by Eric Brown
He went for his laser, at the same time wondering why the Korth hadn’t singled him out and attacked immediately. As he surreptitiously thumbed off the safety control, it came to him. The Korth was an empath, and had been locked on to his earlier emotional signature.
The fact was that Sukara’s call had, briefly, disrupted that default signature, submerging it with his shock...
No sooner had this thought formulated than the alien turned, easing its laser from the folds of its padded jacket.
Something moved behind the Korth, and before either the alien or Vaughan had time to discharge their respective weapons, a woman in combat fatigues yelled something Vaughan didn’t catch.
The alien pirouetted, levelling its laser. The woman fired. The flash blinded Vaughan and he dropped to the floor. When he next looked, the Korth was swaying in the entrance, headless, before falling in stages on its multi-jointed legs and scattering tables and chairs.
Watched by petrified customers, the woman stepped over the alien’s corpse, holstering her pistol, and strode over to Vaughan while the rest of her team moved in on the alien. She gave him a hostile look.
“Vaughan?”
He climbed to his feet.
“You’re one lucky son of a bitch, man,” she said.
“Lucky?” he whispered to himself as the woman rejoined her team.
He raised his wrist and activated his handset, replaying Sukara’s message.
“Jeff,” she had wept. “Jeff, I’ve just seen Dr Chang, and he said, he said...” She broke down, then managed, “Jeff, Li has leukaemia!”
* * * *
TWO
IN TWO MINDS
Parveen Das shut down her softscreen and smiled at the three’ seminar students. “Right. That’s it for today, and for the term. Enjoy your holidays.”
“Are you going away?” Rukshana asked her. She was Das’s favourite student, a Dalit plucked from the slums by Kolkata University’s Uniquely Gifted programme. The girl reminded Das of herself at seventeen, bright and eager to learn and innocent. How things had changed in just twenty years.
“Would you believe I’m taking a voidliner out to the Expansion’s farthest limit and visiting a relatively unexplored colony world?”
“No!” her students said as one.
Das nodded. “No lie. In a few days I’ll be hurtling through the void. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back.”
Their disbelief was to be expected; she reminded herself that most of her students had never left Bengal State, never mind the Communist States of India. The stars were a destination beyond their wildest dreams.
When her students left the room, she turned to the window and stared out. From the fourth floor of the university’s west wing, she had a bird’s-eye view down College Street and across the sprawl of Kolkata. Pedestrians filled the wide conduit between ancient, flaking buildings like ants in a formicary. The flow was never-ending, and Das found the sight of so many citizens mind-numbingly depressing: they represented so much mind-noise, which thanks to her latest implants she was able to switch off altogether, unlike in the early days when the constant migraine of brain-noise had almost driven her mad. Now, the mere sight of packed humanity was enough to trigger a surge of retrospective pain.
How she longed for the wide open spaces of the Deccan, or the empty wilderness of some of the colony worlds she’d visited, where she had taken a car and driven for hundreds of kilometres, parked up and stood out in the open and turned on her tele-ability.
Silence. Absolute silence. Not a human mind in any direction...
She had an hour to kill before she made her way to the labs. She locked her room and passed the Senior Commons Room. She considered popping in for a coffee, but decided against it. Bhandra haunted the SCR and he’d hit on her as usual with his overweening assumption that, because she was single and in her late thirties, she was desperate and available. She’d once probed him and read his desires towards her. That had been enough to ensure she was never alone in the same room with him; she had no wish to be bound and sodomised and stabbed with burning incense sticks, even by a distinguished professor of twenty-first century English.
She bought a coffee at the university’s outdoor café and sat on the terrace, staring through the railings at the passing tide of pedestrians. There were no beggars on the streets these days, unemployment was low, and India was enjoying its greatest period of prosperity for a century. From the main building of the university, a great Indian flag flapped in the sultry breeze: an orange, white, and green tricolour with a red hammer and sickle at its centre.
She wondered how great a part in the country’s prosperity people like her had played, the millions of citizens the party had plucked from poverty and educated so that they might one day pay-back and serve the motherland in countless ways. How had she come to work for the government, and did she resent the gentle coercion a suited official had applied to her conscience shortly after her graduation? It was still a question she wrestled with daily.
She knew that her colleagues, and many of her students, wondered about her: the brilliant xenologist, with a dozen books to her name, internationally famous and feted by politicians and research institutes, who lived alone and had never - at least since she had taught the university, which was ten years - had a boyfriend, or a girlfriend, come to that.
How could she tell them that her ability militated against finding that perfect someone whom she might trust and love? Always, on meeting seemingly pleasant and charming men, she had succumbed to the temptation of ascertaining whether their psyches were as pristine as their outward personas - and always she had been disappointed. It was easier to absorb herself in her work, in her students - in her occasional government duties - and keep a tight rein on her emotions.
And then, a month ago, she had met Rabindranath Chandrasakar at a party at the Chinese embassy; a colleague had introduced the billionaire voidline owner, and they’d chatted for an hour. He’d surprised her on two counts: for a filthy capitalist exploiter of his workers, he was a gracious, charming and intelligent man - and he seemed genuinely interested both in her work and in her as a person. She judged he was more than thirty years her senior, but he’d kept himself in good condition and could easily pass for fifty.
He’d surprise her again a day later when he invited her to dine at an exclusive French restaurant in the city’s international quarter. They’d discussed her work, his experiences on various planets around the Expansion, and had parted with a chaste kiss.
They’d met regularly after that, and two weeks ago he’d asked her to stay the night in his insultingly opulent penthouse suite, and she had willingly agreed. She’d surprised herself again, and enjoyed the experience of sexual intimacy. Earlier, over dinner, she’d been tempted to probe him, but decided instead to tell him about her ability, about her desire to read his mind.
Chandrasakar had smiled and said that he was shielded with the latest Rio technology - for security reasons, of course. But, perhaps, one day when he knew her better...
She’d wondered if she truly wanted to disappoint herself with access to his secret thoughts and memories... but she was gladdened that he was willing to consider opening himself to her inspection, one day.
The last time, they’d met, a few days ago, he’d said that he’d like her to accompany him on an expedition to an unexplored star.
What could be more romantic than that?
* * * *
A tall Chinese guy slipped into a seat at a nearby table and accessed his handset. He glanced up at Parveen and smiled, and she looked away quickly. She wondered if she were exuding more confidence since Chandrasakar’s attentions; she’d noticed men looking at her more often recently. The thought disturbed her, oddly; she liked the idea of being unnoticed, of blending into the background.
He looked at her again. She thought he was about to say something, but she glanced at her handset and saw that it was time to be heading off. She finished her coffee, pushed thro
ugh the crowded street and hailed a cab to take her south to the government labs in the Taltala district.
Five minutes later the car eased itself through the lab checkpoint; she paid the driver and stepped out, into the blazing summer heat, and hurried towards the guarded entrance. She showed her pass and the security woman nodded her through. After a series of further checks she found herself in a plush waiting room equipped with softscreens showing news programmes from around the world, and even from off-world. She watched an item on the building of a new dam on Mars until a receptionist called her name.
An elevator carried her to a secure underground lab, where she underwent another security scan and at last was admitted into Dr Prakesh’s hallowed inner sanctum. She had expected a sanitised, scrubbed-clean technical lab when she’d first been summoned here, five years ago, staffed by technicians in white coats and rubber gloves and disposable galoshes. The reality was more like some holo-movie director’s idea of a tech-geek teenager’s garage, staffed by scientists whose dress code was sub-casual.
Dr Prakesh wore his hair long and gathered in a bunch. He was seated at a desk, peering through a magnifying visor. He didn’t look up.
“Another upgrade, Ajay?” she asked as she shoved a pile of hardware from a swivel chair and sat down.
“The latest, and a new implant.”
She suspected Ajay Prakesh suffered from autism, or at least Asperger’s; at home with AIs and drone-bots, he found interaction with human beings difficult, and eye contact an impossibility.
In his company, Parveen felt almost normal.
“A new implant? What else do they want you to shove into my brain?”
He shook his head. “Not into your head. In fact, we’re taking your old rig out.”
“Out?”
“Ah-cha. Upstairs wants you fitted with the very latest. It’ll be sourced in your handset and routed up your arm into your cerebellum. We’re also upgrading your viral capabilities.”
“When do I have the surgery?”
He blinked, and almost brought himself to look at her. “No surgery. We’ll do it here.”
She looked around at the hi-tech chaos, discarded curry trays, and crumpled plastic lassi bottles. “Hardly the most hygienic surroundings, Ajay.”
He shrugged and blinked. Through the mag-visor, his bloodshot eyes looked as vast as moons. “Just following orders.”
“Okay, let’s have it.”
He opened a wide, flat drawer and pulled out a shrink-wrapped package containing wires and coils of something like microfilaments. “The latest from the Hooghli lab. Bit more powerful than the one you’ve got, and the shield is foolproof.”
“But why scrap the occipital?” she asked. The occipital rig was what made her telepathic, amplifying the effects of the operation she’d undergone in her late twenties.
He blinked. “Word from upstairs is that this is what will be fitted to all subjects - I mean undercover operatives - from now on.”
Subjects, she thought, just about summed up what Prakesh thought of her and the other telepaths. Just the boring meat end of much more interesting soft- and hardware.
“Security,” Prakesh went on. “After the op, no one will be able to tell you have tele-ability. No occipital give-away, see?”
She nodded. “So what do I do?”
“Wait while I call in a nurse, and then I’ll yank out the old rig and insert the implant.”
“You make it sound... industrial,” she said.
“Industrial?” He blinked, the joke beyond him. “No, it’s just technical.”
He buzzed, and two minutes later a professional-looking nurse - professional in that at least he wore a white coat and surgical gloves - entered the lab and readied her for the procedure.
He swabbed the back of her neck around the golden inlay of her occipital rig, and Prakesh inserted some wires and probes. Parveen felt something moving around just under the skin at the base of her skull - imagine a gecko trapped in there, as she’d once tried to explain the sensation to her controller - and a second later something else clunked into her skull. Prakesh yanked, as if trying to pull her brain out through too small a hole, and from the corner of her eye she caught sight of wires and filaments dripping goo. She didn’t ask.
The nurse slapped some synthi-flesh over the wound and said it’d heal in no time.
Prakesh was already working on her handset.
He opened the unit, exposing chips, and eased one end of a red filament into a port. The nurse said, “Don’t be alarmed. You’ll feel an odd sensation crawling up your arm. In fact, if you look closely enough you’ll see the working end moving sub-dermally...”
Prakesh touched a pin to a control mechanism in her handset, and the spooled filament unwound as it was fed up the length of her arm.
“Hey,” she said, as a burning sensation shot from her wrist to her shoulder, along with a tiny subcutaneous ripple. She felt something move across the outside of her skull and dock with whatever mechanism remained in her occipital region.
Prakesh ran a diagnostic and read something from a screen. “All done. Care to check it?”
“You mean, probe someone?”
Prakesh took his shield, on a chain around his neck, and handed it to the nurse. “Just leave the room for a second.”
Parveen looked at him. “You sure?”
“ Chalo!” He shooed the nurse from the room and turned to read something from a com-screen; as far as he was concerned, he’d done his duty so far as Parveen Das was concerned and he was moving on to the next problem.
“Ah-cha, I’m enabling now, Ajay.”
He nodded absently, and she tapped the code into her handset and sent out a probe towards the technician.
Shiva... She was right. Autism. There was a serious lack of anything like emotion going on in there, and even empathy was absent, but she did pick up a maelstrom of concern about... codes and programs and wetware paradigms that meant nothing to her at all. She killed the link and gave thanks that she was who she was.
“Works like a dream, Ajay,” she said.
“Mmm...” he murmured.
She moved to the door.
“Oh,” Prakesh said as she was about to leave. “Message from Anish - he wants you upstairs as soon as you’ve done here.”
“I’m on my way.”
* * * *
If Prakesh were autistic, then Anish Lahore was the opposite, whatever the term for that might be.
He was a fat man whom Parveen had never seen stand up. In fact, she’d never seen him out of the bucket chair that cupped his three hundred pounds of solid fat; without its confines, she feared he might overflow and take up most of the floor-space in his roomy office.
He was an effusive, over-emotive Bengali in his sixties who habitually greeted Parveen by clutching her hands and hanging on for long seconds.
Anish had been her controller for three years now, and he was more like an uncle to her than some conniving party spymaster.
Or, rather, that was the image he liked to project.
He was shielded, of course, so Parveen had never had the opportunity to read him.
“Par-veen!” He gripped her hands like a solicitous grandmother and beamed into her face. “Are they treating you well at the university? I read your last paper. Ex-cellent. A gem.” He had the odd linguistic habit of breaking up his words as if to add emphasis.
She managed to regain possession of her hands and sit down across the desk from him.
“Professor Ranjit Khan behaving himself?” Anish asked.
This was part of her job she didn’t like. Anish Lahore wouldn’t have called it snooping on her colleagues, in so many words, but that’s what it amounted to. Khan was a party member, but someone high up suspected him of bourgeois sympathies. Anish had asked Parveen to keep an eye on him, report back to him any meeting the professor might have with foreign academics or politicos.
Parveen rather liked the dashing professor of applied linguistics, and m
ade sure that what she did dish on him was innocuous.
“Khan’s on his best behaviour, Anish. Anyway, what did you want to see me about?”
“How are things... progressing with your tame tycoon, Parveen?” Anish asked with the merest hint of a lascivious glint in his fat-slitted eyes. “I’ve heard that he might be travelling off planet...?”
Nothing, but nothing, escaped the attention of the party. The day after her third, and amorous, meeting with Chandrasakar, Anish called her in and asked her all about it - like a girlfriend wanting the low-down.
“Of course,” he’d said, “Chandrasakar is a very powerful and influential figure. His interests, by their very nature, are opposed to those of the State. It would help if you were able to become a... confidant, shall we say, of the man.”