The Thrones of Kronos (6 page)

Lysanter tapped the key and the light-bars collapsed. “Each
attempted tempathic probe has affected the conformation of the station, opening
new volumes for exploration. If this tempath recovers, and is as powerful as I
expect, I will need much more compute capacity for the areas she may open up.”

“And what are the chances of her recovery?” Barrodagh tried
to modulate his tone, but to Lysanter he sounded like he hoped for the worst.

Worst for me, that is,
Lysanter thought grimly. “Her vital signs are stable. The Rifter physician is
monitoring her carefully. He sounds optimistic.”

Barrodagh frowned. “Have you found out why the heir
collapsed? Was he shot by mistake?”

“No. He recovered far too quickly. But he was the closest to
the tempath and the aliens with her. The Rifter physician, Montrose, thinks
that a burst of psi energy from the aliens affected the heir. I see no reason
not to believe him.”

Barrodagh looked sour. “But this excess capacity you say is
for exploration. You’re not using it for that right now.”

“No, but it needed to be built in advance and calibrated, so
right now I have those banks configured as correlators and discriminators for
the monitor interfaces, which may deliver additional information during her
attempt.”

“What if her greater powers provoke a greater response? We
could all be killed. Why are you not putting more into stasis control, to
prevent that?”

Lysanter sighed. The Catennach prided themselves on their
superiority to the low-caste Bori—his genitals shrank as he thought of the
measure of that superiority—but they were prone to much the same neuroses.
Barrodagh was clearly as terrified of being swallowed by the station walls as
any menial. Maybe more so; the Catennach felt their exalted position gave them
a chance at sufficient stasis clamps to mute their chambers’ movements to a
comfortable level. The menials had had to accustom themselves to the harmless
shifts and flutters that most of the clamps were programmed to allow.

“Serach Barrodagh, our experiments early in our occupation
provoked reactions as great as any of the material the station can produce,
according to what the interfaces have revealed over the last fifteen years. We
can control any foreseeable reaction in the inhabited areas. And additional
emergency airlocks do not cost anywhere near as much compute capacity as do
stasis clamps. The control curve is exponential.”

“So it will be your continued recommendation to the Avatar
to scant the stasis clamps?” Barrodagh’s voice was almost a snarl.

Lysanter spread his hands in placation.
The man is almost psychotic on the subject.
“You know the Avatar’s
will in this matter is unsheathed. Neither of us can afford to defy it. The
station is safe as instrumented.”

“Is it? Surely you’ve heard rumors. There’s a reason half
the personnel are jumping through doors, and the other half are constipated.”

Lysanter stared at him, utterly baffled by the apparent non
sequitur. Then a forgotten memory from childhood surfaced, and a bubble of laughter
rose in his chest.

“They’re afraid of the disposers?” He fought the laughter.
They think they’ll be sucked down the
disposers.
The childhood dream image was vivid; shorn of its terror by the
decades intervening, it was now only ludicrous. Then a new thought occurred to
him and he lost the battle.
Now I know
why Eusabian and the high-caste Bori have armor-encased disposer chambers.

Lysanter was helpless to stem the tears streaming down his
face, and the rage in Barrodagh’s face just made him laugh harder.
I never realized before that his normal
expression is one of constipation.
He knew he was on the edge of hysteria.
The stress is affecting me, too, as much as
I would deny it. This place was not made for human beings, and it’s trying to
adapt to us using a set of rules we don’t understand.

The thought sobered him slightly. “I’m sorry,
senz-lo
Barrodagh,” he gasped, seeing a
hint of mollification in the Bori’s face at the unusual honorific. He was a
dangerous enemy, and Lysanter had gone too far. He would have to make amends.

But there was no reason he couldn’t advance his own agenda
at the same time. “Perhaps,” he continued, “if the new tempath does open up new
areas, even if we cannot emphasize stasis clamp production, we can divert more
compute power to them. Assuming that I do not lose further computer capacity to
cryptography and the defense preparations, it would take only a slight overage . . .” He let his voice drift. In truth, this was partly his fault. He should
have insisted on greater secrecy for the experiments with the recycling
chamber.

Barrodagh slumped back in his chair, eyeing him
consideringly while Lysanter dried his eyes. “Very well.” He brooded, gazed
fixed, while Lysanter tried not to fidget. “I have not yet seen an analysis of
the new Ur-fruit,” he said finally.

Lysanter’s mood lightened; the new Ur-fruit were an
interesting development. “We’re having trouble getting samples, and what we get
are not consistent. The only common factor seems to be psycho-activity.”

“Drugs, as rumored,” Barrodagh said flatly. “It’s not
surprising you can’t get samples. They sell them.”

Of course,
Lysanter thought.
The Catennach, like
their masters, are deeply suspicious of pleasure, especially in their
underlings.
“I think,” he replied, “that you are missing the point of this
latest manifestation.”

Barrodagh’s hand moved toward his face, then twitched
downward, drawing Lysanter’s gaze to his dry, chafed knuckles, his cuticles
ragged. “How did the station know that we—I mean the unders and the ordinaries—wanted
to get intoxicated? That’s a mental state.”

“Why did it have to know anything?” Barrodagh retorted. “You
spill blood on it, and it spews blood. The menials are forever fermenting some
slop or other into alcoholic concoctions. A simple accident would do it.”

Lysanter stopped himself, aghast at the misstep he’d almost
made. He could not tell Barrodagh his suspicion—that Li Pung’s absorption while
alive had given the station an example of a living brain, which had enabled it
to figure out how to modify its behavior with drugs. The effect on his research
would be disastrous. Barrodagh would go straight to Eusabian, who might do
anything. After all, it was the Avatar’s order, following the reaction of the
station to Li Pung’s sacrifice, to cut off the heads of all future fatalities
and throw them into space. “Perhaps you’re right. That seems reasonable,” he
said instead.

“Immured here with your compute arrays and your technicians,
who are all highly educated, you do not understand the lower ranks.”
Barrodagh’s tone was pompous and dismissive.

Lysanter couldn’t resist evening things up a bit. “No,
indeed, there your position gives you much greater expertise,” he said, earning
a sharpened look.

“What do you know about Ogres?”

The question took Lysanter by surprise. “Ogres?”

“Barcan Ogres, the battle androids,” Barrodagh snapped.

“I know what they are, but I know very little about them.
Never had reason to.” Lysanter ran a series of queries through his console. To
his further surprise, there was a new chunk of data, quite large, tagged with
Barcan origination.

Barrodagh smirked. “Barca has been quite cooperative since
Hreem took them in hand. Can you verify the programming of an Ogre?”

Lysanter scanned the data. “I won’t know for sure until I
dig into this, but in theory, yes.” He looked up. “You want them to defend the
station when the Panarchists attack, don’t you?”

Barrodagh said, “Leave that to those whose concern it is. We
have reason to question their programming. If you have any doubts at all, we
must refuse them. You will have two to work on.”

“The Barcans are subtle, so I can’t guarantee to find
everything, but I can certainly install guard programs to trigger disabling
phages if the Ogres prove to be trapped.”

After fewer additional questions and requests for reports
than Lysanter had expected, many involving the next series of tests, Barrodagh
took his leave.

I should have promised
him more clamp programming sooner.
Lysanter leaned back in his chair,
trying to relax. Barrodagh’s visits always disarranged his thinking; the man’s
fear was contagious. He cast his mind back upon the career that had brought him
here.

Had not Dol’jhar reached him first, he might now be a
centripetal gnostor. He’d been almost ready to publish his first Synthesis, an
intersection of Ontological Physics and Infonetics, when a mysterious visitor
called on him, bearing a device constructed, or grown, of some material like
nothing he’d ever seen before. It had taken years on the Suneater to confirm
the suspicion on which he’d acted that day: that the Urian device the visitor
brought was constructed according to some fantastically advanced evolution of
his synthesis between the structure of fivespace and information theory.

Did he regret it? As always, there was no easy answer: he’d
told himself that pure science had nothing to do with politics, and he would
maintain a strict divide between the political intentions of his new masters
and his own goals. He’d long ago forgotten the look of sunlight, the tang of
natural air, the unplanned beauty of a planetary landscape. But in his research
here he had seen behind the facade that Totality presented to the human mind,
and now, if this Vi’ya recovered, he might at last uncover the last secret of
the Ur, the overarching synthesis that would bring the station to full
potential.

He sat upright again, rolled his head on his tense neck, and
studied his console screen. It appeared that the Panarchists’ surveillance of
the Suneater, long assumed but never detected, was now mutating into active
harassment. Juvaszt was demanding more of the cims’ activity for military
preparations. But it was Barrodagh who balanced Juvaszt’s demands against the
compute-intensive cryptographic efforts that Barrodagh managed, those that
controlled both their communications and the assault on Panarchist secrets in
the DataNet. So Lysanter felt confident that with his new understanding with Barrodagh,
he’d maintain command of the number of compute arrays he needed.

And then he’d be free to get back to the important work.

Vi’ya awoke and tasted salt. Salt water, tears? Irrelevant.

She waited for the gray mist to clear and the voices to
resolve into sense.

Gradually she perceived that the gray was not fading away.
She was staring up at a featureless gray ceiling.

“. . . weeping again.” It was Sedry’s voice.

Slowly memory returned, overlaid by her vision. The landing
bay, Eusabian’s son Anaris, the convulsions of the Suneater.

Her lips parted gummily.

“Let me,” she heard Montrose say, and felt the sticky
reluctance as he pulled something off the hollow of her throat. Hydration
patch? How long had she been in the Dreamtime?

But she knew that was a senseless question. A part of her
would always remain there, with Math, watching the steam-lashed wave towering
over the Isle. And the Chorei were with her, in her.

Irritated by the direction her thoughts had taken, she tried
to sit up, and succeeded as a pair of hands assisted her. She recognized the
strength in the long, bony fingers: Jaim.

She looked up at his somber face, framed in the mourning
braids of the Serapisti. His expression was largely blank, but she felt his
relief and concern. She worked her rusty voice. “How long?”

“Almost three days,” he murmured.

“Three days of trying not to be digested by this hole.”
Marim’s voice betrayed an undercurrent of anxiety, intensified by her emotional
spectrum. Fear and anger were foremost.

Vi’ya winced at the discord. “They drugged me.”

Montrose said, “They shot us all—luckily with tranks, but
not with anything from the standard pharmacopoeia.” He handed her a cup of
water; she drank gratefully, feeling the tissues of her mouth and throat soak
it up.

“Felt like bad Negus,” Lokri drawled, his tone of
indifference clashing with the unease she felt from him. “But the rest of us
came out of it in a few hours.”

Fear thrilled along her arms and back. She couldn’t sense
the Eya’a.

Jaim must have been watching her closely. He said, “They’re
in hibernation. Barrodagh wasn’t cooperative, but Sedry sweet-talked the other
Bori into refrigeration for the Eya’a and their moss banks, and put them in the
chamber next to us.” He pointed.

Vi’ya turned her head. The bed she sat on was nearest a
puckered segment of wall. Slowly she scanned the round chamber, which was
painted a uniform gray. A console sat against one wall, with beds on either
side; Montrose and Sedry sat on those. Narrow beds lay unevenly along the
perimeter, with storage units set up as partial screens. Another puckered
depression led off behind Lokri’s bed—probably the fresher.

“We been waiting for you to wake up,” Ivard put in from the
bed next to hers, his thin face eager. Lucifur, the beige and white cliff cat,
lay next to Ivard, his ears twitching. “The Blessed Three said you and the
Eya’a wandered far away, and not to disturb you.” Ivard laughed; Vi’ya caught a
psychic flicker of the tripled blue radiance of the Kelly, a complex emotion
composed of humor, awe, and others she had no referents for.

“What happened?” Jaim asked. She sensed his reluctance, his
sense of duty, overlaid with the faintest echo of Brandon’s emotional spectrum.
They learned from one another, it seems.

“What did you see?” She turned to Montrose, willing the
heaviness away. Later she would clean the rest of the toxins out of her muscles
by working through Ulanshu Kinesics with Jaim.

“You stopped moving. Stood rigid. Anaris swayed as if the
gravs had failed. Neither of you appeared aware of your surroundings. The
landing bay was shuddering like something in a grand mal seizure. When Anaris
collapsed, Barrodagh shouted something and the Tarkans fired.”