Charles Sheffield - The Mind Pool

What is my name?

More information must be provided before that question can be answered.

“Damn. You know, this thing could be addictive.” Brachis forced himself to move away from the console. “But I can’t stay here much longer. I’ve agreed to perform a guard review.”

“The guards here, at Sargasso Dump? That sounds like a barrel of laughs.”

“Knock it off, Phoebe. These people gave their lives — more than their lives — for System Security. They deserve better than the politicians are willing to give.”

“Which is nothing. Sorry, Commander. This place gets to me after a while.”

“So come watch the review.” Brachis was studying her eyes. “How long have you been at it here, without a rest?”

“All — hmm. Twenty-one hours? Nearly twenty-two.”

“Then you take a break, and come and watch the review. After that you have a meal and a rest. This time that’s an order, Dr. Willard.”

“I hear you.”

Brachis watched as Phoebe Willard went through the sequence to end the interaction with the hidden Construct. As she sealed all access points to the globe filled with liquid nitrogen, it suggested another idea to Luther Brachis.

“Do you have all your question-and-answer sequences stored?’

“Commander, what do you think I am? One of your unfortunate guards? Of course I do.”

“Good. I want a copy to take away with me and study.”

“The best of luck sorting it out. I couldn’t see any pattern. I’ll give you the record, but we’ll have to go over to the main control area to pick it up. I didn’t want to leave it on the computer here when I was away.”

“That’s not like you.” Brachis had caught a change in her voice. “Worried?”

“I guess so. But I can’t see any reason. I really have been ultra-careful. I didn’t just go by the book — I went way past the book.”

’Keep it that way. I have the same feeling myself. When Livia Morgan made those Constructs she took a step in a direction that no one has ever travelled before.”

They were passing through the outer nitrogen shell, emerging into the quiet graveyard of the Dump. A couple of hundred meters from them, drifting along in its own leisurely orbit, a massive dumbbell turned slowly end over end. Brachis paused to watch.

“A pulsed fusion ship built for a human crew. That’s ancient. It was the latest thing until the Mattin Link, then — instant obsolescence. I’ve never seen one before in the Dump. The place is full of stuff like this.”

“Oddities, you mean?” Phoebe was trailing after Luther Brachis, turning now and then to stare at the quiet bulk of the green balloon behind. “I know. When I’m not working I go cruising around. There’s a million of them, things you never see anywhere else. And so old. It’s a ridiculous thought, but as you move around the Dump you have the feeling that every great failure of the solar system has quietly made its own way here. People as well as equipment. It s scary.”

“I know what you mean. ‘And all dead years draw thither, and all disastrous things.’ ”

“Why, Commander.” Phoebe wanted to change the gloomy mood that seemed to be creeping up on both of them. “Do I detect a quotation — and one that’s not from Von Clausewitz’s On War? Someone has been civilizing you. And you’re looking different. What’s happening to the old Luther Brachis?”

But he would not respond. He made another subject switch of his own. “The trouble is, there’s no explanation for the Construct behavior that we’ve been finding.”

Phoebe sighed. No joking today. “That’s not true. I can suggest two explanations.”

“Let’s hear them.”

“All right. I don’t much like either of them. But Number One, the Construct has been damaged to the point where it is not functioning in any consistent way. In other words, it’s crazy.”

“Then it’s in the right place.”

“No insulting remarks about Sargasso Dump guards, you said. If I’m not allowed to say they’re crazy, nor should you.”

“Point made. All right, Phoebe. What’s Number Two?”

“It’s functioning just as it was intended to.”

“And we can’t understand it. Are you saying that the Morgan Constructs are a lot smarter and more complex than anyone ever suspected?”

“I didn’t know I was. But I seem to be.”

And now Phoebe wished that the conversation had stayed with the forlorn relics of the Sargasso Dump.

“No!” The scream boomed through the rocky chambers, resonating on and on. “No, no, no, NO!”

“Chan! Wait for me.” Tatty was running as fast as she could, but the screams ahead of her were fading. Somehow he had escaped again, racing off through the maze of interior tunnels.

She slowed her pace. He could not get away for long, not with the Tracker to reveal his distance and direction. Even so, the folded corridors of Horus made the search a tedious business. And it was not only the corridors themselves. Ten generations of burrowing and excavating had left behind an astonishing legacy of debris: broken tunneling equipment, old food synthesizers, obsolete communicators, mounds of broken supply containers. When the last members of the sect left Horus, they had found few things worth hauling back for use elsewhere. Now the whole mess formed an obstacle course, to be climbed over, moved aside, or burrowed through.

Tatty plowed on. Chan had been crying when he ran, and with the hardest part still to come she felt close to tears herself. When she caught Chan she would have to give him his medication and drag him back for a session with the Stimulator. More and more, that seemed like a pointless exercise.

She forced herself on, grimy and tired. Even before Kubo Flammarion left Horus, Chan had been getting hard to handle. He was bigger, faster, and much stronger than Tatty. Sometimes she could manage him only by using a Stunner, slowing and weakening him enough for her to catch and overpower him.

“Cha-an!” Her cracking voice echoed off rocky walls. “Chan, come on. Come back home.”

Silence. Had he found a new hiding-place? Maybe he was becoming more intelligent, just a little; or maybe it was her wishful thinking. Every day she stared into those bright blue eyes, willing them to show more understanding; every day, she was disappointed. The innocence of a two-year-old gazed back at her, unable to comprehend why the woman who fed him, dressed him, and put him to bed was the same woman who tortured him.

Tatty kept going. Most of the burrows on Horus terminated in dead ends, and after a while Chan, no matter how he tried to escape, would finish in one of them. Usually the same ones. He lacked the memory and intelligence to learn the pattern of the paths. Tatty peered at the Tracker. She was getting close. He had to be somewhere in the next chamber. She saw a pile of plastic sheets draped over powdered rock. He would be behind that, cowering brainlessly with his face pressed to the dirt. Tatty lifted the stunner and crept forward the last few yards.

He was there. Weeping.

It broke her heart to take him back to the training center. She knew she would not need the Stunner, for once she took hold of him his resistance disappeared. He allowed himself to be led along by the hand, passive and hopeless.

When he saw the Stimulator he began to cry again. She sat him in the padded seat, grimly fitted the headset and the arm attachments, and turned away as the power came on. The screams of pain when full intensity was reached were awful, but she had learned to stand those. It was later, when the treatment was over and she released Chan and tried to feed him, that Tatty always felt ready to faint. He would crouch in his chair, sweaty and panting, and look up at her pleadingly. The face was that of a tormented animal, exhausted and uncomprehending. She felt she was torturing a helpless beast, punishing it pointlessly again and again for a reason it did not understand — would never be able to understand.