Charles Sheffield - The Mind Pool

“Sorudan! The light!” The Margrave could not run. He turned back and took three steps down the stairs. Then he groaned, clapped his hands to his ears, and headed again for the surface. Blind to any possible danger from Scavengers, he ran headlong across the cultivated fields. Behind him the skylights of the lab shone brightly and brighter, while from within an ethereal melody rose ever higher and more beautiful.

The Margrave was seventy yards away and beginning to feel safe when the explosion came.

In his desire to destroy the source of the Artefacts and his thirst for revenge on King Bester, Luther Brachis had indulged in massive overkill. Everything within a hundred yards of the Needler lab was vaporized. A vast crater formed in the outer layers of Delmarva Town.

No trace of the Margrave was ever found. But in his family’s religion it was taught that the reward for a life well-lived was the separation of body and soul. Upon a true believer’s death, the spiritual essence was released from all corporeal bonds. The body’s component atoms would then be free to ride the swirling winds of Earth, in their endless flight about the turning globe.

The founders of Fujitsu’s ancient religion, had they been around to observe the manner of his death, would have judged that fate had granted him his fondest wish.

The Margrave, had he been around to do so, would have disagreed most strongly.

On the good days, Tatty could not resist reaching out to Chan and hugging him. He might have the body of a grown man, agile and powerful, but inside he was a little Boy. And like a little boy, he was proud of any new thing that he could do and eager to show it off to Tatty.

But then there were the bad days. Chan would say nothing, cooperate in nothing, was interested in nothing. Tatty wanted to reach out and shake him until he was forced to take notice.

This was a bad day. One of the worst. Tatty told herself to keep calm. She could not afford to lose control — not with another Stimulator session due in an hour. She had to be mentally ready then to comfort Chan and ease him through the time of agony and misery. But for the moment …

“Chan! I won’t warn you again. You concentrate, and you look at that display. See? That’s Earth. You were born on Earth. So was I. These are pictures of parts of Earth. Chan! Stop gawping — look at the display.

Chan stared vacantly at the three-dimensional display for a second or two, then began to study the fine hair that grew on his forearm and wrist. Tatty swore to herself — cussing aloud to Chan was strictly forbidden — and slammed down the button that advanced the presentation. Useful or not, they had to work their way through the whole program. Not one word going in. Tatty had schooled herself to keep her comments internal. It’s all too abstract for him.

Whose stupid idea was it to give him astronomy lessons when he can’t even pick out the letters of the alphabet? He’s supposed to absorb at an unconscious level, is he? Sure — some hopes! He isn’t a bit interested in the lessons and he never remembers them. Waste of time — his time, my time … but what else is there for me to do, stuck out here? I should be on Earth … if only I could get away from this awful place. Oh, God, Earth — there it is. Just look at those beautiful pictures. Seas and skies and rivers and forests and cities. If only I were there now, back in my apartment, just me and …if Esro Mondrian were here I would kill him . … heartless, treacherous, monstrous, ruthless …

The lesson went on, independent of Tatty’s misery and Chan’s indifference. The display toured the whole solar system, bit by bit, in gorgeous, three-dimensional images. Tatty might see Horus as the worst rat-hole of the solar system, but the training equipment was first-rate. The displays moved viewers into them, to see, hear, and sense everything as though they were present at each location. Chan and Tatty floated together down to the surface of Venus. The dense atmosphere around them burned and corroded, and every boulder and jutting rock shimmered in the intense heat. Somehow, the closed surface domes supported their four hundred million people.

Onward, inward, inside the orbit or Mercury, all the way to the Vulcan Nexus and beyond: the solar photosphere flamed and erupted in savage storms of light. Close enough to touch. Tatty shrank back in real fear, although she knew it was no more than a display. Chan stared at it — at everything — impassively.

Onward, outward, carried past Earth to the thriving Mars colonies. There was a sense of enormous excitement here. Zero hour was only a few years away — the magic moment when sufficient volatiles would have been shipped in through an outsized Mattin Link system and a human could survive on the surface without the use of breathing equipment. Already the atmosphere was almost as dense as on the top of Mount Everest. Defying basic biology, daredevil young people ventured out onto the surface every day, without oxygen or air pumps. They were brought back — the lucky ones — unconscious and suffering from extreme anoxia.

Willy-nilly, Chan and Tatty were swept out farther from the Sun, out to the hive of the Asteroid Belt where a hundred minor planets formed the commercial and political power house of the solar system. From there it was outward again, to the huge industrial bases on Europa, Titan, and Oberon. Equipped with Monitor headsets, Chan and Tatty plunged deep into the icy ammonia slush below the deep atmosphere of Uranus, to the infernal region where the Ergas — the Ergatandro-morph Constructs — worked tirelessly on the fusion plants and the Uranian Link system. The work was still three centuries from completion. Disturbingly, the Erga slaves already gave evidence that they were developing their own complex culture.

With the survey of the old solar system approaching its end, Tatty halted the program and stared at Chan. Nothing. Plants and planets, science and society, all left him equally unmoved. Sighing, she signalled for the lesson to continue.

They leaped, a trillion kilometers into the outer darkness. The monstrous bulk of the Oort Harvester was at work here, a world-sized cylinder lumbering along through the hundred billion members of the cometary cloud. Slow and tireless, at home a tenth of a lightyear from Sol, the Harvester was hunting down bodies rich in simple organic molecules, converting them to sugars, fats, and proteins, and Linking the products back to feed the inner system.

A final solar-system leap. Chan and Tatty skipped to the quiet outpost of the Dry Tortugas: arid, volatile-free shards of rock that marked the gravitational boundary of Sol’s domain. Past this point, any matter had to be shared with other stars. Sun itself was a chilly pinprick of light, while temperatures hovered a few degrees above absolute zero. Tatty stared in awe at the billion-year-old metal tetrahedra, enigmatic relics left by a race old before humanity was young.

The lesson halted. “ Questions?” said a polite voice.

Tatty glanced at Chan’s impassive face. Again he was studying the hair on his wrist. “No.” She spoke for both of them.

“Then we will continue.”

So far the lesson had been a general one, designed to teach Chan the structure and varied economies of the solar system. Now it would be specific to Pursuit Team training.

The display changed scale again. Far beyond the boundaries of the solar system lay the members of the Stellar Group.

“First, the overview.” The region of accessible space was a knobby and dimpled sphere, fifty-eight lightyears across and centered on Sol. The Perimeter formed a fuzzy outer boundary where the probe ships, limited at best to a tenth of light speed, expanded the accessible region by up to ten lightyears a century. Humans had never encountered another species possessing the Martin Link. The Perimeter would remain roughly spherical, unless and until — people had talked of it for centuries — some probe ship at the Perimeter met a ship from a second bubble, blown by another species who had found the secret of the Mattin Link for themselves.