Charles Sheffield - The Mind Pool
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- Название:The Mind Pool
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- Издательство:Baen
- Жанр:
- Год:1993
- ISBN:0-671-72165-8
- Рейтинг книги:3 / 5. Голосов: 1
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(Humans had written thousands of papers and millions of words, seeking to analyze the outcome of such a meeting, just as in an earlier era, writers had endlessly discussed possible first contact with intelligent aliens. Like those analyses, the new papers were erudite, well-argued, and persuasive — and reached contradictory conclusions.)
In the final segment of the lesson, Chan and Tatty homed in on the home stars of the known intelligent species. The Pipe-Rillas had been found first. They were stellar neighbors, with the binary stars of Eta Cassiopeiae, only eighteen lightyears from Sol, as their home system.
Next came the Tinkers, twenty-three lightyears out. Their home world was Mercantor, circling the star Fomalhaut.
After that, the discovery program had suffered a long dry spell. The Perimeter expanded steadily, reaching a new volume of space that increased quadratically with time, but no new intelligence was discovered; not until a probe reached Capella, forty-five lightyears from Earth, and found the Angels. That had been a century and a half ago. The Angel language, civilization, and thought processes were still an unlocked mystery for humans.
In the final segment of the lesson, images of each species were added to the displays. That was Kubo Flammarion’s brain child. He hoped to make Chan “feel comfortable with the aliens, before he meets them.” Tatty considered that was optimism of the highest order.
The screen first showed the quivering mass of a Tinker Composite, men the enlarged view of individual components from which the Tinker was made. They were fast-flying legless creatures about the size of a humming-bird. Each of them possessed just enough nerve tissue for independent locomotion, sensation, feeding, breeding, and clustering. Each had a ring of eyes on its blunt head, and long antennae to permit coupling into the Composite. The bodies were purple and black, shiny, sticky-looking. Tatty was fascinated. She was sorry when the display moved on to show the arthropod cylinder segments of a Pipe-Rilla, and finally the dull green fronds of an Angel. But at least this ought to interest Chan — it would interest anyone, even a child. She glanced across to see how he was reacting. He was not watching the display at all. He was staring at her.
“Chan!”
But he was grimacing, not in annoyance or boredom but in pain. He reached up to place his hands on the side of his head.
Tatty stood up at once. Chan did this sometimes after a Stimulator session, never before. “What hurts?”
“Head. Hurt bad.” He was mumbling, rubbing his temples and then his eyes. “Picture make me hurt bad.”
Kubo Flammarion had warned of critical points. They often came with headaches and they could lead to fever, nervous degeneration, and rapid death. Tatty went to kneel by Chan’s side and took his head between her hands. “Don’t move, Chan. I have to look.”
She had been told the warning symptoms. Chan sat quietly as she lifted his eyelid and shone a light on the eyeball. No reddening, no protrusion. The pupils dilated normally with the light on them. Sight, and then hearing, proved normal when she tested them.
Tatty took Chan’s temperature. That was normal, too. So were the brain rhythms of his EEC. Everything was normal. Could Chan possibly be faking it, knowing what came next?
“Do you still hurt?”
“Not bad now. Getting better.”
Tatty sighed — mixed relief and discomfort. She did not have sufficient reason to put off the thing that she most dreaded, the ritual of forcing Chan into one of the “special” sessions with the Tolkov Stimulator.
Might as well get it over with. Tatty stood up. “Come on, Chan.” She took him by the hand and led him through into the next chamber. Amazingly, he did not protest or resist. Could he be faking it the other way round — hurting, and not willing to admit it?
“Chan, are you sure you don’t hurt any more?” He would not look at her, but he slowly shook his head. “Not hurt.” He sat down in the Stimulator chair and let Tatty strap him in.
Tatty hesitated before she connected the headset. The whole thing was unfair. With no experience, she was forced to make decisions that could kill Chan.
“All right?”
Chan did not speak. Tatty turned on the power. Usually she could not bear to watch the whole session, but today she felt obliged to.
For a few minutes Chan sat quiet, eyes closed. There were frown lines on his forehead, and as he gripped the arm-rests the tendons in his forearms and the backs of his hands sprang up white and prominent.
At last he began to moan, a long, breathless sound high in his throat. Tatty knew it well. It was “normal,” if anything about the Tolkov Stimulator could be called normal, a sign that the power build-up was approaching its peak rate. There was nothing to see, but inside Chan s skull a complex series of fields was being generated in both cerebral hemispheres. Natural patterns of electrical activity were sensed by the Stimulator, modulated, and fed back at increased intensity. At the same time, the body’s own motor control was inhibited. The damping was necessary to prevent Chan from tearing himself to pieces. The jerks, spasms, and writhing of the body were still spectacular, but Flammarion had explained that they were unrelated to what Chan was actually feeling. Chan s agonies were far worse than that. They arose within the brain itself, as a pain far more intense than anything of physical origin.
The crisis was approaching. Chan’s body jerked from side to side in the chair. His face was blood-red, with veins in neck and forehead like purple cords. Suffused with blood, medication injection points on his bare arms showed as bright patterns of stigmata. At this point in every treatment, Tatty feared that Chan would die of heart failure or apoplexy.
The Stimulator monitor chattered a final burst of activity. As it cut off a high-pitched scream filled the chamber. Chan writhed against his restraining straps. His body shuddered and shook in the chair.
Tatty went terrified to his side. This was not the normal end point of a special treatment session. Chan was usually loose-limbed and flaccid, now he was reacting as though the session were still going on.
As she placed her hands on his shoulders the spasms ended. Tatty glanced at the monitors. Pulse strong, but blood pressure disturbingly high. All Stimulator functions registered as zero. The session was certainly over, and by now Chan ought to be awake and weeping. Then she would take him in her arms, hold him close, and comfort him. According to Kubo Flammarion that psychological support was supremely important if she was to lower the risk of catatonic withdrawal.
Except that today he was flinching at her touch. “Chan. It’s Tatty. Can you hear me?”
The eyes were beginning to open. Long eyelashes flickered. A slit of white was visible, then blue irises rolled slowly down into view. Chan licked his lips and glanced from side to side. Suddenly he stared right at Tatty as though he had never seen her before.
“Chan!”
Tatty? The voice was as faint and far-off as starlight.
“It’s me, Chan.” Tatty snapped open the restraining straps so that she could draw Chan’s head forward to her breast. “There, baby. You just rest on me. You’ll be all right in a few minutes.”
“No!” He wrenched away from her and spun out of the chair. Before she could grab him he was running out of the chamber and down the outside corridor. He was screaming, and his voice was echoing from the smooth walls.
Something was different — and terribly wrong. After a special Stimulator session Chan always needed soothing, then he would sleep.
Tatty snatched up the Tracker and her case of anesthetic drugs and started after him through the tunnels of Horus.
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