“Transmuted? Into what? If we make major alterations in their holy family it is the same as keeping them.”
“A body of a suitable and similar-looking priestess of about the Holy Lama’s age can be procured. They are, after all, all sisters. The reproductive functions can be restored during the process. The sterilization is surgical, not transmuter induced. Nine males of the royal lineage can also be procured from the Centers as models, and their children can be the templates for the Holy Lama’s children. Each can then be transmuted into the form of one of the randomly selected templates.”
“I see. And since one cannot be transmuted twice, the agent will be exposed, perhaps killed.”
“Possibly. I said transmuters were used to create it. I do not believe it is possible to modify a human being to become one of these creatures. If it was, then all of the rebels would be like this thing and we should be lost. No, it must be created and nurtured in a specially controlled laboratory. It is unlikely that it has ever used a transmitter for more than transport. It has no need to do so, and it might actually be threatened by it. But matter is matter and atoms are atoms to a transmuter program. Have we not created Vals that are so human none can tell the difference without instruments? It will not care what this creature is made of, or how it works. It will simply do a transmute. If it exists at all, it will emerge back on Chanchuk as the Holy Lama or a male consort or a child. It will no longer be artificial—it will be real, and fixed immutably as one of Chanchuk. It is also likely that memory is stored cellularly, throughout the body, rather than merely in the brain. If that is true and it is a true mimic to the end, it is quite possible we may also eliminate most if not all of the memories, knowledge, and personality beneath the Chanchukian facade. Either way, it will be neutralized. Do you need specific programming instructions?”
“No. The only regret in this is that we shall never know for certain if the colonel is brilliant or if this is a fantasy. I would like to know.”
“It is probable. It is the most logical way to explain their successes, as Chi so brilliantly determined. Clay-ben has the ability, Melchior is the logical place, and the idea is consistent with the way Clayben thought. The traitor Nagy could have brought the creature along, since Nagy would be immune to it. No. I am convinced that with this move we shall deal them a blow so crushing that it will be another generation before they succeed in gaining another ring. We will not let down our guard, for we want to capture them all, but as far as obtaining all five rings is concerned, this will halt them in their tracks.”
“It shall be done, and the restoration shall be highly publicized and with suitable ceremony. I feel certain the Holy Lama will go along even without mindpripter inducement, which is always the best way. She is concerned about her people in a genuine way and anxious to restore normalcy. If such normalcy can be assured, what do you wish us to do next?”
“The SPF should be withdrawn as soon as possible, but keep a regional command in the area just in case the Holy Lama is not altogether clear on where her own and her people’s best interests lie. I would suggest that Commodore Marquette and his command be relieved of task force duties and placed in command of a project to analyze specific SPF training responses. I have done a complete analysis of his defensive plan and can find no specific flaws in it. Clearly insufficient force was deployed to defend Chanchuk, and the pirates’ computers were able to predict the logical responses of our programs, commanders, and forces and find the weak links in the chain. It is essential we become less predictable in the future. Were it not for Colonel Chi, we might have suffered a total humiliating defeat in this matter and learned nothing from it.”
“Colonel Chi failed,” the Val pointed out.
“Vals failed on Janipur,” the master computer noted. The only reason we struck any blow at the enemy on Janipur, even with our overwhelming force, was that the enemy was new at the game and had not been tested in battle or planning. They lost their ships and personnel because of their own mistakes, not our efficiency. They are clearly patient and they have learned well. Chi salvaged something here by showing imagination and initiative and because she circumvented the rigidity of procedure and thought that the enemy counted on. I am far removed from the scene of this fight. Communications cannot be instantaneous. On the scene, our computers and their computers are equal. The difference, then, has been their human controllers who clearly have a great deal of resourcefulness and imagination. This system was created because it is the best for humans. Perhaps it is time we allowed the products of that system to have a direct hand in this.”
“What, then, are your orders?”
“The rings on Matriyeh and Alititi are to be secured with monitors so that any removal will result in an automatic alarm. Large automated task forces are to be deployed in waiting stages in null zones out of detection range, but within monitor range, capable of closing on either world and sealing it off should either ring be stolen. Even without their special agent they will try and perhaps succeed, but I do not want them getting away again. I want so much force available with such speed that the enemy must bring all of his ships and weapons to bear. They must be smashed so thoroughly that they are forced to bring their base ship into the fight and we must be able to take and secure it. Colonel Chi is promoted to brigadier and is to be placed in charge of a special SPF task force with all authority necessary. All Vals and other extensions of myself shall be at her disposal. Move!”
Raven had been morose off and on of late. He always had his moods and his depressions, but this one seemed longer and deeper than most. The Crow had taken to simply sitting on an overlook, staring out at the vast worldlet that was the Thunder’s deep interior.
He’d been up there, staring out, for over two days now, eating or drinking nothing, and clearly now even out of cigars. The former was not totally unusual; the latter was history making. Hawks, concerned, finally decided to make his way up there even though it broke his own personal rule on disturbing others and certainly violated the compact that existed now with the remaining multiracial company.
The Thunder was impressive, and never more so than from its heights. Its kilometers-long interior, balanced by a comfortable artificial gravity and landscaped with plants and rocks from dozens of worlds, actually contained small villages and a network of paths, central wells, sanitation, and cooking—all that was needed. There was even a small area for livestock, although, since some of the races aboard were strict vegetarians, some by biology and others by custom or religion, it was agreed that those who chose to remain meat-eaters would eat synthetics in the interest of harmony.
Raven was a craggy old bastard, with scars all over his body from his tough early life and career; his long hair, kept straight at his own insistence, as if to mark him as one apart from the Hyiakutts like Hawks and Cloud Dancer who wore the traditional Plains braids most of the time, was steel-gray now. He was built like a wrestler; a man nature had designed to be large as opposed to tall, yet more muscular than fat.
As much as he had been a prime mover and shaker in the quest for the rings and as much as he was a child of his northwest wilderness, he was also always the cynic, always the materialist and scoundrel, always the one who looked for profit in everything he did and approached even the vastness of the universe in coldly pragmatic terms. In all these years he’d rarely let down his guard, rarely given anyone a glimpse of what might lie behind those cold, brown eyes and that impassive, stonelike face. Just enough, over all this time, to give those with whom he’d lived and worked and plotted and planned an indication that somewhere under all that was a far different sort of human being.
Raven, dressed only in a loincloth and sandals, did not move or acknowledge Hawks’s presence when the leader came up to the platform level and stepped off just behind him. For a while Hawks just stood there, wondering if he was doing the right thing. But he was the leader, and he had to know the condition of his company.
Hawks approached, then sat down next to the big man, cross-legged on the metal platform, and stared out at the vast interior below.
Hawks reached back and took a long object from a box he’d brought with him. “I brought you another box of cigars,” the leader said conversationally.
For a moment Raven said nothing, then, without turning or moving, he responded, “If you came up here and didn’t bring ’em, I’d’ve thrown you off this platform.”
“You’ve been up here a long time.”
“Sixty-two standard hours, forty-six minutes, more or less.”
“You can keep track like that?”
“You kiddin’? The master clock’s just up there.”
Hawks felt a bit silly. “Yeah. I should have thought of that. How long do you intend to stay here?”
“I don’t know. It’s either this or I start hittin’ the bottle. This is healthier. What’s it to you, Chief, anyway?”
“Because I’m the chief,” Hawks replied. “Because I think it’s more appropriate for the chief to check you out than the medicine man, considering that would be Clayben.”
“Good point. So what’s on your mind, Chief?”
“I think that question is reversed. What’s on your mind, Raven? Finally getting to you? All this time, all this plotting and all this waiting—and we still don’t know if we’re going to make it.”
“Oh, we’re gonna make it, Chief. Ain’t you figured that out yet? I don’t know which of us, but some of us’ll make it. We’ll get there and we’ll figure it all out and we’ll switch that big mother right out of the circuit and give it a lobotomy. Somebody will. It’s almost like we were playing out a script. Not our script, or we wouldn’t have this much trouble, but somebody’s script. God’s or something more sinister, I don’t know, but I’m damned sure of that much. We come too far, Chief. A lot farther than I ever dreamed, and maybe you, either, in your saner, less idealistic moments. We got three rings and we know where another one is. We got just one to snatch and then it’s home. And we’ll snatch it. And we’ll come home. Whether we can hold ’em long enough for us to use ’em, I don’t know, but somebody will.”
“That what you’re worried about? Going home? Holding on?”
Raven shook his head. “Uh uh. But, see, we—all of us—been so hot on gettin’ the damned things and survivin’ to use ’em and all that we ain’t thought about the one big thing. We been like folks sealed in detention cells who spend half their lives plottin’ how to escape and findin’ all the flaws, like us back on Melchior so long ago. Then they bust out, finally, and they realize they spent so much time figurin’ how to bust out they ain’t got the slightest idea where the hell they’re goin’ or what they want to do. Suppose we get in there and we turn that sucker off. Ain’t nobody but me ever thought beyond that, I think. What then? What happens then, Chief?”
Hawks was startled. “I don’t know. We just don’t have to worry about Master System anymore.”
“Uh huh, and just what do you turn off? The boss, that’s all. The chief. You knock off the only chief capable of keepin’ track of, much less rulin’, the tribes and what happens? You got thousands of little chiefs all at one another’s throats tryin’ to be the new big chief. You get tribalism and civil war and you get massive deaths. The people? They’re still under the rule of the Great White Father they were born under—or the Great Red Father or the Great Yellow Father or whatever. The C.A.s are still in charge. They just got the boss off their backs is all. The interdependent trade system handled by the automated spaceships also goes down the toilet. No more resupply, no more innovation, no more external contacts. A human empire goes the way of all empires and you get four hundred and fifty plus alien worlds. And I mean alien, Chief. You drop me as I am down in the middle of Janipur and I’ll either get worshipped as a god, stoned as a demon, or in the end cut down as a monster anyways, and they won’t ask about my table manners. Stick a Janipurian on Chanchuk. Try and hold a solid dialogue on important affairs on Earth with the average Matriyehan. You see what I mean?”
Hawks nodded. “I have thought on it. It is not sufficient to turn the machine off. One must also determine how to replace it with something infinitely fairer. Your knowledge and understanding of history are quite surprising, Raven. But doesn’t the Thunder itself give you hope? Here the children of wildly differing races play together as friends, and their parents fight and die alongside and for one another.”
“My business has always been human behavior. You can’t be a field agent without knowin’ a lot more than just how to point and shoot a gun or bow. But the Thunder’s different and you know it. These folks—they ain’t aliens. They’re space children, even the old folks. Their parents were freebooters, the best liars and cheats and thieves in the universe and already alienated from their own homes as much as we are from ours. The rest started off as our own people, and we still think of them that way and they think of themselves that way. So the Chows look like humanoid cows. You think they’re among their own people on Janipur? We’re their people. But you stick ’em anyplace but Janipur or space and you got monsters. You’re the historian. Am I wrong?”
“No. If anything, you are overly optimistic. History is filled with examples of times when people hated all who were different from them even if the differences were quite minor. Our own people were reduced from proud civilizations to helpless prisoners on the worst of our own lands, begging our conquerors for food. We were childlike, primitives, ones who could not accept technology and so had to perish. Accept technology! Before the Spaniards none of the nations of America had so much as seen a horse, let alone a gun. We learned. We took what was useful and valuable. We rejected the rest because it had little value to us. Their values were different from ours, their goals, their cultures, were directed toward things we found dehumanizing. In the end, their worship of mind, property, nation, and invention for its own sake, stripped of any moral valuations, led them to terrible wars and to Master System. I have often reflected on the irony that some of those now attempting an end to that result are of the very people they so scorned and nearly destroyed.”
Raven’s head suddenly turned and he looked directly into Hawks’s eyes. “Are we? Are we, really? Oh, we got the right bloodlines, but we ain’t no damn men of spirit and tribe. You’re a damn computer hacker and researcher into lost records who works in a sophisticated high-tech environment where the air is filtered and measured and you can be practically brought back from the dead. Me? I’m a high-tech security man from the same element. I spent much of my time in the wilds, with the tribes, it’s true, but I wasn’t one of ’em, not even among the Crow. I was a smug, superior, patronizing son of a bitch down there where I was king and the people were blind. Your precious Hyiakutts weren’t your people, they were some charming living history exhibit. A way you could go back and study like Clayben with some new alien bug under his microscope. Funny thing was, you was playin’ Injun among the primitives and me, I was playin’ the white man.”
“So? We are not what we like to think we are. It disturbs me. It disturbs me more to hear you voice it because it is so much the truth. But what would you have us do? Not turn it off?”
Raven sighed. “I don’t know, Chief, but I got a real weird feelin’—I always kind’a had it—that even after the switch is off, it’s up to us. We can turn it off and run and hope we’ll be long dead before whatever wars and new tyranny that follow its death find us, or we can fall into a trap that’s maybe infinitely worse.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“You ever really read all that journal?”
“No, and neither did you. It is decomposing someplace in the middle of the Mississippi River.”
“Come on, Chief. You got the transport copy Warlock’s boss tried to send to Chen. When I decided to take this mission I read the one Warlock had, the one we eventually delivered to Chen along with you. I read all of it, Hawks. All of it. Them rings—they don’t turn Master System off. They revert control to the master consoles. In other words, Master System stops bein’ a run-amok, independent machine and becomes just a computer again. It don’t stop bein’ the master system. It just stops bein’ the boss. Whoever’s at the consoles, whoever’s got the rings—they become the boss. That’s why Chen’s so hot for this—if that slimy rat is still even alive. No matter. Whoever his successor is will be the same guy only lookin’ and talkin’ a bit different. That’s why Clayben’s been such a good, solid, devoted servant all this time, too. He knows. You stick in the rings, you unlock the master control center, and you go in. Then you’re it. You’re God. You’re Master System. You call the shots and good old MS and its minions obey. Of course, originally it just allowed control to return for defense purposes, but Master System has grown into a big boy after all this time. And it’s all yours—whoever uses the rings.”