Lovelock (27 page)

The worst penalty that the law allowed on the Ark was to do to a human being what had been done to me. That limbic node operation had installed a little device that Carol Jeanne could trigger with the painword, or I could trigger myself just by thinking of making love to a female. And it was done to me, not because I had committed a crime and deserved it, not because I was a defective creature who harmed its own young, but because I was to be “enhanced” and therefore needed to be kept under control.

I knew a secret, though. I knew that the limbic operation was not foolproof.

So I had to expose Nancy’s father now, right away, when he could still be sent away from the Ark. Back to Earth. While Nancy and her mother stayed here.

Yet I didn’t want to accuse him myself. If people realized I was spying on them during the offering, they would start resenting me, fearing me. I had to remain invisible to them. An amusing little monkey. Worse yet, it would reflect badly on Carol Jeanne, since they would assume my spying was on her behalf. Nor was an anonymous accusation by computer a viable option; since it was not evidence and wouldn’t be enough to get Nancy away from her father, it would only make things worse for her.

I toyed with the idea of telling Carol Jeanne, flat out, what I had read on Nancy’s offering, and simply letting her handle it. But that would have to be my last resort. No one would believe she had read the offering herself, so however she managed to handle things she’d end up revealing my role as a spy and it would harm both her and me.

But there was someone who could make the accusation without linking it to me at all.

Justice moves swiftly on the Ark, something that I need to remember. It took only one day after my message to Peter for Nancy’s family to feel the hand of the law. Peter told Diana, of course, and Diana went to Nancy and hinted sympathetically until Nancy spilled it all to her. I wish I’d seen it—I knew Diana was smart, but smart doesn’t always mean you can get other people to do things.

Once Diana had heard about the abuse and incest from Nancy herself, she went straight to Red and told him all about it—without a clue of the message that had appeared on Peter’s computer. I know how perfectly she handled that conversation with Red because I downloaded it from Pink. Pink doesn’t mean to be my spy in Red’s private meetings. It’s in the nature of pigs to be exploited.

I’ll give Red credit. He may be his mother’s emotional stepan-fetchit but when it came to a problem outside his own family, he acted with absolute fairness and swiftness. By the book. He first checked with the school counselors and learned that Nancy’s aberrant behavior had been noted with “possible abuse” marked in the file. The counselors had tried to draw her out, but the rules on soliciting testimony against parents were strict, and Nancy had not said to them anything clear enough to use.

Coupled with Diana’s testimony, though, their observations provided ample corroboration to move ahead with the investigation. So the next morning at school, Red came and, with the counselor who had tried hardest to get through to Nancy, he confronted her with what he knew. He didn’t mention Diana’s name, but of course Nancy knew at once. Pink was there, so once again I got the scene.

“Diana wasn’t supposed to tell,” said Nancy dully.

“Everyone is supposed to tell about things like this,” said Red. “That’s the only way it will ever stop, is if people tell. What we need now is for
you
to tell.”

“I’ll never tell on my father.”

“Do you know what, Nancy? If you simply say to us that what I have been told is true, we will immediately remove you from your father’s house and take him into custody. He won’t be able to punish you ever again. He’ll be sent away from the Ark, and you’ll have the choice of going back to Earth separately or staying here with your mother.”

“Mother won’t stay here without him,” she said. “She only left Earth because he made her.”

“Did
you
want to come?” asked Red.

Nancy nodded.

“If your mother decides to go back to Earth with your father, you can still stay. You’re old enough to make that choice. And we’ll all be proud of you for having the courage to tell the truth and put an end to his abuse of you.”

Nancy looked sidelong at Red. “It’s true, all right,” she said in a little voice.

As I watched this replay from Pink’s visual and auditory memory, it occurred to me that if she was old enough to choose to stay alone on the Ark, she was old enough to have walked out of her father’s house and put a stop to the incest herself. But of course, the incest and the physical punishment had been going on for long enough that it was doubtful Nancy had much will of her own. How long would it take her to recover once she was removed from her father’s house? Slavery changes a person, and it isn’t that easy to decide to be free, even when it’s within your power.

In fact, as I think about it, it occurs to me that Red’s key phrase was “we’ll all be proud of you.” What Red implicitly promised was the fatherly approval that her own father never gave her, fatherly approval that she yearned for so deeply that, in the hope of someday attaining it, she would endure all the terrible things he did to her.

But I’m digressing. In fact, I think I’m really analyzing myself. I, poor fatherless creature that I am, also have that primate hunger for approval from a powerful male figure. Who is
my
father? Not Red. I am not as desperate or ignorant as Nancy, to seize on Red as my father figure.

Within an hour, Nancy’s father was in custody, being interrogated in the presence of a lawyer—and Red, Nancy’s new advocate and protector. He admitted everything, weeping as he alternately accused Nancy of seducing him and begged for them to punish him for being so terrible to her. It was sad and sickening to watch.

Sadder still, though, was his wife’s firm denial that any such thing had ever happened. “Sometimes he has to punish her, of course, because she’s a sullen, rebellious girl,” said the mother. “But those other charges are just a vicious little girl’s way of trying to get out from under the strict rules of a righteous family.”

The next transport back to Earth came in two weeks. Nancy’s father and mother were on it.

In the meantime, though, Nancy came to live, temporarily, with us. She got the couch where Stef had slept for his first weeks in Mayflower. It was soon obvious to anyone who cared enough to pay attention that she had fixated on Red as her savior—and on Diana as her enemy. Odd, isn’t it? To Nancy, Red was the one who had rescued her from her father’s cruelty and his constant demand for sexual release, while Diana was the one who had betrayed Nancy’s confidence, causing her to lose the love of her parents. Never mind that both results were inseparable—Nancy, disturbed as she was, was quite capable of separating them. She refused to stay in the house if Diana came over, which made it tricky to have Diana babysit for us.

The first time the subject came up, Nancy insisted that we didn’t need any other babysitters, because she could babysit perfectly well herself. I had already warned Carol Jeanne that Nancy was seriously unstable and should
not
be left alone with Emmy and Lydia. Victims of abuse often become abusers, I reminded her. But in the event, my warnings weren’t needed. Red himself laid it down as law. “Nancy,” he said, “you still need to rest and recover from all that’s happened to you. Tending little children is far too much stress for you. It will be years before I can consider allowing you to babysit anyone.”

From him, Nancy took it without argument. But later that evening, as she sat alone watching a video while Carol Jeanne and Red were putting the children to bed, I watched and listened from the hallway.

“She just wanted to take away all my babysitting jobs,” Nancy murmured. “That’s why she did it, the little tattling bitch.”

The meaning was obvious enough to me. Just as Nancy’s father had blamed everything he did on her—calling her a bitch in the bargain—Nancy was blaming everything on Diana, and using the same name. You didn’t have to be a shrink like Red to understand it.

What was frustrating was that Nancy wasn’t stupid. She was almost bright, for an unenhanced human, and yet she couldn’t see how absurd her own reasoning was. Babysitting had been the happiest part of her life, since it got her out of her father’s house and into other homes where some kind of peace and normality prevailed. Now that Red had decreed that she could not babysit, Nancy “knew” that this had been Diana’s motive all along. Nasty little child, taking her babysitting away from her…

Whenever I was home, I watched Nancy as much as possible. She never spoke her paranoid imaginings aloud again. All she did, at least when I was looking, was gaze at the video screen or watch Emmy and Lydia playing or just sit there, staring out the window of the house at the distant villages rising up the curving floor of the Ark into the sky. Her eyes were usually dead, but sometimes I saw them fill with tears or narrow with rage.

She said little, fitting smoothly into the routine of the household, even allowing herself to become something of a servant for Mamie. “Oh, Nancy, dear, could you fetch me that book I was reading?” “Oh, Nancy, sweetheart, be a dear and bring me a glass of water from the kitchen? Just one little bit of ice, that’s all, if it gets too cold it just
burns
right down my throat, you
know
how it is when you get old, Nancy, you should get down on your knees and thank the Lord for your youth and bright spirits.”

Which showed just how much Mamie noticed anything, since Nancy’s spirits were about as bright as a rat’s rectum. But Nancy, having been raised in utter servitude to another’s will, responded as if Mamie were doing her a favor by giving her things to do. After all, she always asked nicely, which her father had never done. And her requests gave the girl a sense of purpose, which was sorely missing now that her father was gone.

Sometimes, when her eyes were tight with rage and hate, she would notice me, and try to wither me with her glare. The first few times I looked away, but then I became resentful—why should
I
hide from her? In the first place, she had no idea of my role in her liberation. And in the second place, I cared not at all whether she hated me or not. What could
she
do to
me
? So I smiled at her and cavorted cheerfully whenever she glared at me. I’m really good at clowning. Everybody laughs. But she never did.

It was during this time that two agents from the “physical fitness department” showed up at Carol Jeanne’s office. Two women, with that wiry muscularity that made even marginally feminine clothing fit them like a bad disguise. Looking at how lean they were, I estimated that neither of them had menstruated in years. I imagined skin with veins standing out like gopher trails. Breasts like tennis balls stapled onto otherwise masculine chests. Either of them could have crushed my skull in one hand.

“We’ve come to talk to you about computer security violations,” said the taller one, whose name turned out to be Mendoza.

Naturally, I had one terrible moment in which I thought all my clever computer penetrations had been discovered and I was now going to be destroyed. Instinctively I leapt for the highest point in the room. Fortunately, Mendoza and Van Pell had no idea that what they were seeing was the way a capuchin acts out guilty fear. Carol Jeanne might have realized what my action meant, but she had stopped paying attention to me years ago.

“Specifically,” said Mendoza, “that unidentifiable message that your family received a while back.”

“We knew that our network was permeable,” said Van Pell, “and so when you arrived we installed some monitoring devices to make sure we were alerted if someone broke into your system. You deal with a lot of sensitive information, Dr. Cocciolone.”

“Well, then,” Carol Jeanne said. “You probably know more than I do.”

“Actually not,” said Van Pell. “You see, someone neutralized our monitors. They were still in place, but it turns out that they’ve been sending us garbage.”

“Oh,” said Carol Jeanne. “Are you sure they weren’t defective?”

“What we’re sure of,” said Mendoza, “is that they were rewired.”

I toyed with the idea of denying having done anything. Let them think some clever spy was at work.

“Oh, is that all?” said Carol Jeanne. “I’m sure Lovelock did that.”

So much for that idea.

“Lovelock?” asked Mendoza.

These goons were supposed to be the hotshot security force on the Ark, and they didn’t even know the name of Dr. Cocciolone’s witness? Hey, working out till you have less than two percent body fat doesn’t make you efficient, it just makes you stringy.

“My witness,” said Carol Jeanne. “Lovelock always checks out the security of my data. He undoubtedly found your devices and assumed they were some kind of attempt to spy. He’s really very good with computers.”

Why shouldn’t I be? I’ve got a jack in the back of my head.

Mendoza and Van Pell looked at me with expressionless faces. I assumed they were sizing me up. Good with computers, eh?

“Your monkey’s interference made it impossible for us to detect the source of that particular system penetration,” said Van Pell.

Carol Jeanne laughed in their faces. “My witness was merely doing your job—protecting the security of my data. And, I might add, he did it better than you.”

Thanks, Carol Jeanne. Let’s make these goons really like me. Someday my life may depend on how cute and lovable they think I am.

“Next time you want to install some device in my computer,” said Carol Jeanne, “tell me about it so that Lovelock knows to leave it in place. And even then, I suspect he’d still jimmy your devices, because he won’t trust you to maintain security as well as he does.”

“If he’s so good,” said Mendoza, “then he no doubt knows how the network was penetrated in order to send you that anonymous message.”

“Lovelock?” asked Carol Jeanne.

I sprang to her computer. Mendoza and Van Pell, still standing at attention like Marine drill sergeants, oriented themselves so they could see what I typed. I acted confident, but in fact I was dying inside. My sleeper programs would only kick in and work for me when the new network went online. So if I showed them Peter’s and my back door into the old network, they’d close it down and cut off my special access. That wouldn’t be an absolute disaster, because I could write another access for myself. However, any new back door I created now, for the old software, increased my chances of getting caught before the new network even came online.

Still, I knew that it was better to tell them about the back door so they wouldn’t keep searching for it. A really effective search
might
turn up my sleeper instead of the back door, and that would be by far the greater disaster. So I would give them the back door and they would stop searching.

“I discovered the means of entry within hours after the message was sent,” I wrote. “I did an analysis of all network routines reading keyboard input and found one that responded to this password.” I typed the backdoor password. “It gives master access, even more powerful than the sysops. The original programmers must have left this in.”

They looked at each other with faces that might have registered astonishment if they had been capable of showing any expression more complicated than solemn narcissism.

“How did you break into the system in order to read the keyboard interpretation routines?” asked Van Pell.

I ostentatiously looked at the ceiling for a moment, to show them that I thought of this as obvious, easy, baby stuff. When I had demonstrated the technique, they both stood in silence for a long time. “You know,” said Van Pell, “I’m going to be glad when we get rid of that shitty old software.”