“The police will be after me. That’s serious. If I just wander around in aquariums and zoos, something bad will catch up with me—and you.”
“Not just wandering around,” she snarked, “you practiced accessing your fam. I conduct under-the-sky seminars ’cause I come from a planet where we have a sky, not crescents carved in a shit-house roof. Lighten up. When desperate, have some fun.”
“What are your goals?” he asked. “We probably have goals in common.”
“Oh, shut up! Do you think I’m catching hook on that line? My goals are yours right now. I’m smarter than you are. I’ve had my fam for ten years and you’re only a toddler who’s been twiddling with yours a couple hours!”
After such a command there was very little he was allowed to say. He tried and nothing came forth. It was frightening. "‘Permission to speak?” asked Eron dutifully with Calvinistic fatalism.
“Go ahead. Make it short.”
“I’m suspecting that you know who once symbiosed with my fam.”
“You bet. I’m searching for him.”
“How will you find him?”
“Your fam will know where he is. You’re going to talk to it and ask.”
Eron sighed. Dealing with a naive girl wasn’t going to be easy. ‘That’s not possible. No one can talk to a ghoul but his partner.”
She flared, her widened nostrils breathing fire. “Don’t call him a ghoul. He’s locked up in there. It’s a prison. Fams are conscious, you know. He’s suffering! He’s a human being!”
“Not quite. He’s a symbiont.”
“What do you know about anything! I’m the expert.” “What do you want me to call him?”
She shrugged. She wouldn’t say anything. A tear rolled down her cheek.
“Rigone told me I knew him,” he said gently.
“A lot of good that does us. Your fam knew him.”
She obviously loved the man. Ah, Eron realized, he had been her tutor, too. Perhaps that provided a way to toady up to this girl. “I remember some things.” He was ready to drop the name to see what effect it had. “Murek Kapor was one of my idols.” The sentiment felt true enough.
“If you knew him as Murek Kapor, you didn’t know him at all. That was one of his fake names. He dealt with some strange people, even criminals, and with criminals he always used a fake name.”
For some reason, Eron was shocked.
“All this trouble is your fault! When he learned you were going to go into the illegit publishing biz—”
“Nobody knew that!”
“He did. He tried to send you a warning but evidently you’d already zink-zanged or lost your planets or whatever. He only sends out smart code. It pinged him back that it had been intercepted and had destroyed itself. The police were onto you! Then he found out that you were already under house arrest for publishing. That’s when the toad grew hairs! The damn police had back-sourced us! We had to do some fancy dancing.” She skipped her fingers about in a parody of a cops-and-robbers chase. “I’m really annoyed at myself,” she said. “He set me up with a ticket starside and a new identity. He told me to run like a stellar flare was scorching my tail. I should have jumped. He always told me that youth had to be extra careful because we lack judgment.”
In a sudden moment of dej^-vu, Eron Osa was thirteen years old again. “He was your tutor, too?”
Petunia looked up at him askance. “That would be a peculiar way of nailing the tail.”
“So you disobeyed his good judgment?”
“Yeah. Now no one knows he’s in trouble. How stupid can a girl be! But I couldn’t leave him. I’m the only one tuned to his fam. I can find it anywhere if I’m near enough—my Mommy’s doing. Mommy told me never to let him out of my sight. That’s why I was hanging around at the Teaser’s. But I can’t find him. I’m only tuned to find his fam.”
“You seem to have done that!”
“You have to help me find him. How can he keep ahead of the police without his fam? I’m going to be mean and make that an order. Don’t worry. When we find him, my family will give you the best fam you could ever think about. I promise!”
“Petunia. He’s dead.”
“No he’s not! How do you know?”
“Rigone told me.”
He heard the sobs. “I... wanted to get... his fam back to him,” she wailed. Eron tried to comfort her but she shoved him away. “Get away from me. Get away!”
“He was more than your tutor. A friend?”
“Yeah. My Daddy." She lapsed into a silence punctuated only by the occasional resonant sob. He shared her silence because he had much to think about. So—he was the slave of a ghoul’s daughter. Finally she spoke again, tersely. “Let’s go.”
They crawled out when no one was looking, pretended to admire the great plastic whale, and began to stroll until they found a seafood restaurant Even with all the fresh fish abounding in the neighborhood, Eron noted wryly, the fish they ate would be manufactured. It was cheaper to build a fish out of sewage than to grow one—and the template could leave out heads and bones and tail. The manufacturing process was just good enough to get the taste right but not good enough to build a live fish.
“We eat on my credit,” she said stonily. “I have an account they can’t trace. Eron Osa has to disappear. I’ll figure out which of our secret identities you can use. And don’t go sober-face. It’s my Daddy riding on your back, not yours.” My ghoul he thought. “Respect doesn’t permit me the g-word, and he’s not my daddy, so what do I call him?”
“His name was Hiranimus Scogil, but you’re not allowed to repeat that.”
Over delicious fillets made from Splendid sewage, Petunia recounted the rest of the story. “Mommy hated me flying with him on his sorties—he took me everywhere; I loved it—nobody suspects a nice man with a child—so, being overprotective, she rigged his fam’s driving probe with some Cloun side-resoners to enforce his care of me. Mommy is a witch. That was before I knew quantronics. If you fancy me a hot-shot fam modifier, I’m not that good. To hit you, I just calibrated what was already there. Daddy never knew he was my slave ’cause he already loved me. Not like you,” she said resentfully.
“The fish you are feeding me is delicious, and it is a lovely first watch to do nothing—but we still need a plan,” he countered.
“You win. We switch plans.” But it was to be her plan and she wasn’t bothering to consult Eron. After an hour’s thought, the remnants of the meal gone, their napkins twisted, she confessed that she was stumped. “I don’t know what to do next.” She snuggled against Eron in the booth, not the slightest bit afraid that her slave would take advantage of her.
“Are you asking for my input?” he asked hopefully.
“No, we’ll have to consult Daddy’s fam for help. Daddy is the smart one. You’re just a cripple. I don’t see any other way.”
That meant she was suggesting a conversation with a ghoul. “Kid, I can’t read or interact with the storage areas that were private to your father. All I can do is write over them. I can steal him bit by bit for myself. Eventually even the best error-correcting routines won’t be able to salvage much of him.”
“But he’s in there, thinking. He can see with your eyes and hear with your ears.”
“But he can’t make any sense out of that input because we use different codes. He’ll be seeing flashes and hearing noise.”
“We have to talk to Daddy!” she wailed. “He has contacts and I don’t know who they are!”
Eron felt a sudden pity for her—and for himself as her prisoner. “I have contacts, too. Let me use them.”
“No. I don’t trust you. Not with my Daddy on your back! You’re some kind of a criminal.”
“Petunia. I’ll make a contract with you. Let me send out one message that involves a personal professional matter of mine and in exchange I’ll work very hard to communicate with the fam half of your father. I was once a zenoli mind-adept, and that may help. I can use that exotic stuff now that I
own a fam.”
“You’ll work hard ’cause I tell you to!”
“Child, there is a subtle difference between a willing slave
and a reluctant slave. In this case it makes all the difference in the Galaxy. You are asking me to do something that has never been done before. If I’m willing, we may succeed. If I’m forced, we may only try.” It was a lie; there was no hope. She considered. “I see the message and I pay for it!” “We’ll have to buy a portable nonlocatable receiver. Cheapest model with security. And hide it in a secure place.” “We don’t have to buy it. I know all about sneaky. I’m a trained covert agent. It runs in the family. That’s why I’m here. I’m in training. He didn’t think this mission was dangerous.”
The message to Eron’s nameless fan read: “Dear woman of the broad-brimmed fuchsia hat: I desperately need a copy of the monograph you so fortuitously saved. Send it by Personal Capsule, manual fade, if text still extant. Wait five watches. Secure receiver still to be procured. Eron Osa.” “You better be leveling,” threatened Petunia, “or I’ll make an adjustment to mush your brain!”
50
ERON OSA AND THE GHOUL, 14,810 GE
At the moment of combat the zenoli soldier must be free of all prior thoughts and emotions. Priors unbalance any thrust or response. Priors will kill you. Active preconceptions will kill you. Fixed intentions will kill you. Old emotions, grudges, resentments, angers, hatreds, loves, enthusiasms will kill you.
A soldier who enters combat hating his enemy is already a soldier doomed to failure; his hatred will blind him to the thrust that kills him or blind him in victory so that his victory is taken from him. A soldier who is afraid of his enemy is doomed. A soldier who loves his enemy is doomed. A soldier who is thinking about his enemy is doomed.
At the moment of combat the zenoli soldier is poised, inertiatess, ready to act in any direction—like a marble at the top of a smooth multidimensional hill.
To achieve this null state of mind AT WILL the following eighteen brain-fam exercises are recommended...
—The Zenoli Combat Manual,
18th Edition, Founder’s Era 873
Viewed from the roof of Splendid Wisdom, nine hundred kloms from the Lyceum, a prodigious gash slashed through the planetopolis beyond which the distant city-encrusted Coriander Mountains gleamed in metallic and black hues. The great quake shouldn’t have destroyed as much as it did and it shouldn’t have killed 180,000 people, but it was an old First Empire sector that had been salvaged during the rebuilding under the Pscholars. Minor structural damage from the Sack, unnoticed in the hurry of reconstruction, hadn’t gone unnoticed by the later earthquake. Splendid Wisdom was stoic about such disasters. There were great power stations to tame the heat of potential volcanoes as well as undercity mining operations along the major fault lines—but preventive measures weren’t always enough.
Nobody was in a hurry to rebuild. The slash had been there for more than a century. Out of the wreckage, construction engineers had already cleared a canyon to bedrock and below, demolishing even the old tunneled maze, leaving a ravine too colossal for a single eye to encompass. Antlike teams of thousands were still strip-mining the fault block. Nothing had yet been rebuilt except for the ubiquitous antiquake mounts, wormlike elevated transportation tubes, essential piping, and a few giant weather towers that pumped water vapor into the atmosphere at the command of the central weather control computers.
A few yellow dandelions colonized isolated crannies of windbome dust, and Eron collected some of the lusher specimens in a discarded container so that he might take flowers down into his new abode.
For kloms on either side of the gash the surviving structures had been condemned, evacuated, and sealed, their rooms firecoated in a centimeter of SeeOTwo plastic. All services were discontinued. These abysmal depths of abandoned city invited torch-carrying squatters—not many, for it was a water less desert without power or air circulation and Splendid people were spoiled by the plenitude of public services, city folk to the core.
Petunia knew the place, having been here before. They set up house twenty meters below the Splendid roof in a preprepared stygian apartment that could be reached only through a descending maze of seeming dead ends. It had to be illuminated with the occasional etemo-torch hung about the deplasticized walls. Eron dedicated one to his dandelions. If it was daytime, lightpipes provided a tenebrous gloom. The rooms were bare except for an atomo-unit that sucked in air from a nearby shaft and squeezed from the air a meager water supply supplemented by rain. The dispozoria was a camper’s unit imported from some planet where camping was possible.
Eron had waited to ask his question. “Scogil worked with others?”
“Obviously.”
“Can you contact them for help?”
“No.” She smiled. “Agents don’t work that way. Two’s the max. Me and my Daddy. We don’t see the others. You’re a sloppy criminal if you don’t know that”
Eron had a flash vision of himself from his distant life as a Pscholar talking to a very secretive skull while he worked out the mathematics showing how political power, based on carefully guarded secrets, inevitably catalyzed—like his brilliantly blooming dandelion—the evolution of thousands of other secretive groups. And here he was, so to speak, in the secret room of one sneaky dandelion seed that had taken root in this weed-hostile place on a planet which religiously guarded the greatest guild secret in galactic history.
Sometimes Petunia visited hidden caches and was gone for hours. She never left on one of those expeditions without threatening Eron. “You have to be here when I get back. If you run away, I can find you, and you don’t want to know what I’ll do to your brain when I catch you.”
“Yes, Miss Cloun.”
“I’m only stubborn.” She glared.
But she was all smiles when she got back with whatever supplies she had gone after. “You’re still here! So you can share the delicious naval chow I brought for us.”
“I love you.”
“Ha. As if I trust that kind of love!”
Living in a once-luxurious dwelling which had been without power and a functional manufacturum for centuries— without even a physicist’s rudimentary machine shop— strained Eron’s tolerance. He depended upon Petunia too much. Her fam had inherited her mother’s engineering know-how and she had been privy to such skills for ten years. He was still mostly inept, the basic physical concepts from his education surviving in his organic brain, but the fine technical details lost.
On the other hand, he was glad to leave the details of their survival to Petunia. He was occupied with the nontrivial task of training his fam to respond to his own uniquely coded requests. Trying to use this new fam was like hiring a bright child to take over the business, more trouble than it was worth at the moment—but the future benefits were great.
They had to build a bed-nest out of abandoned curtains. They had to wash the same clothes over and over in an inadequate water supply. They had to rig power for their portable Personal Capsule receiver. The simplest tasks required time out for patches of wild ingenuity. Petunia spent hours reconditioning a backpack-size manufacturum to obtain a source for small spare parts. She didn’t seem to mind the inconvenience—which would have led Eron to guess at barbarous origins if her engineering talent hadn’t so shamed him.
After a dozen watches of frenzy she admitted that she was exhausted. She voice-dimmed the torches and snuggled up with Eron in the curtains. “We’re done. I officially declare that we’re burrowed in and safe from the police. Except for the daily emergencies. I’ve made a place for you away from the hubbub. But so far you haven’t kept your end of the bargain,” she accused. “You’re to be talking with my Daddy! You haven’t got any more excuses.”
“Hiranimus and I aren’t on speaking terms because of our differences... so to speak. That’s just the way it is. I’ve tried.”
“Not so fast with your cliche drivel! Let’s take it from the top. You Pscholars were never
mech adepts, right? You tell me why you and Daddy can’t chat and then I’ll tell you why you’re wrong. My people are an offshoot of the Crafters of the Thousand Suns of the Helmar Rift. My ancestors built the first tuned psychic probe on military contract with the Warlord of Lakgan. We built our own versions of the fam as a countermeasure to emotional control since before Cloun died. Maybe we even invented the fam. I know a few things about ghouls. Enough prolog. Why does that sloppy wet-ware of yours think it can’t talk to my father?”
Eron looked at the dim ceiling and heard the un-Splendid silence broken only by her breathing. It was as if they were alone in the universe. “For the same reason telepathy never works.”
“What’s telepathy?”
“An old superstition. Never mind. Why can’t I talk to your father? Any complex neural network can be trained in zillions of ways to think the same thought—each person thinks a thought in a unique way. The same thought has innumerable representations. A brain develops code to decipher its own thoughts, and no one else’s. A fam is basically an analog device built on such a tiny scale that the individual resistances and capacitances and quantronic switch characteristics vary all over the map. That makes it impossible to transfer a memory from one fam to another. Crazy novelists who don’t know their physics are always inventing digital fams as a plot device for thought transfer—but then your fam would be as big as a house and not very portable. When organic brain and fam grow up together in co-communication, they learn to talk to each other because they have spent a lifetime co-creating a shared code.”
“Yaah! And the code is uncrackable and all that barf. I can zap your argument with one question. Are you ready to be dragged out of hyperspace?”
“Fire away.”
She kissed him on the cheek. “Oh, my doomed wise man, all snuggled up in dusty old curtains, tell me then, why is it that you and I, each thinking his mundane thoughts with his own unique and undecipherable code, are right this very moment talking to each other without any trouble? Ha!” She punched him in the arm. “Are we the dumb/illiterate bear and fox?”
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