Jo Clayton: Crystal Heat

Shadith came to awareness abruptly.

She was, seated in front of a sensor board. In a familiar pilot’s chair. She was on the Backhoe. Her body leaned forward, her hands lifted, began moving over the board, entering a destination code. She watched the code print out on the main screen, committed it to memory automatically, then realized with dull horror that she couldn’t turn her head, that no part of her body answered her will.

This was confusing.

She’d meant to leave the Backhoe in the University tie-down. If Digby wanted it back, he could send someone to fetch it.

She should have been frightened and angry. She couldn’t feel anything.

It was as if she were back in the Diadem, looking through the body’s eyes, but with no connection to the other senses or to the body’s emotions.

Her mind barely worked. A word or an image rose to awareness, then faded. A long time later a new thing welled up to take its place.

Digby

Digby’s techs…[[image of Tron Ga working over her body with humming, blinking readouts, fitting the exo to her, adjusting the probe blockers]]

know me. Template…

[Nothing. Blackout.]

…tailored…

… Zombi…

… no.

Mind…

mindlock…

… no.

[Nothing. Blackout.]

…both…

Clearroom…

… yes.

[[image of self waking, seeing Digby seated behind the desk]]

And so it went, word by word, dredged up from the edges of her mind, putting the picture together. There was time, plenty of time, nothing to do while the Backhoe ’splitted toward its enigmatic destination and her body moved to someone else’s programming, feeding itself and keeping itself clean-nothing to do but struggle to think, to understand what had happened to her.

At measured-intervals her awareness left her for about a day. It wasn’t sleep, it was as if someone had touched a button and turned her off. The timer on the sensor panel told her how long she was gone, but she had no internal sense of time passing and that bothered her a lot-all the more because she could do nothing about it.

Interval by interval she pieced together what this was about.

Through his techs and their reports, Digby knew her body and her consciousness-at least as much of them as could be measured from the outside. And he could do anything he wanted to her because he had a fine and frisky scapegoat to blame it on. The Kliu.

He wanted everything she knew. Her history. Aleytys. Vrithian. The Diadem. Everything. He’d been after her from the beginning to tell him things, pressing as hard as he could without driving her away. He’d accepted her evasions because he had no choice about that. When she quit,, though… that ultimate evasion was something he must have decided he couldn’t allow. And with the Mu hanging about, he didn’t even have to kill her when he was finished; all he had to do was brainwipe her and turn her loose. He could even get her back to University and let her be found wandering mindless, traces of drugs in her that might be linked to the Kliu. He didn’t like them; it would appeal to his peculiar humor to get them barred from University as they’d gotten themselves barred from Marrat’s Market.

Information. Miser of knowledge, sitting in his electronic parlor turning over the golden rounds of his secrets.

As the days passed, her thinking became measurably quicker, the alternate pathways strengthening and growing more complex with exercise.

Huh! Omphalos had some use after all.

The work she’d done to slide around their mindwipe had set up so many subroutes and branches that even the most effective lock couldn’t cut all of them out of service.

Digby’s techs are the best around, but they’ve got the limitations that come from knowing too much. Blessings be for that. Let’s see what else they missed…

She couldn’t feel anything, couldn’t smell or taste the food she consumed, couldn’t turn her head, couldn’t even twitch an eyeball. She tried. Over and over she tried to wriggle around the bounds of the lock and tease out a way of getting her body back. Over and over she rammed against a wall there was no penetrating.

Hm. If I can’t go around, maybe I can pull my memories and shove them in a cyst like I did for the thing with Omphalos. Then he can probe all he wants and get nada for his pains.

But nada was what she got when she tried it. It was as if memory were marked Read Only. She could see but not touch. She crashed into the wall until her mind ached with the effort.

And in the trying she called up memories she didn’t want to view again, images that oozed through the mindlock and flared into brief existence in front of her eyes.

IMAGE flares of light, red and blinding white, long torturing squeal of landers as they came rushing through the night and dropped the catchnet on the Weaver’s house, her mother’s house. Dark figures pouring from the landers, it seemed as though there were thousands of them though later she knew it was only a dozen men. They came through the catchnet as if it didn’t exist; the web that paralyzed whatever it touched, they killed her mother and the breeding male who lived there, they took her sisters, her six shining sisters who danced dreams for the Shallana, they took her, too, but only because she was young enough there’d be a market for her.

IMAGE She bent over the narrow casket she dug from a wall in an ancient ruin, ran her three-fingered hands over the panels, brushing the dust away so she could see the patterns some long-dead artist had carved into the stone, white jade it was, the walls thin as fine porcelain. Amazing that it was intact so long after it was made. Her touch triggered it somehow and the lid rose upward. Inside she saw a pile of ash and something else, a necklet she thought at first, a delicate gold chain, complex and supple, draping heavily over her hand when she lifted it, fine wires spun into the petals of stylized blooms with jeweled hearts, jewels that sang single pure notes as she turned her hand and inspected them. She spread out the circle and fitted the Diadem onto her head.

IMAGE Darkness. Nothing. Struggle to be, to see, to do anything she could to break the intolerable tedium of existence inside the treasure tower of the RMoahl. Day upon day of wrestling with her limitations as she learned to ride the Curator’s mind so she could get beyond the boundaries of her patterned life. Then the gem that held her soul sounded its note as a hand snatched it from the case. Darkness again as the Diadem slid into a loot sack and the thief Stavvar began retracing his steps.

When she emerged from the memory dreams and the futile campaign to free herself from the lock, she began watching as much of her body as she could see in the glimpses that chance allowed her. Knowledge was about the only lever she had access to.

The pattern of the body’s actions around the blackouts told her what was happening there. Every four days, when the body moved into the cabin and stretched itself out on the cot, she’d catch a glimpse from the corner of her eye of something descending, little more than a sense of movement and a glint of metal. A moment later she’d be gone-not into sleep but into the blackout. It was easy to tell which was which. Sleep came gradually, settling like a blanket over her. The blackout would cut a thought in half.