The Middle Kingdom (93 page)

As expected,
there was no guard. He pulled himself inside and closed the hatch.

This part was
easy. He had done it a hundred, two hundred times in simulation. He
had been trained to do this thoughtlessly. But at some point he would
need to act on his own: to use his discretion and react with
immediacy. Until then he went by rote, knowing every inch of the huge
craft as if he had buiit it.

The air lock
filled and the inner door activated. He went through quickly, his
weapon searching for targets, finding nothing, no one. But somewhere
an alarm would be flashing. Unauthorized entry at air lock seven. A
matter for investigation. Security would be buzzing already. There
would be guards at the next junction of the corridor.

Karr removed the
two heat-seeking darts from his belt and pressed a button on his
suit. In seconds the ice of his suit was minus ten. He hurled the
darts ahead of him and raced down the corridor after them.

Explosions
punctuated the silence up ahead. The darts had found their targets.
Coming to the ruined corpses he leapt over them without stopping and
ran on, taking the corridor to his left and going through the two
quick-irising doors before he paused and anchored himself to the
ceiling, the short securing chain attached to the back of his sturdy
helmet.

He swung up and
kicked. The inspection hatch moved but did not open. His second kick
shifted it back and he hooked his feet through, scrambling up into
the narrow space, releasing the anchor chain.

Here his size
was a handicap. He turned awkwardly, putting back the hatch, knowing
he had only seconds to spare.

He had cut it
fine. He heard guards pass by below only a moment later, their
confusion apparent. Good. It was going well.

Karr smiled,
enjoying himself.

He moved quickly
now, crawling along the inspection channel. Then, at the next down
intersection, he swung out over the space and dropped.

He landed and
turned about immediately, crouching down then working his way
awkwardly into a second channel. This one came out at the back of the
Security desk. Timing was crucial. In a minute or so they would have
guessed what he had done.

Maybe they had
already and were'waiting.

He shrugged and
poised himself over the hatch, setting the charge. Then he went along
to the second hatch. The explosion would blow a hole in the room next
door to Security—a sort of recreation room. There would be no
one there at present, but it would distract them while he climbed
down.

He lifted the
hatch cover a fraction of a second before the charge blew and was
climbing down even as the guards turned below him, surprised by the
explosion.

He landed on the
neck of one of them and shot two others before they knew he was there
among them. Another of the guards, panicking, helped Karr by burning
two more of his colleagues.

Confusion. That,
too, was a weapon, sharp as a knife.

Karr shot the
panicking guard and rolled a smoke bomb into the corridor outside.
Then he turned and blasted the Security communications desk. The
screens went dead.

He waited a
moment. The screens flickered into brief life, showing scenes of
chaos in corridors and rooms throughout the starship, then they died
again, the backups failing. The inside man had done his job.

Good, thought
Karr. Now to conclude.

He went out into
the corridor, moving fast, jumping over bodies, knocking aside
confused, struggling guards. All they saw was a giant in a dark,
eerily glowing suit, moving like an athlete down the corridor,
unaffected by the thick, black choking •smoke.

He went right
and right again, then fastened himself to the inner wall of the
corridor, rolling a small charge against the hull.

The spiked
charge almost tore his anchorage away. He was tugged violently toward
the breach. The outer skin of the star-ship shuddered but held,
beginning to seal itself. But it had bled air badly. It was down to
half an atmosphere. Debris cluttered about the sealing hole.

In half a minute
he released the anchor chain and ran on down the corridor, meeting no
resistance now. Guards lay unconscious everywhere. Many had been
thrown against walls or doorways and were dead or badly wounded. It
was complete chaos.

The engine was
inside, in the inner shell. A breach of the hull could not affect it.

This was the
difficult part. They would be expecting him now. But he had a few
tricks left to show them before he was done.

He ignored the
inner-shell air lock and moved on to one of the ducts. It would have
shut down the instant the outer hull was breached, making the inner
shell airtight. Thick layers of ice were interlaced like huge fingers
the length of a man's arm. Above them a laser-protected sensor
registered the atmospheric pressure of the outer shell.

Karr undipped a
rectangular container from his belt and took two small packages from
it. The first was a one-atmosphere "pocket." He fitted it
over the sensor quickly, ignoring the brief, warning sting from the
laser. The second.of the packages he treated with a care that seemed
exaggerated. It was ice-wire: a long thread of the deadly cutting
material. He drew it out cautiously and pulled it taut, then swiftly
used it to cut the securing bolts on each of the six sides of the
duct.

The whole thing
dropped a hand's length as the lasers blinked out. There was a soft
exhalation of air. The sound an elevator makes when it stops.

Karr waited a
moment, then began cutting into the casing with small, diagonal
movements that removed pieces of the ice like chunks of soft cheese.
As the gap widened he cut deeper into the casing and then pulled back
and set the thread down.

He climbed up
onto the casing and kicked. Three of the segments fell away. He eased
himself down into the gap.

It was far
narrower than he had anticipated and for a moment he thought he was
going to be stuck. The segments had wedged against the internal
mechanism of the duct at an awkward angle, leaving him barely enough
room to squeeze by. He managed, just, but his right arm was trapped
against the wall and he couldn't reach the device taped to his chest.

He shifted his
weight and stood on tiptoe, edging about until his hand and lower arm
were free, then reached up and unstrapped the bomb from his chest.

Another problem
presented itself. He could not reach down and place the device
against the inner casing of the duct. There was no way he could
fasten it.

Did it matter?
He decided that it didn't. He would strengthen the upper casing when
he was out. The explosion would be forced inward.

It was such a
small device. So delicate a thing. And yet so crude in its power.

He placed the
bomb between his knee and the duct wall, then let it slide down
between leg and wall, catching it with his foot.

He didn't want
it to go up with him there.

He touched the
timer with his boot and saw it glow red. Eight minutes to get out.

He began to haul
himself up the sides of the duct, using brute force, legs and back
braced, his thickly muscled arms straining to free himself from the
tight-packed hole.

At the top he
paused and looked around. What could he use? He bent down and picked
up the ice-wire, then went to a nearby room and cut machinery away
from the decks, then brought it back and piled it up beside the
breached duct.

Three minutes
thirty seconds gone. He went to the doorway and cut a huge rectangle
of ice from the wall. It was thin— insubstantial almost—but
strong. It weighed nothing in itself but he could pile all the heavy
machinery up on top of it.

It would have to
do.

There was just
short of two minutes left to get out.

Time for his
last trick. He ran for his life. Back the way he'd come. Without
pause he pulled the last of his bombs from his belt and threw it,
pressing the stud at his belt as he did so.

The outer wall
exploded, then buckled inward.

Karr, his life
processes suspended, was thrown out through the rent in the
starship's outer skin; a dark, larval pip spat out violently.

The pip drifted
out from the giant sphere, a thin trail of dust and iced air in its
trail. Seconds later the outer skin rippled and then collapsed, lit
from within. It shriveled, like a ball of paper in a fire, then, with
a suddenness that surprised the distant, watching eyes, lit up like a
tiny sun, long arms of vivid fire burning a crown of thorns in the
blackness of space.

It had been
done. War had been declared.

What
is it whose closing causes the dark and whose opening causes the
light? Where does the Bright God hide before the Horn proclaims the
dawning of the day?

—T'ien
Wen
(Heavenly
Questions)

by
Ch'u Yuan, from the
Ch'u TYu
(Songs
of the
South),
second century BC.

A
Bridge over Nothingness

SO
THEY BEGAN, burying the dark; capping the well of memory with a stone
too vast, too heavy, to move. The machine watched them at their work,
seeing many things their frailer, time-bound eyes were prone to
miss—subtle changes of state it had come to recognize as
significant. At times the full intensity of its awareness was poured
into the problem of the boy, Kim. For a full second, maybe two, it
thought of nothing else. Several lifetimes of normal human
consciousness passed this way. And afterward it would make a motion
in its complex circuitry-—unseen, unregistered on any-
monitoring screen—approximate to a nod of understanding.

While the two
theoreticians began the job of mapping out a new mosaic—a new
ideal configuration for the boy's mental state, his personality—the
Builder returned to the cell and to the boy. His eyes, the small,
unconscious movements of his body, revealed his unease, his
awkwardness, finally his uncertainty. As he administered the first of
the drug treatments to the boy he could not hide the concern, the
doubt
he felt.

It watched,
uncommenting, as'the drugs began to have their desired effect upon
the boy. It saw how they systematically blocked off all pathways that
led into the boy's past, noting the formulae of the drugs they used,
deriving a kind of mathematical pleasure from the subtle evolving
variations as they fine-tuned their chemical control of the process
of erasure. There was an art to what they did. The machine saw this
and, in its own manner, appreciated it.

It was a process
of reduction different in kind from what they had attempted earlier.
This time they did not seek to cower him but to strip him of every
last vestige of that which made him a personality, a
being.
In
long sessions on the operating table, the two theoreticians probed
the boy's mind, sliding microthin wires into the boy's shaven skull,
then administering fine dosages of chemicals and organic compounds,
until, at last, they had achieved their end.

In developing
awareness the machine had developed memory. Not memory as another
machine might have defined it—that, to the conscious entity
that tended these isolated decks, was merely "storage," the
bulk of things known. No, memory was something else. Its function was
unpredictable. It threw up odd items of data—emphasized certain
images, certain words and phrases, over others. And it was
inextricably bound up with the sensation of self-awareness. Indeed,
it was self-awareness, for the one could not exist without the
eccentric behavior of the other. Yet it was also much more than the
thing these humans considered memory—for the full power of the
machine's ability to reason and the frighteningly encyclopedic range
of its knowledge
informed
these eccentric upwellings of words
and images.

One image that
it held important occurred shortly after they had completed their
work and capped the well of memory in Kim. It was when the boy woke
in his cell after the last of the operations. At first he lay there,
his eyes open, a glistening wetness at the corner of his part-open
mouth. Then, as though instinct were taking hold—some vestige
of the body's remembered language of actions shaping the attempt—he
tried to sit up.

It was to the
next few moments that the machine returned, time and again, sifting
the stored images through the most intense process of scrutiny.

The boy had
lifted his head. One of his arms bent and moved, as if to support and
lift his weight, but the other had been beneath him as he lay and the
muscles were "asleep." He fell forward and lay there, chin,
cheek, and eye pressed close against the floor. Like that he stayed,
his visible eye registering only a flicker of confusion before the
pupil settled and the lid half closed. For a long time afterward
there was only blankness in that eye. A nothingness. Like the eye of
a corpse, unconnected to the seeing world.

Later, when, in
the midst of treatment, the boy would suddenly stop and look about
him, that same look would return, followed by a moment of sheer,
blind panic that would take minutes to fully subside. And though, in
the months that followed, the boy grew in confidence, it was like
building a bridge over nothingness. From time to time the boy would
step up to the edge and look over. Then would come that look, and the
machine would remember the first time it had seen it. It was the look
of a machine. Of a thing without life.

They began their
rehabilitation with simple exercises, training the body in new ways,
new mannerisms, avoiding if they could the old patterns of behavior.
Even so, there were times when far older responses showed through.
Then the boy's motor activities would be locked into a cycle of
meaningless repetition—like a malfunctioning robot—until
an injection of drugs brought him out of it.