by Ben Bova
Good, thought Westfall.
The doctor continued, “I should be able to synthesize enough immunoglobulin to sustain Ms. Ambrose until we reach the Jupiter station. She will still be carrying the rabies virus in her blood system, of course, but she will exhibit no symptoms.”
Perfect, Westfall said to herself. Once we’re at station Gold she’ll have to depend on me to get enough of the serum to keep her alive. I’ll have her under my control.
LEVIATHAN
The Kin searched for a down-welling current that would carry food particles to them. The Elders directed the Kin toward a new storm that recently had arisen, reasoning that its power would draw food down from the cold abyss above. Leviathan and the rest of the Kin could sense the storm’s turbulence growing even though it was still too far away to see directly. But there was no infall of food to be found at this distance from the storm. The Kin pushed on, directed by the wisdom of the Elders.
Storms were dangerous, but the Elders decided that the Kin had no choice but to seek new currents of down-drifting food particles even if they had to go dangerously near the storm’s turbulent power. Without the food, members of the Kin would starve. As death approached they would dissociate into their separate member parts, never to bud again and generate new members of the Kin.
And there were darters out there, as well, their voracious hunger never satisfied. They would never dare to attack the Kin in all its unity, but when an individual swam off to dissociate, the darters pounced. A lone member of the Kin, dissociating into its separate components, was prey to the darters. Before the components could bud and then coalesce to form a new leviathan, the predators would attack.
It was an ancient dilemma. Without dissociating and budding, new members of the Kin could not be generated. But by going off alone to dissociate, a lone leviathan was prey to the ever-lurking darters.
Leviathan remembered its own buddings, and the narrow escapes it had won from the slashing, insatiable darters. Its battles were painful memories, and the time for a new dissociation was approaching, Leviathan knew.
Time and again Leviathan had pictured the same question to the Elders: Why must a member go off alone to dissociate and bud? Why cannot some members of the Kin escort the individual through its dissociation and budding?
The Elders’ response was always the same horrified revulsion. Dissociating in view of others! Disgusting! The images they flashed said that the Symmetry could only be maintained by continuing the ancient ways, the rituals that the Kin had observed from time immemorial. The darters are part of the Symmetry, they pictured. Accept them as you accept the food that drifts down from the cold abyss above.
Their answer did not satisfy Leviathan, but there was nothing to be done about it. The Kin would go about their lives, feeding, dissociating, budding, and coalescing to create new Kin members just as they always had. And the darters would feast on their weakest.
Unless the flow of food was permanently ended, the Symmetry completely broken. Then the Kin and the darters alike would starve.
The storm was growing stronger. Leviathan’s eye parts could see the faint flicker of lightning far off. Faintly, faintly Leviathan’s sensor parts reported that there were indeed currents of food swirling toward the storm’s churning vortex.
Stationed out on the perimeter of the Kin, Leviathan kept its sensory parts keenly on guard against approaching darters. But it saw nothing. The sea was empty of their threat. Still, Leviathan felt uneasy. They were out there, it knew. Out beyond the range of our sensors, Leviathan reasoned, the darters are waiting for one of us to break away and begin dissociating. Alone.
How close to the storm will we go? Leviathan drew the image of that question on its flank, its luminescent members lighting up in response to the directions from its central brain. The image flickered from leviathan to leviathan, inward toward the core of their flotilla, where the Elders made their stately way.
As it waited for an answer, Leviathan thought again that the Kin who were about to dissociate should be at the Kin’s center, protected from the darters. Yet the Elders regarded his suggestion with abhorrence. Do not attempt to change what has always been, they pictured in harsh blue images. Accept what must always be.
Accept. Leviathan had no choice but to accept the will of the Elders. But it thought that when the time came, many, many buddings from now, when Leviathan itself became an Elder, it would change these ancient ways. It would protect the members who now had to face the darters alone. It would make the Kin safer and better.
For now, though, Leviathan had to accept the Elders’ decision. For now—
Leviathan’s sensor members flashed a shrill warning. Darters! A huge pack of them out there, just on the edge of detection. Moving in the same direction as the Kin, but angling so that they were cutting across the feeble flow of food that was being sucked toward the growing storm.
The darters were placing themselves between the Kin and the needed current of food. This was something new. Leviathan had never seen such a maneuver in all the images the Elders had shown.
The darters were waiting to ambush the Kin. Not satisfied with attacking lone members, they were maneuvering to cut off the Kin from their food.
This was something new. And dangerous.
OBSERVATION BLISTER
As they left Dr. Pohan’s office, Deirdre looked up at the cyborg and said, “Thank you so much, Dorn.”
“De nada,” he said, then translated: “It’s nothing.”
“It means a lot to me.”
He said nothing.
She felt almost uncomfortable walking beside him along the passageway. She was not accustomed to having to look up at people, and he was almost ten centimeters taller than she, his shoulders broad, his torso like the thick body of a miner’s digging torch. He’s half metal, she kept thinking to herself. Half of his body is a machine.
At last she said, “You didn’t ask what my medical problem is.”
“Does it matter?” he asked. “You need my help. It’s simple enough for me to give it.”
They passed a pair of crewmen in gray fatigues coming down the passageway from the other direction. Both men smiled at Deirdre and glanced furtively at Dorn as they squeezed past the cyborg.
Deirdre wondered, “What happened to you when you tried to make contact with the dolphins?”
For several paces Dorn said nothing.
“I’m sorry,” Deirdre said. “I shouldn’t pry.”
“I saw my own past,” he said, his voice a low rumble.
“Your past? That made you go berserk like that?”
His voice heavy with misery, Dorn replied, “It was like all my nightmares at once.”
Deirdre didn’t know how to respond to that.
They walked on for a few more moments, then Dorn asked her, “Did you look up Dorik Harbin’s dossier last night?”
Nodding, Deirdre replied, “Yes, I did.”
“So you know who I was.”
She thought about that for a moment, then said, “But who are you now?”
He looked down at her as they paced along the passageway.
“I mean,” Deirdre explained, “the dossier stopped with the verdict at your trial. Dr. Yeager says you’re some kind of priest. And when did you…” She couldn’t finish the sentence.
“When did I disfigure myself? When did I become a cyborg?”
Deirdre nodded again. Another group of people were coming down the corridor toward them, five passengers, from the way they were dressed.
Dorn waited for them to pass, then suggested, “We need some privacy to discuss this without being interrupted.”
Or overheard, Deirdre added silently.
She followed him as he headed for the elevator. He expects me to go to his quarters? she wondered.
But once they got into the elevator Dorn called out, “Observation blister.” Turning to Deirdre, he said, “We should be able to speak freely there.”
Australia’s observation blister was a glasst
eel ring that ran around the circumference of the ship’s outer hull. It was an adornment for passengers, where they could look out on the universe from the safety of the ship. To the surprise of the shipping company’s management, hardly any passengers took advantage of the facility during midtransit. Despite highly advertised lectures and even cocktail parties hosted by the captain, most passengers had little interest in observing the all-engulfing black emptiness of the universe. It made them uneasy, even frightened. Only when the ship was approaching planetfall did passengers come to gape at the world they were approaching.
Dorn ushered Deirdre through one of the hatches that lined the circular passageway between the elevators and the blister. She stepped through and gasped.
As Dorn closed the hatch, Deirdre suddenly felt as if she were standing in space. The lights went out automatically when the hatch shut and there was nothing between her and the infinite universe but the transparent curving bubble of glassteel. Her knees went weak.
So many stars! The universe was filled with hard unblinking points of light: red, blue, yellow, it was overwhelming. Clouds of stars, swirls of stars, endless boundless teeming stars that sprinkled the blackness of space with color and beauty. Back at Chrysalis II they had observation ports, but nothing like this. This is like being outside!
Dorn heard her gasping breath. “Are you all right?”
“I…” Deirdre had to consciously remind herself that she was perfectly safe, standing on a glassteel deck, warm and protected from the vacuum out there that stretched to infinity. “I think so,” she half whispered.
“I’m sorry,” Dorn said softly. “I forgot how overwhelming it can be the first time. I’ve spent much of my life in spacecraft. This dark forever is like home to me.”
She turned toward him, saw the starlight glinting off the etched metal side of his face.
“The Sun is behind us,” Dorn began to explain, “on the other side of the ship. We’re in shadow here. That’s why you can see so much without the Sun’s glare cutting down visibility.”
“It’s … it’s the most awesome thing I’ve ever seen.”
“The universe,” Dorn said, as solemnly as if praying. “Infinity.”
For several minutes Dorn pointed out the brighter stars for her, identified blue-hot Rigel and the sullen red of Betelgeuse.
At last she interrupted him. “You said we could talk in private here.”
“Yes,” he said, nodding gravely. “The blister goes all the way around the ship, but it’s divided into compartments that are soundproof.” He hesitated. “I believe the ship’s management thought couples might enjoy romantic liaisons here.”
Making it under the stars, Deirdre thought. Not a bad idea, once you got accustomed to having all those unblinking eyes watching you.
“You asked me when I became a cyborg,” Dorn said.
“I don’t want to pry,” said Deirdre. “If it’s painful for you—”
“Pain is part of life. If we’re going to work together at the Jupiter station, you deserve to know about me.”
So he told her. Told her of his life as a mercenary soldier during the Asteroid Wars. How the corporation he worked for supplied their mercenaries with performance-enhancing drugs. How he had murdered a woman who loved him in a blaze of narcotic-driven jealous fury. How he destroyed the old Chrysalis habitat under the battle frenzy that the drugs induced. How he had held a minigrenade to his chest once his mind cleared and he realized what he had done.
“You tried to commit suicide?” Deirdre asked.
In the starlit shadows Dorn replied evenly, “I wasn’t permitted to die. The corporations had invested too much in me. And besides, their medical technicians saw me as an interesting problem. So I was saved. I was rebuilt.”
“That’s how you became a cyborg.”
“Yes. Not every scientist works for the benefit of humankind. Some of them—many of them, I think—work to solve problems that intrigue them. Work to achieve things no one else has achieved before them.”
Deirdre remembered a quotation from her history classes. The physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer had said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.”
DORN’S TRANSFORMATION
“You became a priest?” Deirdre asked.
For a heartbeat Dorn remained silent. Then, “I had a life-altering experience. I encountered … an artifact. A work of an alien intelligence.”
“In the Belt?” Deirdre jumped at his revelation. “The rumors are true? About an alien artifact in one of the asteroids?”
“True,” said Dorn. “There is an alien artifact buried inside a small, stony asteroid. The rock is the property of Humphries Space Systems, Incorporated. I was still an employee of HSS when it was discovered. I was assigned to guard the asteroid and make certain that no one saw the alien artifact.
“But I saw it. Every day, for weeks. It changed me.”
“It’s really true?” Deirdre marveled.
“Really true. However, Martin Humphries guards the asteroid jealously. At first he wanted to keep it for himself alone. When he flew out to see it, though, the artifact drove him insane. He collapsed, jibbering, helpless.”
Dorn stopped, as if the memories he was recalling were too painful to continue. But before Deirdre could think of anything to say, he resumed.
“Humphries recovered, eventually. But he would allow no one to see the artifact. And he wanted to eliminate those who saw his collapse, who heard his weeping, inconsolable pleadings.”
“He wanted to kill you?”
“He tried. But I, too, had seen the artifact. Experiencing it changed my life. I stopped being Dorik Harbin, mercenary warrior. I became Dorn. A priest. I began to try to atone for my former life.”
“Atone? How?”
“By finding the bodies of the mercenaries killed in the Asteroid Wars. Finding them and giving them proper death rites.”
“You did this?”
“For years. Wandering through the Belt, finding the dead who had been left to drift alone endlessly in space. This I did, together with the woman you saw at my trial.”
“My father exiled you.”
Almost smiling in the dim starlight, Dorn said, “He wanted to execute me. He wanted to kill me with his own hands. He settled for exile. I was recruited by the scientists of the Jupiter station. They’ve been testing me at Selene University for the past two years, to see if I can help them make deep dives into the Jovian ocean.”
“And here we are,” Deirdre said, trying to make it sound light, “on our way to Jupiter.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve lived quite a life,” she said. It sounded pathetically inane, she knew.
With a slight shake of his head, Dorn confessed, “But now I have no purpose for living. I’ve found all the dead from the Wars that I could. That doesn’t atone for all those I killed.”
“You’re working for the scientists now.”
“Yes, for the scientists. But serving their purposes doesn’t give me any purpose to my life. I’m an empty shell, Deirdre. I have nothing to live for.”
She reached out and touched the human side of his face. “You’ve gone through so much. You’ll find some reason for living. Maybe at Station Gold. Maybe you’ll find your true purpose there.”
“Maybe,” he echoed. It sounded hollow to Deirdre.
“Well,” she said, “thanks for telling me about yourself. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
She started for the hatch, but Dorn put up his metallic hand, stopping her.
“This conversation began,” he said, “with you saying that I didn’t ask what your medical problem is. May I ask you now?”
She bit her lip, hesitating. He has a right to know, Deirdre told herself. He’s willing to give you his blood to help you. He has a right to know the truth.
“I have rabies,” she said, so softly she
could barely hear her own words.
“Rabies.” Dorn appeared unshaken by the news. Then he asked, “I didn’t realize that animals are kept in Chrysalis II.”
“They’re not,” said Deirdre. “No pets. No meat animals. We get protein from soy substitutes and aquaculture.”
“Then how did you contract rabies? It comes from being bitten or scratched by a rabid animal, doesn’t it?”
Nodding, she answered, “That’s what makes it so peculiar. Dr. Pohan hasn’t been able to figure it out.”
“Is the doctor certain that it’s rabies? It seems totally unlikely.”
She shrugged. “He’s certain. The virus showed up in the blood sample he took.”
Dorn looked out at the endless stars for several silent moments. At last he said to Deirdre, “He took a sample of your blood.”
“Yes. He did it for all the passengers. Didn’t he take a sample of your blood?”
“Weeks ago, just after I boarded at Selene.”
“He must have taken samples from everybody.”
“He extracted your blood with a hypodermic syringe?” Dorn asked.
“How else?”
“And you haven’t been bitten or scratched by an animal before you boarded this ship?”
A little impatiently, she replied, “I told you, Dorn, there aren’t any animals in Chrysalis II to bite or scratch me!”
“Then the only time your skin has been punctured is when the ship’s doctor took your blood.”
“Yes…” She finally saw where he was heading. Her eyes widening, Deirdre asked, “An infected needle?”
“How would it get infected with rabies here aboard the ship?”
“Dr. Pohan said there was a rabies case on the way out from the Earth/Moon system. A fatality.”
Dorn shook his head slowly. “I’ve been aboard this ship since it left lunar orbit. As far as I know, none of the passengers who came aboard from Earth or Selene have died.”
Deirdre felt confused. “He lied to me?”
“He not only lied to you,” said Dorn. “He infected you with rabies.”