Seventeen had an explanation. “The command came with extraordinary force. It was as if it had been done on a specific grid square with the big amp. It was instant, the intensity flagged it as a maintenance emergency, and the adjustment was made.”
“But why a permanent program? Why not a transitory adjustment?”
“It was directed as a permanent program with far too much force and power to be anything else. It is logged as a direct lawful interfaced command via a 7240 master maintenance computer and 725 remote unit.”
That was like a landscape program! “But—how?”
“Perhaps if you give me the exact circumstances. Better yet, put both her, then him, on the interface here and let me read it out.”
He did so. Mary by now was almost feeling sorry for the guy, and Haldayne was desperate.
“The two incidents vary tremendously in interpretation but agree in basic details,” Seventeen told Haller when it was done. “Her animal brain overrode reason. It was sheer fury at him, and it had been building until she could no longer contain it. It was an unthinking, blind, emotional response to a situation that was to her mind intolerable. This is fascinating.”
“Fascinating, yes—but can you undo it?”
“Not exactly. The situation is quite complex.”
“What do you mean by ‘not exactly’?”
“Well, I can’t undo the program from the grid, and I can’t undo it from the tubes, although I could add to it. Change him further. Make him female, for example. Or reorient his brain chemistry and make him gay. He would be a big hit like he is in certain segments of that population.”
“You mean there’s no way to put him back the way he was?”
“Not without redoing the master program of the local 7240 maintenance computer, and that would cause havoc for the time it was down. I do think I see one way around it.”
“Yes?”
“Kill him.”
“What!”
“Yes. Kill him in a lab environment in Anchor. Then he would be removed from master maintenance. At that point I could use his pattern from Eleven that he used to make himself into what he was and bring him back. Of course, he’d lose his memory of the last three years, but it’s possible.”
Haldayne, it turned out, had no more desire to be a woman than to have a woman’s breasts, nor did the sexual preference turn interest him. The idea of being killed and an earlier version revived appalled him the most. He was convinced that it wouldn’t be him but some new creation that just thought it was him. In the end, he went up to administration to work in the labs at finding a different solution and failed, but he discovered a number of women who worked there seemed fascinated by him. Although the locals shunned him as a freak, he discovered that he had some different appeal to some women from what he’d had, but it wasn’t a fatal handicap. In fact, he eventually returned with a short, plump, yet pleasant and attractive woman named Jean and married her.
There were other physical mishaps, but they were all transitory and rather easily corrected. The emotion factor drew much attention, since it explained some of the successes of the rather primitive and untrained wild ones out there living in the void. Out there, they had faced, and been distorted by, their own inner demons, their own fears and frustrations and neuroses and psychoses, but this irrationality gave them great power. The more raw emotion they maintained, the stronger they were against a victim or one another. The more animalistic they became, the more dangerous they became. Many were weakly interfaced to the grid, and could throw mere illusions at the intended victim, but those illusions were frighteningly real to others who saw them and in many cases were as good as the real thing.
All of the Sensitives in the project were carefully monitored by the most skilled psychologists, and the computer was told to flag certain things, but the process did change people, and not always for the better.
Toby and Mickey, however, remained strong and full of control but not essentially changed by the power they were still developing.
“Let’s take a walk,” Mickey suggested one afternoon.
“O.K.,” he agreed. “Where to?”
“In the void.”
He was a little surprised. They really didn’t go in unless they were practicing or researching, but neither feared it or anything it might contain. They held hands, walked in, and were soon enveloped in the pinkish blinking fog and its silence.
“You may think I’m crazy,” she said, “but I’m actually beginning to like it out here more than back there. Nothing personal—it’s your Anchor—but out here there’s just peace and quiet and the feeling that nobody’s staring down at you. I’m beginning to think like a Pathfinder.”
He laughed. “No, I know what you mean. I feel it myself. If I have to choose between Seventeen and Security, I’ll take Seventeen.”
“Toby—I think we have to talk. About us.”
“Yes?” He felt a gnawing fear in the pit of his stomach. She had come to mean just about everything to him, and he was always afraid he would lose her one day. He knew the most intimate details of her life, but, deep down, there was something there that was as unfathomable as the psyche of Seventeen.
“Most of my life here I’ve been insecure as hell. No roots, no foundation. A stranger in somebody else’s really interesting fantasy. I know I’ve been a little crazy to be around, but there are some things I never told you.”
They sat down on the spongy artificial surface of the void. “Go ahead. You should know me by now.”
She nodded. “I think I do. At least, I hope so. First of all, I’m older than you think.”
“So am I, Grandma. Around here, what’s the difference if you’re seventy? You’ve lived maybe a seventh of your life.”
“I know. It makes a difference only because, well, I was married before. Twice, in fact.”
That startled him. And he thought he knew her! “Go on.”
“The first time was back on Earth. I was twenty, he was nineteen. He was a real charmer, a real dream, and fantastic in bed. He went to university—pre-med, then med school— and I took odd jobs to support us and kept house. The pressure got enormous. He wanted a wife who wasn’t as smart as he was, and he was fairly bright but nothing fantastic. I found myself living a lie, pretending I needed help with the checkbook when you know I had it constantly balanced, pretending not to be interested in crossword puzzles and computers. I really wanted it to work; I was willing to sacrifice myself to make it work, but I got so bored and I couldn’t really hide it for long and it enraged him every time it showed. He also couldn’t take the pressure of med school, and the more frustrated he got, the nastier he got with me. I was the only one he could take it out on, and he did.”
“He beat you?”
She nodded. “Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore. One really violent night, without even thinking, I picked up a heavy piece of driftwood we had for decoration and when he turned I cracked his skull with it.”
There wasn’t much to say to that.
“The bastard pressed charges when he got out of the hospital! I got a public defender, we drew a judge who was married to a bank president and wasn’t at all sympathetic to Roy’s views, and I got off with probation and a quick divorce. I heard he flunked out of med school, but I never saw him again. Then I enrolled myself, got a better set of jobs, and worked my own way through. Math was a breeze, and I got full scholarship offers from all over the place, and job offers up the ass after the Ph.D. I took the Kagan job you know about, wound up on Titan, where I met and married a physicist.
“He was a kind guy, totally unlike Roy, and so brilliant in Flux universe physics that he left me behind. Eventually, he had to do that literally, though, going up to establish the primary Borelli Point. He wasn’t the chief, but he was the operations director. I stayed behind on Titan with my job. A month later they came and told me he’d been killed. An accident. A really stupid, one-in-a million accident. Out there, revolving around a Borelli Point, with all the high-tech in the universe and no enemies, he slipped on some soap in a shower and broke his neck. We’d been married less than a year when he left.”
Toby Haller sighed. “I think I see. And you were man-shy ever since.”
“Yeah, well, it was one of those things. Couldn’t live with ’em, couldn’t live without ’em, but I was scared, Toby. One really wrong one, then another snatched away. So I used the mains here eventually to give me a whole new look and I slummed. I got what I wanted, but not what I needed, but even though I met some really wonderful guys I just never could bring myself to go again.”
He put his arm around her. “I understand.”
“Toby—I’m scared to death, but I think I’m ready to go again. If you are.”
He laughed and kissed and hugged her, and they both cried and laughed in turn, and it turned into more than that. Much more, but without much thought, just raw emotion.
The commands were sent, received, interpreted, formed, matrixed, and returned. Because they were so close, the programs were combined and linked.
I will love you and cherish you and keep you forever. Together we are one, till death do us part. We will love, honor, and obey one another, and no man or woman or computer program shall alter this. The love that we feel now will bind us together and not fade so long as we both shall live. Our souls and hearts and minds are as one, and we will think of the other before ourselves in all things. You are my one, my only love; my passion and devotion will never cool, and you are the standard by which all others are measured.
When they had finished, several other things had happened. Each of them had changed, although it would take the project to point this out to them. Both were physiologically young—he perhaps twenty, she perhaps eighteen. Both still looked much as they had looked before, allowing for age, but all blemishes, all imperfections, were gone. Her skin was smooth, her figure perfect, just the way he had idealized her. He was strong, and large, and had a sexual organ of singular size that fit her perfectly, and he was the idealized Toby of her own fantasies. Every day was a newlywed day, and their passion was enormous for each other and unabashed. They seemed almost to know each other’s conscious thoughts, even when not directly with the other, although he still couldn’t do math at her speed or level.
It wasn’t for another couple of months, though, that they found out she was pregnant.
13
AND ALONG CAME A SPIDER. . .
The redoubtable Chief Shindler informed Rembrandt van Haas that the admiral was at his home playing with his choo-choo.
Cockburn was always the all-business sort of military administrator, the sort that lived his job and took his responsibilities quite seriously, not just as an occupation but as a life style. Still, he had one quirk, one that caused a great deal of debate and emotion when he revealed that he had digitized the thing and had it shipped to New Eden.
He was an admiral without oceans or spaceships, but Admiral Sir Thomas Cockburn had his toy train.
It wasn’t merely a toy train, either, but a handcrafted reproduction to exact scale of an early twentieth-century steam locomotive. It was big enough for the admiral to ride on, sitting on a padded seat atop the cab, and it really was a steam locomotive requiring wood and water. Its track ran for almost two kilometers through a forest north of headquarters, starting and ending near the front of his spacious home, a large house that looked almost Victorian in design but was modern inside to a fault. Van Haas waited near the “station” there for the admiral to come around again.
Cockburn was always in high spirits when driving his train, and he greeted the director warmly with a smile and a handshake. “Want a ride?”
“No thanks. I’m afraid I’m here on business.”
The admiral signaled for aides to take over and service the train and with van Haas he walked up to the front porch. Another aide brought the admiral his rum and tonic and van Haas a stein of lager beer. The beer was quite good; it wasn’t synthesized from programs but was actually a product of Anchor Charley.
“Tom, you know the routine by now,” the director began. “Security was supposed to keep very close tabs on Watanabe, not climb in bed with her. I want to know just what the hell Coydt’s up to.”
The admiral sighed. “You know the trouble with Watanabe, Van. You wanted her genius intact, so we didn’t dare do anything but standard psychiatric treatment after Coydt brought her back, and we were pressed for time. That meant she was still nutty as a squirrel but nutty in directions that were useful to us. Still, I’m a bit surprised at your comment. She never has liked the military, and she still hates Coydt’s guts as far as I can tell.”