Charles Sheffield - The Mind Pool

“Of course I will.”

“Then when will we go?”

“Very soon. I’ll have to get special permission from Quarantine, and an exit permit, but I’ll start working on that this morning. We could be leaving Earth in three days. Can you be ready?”

“Ready?” Tatty was suddenly crying. “ Ready! Esro, if you want me I’m ready this minute. I’ve been ready for ages. If you need me, I’ll go right now, without packing one thing.”

“That’s wonderful.”

Tatty had never heard such happiness in his voice. In the darkness, she could not see his face.

The asteroids of the Egyptian Cluster form a solar system anomaly. The orbits of the cluster members share a common inclination and a perihelion distance of about three hundred million kilometers. That supports the idea that they are a cluster, although one now far dispersed spatially. They also share the common material composition of the smaller silicaceous bodies of the solar system.

And yet they are, every one, anomalous. Instead of moving in the ecliptic, like all well-behaved planetoids, their common orbital plane is inclined at an angle of nearly fifty-nine degrees to it.

The physical data for the Egyptian Cluster are given in the Appendix to the General Ephemerides of the solar system — a fair measure of their importance in the big scheme of things. But even within a minor group there is a natural pecking order. Horus, twenty kilometers across, is an asteroid low in the order, very much an undistinguished specimen. No more than a bleak wedge of dark rock, it lacks atmosphere, volatiles, regular form, useful minerals, easily accessible orbit, or any other interesting property.

It is the perfect place for privacy. Mindful of this, an isolationist (and now extinct) religious sect long ago turned Horus into a worm-riddled cheese of black silicate, hollow and tunneled and chambered. The echoing inner cavities, with their entrance corridors paradoxically reflex and convoluted, were an ideal location for assured privacy and security.

Or for incarceration.

In one of the central chambers of Horus minimally appointed as living quarters sat two men and two women: Kubo Flammarion, Chan Dalton, Tatiana Sinai-Peres, and Leah Rainbow.

Flammarion had been talking for a long time, while the other three listened with varying degrees of attention. Chan Dalton fidgeted and played with the plate and fork sitting in front of him. Tatty stared ahead with a dull lifeless face the color of muddy chalk, while her hands trembled whenever she lifted them from the table. Alone of the three, Leah was following every word that Flammarion said.

“But you can’t .” Her face was frowning and furious, and she spoke standard Solar so badly and so angrily that Flammarion could only just understand her. “You absolutely can’t. Don’t you understand what I said? I’ve looked after Chan since he was four years old, ever since his mother sold him to Bozzie. If I’m not with him he’s lost — totally.”

“He’ll be lost at first.” Kubo Flammarion looked no happier than Leah. “Just at first, see, but then he’ll get used to things and he’ll be all right. Princess Tatiana will look after him very well.”

“Chan like Tatty,” said Dalton. It was the most complex statement he had uttered since they arrived on Horus.

“How can she look after him?” exploded Leah. “Look at her, for God’s sake. She’s an addict, as bad as I’ve seen. She can’t look after herself .”

Tatty braced herself in her chair and turned to face Leah. “How do you think I feel about this? Do you think I want to be out here? I don’t. I don’t want to baby-sit that — that overgrown moron you brought with you. I don’t want any of it. I just want to go back home — back to Earth, away from this god-awful, god-damned, god-deserted place.” She leaned forward and buried her face in her trembling hands.

“Moron!” shouted Leah. “What do you mean, moron? Chan’s as good — ”

“Not now.” Flammarion waved his hand across Leah’s face to interrupt her. “Don’t hassle Tatty — you can see she’s not herself. Have some sympathy with her. She’s in Paradox withdrawal.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been there. I know. Believe me, all she can think about is how bad she needs a shot.”

“Shot for Tatty,” said Chan happily. “Tatty’s my friend.” He went across and hugged her.

Flammarion offered him a puzzled stare. The tests that had assigned Chan the intelligence of a two-year-old were imprecise in many ways, and their overall conclusion was just an average of many factors. Sometimes Chan seemed to understand nothing that was said to him. At other times he would fix his gaze on the speaker and nod intelligently, as though he was listening hard and taking in every word. Lean said that was no more than a protective coloration, something that she had painstakingly taught Chan to let him survive in the tough environment of the Gallimaufries. But it was hard to accept that someone who seemed to listen so intelligently could be understanding nothing that was said to him. Leah’s explanation had only halfway persuaded Flammarion.

“Anyway, I won’t leave Chan, and you can’t make me,” said Leah, standing up from the table. “You want me to become a candidate for your stupid Pursuit Teams? Then you just try and force me. But if you make me leave here, I promise you I won’t cooperate on anything.”

Flammarion wriggled in nervous frustration. He had been carefully coached in the next part by Mondrian, but he was not sure he could carry it off. “How much do you care for Chan, Leah?”

“More than anything or anyone.” Leah went to the blond youth’s side. “He’s all I care about. I worry more about what happens to Chan than to anyone on Earth, or off it, or in all your wonderful ‘Stellar Group.’ You just asked a really stupid question.” She put her arms possessively around Chan.

“It wasn’t really a question.” Flammarion sniffed. “I thought that’s what you’d say. Now you listen to me, Leah Rainbow. In all your years of looking after Chan and loving him, didn’t it ever make you sad to know that Chan would not develop as a normal human being? I’m not talking about the physical side, I mean his mental maturity.”

“Of course it did. It broke my heart.”

“And didn’t you grieve, to think that he’d always be like this, and never know the world that we know?”

“I cried myself to sleep over Chan, a thousand times.”

Flammarion looked uneasily across at Chan Dalton. It made him feel very uncomfortable, referring to Chan as though he was not even there; although surety Leah must know what she was doing, and Chan didn’t comprehend what they were saying about him.

But the questions were having a profound effect on Leah Rainbow herself, and Chan noticed that. He put his arms around her in turn, and squeezed her to him.

“You silly old man.” Leah’s eyes were blinking away tears. “I’ve wept more for Chan than I’ve ever wept for myself. I’ve often thought I’d trade everything I had, sell my body, give my whole life — if it could somehow make Chan grow up. I still feel that way, I would do anything. Only now I’m old enough to know that it’s a hopeless wish.”

“Hopeless, is it? Then you listen to me, Leah Rainbow.” Flammarion leaned forward and lowered his voice confidentially, although the room held the only people within seventy million kilometers. “People on Earth don’t know everything, even though there’s many as thinks they do. So you listen. A few years ago, a man named Tolkov built a gadget out on Oberon Station. He intended it for use in working with alien forms, ones who might be intelligent but who seemed like borderline cases. It worked pretty well, and people called his invention a Tolkov Stimulator. Just a few models were made, and their use was pretty much prohibited for use on humans. The only exception is in case of Stellar Group emergencies. You see, the Stimulator heightens the level of mental activity. Sort of like some of the mental stimulant drugs — except that it does it permanently.”