Partnership (37 page)

"Nancia, girl, can you hear me? Keep it up!"

"Don't be a fool, Forister," Polyon said tiredly. "If your brainship were conscious and coherent, she'd have brought us out of Singularity herself."

He used the remaining seconds in normspace to tap out one more command. The singing tones of Nancia's access code rang through the room. Forister's face went gray. Then the transition spaces whirled about them, monstrously transforming the cabin and everything in it, and Polyon could not tell which of the distorted images before him showed the opening of Nancia's titanium column.

On the next pass through normal space he saw that the column was still closed. Transition must have 292

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garbled the last sounds in the access sequence. He typed in the command again; again the musical tones rang out without their accompanying syllables; again nothing happened.

"You'd better tell me the rest of the code," he said to Forister on the next normspace pass.

Forister smiled — briefly; something in the expression reminded Polyon of his own ironic laughter.

"What makes you think I have it, boy? The two parts are kept separate. I didn't even know how to access the tone sequence from Nancia's memory banks. The syllables probably aren't encoded in her at all; they'll be on file at Central."

"Brawns are supposed to know the spoken half of the code," Polyon snapped in frustration.

"I asked to have it changed just before this run,"

Forister claimed. "Security reasons. With so many prisoners on board, I feared a takeover attempt—and with good reason, it seems."

"I do hope you're lying," Polyon said. He clamped his mouth shut and waited through the transition loop, marshaling his arguments. "Because if Central's the only source for the rest of the code, we're all dead. I can't tap the Net and hack into the Courier Service database from Singularity — and I can't get us out of Singularity without neutralizing the brain."

"You mean, without killing Nanria," Forister said in a voice emptied of feeling. His eyes flickered once to the cabin consol. Polyon followed the man's gaze and felt a moment of fear. A delicate solido stood above the control panels, the image of a lovely young woman with an impish smile and clustering curls of red hair.

Polyon had heard of brawns who developed an emotional fixation on their brainship, even to the point of having a solido made from the brainship's genotype that would show how the freakish body might have matured without its fatal defects. He PARTNERSHIP

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hadn't guessed that Forister was the sentimental type, or that he'd have had time to grow so attached to Nanda. The idiot might actually think that he'd rather die than kill his brainship.

"There's no need to clutter the problem with emotionalism," Polyon told him. How could he jolt Forister out of his sentimental fixation? "With partial control of the ship to me and partial control to Nanria, neither of us can navigate out of Singularity.''

Damn the transition loop! Forister had caught on to the rhythm by now; and the necessary wait while three distorted subspaces composed and decomposed around them gave him time to think.

"I've a better suggestion," the brawn said. "You say you can navigate us out; well, we all know Nancia can.

Restore full control to her, and — "

"And what? You'll drop charges, let me go back to running a prison factory? I've got a better career plan than that now."

"I wasn't," said Forister mildly, "planning to make that offer."

The rhythm of collapsing and composing subspaces was becoming natural to them all; the necessary pauses in their conversation no longer bothered Polyon.

"I had something like your own offer in mind,"

Forister continued at the next opportunity. "Release Nancia's hyperchip-enhanced computer systems, and she'll get us out of Singularity — and you'll live.**

"How did you guess?"

Forister looked surprised. "Logical deduction. You designed the hyperchips; you tricked me into running a program that did something peculiar to Nancia's computer systems; the failure reports I read just before you came in showed precisely the areas where she has had hyperchips installed, the lower deck sensors and the navigation system; you've since exercised 294

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voice control on Micaya's hyperchip-enhanced prostheses. Clearly your hyperchip design includes a back door by which you can personally control any installa-tion that uses your chips."

"Clever," Polyon said. "But not clever enough to get you out of Singularity. I assure you I'm not going to restore full computing power to a brainship who is probably mad by now."

"What makes you think that?"

Polyon raised his brows. "We all know what sensory deprivation does to shellpersons, Forister. Need I go into the details?"

"Take more than a few minutes in the dark to upset my Nanda," Forister said levelly.

Polyon bared his teeth. "By now, old man, she's had considerably more than that to deal with. The first thing my hyperchip worm does is to strike at any intelligence linked to the computers in which it finds itself The sensory barrage would make any human break the link at once. I'm afraid that 'your' Nancia, not being able to escape the link that way, will have gone quite mad by now. So — I think—if you want to live—

you'll tell me, now, the rest of the access code."

"I think not," Forister said calmly. "You've made a fetal error in your calculations."

The transition loop stifled all talk for the endless winding, looping moments of passage through shrinking and distorting spaces. Polyon ignored the sensory tricks of spatial transformations and thought furiously.

When normspace returned, he reached up from his chair to grasp the solido of Nancia as a young woman.

Deliberately, watching Forister's face, he dropped the solido on the deck and ground the fragile material to shards under his boot-heel.

"That's what's left of 'your' Nancia, old man," he said. "Are you going to let your love for a woman who never lived kill us all?"

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Forister's face was lined with pain, but he spoke as evenly as always. "My — feelings — for Nancia have nothing to do with the matter. Your error is much more basic. You think I'd rather set you free with the universe in your control than die here in Singularity.

This is incorrect."

He spoke so calmly that it took Polyon a moment to understand the words, and in that moment die transition loop warped the room and disguised the movements in it. When they passed through normspace again, Fassa del Parma was standing between Forister and Darnell, as if she thought she could shield the brawn from a direct needier spray.

"He's right," she said. "I didn't have time to think before. You're a monster."

Polyon laughed without humor. "Fassa, dear, to righteous souls like Forister and General Questar-Benn we're all monsters. I should have remembered how you sucked up to them before, helping them trick me. Did you think that would save you? They'll use you and throw you away like your father did."

Fassa went white and still as stone. "We don't all take such a simple-minded view of the universe," Forister said. "But, Fassa, you can't — "

Darnell's fingers were twitching. Polyon nodded.

Slowly, too slowly, Darnell raised the needier. He gave Forister ample time to grasp Fassa by the shoulders and spin her out of danger. As Forister moved, the cabin seemed to lurch and the lights dimmed. Gravity fell to half-normal, then to nothing, and as Fassa spun into midair the reaction of Forister's thrust pushed him in the opposite direction. The spray of needles went wide, but one bright line on the for edge of the arc stung through Forister's sleeve and bloodied his wrist. The blood danced out across the cabin in bright droplets that the transition loop pulled out into bloody seas; Polyon watched a bubble the size of a small pond 296

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float inexorably toward him, settle around him with a clammy grip, then shrink to a bright button-sized stain on his shut front.

Fassa floated back to grasp Forister's flaccid body and cry, "Why did you do that? I wanted to save you!"

"Wanted him — to kill me," Forister breathed. The paravenin was fighting the contractions of his chest.

"Without me — no way to get Nancia's code. Trapped here, all of us — better than letting him go? Forgive me?"

"Death before dishonor." Polyon put a sneering spin on the words, letting the maudlin pair hear what he thought of such brave slogans. "And it will be death, too. See how the ship's systems are failing? What do i you think will go next? Oxygen? Cabin pressure?"

In the absence of direct commands, gravity and lighting should have been controlled by Nancia's •

autonomic nervous functions. Forister groaned as the \

meaning of this latest failure came through to him.

"She's dying anyway. With or without your help,"

Polyon drove the point home. "And you're not dead yet I lied to you. The needier was only set to paralyze.

Now let's have the access code before Nancia stops breathing and kills us all."

Forister shook his head with slow, painful twitches.

"Come here, Fassa, dear," Polyon ordered.

"No. I stay with him."

"You don't really mean that," Polyon said pleasantly.

"You know you're far too afraid of me. Remember those shoddy buildings you put up on Shemali? You replaced them free of charge, remember, and I didn't even have to do any of the interesting things we discussed. But if I'd threaten you with flaying alive for cheating me over a factory, Fassa, just think for a moment what I'll do to you for interfering with me now."

The transition loop was almost a help; the pauses it forced gave Fassa time to consider her brave stand.

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Go on, Fassa," Forister urged when normal speech possible again. "You can't help me now, and I've no wish to see you hurt for my sake."

Thank you for the information," Polyon said with a courteous bow. "Perhaps I'll try that next But I think we'll begin with an older and dearer friend for quick results. Darnell, bring the freak—no, 111 do it; you keep the needier on Fassa, just in case she gets any silly ideas."

Holding onto the pilot's chair to keep himself in place, Polyon turned and aimed a loose kick at Micaya Questar-Benn. The cessation of ship's gravity had freed her of the artificially weighted prostheses that held her down, but the arm and leg were still flopping loose, free of her control. She was as good as a cripple

— she was a cripple, disgusting sight

"I want Forister to get a good view of this," he told her politely. "Lock prostheses."

This to the computer; a signal to the hyperchips clamped Micaya's artificial arm and leg together.

"Lay a finger on Mic — " Forister threatened, struggling vainly against the effects of the paravenin.

"I won't need to," Polyon said with a brilliant smile.

"I can do it all from here."

A series of brisk verbal commands and typed-in codes caused the portion of the ship's computer that Polyon controlled to transmit new, overriding instructions to the hyperchips controlling Micaya's internal organ replacements. The changes had the full duration of a transition loop to take effect. When they returned to normspace, Micaya's face was colorless and beads of sweat dotted her forehead.

"It's amazing how painful a few simple organic changes can be," Polyon commented gaily. "Little things like fiddling with the circulation, for instance.

How's that hand, Mic, baby? Bothering you a bit?"

"Come a little closer," Micaya invited him, "and find out" But now Polyon had drawn attention to her one 298

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remaining hand; they could all see ho wit had changed color. The fingernails were almost black, the skin was purplish and swollen.

"Keep it like that for a week," Polyon said, "and she'll have a glorious case of gangrene. Of course, we don't have a week. I could trap even more blood in the hand and burst the veins, but that might kill her too fast. So I'll just leave it like that while you think it over, Forister, and maybe we'll start working on the foot as well. Fortunately, the heart's one of her cyborg replacements, so we don't have to worry about it failing under the increased demands; it'll go on working . . .

as long as I want it to. Want to hear how well it works now?"

A word of command amplified the sound of Micaya's artificial heart beating vehemently, the pulse rate going up to support the demands Polyon was making on the rest of her system. The desperate, ragged double beat echoed through the cabin, droned and drummed and shrilled through a complete transition loop, and no one spoke or moved.

For a heartbeat, no more, Nantia found silence and darkness a welcome relief from the stabbing pain of the input from her rogue sensors. Is this what Singularity is like for softpersons? But no, it was worse than that. In the confused moments before she shut down all conscious functions and disabled her own sensor connections, she had been aware of something much worse than the colorshifts and spatial distortions of Singularity; the malevolence of another mind, intimately entwined with her own, striking at her with deliberate malice.

He means to drive me mad. If I enable my sensors ogam, he'll bleak desperation of die thought came from somewhere iar back in her memories. When, how, had she ever felt so utterly abandoned before? Nantia reached out, unthinking, to search her memory banks — then stopped before die connection was complete. If sensors could be turned into weapons to use against her, could not memory, too, be infiltrated? Access the computer's memory banks, and she might find herself "knowing"

whatever this other mind wanted her to believe.

Is it another mind ? Or a part of myself? Perhaps Fm mad already, and this is the first symptom. The flashing, disorienting lights and garbled sounds, the sickening whirling sensations, even the conviction that she was under attack by another mind — weren't all these symptoms of one of those Old Earth illnesses that had ravaged so many people before modern electrostim and drug therapy restored the balance of their tortured brains? Nancia longed to scan just one of the encyclopedia articles in her memory banks; but that resource was denied her for the moment. Paranoid schizophrenia, that was it; a splitting off of the mind from reality.