Charles Sheffield - The Mind Pool

He made no progress. Mondrian would not yield.

Chan thrust about in uncontrolled surges, and at last felt the first random contact with the memory block. It was like a dark, confined presence in Mondrian’s brain, sealed off from everything around it. Chan pushed deeper, using the full power of the whole mind pool. He knew what he had to do. But could he bring himself to do it, against the resistance of all the others?

Now. He used the edge of his own worst memories to cut into the naked, delicate fiber of Mondrian’s mind. The darkness resisted for one more moment, then shivered to pieces.

The block was gone. But as Almas reached past Chan to pick up the abort command and Mattin Link sequence from Mondrian’s mind, Chan himself was caught in a mental explosion. Mondrian had been forced to look at the horror of his own distant past. The scream of pain and mental anguish blew Chan out of the tortured brain and far away into a sea of fading consciousness.

The mentality caught Chan and cradled him. But Mondrian’s intellect was flickering and dimming, a quenched ember of mind that sank rapidly to nothing.

“Safe. We are safe,” said Chan.

“Death. We are Death,” said an echo. Then Chan was sinking into a maelstrom of bottomless terror, knowing it was his terror, knowing it was only the faintest shadow of what he had found inside Esro Mondrian.

“Death. Death?” said the echo, closer and louder.

But now it could not touch him. For at last Chan had let go, and been sucked all the way into the whirlpool.

The transition came at the hundred and twentieth level of the warrens, and it came suddenly. Above that point were the signs of success: fashionable apartments, bright lights, beautiful people, high rents, and easy access to the link points. Below Level 120 a traveller found only dark hell-holes, fugitives, and failure.

Chan approached the apartment cautiously, walking light-footed along the trash-filled corridor with its grimy walls and solid grey doors. Reaching his destination, he placed his hand on the ID unit and pressed. The light glowed. He was allowed through into the coffin-like outer nail and stood there, patiently waiting.

It took a long time. The woman who opened the inner door was tall and stooped, with long, unkempt hair. She peered out into the tiny dim-lit hall and stared at Chan with tired, bleary eyes.

He nodded. “It’s me, Tatty. May I come in?”

She did not speak, but she turned and shuffled through into the apartment. Following her, Chan saw the purple of Paradox shots along both of her arms. They went into a tiny living-room, where Chan sat down uninvited on a hard chair and stared around him. The place was a clutter of clothes, dishes, and papers, the result of many weeks of casual living with no attempt to clean.

She sat down opposite him on a ragged hassock and stared up at his face. She nodded slowly. “You’ve changed, Chan. Just like they said.”

“We’ve all changed.” He sat stiffly, hands on knees.

“I heard the rumors. The Gallimaufries are full of them. How you and Leah went out to the far stars, with Esro Mondrian and Luther Brachis and the aliens. How you were changed, and caught a super-being, and it killed to save itself. They say it will make everything different, out there and back here, too.” She rubbed at her eyes.

“We’re not sure of that, Tatty. At first it seemed we were dealing with something superior, something that had us beat in every way. Now, we’re not so sure. We can sometimes do things, us humans, that the super-beings don’t seem able to do.”

It was equally true, whether he was talking of the mentalities or the Morgan Constructs. And not only humans. The Pipe-Rillas and the Angels had their own special powers, their own reservations about the mind pool mentalities. Only the Tinkers, advocates of all forms of Composites, were unreservedly in favor.

“Any way,” he went on, “the Stellar Group ambassadors have laid down the rules. There will be no risks taken. The new beings will be kept in a protected environment, along with the captured Construct, until they are completely understood.’

“Are they dangerous?”

“I don’t know. There were casualties on Travancore, but I’m not sure who was to blame.”

“I heard.” Her eyes were glassy. She was bottoming out after a Paradox high. “Esro, and Luther Brachis, and Godiva.”

“You heard the … other thing about her?”

“Oh, yes. So sad.” Turning to hide it from Chan, Tatty pressed a tiny bulb against her forearm. “I should have guessed, long ago. She came from nowhere, and she was too good to be true. Poor, poor Godiva. The perfect woman, the perfect partner … and one of Fujitsu’s Artefacts. What made you suspect it?”

“I didn’t. About her. But I wondered for a while after the Stimulator treatment if I might be an Artefact myself. I was twenty years old, with an undamaged brain. And I had been a moron. I had to wonder if I was really human.”

“Mondrian never told you?” She was frowning at him, suddenly more alert. “He wanted to know where you came from as much as you did yourself. When I came back to Earth he asked me to find out everything I could about you. But I guess he didn’t tell you.’

“Not a word.”

“You’re not a moron, Chan, you never were. And you’re not an Artefact. But you are an experiment. One of the Needler labs — not the Margrave’s, he would never have tolerated such incompetence — was trying to make a superman, a physically and mentally perfect person. They failed, but only because they messed up and didn’t provide a final set of neural linkages. They didn’t realize that, and they dumped the result down in the warrens.” Tatty gave Chan a sad but fond smile. “Welcome to the cast-offs’ club. But you’re one hundred percent human. Like me. Isn’t it a rotten group to belong to?”

She leaned back on the hassock and closed her eyes. Her face was lively now, but grey and bony, no more than an aging specter of the woman Chan had known so well on Horus.

“I can’t believe he is gone,” she said at last. “Were you there when it happened?”

“Right to the very end. I saw his mind, in the last few moments. He was never at peace, you know.”

“Better than you ever will.” Tatty turned her head away. “I would have helped him. Once, I would have done anything for him. But he would never tell me what it was that gnawed away inside him.”

“He could not tell. But I know.”

Chan paused. He did know, in dreadful detail. And he could not speak of what he had found in Mondrian’s mind. Even at second-hand, the terror was too strong.

He felt the impact of that dark memory taking him again, as it took him every day …

The grass was three times as high as his head. It grew all the way around, like the walls of a big circular room, with the blue sky above as a domed ceiling that held in the heat. It was much too hot, and he was sweating.

He bent down, staring curiously at the little bugs running fast and squiggly among the stems of the dusty grey plants.

“Come on. We don’t have time for you to dawdle around.”

He straightened at the shouted words and hurried after the others. Mummy was still walking next to Uncle Darren, holding his hand and not looking back. He came up behind them and impulsively reached out to clutch her around the knees. He could smell her sweat and see the beads of perspiration on her legs.

Was she still mad?

“Mummy, pick me up.” He peered up and around her body, trying to see her face. It had been a long time since she held him without being asked. “Mummy?”