A deeper probe then. She launched it, braced for the mental distortion.
It came. The shields stiffened, damping it, but she had giddy feelings of being dragged sideways, stretched, compressed. And the probe was being blocked. She drew it back. Strangeness writhed for a moment among her thoughts and was gone. Echo, at last, of alien mind—of the mind that wanted no contact!
The sense of violent distortion ended almost as soon as her probe withdrew. The dark lay before her again, sullen and repelling. A psi device, assembled by mind. A shield, a barrier. A formidable one. But she’d touched for a moment the fringes of the alien mind concealed by the barrier, and now contact with it, whether it wanted contact or not, might be very close. She’d have to do more than she’d done. She decided to trust her shields.
She paused then, at a new awareness.
She wasn’t alone. The presence had followed. More than a presence now. Mind, human mind, behind heavy shielding.
“What do you want?” Telzey asked.
Thought, replied. “After you make the contact, you may need support.”
She would. “Can you give it?”
“I believe so. Be ready!” The impression ended.
Telzey moved in her shields toward the dark barrier, reached it. The barrier awoke like a rousing beast. Her probe stabbed out, hard and solid. The barrier shook at her savagely, and mind-strangeness flickered again through her thoughts. She caught it, tagged it, felt incomprehensibility and an icy deadliness in the instant before it was gone. Now there had been contact—a thread of psi remained drawn between herself and the alien mind, a thin taut line which led through the barrier. Following the line, she moved forward into the barrier, felt a madness of power surge up about her.
“Link with me quickly before—”
Vast pressures clamped down. Telzey and the other spun together through the thunders of chaos.
She’d joined defenses before the barrier struck. With whom, she didn’t know, and there was no time just now to find out. But she’d felt new strength blend with hers in that moment, and the strength was very, very useful. For here was pounding confusion, a blurring and blackening of thought, a hideous distorting and twisting of emotion. The barrier was trying to eject her, force her back, batter her into helplessness. It was like moving upstream through raging and shifting currents.
But the double shield absorbed it. And her psi line held. For a time she wasn’t sure she was moving at all through the psi barrier’s frenzies. Then she knew again that she was—
IX
She was lying in bed in a darkened room and didn’t have to open her eyes to know it was her bedroom in the summer house. She could sense its familiar walls and furnishings about her. How she’d got there, she didn’t know. Her mind screens were closed; not drawn into a tight shield, but closed. Automatic precautionary procedure.
Precaution against what?
She didn’t know that either.
Something evidently had happened. She felt very unpleasantly weak; and it wasn’t the weakness of fatigued muscles. Most of her strength seemed simply absent.
There were no indications of physical damage otherwise. But her mental condition was deplorable! What had knocked out her memory?
The answer came slowly.
The Hana had knocked out her memory.
With that, it was all back. Telzey lay quiet, reflecting. That incredible species! Waiting on the three worlds they’d filled wherever they could grow, worlds transformed into deadly psi forts—waiting for the return of an enemy they’d fought, how long ago? Fifty thousand human years? A hundred thousand?
They’d been convinced the Veen would be back and attempt again to enslave, or destroy them. And they’d been ready to receive the Veen. What giant powers of attack and defense they’d developed in that long waiting while their minds lay deeply hidden! When an occasional psi entity began to search them out, it was hurled back by the reef of monstrous energies they’d drawn about themselves. None had ever succeeded in passing that barrier.
Until we did, Telzey thought.
They had; and the Hana mind, nakedly open, immensely powerful, believing they were Veen who had penetrated its defenses, began killing them. They’d lasted a while, under that double shield. They couldn’t have lasted very long even so, because life was being drained from them into the Hana mind in spite of the shield; but there was time enough for Telzey’s concepttransforming process to get into operation. Then the Hana realized they weren’t Veen, weren’t enemies, didn’t intend to attack it; and it stopped killing them.
Things had begun to get rather blurred for Telzey around then. But she’d picked up some additional details—mostly about the other who’d come through the barrier with her.
She relaxed her screens gradually. As she’d suspected, that other one was in the room. She opened her eyes, sat up unsteadily in bed, turned on the room lights.
Pilch sat in a chair halfway across the room, watching her. “I thought you’d come awake,” she remarked.
Telzey settled back on the bed. “How’s Trigger?”
“Perfectly all right. Asleep at present. She was behind a rather formidable shield at the time of contact.”
“The Old Galactic’s,” said Telzey.
“Yes.”
“What was it doing here—in the Hana?”
“A precaution the Old Galactics decided on after they realized what the Hana was,” Pilch said. “If our psi investigations failed and the Hana began to cut loose, it would have died on the physical side. They have fast methods.”
Telzey was silent a moment. “As I remember it,” she said then, “you weren’t in much better shape than I was when I passed out.”
“True enough,” agreed Pilch. “We were both in miserable shape, more than half dead. Fortunately, I’m good at restoring myself. At that, it took me several days to get back to par.”
“Several days?”
“It’s been ten days since you made the contact,” Pilch told her.
“Ten days!” Startled, Telzey struggled back up to a sitting position.
“Relax,” said Pilch. “No one’s missed you. Your family is under the impression you’re vacationing around, and it won’t occur to the caretakers to come near the house until we’re ready to let them resume their duties. Which will be quite soon. I know you still feel wrung out, but you’ve been gaining ground very rapidly tonight. A few more hours will see you back to normal health. That was no ordinary weakness.”
Telzey studied her thoughtfully. “You use anyone about any way you like, don’t you?” she said.
“You, too, have been known to use people, Telzey Amberdon!” Pilch remarked. “You and Trigger, in your various ways, share the quality of being most effective when thrown on your own resources. It seemed our best chance, and it was. None of our xenos could have done precisely what you did at the critical moment, and I’m not at all sure the contact could have been made in any other manner.”
She glanced at the watch on her wrist, stood up and came over to the bed.
“Now you’re awake and I’m no longer needed here, I’ll be running along,” she said. “Trigger can fill you in. If there’s some specific question you’d like me to answer, go ahead.”
“There’s one question,” Telzey said. “How old are you, Pilch?”
Pilch smiled. “Never you mind how old I am.”
“You were there before they founded the Federation,” Telzey said reflectively.
“If you saw that,” said Pilch, “you’ve also seen that I helped found the Federation. And that I help maintain it. You might keep it in mind. Any time a snip of a psi genius can be useful in one of my projects, I’ll use her.”
Telzey shook her head slightly. “I don’t think you’ll use me again.”
Pilch’s knowing gray eyes regarded her a moment. Then Pilch’s hand reached down and touched her cheek. Something like a surge of power flowed through Telzey and was absorbed. She blinked, startled.
Pilch smiled.
“We’ll see, little sister! We’ll see!” she said.
Then she was gone.
“Are you angry with her?” Trigger asked, an hour later, perched on the edge of Telzey’s bed while they both took cautious sips from cups of very hot broth. It was early morning now, and they were alone in the house. The Hana and the Old Galactic had left with Pilch’s people days ago, and Trigger had gathered they were going first to bring the news that the Veen War was over to the other Hanas currently in Hub laboratories. Afterwards, they’d all be off together to the Hana planets to make arrangements which would avoid further problems.
Telzey shook her head.
“I’ll forgive her this time,” she said. “She took a chance on her own life helping me get through the Hana shield, and she knew it. Then she seems to have spent around a week of her time here, to make sure I’d recover.”
Trigger nodded. “Yes, she did. You were looking pretty dead for a while, Telzey! They said you’d be all right, but I wasn’t at all certain. Then Pilch appeared and took over, and you started to pick right up.” She sighed. “Pilch has her ways!”
Telzey sipped her broth meditatively. The Hanas hadn’t been the only ones who’d had trouble with the Veen. It appeared that conflict wasn’t much more than a minor skirmish on the fringes of the ancient war which blazed through the empire of the Old Galactics and destroyed it, before the survivors of those slow-moving entities brought their own weapons into full play and wiped out the Veen. “The Old Galactics weren’t too candid with you either, were they?” she said.
“No, they weren’t,” said Trigger. She regarded Telzey soberly. “It looks as though we got a bit involved in Galactic politics for a while!”
Telzey nodded. “And I personally plan to keep out of Galactic politics in future!”
“Same here,” Trigger agreed. “It doesn’t—” She raised her head quickly as the ComWeb chimed in the hall. “Well, well! We seem to have been restored to the world! Wonder who it is . . .”
She hurried from the room, came back shortly, smiling. “That Pilch!”
“Who was it?”
“Ezd Malion. Calling to say he was going to town early and did we want any groceries.”
“No idea that it’s been ten days since he talked to us last?” asked Telzey.
“None whatever! He’s just picking up where he was told to leave off.”
Telzey nodded.
“That’s about what we’ll be doing,” she said. “But at least we know we’re doing it.”
1971
THE TELZEY TOY
It wasn’t so much that Telzey bit off more than she could chew—but that somebody suddenly took her teeth away!
I
An auburn-haired, petal-cheeked young woman who belonged in another reality came walking with feline grace along a restaurant terrace in Orado City where Telzey had stopped for lunch during a shopping excursion.
Telzey watched her approach. This, she decided, was quite strange. Going by her appearance and way of moving, the woman seemed to be someone she’d met before. But she knew they hadn’t met before. She knew also, in a curiously definite manner, that the woman simply couldn’t be on this terrace in Orado City. She existed in other dimensions, not here, not now.
The woman who didn’t exist here glanced at Telzey in passing. There was no recognition in the look. Telzey shifted her chair slightly, watched the familiar-unfamiliar phantom take another table not far away, pick up an order disk. A very good-looking young woman with a smooth unsmiling face, fashionably and expensively dressed—and nobody else around seemed to find anything at all unreasonable in her presence.
So perhaps, Telzey reflected, it was her psi senses that found it unreasonable. She slipped out a thought probe, held it a moment. It produced no telepathic touch response, no suggestion of shielding. If the woman was psi, she was an atypical variety. She’d taken a snack glass from the table dispenser by now, was sipping at it—
Comprehension came suddenly. No mystery after all, Telzey told herself, half amused, half disappointed. A year ago, she’d gone with some acquaintances to take in a Martridrama. The woman looked and walked exactly like one of the puppets they’d seen that evening, one who played a minor role but appeared enough of an individual to have left an impression in memory. No wonder it had seemed a slightly uncanny encounter—Martri puppets didn’t go strolling around the city by themselves!
Another thought drifted up then, quite idly.
Or did they?
Telzey studied the pale profile again. Her skin began prickling. It was a most improbable notion, but there might be a quick way of checking it. Some minds could be tapped easily, some with varying degrees of difficulty, some not at all. If this woman happened to be one of the easy ones, a few minutes of probing should establish what she was—or wasn’t.
It took longer than that. Telzey had contact presently, but it remained tenuous and indistinct: she lost it repeatedly. Then, as she reestablished it again, a little more definitely now, the woman finished her snack drink and stood up. Telzey slipped a pay chit for her lunch into the table’s receptacle, waited till her quarry turned away, then followed her toward a terrace exit.
A Martri puppet was a biological organism superficially indistinguishable from a human being. It had a brain which could be programmed, and which responded to cues with human speech and human behavior. Whether something resembling the human mind could be associated with that kind of brain was a point Telzey hadn’t found occasion to consider before. She was no Martriphile, didn’t, in fact, particularly care for that form of entertainment.
There was mind here, and the blurred patterns she’d touched seemed human. But she hadn’t picked up enough to say it couldn’t be the mind of a Martri puppet . . .
The woman took an airtaxi on another terrace of the shopping complex. As it rose from the platform, Telzey got into the next taxi in line and told the driver to follow the one that had just left. The driver spun his colleague’s car into his screen.
“Don’t know if I can,” he said then. “He’s heading up into heavy traffic.”
Telzey smiled at him. “Double fare for trying!”
They set off promptly in pursuit. Telzey clung to her contact, began assembling additional data. Some minutes later, the driver announced, “Looks like we’ve lost them!”
She already knew it. Distance wasn’t necessarily a factor in developing mind contact. In this case it had been a factor. The crosstown traffic stream was dense, close to the automatic reroute point. The impressions she’d been receiving, weak at best, had begun to be flooded out increasingly by intruding impressions from other minds. The car they’d been pursuing must be several miles away by now. She let contact fade, told the driver to return to the shopping complex, and settled back very thoughtfully in her seat.
Few Martriphiles saw anything objectionable in having puppets killed literally on stage when a drama called for it. It was an essential part of Martri realism. The puppets were biological machines; the emotions and reactions they displayed were programmed ones. They had no self-awareness—that was the theory.
What she’d found in the mind of the auburn-haired woman seemed less important than what she hadn’t found there, though she’d been specifically searching for it.
That woman knew where she was, what she was doing. There’d been scraps of recent memory, some moment to moment observations, an intimation of underlying purpose. But she appeared to have no personal sense of herself. She knew she existed—an objective fact among other facts, with no more significance than the others.
In other words, she did seem to lack self-awareness. As far as Telzey had been able to make out, the term had no meaning for her. But the contact hadn’t been solid enough, or extensive enough, to prove it.
On the face of it, Telzey was telling herself an hour later, the thing was preposterous. She’d had a wild notion, had tried to disprove it and failed. She’d even turned up some evidence which mig
ht seem to favor the notion. It remained wild. Why waste more time on it?
She bit her thumb irritably, dialed an information center for data on Martridramas and Martri puppets, went over the material when it arrived. There wasn’t much there she didn’t already know in a general way. A Martri stage was a programmed computer which in turn programmed the puppets, and directed them during a play under the general guidance of the dramateer. While a play was new, no two renditions of it were exactly the same. Computer and puppets retained some choice of action, directed always toward greater consistency, logic and effect. Only when further improvement was no longer possible did a Martridrama remain frozen and glittering—a thing become perfect of its kind. It explained the continuing devotion of Martriphiles.
It didn’t suggest that such a thing as a runaway puppet was a possibility.
The Martri unit which had put on the play she had seen was no longer on Orado. She could find out where it was at present, but there should be simpler ways of determining what she wanted to know immediately. A name had turned up repeatedly in her study of the Martri material . . . Wakote Ti. He was locally available. A big man: Multilevel scientist, industrial tycoon, millionaire, philanthropist, philosopher, artist and art collector; above all, a Martri specialist of specialists. Wakote Ti designed, grew and merchandised the finest puppets in the Hub, built and programmed the most advanced Martri stages, had written over fifty of the most popular plays, and was a noted amateur dramateer.
A Martriphile relative of one of Telzey’s friends turned out to be an admirer and business associate of Wakote Ti. He agreed to let Telzey know the next time the great man appeared at his laboratories in Draise, and to arrange for an interview with him.
“The legality of killing a puppet is regarded as unarguable,” said Wakote Ti. A college paper she’d been preparing on the legal niceties involved in the practice had been Telzey’s ostensible reason for requesting the interview. He shrugged. “But I simply couldn’t bring myself to do it! They have life and a mentality, however limited and artificial it may be. Most importantly, they have personality, character. It’s been programmed into them, of course, but, to my feeling, the distinction between puppets and humanity is one of degree rather than kind. They’re unfinished people. They act always in accordance with their character, not necessarily in accordance with the wishes of the composer or dramateer. I’ve been surprised many times by the twists they’ve given the roles I assigned to them. Always valid ones! They can’t be forced to deviate from what they are. In that respect they seem more honest than many of us.”
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 217