Robert Silverberg - The Secret Sharer

That was the second jolt, the stronger one, that Dismas and I had felt, when Vox, selecting a passenger at random, suddenly, impulsively, had slipped herself inside his brain. She had realized her mistake at once. The passenger, lost in whatever dreams may come to the suspended, reacted to her intrusion with wild terror. Convulsions swept him; he rose, clawing at the equipment that sustained his life, trying desperately to evict the succubus that had penetrated him. In this frantic struggle he smashed the case of his housing and died. Vox, fleeing, frightened, careered about the ship in search of refuge, encountered me standing by the screen in the Eye, and made an abortive attempt to enter my mind. But just then the death of the passenger registered on 49 Henry Henry’s sensors and when the intelligence made contact with me to tell me of the emergency Vox fled again, and hovered dolefully until I returned to my cabin. She had not meant to kill the passenger, she said. She was sorry that he had died. She felt some embarrassment, now, and fear. But no guilt. She rejected guilt for it almost defiantly. He had died? Well, so he had died. That was too bad. But how could she have known any such thing was going to happen? She was only looking for a body to take refuge in. Hearing that from her, I had a sense of her as someone utterly unlike me, someone volatile, unstable, perhaps violent. And yet I felt a strange kinship with her, even an identity. As though we were two parts of the same spirit; as though she and I were one and the same. I barely understood why.

“And what now?” I asked. “You say you want help. How?”

“Take me in.”

“What?”

“Hide me. In you. If they find me, they’ll eradicate me. You said so yourself, that it could be done, that I could be detected, contained, eradicated. But it won’t happen if you protect me.”

“I’m the captain ,” I said, astounded.

“Yes.”

“How can I—”

“They’ll all be looking for me. The intelligences, the crewmen. It scares them, knowing there’s a matrix loose. They’ll want to destroy me. But if they can’t find me, they’ll start to forget about me after a while. They’ll think I’ve escaped into space, or something. And if I’m jacked into you, nobody’s going to be able to find me.”

“I have a responsibility to—”

“Please,” she said. “I could go to one of the others, maybe. But I feel closest to you. Please. Please.”

“Closest to me?”

“You aren’t happy. You don’t belong. Not here, not anywhere. You don’t fit in, any more than I did on Kansas Four. I could feel it the moment I first touched your mind. You’re a new captain, right? And the others on board are making it hard for you. Why should you care about them ? Save me. We have more in common than you do with them. Please? You can’t just let them eradicate me. I’m young. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. All I want is to get to Cul-de-Sac and be put in the body that’s waiting for me there. A new start, my first start, really. Will you?”

“Why do you bother asking permission? You can simply enter me through my jack whenever you want, can’t you?”

“The last one died,” she said.

“He was in suspension. You didn’t kill him by entering him. It was the surprise, the fright. He killed himself by thrashing around and wrecking his housing.”

“Even so,” said Vox. “I wouldn’t try that again, an unwilling host. You have to say you’ll let me, or I won’t come in.”

I was silent.

“Help me?” she said.

“Come,” I told her.

It was just like any other jacking: an electrochemical mind-to-mind bond, a linkage by way of the implant socket at the base of my spine. The sort of thing that any two people who wanted to make communion might do. There was just one difference, which was that we didn’t use a jack. We skipped the whole intricate business of checking bandwiths and voltages and selecting the right transformer-adapter. She could do it all, simply by matching evoked potentials. I felt a momentary sharp sensation and then she was with me.

“Breathe,” she said. “Breathe real deep. Fill your lungs. Rub your hands together. Touch your cheeks. Scratch behind your left ear. Please. Please. It’s been so long for me since I’ve felt anything.”

Her voice sounded the same as before, both real and unreal. There was no substance to it, no density of timbre, no sense that it was produced by the vibrations of vocal cords atop a column of air. Yet it was clear, firm, substantial in some essential way, a true voice in all respects except that there was no speaker to utter it. I suppose that while she was outside me she had needed to extend some strand of herself into my neural system in order to generate it. Now that was unnecessary. But I still perceived the voice as originating outside me, even though she had taken up residence within.

She overflowed with needs.

“Take a drink of water,” she urged. “Eat something. Can you make your knuckles crack? Do it, oh, do it! Put your hand between your legs and squeeze. There’s so much I want to feel. Do you have music here? Give me some music, will you? Something loud, something really hard.”

I did the things she wanted. Gradually she grew more calm.

I was strangely calm myself. I had no special awareness then of her presence within me, no unfamiliar pressure in my skull, no slitherings along my spine. There was no mingling of her thoughtstream and mine. She seemed not to have any way of controlling the movements or responses of my body. In these respects our contact was less intimate than any ordinary human jacking communion would have been. But that, I would soon discover, was by her choice. We would not remain so carefully compartmentalized for long.

“Is it better for you now?” I asked.

“I thought I was going to go crazy. If I didn’t start feeling something again soon.”

“You can feel things now?”

“Through you, yes. Whatever you touch, I touch.”

“You know I can’t hide you for long. They’ll take my command away if I’m caught harboring a fugitive. Or worse.”

“You don’t have to speak out loud to me any more,” she said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Just send it. We have the same nervous system now.”

“You can read my thoughts?” I said, still aloud.

“Not really. I’m not hooked into the higher cerebral centers. But I pick up motor, sensory stuff. And I get subvocalizations. You know what those are? I can hear your thoughts if you want me to. It’s like being in communion. You’ve been in communion, haven’t you?”

“Once in a while.”

“Then you know. Just open the channel to me. You can’t go around the ship talking out loud to somebody invisible, you know. Send me something. It isn’t hard.”

“Like this?” I said, visualizing a packet of verbal information sliding through the channels of my mind.

“You see? You can do it!”

“Even so,” I told her. “You still can’t stay like this with me for long. You have to realize that.”

She laughed. It was unmistakable, a silent but definite laugh. “You sound so serious. I bet you’re still surprised you took me in in the first place.”

“I certainly am. Did you think I would?”

“Sure I did. From the first moment. You’re basically a very kind person.”

“Am I, Vox?”

“Of course. You just have to let yourself do it.” Again the silent laughter. “I don’t even know your name. Here I am right inside your head and I don’t know your name.”

“Adam.”

“That’s a nice name. Is that an Earth name?”

“An old Earth name, yes. Very old.”

“And are you from Earth?” she asked.