Sundiver

by David Brin

  Bubbacub made a gesture with his hand that Jacob didn’t try to interpret.

  “Finally, there’s the matter of the death of chimpanzee Jeffrey. Actually, it’s the easiest part.

  “Bubbacub knew almost everything there was to know about the Galactic technology in Sundiver; the drives, the computer system, the communications . . . aspects which Terran scientists haven’t even scratched.

  “It’s only circumstantial evidence that Bubbacub was working on the laser communications pylon, spurning Dr. Kepler’s presentation, when Jeff’s largely remote-controlled ship blew up. It wouldn’t convict in a court of law, but that doesn’t matter since Pila have extraterritoriality and all we can do is deport him.

  “Another thing that’d be hard to prove would be the hypothesis that Bubbacub planted a false lead in the Space Identification System . . . a system linked directly to the Library at LaPaz . . . creating a false report that LaRoque was a Probationer. Still, it’s pretty clear that he did. It was a perfect red herring. With everyone sure that LaRoque did it, nobody bothered to really do a detailed double-check of the telemetry on Jeff’s dive. Right now I believe I recall that Jeff’s ship went into trouble almost exactly when he turned on his closeup cameras, a perfect delayed trigger if that was the technique Bubbacub used. Anyway, we’ll probably never know. The telemetry is probably missing or destroyed by now.”

  Fagin fluted. “Jacob, Culla asks that you stop. Please do not embarrass Pil Bubbacub any further. It would serve no purpose.”

  Three armed crewmen appeared at the door. They looked at Commandant deSilva expectantly. She motioned for them to wait.

  “Just a moment,” Jacob said. “We haven’t dealt with the most important part, Bubbacub’s motives. Why would an important sophont, a representative of a prestigious galactic institution, indulge in theft, forgery, psychic assault, and murder?

  “Bubbacub had personal grudges against both Jeffrey and LaRoque, to start with. Jeffrey represented an abomination to him, a species that had been uplifted a mere hundred years before and yet dared to talk back. Jeff’s ‘uppityness’ and his friendship with Culla contributed to Bubbacub’s anger.

  “But I think he hated what chimpanzees represent most of all. Along with dolphins, they meant instant status for the crude, vulgar human race. The Pila had to fight for half a million years to get to where they are. I guess Bubbacub resents us having it ‘easy.’

  “As for LaRoque, well, I’d say Bubbacub just didn’t like him. Too loud and pushy, I suppose . . .”

  LaRoque sniffed audibly.

  “And perhaps he was insulted when LaRoque suggested that the Soro might have once been our Patrons. The ‘upper crust” in Galactic society frowns on species who abandon their clients.”

  “But those are just personal reasons,” Helene objected. “Haven’t you got anything better?”

  “Jacob,” Fagin began. “Please . . .”

  “Of course Bubbacub had another reason,” Jacob said. “He wanted to end Sundiver in a way that would put into disrepute the concept of independent research and boost the status of the Library. He made it seem that he, a Pil, was able to make contact where humans weren’t, concocted a story that made Sundiver out to be a bungled operation. Then he faked a Library report to verify his claims about the Solarians and ensure that there would be no more dives!

  “It was the failure of the Library to come up with anything that probably irked Bubbacub the most. And it’s faking that message that’ll get him in the deepest trouble back at home. For that they’ll punish him worse than we ever would for killing Jeff.”

  Bubbacub rose slowly. He carefully brushed his fur flat and then clicked his four-fingered hands together.

  “You are ver-y smart,” he said to Jacob. “But se-man-tics bad . . . aim too high. You build too much on small stuff. Hu-mans shall al-ways be small. I shall speak your kaka Terran tongue no more.”

  With that he removed the Vodor from around his neck and tossed it idly on the table.

  “I’m sorry, Pil Bubbacub,” deSilva said. “But it appears that we’re going to have to restrict your movement until we get instructions from Earth.”

  Jacob half expected the Pil to nod or shrug but the alien performed another movement that somehow conveyed the same indifference. He turned away and marched stiffly out the door, a small stubby, proud figure leading the large human guards.

  Helene deSilva picked up the bottom of the “Lethani relic.” She weighed it carefully in her hands, thoughtfully. Then her lips tightened and she threw the object with all her might against the door.

  “Murderer,” she cursed.

  “I’ve learned my lesson,” Martine said slowly. “Never trust anyone over thirty million.”

  Jacob stood in a daze. The exalted feeling was draining away too quickly. Like a drug, it left behind it an emptiness—a return to rationality but a loss of totality as well. Soon he would begin to wonder if he had done right in releasing everything at once in an orgiastic display of deductive logic.

  Martine’s remark made him look up.

  “Not anyone?” he asked.

  Fagin was nudging Culla into a chair. Jacob went over to him.

  “I’m sorry, Fagin,” he said. “I should have warned you, discussed it with you first. There may be . . . complications to this thing, repercussions that I didn’t think out.” He brought a hand to his forehead.

  Fagin whistled softly.

  “You unleashed that which you have been restraining, Jacob. I do not understand why you have been so reticent to use your skills, of late, but in this instance justice demanded all of your vigor. It is fortunate that you relented.

  “Do not worry too much about what has happened. The Truth was more important than the damage done through minor over-eagerness, or through the, use of techniques too long dormant,”

  Jacob wanted to tell Fagin how wrong he was. The “skills” he had unleashed were more than that. They were a deadly force within him. He feared that they had done more harm than good.

  “What do you think will happen?” he asked, tiredly.

  “Why I believe that humanity will discover that it has a powerful enemy. Your government will protest. How it does so will be of great importance, but it will not change the essential facts. Officially the Pila will disown Bubbacub’s unfortunate actions. But they are peevish and prideful, if you will excuse a painful but necessarily unkind description of a fellow sophont race.

  “That is just one result of this event-chain. But do not worry overmuch. You did not do this thing. All that you did was make humanity aware of the danger. It was bound to happen. It always has happened to wolfling races.”

  “But why!”

  “That, my most esteemed friend, is one of the things I am here to try to discover. Though it may be of little comfort, please note that there are many who would like to see humanity survive. Some of us . . . care very much.”

  20. MODERN MEDICINE

  Jacob pressed against the rubber rimmed eyepiece of the Retinal scanner, and once again saw the blue dot dance and shimmer alone in a black background. Now he tried not to focus on it, ignoring its tantalizing suggestion of communion, as he waited for the third tachistoscopic image.

  It flashed on suddenly, filling his entire field of view with a 3-D image in dull sepia. The gestalt he got in that first, unfocused instant was of a pastoral scene. There was a woman in the foreground, buxom and well fed, her old-fashioned skirts flying as she ran.

  Dark, threatening clouds loomed on the horizon, above farm buildings set on a hill. There were people on the left . . . dancing? No, fighting. There were soldiers. Their faces were excited and—afraid? The woman was afraid. She fled with her arms over her head as two men in seventeenth-century body armor chased her, holding high their matchlocks with bayonets sharp. Their. . .

  The scene blacked out and the blue dot was back. Jacob closed his eyes and pulled back from the eyepiece.

  “That’s it,” Dr. Martine said. She bent
over a computer console nearby, next to Physician Laird. “We’ll have your P-test score in a minute, Jacob.”

  “You’re sure you don’t need any more? That was only three.” Actually, he was relieved.

  “No, we took five from Peter to have a double-check. You’re just a control. Why don’t you just sit down and relax now, while we finish up here.”

  Jacob walked over to one of the nearby lounge chairs, wiping his left cuff along his forehead to remove a thin sheen of perspiration. The test had been a thirty-second ordeal.

  The first image had been a portrait of a man’s face, gnarled and lined with care, a story of a life-time that he had examined for two, maybe three seconds, before it disappeared again, as seared as any ephemera could be into his memory.

  The second had been a confusing jumble of abstract shapes, jutting and bumping in static disarray . . . somewhat like the maze of patterns around the rim of a sun-torus but without the brilliance or overall consistency.

  The third had been the scene in sepia, apparently rendered from an old etching of the Thirty Years War. It was explicitly violent, Jacob recalled, just the sort of thing one would expect in a P-test.

  After the overly dramatic “parlor scene” downstairs, Jacob was reluctant to enter even a shallow trance to calm his nerves. And he, found that he couldn’t relax without it. He rose and approached the console. Across the dome, near the stasis shell itself, LaRoque wandered idly as he waited, staring out at the long shadows and blistered rocks of Mercury’s North Pole.

  “May I see the raw data?” Jacob asked Martine.

  “Sure. Which one would you like to see?”

  “The last one.”

  Martine tapped on her keyboard. A sheet extruded from a slot beneath the screen. She tore it off and handed it to him.

  It was the “pastoral scene.” Of course now he recognized its true content, but the whole purpose of the earlier viewing was to trace his reactions to the image during the first few instants he saw it, before conscious, consideration could come into play.

  Across the image a jagged line darted back and forth, up and down. At every vertex or resting point was a small number. The line showed the path of his attention during that first quick glimpse, as detected by the Retinal Reader, watching the movements of his eye.

  The number one, and the beginning of the trace, was near the center. Up to number six the focus line just drifted. Then it stopped right over the generous cleavage presented by the running woman’s bosom. The number seven was circled there.

  There the numbers clustered, not only seven to sixteen, but thirty through thirty five and eighty two to eighty six, as well.

  At twenty the numbers suddenly shifted from the woman’s feet to the clouds over the farmhouse. Then they moved quickly among the people and objects pictured, sometimes circled or squared to denote the level of dilation of the eye, depth of focus, and changes in his blood pressure as measured by the tiny veins in his retina. Apparently the modified Stanford-Purkinje eye scanner he had devised for this test, from Martine’s tachistoscope and other odds and ends, had worked.

  Jacob knew better than to be embarrassed or concerned by his reflex reaction to the pictured woman’s breast. If he’d been female his reaction would have been different, spending more time with the woman, overall, but concentrating more on hair, clothes, and face.

  What concerned him more was his reaction to the overall scene. Over to the left, near the fighting men, was a starred number. That represented the point at which he realized that the image was violent, not pastoral. He nodded with satisfaction. The number was relatively low and the trace darted immediately away for a period of five beats before returning to the same spot. That meant a healthy dose of aversion followed by direct instead of covert curiosity.

  At first glance it looked like he’d probably pass. Not that he ever really doubted it.

  “I wonder if anyone will ever learn how to fool a P-test,” he said, handing the copy to Martine.

  “Maybe they will, someday,” she said as she gathered her materials. “But the conditioning needed to change a man’s response to instantaneous stimuli . . . to an image flashed so fast that only the unconscious has time to react . . . would leave too many side effects, new patterns that would have to show up in the test.

  “The final analysis is very simple; does the subject’s mind follow a plus or zero sum game, qualifying him for Citizenship, or is it addicted to the sick-sweet pleasures of a negative sum. That more than any index of violence, is the essence of this test.”

  Martine turned to Physician Laird. “That’s right, isn’t it, Doctor?”

  Laird shrugged. “You’re the expert.” He had been allowing Martine to slowly win her way back into his good graces, still not quite forgiving her for prescribing to Kepler without consulting him.

  After the denunciation downstairs, it became clear that she had never prescribed the Warfarin to Kepler at all. Jacob recalled. Bubbacub’s habit, aboard the Bradbury, of falling asleep on articles of clothing, carelessly left on cushions or chairs. The Pil must have done it as a subterfuge to enable him to plant, in Kepler’s portable pharmacopoeia, a drug that would cause his behavior to deteriorate.

  It made sense. Kepler was eliminated from the last dive. With his keen insight he might have detected Bubbacub’s trick with the “Lethani relic.” Also his aberrant actions would have helped in the long run to discredit Sundiver.

  It hung together, but to Jacob all of these deductions tasted like a dinner of protein-flakes. They were enough to persuade but they had no flavor. A bowl full of suppositions.

  Some of Bubbacub’s misdeeds were proven. The rest would have to remain speculation since the Library representative had diplomatic immunity.

  Pierre LaRoque joined them. The Frenchman’s attitude was subdued. “What is the verdict, Doctor Laird?”

  “It’s quite clear that Mr. LaRoque is not an asocially violent personality and that he does not qualify for Probation,” Laird said slowly. “In fact, he betrays a rather high social conscience* index. That may be part of his problem. He’s apparently sublimating something and he would be well-advised to seek the help of a professional at his neighborhood clinic when he gets home.” Laird looked down at LaRoque sternly. LaRoque merely nodded meekly.

  “And the controls?” Jacob asked. He had been the last to take the test. Dr. Kepler, Helene deSilva, and three randomly selected crewmen had also taken their turns at the machine. Helene hadn’t given the test a second thought and had taken the crewmen with her when she left to supervise the hurried pre-launch checkout of the Sunship. Kepler had scowled as Physician Laird read him his own results privately, and stalked off in a huff.

  Laird reached up and pinched the bridge of his nose, just below the eyebrow.

  “Oh, there isn’t a Probationer in the bunch, just as we expected after your little show downstairs. But there are problems and things I don’t quite understand, bubbling in the minds of some of the people here. You know, it’s not easy for a country sawbones like me to have to fall back on his internship training and look into people’s souls. I would have missed half a dozen nuances if Dr. Martine hadn’t helped. As it is, I find it hard to interpret these hidden darknesses, especially of men I know and admire.”

  “There’s nothing serious, I hope.”

  “If there were you wouldn’t be going on this rush-job dive Helene’s ordered! I’m not grounding Dwayne Kepler because he has a cold!”

  Laird shook his head and apologized. “Forgive me. I’m just not used to this. There’s nothing to worry about, Jacob. You had some awfully strange quirks in your test but the basic reading is as sane as any I’ve ever seen. Decidedly positive-sum and realistic.

  “Still, there are some things that confuse me. I won’t go into specifics that might cause you more worry than they’re worth while you’re on this dive, I’d just appreciate it if you and Helene would each come and see me when you get back.”

  Jacob thanked the man an
d walked with him, Martine, and LaRoque toward the elevator.

  High overhead, the communications pylon pierced the stasis dome. All around them, beyond the men and machines of the chamber, the blistered rocks of Mercury sparkled or shone dully. Sol was an incandescent yellow ball above a low range of hills.

  When the elevator car arrived, Martine and Laird entered, but LaRoque’s hand on his arm kept Jacob back until the door had dosed, leaving the two of them alone.

  Pierre LaRoque whispered to Jacob.

  “I want my camera!”

  “Sure, LaRoque. Commandant deSilva disarmed the stunner and you can pick it up any time,now that you’re cleared.”

  “And the recording?”

  “I’ve got it. I’m holding onto it, too.”

  “You have no business . . .”

  “Come off it, LaRoque,” Jacob groaned. “Why don’t you just once cut the act and give someone else credit for some intelligence! I want to know why you were taking sonic pictures of the stasis oscillator in Jeffrey’s ship! And I also want to know what gave you the idea my uncle would be interested in them!”

  “I owe you a great deal, Demwa,” LaRoque said slowly. The thick accent was almost gone. “But I have to know if your political views are at all like your uncle’s before I answer you.”

  “I have a lot of uncles, LaRoque. Uncle Jeremy is in the Confederacy Assembly, but I know you wouldn’t be working with him! Uncle Juan is pretty big on theory and very down on illegality . . . my guess is that you mean Uncle James, the family kook. Oh I agree with him about a lot of things, even some things the rest of the family doesn’t. But if he’s involved in some sort of espionage plot, I’m not going to help to dig him deeper . . . especially in a plot as clumsy as yours appears to be.

  “You may not be a murderer or a Probationer, LaRoque, but you are a spy! The only problem is figuring out who you’re spying for. I’ll save that mystery for when we get back to Earth,

  “Then, maybe, you can visit me; you and James can both try to talk me out of turning you in. Fair enough?”