Charles Sheffield - The Mind Pool

The weather was foul, the night dark, and Brachis had been hurrying along with less man his usual caution. He realized his mistake when his feet were yanked abruptly from under him, and he went skidding flat on his back down a steep slope. At the bottom he tried to stand up. He felt a loop of rope tight around his ankles.

“Gotcher!” said a gruff voice. A shielded lamp shone into his eyes.

Brachis straightened up slowly and carefully. There were five of them. Four were dressed in dark, mottled clothes that blended well into the vegetation patterns of the surface. The fifth man, obscenely fat, wore a sequined robe and carried an ornate mace over his shoulder like a club. Knives and grinning teeth flashed in the lamplight. The men moved to form a small circle around Brachis. He recalled Bester’s warning. “Never forget: the surface is dangerous. I don’t mean the local patrols — I’m talking about the Scavvies.”

“Scavengers, is it?” growled Brachis, using low Earth-tongue. “What you want, then? Money, trade crystals, I got both.”

“A bit more than that, squire.” It was the fat man, smiling amiably. “Don’t you think so, boys?”

“Do a deal, then? I got friends.”

“I know you do. Good friends.” The man pointed the mace at Brachis. “I know you, see. There’s people up aloft who’d pay good to have you back — ’specially when they’ve had a few of your fingers and toes to show I mean business.”

Brachis had recognized that gross shape and oily voice. “Bozzie, we can do a deal. Listen, squire, I can get you—”

“Not Bozzie to you,” said the other man viciously. “No, and not squire, either. Off-Earth trash like you call me Your Majesty. All right, lads. Do him!”

The four came diving at him from sides and back. Luther Brachis switched to Commando mode. He smashed the larynx of the man on his left with the outer edge of his hand, at the same time back-heeling another in the testicles. He sensed a knife stabbing in at him and ducked, pivoted right, and drove into the third man’s eyes with the stiff outstretched fingers of his left hand. He kept the turn going, spinning through another hundred and eighty degrees. His extended right arm swept on like a flail. The sleeve of his combat uniform, stiffened by rapid acceleration, shattered the jaw of the fourth man. Then all were down, groveling and moaning on the wet earth.

The Duke of Bosny had seen the rapid demolition of his Scavenger force. He dropped the lamp and went waddling away across the dark field. Brachis caught him in half a dozen strides, hurled him facedown on the ground, and knelt on the huge back. He took a grip on Bozzie’s neck, forearms locked.

“All right, Your Majesty. I want some honest answers. And if you lie to me, you’ll find your Scavvies got off easy.”

“Anything! Anything.” Bozzie was trembling, quivering on the ground like a monstrous jello. “Don t hurt me. Please! Take my jewels — anything you want.”

“I want an answer. You were lying in wait for me. Did you know it was me, or was it set up for anyone who happened to come along? Remember, now, I have to have the truth.”

Bozzie hesitated. Luther Brachis tightened his grip, flattening the windpipe in the gross neck.

“No!” Bozzie gave a whistling scream. “I’ll tell you. We saw you when you first came up on the surface, and I recognized you then. We watched you go into Fujitsu’s Needler lab, and decided to wait for you until you came out.”

“That the truth?”

“It is, it is. For God’s sake, don’t hurt me. It’s the truth.”

Brachis nodded. “I believe you. Sorry, Bozzie. That was the wrong answer. It means you don’t have any more information for me.”

He shifted his grip, moved his hands to lock his own arms, and twisted. Bozzie’s neck cracked sharply. The great hulk jerked, shivered, and lay silent.

Luther Brachis did not give the body a second look. He went to each of the other four in turn, breaking necks cleanly and effortlessly.

He straightened up. The whole episode had not lasted more than two minutes. He thought of rolling the bodies down into an irrigation ditch, and decided against it. Scavvie fights on the surface must be common enough, and this would look like just another one — a bit more notable than usual, perhaps, because the Duke of Bosny was one of the victims.

Brachis brushed mud off his uniform and hurried on towards the tunnel entrance. Already he had begun the process of self-discipline needed to put the incident into the back of his mind. He was determined not to let it ruin the rest of the evening, even though he told himself, with a mocking self-awareness, that he was behaving totally illogically. He should be worrying about the possibility that he had somehow left clues to his identity on one of the bodies.

But all that seemed unimportant. What was important was the need to get to a certain apartment on the fifty-fifth level.

Was he crazy? He must be. Here he was, after only two meetings, rushing to a tryst with Godiva Lomberd as though she were an innocent virgin and this was his first romance. And it was not as though she would not wait if he were late. There was no questionable outcome for this rendezvous, no uncertainty, no doubt about what they were going to do, no danger of rejection. It was a wholly commercial transaction, arranged by money and controlled by lust, the sordid temporary purchase of a woman’s body.

Luther Brachis could tell himself all that. It made no difference. He was going to meet Godiva Lomberd again. And for the moment nothing else mattered.

The rings were all of different sizes and colors; the cylinder tapered from a blunt point at the top down to a thick base. The rings would all fit onto it only if they were placed there in the correct sequence, largest to smallest.

Chan Dalton was sitting on the floor, hunched over the toy. His forehead, normally unlined, was wrinkled with effort. He was picking up the rings one after another, studying each, and after a few seconds putting it down between his splayed legs. The chamber he was sitting in was cheerfully decorated in pinks and blues, with paintings and drawings around the wall and a thick soft carpet on the floor.

Chan had positioned himself in the exact center of the room. Now after long deliberation he picked up the red ring and placed it on the cylinder. A few moments later he did the same thing with the orange one. Then the yellow.

“He’s getting them right!” Tatty was whispering, although there was no chance that Chan could hear her. She and Leah Rainbow were watching him through a one-way glass set into the nursery wall. “Could he ever have done that when he was with you?”

Leah shook her head. “Never — he wouldn’t have had the slightest idea.” Her voice echoed Tatty’s excitement. When she had first returned to Horus, she and Tatty had not found it easy to talk. Finally and simultaneously, they had realized why. They were like mothers to Chan — and both the old and the new mother were jealous. Tatty had resented it when Chan ran to hug Leah as soon as he saw her, with a great yell of pleasure and excitement; Leah hated the way that Tatty organized Chan’s day, telling him what to do next, where his clothes must go, and what he had to eat. Leah still saw that as her prerogative.

The daily session with the Tolkov Stimulator had been another cause of tension between them. Leah mistook for heartlessness Tatty’s insistence that Chan could not miss a treatment, whether there was a visitor or not. She would not help Tatty to catch him, or to strap him in. And the presence of both her own and Esro Mondrian’s picture, where Chan could see them when he was in the Stimulator, perplexed her. What did Tatty think she was doing?