Fool's War

by Sarah Zettel

  “‘Dama Al Shei? I’m Lewis Brooke, Guild Cadet.” He started to hold out his hand, but apparently decided against it and just tightened his fingers around the straps of the two satchels slung over his shoulder. “I’m here to collect Evelyn Dobbs’ possessions.”

  “So I’ve been informed.” Al Shei stood aside and gestured for him to enter the cabin. He unfolded the bunk and placed both empty satchels on it. Then, obviously trying hard not to look at Schyler and Al Shei, he started opening drawers and packing away what he found in there.

  Al Shei gave Schyler a jerk of her chin that meant “go away.” Schyler hesitated a moment, but then nodded and left. Al Shei, leaving the hatch open, crossed the threshold and sat down in the desk chair.

  “Do you know Dobbs well?”

  The question seemed to startle Brooke. He froze, halfway bent over the bag with a spare turquoise tunic in his hands.

  “Not very well.” He had a raspy voice, as if he didn’t use it much. “I’ve met her a few times. She’s a good friend of Cyril Cohen,” he added like he was volunteering a great secret. He moved to the pile of cushions velcroed to the floor and began pulling them up and collapsing the air out of them. She barely heard him over the hissing. “He’s my tutor.”

  Al Shei nodded, although she wasn’t sure how far student-teacher loyalty extended in the Guild, but Brooke’s manner made her believe he valued it. “I was wondering if there was anyway you could take a message from me to Dobbs. Quietly, you know. I understand she’s in a severe amount of trouble for helping us.”

  “Yeah, that’s for sure.” Brooke rolled the squares of fabric that had once been cushions up into a single cylinder and stowed them in the satchel. His gaze slid to the open hatch and the empty corridor. “Actually, ‘Dama, I’ve been asked to give you a message.”

  This is turning into plot, counter-plot, thought Al Shei with a touch of exasperation. We’ll probably be speaking in code next. “Then I’d appreciate you doing so.”

  “Cohen wants to know when you’re leaving and if you’ll agree to take Dobbs with you.”

  Al Shei straightened her spine one inch at a time. “Cohen wants to know? Has anyone thought to ask Dobbs what she wants to do?”

  Brooke’s face scrunched up in an expression that might have been alarm or simple distaste, Al Shei couldn’t tell. “Dobbs is in solitary confinement right now. We’re trying to get her out.” He turned quickly away and darkened the mirror and both memory boards. One at a time, he lifted them away from the walls and leaned them up against the bunk.

  Al Shei just stared at him. “Solitary confinement? An employment guild allows solitary confinement?”

  Brooke rested his hand against the mirror frame and nodded.

  “That’s uncivilized!” she exclaimed, knowing that the outburst was irrational.

  “Probably.” Brooke shrugged and began taking the cloth draperies down from the walls. “But it is reality. Dobbs is in confinement. Cohen and I and a few others are trying to get her out, but she’s going to need a place to go once she gets there. The only place we have to take her is the Pasadena.”

  Al Shei felt as if the deck had just tilted under her. “What kind of organization is this? Why doesn’t she just quit?”

  Brooke bit his lip and glanced at the open hatchway. “We don’t think she’s going to be allowed to.”

  “That’s insane.” This can’t be real. I’m being lied to. Dobbs has done something illegal or…but what could she have done? If she had really broken the law, why didn’t Guild Master Ferrand say something about it?

  “It is insane, ‘Dama,” Brooke agreed solemnly, blinking his wide, dark eyes. He was young, Al Shei realized, maybe as young as Ianiai. “It also happens to be the truth.” He cast another glance at the hatchway. Al Shei made no move to close it. “‘Dama, Cohen said you know a little about us, about the Guild. You can understand why there might be fanatics who don’t want Dobbs to just walk away, can’t you?”

  “No, I can’t,” she said firmly. “I do not understand one thing about your Guild. This is brutal and irresponsible. You and your colleagues should be mounting a complaint, not engaging in amateur espionage.”

  Brooke winced. “Perhaps we should. We want to make some changes, but until we can, it’s important that we get Dobbs out of here. Will you take her, ‘Dama? Please?”

  Al Shei swayed on her feet. This was getting to be far, far too much. Maybe we should sell the diaries from this run, Asil, she thought toward the part of her mind that held her husband’s memory. We could pay for The Mirror of Fate off the media adaptation fees. She rubbed her hands together. Brooke, apparently realizing she wasn’t going to answer immediately, moved around the cabin, opening the remaining drawers and packing up the last of Dobbs’ thirty-five pounds worth of possession.

  It’s an internal matter. I should leave it, finish the run, go home, get Uncle Ahmet outraged and cut this place open. Brooke disappeared into the bathroom.

  But I can’t leave her here. I am not happy with this “guild.” She’s been in the thick of this mess the run’s started, but she risked her ranking, name of God, she risked her whole livelihood to get us to help, that’s clear. She felt the spark of anger glowing inside her again. She remembered Dobbs, tired and overtaxed, doing her best to complete her tasks, not just to deliver the AI to the Fool’s Guild, but to keep the Pasadena’s crew safe and sane.

  Brooke came out of the bathroom with a small bag of toiletries in his hand. Al Shei stood up.

  “After everything we’ve been through, I’m going to want to run a few extra checks on the feeder lines. We should be ready to leave in four hours. If, after that, it turns out there’s a stowaway aboard, well, that becomes my problem, doesn’t it?”

  Brooke, unsmiling, nodded and sealed the satchels. He slung the strap of the first bag across his shoulder. Then, he hoisted the mirror and the memory boards up under one arm and the second satchel under the other. Al Shei left the bare cabin behind him and let the hatch cycle shut.

  “I trust you can find your way to the airlock,” she said as they both climbed down the stairs to the data hold. “I’ve got a lot of work to do around here.”

  “I understand.” He stopped in front of the hatch and bent reflexively into the Fool’s exiting bow. He caught himself about halfway down and straightened up. He gave a clumsy nod instead.

  Al Shei left him and started down for the engineering deck. After a moment, a hatch cycled open and the echoes of Brooke’s footsteps faded to silence. She glanced up and down, the dropshaft was empty.

  She leaned across the outer railing to reach a memory board and took out her pen.

  Zubedye, she wrote. You need to brush up on maritime law concerning stowaways. I particularly need to know what the captain’s discretionary powers are. She coded it for Resit’s cabin and added the send command. After a couple of seconds, the message faded away.

  I’ve heard of more graceful resignation plans, Dobbs, thought Al Shei as she started down the stairs again. But never of one that was more effective.

  Dobbs paced around the hospital cabin. There were no windows or books, and, of course, no access boards. The one set of cable jacks had their lids locked down. Pacing was better than just sitting still and thinking. Not much better, but a little.

  A flash caught her eye. The door light blinked from red to green. The hatchway opened a moment later. Cohen slipped inside and cycled the hatch shut immediately.

  Dobbs’s heart leapt, but whether it was from joy or fear she couldn’t tell.

  She ran up to him and grabbed his hand. “What’s going on?”

  Cohen squeezed her hand briefly. His face had gone pastey grey. “Dobbs, I’m getting you out of here.”

  She tried to pull back. “Cyril…thanks for the thought, but I’m in enough trouble for ten. I don’t want you to…”

  Cohen held onto her hand, squeezing it almost to the point of pain. “Dobbs, I know what you pulled out of the personnel files. I touche
d it as it went by.” She knew he saw the shock in her eyes. “I had to, Evelyn. I had be sure you weren’t the one who was lying.” That hurt, but she couldn’t blame him.

  He swallowed hard and his grip relaxed a little but he still didn’t let go. “Evelyn, I eavesdropped on the Guild Master’s session about you. They…they decided to take you apart.”

  Dobbs’s heart stopped dead in her chest. “I don’t understand,” she whispered.

  Cyril’s eyes were wide and full of turmoil. “Your body is going to be taken apart for the useable material, and you’re not going to be allowed to leave before they do it. They’re going to manufacture an accident for the records.”

  Dobbs felt her knees begin to give way. She groped for the bed and sat down heavily. “No. They wouldn’t. Not even for what…for what I’ve done. You’re wrong.”

  “I wish I was.” Cyril spread his hands. “I spent an hour trying to convince myself I’d misheard. Maybe I’d gotten garbled data. Anything.” He shook his head. “You’ve got two hours left before the Pasadena leaves. I had Brooke pass a message to Al Shei. If you turn up as a stowaway, she’ll treat it as a personal matter.”

  Dobbs pressed her hand against her forehead to try to calm the spinning in her head. She’d already assembled a list of what she had told herself was the worst the Guild could do to her. Lock her up until her body died of old age. Put her on-line under supervision until she was a hundred years old.

  Now Cohen, who she’d known since he came to the Guild, was telling her that her masters, their masters, were going to kill her. She couldn’t believe it, and she couldn’t not believe it.

  Finally, she raised her head. “And how am I going to stow away?” Her voice had gone hoarse. “Fly through the bulkheads?”

  Cyril reached into his pocket and drew out a familiar flat, black box. “Brooke is going to say that he didn’t find this when he packed up your gear and that you must have it on you. You are going to be found without a pulse. The assumption will be that you must have overdosed yourself.”

  Dobbs shook her head. “You’re crazy, Cohen. They’ll never believe I’m dead. They’ll know its a set-up.”

  “They’ll believe it if they find you’re transceiver smashed on the floor beside you.”

  Dobbs swallowed. His face was absolutely serious. “And if my transceiver is smashed, how am I going to get back into my body?”

  “Lonn’s already gone to get your back-up out of storage.”

  This was ridiculous. This was impossible. There was no way this could work. “What if the Guild Masters go for my back-up to try to revive me?”

  Now it was Cohen’s turn to shake his head. “Dobbs, after what they were planning to do, do you really think they’re going to try to revive you?” Neither one of them said anything for a moment. “At most they’ll mount a guard on the Drawbridge, just in case,” Cohen went on, finally. He held out the box.

  Dobbs’ hands were sweating as she took it. “All right, we stage the overdose. Then what?”

  “Then, Brooke and Lonn get your unguarded body out of the surgery, into a maintenance cart and then onto the Pasadena, while I go on-line and help smuggle yourself out of the Guild Hall network.”

  Dobbs stared at him. His words were taking a long time to sink in. “Why would any of you do this?”

  “Same reason you’ve done what you have,” said Cyril. “Something’s gone really wrong with some of the Guild Masters. We have to get you clear and then we have to figure out who we can tell about all of this.” He swallowed. “It isn’t you that’s jeopardizing the Guild security. It’s them.” He glanced towards the door. “You’ve got to do this now, Dobbs. I’ve got to be able to smash your transceiver and tell everybody you’re dead.”

  Dobbs’s head felt light. “The cable jacks are locked.”

  Cohen gave her a small, lopsided smile. “Not for me, they’re not.”

  “Right.” Dobbs swung her legs up onto the bed and pulled the transceiver and the hypo out of the box. “I’m going to need a new supply of juice, Cyril. I’m running low. And make sure Brooke gets the back-up transceiver to my body.” She held up the transceiver and cable briefly before she jacked it into her implant. “I’d like to be able to find my way home again.” The transceivers were individually constructed for each Fool and served as the gateway back into the physical body, allowing for restimulation of the individual synaptic patterns that the anesthetic blocked.

  She watched while Cohen undid the catches on the jack cover beside the bed. She plugged her cable in and measured out eight hours on the hypo.

  “Not enough,” said Cohen. “It’s got to be at least twenty, or they’re not going to find enough in your bloodstream.”

  She looked up at him. The transceiver tickled in her implant and the room was blurring around the edges. “Twenty hours will just about kill me.” Maximum dosage was twenty-four hours. She didn’t say that aloud. Cohen already knew that.

  “I know,” Cohen said softly. Dobbs’ hands shook. Cohen took the hypo. She could barely see him now. The room was blurry and far away. Her limbs seemed to be lengthening out of all proportion.

  Cohen pressed the hypo back into her hand and Dobbs, reflexively, held it to her neck. She closed her eyes and let her body drop away.

  Dobbs shot free into the network in a tight ball. As soon as she broke into the path, she spread herself out flat and thin. Then, slowly, painstakingly, she began to stretch herself out as far as she could.

  It was a variant on the technique that she and Lipinski had used. Fools were dense, quick things. Thin, disbursed packets were non-sentient programs; somebody’s experiment or searcher, or game. No Fool would stretch themselves until the connections between their thoughts were just threads and work to stay that way. No Fool would hold their thoughts like a human would hold their breath. Especially in the Guild Hall. No Fool would try to hide in the Guild Hall. Why would they want to?

  Dobbs knew that this was her only real protection. No one would be seriously looking for her because no one expected her to try to hide in the network. If Cyril’s lie didn’t work and the Guild Masters mounted a search, she would be found. That was all there was to it. She could not totally suppress her conscious thoughts. She could run, she could even try to shred the network like a newborn on a rampage, but it wouldn’t do any good. There were over two thousand Fools who didn’t know there was anything wrong inside the Guild, and if the Guild Masters spoke against her, all of them would be after her. She could not hide from all of them. Not for eight hours. Not for eight seconds. Not even if she made it to a transmitter and managed to erase the records of her jump.

  Somebody shot past overhead, grazing her outer layers. Dobbs shrank further in on herself. Fear weighted her down, pressing harder with each second that crawled past. This was wrong. This was wrong. She shouldn’t be afraid of other Fools. They were like her. They were her friends, her family. They were the root of what she was. They were the nucleus of a relationship that was supposed to last for as long as she could keep herself coherent.

  It’ll be all right. It’ll be all right, she told herself in the same tones a mother might use to hush a crying child. You’ll get this straightened out. You’ll find Theodore Curran and then everything will be all right again.

  Another Fool flitted by. What is going on out there? Dobbs wondered. One hour, fifteen minutes, three point two seconds had gone by. Had Cohen shown Havelock her body yet? Had they believed that she was dead? Had they held him for questioning? Was he going to be able to get to her? How much longer should she wait before she tried to get out alone?

  What do I do? What can I do?

  A signal shot through Dobbs’s outer layers and her whole self convulsed. She grabbed at it, stretching it out, trying to swallow it. Her memory twisted.

  And she knew it was Cohen at the other end. If she had been in her body, she would have cried with relief. Another twist and she knew what he wanted her to do.

  Dobbs curled in on he
rself, making herself into the smallest, tightest packet she could manage.

  Cohen enveloped her. His touch was as gentle as it could be, but it was all encompassing. She tried to relax, but she couldn’t. She was being smothered. She couldn’t touch her surroundings. She was being moved but she didn’t know where. She had no control, no voice, nothing. She could barely think without disturbing Cohen’s own thoughts. If she tried to touch him from deep inside, she might accidently upset a memory or set off a controlling reflex. At the least, that would be painful for Cohen. At the most, that would give her presence away.

  They might be meeting other Fools now. Cohen might be engaged in multi-level conversation for all she knew. This was totally unnatural. Fools in the network had no analogy for eyesight, but human’s had no analogy for the Fool’s total awareness of the immediate environment. A Fool touched everything around them with every atom of their skin. They knew what all of it was and where all of it was in relation to themselves. Now, she only knew Cohen and the surge of his inner processes. She wanted to touch them, to probe them and understand them and how they fit together. She couldn’t. She couldn’t hear. She couldn’t feel. She was deaf and dumb and all she could do was grit her whole self and try not to scream.

  Were they through the Drawbridge yet? Was a Guild Master detaining them? Had an alarm sounded? What was going on? Where were they?

  Jump.

  All at once, Cohen was gone. Dobbs flew free into the network, right into the thick of a stream of packets. Only years of training kept her from reaching through all of them and drinking them into herself. She did touch the location ID and time. She was inside IBN repeater PO3-IBN35091-A410. The jump had taken two hours, fifty seconds.

  Cohen stirred next to her. She stretched out until she reached through his outer layers and into his unprotected memories. She poured in her thanks.

  In response, Cohen turned over his memories of what had happened in the hospital room. Paravel, a medical technician had done the blood-test and pronounced that there was enough residual tranquilizer in her blood to have done the job. She had no pulse, no brainwave activity. Paravel was more than willing to pronounce death. Havelock had greeted the announcement with a blank face and absolute silence. He’d done nothing more eloquent than turn on his heel and stride out of the room.