Robert Silverberg: The Secret Sharer

“Went back to work. Five, ten minutes, maybe. Felt another jolt, a stronger one.” He touched his forehead, right at the temple, showing me where. “Detectors went off, broken glass. Came running, found this Cul-de-Sac passenger here undergoing convulsions. Rising from his bindings, thrashing around. Pulled himself loose from everything, went smack against the housing window. Broke it. It’s a very fast death.”

“Matrix intrusion,” Roacher said.

The skin of my scalp tightened. I turned to him.

“Tell me about that.”

He shrugged. “Once in a long while someone in the storage circuits gets to feeling footloose, and finds a way out and goes roaming the ship. Looking for a body to jack into, that’s what they’re doing. Jack into me, jack into Katkat, even jack into you, Captain. Anybody handy, just so they can feel flesh around them again. Jacked into this one here and something went wrong.”

The probing fingers, yes. The silent voice. Help me .

“I never heard of anyone jacking into a passenger in suspension,” Dismas said.

“No reason why not,” said Roacher.

“What’s the good? Still stuck in a housing, you are. Frozen down, that’s no better than staying matrix.”

“Five to two it was matrix intrusion,” Roacher said, glaring.

“Done,” Dismas said. Gavotte laughed and came in on the bet. So too did sinuous little Katkat, taking the other side. Rio de Rio, who had not spoken a word to anyone in his last six voyages, snorted and gestured obscenely at both factions.

I felt like an idle spectator. To regain some illusion of command I said, “If there’s a matrix loose, it’ll show up on ship inventory. Dismas, check with the intelligence on duty and report to me. Katkat, Gavotte, finish cleaning up this mess and seal everything off. Then I want your reports in the log and a copy to me. I’ll be in my quarters. There’ll be further instructions later. The missing matrix, if that’s what we have on our hands, will be identified, located, and recaptured.”

Roacher grinned at me. I thought he was going to lead a round of cheers.

I turned and mounted my tracker, and rode it following the lights, yellow, blue, green, back up through the maze of decks and out to the Eye.

As I entered my cabin something touched my mind and a silent voice said, “Please help me.”

Carefully I shut the door behind me, locked it, loaded the privacy screens. The captain’s cabin aboard a Megaspore starship of the Service is a world in itself, serene, private, immense. In mine, spiral galaxies whirled and sparkled on the walls. I had a stream, a lake, a silver waterfall beyond it. The air was soft and glistening. At a touch of my hand I could have light, music, scent, color, from any one of a thousand hidden orifices. Or I could turn the walls translucent and let the luminous splendor of starspace come flooding through.

Only when I was fully settled in, protected and insulated and comfortable, did I say, “All right. What are you?”

“You promise you won’t report me to the captain?”

“I don’t promise anything.”

“You will help me, though?” The voice seemed at once frightened and insistent, urgent and vulnerable.

“How can I say? You give me nothing to work with.”

“I’ll tell you everything. But first you have to promise not to call the captain.”

I debated with myself for a moment and opted for directness.

“I am the captain,” I said.

“No!”

“Can you see this room? What do you think it is? Crew quarters? The scullery?”

I felt turbulent waves of fear coming from my invisible companion. And then nothing. Was it gone? Then I had made a mistake in being so forthright. This phantom had to be confined, sealed away, perhaps destroyed, before it could do more damage. I should have been more devious. And also I knew that I would regret it in another way if it had slipped away: I was taking a certain pleasure in being able to speak with someone—something—that was neither a member of my crew nor an omnipotent, contemptuous artificial intelligence.

“Are you still here?” I asked after a while.

Silence.

Gone, I thought. Sweeping through the Sword of Orion like a gale of wind. Probably down at the far end of the ship by this time.

Then, as if there had been no break in the conversation: “I just can’t believe it. Of all the places I could have gone, I had to walk right into the captain’s cabin.”

“So it seems.”

“And you’re actually the captain?”

“Yes. Actually.”

Another pause.

“You seem so young,” it said. “For a captain.”

“Be careful,” I told it.

“I didn’t mean anything by that, Captain.” With a touch of bravado, even defiance, mingling with uncertainty and anxiety. “Captain sir .”

Looking toward the ceiling, where shining resonator nodes shimmered all up and down the spectrum as slave-light leaped from junction to junction along the illuminator strands, I searched for a glimpse of it, some minute electromagnetic clue. But there was nothing.

I imagined a web of impalpable force, a dancing will-o’-the-wisp, flitting erratically about the room, now perching on my shoulder, now clinging to some fixture, now extending itself to fill every open space: an airy thing, a sprite, playful and capricious. Curiously, not only was I unafraid but I found myself strongly drawn to it. There was something strangely appealing about this quick vibrating spirit, so bright with contradictions. And yet it had caused the death of one of my passengers.

“Well?” I said. “You’re safe here. But when are you going to tell me what you are?”

“Isn’t that obvious? I’m a matrix.”

“Go on.”

“A free matrix, a matrix on the loose. A matrix who’s in big trouble. I think I’ve hurt someone. Maybe killed him.”

“One of the passengers?” I said.

“So you know?”

“There’s a dead passenger, yes. We’re not sure what happened.”

“It wasn’t my fault. It was an accident.”

“That may be,” I said. “Tell me about it. Tell me everything.”

“Can I trust you?”

“More than anyone else on this ship.”

“But you’re the captain.”

“That’s why,” I said.

7.

Her name was Leeleaine, but she wanted me to call her Vox. That means “voice,” she said, in one of the ancient languages of Earth. She was seventeen years old, from Jaana Head, which is an island off the coast of West Palabar on Kansas Four. Her father was a glass-farmer, her mother operated a gravity hole, and she had five brothers and three sisters, all of them much older than she was.

“Do you know what that’s like, captain? Being the youngest of nine? And both your parents working all the time, and your cross-parents just as busy? Can you imagine? And growing up on Kansas Four, where it’s a thousand kilometers between cities, and you aren’t even in a city, you’re on an island ?”

“I know something of what that’s like,” I said.

“Are you from Kansas Four too?”

“No,” I said. “Not from Kansas Four. But a place much like it, I think.”

She spoke of a troubled, unruly childhood, full of loneliness and anger. Kansas Four, I have heard, is a beautiful world, if you are inclined to find beauty in worlds: a wild and splendid place, where the sky is scarlet and the bare basalt mountains rise in the east like a magnificent black wall. But to hear Vox speak of it, it was squalid, grim, bleak. For her it was a loveless place where she led a loveless life. And yet she told me of pale violet seas aglow with brilliant yellow fish, and trees that erupted with a shower of dazzling crimson fronds when they were in bloom, and warm rains that sang in the air like harps. I was not then so long in heaven that I had forgotten the beauty of seas or trees or rains, which by now are nothing but hollow words to me. Yet Vox had found her life on Kansas Four so hateful that she had been willing to abandon not only her native world but her body itself. That was a point of kinship between us: I too had given up my world and my former life, if not my actual flesh. But I had chosen heaven, and the Service. Vox had volunteered to exchange one landcrawling servitude for another.