Charles Sheffield - The Mind Pool

“See ’em?” said Flammarion. “Whole planet’s like that. Pretty odd place, and I’ve seen some. Those hills are solid plant life. Surface gravity is low, but not all that low. Somehow, though, vegetation can grow six kilometers deep.

Vertical jungle, layer after layer after layer of it. Don t ask me why it doesn’t all come crashing down.”

“How can a ship land there?”

“Very fair question. It can’t — not in the usual way. There’s no solid surface to put a ship down on, and no way it could stay in one place if it tried to land. It would sink down and down, Lord-knows-how far before packed vegetation could hold up the weight. So a ship has to hover at the top layer, and drop off people and cargo, and then hit right up again.”

“I never heard of a ship doing that,” said Tatty.

“So you’re learning something as well as Chan. Flammarion was fiddling with another part of the control board as he spoke. “You can both see why Travancore makes such a hell of a good hiding place — we can’t see much with a space survey, and we can’t do a mechanized ground survey. But somewhere under all that mess, if you believe the Angels, there’s a surviving Morgan Construct.”

“Leah will go there?”

“Not until they know the planet a whole lot better — maybe in another week or two. But eventually Leah and her team have to find the Construct and destroy it.” A series of clicks came from the communicator, while a pattern of red squares appeared in the upper left corner of the display.

“Virtue rewarded,” said Flammarion. “I put in that tracer, but I didn’t really expect success. That s the signal I.D. from Team Alpha itself — we’re in contact with the ship, not just tapping the data stream they’re sending back to base.”

“You mean I can talk to Leah?”

“If our luck holds.” Flammarion started to complete the sequence. “I told her that you’d be on-line at this end.”

“Wait a minute.” Chan stood up and stared at the screen. He began to breathe very rapidly.

“And here she is.”

Flammarion had taken no notice of Chan’s request to wait. He had just managed a pretty neat trick of realtime signal patching, and he was rather pleased with himself. He turned to explain to Chan what he had done, and found himself looking at a rapidly retreating back. “Hey, where are you going? I’ve got her on the line with me right now.”

“Chan?” Leah’s dark countenance flickered onto the screen. “Chan, is that really you? This is wonderful.” The camera panned across the room and she looked increasingly puzzled. “Chan, where are you? I’ve been longing to talk to you ever since the moment I got the news.”

Tatty came forward and stood in front of the scanning camera. “I’m sorry, Leah. This is Tatty. I ought to have guessed that this might happen. Chan’s here, and he’s doing fine. But he finds it hard to talk to you.”

“Hard to talk to me ?” The picture quality was too poor to read subtleties of Leah’s expression, but her voice was bewildered. “Tatty, I’ve been talking to Chan since he was practically in diapers. I can talk to him and understand him better than anyone else breathing.” The voice hardened. “What have you and Flammarion and Mondrian done to him? For all your sakes, he’d better be all right. Because if he’s not, I’ll come back from this place and scrag every one of you.”

“Calm down.” Tatty knew better than to smile and joke when Leah was in this mood. “I told you, Chan is all right. Better than all right, he’s so smart now he frightens us. And I can tell you exactly what’s wrong with him. It’s you. He finds it hard to talk to you — really — because he’s embarrassed.”

“Spacefluff!” Leah shook dark hair clear of her eyes. “Get your head screwed on, Tatty Snipes. I said I’ve known Chan since he was in diapers, but that’s only half of it. Since I was six years old, we’ve eaten together, and cried together, and slept together, and bathed together. Everything, from the first day I took him over down in the Gallimaufries. He was just like my own baby.”

“I’m sure he was,” said Tatty dryly. She was having her own “problems with this conversation. “But he’s not your baby now. He’s not anyone’s baby. He’s a man.”

It went right past Kubo Flammarion, but Leah caught it in a second. “Chan? You mean somebody—”

“Yes.”

“Who was it. Do you know who — ”

“Yes.” Tatty turned to Flammarion, who had listened to the exchange with total incomprehension. “Kubo, would you please go and bring Chan back here. Leah really needs to talk to him.”

As he left she turned rapidly to face the camera. “I was the somebody. I think you guessed that. And it wasn’t the way you think, an experienced woman seducing an innocent boy. It happened right after a Stimulator session, the one that made the big change. Leah, he needed somebody — any somebody. No, I don’t mean that. He needed somebody, but what he wanted was you. He spoke your name to me as though I was you. Maybe he even thought I was you.”

Leah’s image stared stonily out of the screen. “I see.”

“I know, Leah. I know just how you must be feeling.”

“No.” Leah shook her head. “You sure as hell don’t know how I’m feeling. You can’t. For all those years, ever since we were little children, I looked after both of us. As I grew up I had my own secret hope. I dreamed that Chan would somehow become intelligent, and grow up too, and we would become lovers.

“That was my fantasy, and by the time I was twelve I knew it could only be fantasy. He was the little boy who would never grow up. I could love Chan, but for that kind of love, sexual love, I would have to look somewhere else.” The anger faded from Leah’s voice and was replaced by a wistful tone. “There was no trouble finding sex, you see. There never is. But it wasn’t what I’d dreamed of. And now you tell me that the dream came true — but it was you and Chan, not me and Chan …”

Kubo Flammarion was entering the room, trailing a reluctant Chan along with him. But as they arrived in camera range, Leah was suddenly gone from the screen.

“Here he is,” said Flammarion. He stared at the empty display. “Well, blast it. Now where did she go?”

Tatty swiveled to face him. “Leah had to run. Her pursuit team is meeting. Let’s forget it, Kubo, it won’t work today.” She turned to Chan. I spoke to Leah. She sends you all her love, and she says she can’t wait until she has a chance to see you.”

Chan blushed with pleasure, a flood of pink across fair cheeks. “She said that? I wish I could have said the same thing to her.”

“You will. But she couldn’t stay. The program out there is really strict.”

“And it’ll get stricter,” added Flammarion, “the closer they get to descent to Travancore and the hunt for the Construct. But you shouldn’t be looking at that now, Chan — you ought to be learning all you can about Barchan, because that’ll be your next stop.”

He winked at Tatty. He didn’t know quite what was happening, but he sensed that somehow she had carried them through an awkward situation. Now it was time to get Chan thinking about something else.

Flammarion keyed in the sequence to take them back to the first image.

“Barchan,” he said. “Take a good look at it.”

The scene changed, and he leaned back in confusion. Instead of the heated dust-ball that would be Chan’s training site, the screen displayed the face of Esro Mondrian.

He nodded casually at Flammarion. “Sorry, Captain. I came in on override. I need to talk with Princess Tatiana.” He smiled at Tatty with no trace of embarrassment. “Congratulations, Princess. You did it. I knew you would. And to you, Chan” — he inclined his head — “welcome to Ceres. From all that I hear you’re going to be an outstanding member of the next Pursuit Team.”