The collected short fict.., p.74
The Collected Short Fiction, page 74
My auto counsellor found the relevant council rules on courtesy briefings, and the particular rule passed thirty years before, by the council, that mandated the council’s right to hear just what the president heard, as testimony, under oath. A strange and parochial law, so seldom invoked that I had never heard of it. Until now.
“I’m ending this discussion,” I said, standing.
“Tell Thomas Sandoval-Rice that you and he should be at the next full council meeting. Under council agreements, you don’t have any choice, Mickey.”
She did not smile. I left the office, walked quickly down the hall, avoided looking at anyone, especially the young women still moving files.
“She’s snared her rabbit,” Thomas said as he poured me a beer.
He had been unusually quiet all evening, since I had announced myself at his door and made my anguished confession of gross ineptitude. Far worse than being blasted by his rage was facing his quiet disappointment. “Don’t blame yourself entirely, Micko.” He seemed somehow deflated, withdrawn, like an aquarium anemone touched by an uncaring finger. “I should have guessed they’d try something like this.”
“I feel like an idiot.”
“That’s the third time you’ve said that in the past ten minutes,” Thomas said. “You have been an idiot, of course, but don’t let that get you down.”
I shook my head; I was already down about as far as it was possible to fall.
Thomas lifted his beer, inspected the large bubbles, and said, “If we don’t testify, we’re in much worse trouble. It will look as if we’re ignoring the wishes of our fellow BMs, as if we’ve gone renegade. If we do testify, we’ll have been manoeuvred into breaking the BMs’ sacred right to keep business and research matters private . . . and that will make us look like weaklings and fools. She’s pushed us into a deep rille, Mickey. If you had refused to go in, and had claimed family privilege, she’d have tried something else . . .
“At least now we can be sure what we’re in store for. Isolation, recrimination, probable withdrawal of contracts, maybe even boycott of services. That’s never happened before, Micko. We’re going to make history this week, no doubt about it.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
Thomas finished his glass and wiped his lips. “Another?” he asked, gesturing at the keg. I shook my head. “No. Me neither. We need clear heads, Micko, and we need a full family meeting. We’re going to have to build internal solidarity here; this has gone way beyond what the director and all the syndics can handle by themselves.”
I flew back from Port Yin, head cloudy with anguish. It seemed somehow I had been responsible for all of this. Thomas did not say as much, not this time; but he had hinted it before. I halfway hoped the shuttle would smear itself across the regolith; that the pilot would survive and I would not. Then, anguish began to be replaced by a grim and determined anger. I had been twisted around by experts; used by those who had no qualms about use and abuse. I had seen the enemy and underestimated the strength of their resolve, whatever their motivations, whatever their goals. These people were not following the lunar way; they were playing us all—all of the BMs, me, Rho, the Triple, the Western Hemispheric United States, the corpsicles—like fish on a line, single-mindedly dedicated to one end.
The heads were just an excuse. They had no real importance; that much was obvious.
This was a power play. The Logologists were intent on dominating the Moon, perhaps the Earth. I hated them for their ambition, their evil presumption, for the way they had lowered me in the eyes of Thomas.
Having erred on the side of underestimation, I was now swinging in the opposite direction, equally in error; but I would not realize that for a few more days yet.
I came home, and knew for the first time how much the station meant to me.
I met a Cailetet man in the alley leading to the Ice Pit. “You’re Mickey, right?” he asked casually. He held a small silver case, danging in front of him from one hand. He seemed happy. I looked at him as if he might utter words of absolute betrayal.
“We’ve just investigated one of your heads,” he said, only slightly put off by my expression. “You’ve been shuttling, eh?”
I nodded. “How’s Rho?” I asked, somewhat irrelevantly; I hadn’t spoken to anybody since my arrival. “She’s ecstatic, I think. We’ve done our work well.”
“You’re sticking with us?” I asked suspiciously. “Beg your pardon?”
“You haven’t been recalled by your family syndics?”
“No,” he said, drawling the word dubiously. “Not that I’ve heard.”
The families were being incredibly two-faced. “Just curious,” I said. “What’s it going to cost us?”
“In the long term? That’s right,” he said, as if the reason for my surliness had finally been solved. “You’re financial manager for the Ice Pit. I’m sorry; I’m a bit slow. Believe me, we’re interested in this as a research project. If we perfect our techniques here, we can market the medical applications all over the Triple and beyond. We’re charging you expenses and nothing else, Mickey. This is a platinum opportunity.”
“Does it work?” I asked, still sullen.
He thumped the case. “Data right here. We’re checking it with history on Earth. I’d say it works, yes. Talking with the dead—I don’t think anybody’s done that before!”
“Who was it?” I asked.
“One of the three unknowns. Rho decided we’d work with them first, to help solve the mystery. Please go right in, Mickey. Nernst has designed a very nice facility. Ask questions, see what they’re doing. They’re working on unknown number two right now.”
“Thanks,” I said, wondering what distortion of protocol could lead this man to invite me into my own BM’s facility. “I’m glad it’s working.”
“All right,” the man said, with a short intake of breath. “Must be off. Check this individual out, correlate . . . on our own nickel, Mickey. Good to have met you.”
I stopped at the white line and queried. “Goddamn it, yes!” William’s voice roared from the speaker. “It’s open. Just cross the goddamn line and stop bothering me.”
“It’s me, Mickey,” I said.
“Well then, come on in and join the party! Everybody else is here.”
William had locked himself in the laboratory. Three Onnes and Cailetet techs were on the bridge, standing well away from the force-disorder pumps, chatting and eating lunch. I passed them by with casual nods.
William sounded in no mood for visitors—this time of day was usually his phase of most intense activity. I swung on to the lift and descended to Rho’s facility, twenty feet below the laboratory. The Ice Pit echoed with voices from above and below; the sounds seemed to come from all directions as I descended in the open lift, first to the right, then the left, cancelled, returned, grew soft, then immediate. Rho came through the hatch at the top of the chamber and rushed forward excitedly. “William’s furious, but we’re leaving him alone, mostly, so it will pass.” She fairly brewed over with enthusiasm. “Oh, Mickey!” She threw her arms around me.
“Yes?”
“Did you hear upstairs? We tuned in to a head! It works! Come on in. We’re working on the second head now.”
“An unknown,” I said with polite interest, her enthusiasm not infecting me. (How much could I blame her for these problems?)
“Yes. Another unknown. I still can’t get a response from the StarTime trustees. Do you think they’ve lost all their back-up records? That would be something, wouldn’t it?” She ushered me down the hatch into the chamber. Within the chamber, all was quiet but for a faint song of electronics and the low hiss of refrigerants.
I recognized Armand Cailetet-Davis, the balding, slight-figured powerhouse of Cailetet research. Beside him stood Irma Stolbart of Onnes, a reputed lunar-born superwhiz whom I had heard of but never meh thirty or thirty-five, tall and thin with reddish brown hair and chocolate skin. They stood beside a tripod-mounted piece of equipment, three horizontal cylinders strapped together, pointed at the face of one of the forty stainless-steel boxes mounted in the racks.
Rho introduced me to Cailetet-Davis and Stolbart. I felt a little thrill of something—a realization of what was actually going on here—penetrating my dark mood.
“We’re selecting one of the seventy-three known natural mind languages,” Armand explained, pointing at a thinker prism in Irma Stolbart’s hands. She smiled, quick glance at me, at Armand, distracted, then continued to work on her thinker, which was about a tenth the size of William’s QL, easily portable. “We’ll test some uploaded data for patterns—”
“Patterns from the head,” I said, stating the obvious.
“Yes. A masculine individual, age sixty-five at death, apparently in good condition considering the medical standards of the time. Very little deterioration.”
“Have you looked inside?” I asked.
Rho lifted her brows. “Brother, nobody looks inside. Not by actually opening the box. We don’t care what they look like.” She laughed nervously. “It’s not the head, it’s what’s locked up in the brain.”
A soul, still? Now I was shivering from fatigue, as well as something like superstitious awe. “Sorry,” I said to nobody in particular. They ignored me, concentrating on their work.
“We find northern Europeans tend to cluster in these three program areas,” Stolbart explained. She showed me a slate screen on which a diagram had been sketched. The diagram showed twelve different rectangles, each labelled with a cultural-ethnic group.
Her finger underlined three boxes: Finn/Scand/Teut/. “Mind memory-storage languages are among the genetic traits most rigidly adhered to. We think they change very little across thousands of years. That makes sense, considering the necessity of immediate infant adaptation to its milieu.”
“Indeed,” Rho said, smiling at me, squeezing my arm again gently. “So he’s of northern European stock?”
“He’s definitely not Levantine, African or Oriental,” Irma Stolbart said. I watched her curiously, focusing on her face, lean and intent, with lovely, sceptical brown eyes.
“Have you spoken with your syndics?” I asked out of the blue, startling even myself.
Armand had clearly earned his position in Cailetet through quick thinking and adaptability. With no hesitation whatsoever, he said, “We work here until somebody tells us to leave. Nobody has yet. Maybe you administrators can work it all out in the council.”
You administrators. That put us in our place. Paper pushers, bureaucrats, politicians. Cut the politics. We were the ones who stood in the way of the scientist’s goal of unrestrained research and intellection.
“I see a fourteen Penrose cipher trace algorithm in the cerebral cortex,” Irma said. “Definitely northern European.”
Rho looked troubled, examined my face for signs. With a tug of my ear and a gesture up into the air I indicated we should talk. She drew me aside. “Are you tired?” she asked.
“Dead on my feet,” I said. “I’m an idiot, Rho, and maybe I’ve augured this whole thing right into a rille.”
“I have faith in the family. We’ll make it. I have faith in you, Micko,” she said, grasping my arm. I felt vaguely sick, seeing her expression of support, her trust. “I’d like you to stay and watch . . . this is really something . . . if you’re up to it?”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” I said.
“It’s almost religious, isn’t it?” she whispered in my ear.
“All right,” Armand said. “We have the locale. Let’s take a picture, upload into the translator, and see if we can draw a name from the file.”
Armand adjusted the position on the triple cylinders and tuned his slate to their output, getting a picture of a vague grey mass suspended by a thin sling in a sharp black square—the head resting in its cubicle and cradle within the larger box. “We’re centred,” he said. “Irma, if you could . . .”
“Field guide on,” she said, flipping a switch on a tiny disc taped to the box.
“Recording,” Armand said nonchalantly. There was no noise, no visible or audible sign that anything was happening. Squares appeared on Armand’s slate in the upper right-hand portion of the mass. I was able to make out that the head had slumped to one side, whether facing us or not, I could not tell. I kept staring at the image, the squares flashing one by one in sequence around the cranium, and I realized with a gruesome tingle that the head was misshapen, that during its decades in storage it had become deformed in the presence of Earth gravity, nestling deeper into its sling like a frozen melon.
“Got it,” Armand said. “One more—the third unknown—and we’ll call it a session.”
For Rho’s sake, I stayed to watch the third head being scanned and its neural states and patterns recorded. I kissed Rho’s cheek, congratulated her and took the lift to the bridge. Again, the voices flowed around me, soft technical chatter from the chamber below, the technicians on the bridge above.
I went to my water tank room and collapsed.
Strangely enough, I slept well.
Rho came into my room and woke me up at twelve hundred, eight hours after I’d dropped on to my bed. Obviously, she had not slept at all; her hair was matted with finger-tugs and rearrangement, her face shiny with long hours.
“We got a name on the number one unknown,” she said. “It’s a female, not a male, we think. But we haven’t done a chromosome check through their sensors. Irma located a few minutes of pre-death short-term memory and translated it into sound. We heard . . .” She suddenly wrinkled her face, as if about to cry, and then lifted her head and laughed. “Micko, we heard a voice, it must have been a doctor, a voice speaking out loud, ‘Inchmore, can you hear me? Evelyn? We need your permission . . .’ ”
I sat up on the bed and rubbed my eyes. “That’s . . .” I couldn’t find a good word.
“Yeah, amen,” Rho said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Evelyn Inchmore. I’ve sent a query to StarTime’s trustees on Earth. Evelyn Inchmore, Evelyn Inchmore . . .” She spoke the name out loud several more times, her voice dropping in exhaustion and wonder. “Do you know that this means, Micko?”
“Congratulations,” I said.
“It’s the first time anybody has ever communicated with a corpsicle,” Rho said distantly.
“She hasn’t answered back,” I said. “You’ve just accessed her memories.” I shrugged my shoulders. “She’s still dead.”
“Yeah,” Rho said. “Just accessed her memories. Wait a minute.” She looked up at me, startled by some inner realization. “Maybe it’s a male, after all. We thought the name was female . . . But didn’t Evelyn used to be a male’s name? Wasn’t there a male author centuries ago named Evelyn?”
“Evelyn Waugh,” I said.
“We could have it all wrong again,” she said, too tired to build up much concern. “I hope we can straighten it out before this goes to the press.”
My level of alertness went up several notches. “Have you told Thomas what’s happened?”
“Not yet,” she said.
“Rho, if word gets out that we’ve already accessed the heads . . . But who’s going to stop Cailetet or Onnes from trumpeting this?”
“You think it would cause problems?” Rho asked. I felt vaguely proud that finally I was starting to anticipate trouble, as Thomas would want me to. “It would probably start a war,” I said.
“All right, then. I don’t want to cause more trouble than is absolutely necessary.” She looked at me with loving sympathy. “You’ve been in a rough, Micko.”
“You heard what happened in Port Yin?”
“Thomas talked to me while you were shuttling home.” She pushed out her lips dubiously and shook her head. “Fapping pol. Someone should impeach her and take away the Task-Felder charter.”
“I appreciate the sentiments, but neither is likely. Could you keep this quiet for a few more days?”
“I’ll do my damnedest,” Rho said. “Cailetet and Onnes are under contract. We control the release of the results, even if they get full scientific credit. I’ll tell them we want to confirm with the Earth trustees, back up our findings, analyze the third unknown head . . . work on a few known heads and see if the process is reliable.”
“What about Great-Grandmother and Great-Grandfather?” I asked.
Rho’s smile was conspiratorial. “We’ll save them until later,” she said.
“We don’t want to experiment on family, right?” She nodded. “When we’re sure the whole thing works, we’ll do something with Robert and Emilia. As for me, Micko, in a few minutes I’m going to get some induced sleep. Right after I lay down some rules to the Cailetet and Onnes folks. Now, William wants to talk with you.”
“About the interruptions?”
“I don’t think so. He says work is going well.”
She hugged me tightly and then stood. “To sleep,” she said. “No dreams, I think . . .”
“No ancient voices,” I said.
“Right.”
William seemed tired but at peace, pleased with himself. He sat in the laboratory control centre, patting the QL thinker as if it were an old friend.
“It did me proud, Micko,” he said. “It’s tuned everything to a fare-thee-well. It keeps the universe’s quantum bugs from nibbling at my settings, controls the rebuilt disorder pumps, anticipates virtual fluctuations and corrects for them. I’m all set now; all I have to do is bring the pumps to full capacity.”
I tried to show enthusiasm, but couldn’t. I felt sick at heart. The disaster in Port Yin, the upcoming council meeting, Rho’s success with the first few heads . . .
With a little time to think about what had happened, I realized now that it all felt bad. Thomas was scrambling furiously to convince the council to reverse its action. And here I was, cut out of the drift of things, watching William gloat about an upcoming moment of triumph. William caught my mood and reached out to tap my hand.
“Hey,” he said. “You’re young. Fapping up is part of the game.”
I screwed my face up at first in anger, then in simple grief, and turned away, tears running down my cheeks. To have William name the card so openly—fapping up—was not what I needed right now. It was neither circumspect nor sensitive. “Thank you so very much,” I said.
