The Mind Pool tmp-1

by Charles Sheffield

“The best of luck sorting it out. I couldn’t see any pattern. I’ll give you the record, but we’ll have to go over to the main control area to pick it up. I didn’t want to leave it on the computer here when I was away.”

  “That’s not like you.” Brachis had caught a change in her voice. “Worried?”

  “I guess so. But I can’t see any reason. I really have been ultra-careful. I didn’t just go by the book — I went way past the book.”

  ’Keep it that way. I have the same feeling myself. When Livia Morgan made those Constructs she took a step in a direction that no one has ever travelled before.”

  They were passing through the outer nitrogen shell, emerging into the quiet graveyard of the Dump. A couple of hundred meters from them, drifting along in its own leisurely orbit, a massive dumbbell turned slowly end over end. Brachis paused to watch.

  “A pulsed fusion ship built for a human crew. That’s ancient. It was the latest thing until the Mattin Link, then — instant obsolescence. I’ve never seen one before in the Dump. The place is full of stuff like this.”

  “Oddities, you mean?” Phoebe was trailing after Luther Brachis, turning now and then to stare at the quiet bulk of the green balloon behind. “I know. When I’m not working I go cruising around. There’s a million of them, things you never see anywhere else. And so old. It’s a ridiculous thought, but as you move around the Dump you have the feeling that every great failure of the solar system has quietly made its own way here. People as well as equipment. It s scary.”

  “I know what you mean. ‘And all dead years draw thither, and all disastrous things.’ ”

  “Why, Commander.” Phoebe wanted to change the gloomy mood that seemed to be creeping up on both of them. “Do I detect a quotation — and one that’s not from Von Clausewitz’s On War? Someone has been civilizing you. And you’re looking different. What’s happening to the old Luther Brachis?”

  But he would not respond. He made another subject switch of his own. “The trouble is, there’s no explanation for the Construct behavior that we’ve been finding.”

  Phoebe sighed. No joking today. “That’s not true. I can suggest two explanations.”

  “Let’s hear them.”

  “All right. I don’t much like either of them. But Number One, the Construct has been damaged to the point where it is not functioning in any consistent way. In other words, it’s crazy.”

  “Then it’s in the right place.”

  “No insulting remarks about Sargasso Dump guards, you said. If I’m not allowed to say they’re crazy, nor should you.”

  “Point made. All right, Phoebe. What’s Number Two?”

  “It’s functioning just as it was intended to.”

  “And we can’t understand it. Are you saying that the Morgan Constructs are a lot smarter and more complex than anyone ever suspected?”

  “I didn’t know I was. But I seem to be.”

  And now Phoebe wished that the conversation had stayed with the forlorn relics of the Sargasso Dump.

  Chapter 10

  “No!” The scream boomed through the rocky chambers, resonating on and on. “No, no, no, NO!”

  “Chan! Wait for me.” Tatty was running as fast as she could, but the screams ahead of her were fading. Somehow he had escaped again, racing off through the maze of interior tunnels.

  She slowed her pace. He could not get away for long, not with the Tracker to reveal his distance and direction. Even so, the folded corridors of Horus made the search a tedious business. And it was not only the corridors themselves. Ten generations of burrowing and excavating had left behind an astonishing legacy of debris: broken tunneling equipment, old food synthesizers, obsolete communicators, mounds of broken supply containers. When the last members of the sect left Horus, they had found few things worth hauling back for use elsewhere. Now the whole mess formed an obstacle course, to be climbed over, moved aside, or burrowed through.

  Tatty plowed on. Chan had been crying when he ran, and with the hardest part still to come she felt close to tears herself. When she caught Chan she would have to give him his medication and drag him back for a session with the Stimulator. More and more, that seemed like a pointless exercise.

  She forced herself on, grimy and tired. Even before Kubo Flammarion left Horus, Chan had been getting hard to handle. He was bigger, faster, and much stronger than Tatty. Sometimes she could manage him only by using a Stunner, slowing and weakening him enough for her to catch and overpower him.

  “Cha-an!” Her cracking voice echoed off rocky walls. “Chan, come on. Come back home.”

  Silence. Had he found a new hiding-place? Maybe he was becoming more intelligent, just a little; or maybe it was her wishful thinking. Every day she stared into those bright blue eyes, willing them to show more understanding; every day, she was disappointed. The innocence of a two-year-old gazed back at her, unable to comprehend why the woman who fed him, dressed him, and put him to bed was the same woman who tortured him.

  Tatty kept going. Most of the burrows on Horus terminated in dead ends, and after a while Chan, no matter how he tried to escape, would finish in one of them. Usually the same ones. He lacked the memory and intelligence to learn the pattern of the paths. Tatty peered at the Tracker. She was getting close. He had to be somewhere in the next chamber. She saw a pile of plastic sheets draped over powdered rock. He would be behind that, cowering brainlessly with his face pressed to the dirt. Tatty lifted the stunner and crept forward the last few yards.

  He was there. Weeping.

  It broke her heart to take him back to the training center. She knew she would not need the Stunner, for once she took hold of him his resistance disappeared. He allowed himself to be led along by the hand, passive and hopeless.

  When he saw the Stimulator he began to cry again. She sat him in the padded seat, grimly fitted the headset and the arm attachments, and turned away as the power came on. The screams of pain when full intensity was reached were awful, but she had learned to stand those. It was later, when the treatment was over and she released Chan and tried to feed him, that Tatty always felt ready to faint. He would crouch in his chair, sweaty and panting, and look up at her pleadingly. The face was that of a tormented animal, exhausted and uncomprehending. She felt she was torturing a helpless beast, punishing it pointlessly again and again for a reason it did not understand — would never be able to understand.

  She worried, always, that she was not using the Stimulator correctly. Kubo Flammarion had instructed her in the use of it before he left, and told her that Mondrian would give more detailed advice when he came to Horus.

  He had never come. There had been not even a message. Day after day, Tatty did her best to follow Flammarion’s instructions, in his three-fold way of Machine, Medication, Motivation.

  “The Stimulator won’t work by itself,” he said. “You have to follow the right drug protocol, night and morning. But more important than that, you have to be involved. You have to bond with Chan, link to him and somehow make him want to learn.”

  “And how am I supposed to do that, when he doesn’t understand even the idea of learning?”

  Flammarion had scratched his scurvy head. “Beats me. All I can tell you is what they told me. If he doesn’t have motivation, he’ll never develop. But where there is motivation, the Stimulator can work what looks like a miracle. Here, how about using Leah’s picture?”

  Flammarion had produced from a packet of papers a grimy image of Leah, part of her official identification when she was inducted for Pursuit Team training. “Chan loves her more than anything in the world,” he said. “If you show him this every time you use the Stimulator, and tell him that Leah wants him to learn — maybe that will help. And tell him that when the treatments are over, he’ll be able to go and see Leah,”

  Tatty took the picture. Every day, after the injections and after the stimulator session, she made her speech. “Look at Leah, Chan. She wants you to learn. And you’ve got to want to be more intelligent, t
oo. Just a little bit more, every day. And soon you’ll be able to go and see Leah, and she’ll come and see you.”

  Chan stared at the image and smiled. He certainly knew who it was. But that was the only response. The days wore on, all the same, and at last Tatty gave up hope. She should stop trying, stop torturing. Chan would never learn.

  She brooded on her own situation. No visit from Esro Mondrian. No calls, not even a message. He had talked her into leaving Earth, duped her into doing what he wanted, as he could always do — and then forgotten about her until the next time she might come in useful.

  She took the initiative, placing calls to him and to Kubo Flammarion. She could never get through to either of them. But one day, after many attempts, she managed to pass the shielding layers of guard and assistants and found herself talking to Mondrian’s private office on Ceres.

  “I’m sorry.” One of Mondrian’s personal guards took the call. “Captain Flammarion is in a meeting, and Commander Mondrian himself is not here.”

  “Then where the devil is he?” To get so far, and have her hopes dashed again …

  There was a pause, while the woman consulted a display. “According to the itinerary, Commander Mondrian is on Earth. He will be there for two days.”

  “He is where!”

  Tatty disconnected the communicator in a cold, clean rage. To drag her all the way to Horus to do his dirty work. To use her, and neglect her, while she passed through the agonies of Paradox withdrawal. And then to go back to Earth himself, without even telling her.

  Tatty felt bitterness consuming her body, burning in her stomach. She went through to the other room, where Chan was connected to the Stimulator. The session was almost over. He was sweating prodigiously, banging his head from side to side in the neck brace and headset. Tatty went to stand next to him.

  “Chan. Can you hear me?”

  His eyes opened a slit. They were bloodshot and slightly bulging. There was inflammation and some excess pressure inside the skull case, but he was listening. She put her arms around him.

  “He’s using us, Chan. Both of us.”

  Tears rolled down her cheeks. Chan’s eyes widened, and he reached out a wondering finger to touch the drops of moisture.

  “Tatty crying.”

  “Oh, Chan, I’d have done anything for him, anything in the world. I thought he was wonderful. I even let myself be marooned out here, because I thought I’d be helping him. But it’s no use. He doesn’t care about us — about anything, except himself. He’s a devil, Chan, crazy and heartless. He’ll destroy you, too, if you let him, the way he’s destroying me. Don’t let him do it.”

  “Him?” He was staring at her in stony incomprehension. Tatty fumbled in the overall pocket above her left breast. She took out a thin wallet, removed from it a small holograph, and held the image for Chan to see.

  “Him. Look at it, Chan. This is the man who brought us away from home. This is the one who took Leah away from you. See him? This is the person who makes you go into the Stimulator. If you learn your lessons you can get away from here. You can go and find him.”

  The bloodshot eyes stared in silence, until at last Chan took a deep, shuddering breath. He reached out to take the hologram, with its smiling face of Esro Mondrian.

  Was it imagination, or wishful thinking?

  Tatty could not be sure, but she thought that a faint spark of understanding had glowed for a moment behind those innocent, tormented eyes.

  The Margrave of Fujitsu paused and lifted his ugly head from the stereo-microscope. “And what, if I might ask, did you expect to see?”

  Luther Brachis shrugged. “That’s a hard question. But a lot more than this.” His sweeping gesture took in the whole room, from the grimy skylight window that looked out onto Earth’s surface, to the huge display system that covered a whole wall. “I mean, apart from those special microscopes almost everything here looks like part of a standard computer facility. If you hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t know this is a Needler lab at all.”

  “I see.” The Margrave bent again over the microscope and” made a minute adjustment to the setting. He laughed, without looking up. “Of course. You expected to see Needlers, didn’t you — men in white coats, sticking pins into cells. I’m sorry, but you are seven hundred years too late.”

  He at last straightened, turned, and lifted a great pile of listings from the desk at his side. “In the earliest days, yes. A strange set of methods was used at one time to stimulate parthenogenetic egg development. Ultraviolet radiation, acid and alkaline solutions, neat, cold, needle puncture, radioactivity — almost everything was tried, and a surprising number of them worked — after a fashion.

  “But all those methods produce only exact copies of a parent organism, rather than interesting variations. And even when mutations arise as a side effect of stimulation, they are quite random. As a way of producing an art form it would be quite hopeless, like dropping a block of marble off a cliff, and hoping to find a masterpiece of sculpture when you got to the bottom. Today, everything is planned.” He held out the pile of listings. “With these.”

  Brachis took the top few sheets and inspected them. “These don’t mean a thing to me, Margrave.”

  “Not Margrave. I am to be called simply Fujitsu. Mine was an Imperial line when most of your under-level braggarts were wearing animal skins and eating their food raw.

  “Sorry, Fujitsu. But I don’t see much here. Just page after page of random letters.”

  “Ah, yes. Random.” The Margrave stabbed at the top page with a bony index finger. This is random in very much the same way as we are random, you and I, since what you are holding is the complete DNA sequence of a living organism, in its precise and correct order. This output simply indicates the nucleotide bases in each of the chromosomes, letter-coded of course for convenience: A for adenine, C for cytosine, G for guanine, and T for thymine. The whole listing is built up — as we are — from those four letters. Taken together, they constitute the exact blueprint for production of an animal.” He shook his head and stared at Luther Brachis. “I am sorry. You are no innocent and no fool, though you sometimes choose to pretend to be. I will be more specific. This is the blueprint for production of a special animal — a human being.”

  “I thought DNA had a coiled spiral structure. There’s no spiral here. And I don’t want to produce a human being.”

  “A coiled spiral is topologically equivalent to a straight line, and a straight-line presentation of data is far easier to comprehend and analyze. As for the fact that this is presently a human encoding, do not worry about it. This is only my starting point, the theme from which we will construct sublime variations. Any one of the nucleotides can be changed to any other. We have full chemical control of the whole sequence. The chains can be split, lengthened, shortened, inverted, and modified in any way that I wish.” He tapped the stack, with its endless and apparently random jumble of letters. “You asked me earlier, what is my job? What is it that I actually do. After all, since I am merely evaluating the effects of inserting different DNA fractional chains into this coding, what can I do that is not done better and faster by a computer? “I have been asked that question many times, and still I can answer only by analogy. Do you play chess?”

  “Some. It’s required for Level Six education.” Brachis saw no reason to mention that he had once been close to Grand Master level. It was hard to see how that slight misdirection could have future value, but the habit was ingrained.

  “Then you probably know that, despite many centuries of work, the best chess-playing programs still fail to beat the best human players. Now, how can that be? The computers can store a million times as many games in memory. They can evaluate all possible moves, far ahead, to see which one is the best. They are tireless, and they never make the foolish errors of fatigue.

  “And yet the best humans still win. How? Because they can somehow grasp within the slow, quirky, organic computer of the human brain an overall sense of board and
position, in a holistic way that transcends individual moves. The computers play better every year — but so do the humans! The greatest chess players can feel the board, in its entirety, in a way that has never been caught in any computer program.”

  The Margrave turned to the display screen, where a long sequence of coded letters was shown. “The same ability is possessed by the best Needlers. In a string of a hundred billion nucleotide bases, random substitution, exchange, or deletions could prove totally disastrous for the organism that it represents. No viable plant or animal would result. But it is my special talent — and I assure you, Commander, that in my field I admit no peers — to sense the final and total impact of changes in the sequences. To grasp the pattern, whole, and more than that, to estimate how different changes will interact with each other. For instance, suppose that I were to invert the order of the section on the middle of the screen, and make no other change of any kind. What would it do? I am not absolutely sure — I have never thought of that variation before, and what I do is more an art than a science — but I believe that it would produce a perfectly formed individual, able to function as usual, but a little more hirsute than the norm. In the large scale of things, that is an amazingly small change. It happens that way because we are all of amazingly robust genetic stock. There is much redundancy in the DNA chain, and it stabilizes against minor copying errors in the genetic codes.”

  “So just who is that on the screen?” Brachis was not at ease with Fujitsu. The man had the cold, clear-eyed enthusiasm of a true fanatic. To the Margrave, Luther Brachis suspected he was nothing more than a section of interesting genetic code.

  Fujitsu smiled for the first time, showing stained and crooked teeth. “No one that you know, Commander. And even if it were, this is no more than a starting point. When I am finished, and you see your Artefact, you will recognize nothing of what lies behind it. In fact, the listing in front of you already contains part of my general design. King Bester delivered your specification a week ago, and it provides such an intriguing challenge that since then I have worked on nothing else.”