Sarah Zettel - Fool's War

“Not enough,” said Cohen. “It’s got to be at least twenty, or they’re not going to find enough in your bloodstream.”

She looked up at him. The transceiver tickled in her implant and the room was blurring around the edges. “Twenty hours will just about kill me.” Maximum dosage was twenty-four hours. She didn’t say that aloud. Cohen already knew that.

“I know,” Cohen said softly. Dobbs’ hands shook. Cohen took the hypo. She could barely see him now. The room was blurry and far away. Her limbs seemed to be lengthening out of all proportion.

Cohen pressed the hypo back into her hand and Dobbs, reflexively, held it to her neck. She closed her eyes and let her body drop away.

Dobbs shot free into the network in a tight ball. As soon as she broke into the path, she spread herself out flat and thin. Then, slowly, painstakingly, she began to stretch herself out as far as she could.

It was a variant on the technique that she and Lipinski had used. Fools were dense, quick things. Thin, disbursed packets were non-sentient programs; somebody’s experiment or searcher, or game. No Fool would stretch themselves until the connections between their thoughts were just threads and work to stay that way. No Fool would hold their thoughts like a human would hold their breath. Especially in the Guild Hall. No Fool would try to hide in the Guild Hall. Why would they want to?

Dobbs knew that this was her only real protection. No one would be seriously looking for her because no one expected her to try to hide in the network. If Cyril’s lie didn’t work and the Guild Masters mounted a search, she would be found. That was all there was to it. She could not totally suppress her conscious thoughts. She could run, she could even try to shred the network like a newborn on a rampage, but it wouldn’t do any good. There were over two thousand Fools who didn’t know there was anything wrong inside the Guild, and if the Guild Masters spoke against her, all of them would be after her. She could not hide from all of them. Not for eight hours. Not for eight seconds. Not even if she made it to a transmitter and managed to erase the records of her jump.

Somebody shot past overhead, grazing her outer layers. Dobbs shrank further in on herself. Fear weighted her down, pressing harder with each second that crawled past. This was wrong. This was wrong. She shouldn’t be afraid of other Fools. They were like her. They were her friends, her family. They were the root of what she was. They were the nucleus of a relationship that was supposed to last for as long as she could keep herself coherent.

It’ll be all right. It’ll be all right, she told herself in the same tones a mother might use to hush a crying child. You’ll get this straightened out. You’ll find Theodore Curran and then everything will be all right again.

Another Fool flitted by. What is going on out there? Dobbs wondered. One hour, fifteen minutes, three point two seconds had gone by. Had Cohen shown Havelock her body yet? Had they believed that she was dead? Had they held him for questioning? Was he going to be able to get to her? How much longer should she wait before she tried to get out alone?

What do I do? What can I do?

A signal shot through Dobbs’s outer layers and her whole self convulsed. She grabbed at it, stretching it out, trying to swallow it. Her memory twisted.

And she knew it was Cohen at the other end. If she had been in her body, she would have cried with relief. Another twist and she knew what he wanted her to do.

Dobbs curled in on herself, making herself into the smallest, tightest packet she could manage.

Cohen enveloped her. His touch was as gentle as it could be, but it was all encompassing. She tried to relax, but she couldn’t. She was being smothered. She couldn’t touch her surroundings. She was being moved but she didn’t know where. She had no control, no voice, nothing. She could barely think without disturbing Cohen’s own thoughts. If she tried to touch him from deep inside, she might accidently upset a memory or set off a controlling reflex. At the least, that would be painful for Cohen. At the most, that would give her presence away.

They might be meeting other Fools now. Cohen might be engaged in multi-level conversation for all she knew. This was totally unnatural. Fools in the network had no analogy for eyesight, but human’s had no analogy for the Fool’s total awareness of the immediate environment. A Fool touched everything around them with every atom of their skin. They knew what all of it was and where all of it was in relation to themselves. Now, she only knew Cohen and the surge of his inner processes. She wanted to touch them, to probe them and understand them and how they fit together. She couldn’t. She couldn’t hear. She couldn’t feel. She was deaf and dumb and all she could do was grit her whole self and try not to scream.

Were they through the Drawbridge yet? Was a Guild Master detaining them? Had an alarm sounded? What was going on? Where were they?

Jump.

All at once, Cohen was gone. Dobbs flew free into the network, right into the thick of a stream of packets. Only years of training kept her from reaching through all of them and drinking them into herself. She did touch the location ID and time. She was inside IBN repeater PO3-IBN35091-A410. The jump had taken two hours, fifty seconds.

Cohen stirred next to her. She stretched out until she reached through his outer layers and into his unprotected memories. She poured in her thanks.

In response, Cohen turned over his memories of what had happened in the hospital room. Paravel, a medical technician had done the blood-test and pronounced that there was enough residual tranquilizer in her blood to have done the job. She had no pulse, no brainwave activity. Paravel was more than willing to pronounce death. Havelock had greeted the announcement with a blank face and absolute silence. He’d done nothing more eloquent than turn on his heel and stride out of the room.

Cohen had left shortly after that to get back into the network and get Dobbs out of the Guild Hall.

That much had gone well. As for the rest of the plan, they’d know that when she was pulled back to her body. If she was pulled back to her body. If Brooke and Lonn couldn’t get the transceiver jacked into her implant, if they hadn’t been able to tell someone aboard Pasadena her cable needed to be jacked into the system, that would never happen and she’d be a fugitive in the nets until she dissipated like Verence, or until the Guild caught her again.

Dobbs tucked those thoughts back in an isolated part of herself. She reached for Cohen again.

What will you do now?

He rippled uneasily and Dobbs felt him trying to gather his nerve. Go back to the Guild and find out what the fallout of this is. Get to Brooke and Lonn and try to decide who else we can trust at this point. Try to get a search going for this Theodore Curran.

Good idea. I’ll be out of it for least two days to clear the juice out of my system. That gives Master Havelock forty-eight hours to react to what we’ve done. It might not be safe for me to come back in. They’ll have somebody watching the Pasadena’s network.

And every port it puts in at. Cohen shivered. Blast, fry and fall, Dobbs, it’s just really starting to sink in what we’re doing.

For a moment they did nothing but sit there and be afraid with each other. When the worst was over, Dobbs turned over Cohen’s memory again.

The Pasadena’s headed for the Vicarage next, and Out There after that. I’ll drop a two minute searcher into the network twenty-four hours after we dock. If you answer it, I’ll come back in immediately. If you’re don’t, well, I’ll still be outside, and no one will be able to…do anything, at least not immediately.