The neighborhood of the brainship collapsed inward on itself, spiraling down tornado-like to the Singularity point where Central Worlds subspace could momentarily be defined as intersecting Vega subspace. The ship's metachip-augmented parallel processors solved and optimized the set of equations represented in a thousand-square matrix of subspace points, dropped out of that subspace into Decomposition, rode the collapsing funnel of spaces with a new optimization problem to choose and resolve every tenth of a second. To Nancia, Singularity was how she envisioned the ancient Earth sport called "surfing"; balanced at the non-degrading point where decomposing subspaces met, she recognized and evaluated local paths so quickly that the massive optimization problems blurred together into a sense of skimming over a wave that was always just about to crash beneath her.
The Singularity field test she'd taken at the Academy had been simpler than this. There, she'd had to deal with only one set of parallel equations; here, the sequence of equations and diminishing subspaces streamed past her in an incessant flow. It was challenge, danger, joy: it was what she had been trained for. She swept over matrices of data and guided them to the ship's processors, choosing and resolving the ever-changing paths to Singularity with an athlete's single-minded concentration.
The same newsbeam that showed Nancia the sport of "surfing" had also had a section on a diving competition. The clean lines of the divers' movements, the seconds during which they hurtled through the air as though they could give their bodies the lift and freedom of brainships, fascinated Nancia; she'd viewed the beam over a dozen times, marveling at what softpersons would go through for a few seconds of physical freedom. "Didja see how he ripped that dive!" the newsbyter had jabbered after one athlete's performance, then explaining that the term referred to the clean way the diver had entered the water without a single splash.
Nancia ripped a perfect dive through Singularity and came out into Vega subspace.
For her passengers, with nothing to do during Singularity and no way to filter the barrage of sensory data, the transition was markedly less pleasant. The few seconds of decomposition and reformation seemed like hours of wading through air gone viscous, picking their way among shapes distorted out of all recognition, in a place where colors hummed on the air and light bent around corners.
They gasped with relief when the ship broke through into normal space again.
Nancia watched them staggering and rubbing their eyes and ears. She was rather surprised by the intensity of their reactions; the trainer who'd accompanied her through her Singularity test had not seemed to be bothered by the few seconds of sensory distortion. Perhaps practice made a difference to how softpersons took Decomposition. Polyon's first words after the return to normal space suggested this might be the case.
"Well, mes enfants," said Polyon, "how did you like your first Decomposition? It's been so long since my first training flights that I've forgotten how it affects newcomers."
"Once is enough," said Darnell with feeling. "If I ever go home again, I'll take the six months of travel by FTL. Or better yet, I'll walk."
Fassa nodded vigorous agreement, then winced as if she wished she hadn't moved her head so soon.
"Have a Blissto," Alpha offered. "Works on hangovers—ought to help with Singularity headaches too."
Darnell snatched the small blue pills out of her hand and downed six of them in a single desperate gulp. Fassa started to shake her head and then obviously thought better of it. She waved Alpha's hand away with a languid gesture. "Never touch drugs."
"More fool you," said Alpha. "I know more about side effects than any of you, and I promise you a few blues won't do any harm. Just wish I'd thought of it before we entered Singularity. Blaize?"
"Excellent idea," Blaize said hollowly, accepting the offered pills. Unlike Darnell, he made his way to the far side of the cabin and found a half-empty bottle of Stemerald to help him choke down the pills. "Almost as good an idea as walking. Don't think I ever really appreciated Earth before." His skin was pale green under the spattering of freckles.
Polyon chuckled. "May have been a blessing in disguise that you weren't allowed to go in for brawn training, little one. Apparently you haven't the stomach for it. Now when you imagine combining frequent Decom hops with Mil Spec meals of boiled synthoprot and anonymous vitacaps that all smell like cabbage—"
Fassa clapped a hand over her mouth and ran for the door. Darnell swallowed convulsively two or three times. "Would you mind very much not mentioning food just now?" His last words were slurred and relaxed; the Blissto was already taking effect.
"At least not till I've had my own blues," Alpha added, pouring a handful of the shiny blue pills down her throat.
Fassa didn't quite make it to the privacy of her cabin. Silently, Nancia extruded probes that captured and vaporized the resulting mess. She activated the release latch on Fassa's cabin door so that it irised open in front of the girl.
"T-thank you," Fassa hiccuped into the wet cloth Nancia's second probe held out. "I mean—I know you're just a droneship, so this is silly, but—oh, thank you anyway." She collapsed on her bunk, a huddle of misery. Nancia closed down the cabin sensors, transmitted a shut command to the door iris, and left Fassa to recover on her own. At least, she thought, the girl had the strength of character to abstain from mind-rotting drugs. And the manners to thank whoever helped her, even a supposedly inanimate droneship. Her stated intention of using sex to get concessions for her company was appalling, as were her manners in general; but maybe she was a shade less repellent than the rest of Nancia's young passengers.
They had completely ignored Fassa's distress, Nancia noted. Polyon was playing a solitaire round of SPACED OUT and the other three were giggling over a new bottle of Stemerald. Nancia wondered uneasily what the mix of stimulants and depressants was likely to do to a softperson's nervous system—and what else Alpha might have smuggled aboard. Maybe it had been a mistake to turn off the cabin sensors; these people didn't deserve privacy.
But then, what business was it of hers if they wanted to drug themselves into a stupor? They'd be much nicer that way, after all. Nancia herself could conceive of nothing more horrible than voluntarily scrambling one's synapses, but softpersons did, by all reports, have very strange tastes.
Besides, they were much easier to put up with now that they were too doped to do anything but giggle softly and spill their Stemerald. Nancia's housekeeping probes mopped up the green puddles on the cabin floor; her passengers ignored the probes and their cleanup activity, and she, as far as possible, ignored the passengers.
Because now, at last, there was somebody else to talk to.
Within seconds of her emergence from Singularity, Nancia had initiated a tightbeam contact with Vega Base. By the time Fassa was cleaned up in her cabin and the other passengers busy with their own peculiar amusements, she had gone through the recognition Sequences and the official messages and was happily chatting with Simeon, the managing brain of Vega Base.
"So how did you like your first voyage?" Simeon inquired.
"Singularity was . . ." Nancia couldn't find words for it; instead she transmitted a short visual burst of colors melting and expanding like soap bubbles, iridescent trails of light joyously spiraling around one another. "I can't wait to jump again."
Simeon chuckled. "You're one of the lucky ones, then. From all I hear, it doesn't take everyone that way."
"My passengers didn't seem to enjoy it much," Nancia conceded, "but who cares?"
"Even brainships don't always get such a kick out of Singularity," Simeon told her.
Nancia found that hard to believe, but she remembered that Simeon was a stationary brain. Embedded in the heart of Vega Base, his only experience of travel would have been the jump that brought him here from Laboratory Schools—as a passenger, like any softperson. Perhaps she shouldn't go on about the joys of Singularity to someone who could never experience the thrill of managing his own jumps.
Besides, Simeon wanted to pursue something else.
"You don't seem to care much for your passengers' comfort."
Again words failed Nancia. She damped the colors of her visual burst to a muddy swirl of greenish browns and grays. "They're not . . . very nice people," she finally answered. "Some of the things I overheard them discussing on the trip . . . Simeon, could I ask you a hypothetical question? Suppose a brainship happened to learn that some people had unethical plans. Should she report them?"
"You mean, like a plot to murder somebody? Or high treason—an attempt to overthrow Central?"
"Oh, goodness, no, nothing like that!" How could Simeon sound so calm while discussing such dreadful things? "At least, I don't think—I mean, suppose they weren't planning to hurt anybody, but what they meant to do was morally wrong? Even illegal?" Alpha's plans to profit from a drug that should have been credited to Central Meds, Polyon's idea of creating a black market in metachips—no, Nancia assured herself, her passengers were nasty and corrupt as all get-out, but at least they weren't violent.
"Hmm. And how might this brainship have found out about her passengers' plans?"
"I—they thought she was a droneship," Nancia said, "and they discussed everything quite freely. She has datacordings of it all, too."
"I see." Simeon sounded quite disapproving, and for a moment Nancia thought he shared her shock at her passengers' plans. "And has it occurred to you, young XN-935, that masquerading as a droneship in order to eavesdrop on High Families' conversations is a form of entrapment? In fact, given that the passengers involved are High Families and very close to CenCom, the act of taking surreptitious datacordings could even be interpreted as treason. What if they'd been discussing vital military secrets?"
"But they weren't—I didn't—Listen, VS-895, they're the criminals, not me!" Nancia shouted.
"Ouch."
Simeon's reply was almost an electronic whisper.
"Turn down your waveforms, would you? That nearly jolted me out of my shell."
"Sorry." Nancia controlled her impulses and channeled a clean, tight beam at Simeon. "But I don't see what you're accusing me of."
"Me? Nothing, XN, I assure you. I'm just trying to warn you that the courts may see things rather differently. Now, I don't know what your young passengers have been up to, and I don't particularly care to know. You haven't seen much of the world yet, or you'd realize that most softpersons have some way or other to get a little extra out of every situation in which they find themselves."
Nancia mulled that over. "You mean—are they all corrupt, then?"
Simeon chuckled. "Not all, Nancia, just enough to make it interesting. You have to understand the poor things. Short lifespan, limited to five senses, single-channel comm system. I expect they feel cheated when they compare themselves with us. And some of them translate that feeling into trying to get extra goodies for themselves."
Nancia had to agree that what Simeon said made a lot of sense. She tried to emulate his attitude of lofty detachment while she went about the business of landing her passengers at their assigned stations in the Nyota ya Jaha system. Since four of them still thought her a droneship and the fifth knew she wasn't speaking to him, it was easy enough to remain aloof.
Nancia made each planetary landfall an exercise in split-second timing and perfect orbit-matching. It was good practice, it kept her concentrating on her own business and not on that of her passengers, and if the rapid maneuvers involved gave them a bumpy ride—well, so much the worse. She took pride in making the actual moments of touchdown as gentle as the landing of a feather. At least, Bahati and Shemali went that way. When she reached Angalia, she couldn't quite restrain her impulse to give Blaize a good shaking on the way down. He was pale and sweating by the time they came to a bumpy halt on the mesa that served as Angalia's spacefield.
"That," he said as he collected his baggage, "was not necessary."
Nancia preserved an icy silence—literally. Each moment that Blaize delayed, she lowered her internal temperature by several degrees.
"You could at least send a housekeeping probe to help me with all this stuff," he complained, gripping a box of novelhedra with fingers that were rapidly turning blue with cold.
"You're not my mother, you know," he said while leaning on the button to the lift. "Nobody asked you to pass judgment on my moral standards. Just like nobody asked me if I wanted to come out to this godforsaken place."
"I guess it would be too much to expect anybody to have a little sympathy," he said as the lift sped downward.
Nancia tilted the hatchway floor so that Blaize's carefully stacked boxes of supplies tumbled out as soon as he stepped onto the surface of Angalia.
"I know what you're thinking," he shouted from the red dust of the mesa top, "but you're wrong about me! You're all wrong! I'll show you!"
Nancia was pleased that her assignment made no mention of collecting the previous PTA administrator, the one whom Blaize had been sent to relieve. Apparently, not being a member of the High Families, he was expected to wait for the regularly scheduled PTA transport rather than taking advantage of a brainship for the Courier Service. Hard on him, Nancia thought, but quite appropriate. She would proceed directly to Vega 3.3, collect this stranded brawn, and return to Central for a real assignment—with a brawn of her own choosing. Thank goodness she was through being used as a substitute droneship for the convenience of the rich and powerful!
She discovered her error when she was halfway from Nyota ya Jaha to Vega 3.
"What do you mean, another little errand?" she blasted poor Simeon.
"Turn it down," came Simeon's low-intensity reminder. "It wasn't my idea and you don't have to shout like that. Anyway, what difference does it make? You were going to Vega 3 anyway."
"I was going to 3.3, not 4.2," Nancia pointed out, and this reminded her of another grievance. "Why can't these people give their suns and planets real names, anyway? This Vega numbering system makes me feel like a machine."
"They're great believers in efficiency," Simeon said. "And logic. You'll see what I mean when you pair up with Caleb."
"Hmph. You mean, when I transport the man—for that's all I've agreed to. Efficiency!" Nancia grumbled. "That's a new word for misuse of the Courier Service. Why, it's a whole different solar system and an extra stop to pick up this governor Thrixtopple and his family, not to mention having to feed them all the way back to Central. Time and fuel and ship's stores wasted. My fuel belongs to the Courier Service," she said, "and so does my time."
"What about your soul?" inquired Simeon, returning to a normal-intensity beam. "Oh, never mind. I keep forgetting how new you are, XN. Wait till you've been around the subspaces a few hundred years. You'll start understanding how the rules have to be bent to accommodate people."
"You mean, to accommodate softpersons," Nancia corrected proudly. "I've never asked for an exception or a favor in my life, and I'm not about to start now."
Simeon's responding burst of discordant waves and clashing colors was the electronic equivalent of an extremely rude word. "I can see why Psych thought you and Caleb would be a good match," he said. Infuriatingly, he shut down transmissions on that comment, leaving Nancia to wonder all the way to Vega 3.3. Why did Psych see fit to match her with a brawn whose major accomplishment so far had been the loss of his first brainship? Was there something wrong in her profile, some instability that made it appropriate to assign her an incompetent brawn? This Caleb softperson was probably going to be stuck doing interplanetary hops and minor errands—like picking up Governor Thrixtopple—for the rest of his Service. And Central Psych wanted to stick her with him and his flawed record! It wasn't fair. Nancia brooded about it all the way to Vega 3.3.
Her first sight of Caleb did nothing to restore her confidence in this assignment. Courier Service records said that he was only twenty-eight—young for a softperson—but he walked slowly and carefully, as if he were already old and tired. His Service uniform looked as if it had been designed for a larger man; the tunic hung loosely from broad but bony shoulders, the trousers flapped about his shins. Short, scrawny and sour-faced, Nancia mentally catalogued as he made his halting way up the stairs. And why couldn't he use the lift, if he's too out of shape to walk up one flight of stairs?
His greeting to her was correct but lifeless. Nancia responded in the same tone. Listlessly, they went through the Service formulas until Nancia displayed the orders beamed from Vega Base.
Caleb exploded. "Detouring to pick up that lard-bottomed junketer and his family? That's not a Courier Service job. Why can't Thrixtopple wait for the next scheduled passenger transport like anyone else?"
Nancia sent a ripple of muddy brown rings across the screen where their orders were displayed. "Nobody told me anything," she responded verbally for Caleb's benefit. "Stop here, go there, take these kids to the Nyota system, collect a stranded brawn on Vega 3.3, pick up the governor of 4.2 and take him back to Central. I don't know why he rates a special deal; he's not even High Families."
"No, but he's been working this subspace for a long time," Caleb told her. "Probably has more pull than half a dozen empty-headed aristos with their double-barreled names."
"We are not all," Nancia said, "empty-headed. Perhaps you failed to read your orders in detail?" She flashed her full name on the screen to get his attention.
"Oh, well, you can't help your birth," Caleb said absent-mindedly, "and I suppose a good Lab Schools training will make up for a lot. Are you ready for liftoff? We can't waste time gossiping if we have to fit this extra stop into the itinerary."
I give him ten minutes after we reach Central to get himself and his bags off me and make room for a brawn with some manners, Nancia vowed to herself as she drove her engines through a harder and faster takeoff than she would normally have imposed on a softperson passenger. No, that's too generous. Five minutes.
She felt slightly regretful when she peeked through Caleb's cabin sensors and saw him struggling to sit up after the takeoff, white and shaken. But she wasn't sorry enough to change her basic position on brawn assignments.
"There's one thing we should have settled before liftoff," she announced without preamble.
"Yes?" Caleb didn't bother turning his head to look at the cabin speaker. Of course, he was an experienced—if incompetent—brawn; he would know that she would be able to pick up his words from any direction. Still, Nancia felt vaguely ruffled—as if she were being ignored even as he replied to her.
"Transporting you back to Central Worlds is my official assignment, and I cannot refuse it. But I do not wish you to construe this as formal acceptance of you as my brawn. I have no intention of waiving my rights to free choice of my own brawn just because this match is convenient for Central."
Now what ailed the man? He had just begun to regain some color after the high-G lift-off; now his face was drained again, still as a mask—or a corpse. Nancia began to wonder if this brawn would live to see Central. If he wasn't fit enough to make the journey, somebody should have warned me.
"Of course," said Caleb in a voice so level and drained of meaning that it could have issued from any housekeeping drone, "no one would expect you to waive that right. Particularly for me." He turned his head and for the first time looked directly at the sensor. "Shut down sensors to this cabin, please, XN. I wish to rest. In privacy," he emphasized. He lay down again with one arm flung over his face. After a moment he rolled over and lay facedown on the bunk, as if he didn't trust Nancia not to peek at him.
"Simeon? Shellcrack, Simeon, I know you're picking up my beams. TALK TO ME!"
"You're an excessively demanding young thing, XN-935, and you're shouting again."
"Sorry." Nancia was so glad to have got some response from the Vega Base brain that she immediately lowered the intensity of her beam to match Simeon's almost inaudible burst. "Simeon, I need to know about this brawn they've saddled me with."
"So scan the newsbeam files."
"I did. There's nothing in them. Not what I need to know, anyway." The files had been enlightening in their own way, with their lurid stories of a ship and a man almost destroyed by a sudden radiation burst, the brawn's limping, months-long journey homeward in his crippled, brainless ship and the hero's welcome he had received when he arrived at Vega 3.3 with the survey data he'd been sent to gather. The tale of what Caleb had gone through, the months of solitude and deprivation and the lingering effects of radiation poisoning, had done much to reshape Nancia's feelings towards the pallid brawn who'd boarded her on Vega 3.3. She felt a grudging respect for the man she saw spending hours in her exercise facility, working out with gyroweights and spring resistors to restore wasted muscles.
The man who had accepted her initial hostile attitude as no more than his due, who'd shut her out of his mind at once and had not spoken a word to her since. They had traveled in silence through the three days it took to move between the suns of Vega 3 and Vega 4, while Nancia waited impatiently for Simeon to resume communications so that she could ask what she wanted to know. Finally she'd begun battering at the Vega Base brain's frequencies with ever-increasing bursts of communication that must have given him the equivalent of a softperson's "headache."
Nancia condensed the newsbytes she'd read and transmitted them in three short bursts to Simeon, just to convince him she'd done her homework.
"So what else do you want to know?"
"How. Did. He. Lose. His. Ship?" Nancia punctuated each word with a burst of irritated static.
"You read the newsbytes."
"WE'RE SHIELDED AGAINST—sorry." She started over at normal intensity. "We're shielded against radiation. He shouldn't have been harmed, unless he was being careless—leaving the ship without checking radiation levels? And there's no way his ship could have been affected. What could have got through her column?"
"His column, in this case," Simeon corrected, as if that mattered.
Unless Caleb used the access code to open his brainship's shell. That was the nightmare, that was what she wanted reassurance about. No brawn was supposed to know both the syllables and the musical tones that comprised his brainship's access codes. One sequence was given to the brawn on assignment, the other deeply classified in CenCom's codes. But Polyon's casual dabbling in the Net had left Nancia deeply suspicious of computer security systems. Any code invented could be broken . . . and how else could the CL-740 have been lost to something as minor as a radiation burst?
"Nothing did get through the column," Simeon told her. "The CL-740 was one of the first Courier Service ships commissioned, though. Three hundred years ago they didn't know as much as we do about shielding the synapse connectors. The radiation burst they were subjected to wasn't enough to harm the major ship's systems, but it fried the connections to the shell, leaving CL-740 in total isolation—unable to communicate or to receive signals, completely unable to control the ship. Caleb brought the ship back on manual controls, but by the time they got to Vega the CL-740 had gone mad from sensory deprivation."
"But the Helva System—" Nancia protested. It had been a long, long time since any brainship had been subjected to sensory deprivation; shell-internal metachips, named for the legendary brainship who'd survived the ordeal and suggested the modification, should have been invulnerable to any outside interference.
"The Helva modifications are not universal, though God knows they should be." Simeon sounded very tired. "It's a traumatizing procedure for those of us who aren't lucky enough to have it built into our first design, young'un. Some of the older brainships, those who'd paid off and continued in the Courier Service as free agents, had a right to refuse retrofitting. CL . . . exercised that right."
"Oh." It was a brain's worst nightmare, that being cut off from the world with a thoroughness no softperson could even imagine. Nancia closed down all her sensors for a moment, imagining that absolute blackness. How long would she be able to bear it? No wonder her supervisor at Lab Schools had canceled the first newsbyte about the CL-740. No wonder the newsbyte files made available to her now had been censored. No one wanted a brainship to start thinking about the worst that could happen. Nancia didn't want to think about it any longer. With an internal shudder she threw open all her sensors and comm channels at once.
The minor clatter of everyday life was a warm, reassuring tide about her, connecting her with the rest of humanity, the rest of all sentient life. Nancia catalogued the details with surprise and gratitude. How strange and wonderful all this is . . . to see, hear, feel, think, know . . . and I have been taking it all for granted! For a moment, the smallest input was precious to her, a gift of life. Caleb was hanging between two spring-resistors in the gym, the display screens in the central cabin were dancing with their elegant geometric screensaver patterns, the stars outside burned with their distant fire, Vega 4 was a ruddy glow before her, someone was chattering between Vega 4.3 and 4.2 about Central synthsilk fashions. Someone else was crying into a satellite link. . . .
And Simeon was still talking. "Levin." The databits transmitted like a whisper. "His name wasn't CL-740. His name was Levin, and he was my friend."
At Vega 4.2, Governor Thrixtopple and his family spilled aboard Nancia like a pack of cruise passengers, dropping their luggage anywhere for the patient servants who followed to pick up, commenting loudly on any feature of Nancia's interior that caught their attention.
"Hey! Look at these display screens!" The youngest Thrixtopple, a weasel-faced brat in his early teens, lit up on sight of the three wall-size display screens in the central cabin. "Sis, where's my SPACED OUT hedron? I could play all the way home—"
"I don't have to keep track of where you drop all your junk," his older sister whined. "Mama, there's only one storage bin in my cabin. My Antarxian ruffs will get all wrinkled!"
"Who cares? They still won't make any difference to your ugly face!" Thrixtopple Junior stuck out his tongue at his sister. She hurled a globe of something pink and slushy at him; he ducked out of the way and Caleb caught the globe in a neat one-handed catch.
"Now, kiddies," Thrixtopple Senior mumbled, "mustn't upset your mother or the servants." He held out one skinny hand to receive the pink globe his daughter had thrown; glance and gesture included Caleb among those "servants." Nancia bristled. He might not be her official brawn, she might still have her reservations about the way Psych was trying to throw the two of them together for the convenience of CenCom, but Caleb was still a trained brawn and deserving of more respect than that!
"Governor Thrixtopple, I'm afraid I will have to ask all of you to enter your personal cabins and strap down for lift-off now," Caleb said tonelessly.
"Already? Why, these clumsy servants haven't begun to unpack for me yet! I'm not nearly ready to send them away!" Trixia Thrixtopple complained without a word of gratitude or farewell to the servants who had, presumably, waited on her through the twenty years of Governor Thrixtopple's service. It was clear where her daughter had learned that penetrating whine.
"My apologies, ma'am," Caleb said, still without any inflection that they could react to, "but I am bound by regulations. Section 4, subsection 4.5, paragraphs ii to iv. Courier Service ships are not permitted to dally for any reason; a prolonged stop here could upset urgently needed communications elsewhere."
He personally escorted the Thrixtopple family to their bunks and made sure each of them was secured against the high-grav stresses of lift-off. Nancia kept the cabin sensors open to double-check every move, but Caleb made no mistakes.
Once the passengers were strapped down and their luggage stowed, Caleb returned to the central cabin and waved one hand towards the door. "Would you close us off, please, XN?" He sighed with exaggerated relief. "If only we could keep them out of here for the entire flight. People like that are a disgrace to Vega. Why, they didn't even have the manners to greet you!"
"Neither did the passengers I took on the way out," Nancia told him. "I was beginning to feel invisible."
"Not to me," Caleb told her. His eyes scanned the entire cabin with a look of longing that surprised Nancia. "Never to me. . . . If I don't get a new assignment, this could be my last voyage on a brainship. And we had to be saddled with these, these . . ." He threw up his hands as though words failed him.
"It is a pity," Nancia agreed, "but there's no reason we can't be professional about doing our jobs, is there?" While she made conversation with Caleb, she was rapidly reviewing the volumes of Courier Service regulations with which her data banks had been loaded upon commissioning. There should have been something in the third megahedron. . . . Ah, there it was. Precisely what the situation called for. But she wouldn't mention it now. Caleb was eager to escape the surface of Vega 4.2 before the Thrixtopple family started complaining about their restraints, and she couldn't blame him.
In deference to Caleb's weakened condition, Nancia made this lift-off as slow and gentle as she could. After all, it wasn't his fault that Psych Central was practically forcing their personal codes into one datastream. And she didn't want to kill the man on the way home.
When they entered freefall again, Caleb unlatched himself from the support chair and moved about the cabin with none of the languor he'd shown after the previous lift-off. "Being gentle with the civilians?" he inquired. "I seem to recall that you can lift considerably faster than that when you're so inclined, XN."
"I . . . um . . . I didn't see any need to hurry," Nancia muttered. Damn the man! Too stiff-necked to admit that he, too, could benefit from a slightly gentler takeoff!
Caleb looked faintly amused. "No. Considering that now there's no excuse to keep them strapped in, and we'll probably have the brats in our laps until you reach Singularity. . . . I wouldn't have wanted to hurry, either."
As if on cue, the Thrixtopple boy punched through the iris-opening of the door. Nancia winced at the damage to her flexible membranes. She left the door iris open so that Governor Thrixtopple, proceeding down the corridor at a stately pace behind his son, wouldn't inflict further violence on her.
"OK, we're in space now, lemme play with the computer!" the boy demanded.
Nancia slid her datareaders shut as the boy approached and deliberately blanked her screens. "I'm sorry, young sir. Courier Service Regulations, volume XVIII, section 1522, subsection 6.2, paragraph mcmlii, strictly prohibit allowing unauthorized passengers access to the ship's computer or free movement within the central cabin. The prohibition is intended as a protection against illegal interference with Courier Service property."
"Hear now, you—you talking shell, that's not meant to apply to people like us!" Governor Thrixtopple blustered as he entered the cabin.
"The official orders which were transmitted to me by CenCom at the beginning of this voyage make no reference to your family, Governor Thrixtopple," Nancia replied. She paused slightly between words and gave her voice a slight metallic overtone to make the Thrixtopples feel they were talking to a machine that could not be threatened or bribed. "I am not myself authorized to change such orders save on direct beam from Central Command."
"But Vega Base told you to ferry us to Central!"
"And I am always happy to do my good friends at Vega Base a favor," Nancia replied. "Nevertheless, it is not in my power to change regulations. Should Central Command retroactively authorize you to access my computers, I will—retroactively—permit you to have done so. In the meantime, I must request that you return to your personal cabin areas. I should be reluctant to enforce the order, but you must know that I retain the power to flood all life support areas with sleepgas."
Governor Thrixtopple grabbed his son's collar and dragged him out of the central cabin. The iris of the door membrane slid together.
"That," said Caleb reverently, "was brilliant, XN. Positively brilliant. Ah—I suppose there is such a regulation?"
"Of course there is! You don't think I'd lie?"
"My deepest apologies, ma'am. It was only that I had no personal recollection of the paragraph in question—"
"I understand that softperson brains are quite limited in their storage and retrieval powers," Nancia said loftily. Then she relented. "It took me several minutes of scanning to find something applicable, actually. And I never would have thought of it if you hadn't quoted regulations to get them out of here before lift-off."
"If it weren't for meals," Caleb reflected aloud, "we wouldn't have to speak to them again all the way back to Central. . . ."
"I have the capacity to serve meals from any room in the living quarters," Nancia informed him. Unlike the older models . . . She cut that thought off before voicing it. It would be sheer cruelty to remind Caleb of what he had lost.
"Okay, XN, try this one." Caleb manipulated the joyball to bring up a display of a double torus containing two simple closed curves. Three disks labeled A1, B, and A2 contained sections of the torus. "You're in A1; A2 is your target space. Find the Singularity points and compute the decompositions required."
"No fair," Nancia protested. "It's never even been proved that there is a decom sequence that'll navigate that structure. Satyajohi's Conjecture." She quoted from her memory banks, "If h is a homeomorphism of E3 onto itself that is fixed on E3 – T, need one of h(J1), h(j2) contain an arc with four points of A+B such that no two of these points which are adjacent on the arc belong to the same one of A and B? If so, the decomposition space H does not yield E3. And in this application," she reminded Caleb, "E3 is equivalent to normal space."
Caleb blinked twice. "I didn't expect you to know Satyajohi's Conjecture, actually. Still—let me point out, XN, it's only a conjecture, not a theorem."
"In one hundred and twenty-five years of deep-space mathematics it's never been disproved," Nancia grumbled.
"So? Perhaps you'll be the first to find a counterexample."
Nancia didn't think there was much point in even trying, but she set an automatic string-development program to race through the display, illuminating various possible Singularity paths as lines of brilliant blue light, then letting them fade out as the impossibility of one after the other was proved. There was something else on which she very much wanted Caleb's advice, and now—with the Thrixtopple family intimidated into staying in their cabins, and Caleb in as good a mood as she'd ever seen him after his demonstration of Satyajohi's Conjecture—now was the best time she could have to bring it up.
"I haven't been commissioned very long, you know, Caleb," she began.
"No, but you're going to be one of the best," Caleb told her. "I can see it in the way you handle little things. I wouldn't have thought of finding a regulation to get the Thrixtopples out of our hair. And I don't think I'd have tested Satyajohi's Conjecture the way you're going about it right now, either." Two possible Singularity lines flashed bright blue and then vanished from the screen as he spoke, while a third snaked through A1 and into the B disk around the double torus.
"Some things," Nancia said carefully, "get more complicated than that. In mathematics a conjecture either is or isn't true."
"The same is true of Courier Service Regulations," Caleb pointed out.
"Yes, well . . . not everything. They don't tell you what to do if a brainship happens to hear her passengers making illegal plans."
"If you've been eavesdropping on Governor Thrixtopple in his cabin," Caleb said sternly, "that's a dishonorable action and I hereby formally request you to stop it immediately."
"Oh, I haven't," Nancia assured him. "But what if—if a brainship had some passengers who didn't know she was sentient, and they liked to sit in the central cabin and play SPACED OUT, and they just happened to discuss some possibly illegal plans while they were doing it?"
"Oh—a hypothetical case?" Caleb sounded relieved, and Nancia felt the same way. At least he hadn't guessed immediately, as Simeon had, that she was talking about her own previous experience. Everything Nancia had learned or seen of Caleb—the newsbeams of his heroic solo return to Vega, the dedication with which he put himself through a grueling exercise program, his respect for Courier Service regulations—made her think of him as a man of supreme integrity, one whose word she could trust under any circumstances. She would not have wanted to hear him laugh at her as Simeon had done, or suggest—as Simeon had done—that her own actions in this instance had been morally culpable.
"Well, in such a case—if it ever arises—you should remember that a sentient ship is morally obliged to identify herself as such to her passengers at the first opportunity."
"That's not in the regulations," Nancia defended herself against a charge Caleb didn't know he had made.
"No, but it's common sense. Anything else would be like—like me hiding in a closet to catch Governor Thrixtopple counting his ill-gotten gains from bribes while in public office." Caleb said this with so much disgust in his voice that Nancia shrank from pursuing the subject.
So, evidently, did Caleb. He looked up at the central display screen, where a network of dim gray lines showed Nancia's repeated attempts to compute a path of Singularity points through the topological configuration he'd defined.
"Let's just take it that Satyajohi's Conjecture is upheld in this particular case," he suggested, "and now it's your turn to put up a problem. I don't know why we're discussing hypothetical ethical problems that are never likely to arise when we could both be improving our Decom Math skills. Nor do I understand why—" He bit his lip and blanked out the screen with a swift roll of the joyball.
"Why what?" Nancia asked.
"Your turn to pose a problem," Caleb reminded her.
"Not until you finish that sentence."
"All right! I don't understand why you're asking for ethical guidance from a brawn whose greatest achievement to date has been the loss of his first ship!" Caleb bit out the words with a frustrated savagery that aroused Nancia's sympathy. She remembered Simeon's grief for his lost friend Levin, the CL-740. How stupid she had been.
"I'm sorry," she told Caleb. "I should have realized that discussing such issues would remind you of Levin. Do you miss him so very much?"
Caleb sighed. "It's not that, XN. Levin was a good, competent brainship, and he trained me when I was a new brawn, and I'll always owe a debt of gratitude to him. But we weren't—we never just talked, like this, you know? Five years I served with him, and I don't feel I ever really got to know him. No, I'm not in mourning for Levin. But he had a right to look forward to hundreds more years of service, and I lost him that time. And I myself had rather hoped to spend more than five years as a brawn."
"You may yet," Nancia pointed out. "Just because you haven't got a ship assignment yet—"
"And what brainship is going to accept the brawn who let the CL-740 die?" Caleb snapped back. "You yourself have made that little point tolerably clear, XN. Now drop it. Next problem, please!"
Nancia started transmitting to CenCom—on a private beam—the moment she exited Singularity and entered Central Worlds subspace. She wanted to have everything arranged, with no possibility of argument, before Caleb was ready to leave the ship.
All proceeded as planned. Dahlen Rahilly, her Service Supervisor, requested permission to enter even before the Thrixtopple family had gathered their numerous items of luggage and departed.
"Arrogant snit," Rahilly commented as they watched the last of Governor Thrixtopple's bony shoulders through Nancia's ground viewport. "He could at least have credited you with a bonus for doing him the favor of this quick transport home."
"I didn't expect it," Nancia replied with perfect truth. The only bonus she expected—or wanted—was still in his cabin, using the cabin comm board to enter a job application letter that somehow kept getting wiped from his personal file storage area. This was his third attempt, and Nancia could tell by the emphatic way Caleb's voice snapped out the words for the dictaboard that he was losing patience. If she didn't get matters settled soon, he would quit trying to use the ship's comm system and make his application personally, at CenCom offices. And that wouldn't suit her at all.
"Well . . . there will have to be a few changes. Paperwork," Rahilly said. "We . . . weren't expecting this, you know, XN. In fact, VS at Vega seemed quite certain that you had formally refused the assignment."
"He . . . may have misinterpreted my words," Nancia said demurely. "How soon can it be arranged?" Shellcrack! While she was talking to Rahilly, Caleb had managed to dictate the complete text of his application letter. He was getting ready to transmit it to CenCom. That mustn't happen . . . not yet. Nancia shut down all outgoing beams at once.
"Oh, we can finish the paperwork in a day. If you're sure that's what you want?"
"I am," Nancia said firmly. There was another party to be consulted, but Rahilly didn't seem to think that would be necessary.
Caleb stalked into the central cabin, brows drawn together. "XN, what do you mean by shutting down my beam to CenCom?"
"Your beam?" Nancia replied. "Oh, dear. All my external beams seem to have lost power for a moment."
"We'll have a tech out to fix the malfunction immediately," Rahilly promised.
"Oh . . . I don't think that will be necessary," Nancia told him. "I've been investigating while we talk, and I believe I have found the source of the problem. It should be easy enough to correct internally." All she needed to do was reopen the power gate. . . .
"Very well, CN-935." Rahilly sketched a Service salute in the general direction of Nancia's titanium column. "The remaining paperwork will be completed within the day, and then you and Brawn Caleb will be requested to hold yourselves ready for a new assignment—there was one pending, actually; Central will be happy not to have to wait while you choose a brawn."
He left as soon as the last word was snapped out, and Nancia was grateful for that. Caleb was staring around the cabin with an expression she could not read. If he was going to be angry with her for going behind his back, she'd just as soon have it out in private.
"I . . . don't understand," he said slowly. "You aren't waiting to choose a new brawn? You're going to go out solo again?"
"Hardly that," Nancia told him. "I've had enough of solo voyages, thank you very much; I find that I much prefer to travel with a partner."
"Then . . ."
"Didn't you hear the man? From now on I'm the CN-935. I've decided that Psych Central was right," Nancia said. It was a struggle to keep her voice projections calm and even. "We make a very good team."
Caleb was still speechless, and Nancia felt her one fear approaching.
"If . . . if that's all right with you?"
"All right, all right, all right!" Caleb exploded. "The woman gives me back my life—and with the perfect brain partner—and she wants to know if it's all right? I—Nancia—oh, wait a minute, would you? There's something I've got to take care of before you restore external beam transmissions."
He hurried off to his cabin, presumably to erase the job application letter that had taken so long to create, and Nancia permitted herself a small coruscating display of stars and comets across her three wide screens. It was going to be all right.
More than all right. "Nancia," she repeated to herself. "He finally called me Nancia."