Cosmopath - [Bengal Station 03]

by Eric Brown

  With the absence of sunlight, the temperature plummeted. Vaughan was grateful for his insulated one-piece suit.

  Chandrasakar sent a couple of drones ahead, then followed. A minute later, with everyone else having processed themselves through the narrow opening, Vaughan followed Das down a narrow flight of precarious steps. They descended for about ten minutes, and then the steps ended; Vaughan heard gasps from up ahead.

  They were in a cavern, easily the size of the Kali, a chamber whose walls were adorned with glowing fungus. One by one they switched off their flashlights, and it was as if the natural illumination brightened in compensation: the cavern was filled with a pulsing verdant light. Vaughan moved off to one side, reached out and touched the wall. His fingers came away green, and he understood now the colouration of the colonists. He wondered whether the fungus was an adornment they had chosen themselves, or an infection - or infestation - they had had thrust upon them along with the troglodyte lifestyle they had been forced to adopt.

  The party set off again, moving in single file along a path, which skirted the edge of the cavern.

  Vaughan enabled his tele-ability and made out the mind-shield static before him. He caught up with Das and said, “Are you reading?” He was more than a little uncomfortable at the thought.

  She nodded. “And have been since we landed.”

  They were walking side by side; her dark face was made sickly by the fungal light.

  She said, “I know it’s painful, being away from Sukara, with Li ill. You have my sympathy, for what it’s worth.”

  Painful, he thought, doesn’t describe it.

  “I...” she said. “I don’t often read true love, Jeff. I read people who kid themselves, or who think they’ve found it, but what you feel for Sukara...”

  It was impossible to keep visions of his wife from his head; who she was now, the kid she had been when they first met.

  “She saved my life,” he said, “and needed someone.”

  “And is a good person,” Das finished.

  He nodded, and formed a question. Before he could articulate it, Das said, “No, I haven’t. I haven’t had a lover for years. And then Rab came along...”

  “It’s strange...” he began.

  “... having someone read your every thought,” she finished. “The tables are turned. The telepath is the subject. I can read your every thought, access your every emotion, your every memory, far, far back... I look into your head and I know you, Jeff.”

  Disturbing, he thought.

  “You’re a different person, did you know that?”

  “To who I was years ago, before Sukara?”

  She smiled. “You were one sad, cynical bastard back then. That said, you had every reason to be.”

  “I wish you’d turn that thing off,” he said. If I probe any little green men, he thought, I’ll let you know.

  “Okay,” she said, reached to her handset and killed the program.

  They walked for a while in silence; they were approaching the end of the cavern, where it whittled down to form a tunnel still twice the height of a man. The green fungus followed the contours of the wall like the skin of a reptile, glowing eerily.

  They entered the corridor behind the others, and the floor beneath their feet began a gradual downward slope. The nearest scientist was perhaps five metres ahead.

  Vaughan said, “The others in Chandrasakar’s team? Have you used your viral program on them, too?”

  “Singh has protection I can’t overcome,” Das told him. “For obvious reasons. The others... what they know isn’t considered priority by Chandrasakar.”

  “So you’ve read them? How much has he told them?”

  She glanced across at him, her eyes unreadable dark pits in her lit face. “None of them know that the colonists have discovered something. I suspect he’s let Singh in on it. He and Singh are like this.” She crossed two fingers. “And it’d make sense to clue in your head of security.”

  “So as far as the others are concerned, this is all about contacting the colonists?”

  She nodded. “There’s a sociologist in the team, a psychologist, as well as the more obvious specialisms. Geologists and mineralogists, to assess the planet’s potential worth.”

  They walked in silence for a while. He wondered how long the trek might take; how long before the colonists came into range, and along with them their secret?

  A thought occurred to him. “What are the chances that Chandrasakar would have another telepath on his team?”

  She pursed her lips. “It’s a possibility.”

  “You said you couldn’t read Singh,” he said. “What if he’s a telepath?”

  She shook her head. “My people checked his history. He’s a security expert, and nothing more.” She grunted a humourless laugh. “If there was the slightest chance of his being Chandrasakar’s pet telepath, Jeff, you don’t think I’d’ve come clean with you, do you?”

  “Of course not,” he said.

  Unless, he thought, she and Singh were both Indian spies...

  He was glad she wasn’t reading now, though it didn’t really matter. When she next probed, she’d read his suspicion about her and Singh; she’d read that he trusted her about as much as he trusted Chandrasakar.

  She had a massive advantage over him - and one that he could do nothing about.

  The corridor descended more steeply now; in some places the descent was so steep that steps had been hewn in the rock. They descended, and the muscles in Vaughan’s legs set up a painful ache in protest.

  He said, “His team, the scientists and techs... they’re all loyal to the Chandrasakar Organisation?”

  She nodded. “All one hundred per cent Chandrasakar men and women. They’ve been with him years. He treats them well, and they respond. Almost Pavlovian,” she said. Then, “Why do you ask?”

  He shrugged. “Just wondering if we might have any allies when the crunch comes.”

  “Don’t rely on anyone else. It’s you and me against the universe.”

  He turned, wondering if a spider drone was behind them. The corridor was empty.

  They walked on in silence for a while.

  A few minutes later Das said, “Ganesh, but I thought life as a Saharan Bedouin was extreme.”

  He looked at her. “Meaning?”

  “Human beings,” she mused. “They adapt to anything. We live on ice caps, in deserts. There’s a colony out Sigma Draconis way, they declared independence twenty years ago and don’t like visitors. They live on islands of floating vegetation that’s the sole food of a cetacean, which the humans in turn prey upon. They have no government as such, and in their society everyone is equal who can hunt for food. Those who can’t are summarily and ceremonially drowned. They’re post-industrial by now, of course. Been there a hundred years.”

  He glanced at her. “Sounds like they live some kind of egalitarian ideal. I’m surprised you haven’t shacked up with them.”

  “Watch it, Vaughan,” she said. “Anyway, I was just wondering what we’ll find when we happen across the colonists. They must have adapted in many odd ways.”

  Vaughan scanned ahead, came across twenty areas of mind-shield static, and nothing more.

  “No sign of anything yet,” he reported.

  They walked on.

  Perhaps an hour later the corridor opened out again, sloped, and dropped into another vast cavern.

  Ahead, he heard Chandrasakar give the order to set up camp for the night. It was late, by Vaughan’s reckoning well past sunset, and for the first time he realised how tired and hungry he was.

  He and Das entered the cavern and dropped their backpacks.

  “Hey,” a scientist called out. “Come and look at this!”

  * * * *

  EIGHTEEN

  LOYALTIES

  Parveen joined the procession around the cavern walls, examining the bas-relief carvings, but she found it hard to summon the requisite measure of wonder which everyone else seemed to be e
xhibiting. Intellectually she knew what the panels meant - the sequence of frames showing stick-shaped humanoids with domed heads was the first indication that an alien race was, or had been, native to the planet - but she was more preoccupied with the course of recent events, and how they might impinge on her.

  She still couldn’t decide how she felt about Rab; her heart wanted nothing more than to abandon herself to him, to trust his reassurances, but she knew there was always the possibility that he might very well be using her to his own ends. Was this why she had so impulsively divulged what she knew to Vaughan? She knew she could trust him, and sooner or later she might very well be in need of an ally.

  Now another thought assailed her. Something that Vaughan had asked on the way down: might Singh be a telepath?

  According to the information on the data-pin compiled by her controller, Anil Singh was nothing more than what he appeared: a steroid-abusing thug with an over-developed pride in his ability to maim... But what if party intelligence had got it wrong, and he was a telepath? It would make sense for Rab to have an in-house telepath loyal to him.

  What sickened her was the thought that if he were a telepath, then her shield might not be up to the task of baffling his probes. What if he’d read her every thought, her recent conversations with Vaughan, and reported back to his boss?

  She glanced across the cavern. Singh had made the rounds of the frescoes like a bored visitor at a museum, and was now back with his team, setting up camp and breaking out rations around a heater; they had encamped together in a small group apart from the rest of the expedition.

  She looked across the cavern at Rab. He was deep in discussion with a group of scientists. Later, she decided suddenly, she would do what she had been too scared of doing before now, and try to invade his shield, even though she suspected she’d fail.

  “What do you make of them?”

  She jumped, then laughed nervously. Vaughan stood beside her, gazing at the carvings.

  “Well, they’re certainly not the work of the colonists,” she said, fatuously.

  He smiled. “I came to that conclusion myself.” He reached out, traced his fingers around the outline of a stick figure. “I wonder how the first meeting between the colonists and the aliens went? I wonder if they’re a friendly race?”

  She smiled. “Most alien races that we’ve met are, Jeff. Gone are the days of the stereotypical idea of the alien as the hostile other. Only the Merth have been vaguely inimical, and that was because of an initial misunderstanding.” She looked at the dome-headed, almost amphibian-seeming figures. “Of course, these carvings are old. They might be the work of a race now extinct. Conditions are harsh here, to say the least.”

  He nodded. “Anyway... I came over to see if you were hungry.” He gestured to where the main group had deposited backpacks and bedrolls. He’d set up a heater and broken out the self-heating food trays.

  “Famished. What’s on the menu?”

  They crossed to the camp and sat down, Vaughan handing her a tray. “Dal baht or lamb masala.” He shook his head. “The Chandrasakar Organisation spares no expense.”

  They snapped the seals on the trays and ate the dhal.

  She hoped the conversation wouldn’t come round to the topic of security again: she didn’t want him quizzing her about the status of Singh, and working out that she’d been less than tactful in seeking him as an ally - even though she’d been at a low ebb at the time.

  Thankfully he asked her about herself. “I’m intrigued-” he began.

  “By?” she asked.

  “By people like you,” he said.

  “How many thirty-something commie xenologist telepaths have you met, Mr Vaughan?”

  He smiled and forked dal and rice into his mouth. “I mean, people consumed with an over-riding belief system.”

  “You make me sound like some religious fundamentalist-”

  He gestured with his fork. “You said it, Parveen.”

  She looked at him. “You’re serious, aren’t you? Listen, religious belief is nothing more than superstition, though some might call it faith: it’s the same thing. My set of beliefs are based on a rational analysis of the socio-economic state of the modern world.”

  He shrugged. “As far as I’m concerned, and I’ve read enough people to make a case, political beliefs and religious faith are the same in this respect: they make for an intolerant mind-set that doesn’t allow the admission for the possibility of error, or that the other view might possibly have credence.”

  She shook her head, containing her anger. “But I know that the only way forwards for the human race-”

  He shrugged. “Say no more, Parveen.” He was smiling to himself.

  She ate for a while in silence, then said, “Rather my certainties, and the possibility of good that might accrue for my fellow man, than your apathy. That’s one thing I didn’t like about you from what I read.”

  “Apathy. You’re not the first person to have pointed that out.”

  She looked at him. “And how do you feel about that?”

  “I couldn’t give a damn one way or the other what other people think about me,” he said, but she saw that he had the grace to smile.

  “Your anti-intellectual stance is as self-centred and insular as the intolerance you deplore in those with definite beliefs.”

  He cocked an eye at her. “You think so? That’s interesting. But you see, I’ve read so many minds that I think I’ve learned something about my fellow man. And that is, they all think they’re right on some deep, fundamental level, no matter how wrong they might be. I might give my trust to individuals, because their solipsism is manageable, but as far as organisations and political parties are concerned...”

  “You think of yourself as an anarchist.”

  He laughed, without humour. “There you go again. Why the eagerness to label people? I think of myself as Jeff Vaughan, husband of Sukara and father to Pham and Li. My loyalties end there.”

  She looked at him. “I don’t know whether to think of you as one deluded bastard, or supremely fortunate.”

  “Just think of me as Jeff Vaughan, husband and father, and leave it there, okay? You’ve read my mind. You know that’s all that matters to me.”

  She continued eating. “You know, I’d like to meet Sukara someday. I’d like to read her, read the goodness you see in her.” She looked up. “Have you read her?”

  “You’ve been in here.” He tapped his head. “Didn’t you read it?”

  “No, not that. There was so much...”

  He shook his head. “When I first met her, I wasn’t reading, but I picked up her goodness.”

  “And you’ve never been tempted to...?”

  “No. I promised her. Anyway, I know her well enough not to need to pry. I know and love her.”

  She nodded. After a moment she murmured, “I... I wish I could read Rab.”

  “Well, it’d make things here a bit easier.”

  “No, I mean... for personal reasons. I’d like to read what he thinks about me.”

  He stopped eating and regarded her. “You really fell for him, didn’t you?”

  She smiled. “Who would have thought it? Card-carrying party member falls head-over-heels for filthy capitalist exploiter.”

  “I’m sorry. It must be painful. The conflict.”

  She looked up. “Anybody would have thought you’d read me.”

  “I don’t need to probe to see that you were lonely before he came along, that part of you regrets letting your heart rule your head when you met him.”

  “Jeff, I’ve always lived up here, tried to rationalise my loneliness-”

  “But we’re all slaves to the tyranny of our biology,” he said.

  “You seem to have done okay by it.”

  He shrugged. “It takes time,” he said. “I went through years of not letting myself get close to people, in my case for fear of getting hurt. Then, the big cliché, the right person came along.”

  He reached
out and squeezed her hand. “But hey, who’s to say we haven’t got Rab wrong? He might be the altruist people think he is...”

  “Yeah, and he might love me too, hm?”

  They scraped their trays clean and Vaughan settled down on his bedroll, linking his fingers behind his head and gazing up at the green vault overhead.