This Alien Shore (21 page)

She began to move then, a bizarre sort of mechanical pacing, until the softly whirring carapace had brought her around behind him. He couldn't turn to watch her. He couldn't even want to turn. Some vital link had been severed in his brain, and he could only listen.

“You of course do not know,” she began, “the ceremony that accompanies the rise to guildmastership. It's quite secret, and steeped in a symbolism centuries old. At the end of it, when the investiture has been completed, the new Master or Mistress stands before the Prima and is permitted to make one request. A sort of gift, to celebrate her new position. Also a test. Not all realize that, of course. The first free interaction between a new guildmaster and his superior says a lot about what their relationship will become. Few realize the potential of that moment.”

Pictures began to form before his eyes, misty images which the house net was feeding into his optical center. Then, like an uploaded vidlink, the details slowly crystallized. He saw a room, all in shades of gray. A woman in black robes, with the mark of the Guild in gold upon her chest. A man behind her and to the side, some sort of waiting attendant not fully admitted to the circle of ritual. Delhi was visualizing her memories and using the house net to feed the images into his brain. It wasn't an unfamiliar technique by any means; what child of the outworlds hadn't done the same thing at some point, mimicking telepathy in order to transfer dirty or shocking pictures to a friend? But combined with his inability to edit the input—combined with his total helplessness—the sensation of having someone else's memories fill his brain was doubly terrifying.

“Some ask for but token things, thinking the point of that moment is to reaffirm their loyalty with the ultimate statement of selflessness. Those people are fools. Others may ask for the station they covet, backing in their first guild investments, a choice position for a loved one or ally. The list of requests is as long as the list of guildmasters. How does one make the most of such a moment? There is no preparation for this, you understand, the ceremony is kept such a secret that the answer serves as a test of sorts, to see what manner of Gueran has been raised to power ... how quickly he thinks, how perfectly he weighs the various options, and what his political priorities are....” She paused, letting Stivan's helpless brain absorb that final confirmation of terror :
Secret ceremonies. No one knows. She is telling me.
It didn't take rational thought to draw a conclusion from those bits and pieces; the connection was primal, as much a part of his neural circuitry as the desire to eat or drink ... or flee.

“And so, you see, the question was put to me. And in that small eternity I wondered, what did I want most in the whole of the outworlds, and could the Prima give it to me? It wouldn't do to ask for the impossible ... nor to understate the moment's opportunity. Surely this moment was as much a test as a reward.”

He saw them waiting, the man and woman both. Strangely, there seem to be fine lines connecting the two of them, that trembled in the still air between them like a spiderweb. The longer the vision remained in his head, the more clearly he could see them.

“At last I said,
I want a program.

“What manner of program?
the Prima asked.

“My thoughts were racing; I took my time before speaking.
Give me something that will remove a man's initiative,
I told
her. Give me a program I can plant in a man's brain, which when activated will remove all capacity for self-motivation. Not only of the body,
I added quickly,
but of the mind
itself.

“There was silence for a moment. Then she said,
There are very few programmers capable of designing such a thing. ”

He saw as the woman turned back to glance at the man. Devlin Gaza? His nod was so slight as to be almost imperceptable. The silken lines between them shimmered as he did so.

“At last she nodded.
Very well,
she told
me, if it can be done, it will be done.

“So you see,” Delhi said quietly—the pictures vanished in a flash of light, “I can do that now. Burn out that part of the brain which provides the spark of initiative. Make a man into something which can only react ... and obey.”

She stepped around him, into his field of vision once more. For a moment there was silence. Then: “Raise your left arm, Stivan.”

To his horror he saw his arm moving upward, as if pulled by a puppeteer's string. When it had reached the level of his shoulder and it was clear he was not going to halt on his own, she said curtly, “Stop.”

He did.

“Put it down.”

He did.

“Excellent. Let us hope that internal commands work as well.”

She walked around to where his keyboard lay, and studied the hand-inscribed sigils on its keys. Customized icons, every last one of them. Her silence, and her utter stillness, hinted at some internal monologue ... or dialogue, perhaps, with the computerized presence that surrounded them.

Suddenly one of the images formed in his mind's eye, placed there by an outside force. To his horror he could feel his brain stirring in response, a cascade of neural connections triggered by the familiar symbol. He couldn't stop it. He wasn't even part of it. He was a spectator in his own brain, watching his own secret icons appear and disappear before him as one would watch a viddie.

“Excellent,” she said at last. “Gaza did well.” She gazed at him directly—eyes so cold, expression devoid of all human sympathy—and said, “It's so hard to interrogate a human brain, since one single thought can shut down the brainware. One flash of an icon, prearranged, to alert the internal security systems that all input is to be rejected. I'm sure you have such safeguards, Stivan. So you understand, there was no other way to question you. I am so sorry. You were a good servant.” She looked deep into his eyes, as if searching for something within him. The sensation was sickening, as if some huge predatory creature had flicked out its tongue to taste him. “Now let us begin, shall we? I'd like to review your most recent discoveries, and outload them for my records. I regret that your brain will be ruined in the process... but I'm afraid that the program does irreparable damage when it's used. Something one reserves for enemies, Stivan.” Her expression hardened. “Or traitors.”

The flow began then, secret data worming its way out of his brain in response to her electronic summons. It wouldn't have been so bad if he could have closed his eyes. The flow involved no visual processing; if he could have shut his eyes, he could have pretended it wasn't happening, could have cowered in some hidden little portion of his brain and pretended nothing was wrong, until it was over.

As it was, he had to stare at her until the end.

T
HE HARVESTER was a strange and wonderful creation. With silver wings that spread out for miles in every direction, shifting moment by moment as some new solar current tickled their paper-thin substance, it seemed more like a living creature than what it was, a man-made construct of plasteel struts and sheets. Out here the wings were mostly folded, of course; only within the bounds of a fertile solar system would they stretch out to their full length, like a bird of prey splaying out his feathers to catch the wind. Here the galactic breezes were quiet, mere echoes of the storms that had once sparked on some solar surface, billions of miles away. Here the vast creature was quiescent.

Beneath those wings, sheltered in a cocoon of paper-thin hydrogen collectors, would be more substantial cargo: elements harvested from the outer planets by tiny probes, who now lay tucked within the bosom of their mothership, sleeping the mechanical sleep of their flight. Precious metals and radioactives, gases compressed nearly to the breaking point, and anything else that the nodes needed for construction and energy were all stored away for the decade-long journey.

It was life, Hsing mused, or at least the source of life. As much as the sun of Guera made life on that planet possible, as much as Sol warmed Earth so that life could prosper, these vast collectors made life possible in the nodes. Because you couldn't support living worlds with no new raw materials, no fresh energy input. The stations of the outworlds were nearly perfect closed systems, and even so, there was a limit to how often the same materials could be reused. An endpoint even to recycling, when metal and plastic had been reshaped so often that molecular integrity could no longer be guaranteed. The Earth Tithe made up for some of that, of course, with its requirement that every ship coming from the dirtworlds bring with it a mass of raw materials for the Guild to use as needed. But that just barely supported the building of new stations, new ships, and necessary repairs. Without the harvesters making their constant journeys to living systems for supplies, there would not be enough new energy in the outworlds to keep trillions of humans alive. Much less to keep them happy.

Hsing stayed at the viewpoint until the harvester receded into the distance, as did most of the passengers surrounding him. You could almost sort them into racial categories by the distance they kept from him: the Guerans close by, undisturbed by his Guild office; other Variants keeping a few steps away, wary and respectful; the few Terrans on the ship staying as far away from him as they could at all times. Was it his power that unnerved them, he wondered, or simply the fact that his Variation was hidden, causing them to imagine the worst? Or was it the “ferocious war paint” (as one Terran had labeled the kaja) which spoke to them on a more primitive level, warning them not to get too close? What did they imagine he was going to do if they did invade his personal space? Eat them?

It was doubly ironic, being that his own Variation had been corrected long ago. Some people made that choice. In his case it had been pretty simple, really, a choice between having a body that would respond to his commands and one that wouldn't. He'd had the procedure done as soon as he was old enough to make his wishes known, and had never regretted it since. Oh, there were Guerans who would accuse him of throwing away a rare opportunity, those who would remind him in no uncertain terms that some of humankind's greatest works of genius had come from minds that others would consider “handicapped.” It was bullshit as far as he was concerned. Maybe relevant enough for folks like Masada and his wife, whose cognitive patterns had shifted into an alternate mode, but how did it benefit the human mind to be trapped in a body that couldn't respond to it? He thought Ra was crazy, for not having her visual circuits fixed. He knew that Delhi would trade in her current body in a nano for one that worked, if the operation required to do so didn't put her whole consciousness at risk. And even Masada had a wellseeker programmed to tune out the worst of his sensory distortions, at least when it would affect his work.

We're all human, right?
But you didn't tell the Terrans that. God, no! One must preserve the mystique at all costs.