Jack Chalker - Priam's Lens

He stared at the commander. “What do you mean, `this time’?”

“Well, it’s not exactly done all the time, nor does it need to be. We can usually use robots, after all.”

“Maybe you ought to use a robot this time, too,” Harker suggested. “What can I add?”

“On-the-spot evaluation, my boy! Don’t worry so much!” He paused a moment. “Say—you want to see what’s going on in there?”

“Huh?”

“Sure. Have a seat. It’s been a real battle of wits with Madame Krill in there, but even she doesn’t have everything we have. Come! Sit! Visual, security code A seven stroke three tilde bravo two level. Show digest.”

The wall opposite the utilitarian couch in the commander’s two-room quarters flickered on, and for the first time Harker saw the inside of the passenger quarters aboard the Odysseus. It was quite luxurious compared to Navy ships, more like a passenger liner for the very rich in its appointments and comforts. The view was from above and slowly proceeded down a corridor until it opened into a major lounge. Top of the line robotic bar, what looked like real fruit on the tables in tasteful bowls, very plush seating, and at the far end a screen and stage area.

“They have shows? Or does the old lady sing for them?”

Park chuckled. “Want to see the old bat? Visual—show us Anna Marie Sotoropolis, please.”

The scene jumped, and then settled. The scene was the same, only now there were people in there; it clearly had been a bit busier and had not yet been cleaned and freshened. There was only one person visible, a tiny figure sitting in the center relative to the screen and perhaps twenty percent back. She seemed to be listening to something, but there was not at the moment any audio.

“She does this a lot,” Park told Harker. “Sits there for hours and listens to recordings of her old opera gigs. Never visuals, never performances just audio. I think she really loves the music but she can’t stand to be re-minded of what she once looked like. You’ll see why in a moment. Ah—there!”

Even as somebody used to and victimized by the ravages of space, Gene Harker gasped at the sight. She was a mass of tumors, ugly, multicolored, hanging so densely in places they looked like bunches of grapes. The head was deeply scarred, and the face—the face was certainly human, but it looked like that of someone who’d been dead for quite some time, buried, and exhumed. The arms looked like a skeleton’s arms, just brittle purplish skin over clear bone. She was among the most repulsive sights he’d even seen, even on a battlefield.

“She’s built into the cozy,” Park told him. “The integration’s the best money can buy. How much of her is machine and how much isn’t it’s impossible to tell, but you got to figure that the horror you can see is all her. Skull and bones infected by pus bags. Makes you puke, huh? Little wonder she goes out only wrapped from head to whatever she uses for feet.”

Harker looked away in disgust. “She said she was over nine hundred years old.”

“Probably true. And probably she’s over two hundred and fifty chrono, which makes her one of the oldest living humans in either measure. You wonder why she hangs on, don’t you? She goes to mass every day, but she sure still hangs on.”

“And she doesn’t care if she’s seen like—that on board?”

“Oh, yeah, she cares. But it’s her ship, as it were. At least, she’s the ranking family member. When the others don’t need it, she goes in, shuts off all access, removes the stuff so that she can plug into a maintenance and rehab port built in under that place in the deck, and gets her blood changed, her organs checked or worse, her biomechanical parts regenerated as needed, and so on. When they’re close to that old, there’s usually so much biomachine in the brain you don’t even have a big personality any more, just a lot of data, but she’s still in there, somewhere. Otherwise she’d never bother listening to the old performances. She has them, after all, entirely recorded as data in her head. No, when she’s there, she’s eighteen or twenty again, on stage at some famous opera hall, singing the role of Carmen, or Desdemona, or whatever. Kind of sad, really.”

“Anything on the others?”

“Yeah. We have to deactivate these microprobes after a little while, which means completely deactivating, when Krill makes her sweeps, but we have plenty of spares. That’s the negative of sitting in one place so long when your opposition owns the dock, the communication lines, the service department, you name it. We can make ’em a lot faster than she can find and kill them. My techs play a little game with her much of the time. Her ego says she outsmarts us; our egos don’t come into play because we either get transmissions or we don’t. Visual—latest briefing, please.”

The scene changed again, less sad, more menacing. There was N’Gana, enormous and mean-looking, blacker than night and in combat fatigues that made him look like he was about to single-handedly overthrow a small planetary government. His aide, or batman as he was called in the services and by the former Ranger colonel, Alan Mogutu, looked far different—light and reflecting his half-Hamitic, half-East Indian heritage. Mogutu didn’t look at all imposing even in the same kind of fatigues, but he was a nasty fighter who stayed with N’Gana not only out of loyalty but because they were complementary parts of one mercenary machine.

In much lighter, more casual wear was Admiral Juanita Krill, a woman who was not only tall, taller than Harker’s one-fifty centimeters, but also large-boned. She wasn’t so much fat as imposing, and the fact that she had a bony crest going from above the eyes back and over the skull and terminating near the back of her neck made her look almost alien. The crest was actually a fairly common effect, as were the tumors, but on her it didn’t look like a deformity. It, well, worked.

She wasn’t known for her brawn or fighting abilities, though. She was known as The Confederacy’s greatest expert on planting and finding eavesdropping and other such devices. In an age when these might be nanomachines created in the food preparation modules and inserted in your morning coffee, this was impressive. So, of course, was Commander Park.

“You worked with her, I believe,” Harker commented.

Park nodded. “I was one of her proteges. She made me an offer when she left the service to do all the things we wouldn’t allow her to do and get better paid for it, but I turned it down. I was impressed that she was here. I actually sent her an open invitation to get together in town or up there or anywhere else to talk about old times but I never got a reply. Of course, she’s prohibited from all service facilities and installations, but there’s plenty of places beyond the Cuch. Too bad.”

“The others?”

“The little twitch who looks like a chicken is van der Voort, you know the good Father Chicanis, the lady who looks like an Oriental bowling ball is Doctor Takamura, our physicist, and the thing slithering in that looks like a furry snake with pop-up eyes and sharp pointy teeth is our Pooka. Last, but not least, the fairly pretty lady with no growths and her own hair is Doctor Katarina Socolov, a recent graduate of Mendelev University who specializes in cultural anthropology of all things. You make any sense of the group?”

“I’ve been trying. You?”

“I think they’re going to attempt a landing on a Titan world. In fact, I’d stake my professional reputation, which is nonexistent for the most part, that they are going to attempt a landing on Helena, the Karas family’s home in the pre-invasion days.”

“But that was two, three generations ago! What could possibly be left there for them now?”