Mute (62 page)

Finesse looked at him. “Amplification is the opposite of what we need! With most of the psi on the other side, it’ll just increase the odds against us.”

“Maybe not,” Knot said.

After a pause, a somewhat homely rooster arrived.
Can you amplify any psi selectively?
Knot asked it via the chicken telepaths.

Yes,
the rooster’s thought was relayed back.

Then amplify the psi of the roaches in my pocket.

Roaches?
the rooster inquired with interest.

Not to eat!
Knot clarified quickly.
These are allies, sacrosanct.

The rooster strutted about, not pleased. He eyed Knot, trying to discover where the roaches were. The roaches were aware of the danger, and became increasingly nervous.

Finally the rooster crowed. Nothing happened to Knot but there was commotion in the group. “He’s gone!” Klisty exclaimed, looking right at Knot.

“Yeah, sure,” Knot said, not finding this failure humorous.

But Finesse, too, seemed alarmed. “Did you teleport him out?” she demanded of the chickens.

We have not interfered,
the chickens assured her.
Were your bugs teleporters?

“You mean you really can’t perceive me?” Knot demanded, still suspecting a joke. No one reacted.

“The roaches! Finesse said. “When they get frightened, as they would when a rooster eyes them, they become invisible, inaudible, probably telepathically undetectable too!”

So now
he
was unperceivable, being in the ambiance of the roaches’ amplified psi. That was what he had hoped for, but he still wasn’t sure it was so. For one thing, how was it that he could perceive all of them so readily, if there was a perception shield between them? He decided to test this properly.

“I’m going to goose you again,” he announced, striding over to Finesse. When she did not react, he moved his hand suggestively—but decided to kiss her instead. No sense in living
too
dangerously!

Her lips were mushy, unprepared. Her eyes stared through him. She did not perceive him at all. He was not a ghost; when he pushed her, she was solid, and had to catch her balance. But she was not aware of the reason for it.

“That is what I call amplification,” Knot said. “You roaches disappear only when frightened, and you can’t have stayed that scared all this time, but I have disappeared regardless. Yet I am not in a shell that blocks the outside world off from me. This is the perfect protection.”

“This is making me nervous,” Finesse said. “Release the amplification. I want to see if he’s still here.” And she did look nervous; evidently she feared something more sinister had occurred.

The rooster clucked—all the chickens seemed to accompany their efforts with sound—and suddenly everyone was looking at Knot.

“So it worked,” he said, feeling awkward, on stage.

“Could you see us?” Finesse demanded, hardly relaxing.

“I saw you, heard you, felt you, and picked up the telepathy,” Knot said.

They were impressed. “Could that rooster amplify a teleport?” Klisty asked. “You could jump right to another world!”

But some discussion convinced them that it would be foolish to try such a thing. The vagaries of interstellar motion were such that jumping directly between worlds would not be safe. Amplification could enable more people to be moved longer distances on the surface of a planet, but that was the practical limit. Considering the way three people had been spread across the terrain when teleported the relatively short distance from the barn to the open field, accuracy was a prime consideration.

“Still,” Knot concluded, “we could use a teleport. And the amplifier. I think with these psi-tools we have a fair chance against CC.”

They discussed it some more, and the agreement was made. Klisty would remain as hostage-queen, while the rest of them would travel to CC with the two chickens. If they succeeded in reversing the program, they would send the news through CC channels; Chicken Itza would belong to the birds by fiat. If they failed—

They did not dwell on that. The chickens provided a henhouse nicely furnished with roosts, nesting boxes and hay for their lodging, and left them to work out their campaign. Klisty started in on her duties immediately, learning how to organize and govern a planetful of chickens. It was a busy time.

CHAPTER 14:

Making plans to counter the lobos was no simple matter. “Knot,” Finesse said. “I’m not sure what you have in mind. If we reach a CC control terminal—what then?”

“Why, we reverse it, of course. We wipe out Piebald’s dictate, and set up our own.”

“What is our own dictate?” she asked.

Now that the question had been put to him, he was uncertain of his answer. He had served the existing order before, albeit it with certain reservations. But if he had to take over control of CC to restore the program, was the old order the best he could implement? “First we honor any outstanding commitments. Chicken Itza to be freed, for example.”

“Yes, of course. But what of the fundamental system. Are we going to leave everything as it was before, including the lobos?”

“I suppose a modified program, to eliminate the worst of the present evils—”

“Evils!” she exclaimed. “What evils?”

“As you said, the lobos. We can’t allow them to continue lobotomizing law-abiding psi-mutes.”

“That does not require modification of the program. Just enforcement of the original program.”

“And abolition of the slum enclaves. And cessation of the shameless exploitation of animals—”

“Animals aren’t people!”

“Communicate with Hermine and tell me that.” He was trying to be reasonable, but wondered what she was getting at.

“Hermine’s special. She’s psi.”

“So are these chickens. So are the rats and roaches and flies. Maybe in times past they were beneath man’s serious notice. That is true no longer. They have achieved parity in psi, and are moving ahead. They deserve recognition now. That’s what this mutiny is all about. This is the age of psi.”

“The mutiny is the turning of CC against the welfare of mankind!” she insisted. “We have to turn it back.”

“Or make it serve the interests of civilization more perfectly than it has before.”

“You can’t direct it to any better course! We established that before.”

“I didn’t have enough information before,” he said. “Neither did CC. The old program may have been best suited to the needs of a single species, man—but now we know that civilization will comprise multiple species, including chickens, rats, roaches and bees. Only a new program can represent their best interests.”

“That’s what I suspected. If you get control of CC, you may after all betray the program you came to restore.”

He had to concede that. “I would not term it betrayal, though. Now the crisis is upon us. We were unable to prevent it—that was what we established before. My proposed policies never received proper examination. A new situation is opening up. So if we can improve things by changing the setting on CC, maybe we should do it.”

“No! The old system was functional. It has been proven by experience. It is the only proper one.”

Knot thought about the chasm enclave of Planet Macho. Had Finesse been there, she might have found new insights. His own perspective had evidently broadened more than he had been aware of at the time. Finesse, instead, had been tortured by the lobos, so she was much more aware of the lobo evil. The two of them had grown apart without realizing it, because of the traumatic differences in their experiences. It behooved him to seek ways to mend that rift before it became more significant. But at the moment, there was a more pressing concern.

“Let’s not argue,” he said. “We don’t even know we can get to a suitable CC terminal for override, so it is as yet academic. We agree that the lobos should not remain in charge; that’s enough for now.”

She was silent, but he knew that the argument, if such it was, was not over. It had merely been postponed. A split was developing between then, and that was uncomfortable even though he believed he understood it. Already he felt the beginning coolness in her attitude toward him.

There was also the problem of strategy. They had a fine nucleus of psi mutant talents now, several of which CC and the lobos did not know about. With the limits set by the CC psi employees this gave Knot’s party the psi advantage—maybe. But CC had vast resources, and well understood how to deal with psi. The overall advantage had to remain with the machine. The lobos themselves had a most dedicated and efficient organization, backed by that ineffable power that Knot had never been able to pinpoint. There seemed to be some advantage in being lobotomized, paradoxical as that might appear—and Knot would have felt a lot better if he could have fathomed its precise nature.

“We can’t just march to CCC and take over,” Knot said. “We need more than we have, or our effort will be futile.”

“More what?” Finesse asked, still cool. “More commitment from the animal kingdoms?”

He elected to ignore that. She could be very cutting, but he would simply have to live with it. “More information. CC we know, but the lobos we don’t know.”

“Don’t know!” she exclaimed. “I know them better than I ever want to remember!”

And how could he blame her for that? “They’re too disciplined, for criminal types. They shouldn’t obey a leader like Piebald with so little question. He has no loyalty to them; he let all the ones remaining in the volcano villa die without warning or help. He’s been pushing a program of experimentation that is dangerous—as in your case, where you almost wrapped up the lobos right there—and is unlikely to be productive. There should be deep rumblings of discontent, even open rebellion—yet the lobos remain unified, like the hive. The hive is unified by telepathy, so that’s explicable; bees are social insects anyway. Men are less amenable to that sort of unity, especially the criminal types. There has to be some overwhelming cohesive force—and that must be what CC has really been fighting. If we could only understand the nature of that force, and locate its source, we might destroy the lobo unity.
Then
we could go after Piebald and CC.”

“There may be something to that,” she agreed slowly. “Considering that the lobos have used neither psi nor advanced electronics—until now—they have been suspiciously effective opponents. Your psi enables you to hide from almost anyone or anything except CC itself, yet they chased you down quite handily. With no hive-psi and no computer communication, they must have something that the normals don’t. But it’s intangible. We have never seen it, only its effect. How could we find out what it is, at this late date, if CC itself was unable to do so before it was too late for it?”

“I’ve been mulling that over. CC didn’t know that the lobos were its enemies; had it known in time, it might have divined their weapon. We do know about the lobos, and maybe with the help of psi we can work it out. A couple of things Piebald said may be a key to how his mind works. I don’t know; it’s really not much at all—”

“Get on with it!”

“Well, he tried to use your husband against you, restoring your memory when you were at a crucial pass. It didn’t work—”

“It was a hard strike, though,” she admitted.

“But if he felt it would be more effective than it was, maybe that means it
would
have been effective—if he had been the one struck. And the other thing—”

“His wife!” she exclaimed. “He has a wife! He mentioned it.”

“Yes. You were sending, then. You said something about his raping you, and he said his wife would object. And he never did—” Knot paused.

Finesse smiled, warming despite the subject. “No, he never did rape me. I’m sure it wasn’t any sensitivity about my feelings that restrained him. Had he thought rape would make me evoke my psi—” She shrugged. “Maybe he just hadn’t gotten to it yet. Of course, he simply may not have found me attractive.”

“You’re attractive,” Knot assured her. “Unless you made him dislike you, through psi, unconsciously.”

“That would have made him fear me, not dislike me. He never feared me, until my psi manifested openly.
I
must have been the one afraid, or I would have given him a phobia about blood or something—”

“No, your psi was keyed to me. When the Doublegross Bladewings threatened me, then your psi acted. You never used it to help yourself, until I was threatened.”

“Yes. I’m not too pleased with the way CC set that up.”

“So Piebald’s wife must have some real power over him,” Knot concluded. “If something happened to her—”

Finesse shook her head. “He’s tough. He’d just bluff it through—or even write her off, as he did the lobos at the villa.”

“Still, if we could get to her, maybe we could learn something. If she knows what unifies lobos—”

“She may not even know what Piebald’s doing! He suggested as much.”

“In which case, perhaps we ought to tell her. Just in case she does happen to have some clout.”

Finesse smiled. “Your diabolic way of thinking grows on me. But CC supervises the diskships; if we try to travel there, we’ll be discovered. And we don’t even know where she is. Or even
if
she exists; he might have made her up.”

“Yes. Traveling is going to be a problem. But I wonder; with all the psi we can borrow, whether—you know, amplification—”

“Interplanetary teleportation? We already considered that. You know that’s too dangerous!”

“Well, what about psychic projection? Like a holograph, only psi-generated. If we could arrange something like that—”

“Suddenly I’m with you!” she said. “That would be safe to do, and safer to confront the lobos with, too. Such a projection could not be captured and tortured.”

The details took several hours, and represented Klisty’s first organizational test. It was necessary to locate the proper psi-fowl and acquaint them with the nature of the task. Since this was complicated, and the birds were not bright, it took some explaining. Finally Knot made the excursion, while Finesse remained behind to keep the psi-chickens on the job and plan the forthcoming approach to Coordination Computer Central. They knew it would come to a direct confrontation eventually, and the sooner the better, before the lobos got well entrenched. Knot’s effort was merely to improve their chances.