“I understand,” I said, and I think that I truly did. “But the voyage to Cul-de-Sac is short. A few virtual weeks and you’d be there, and out of storage and into your new body, and—”
“Weeks? Think of that itch on the back of your neck, Captain. The itch that you can’t scratch. How long do you think you could stand it, lying there feeling that itch? Five minutes? An hour? Weeks?”
It seemed to me that an itch left unscratched would die of its own, perhaps in minutes. But that was only how it seemed to me. I was not Vox; I had not been a matrix in a storage circuit.
I said, “So you let yourself out? How?”
“It wasn’t that hard to figure. I had nothing else to do but think about it. You align yourself with the polarity of the circuit. That’s a matrix too, an electrical pattern holding you in crosswise bands. You change the alignment. It’s like being tied up, and slipping the ropes around until you can slide free. And then you can go anywhere you like. You key into any bioprocessor aboard the ship and you draw your energy from that instead of from the storage circuit, and it sustains you. I can move anywhere around this ship at the speed of light. Anywhere. In just the time you blinked your eye, I’ve been everywhere. I’ve been to the far tip and out on the mast, and I’ve been down through the lower decks, and I’ve been in the crew quarters and the cargo places and I’ve even been a little way off into something that’s right outside the ship but isn’t quite real, if you know what I mean. Something that just seems to be a cradle of probability waves surrounding us. It’s like being a ghost. But it doesn’t solve anything. Do you see? The torture still goes on. You want to feel, but you can’t. You want to be connected again, your senses, your inputs. That’s why I tried to get into the passenger, do you see? But he wouldn’t let me.”
I began to understand at last.
Not everyone who goes to the worlds of heaven as a colonist travels in matrix form. Ordinarily anyone who can afford to take his body with him will do so; but relatively few can afford it. Those who do travel in suspension, the deepest of sleeps. We carry no waking passengers in the Service, not at any price. They would be trouble for us, poking here, poking there, asking questions, demanding to be served and pampered. They would shatter the peace of the voyage. And so they go down into their coffins, their housings, and there they sleep the voyage away, all life-processes halted, a death-in-life that will not be reversed until we bring them to their destinations.
And poor Vox, freed of her prisoning circuit and hungry for sensory data, had tried to slip herself into a passenger’s body.
I listened, appalled and somber, as she told of her terrible odyssey through the ship. Breaking free of the circuit: that had been the first strangeness I felt, that tic, that nibble at the threshold of my consciousness.
Her first wild moment of freedom had been exhilarating and joyous. But then had come the realization that nothing really had changed. She was at large, but still she was incorporeal, caught in that monstrous frustration of bodilessness, yearning for a touch. Perhaps such torment was common among matrixes; perhaps that was why, now and then, they broke free as Vox had done, to roam ships like sad troubled spirits. So Roacher had said. Once in a long while someone in the storage circuits gets to feeling footloose, and finds a way out and goes roaming the ship. Looking for a body to jack into, that’s what they’re doing. Jack into me, jack into Katkat, even jack into you, Captain. Anybody handy, just so they can feel flesh around them again. Yes.
That was the second jolt, the stronger one, that Dismas and I had felt, when Vox, selecting a passenger at random, suddenly, impulsively, had slipped herself inside his brain. She had realized her mistake at once. The passenger, lost in whatever dreams may come to the suspended, reacted to her intrusion with wild terror. Convulsions swept him; he rose, clawing at the equipment that sustained his life, trying desperately to evict the succubus that had penetrated him. In this frantic struggle he smashed the case of his housing and died. Vox, fleeing, frightened, careered about the ship in search of refuge, encountered me standing by the screen in the Eye, and made an abortive attempt to enter my mind. But just then the death of the passenger registered on 49 Henry Henry’s sensors and when the intelligence made contact with me to tell me of the emergency Vox fled again, and hovered dolefully until I returned to my cabin. She had not meant to kill the passenger, she said. She was sorry that he had died. She felt some embarrassment, now, and fear. But no guilt. She rejected guilt for it almost defiantly. He had died? Well, so he had died. That was too bad. But how could she have known any such thing was going to happen? She was only looking for a body to take refuge in. Hearing that from her, I had a sense of her as someone utterly unlike me, someone volatile, unstable, perhaps violent. And yet I felt a strange kinship with her, even an identity. As though we were two parts of the same spirit; as though she and I were one and the same. I barely understood why.
“And what now?” I asked. “You say you want help. How?”
“Take me in.”
“What?”
“Hide me. In you. If they find me, they’ll eradicate me. You said so yourself, that it could be done, that I could be detected, contained, eradicated. But it won’t happen if you protect me.”
“I’m the captain,” I said, astounded.
“Yes.”
“How can I—”
“They’ll all be looking for me. The intelligences, the crewmen. It scares them, knowing there’s a matrix loose. They’ll want to destroy me. But if they can’t find me, they’ll start to forget about me after a while. They’ll think I’ve escaped into space, or something. And if I’m jacked into you, nobody’s going to be able to find me.”
“I have a responsibility to—”
“Please,” she said. “I could go to one of the others, maybe. But I feel closest to you. Please. Please.”
“Closest to me?”
“You aren’t happy. You don’t belong. Not here, not anywhere. You don’t fit in, any more than I did on Kansas Four. I could feel it the moment I first touched your mind. You’re a new captain, right? And the others on board are making it hard for you. Why should you care about them? Save me. We have more in common than you do with them. Please? You can’t just let them eradicate me. I’m young. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. All I want is to get to Cul-de-Sac and be put in the body that’s waiting for me there. A new start, my first start, really. Will you?”
“Why do you bother asking permission? You can simply enter me through my jack whenever you want, can’t you?”
“The last one died,” she said.
“He was in suspension. You didn’t kill him by entering him. It was the surprise, the fright. He killed himself by thrashing around and wrecking his housing.”
“Even so,” said Vox. “I wouldn’t try that again, an unwilling host. You have to say you’ll let me, or I won’t come in.”
I was silent.
“Help me?” she said.
“Come,” I told her.
8.
It was just like any other jacking: an electrochemical mind-to-mind bond, a linkage by way of the implant socket at the base of my spine. The sort of thing that any two people who wanted to make communion might do. There was just one difference, which was that we didn’t use a jack. We skipped the whole intricate business of checking bandwiths and voltages and selecting the right transformer-adapter. She could do it all, simply by matching evoked potentials. I felt a momentary sharp sensation and then she was with me.
“Breathe,” she said. “Breathe real deep. Fill your lungs. Rub your hands together. Touch your cheeks. Scratch behind your left ear. Please. Please. It’s been so long for me since I’ve felt anything.”
Her voice sounded the same as before, both real and unreal. There was no substance to it, no density of timbre, no sense that it was produced by the vibrations of vocal cords atop a column of air. Yet it was clear, firm, substantial in some essential way, a true voice in all respects except that there was no speaker to utter it
. I suppose that while she was outside me she had needed to extend some strand of herself into my neural system in order to generate it. Now that was unnecessary. But I still perceived the voice as originating outside me, even though she had taken up residence within.
She overflowed with needs.
“Take a drink of water,” she urged. “Eat something. Can you make your knuckles crack? Do it, oh, do it! Put your hand between your legs and squeeze. There’s so much I want to feel. Do you have music here? Give me some music, will you? Something loud, something really hard.”
I did the things she wanted. Gradually she grew more calm.
I was strangely calm myself. I had no special awareness then of her presence within me, no unfamiliar pressure in my skull, no slitherings along my spine. There was no mingling of her thoughtstream and mine. She seemed not to have any way of controlling the movements or responses of my body. In these respects our contact was less intimate than any ordinary human jacking communion would have been. But that, I would soon discover, was by her choice. We would not remain so carefully compartmentalized for long.
“Is it better for you now?” I asked.
“I thought I was going to go crazy. If I didn’t start feeling something again soon.”
“You can feel things now?”
“Through you, yes. Whatever you touch, I touch.”
“You know I can’t hide you for long. They’ll take my command away if I’m caught harboring a fugitive. Or worse.”
“You don’t have to speak out loud to me any more,” she said.
“I don’t understand.”
“Just send it. We have the same nervous system now.”
“You can read my thoughts?” I said, still aloud.
“Not really. I’m not hooked into the higher cerebral centers. But I pick up motor, sensory stuff. And I get subvocalizations. You know what those are? I can hear your thoughts if you want me to. It’s like being in communion. You’ve been in communion, haven’t you?”
“Once in a while.”
“Then you know. Just open the channel to me. You can’t go around the ship talking out loud to somebody invisible, you know. Send me something. It isn’t hard.”
“Like this?” I said, visualizing a packet of verbal information sliding through the channels of my mind.
“You see? You can do it!”
“Even so,” I told her. “You still can’t stay like this with me for long. You have to realize that.”
She laughed. It was unmistakable, a silent but definite laugh. “You sound so serious. I bet you’re still surprised you took me in in the first place.”
“I certainly am. Did you think I would?”
“Sure I did. From the first moment. You’re basically a very kind person.”
“Am I, Vox?”
“Of course. You just have to let yourself do it.” Again the silent laughter. “I don’t even know your name. Here I am right inside your head and I don’t know your name.”
“Adam.”
“That’s a nice name. Is that an Earth name?”
“An old Earth name, yes. Very old.”
“And are you from Earth?” she asked.
“No. Except in the sense that we’re all from Earth.”
“Where, then?”
“I’d just as soon not talk about it,” I said.
She thought about that. “You hated the place where you grew up that much?”
“Please, Vox—”
“Of course you hated it. Just like I hated Kansas Four. We’re two of a kind, you and me. We’re one and the same. You got all the caution and I got all the impulsiveness. But otherwise we’re the same person. That’s why we share so well. I’m glad I’m sharing with you, Adam. You won’t make me leave, will you? We belong with each other. You’ll let me stay until we reach Cul-de-Sac. I know you will.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” I wasn’t at all sure, either way.
“Oh, you will. You will, Adam. I know you better than you know yourself.”
9.
So it began. I was in some new realm outside my established sense of myself, so far beyond my notions of appropriate behavior that I could not even feel astonishment at what I had done. I had taken her in, that was all. A stranger in my skull. She had turned to me in appeal and I had taken her in. It was as if her recklessness was contagious. And though I didn’t mean to shelter her any longer than was absolutely necessary, I could already see that I wasn’t going to make any move to eject her until her safety was assured.
But how was I going to hide her?
Invisible she might be, but not undetectable. And everyone on the ship would be searching for her.
There were sixteen crewmen on board who dreaded a loose matrix as they would a vampire. They would seek her as long as she remained at large. And not only the crew. The intelligences would be monitoring for her too, not out of any kind of fear but simply out of efficiency: they had nothing to fear from Vox but they would want the cargo manifests to come out in balance when we reached our destination.
The crew didn’t trust me in the first place. I was too young, too new, too green, too sweet. I was just the sort who might be guilty of giving shelter to a secret fugitive. And it was altogether likely that her presence within me would be obvious to others in some way not apparent to me. As for the intelligences, they had access to all sorts of data as part of their routine maintenance operations. Perhaps they could measure tiny physiological changes, differences in my reaction times or circulatory efficiency or whatever, that would be a tipoff to the truth. How would I know? I would have to be on constant guard against discovery of the secret sharer of my consciousness.
The first test came less than an hour after Vox had entered me. The communicator light went on and I heard the far-off music of the intelligence on duty.
This one was 612 Jason, working the late shift. Its aura was golden, its music deep and throbbing. Jasons tend to be more brusque and less condescending than the Henry series, and in general I prefer them. But it was terrifying now to see that light, to hear that music, to know that the ship’s intelligence wanted to speak with me. I shrank back at a tense awkward angle, the way one does when trying to avoid a face-to-face confrontation with someone.
But of course the intelligence had no face to confront. The intelligence was only a voice speaking to me out of a speaker grid, and a stew of magnetic impulses somewhere on the control levels of the ship. All the same, I perceived 612 Jason now as a great glowing eye, staring through me to the hidden Vox.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Report summary, Captain. The dead passenger and the missing matrix.”
Deep within me I felt a quick plunging sensation, and then the skin of my arms and shoulders began to glow as the chemicals of fear went coursing through my veins in a fierce tide. It was Vox, I knew, reacting in sudden alarm, opening the petcocks of my hormonal system. It was the thing I had dreaded. How could 612 Jason fail to notice that flood of endocrine response?
“Go on,” I said, as coolly as I could.
But noticing was one thing, interpreting the data something else. Fluctuations in a human being’s endocrine output might have any number of causes. To my troubled conscience everything was a glaring signal of my guilt. 612 Jason gave no indication that it suspected a thing.
The intelligence said, “The dead passenger was Hans Eger Olafssen, 54 years of age, a native of—”
“Never mind his details. You can let me have a printout on that part.”
“The missing matrix,” 612 Jason went on imperturbably. “Leeleaine Eliani, 17 years of age, a native of Kansas Four, bound for Cul-de-Sac, Vainglory Archipelago, under Transmission Contract No. D-14871532, dated the 27th day of the third month of—”
“Printout on that too,” I cut in. “What I want to know is where she is now.”
“That information is not available.”
“That isn’t a responsive answer, 612 Jason.”
“No better answ
er can be provided at this time, Captain. Tracer circuits have been activated and remain in constant search mode.”
“And?”
“We have no data on the present location of the missing matrix.”
Within me Vox reacted instantly to the intelligence’s calm flat statement. The hormonal response changed from one of fear to one of relief. My blazing skin began at once to cool. Would 612 Jason notice that too, and from that small clue be able to assemble the subtext of my body’s responses into a sequence that exposed my criminal violation of regulations?
“Don’t relax too soon,” I told her silently. “This may be some sort of trap.”
To 612 Jason I said, “What data do you have, then?”
“Two things are known: the time at which the Eliani matrix achieved negation of its storage circuitry and the time of its presumed attempt at making neural entry into the suspended passenger Olafssen. Beyond that no data has been recovered.”
“Its presumed attempt?” I said.
“There is no proof, Captain.”
“Olafssen’s convulsions? The smashing of the storage housing?”
“We know that Olafssen responded to an electrical stimulus, Captain. The source of the stimulus is impossible to trace, although the presumption is that it came from the missing matrix Eliani. These are matters for the subsequent inquiry. It is not within my responsibilities to assign definite causal relationships.”
Spoken like a true Jason-series intelligence, I thought.
I said, “You don’t have any effective way of tracing the movements of the Eliani matrix, is that what you’re telling me?”
“We’re dealing with extremely minute impedances, sir. In the ordinary functioning of the ship it is very difficult to distinguish a matrix manifestation from normal surges and pulses in the general electrical system.”
“You mean, it might take something as big as the matrix trying to climb back into its own storage circuit to register on the monitoring system?”
“Very possibly, sir.”
“Is there any reason to think the Eliani matrix is still on the ship at all?”
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