son as he entered: her eyes flicked restlessly across the screens as if she could absorb and understand them all simultaneously.

From them came a steady mutter of voices and sound tracks, a muted and indistinguishable argument interleaved with at least half a dozen kinds of music—a noise like a rabble, uneasy and irate, but so blurred and distant that it might have been the tectonic grumbling of rocks or the lost complaint of the sea. The sound alone set Holt’s teeth on edge: at times it seemed to muddle his brain. It made him think there was something structurally wrong with the home office itself.

He knew from experience, however, that Norna absorbed and understood the voices as well as the images.

“Hello, Mother,” he greeted her—artificially hearty, in part as a matter of policy, in part because he had to do
some
thing to counteract the effects of the noise. “You’re looking well, better than ever. I do believe you’ll be able to get out of bed soon. I can certainly use your help running the company. How are you feeling? What do the doctors say?”

She met his blather with her usual disregard. The way her eyes hunted the screens made him think of a chicken trying to peck seeds out of stony soil.

He scanned the screens himself for a moment. But their images offered him nothing. The typical collection: half a dozen news broadcasts, all trying to reinterpret life for their viewers, all reaching the same conclusions; three or four sports programs showing acts of extreme violence in varying degrees of simulation; four or five comedies and satires which gave the impression that they all repeated the same jokes over and over again; and half a dozen romantic videos—“Mother, really, at your age, aren’t you ashamed?”—reveling in the kind of mindless and supernal lust that had apparently driven Morn Hyland and Nick Succorso together. With such tripe masses of human beings were tranquilized—until those rare occasions when they woke up, saw what was really happening around them, misunderstood it, and did their best to impose the stupidest possible solution on the men who normally led them. The Humanity Riots were a case in point. The rest of the time, the world reflecting from the screens served its purpose efficiently enough. But it had nothing to give Holt himself.

For the umpteenth time he wondered what it gave his mother. Did she see in it something that he missed? Was she simply hoping for news that some disaster had befallen him? Or was she able to snatch a secret knowledge out of the gabble—knowledge that had somehow eluded him despite his vast resources?

The question added piquancy to his visits with her.

What
could
he have missed? Not much, obviously, since he’d demonstrated his ability to profit—and profit hugely—from those times when the human billions kicked over the traces and demanded irrationality from their leaders. If any man in history could claim to have
not missed much
, Holt Fasner was the one.

Nevertheless he kept the question—and his mother—alive to help him ensure that he didn’t start missing things now.

At one hundred fifty years of age, he was almost in his prime, still close to his middle years physiologically. But his cheeks were just a shade too ruddy. He had to blink a bit too often to keep his eyes from filming over. At times he couldn’t hold his hands steady; at times his prostate troubled him. His doctors had advised him against any form of strenuous exercise because they didn’t know how long the tissues of his heart could last. Now more than ever it was vital to make no mistakes.

“Mother,” he went on with the same bland heartiness, as if she hadn’t refused to answer his polite inquiries—as if she had, in fact, given him the answer he desired most—“I need your advice. In the past few days I’ve had a couple of troubling conversations with Godsen Frik.

“You remember him, don’t you?” Holt knew perfectly well that his mother never forgot anything. “He’s Ward’s Director of Protocol. For some reason”—Holt showed his teeth in a salesman’s grin—“he thinks he has the right to go over Ward’s head when he doesn’t like Ward’s decisions or policies. Reprehensible conduct in a subordinate, don’t you think? Ward wouldn’t tolerate it if he didn’t know that Godsen is a particular protégé of mine. In time—ten years or so—I think Godsen will be ready to do his duty to all humankind by accepting the Presidency of the GCES. But is it a problem, isn’t it? For Ward as Godsen’s Director. And for me, as Ward’s friend, ally, and mentor. After all, I want Ward”—Holt had a malicious love for phrases like this one—“to be happy in his work. All human space depends on him.”

If Holt hadn’t been listening hard, trying to filter out the insistent mutter of the screens, he wouldn’t have heard Norna’s almost inaudible question, chewed out by her bloodless lips and toothless gums:

“What’s the situation?”

Ah, Mother, you live for me, don’t you. You don’t want to, but you do it anyway.

Holt went on smiling.

“Ward has decided that it’s time to do something about one of the worst of the bootleg shipyards that serve forbidden space by helping illegals—as well as by what they used to call ‘fencing stolen goods.’ The question is how. He would lose his job if he committed an act of open warfare against the Amnion. So he’s planning a covert strike.

“Do you remember that situation on Com-Mine, oh, half a year ago? The one where it looked like Security was in collusion with one pirate to frame another?” Of course she did. “The one that tipped the votes to get the Preempt Act passed? Well, the illegal who got framed is called Angus Thermopyle—one of the slimiest characters you would ever want to meet. Ward reqqed him under the Act. Now he’s been welded and programmed, and he’s being sent against that shipyard. Today, I think.

“It’s a complex issue. Please stop me if I’m boring you, Mother. I had the distinct impression that Ward didn’t want to obey when I told him to set up that frame on Com-Mine. Our Ward is still too much of an idealist. He doesn’t like to get involved in the practical side of politics. I’ve actually heard him make speeches against ‘descending to the level of our enemies.’ But he did it because he could get something he wanted out of it—which was this Angus Thermopyle.” As if to himself—but watching his mother closely—Holt mused, “I wish I knew how hard I would have had to push him to make him follow orders otherwise.”

If Norna said anything, he didn’t hear it.

“The point, however,” Holt resumed, “is that Ward did follow orders. He is following orders. The next few days should produce some interesting developments on the fringes of forbidden space.”

Now Norna muttered something that sounded like “Why does that bother Godsen?”

“Good question!” her son exclaimed jovially. “As usual, Mother, you’ve cut right to the heart of the matter. Why
does
that bother a dedicated public servant like Godsen Frik?

“Well, of course, we wouldn’t have been able to frame this Angus Thermopyle if we hadn’t had someone working for us inside Com-Mine Security. But it would be”—Holt considered his choice of adjectives—“unfortunate if any local investigation uncovered the truth. We passed the Preempt Act on the assumption that local Security couldn’t be trusted—that Com-Mine had a traitor working for forbidden space. If word got out that the traitor was actually working for
us
—well, I could probably keep the station votes in line, but the rest of the Council would go absolutely shit-faced.

“To protect against that eventuality, Ward reqqed our traitor at the same time as Angus—a sadistic little bureaucrat named Milos Taverner. All well and good, so far. But here comes the part that upsets Godsen. Angus is a cyborg now, programmed down to his toes. He can’t clean his teeth without permission from his datacore. But he still needs a control—someone who can adjust his programming to meet unforeseen circumstances. In addition, he needs crew. And on top of that, he needs cover. He needs an explanation for why he’s free, how he got out of lockup, where he got his ship.”