A new pang shot through Angus. He blinked to disguise his outrage. Destroy Billingate? The director’s arrogance offended him. He’d been dependent on places like Billingate more often than he cared to remember. Without them, he would have died long ago. Or been caught and convicted.
If you think I’m going to do that kind of bloody work for you—
On the other hand, it would be better to destroy Billingate than to be destroyed himself.
“Of course,” Dios added as if he were responding to Angus’ emotion, “it would be simpler to send a battle-wagon and blast that rock to rubble. But our treaties with the Amnion prevent it. I don’t want to precipitate an open war. In any case, it’s likely that Thanatos Minor is fairly well defended. All in all, a covert approach is preferable.”
“Director.” Milos stiffened his resolve. “I’ve said this before—often—but I’ll say it again.” He kept his nic in his mouth as if it gave him courage. Light made the stains on his scalp vivid. “I’m not the right man for this mission.”
Dios fixed Taverner with his single stare and waited for Milos to go on.
Exhaling smoke, Milos said, “You’ve trained me for it. You probably don’t have a substitute handy. But I’m still the wrong man. For one thing, I’ve had no experience with covert operations—or combat, either. A couple of months of training can’t take the place of real experience. And for another”—he glanced at Min Donner as if he had an irrational desire to ask for her support—“the experience I do have is all from the wrong side. Lying isn’t my job.” Angus snorted at this, but Milos ignored him. “Breaking down liars is. My experience—the training of my life—isn’t just inadequate. It’s wrong for this mission. It’ll work against me. I’ll make mistakes I won’t even notice. I’ll betray you—I won’t be able to help myself.”
“In other words—” Angus began.
“You underestimate yourself, Milos,” put in Warden mildly. “You aren’t the wrong man.”
“—you’re scared shitless,” Angus went on. “The mere thought of being alone with me makes you crap your suit.”
“Nor are you the perfect man,” Dios continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “You’re the only man.
“As I’m sure you’ve been told, we can’t simply let Angus Thermopyle loose on an unsuspecting galaxy. Why is he free? How did he get his hands on a ship like Trumpet? We have to account for him somehow. He must be able to account for himself. He’ll never be trusted otherwise.
“You are the answer. You’re his cover, Milos. When you realized that Com-Mine Security was about to nail you for your—shall we say, indiscretions?—you broke him out of lockup. Precisely because you aren’t trained for space, you needed him. Together you stole Trumpet.
“Without you, Milos—without you and no one else—I’m afraid he’ll be totally ineffective.
“However,” the director said to Angus, “Milos makes an important point. If I were you, I wouldn’t rely too heavily on his reflexes in emergency situations. His instincts haven’t been”—Dios’ eye gleamed—“as well honed as yours.”
He sounded so clear and irrefutable—and so untouched by the dull panic glowering in Milos’ eyes—that Angus couldn’t resist challenging him.
Harshly he said, “You probably think I’m grateful you’re going to put me on a ship with a coward and a traitor who has bad reflexes as well as the power to shut me down whenever he panics. If I wanted to get away from you, he’s the man I would choose to be in charge of me.”
For the first time, Min Donner spoke. “Angus, nobody here makes the mistake of thinking you’re grateful for anything.”
Angus ignored her. “But that’s beside the point, isn’t it. You’re throwing up static mines. You want me to be so keen on outmaneuvering this lump of shit that I won’t think about what’s really going on.”
“And what,” Dios asked steadily, “do you imagine is ‘really going on’?”
“You tell me. We’ve both been here for months. Now all at once we’re in a hurry. What makes your fucking ‘need’ suddenly so fucking ‘acute’?”
In the dimness, Dios’ mouth twisted; he may have been smiling. “Events converge. Everything you need to know about them is already in your datacore. You’ll be given access to it in due course. However”—he glanced down the table at Min, then returned his gaze to Angus—“I’ll just mention that people you know are involved. Nick Succorso and Captain’s Fancy should be arriving at Billingate—oh, any time now.”
Calmly, as if the details had no special meaning, he added, “He has Morn Hyland with him. We don’t know where they’ve been, but an analysis of their transmission vectors suggests that they’re approaching Thanatos Minor from the direction of Enablement Station.”
Morn.
“They’ve spent some time in forbidden space.”
Angus sagged in his chair. He didn’t care about forbidden space. He cared about Morn Hyland. She was the only person alive who could betray his last secret; his last hope.
He was alive because he’d made a deal with her. Had she kept it? Would she keep it?
“Min,” the director continued, “what did Nick’s last message say?”
“It was short,” Min answered as if she were restraining an impulse to snarl. “It said, ‘I rescued her for you, goddamn it. Now get me out of this. If you don’t, I can’t keep her away from the Amnion.’”
For Angus, the gravest danger wasn’t that she might be given to the Amnion. It was that he might be programmed to rescue her, bring her back to the UMCP—and she wouldn’t keep her promise.
And yet the thought of seeing her again seized his heart like a clutch of grief.
Behind his nic, Milos looked like he was about to vomit.
“I’m afraid,” Dios remarked, “Nick Succorso isn’t particularly trustworthy. But we really can’t ignore the possibility that a UMCP ensign is about to fall into the hands of the Amnion.”
Without shifting his posture or his tone, he said to the ED director, “Take Milos to Trumpet. Make sure he remembers his instructions. Remind him of the consequences if he violates them. Don’t worry about boring him—a little repetition won’t do him any harm.
“I want to talk to Angus for a few minutes. I’ll bring him to you when I’m done.”
Donner’s gaze narrowed. “Do you think that’s safe?”
“Do you think it isn’t?” Dios countered.
At once she got to her feet. Her face looked closed and hard in the gloom. “Come on, Milos.”
Taverner’s hands shook feverishly as he took the nic out of his mouth, dropped it on the floor, and stood up. He moved toward Min as if she would escort him to his execution.
They were at the door when Warden said softly, “It isn’t an insult, Min. Even I have to do without protection sometimes. If I’m not willing to take a few risks for my convictions, what good am I?”
“I ask myself that question,” she retorted in a rough voice, “almost every day.”
As she and Milos left, the director smiled after her.
It didn’t make him look happy. It made him look like he was about to condemn someone. The glittering of his eye conveyed the impression that he hated doing that; loathed it with a passion too strong to be articulated.
Maybe, Angus thought, inspired by panic, Warden Dios was about to condemn himself. Maybe he was about to make a mistake that would improve his, Angus’, chances.
That didn’t seem very likely.
Alone with Warden Dios, he sat and sweated. The director studied him, saying nothing. He could feel Dios’ eyes on him, the hidden one probing for his secret. He wanted to duck his head—wanted to get out of the room. He wasn’t the right man to face down the director of the UMCP: he had too much panic bred in his bones. Let him go with Milos aboard Trumpet. Let him get back to people and places he understood. Then he would have a chance. Here he was lost.
Nevertheless his fear had taught him to hate—and hate gave him strength. He hated Wa
rden Dios; hated everything the UMCP director stood for. He hated cops and law-abiding citizens; hated romantics and idealists. He hated them because they had always hated him.
His hate enabled him to look Warden Dios in the eye.
“You’re wasting time,” he rasped. “The ‘need’ is ‘acute,’ remember?”
“Tell me the truth, Angus,” Warden replied as if he weren’t changing the subject. “Those glitches aren’t scan interrupts.” His gaze was fixed, not on Angus’ face, but on his chest—on the IR emissions of his heart and lungs. “They’re elisions. You edited the evidence against you out of your datacore.”
Because he was already full to the teeth with fear and hate, Angus didn’t flinch; he didn’t so much as drop his eyes. Instead he gaped. “You’re crazy. If I could do a trick like that, I wouldn’t be here at all. I would be sitting someplace like Billingate, making myself rich by doing that trick for every illegal ship in human space.”
“No, you wouldn’t.” The director was certain. “You aren’t that kind of man. You hate too much—you hate everybody. You wouldn’t protect people like Nick Succorso, even if it made you rich.”
A moment later he sighed. “But you can calm down. Believe it or not, your secret is safe with me. I won’t ask you how you do it. I can’t afford to know. That ‘trick,’ as you call it, is the most explosive piece of knowledge since Intertech’s immunity drug. I was outplayed then. I don’t propose to be outplayed again. It would be suicide for me to reveal what you know.”
Without transition, as if everything he did were part of a whole, unified by some principle Angus couldn’t grasp, Warden said, “Stasis, Joshua.”
A fire storm of panic had hold of Angus when his zone implants shut him down. Still staring at the UMCP director, he slumped forward until his head rested on the table, displayed like a sacrifice under the light.
“There are two ways to look at this,” Dios remarked as he rose to his feet. “One is that I sent Min away for her own protection.” In one hand he carried a large black box. “If she knew what I’m going to do, she might not be able to hide her relief.” He may have had it in his lap all along. “Sooner or later, she would give herself away.”
Opening the box, he moved around the table. When he was behind Angus, he put the box down and began peeling Angus’ shipsuit off his shoulders.
Although he couldn’t focus his eyes, Angus recognized the box. It was a first aid kit.
“I could probably recover if she made Hashi suspicious enough to figure out what I’m doing. He’s dangerous—not because he comes to the wrong conclusions, but because he gets to the right ones for the wrong reasons. That’s what he did when he suggested using Milos to control you.”
As soon as he reached the sore place between Angus’ shoulder blades, he stopped pulling down the shipsuit. With a jerk, he removed the bandage. His hands were as steady as stones as he took a scalpel from the first aid kit. Quickly he made a new incision. With a swab, he mopped blood away from Angus’ computer.
Angus would have yelled if he’d been in control of his mouth—or his vocal cords.
“It’s Godsen I’m really worried about,” Warden continued, talking to himself. “If Min did anything to make him suspicious, she and I would both be finished. From that point of view, I really ought to keep this risk to myself.”
All at once, a strange cold void filled Angus’ mind. The datacore had been unplugged from his computer.
“The other way to look at this is that I’m protecting myself.” Dios dropped the datacore unit on the table and lifted another out of his box. “If Min knew why I’m doing this, she’d turn against me herself.” As soon as the new unit was plugged in, Angus felt his programming come back on-line. “I probably wouldn’t live long enough to worry about what happens when Godsen betrays me.”
No hesitation or insecurity slowed Warden’s movements as he pinched the incision closed, sealed it with new tissue plasm. From his first aid kit, he selected a clean bandage and applied it carefully to Angus’ back.
When he’d put the old datacore and bandage away, he pulled Angus’ shipsuit back up and redid its seals. Then he moved.
A few steps took him into Angus’ field of vision. Unable to see clearly, blinking autonomically, Angus watched as the director rounded the end of the table and reentered the light, walking toward the chair where Milos had sat.
Angus lost sight of him for a moment. Then Warden reached across the table and shifted Angus’ posture so that the UMCP director and his newest tool could look at each other.
Dios sat down in Milos’ chair—in the light—as if he wanted to be sure that Angus could see him as accurately as possible. Nevertheless Angus still slumped with his neck exposed like a man in an abattoir.
“Angus,” Warden said distinctly, facing Angus with his tooled jaw and his broken nose, his patch and his human eye, “I’ve replaced your datacore. You know that—your mind is still alert, even if you can’t move. You won’t be able to tell the difference. In any case, most of the changes are extremely subtle. But even if they weren’t, you wouldn’t recognize them because you can’t compare the two programs. As far as you’re concerned, the datacore you have now is the only one that exists.”
Angus blinked because his brain stem decided he should. His heart and lungs continued functioning. Something in Dios’ manner told him that what he was about to hear was crucial, the crux of the whole situation.
“I wonder,” the director continued, musing as if to himself, “if you understand what we’ve done to you. We call the process ‘welding.’ When a man or woman is made a cyborg voluntarily, that’s ‘wedding.’ ‘Welding’ is involuntary.
“Technically, we’ve done you a favor. That’s obvious. You’re stronger now, faster, more capable, effectively more intelligent. Not to mention the fact that you’re still alive, when you should have been executed years ago. And all you’ve had to give up is your freedom of choice.
“But I’m not talking about technical questions. In every other way, we’ve committed a crime against you.” As he spoke, his tone became more and more like his earlier smile—the tone of a man who couldn’t begin to express how intensely he loathed his power, or perhaps his obligation, to inflict condemnation. “In essence, you’re no longer a human being. You’re a machina infernalis—an infernal device. We’ve deprived you of choice—and responsibility.
“Angus, we’ve committed a crime against your soul. You may be ‘the slime of the universe,’ as Godsen says, but you don’t deserve this.
“It’s got to stop.” Dios folded his hands together on the table as if he were about to pray. “Crimes like this one—or like withholding the immunity drug. They’ve got to stop.”
Angus went on breathing. His heart went on pumping blood. Occasionally he blinked. Those were the only responses available to him.
Eventually Warden Dios got back to his feet. When he’d picked up his black box and tucked it under his arm, he said, “End stasis, Joshua.”
Then he took Angus out to the docks to join Milos Taverner and Min Donner aboard Trumpet.
This is the end of Forbidden Knowledge.
The story continues in
The Gap into Power:
A Dark and Hungry God Arises.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
STEPHEN R. DONALDSON made his writing debut in 1977 with the first Thomas Covenant books; the series quickly became an international bestseller and earned him worldwide critical acclaim. Stephen Donaldson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and currently lives in New Mexico.
READ A PREVIEW OF
A DARK AND HUNGRY
GOD ARISES
THE THIRD VOLUME IN THE GAP CYCLE—
on sale wherever Bantam Books are sold
The intergalactic web of intrigue is cast even wider … At the hands of the United Mining Companies Police, the imprisoned Angus Thermopyle has undergone extensive cybernetic surgery, transformed into a cyborg of nearly infinite powers—kept in check by only a
few fragile limitations. Hidden deep in his datacore is a set of instructions for a mission. And that mission will mean the difference between life and death not only for Morn Hyland … but for all of humanity.
An hour or two before Angus Thermopyle and Milos Taverner left UMCPHQ aboard Trumpet, Holt Fasner visited his mother.
He did this despite the fact that the old harridan had been in a foul temper for decades.
The medical advances that had kept him nearly healthy, relatively strong, almost in his prime for a hundred fifty years had come too late to be comparably effective for her. In fact, they would have failed her thirty years ago if her son hadn’t insisted on plugging her into machines that first pumped blood, then digested food, and eventually breathed for her. She was technically still alive, of course; but now she was only the husk of a woman. Her skin was the blotchy color of rotting linen; she could hardly move her hands; she hadn’t lifted her head from its supports for at least ten years. She no longer knew the difference when tubes brought her sustenance, or carried away waste.
acid, Norna Fasner continued to think long after her body lost its last capacity to do anything.
That was why her son kept her alive. Many years ago she’d given up asking him to let her die. She knew from old, painful experience that he would put her off with a bland chuckle and a vacuous remark: “You know I can’t do without you, Mother.” And shortly afterward she would find yet another video screen installed in the room that she considered her tomb.
She studied the screens, even though she hated them. Their images were all she had to think about. If they were switched off, her brain would almost surely go null; and she didn’t want that: she desired death, not unconsciousness. If even one of her screens had gone blank, she might have wept in frustration and grief. Every image, every word, every passing implication was a hint that might eventually enable her to believe that her son would be destroyed. Without hints—without the possibility that she would receive hints—all her years of paralyzed, unliving existence would come to nothing.
Her son was the United Mining Companies CEO, unquestionably the richest and beyond doubt the most powerful man alive. From his corporate “home office,” his station orbiting Earth half a million kilometers beyond UMCPHQ, he ruled his vast empire: the largest, arguably the most necessary enterprise in human history. His employees were counted in millions; men and women who lived or died by his decisions and policies, in billions. Disguised by the UMC charter and by the public democracy of Governing Council for Earth and Space, he raised and toppled governments, destroyed or enriched competitors, caused potential futures to take on substance or fray away like mist. Behind his back, people who feared him sometimes referred to him as “the Dragon”—and only people who had no idea who he was didn’t fear him.
Forbidden Knowledge: The Gap Into Vision Page 45