Forbidden Knowledge (9 page)

The course correction was certainly gradual. Her sense of balance was normally sensitive enough to tell her when she was experiencing g along more than one vector. She had to wonder if he was telling her the truth—and, if so, why.

“For a ship with no gap drive,” she commented, “we’re trying to cross a lot of space. Where are we going?”

“Repairs,” the engineer answered succinctly. “We need to reach a shipyard where we can get the gap drive fixed.”

Morn faced him in surprise. Discounting Com-Mine Station itself, she couldn’t think of any shipyard in human space that
Captain’s Fancy
could reach using only thrust. The ship’s speed might well go as high as 150,000 kilometers per second; but even that much velocity was trivial compared to the light-years between the stars.

Forgetting caution, she asked, “What shipyard? Where is it?”

Vector’s eyes were as clear as clean sky. “You know I can’t tell you that.”

“No, I don’t,” she retorted. “As far as I can see, you shouldn’t be talking to me at all. As long as you’re doing something I don’t understand, you can’t expect me to guess where your limits are.”

He smiled, unperturbed. “As I say, we’re going to be coasting for a long time. That means we’re going to see so much of each other we’re likely to turn homicidal. We’ll all have an easier time if we try to be friendly.”

She didn’t smile back. Vector Shaheed, she told herself, was male. Like Nick Succorso and Angus Thermopyle. If he was “friendly,” he wanted something from her.

She was prepared to give Nick what he wanted. For her own survival. That’s what the zone implant control was for.

But nobody else. Nobody. Ever.

Deliberately cold, she said, “And we’re doing all this on UMCP orders. We’re doing it to keep Hashi Lebwohl’s nose clean for planting station supplies on
Bright Beauty.
Loyalty is a good thing, but this is ridiculous.”

Just for a moment, Vector appeared perplexed. Then his expression cleared. “Ah. Your theory that Nick is a DA operative. Now I understand.

“Listen to me.” He leaned forward to emphasize his words, and his round face gave up its smile. “I wouldn’t count on that assumption if I were you. I wouldn’t even repeat it. It’s too dangerous. You took enough of a chance when you mentioned it the first time.”

She scowled at him. “Why? I’m a cop myself.” She had no reason to trust him—and no reason to let him think she did. “Why else did Nick decide to keep me, if he didn’t have UMCP orders?”

Abruptly Vector stood up; he went to the coffee maker and refilled his mug. All his movements were wooden, as if his joints had frozen while he sat.

Not facing her, he said, “Nick kept you for his own reasons. He’ll tell you what they are—if he ever feels like it.

“As for the rest of us—

“There isn’t anybody aboard this ship who doesn’t hate the UMCP.” An undercurrent of vehemence ran through his mild tone. “And we’ve got cause. We can just barely tolerate you as it is. If you try to taint Nick with your own crimes, we’ll use your guts for thruster fuel.”

“‘Crimes’?” His anger stopped hers; but it didn’t stop her questions. “What are you talking about? I didn’t ask you to frame
Bright Beauty.
I never got the chance. That was your crime, not mine.”

“The crime of being a cop,” Vector returned without hesitation. However, his vehemence was gone: it vanished as suddenly as it came. “The UMCP is the most corrupt organization there is. It makes piracy look like philanthropy.”

While Morn stared at him, he returned stiffly to his seat. With his mug in front of him, he faced her, smiling and mild, like a man who knew nothing about anger. “Let me tell you a story.”

Reeling inwardly, she nodded. She’d been shocked by the bare concept of UMCP complicity in Angus’ false arrest; but the step from betraying a pirate to being “the most corrupt organization there is” was a large one. If it were true, it made lies out of her own reasons for becoming a cop. It stained her father, whom she considered the most incorruptible man she’d ever known; it transformed her mother’s death into something foolish, pitiful. If it were true—

She listened to Vector Shaheed as if—for the time being, at least—every other question or consideration had ceased to exist.

“You may not realize,” he said evenly, “that piracy is an unusual vocation for a man like me. I’m not violent. I’m not rebellious—or even larcenous. The truth is, I’m not even a particularly good engineer. If you’d had time to think about such things, you might have wondered what I’m doing here.

“I’ll tell you.

“By training, anyway, I’m a geneticist, not an engineer. Engineering is something I picked up later, after I decided to change careers. Before that, I worked for Intertech. In genetics.

“Actually, that’s where I met Orn. He was the computer expert for our section. He was prone to accidents even then, and some of his surgical reconstructions were more successful than others, but he was in better shape then than he is now. At first I didn’t care for him. He was too—too unscrupulous for my taste. We used to say he’d fuck a snake if it just opened its mouth wide enough. But he was a wizard with computers, and we all depended on him.

“Anyway, I was a geneticist, and as soon as I proved I was good enough I got assigned to some top-priority research. The kind of research where they check the gaps between your teeth and the slush in your bowels to make sure you don’t take anything classified home with you when you leave work. Intertech was always twitchy about security—you’ve probably read about the trouble they were in years ago, the riots and so on—and they were getting worse all the time.”

He paused to drink some of his coffee. Morn may have done the same: she was concentrating too hard to notice.

“From our point of view, that was understandable. Intertech’s charter forbids genetic tampering. You probably know that.” Morn nodded. “It’s a universal prohibition. Even the United Mining Companies charter says the same thing. Intertech could have been dismantled if the things our section did were looked at the wrong way.

“We were working,” he said as if the statement had no special significance, “on a defense against genetic warfare. An immunization for RNA mutation.”

Morn’s throat closed in shock; she almost stopped breathing.
An immunization for RNA mutation.
She may have been only a UMCP ensign, but no space-going man or woman could have failed to recognize the implications.
A defense against genetic warfare.
If that were achieved, it would be the most important single discovery since Juanita Estevez stumbled on the gap drive. It would transform human space. It would defuse—and conceivably resolve—the peril of forbidden space. It might even end the problem of piracy, if the pirates were deprived of what was by far their largest market.

No wonder Intertech was “twitchy about security.” The patents alone on such a discovery might make the company rich enough to buy out the UMC.

But Vector was still talking. While she struggled to catch up with him, he went on, “As you can imagine, we had to be pretty good at tampering ourselves before we could find a way to protect genetic coding against alteration. And we were good. The truth is, we were close. We were so close I used to dream about it at night. It was like climbing a ladder where you can’t see the top because it disappears into a cloud. I couldn’t see the end, exactly, but I could see every rung along the way. All I needed was a handlight, and I could have guessed my way past the rest of the rungs to the answer.

“What I dreamed, you see,” he said half apologetically, “was that I was going to be the savior of humankind. We were all part of it, of course, our whole section—and we wouldn’t have been able to do that kind of work without Orn—but
I
was the one who could see the rungs.
I
was the one who knew how close we were to the end of the ladder.”

Then his smile twisted ruefully, as if he were amused by his own regret. “That’s as far as I got.”

“What happened?” asked Morn. A few short weeks ago, she’d been a young officer on her first mission, with ideals she’d adopted from her family, and enough experience of loss to know that such ideals were important. The idea of an achievement as vital, as
tremendous
, as a mutagen immunization—the idea of being able to do that many people that much good—still touched her, despite Angus and gap-sickness.

Vector shrugged stiffly. “One day, when I went in to work, I found I couldn’t call my research up on the screen. We didn’t do that kind of research in a bio lab. It was too complex and time-consuming to be run physically. We did it all with computer models and simulations. And my research was just gone. The whole project was gone, everything the whole section was doing. No matter whose authorization we used, or what priority it had, our screens came up blank.

“It was Orn who figured out what happened. He rigged his way into the system and found it was full of embedded codes none of us knew anything about. When those codes were activated, they closed down the project. Sealed it off. None of us could get the smallest fraction of our data back. The system wouldn’t even recognize our names.

“Those codes were UMCP.” As he spoke, his voice resumed its undertone of vehemence, harsh and bleak. “Not UMC. This wasn’t just a situation where the United Mining Companies wanted to protect itself in case Intertech became too powerful. Orn knew that because the codes included source- and copy-routes. They came from a dedicated UMCP computer over in Administration, and they copied everything we did to the same place.”

She listened as if she were transfixed. What he was saying made her skin crawl.

“That computer was DA. It wasn’t supposed to have the capability to do anything except scan Intertech research, looking for developments the cops might find useful. But when Orn got into the system, he learned that computer had the power—and the
authority
—to blank the entire company.

“You’re young,” he said to Morn abruptly. “You haven’t been out of the Academy, or away from Earth, very long. Have you ever heard
one
rumor about an immunization against RNA mutation? Has anyone
ever
given you a reason to believe we don’t need to spend the rest of our lives in terror of forbidden space? Have the cops—or the UMC—ever released our data?”

Stunned, she shook her head.

“We had the raw materials for a defense, we had all the rungs. And they took it, they
suppressed
it.” Vector’s eyes were so blue they seemed incandescent. “They don’t want us to know that the way we live now isn’t necessary—and it sure as hell isn’t inevitable. Forbidden space is their excuse for power, their justification. If we had an immunity drug, we wouldn’t
need
the United Mining Companies fucking Police.”

He made an effort to control himself, but it didn’t work. “Think about it for a while,” he broke out. “At least a dozen billion human beings, all condemned to the terror and probably the fact of genetic imperialism, and for what? For
nothing.
Except to consolidate and extend the power of the cops. And the UMC. In the end the whole of human space is going to be one vast gulag, owned and operated by the UMC for its own benefit, with the cops for muscle.

“I’m one of the lucky ones.” Now at last Vector’s anger began to recede; but his smile didn’t come back. “I got out. Intertech shut down our section and transferred all of us, but I kept in touch with Orn. Mostly because he has so few scruples, he tends to meet people with none at all. I quit Intertech and apprenticed engineering on one of the orbital smelters. Then Orn got me a job on a small, independent orehauler, along with a few other”—at last he permitted himself a mildly sarcastic grin—“disaffected souls. We took over the ship and went into business for ourselves. Eventually we met Nick. Orn understands illegals, and I understand brilliance, so we joined him. We’ve been here ever since.”

There he stopped. Maybe he could see how profoundly he’d disturbed her. Or maybe he was just exhausted himself, worn out by too much mass and too little rest. He stood up as if he had to fight resistance in every joint, apparently intending to leave her alone with the implications of what he’d said.

But he wasn’t done after all. Halfway out of the galley, he paused to ask, “Do you know why I move like this?”

Morn shook her head dumbly.

“Arthritis,” he told her. “Once I made the mistake of interfering with one of Orn’s less scrupulous pleasures. He beat me up. Rather severely. Quite a few of my joints were bruised or damaged. That’s where arthritis starts. It gets a toehold on old wounds or scar tissue. Then it spreads. Heavy g is—agony.

“G is agony, agony g,” he said as if he were quoting, “that is all ye know in space, and all ye need to know.”

As he left, he concluded, “I prefer it that way. As far as I’m concerned, the pirates are the good guys.”

She stayed in the galley alone for a long time. She’d just survived a bout of gap-sickness: for the first time since
Starmaster
sighted
Bright Beauty
, she’d discovered a reason for hope. Nevertheless she felt none: she felt abandoned and desolate. She’d become a cop because she’d wanted to dedicate herself to the causes and ideals of the UMCP; perhaps, covertly, because she’d wanted to avenge her mother. But if Vector was right—if he was telling the truth—

In that case, the UMCP had perpetrated an atrocity so colossal that it beggared her imagination; so profound that it altered the meaning of everything she’d ever valued or believed; so vile that it transformed the moral order of human space from civilization and ethics to butchery and rape, from Captain Davies Hyland to Angus Thermopyle.

Now
what was she supposed to hope for? That Vector was lying? If so, she would never be able to prove it. And she would never be able to eradicate what he’d told her from her brain: it would always be there, tainting her thoughts, corrupting her as surely as forbidden space. No matter how much personal integrity her father—or she herself—had possessed, he and she may have been nothing more than tools in malign hands.