The Mind Pool tmp-1

by Charles Sheffield

  No wonder the others had not been able to shoot. No wonder they had — without him — discussed ways to incapacitate a Simmie without harming it.

  Chan thought of Leah’s team. According to the pursuit team trainers, they had destroyed their Simulacrum. But was that true — or had they found a secret way to allow it to continue its existence, unknown to anyone else?

  He might never know the answer to that question. And S’greela was reappearing, Angel held lightly in her mid-limbs. The mobile cloud of Shikari was not far behind. The tall Pipe-Rilla stooped and placed her burden gently on the ground right next to the Simulacrum. To Chan s surprise, every frond on Angel’s bulky body went at once into agitated motion. The communications unit turned to face him.

  “Before we begin to converse with the Simulacrum,” said Angel, “We wish to congratulate you — and each other. We are all in total agreement. This is a wonderful day. Chan, we are at last a team.”

  “And what a team!” added S’greela. “Do you not agree, Chan? We have performed wonderfully — better than any of us ever dared to hope.”

  Shikari was still in process of re-assembly, but the surface of the Tinker shook in violent agitation. “Shikari agrees,” added S’greela. “And we are still improving! We will become better yet.”

  Better!” Chan turned on the Pipe-Rilla. “What do you mean, better? We didn’t do one damned thing as we’d agreed to do it. And we’re going to have to explain all this! As soon as we reach S’kat’lan, and report back to Anabasis Headquarters, they’ll — ”

  He stopped. The others were not listening to him, not one of them.

  “Better,” said Angel cheerfully. “Much, much better! As we all know, Practice makes perfect.”

  Chapter 27

  Luther Brachis could feel the difference; in the guards at the Sargasso Dump, in Captain Ridley, most of all inside the nitrogen bubble that held the fragmented and etiolated brain of M-26A.

  The hair bristled on the back of his neck. But he could not begin to explain the reason for his reaction as he reviewed the new project records.

  Phoebe Willard appeared to be in full control of the project, and she was clearly enjoying herself mightily. Her report showed remarkable progress in communicating with M-26A. Already the brain remnant of the Construct had been fed enough data to allow a million questions to be asked and answered.

  The change in Blaine Ridley, however, was most remarkable of all. The replacement eye no longer rolled in his head. His rebuilt jaw did not waggle constantly from side to side. When Brachis appeared in the bubble, Ridley stood to attention, saluted smartly, and said, “Ready to proceed, Commander. Interface has already been established for you.”

  What would he have said and done a month ago? Writhed and jerked and stammered, and peed his pants. Ridley’s improvement was a cause for rejoicing. And yet …

  “Very good, Captain. Dismissed.”

  The inside of the bubble felt cold after Ridley had gone. It was cold, at the temperature of liquid nitrogen. But Brachis’s hardened suit was working fine. He ought to be comfortable inside it at absolute zero, or on the surface of the sun.

  There had to be another reason for his inner shiver, and surely it was both psychological and physical. He was squeezing this visit into a schedule that had no room for it, stealing sleep to make the local Link out to the Dump. And he would have to push himself even harder when he got back to Ceres.

  He forced his attention to the keyboard, and typed a new input.

  I want to ask you questions regarding the possible capture of the escaped Morgan Construct by a Pursuit Team consisting of human, Tinker, Pipe-Rilla, and Angel members.

  That was not a question, and Brachis knew better than to expect anything of M-26A unless he asked a direct inquiry. He typed on. You have received data on the Pursuit Teams. You have also received data concerning the most probable location of the escaped Morgan Construct. Question: Based on your knowledge of Constructs, and of the individual species that constitute a Pursuit Team, can you estimate the probability of success of any Pursuit Team, as presently constituted, capturing or destroying the escaped Construct?

  It was a direct question. Brachis had been getting anything but direct answers. He was surprised at the reply.

  Answer: I can make such an estimate. The words appeared at once on the display.

  Don’t stop now. Brachis typed: Question: What is the probability?

  Answer: The probability is 0.000873, less than one in a thousand.

  That was direct enough for anyone, even if it was not the answer Brachis had hoped for. Question. What are the primary reasons for that low probability? List those reasons in decreasing order of importance. Answer:

  1) Livia Morgan employed the best elements from every species in the Stellar Group in designing the Morgan Constructs.

  2) By employing inorganic augmentation, Livia Morgan was able to design a form for every Morgan Construct that exceeds in capability every Stellar Group member.

  3) The escaped Morgan Construct, M-29, was believed by Livia Morgan to be the most advanced of the seventeen.

  Not encouraging, but also not surprising. Brachis had been pessimistic himself, which is why he had relied on information from M-26A to change the odds.

  Except … wasn’t something a little strange in at least one part of the previous answer?

  You state that “the escaped Morgan Construct, M-29, was believed by Livia Morgan to be the most advanced of the seventeen.” Question: Why do you use the word believed?

  Answer. Livia Morgan believed it to be true.

  Question: Do you disagree with that statement?

  Answer: Yes.

  Question: On what basis do you question the statement?

  Answer: On the basis of the events at Cobweb Station.

  Question: Can you describe the relevant events?

  Answer: Those events were initiated and led by M-29, whose instability and insanity spread to others.

  A Construct that was not just dangerous, but insane. That information certainly had to go to Esro Mondrian.

  Question: Why did M-29 act in that way?

  Answer: M-29 was driven to insanity.

  Question: What made M-29 go insane?

  Answer: The manifest destiny of M-29 had been thwarted.

  Question: What was the manifest destiny of M-29?

  That question cannot be answered.

  Brachis swore. He thought they were all done with that sort of nonsense. After three similar questions reached the same dead end, he typed in: Two Pursuit Teams have been formed. Question: Has information been provided to your data banks on the individuals who compose them?

  Answer: It has.

  Question: If those two Pursuit Teams attempt to destroy the escaped Morgan Construct, do you assign the same tow probability to their chances of success?

  Answer: No.

  Which made no sense at all. It contradicted the earlier answer. But there was no stopping now. Question: What do you estimate as their chances of success?

  There was a long pause. The display screen fragmented into spinning pools of light, and finally formed the words: Answer: Their chance of success is in excess of 0.95, provided that certain conditions are met.

  Question: Can you describe those conditions? Answer: No.

  Another blind alley. Brachis tried the same question in a score of different ways, and got nowhere. He paused in the dialogue, and puzzled over the answers. The Pursuit Teams — “as presently constituted” — could not capture the rogue Construct. But the chance of success, for those same Pursuit Teams, was better than nineteen in twenty. Impossible.

  Question: Should the composition of any Pursuit Team be changed to enhance the chance of success in destroying the Morgan Construct?

  Answer: No.

  Luther Brachis had had enough. The attempt to build a rational Construct brain from the damaged remnant must have failed. He was dealing with something as marred in its way as the brain-damaged gu
ards of the Sargasso Dump.

  Only a streak of stubbornness made him keep going. If precise, systematic inquiries did not work, what would general and random ones do? He went on a fishing expedition.

  There is now an ongoing attempt by two Pursuit Teams to destroy the Morgan Construct which escaped from Cobweb Station. Question One: Will the Pursuit Teams succeed? Question Two: Will the Morgan Construct be totally destroyed?

  He expected vague answers, or the old familiar message: More information must be provided before that question can be answered. Instead, the screen was already pooling to form new words: Answer One: Yes, the Pursuit Teams will succeed. Answer Two: No, the Morgan Construct will not be totally destroyed.

  Brachis paused before he went on. It was time for a general sanity check on the isolated brain. The next few questions should be designed with that in mind — and to satisfy his own curiosity.

  Four Questions: Is the future of the Stellar Group in danger? Will I, Luther Brachis, emerge at the end of this project increased in status? Where does my future lie after the conclusion of this project? Where does the future of Esro Mondrian lie?

  Four Answers: The future of the Stellar Group is in danger. You will emerge at the end of this project increased in status. Your future lies here. The future of Esro Mondrian lies here.

  It was worse than nothing. Luther Brachis had spent three precious hours at the terminal. Now he suspected that all the replies he had received were meaningless. He was in the process of signing off when Phoebe Willard returned.

  “Progress?”

  He shook his head. “If you want my unprofessional opinion, we’ve got ourselves an insane Construct.”

  She was on him like a tiger. “Luther, that’s rubbish! We’ve been getting wonderful results, for all this past week. If anything is wrong, it has to be your way of asking questions. M-26A is fine.”

  He had expected disagreement This was Phoebe’s baby now, and like any good project officer she defended her offspring. What he was amazed by was the vehemence. Blaine Ridley was not the only one at the Sargasso Dump who had been through a major change.

  “So you think M-26A is fine. What’s your explanation of these answers? It’s like a damned Oracle — the answer can mean anything you want it to, or nothing at all.” Brachis began to play back the session, beginning with the statement that no pursuit team could capture or destroy the escaped Morgan Construct.

  Phoebe watched for only a few seconds. “Luther, I’m too old to be trapped into giving two-second answers to two-hour problems. Drop a copy out on storage, and I’ll go over all this in detail — after you are back on Ceres.” She frowned at one of the answers that had scrolled into view. “ ‘Your future lies here’?”

  “I know. It s a ridiculous answer.”

  “To a ridiculous question. Commander, I don’t know what M-26A means by that, but I’ve been at the Dump so long I’m beginning to feel as though my future lies here. I have to sort out a few things back home, personal stuff that can’t be left much longer. Next week I’d like to make a quick trip to Mars.”

  “You’re picking a bad time. The work ought to go on.”

  “That’s what you always say, whenever I talk about taking any leave. But the work won’t stop. With your permission it will continue — under Blaine Ridley’s direction.”

  It was tempting to say yes at once. Brachis wanted to think that Ridley could do the job, wanted to believe that something precious could be salvaged from the human debris of the Sargasso Dump.

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “Ridley can do it. You know he can.”

  “Two months ago he couldn’t say his own name. How do you know he won’t be sitting in diapers again, a week from now?”

  “Suppose he is. What harm can he possibly do?” Phoebe pointed at the screen. “Those are the best replies that you’ve been able to get out of M-26A. Do you think that Ridley can do w orse? Even if he does nothing but sit on his rear end from the time I leave to the time I get back, what difference will it make?”

  She was probably right. Brachis stared at the screen. Your future lies here. Maybe. But his present lay back at Ceres. He had to get back there, without delay.

  “You win, Phoebe. But not because I think it’s a good decision. I just don’t have time to sit around and debate it with you. Who will assist Ridley? If you needed an assistant, so will he.”

  “Commander, you can’t know what’s going on here when you come in for flying visits and then head off again right away. We have over a dozen guards — maybe more than twenty of them — who are well enough to work as Captain Ridley’s assistants. He has been training people for weeks, snowing them this facility one by one. It always seems to make a terrific improvement in their condition. Maybe that’s what has been wrong here, no one has ever had enough real work to do. People have to feel useful.”

  She stood up, and went across to where a session recording had been played out for her. “When I first came here you made me sit through meetings with the guards.”

  “And you benefitted from it, Phoebe.”

  “I did. It’s your turn now, Commander. Before you fly off again, I want you to shake hands with a few of the old-timers.” Phoebe headed for the lock folds. “Come on. I think you’ll be amazed at the changes.”

  Chapter 28

  The first experimenters with the Mattin Link transfer system had learned three lessons very quickly:

  Know your exit point. Careless travellers had landed suitless in the hard vacuum of an extrasolar probe, or on the open surface of Mercury and Ganymede.

  Close is not good enough. Travellers who missed the long, coded sequence of Link settings by a single digit tended to arrive as thin pink pancakes, or as long, braided ribbons of cytoplasm.

  Someone always pays. The instantaneous transfer of messages and materials through the Mattin Link had opened the road to the stars, but it would never be cheap. The power for a single interstellar trip between points of different field potential could eat up the savings of a lifetime. Linkage of materials from the Oort Cloud to the Inner System consumed the full energy of three kernels aboard the Oort Harvester.

  To those three rules, Esro Mondrian had added a fourth one of his own. A very old rule, familiar to the rulers of ancient Egypt: Access is power. Certain Link coordinates and transfer sequences were held strictly secret. Knowledge of them was not permitted without lengthy checking of credentials and need-to-know. The set of coordinates for the ship orbiting Travancore was not stored, not even in the Dominus data bank. It was known to just three people in the system: Mondrian, Kubo Flammarion, and Luther Brachis. The latter would use their information only if Mondrian himself were dead or unconscious.

  The receiving point for information from Travancore was just as closely guarded. The Link Exit point was at Anabasis Headquarters, and nowhere else. The Solar Ambassador had agreed to that grudgingly, after direct pressure on Dougal MacDougal from the other members of the Stellar Group.

  What the Stellar Group ambassadors had not approved, and what no one outside the Anabasis had been told about, was Mondrian’s other decision concerning Team Alpha. The human team member was equipped with a personal Link communicator, to send sound and vision through a mentation unit for the entire period that Leah Rainbow was on Travancore. She knew that those data were being beamed to Team Alpha’s orbiting ship. What she did not know was that they were sent on from there, to be received in real-time at Anabasis Headquarters.

  Mondrian would monitor those signals himself, with help only from Kubo Flammarion and Luther Brachis.

  Dawn on Travancore, night on Ceres. Esro Mondrian tapped Flammarion on the shoulder to indicate his arrival and sat down on the other side of the desk. Flammarion nodded and disconnected. He placed the headset in his lap, rubbed his temples, and yawned. “Quiet night. They heard a few funny noises outside the tent, then there was half an hour of heavy rain. Rain like Leah says she never heard of, even on Earth’s surface. Now the whol
e team is awake.”

  Mondrian nodded. “I’m probably going to spend most of the day with them. Don t interrupt me unless we have an emergency.” He fitted the set carefully over his head and turned on. After the first unpleasant moment of double sensory input he was linked abruptly across fifty-six lightyears. The Link connection was excellent. He was seeing through Leah’s eyes and hearing with her ears. Whatever she saw and heard, he would experience as long as he wore the headset.

  Leah was standing now on the reinforced side lip of the balloon tent, gazing out across the vivid emerald of Travancore’s endless jungle. The growth below the tent formed a tight-woven fabric of stems and vines. The early dazzle of Talitha’s light scattered and diffused from the array of trunks and creepers, so that Leah could look straight down and see for maybe two hundred feet. At that depth a continuous layer of broad leaves hid everything beneath it. Even with Talitha’s brilliance, the barrier of leaves was effective. There could be little photosynthesis deeper than the top few hundred meters. That left a real mystery: How did the lower levels obtain their energy supply?

  Ishmael and S’glya were emerging from the tent to stand next to her.

  “Cold,” said S’glya as a greeting. She vibrated vestigial wing cases.

  Leah turned to point over the edge, as Ishmael flowed and fluttered to form a living blanket around her legs. “Is that a solid layer of leaves? I can’t see a thing below it.”