Voyagers III - Star Brothers

by Ben Bova

  “Have you formed a theory in your mind about why I survived freezing when no one else has?” Stoner asked.

  “A hypothesis,” she said. “You should use the proper term.”

  He accepted the correction with a small nod. “I told you, it’s been a long time since I did any scientific work.”

  “No, I have no hypothesis. No idea whatever why you were revived successfully when all the others failed.”

  Stoner knew it was a lie. She was hiding something, and he had to find out what it was.

  “As I told you,” Ilona went on, “the task of investigating you has been forced upon me. A post-doctoral student does not deny a request that comes from the president of the nation.”

  That much was the truth, he sensed. But what was the rest of it?

  “If you weren’t forced to study this cryonics problem,” he asked, “what work would you rather be doing?”

  Her face took on a thoughtful look. “I was beginning to study ways of interfacing neurons with protein-based semiconductors.”

  “Biochips?”

  Nodding, “That is what some people call them, yes.”

  “And the idea is to interface the biochips with the nervous system.”

  “Yes,” she replied carefully. “With protein-based chips practically any electronics system can be implanted into the human body and wired directly to the brain.”

  Stoner took a sip of wine. “You can carry your computer around inside your head. And your communicator with it. You can access other computers and get the information directly in your mind.”

  “And the information comes as sensory data,” Ilona said, more eagerly. “You do not merely see letters and numbers, you experience the data, taste it, hear it, smell it.”

  Stoner laughed softly. “I wonder what a quadratic equation tastes like.”

  “Communications between individuals can become like mental telepathy,” Ilona said. “You can experience direct mind-to-mind linkage.”

  A wisp of memory gusted through Stoner’s mind. Cavendish. The haunted, hollow-eyed British physicist who had drowned himself when they had been on Kwajalein. The old KGB had implanted electrodes in his brain’s pain center. Markov had told him the truth of it, years ago.

  “It is an enormous breakthrough,” Ilona was saying, her excitement growing. “The size of the human brain has not grown since the Ice Ages. A baby’s head can be only so big, of course, otherwise it could not survive birth.”

  “Neither would the mother,” Stoner said.

  “Yes, certainly. With biochips, however, we can increase the power of the brain by connecting it electronically to computers and other information systems.”

  “An evolutionary step forward,” Stoner murmured, knowing it was merely the first step toward the level where all humans shared their existence with star brothers.

  “Exactly!”

  “You could also use such technology to pry into people’s minds,” he cautioned. “Even control their thoughts.”

  Lucacs stared at him for a long moment, her expression going from excitement to deflation to—something else. “Yes, that is true. It is also possible to stimulate the brain’s pleasure centers directly. A new form of narcotic.”

  “Have you tried it?”

  “Direct stimulation has been going on for years,” she said. “It is one of the little vices that only an elite few researchers can indulge in.”

  “Sounds like more than a little vice to me.”

  “It is harmless,” she said, but her face betrayed the lightness of her tone.

  There’s more to it, Stoner knew. He studied her face as she sipped at the wine, then lowered her eyes and returned her attention to the meal on the plate before her.

  “A colleague?” he asked gently.

  She looked up at him, her eyes alert again, alarmed.

  “I have a hypothesis about you,” he said, trying to make it sound amusing, nonthreatening, “even if you don’t have one about me.”

  She said nothing, but there was more than wariness in her eyes now. Deep within her, Ilona Lucacs was afraid, with the terrible feral fear of a trapped animal.

  “Before your superiors sent you looking for me, you were working with a colleague—about your own age, I think—on the biochip interface problem.”

  “That is true,” she said, her back stiffening.

  “He has become addicted to brain stimulation, hasn’t he?”

  The fork slipped out of her hand and clattered to the floor. A few of the other diners turned their heads. Their table robot rolled swiftly to the spot, deftly picked it up between two rubber-padded stainless steel fingers, and replaced it with a clean fork drawn from the silverware drawer built into its midsection.

  “Hasn’t he?” Stoner probed.

  Ilona Lucacs made a smile that held no trace of joy. Stoner saw a hint of anger in her gold-flecked eyes.

  “You are almost correct, Dr. Stoner,” she said coldly. “Almost. But it is not my colleague who is addicted to the stimulant. It is me.”

  Stoner finally recognized the expression in her tawny eyes: defiance

  In Hawaii it was almost nine a.m.

  Jo had slept poorly on her scramjet flight back to Hilo, and the fact that Keith had not phoned her yet did not improve her crankiness. It’s still dinnertime in Moscow, she told herself. Then she pictured her husband at dinner with that Hungarian witch and she felt her blood seething within her.

  Still, when she swept into her office at the Vanguard complex on the edge of the city, she looked as sharp and fresh as on any other day in a cream-colored sleeveless camisole and ginger-brown knee-length skirt. And makeup that covered the dark rings of sleeplessness under her eyes.

  She saw her reflection in the blank display screen on her office wall and thought idly that her hair was getting longer than she wanted it to be. The longer it is the more time and trouble it takes. But Keith likes it long and why the hell hasn’t he called me, it must be getting on toward midnight in Moscow.

  She took in a deep breath, held it, then exhaled slowly. It should have calmed her. It did not. Looking again at her faint reflection she wondered if the time had come for cosmetic surgery. Several of her friends had undergone face-lifts and…

  Nonsense! Jo dismissed the idea with a disdainful grimace. With all the toners and tighteners the Vanguard cosmetics division produces, if I ever need a face-lift I’ll fire the whole division’s staff.

  Her sense of humor somewhat restored, Jo sat down in her contoured powered chair and tapped the button in its armrest that activated the comm system.

  “Vic Tomasso,” she said. Then she tilted her chair back slightly and began her day’s work.

  By the time she had scanned the latest figures on the pharmaceutical division’s quarterly sales, Vic Tomasso rapped lightly on her open office door and stepped in.

  Jo’s office looked more like an informal sitting room than the nerve center of a powerful multinational corporation’s president. Instead of a desk, conference table, and the other imposing symbols of authority, the office was furnished with comfortable chairs and two small sofas. The wall decor could be changed at the touch of a button in the armrest of Jo’s powered chair. At the moment it was cool forest greens and earth colors.

  Like the changeable decor of the office, Vic Tomasso was a chameleon. Neither especially tall nor broad-shouldered, he had worked hard since a teenager at maximizing his physical potential. Office gossip claimed he spent more time in the gym than on the job, and most of his evening hours in the beds of married women. In other times he would have been a beach boy, making his living by hanging around tourist hotels and offering a smiling youthful escort to lonely women.

  Today he was a corporate executive, the staff assistant for security to the president of Vanguard Industries. Most of the world thought he was one of Jo Camerata’s handsome young men, and there was no doubt that she enjoyed having handsome young men working for her. But each of them had to have some talent for
business, or no matter how handsome or eager they were, they did not last long at Vanguard.

  Vic Tomasso’s real talent, beneath his perfect smile and thick wavy hair and darkly handsome face, was his ability to emulate a chameleon. For Vic Tomasso was a corporate spy.

  He gave Jo his best and brightest smile as he sat on the sofa beneath the picture window that looked out on the distant Pacific. Tomasso wore a standard business outfit: collarless tunic of navy blue and light gray slacks. His shirt, though, was glittery electric blue and unbuttoned far enough to show off his muscular hairy chest.

  “No jewelry today?” Jo quipped.

  He grinned at her. They had a standing joke about which of them owned the more jewelry. Jo wore two gold and diamond bracelets and three rings.

  “Just this today.” Tomasso pushed up the left sleeve of his tunic to reveal a heavy silver bracelet studded with turquoise.

  “Navaho,” Jo said, making it sound disappointed.

  “I’m in a cowboys-and-Indians mood,” he explained.

  Jo did not follow his hint. Instead, she asked, “What happened in Hong Kong? What’s Hsen up to?”

  Tomasso’s smile vanished. “Kruppmann was there. And Hsen’s chief of intelligence has come up with holograms of your husband.”

  Jo felt a cold fist clutch at her heart. “They’ve identified him?”

  “Yep. They know he visited de Sagres in Brasilia, and they figure that he’s been involved in several other affairs they don’t like.”

  “Christ! I’ve got to get Keith back here where I can protect him.”

  “They’re not too happy about you, either,” Tomasso said.

  “I didn’t think they would be. What else? What are they planning to do now that they know?”

  Running a hand through his hair, “They want to get your husband out of their way. And you, too.”

  “How? What are they planning?”

  Tomasso made an elaborate shrug. “Beats me. They pumped me for the site of the next board of directors meeting, then Hsen told me to come back here and wait for further instructions.”

  “Do you think he suspects you’re really working for me?”

  “He might, yeah, maybe.”

  Jo realized she was biting her lip. She straightened up the chair. “Not a word of this to anyone,” she commanded. “No written reports. This is strictly between you and me.”

  “Like always. Right.”

  “We don’t know who could be leaking information to Hsen.”

  “You think he’s gonna try something at the board meeting?”

  “He might,” Jo said. “Maybe we’ll make it a video conference; then we won’t all have to be in the same place.”

  Tomasso got to his feet, waited a moment for Jo to say more. When she did not, he walked out of her office, leaving Jo frowning in deep, desperate thought.

  I’ve got to start polling the board members and find out how many Hsen’s got in his pocket. Time to start twisting arms, she told herself.

  Tomasso had not told her that Hsen had asked about the layout and security systems of Jo’s house. And Jo did not think to ask herself if her corporate spy might not be a double agent.

  Stoner lay naked on the hotel’s overly soft bed and stared at the ceiling for a moment. Remembering Jo’s suspicions, he wondered if there were cameras or recording devices hidden behind the smooth plaster up there. He could sense none, but that did not always mean none were there.

  Absence of proof, he reminded himself, is not proof of absence. The first probes of the planet Mars did not find any traces of life there, but that didn’t mean there was no life on Mars.

  He could almost feel the hosts of nanometer symbiotes in his blood and tissues assimilating the wine and food of his dinner with Ilona Lucacs. My alien brother protects me so well that I can’t get drunk, he said to himself. He felt a wry laughter deep in his mind and remembered that he was never by himself. And never would be.

  Lifting his left arm so that his wrist communicator was above his mouth, he phoned Jo in Hilo. Her computer replied that she was in a meeting, but his call would be added to her list of messages.

  “I love you Jo,” he said to the machine. “And my virtue is still intact.”

  He did not feel the need for sleep. Ilona Lucacs was addicted to electrical stimulation of her brain’s pleasure center. That was the real hold her superiors had on her. He pictured her in her room now, sprawled on the narrow hotel bed, the small case that looked like a portable computer lying open on the floor, wires as thin as spider’s silk leading from it to electrodes pasted on her forehead, all the world forgotten as a current of pure pleasure flowed through her brain.

  No need for sex. No need for food or drink or anything. As long as the current flowed she was in ecstasy.

  The machine must be programmed to turn itself off, he thought. Otherwise she runs the risk of killing herself.

  I could get her off the addiction, he told himself. But what kind of harm would I be doing if I just overpowered her addiction with my own commands? Would that destroy her? It might, he decided.

  He asked his star brother how he would handle the problem if he became addicted to direct stimulation. It’s not like drugs or other chemicals, he pointed out. It’s direct electrical stimulation of the pleasure centers.

  His star brother’s answer was immediate. Stop the neural impulses of the pleasure center. No discharge of those nerves, no sense of pleasure. And therefore no addiction.

  It’s simple when you have a few trillion symbiotes inside you, Stoner said. And his star brother agreed.

  Then he sat bolt upright on the bed, a powerfully-built man in his middle years with a strong black beard and a look of sudden revelation on his face. The question that had eluded him ever since he had met Ilona Lucacs finally reached the surface of his mind.

  What else is she after? If they’re into biochips, they’re only a step or two away from nanotechnology. From building the kind of self-replicating machines that course through my body.

  She knows! Or at least she suspects the truth about us. She does have a hypothesis about me and it’s damned accurate.

  The thought filled him with unease. Why? he asked his star brother. What is there to be afraid of? He knew the abstract worry that nanotechnology would cause a new and irresistible population explosion. Reduce the death rate to nearly zero overnight, yes, but it takes generations to reduce the birthrate. With symbiotes protecting their health and extending their lifespans, the human race could populate itself into extinction, bury the planet Earth in human flesh, even swamp the entire solar system.

  That much Stoner knew. He had worked for fifteen years to prepare the way for nanotechnology, to get the human race to control its numbers before this gift from the stars raised them to the next level of their evolution.

  But the growing terror he felt at the realization that others were developing nanotechnology on their own was beyond all rational, reasonable fear. What is it? he asked his star brother.

  His star brother did not reply.

  CHAPTER 13

  “WE must be ready to strike when Stoner returns to Hilo.”

  Li-Po Hsen listened carefully to his chief of security. The woman’s flat round face was as impassive as the westerner’s stereotype of the inscrutable oriental while she briefed Hsen in precise detail on her plan for abducting Stoner from his own home.

  “The man Tomasso will tell us when he returns?” asked Hsen.

  “Yes,” the woman acknowledged. “It should be within the next day or two. That gives us very little time to prepare.”

  The tabletop display screen glowed in Hsen’s darkened office with an engineering drawing of the house outside Hilo. The security system wiring was shown in red.

  “There is no way to override the security system,” she said. “It has its own power source inside the house.”

  “Corrupt one of the servants, perhaps?” Hsen suggested.

  “There are only six human servants,
all of them drawn from Ms. Camerata’s family in southern Italy. It would be difficult to sway them, especially with so little time available.”

  “What then?”

  “Overwhelming force. We will require a mercenary attack force of at least twelve men. Twenty would be much better.”

  Hsen nodded. “But how will you get that large a number into the main house without raising an alarm that will bring Vanguard security forces from the outlying buildings?”

  “They must get in and out before the Vanguard security teams can react.”

  “Yes, but how?”

  For the first time since Hsen had known her, the security chief smiled. Only slightly, but the corners of her mouth definitely curved upward.

  “They will arrive from the sky, like angels,” she said. “And depart the same way.”

  Stoner met Ilona Lucacs for breakfast in their hotel’s coldly efficient automated cafeteria. One entire wall consisted of gleaming metal and glass display cases, shut tight until a guest touched the button that popped that window open. No warmth of cooking, no odor of food. As hermetically sealed as a space capsule, Stoner thought. And just about as appetizing.

  Other hotel guests already half-filled the austere cafeteria, chattering and clattering, the noise of their talk and eating echoing almost painfully off the bare walls. Stoner and Dr. Lucacs went through the line wordlessly, making their selections, little sighs of air gushing out when a window snapped open.

  Stoner studied her face closely. She seems to have slept well. No bags under her eyes, no nervous fidgets. He realized that she combed her honey-colored hair down over her forehead in bangs that almost reached her brows. Must paste the electrodes to her forehead, he thought. Or maybe she uses some sort of helmet that fits over the top of the head.

  Just the slightest touch of a delicate probe into her mind. She flinched instantly, but Stoner saw the flicker of a vision. Ilona Lucacs had shaved off all her hair so that the electrodes could be planted firmly against her scalp. She wore a wig to hide her baldness.

  They sat at a small table along the far wall. Ilona wore a fresh blouse of nondescript beige beneath her same tweed suit. Stoner had no other clothes except the denim jacket, jeans, and light blue cotton twill shirt he had arrived in. They had been cleaned overnight by the hotel’s robots, and he had instructed the hotel computer to buy two complete changes of clothes for him.