Polyon was pacing the narrow space of his cabin, too impatient to strap himself in for Singularity, waiting for some sign that Forister had taken the bait, when the air shimmered and thickened around him.
He opened his mouth to curse his luck. The ship had entered Singularity before that thick-headed brawn ambled to a reader slot.
The air distorted into glassy waves, then became almost too thin to breathe. The cabin walls and furnishings receded to specks in the distance, then swam around him, huge menacing free-flowing shapes. Polyon's curses became a comical growl ending in a squeak.
Damn Singularity! There was no chance that Forister would drop the datahedron into a reader now, he'd be safely strapped into his pilot's chair like a good little brawn. By now, too, the ship's reader slots would probably be shut down for Singularity—and even if by some miracle he could persuade Nancia to accept the hedron, he still would not be able to enter the Net until the transformations were over and they had returned to normal space. No, he would have to wait until after the subspace transformation to implement Final Phase—and this transformation would bring the brainship into Central subspace, close to all the aid that Central Worlds and their innumerable fleets could give.
He reminded himself that this made no difference whatsoever. The basic nature of the gamble remained the same. Either his plan had advanced far enough to succeed despite the way they were forcing his hand, or it hadn't. If it had, then the fleets of Central would be obedient to him and not to their former masters. If it hadn't—well, then, annihilation would be a little quicker than if he'd moved from the remote spaces around Nyota, that was all.
He had only to sit and wait. And waiting out a single transformation through Singularity should be nothing to him. He had already spent patient years waiting on Shemali, planting his seeds, watching them grow, seeding the universe, ever since he had the flash of brilliance which at once conceived the hyperchip design and saw how it could be twisted to his own ends.
But this waiting was harder than all those years in which he had at least been doing something to further those ends; and it seemed longer; and there was something disturbing about this particular ship's decomposition. Singularity wasn't supposed to be this bad. Polyon breathed and gagged on a sickly swirl of colors and smells and textures, looked down at the wavering distortions of his own limbs and closed his eyes momentarily. That was a mistake; Singularity sickness heaved through his guts. What was the matter? He'd been through plenty of decompositions during his Academy training, not to mention passing through this very same Singularity point on the way out to Vega subspace. Had he so completely lost conditioning in the five years on Shemali, to be gagging and puking like any new recruit now?
No. Something else was wrong. This decomposition was lasting too long. And some of the visual distortions looked oddly familiar. Polyon fixed his eyes on one small sector of the cabin, where braces supporting an extruded shelf formed a simple closed curve of permalloy and plastifilm. As he watched, the triangle of brace, wall and shelf elongated to a needle-shape with one thin eye, stretched out into an open eye as big as the wall, squeezed into a rotating pinpoint of light with absolute blackness at its center, and opened again into the original triangle. Needle, eye, pinpoint, triangle; needle, eye, pinpoint, triangle. They were caught in a subspace loop, perpetually decomposing and reforming in a sequence which preserved topological properties but which made no progress towards the escape sequence leading to Central subspace.
A loop like that couldn't have happened, shouldn't have happened, unless the ship's processors had shut down. Or—a wild hope tantalized him—unless the ship's processors were too busy with some other problem to navigate them out of Singularity.
A problem like assimilating a worm program which would turn over all control to a single user, effectively cutting the brain off from her own body and its processing.
Polyon swallowed his unspoken curses and plunged across the cabin. He had some trouble locating the palmpad and holding his hand steady over it, but eventually he managed to match his shrinking and bending arm with the erratic loop of the ballooning palmpad. He slapped the surface twice. "Voice control mode!"
His own voice boomed oddly in his ears, the soundwaves distorted by the perpetual twisting of space around him, but evidently there was something unchanging in the voice patterns which his worm program still recognized. "Voice control acknowledged," an undulant voice boomed and twittered from the speakers.
"Unlock this cabin door." The first time the words came out as an unrecognizable squeak; the next, something close to his normal speaking voice emerged and the computer acknowledged the command. But nothing happened. A moment later the quavering vocal signal of the program responded with a shrill squeak that gradually became a groaning boom.
"Unable to identify designated entity."
Polyon was beginning to catch on to the rhythm of the subspace loop. If he kept his eyes fixed on any known point, like the triangle of shelf and wall and brace, he could recognize when they were passing through the decomposition closest to normal space. If he spoke then, residual subspace transformations still distorted his voice, but at least the computer could recognize and accept his orders.
He waited and spoke when the moment was right.
"Identify this cabin."
Lights flashed on the cabin control panel, rose and fluttered like fireflies trailing the liquid surface of the panel, swam into elongated hieroglyphics of an unknown language, and sank back into the panel's surface to become a pattern signaling failure.
"No such routine found."
Polyon cursed under his breath, and the subspace transformation loop twisted his words into a grating snarl. Something was wrong with his worm program. Somehow it had failed to complete its takeover of the ship's computer functions.
"General unlock," he snapped on the next loop through normal space.
His cabin door irised halfway open, then screeched and wobbled back and forth as the smooth internal glides had jammed on something. Polyon dove through, misjudged distances and clearance in the perpetual liquid shifting of the transformations, cracked a solid elbow on the very solid edge of the half-open door, landed on a bed of shifting sand, rolled, and found his feet in what was again, briefly, the solid passageway outside the cabin.
"Out! Everybody out!" The loop stretched his last word into a howl. At least it got their attention. A green slug oozed through one of the other doors and became Darnell, vomiting. Farther away, Blaize's red head blazed under lights that kept changing from electric blue to artificial sun to deepest shadow. Fassa was a china doll, white and neat and compact and perfect, but as the loop progressed she grew to her normal stature.
"What's happening?" The loop snatched away her words, but Polyon read her lips before the next phase stretched them into rubber. He waited for the next normal-space pass.
"Get Alpha. Don't want to have to explain twice."
Fassa nodded—Polyon thought it was a nod—and ducked into the cabin nearest hers. Darnell quivered and resumed his form as a giant green slug. The passageway elongated into a tunnel with Blaize at the far end, somehow aloof from the group.
Fassa reappeared, shaking her head. "She won't move. I—" She was bright, Fassa del Parma was; in mid-sentence, as space shifted around her, she waited until the next normspace pass to complete her sentence. "—think she's too frightened, I'm scared too. What's—"
Polyon didn't have time to waste listening to obvious questions. When the next normspace passed through them, he was ready to seize the moment. "I'm taking over the ship, is what's happening," he said over the tail-end of Fassa's question. "Any function on this ship that uses my hyperchips is under my command now. The reason—"
Shift, stretch, contract, waver, back to normal for a few seconds.
"—for this long transition is that the ship's brain is nonfunctional, can't get us out of Singularity."
Darnell wailed and vomited more loudly than before, drowning out Polyon's next words and wasting the rest of that normspace pass. Polyon waited, one booted foot contracting as he tapped it, stretching and looping over itself like a snake, then deflating again into the normal form of a regulation Academy boot.
"I can pilot us out of Singularity," he announced. "But I need to be at the control console. May have some trouble there. You'll have to help me take out the brawn and the cyborg."
"Why should we?" Blaize demanded.
Polyon smiled. "Afterwards," he said gently, "I won't forget who my friends are."
"What good—" Darnell, predictably, wanted to know, but the transformation loop washed away his question. And when normspace came round again, Blaize was closer to the rest of them; close enough to answer for Polyon.
"What good will his favor do? Quite a lot, I should imagine. It's not just the hyperchips on this ship, is it, Polyon? All the hyperchips Shemali has been turning out so fast have the same basic flaw, don't they?"
"I wouldn't," said Polyon, "necessarily define it as a flaw. But you're right. Once we're out of Singularity and ready to access the Net again, this ship's computer will broadcast Final Phase to every hyperchip ever installed. I'll have—"
They'd all caught on to the rhythm of the transformation loop by now; the wait through three distorted subspaces was becoming part of normal conversational style.
"—control of the universe," he finished on the next pass through normspace. Blaize had come closer yet; stupid little runt, trying to move during transformations.
"And we'll be your loyal lieutenants?" Blaize asked.
"I know how to reward service," Polyon said noncommittally. Into a Ganglicide vat with you, troublemaker, as soon as I have the power.
"Not if I know it," Blaize mouthed as normspace slid away into the first distortion. He swung a fist at Polyon, but before it landed his hand had shrunk to the size of a walnut, and on the next dip through normspace Polyon was ready for him with a return blow that sent Blaize to the deck. By the time he landed, it was soft as quicksand, a pool in which Blaize swirled, too dizzy to rise immediately.
"Stop me," Polyon said to the other two as normspace passed through, "and you die here, in Singularity, because nobody else can get us out of it. Try to stop me and fail," and he smiled again, very sweetly, "and you'll wish you had died here. Are you with me?"
Before they could answer, a new element entered the game; a hissing cloud of gas, invisible in normspace, dearly delineated as a pink-rimmed flood of rosy light in the first transformational space. It engulfed Blaize and he stopped twitching, lay like one dead in the yielding transformations of the deck.
Sleepgas. And he couldn't shout through the loop to warn them. Polyon clapped both hands over his mouth and nose, saw that Fassa did the same, jerked his head towards the central cabin. That door too was half open. He made for it, staggering through mud and quicksand, swimming through air gone thick as water, lungs aching and burning for a breath. Fell through, someone pushing behind him, Fassa, and Darnell after her. Forget Blaize, the traitor, and Alpha, by now sleepgassed in her cabin. Polyon gasped and with his first burning breath called, "General lock!"
The control cabin door irised shut with a strange jerky motion, as if it were fighting its own mechanism, and Polyon found his feet and surveyed his new territory.
Not bad. The only passenger he'd been seriously worried about was Sev Bryley-Sorensen. But Bryley wasn't here. Good. He was locked out, then, with Alpha and Blaize; probably sleepgassed, like them. The other two were bent over their consoles, probably still trying to figure out why doors were opening and closing without their command, trying to flood the passenger areas with sleepgas—well, they'd succeeded there, but much good it would do them now! Through the transitions he saw them turning in their seats, open mouths stretching like taffy in the second subspace, then shrinking to round dots in the third. Normspace showed the cyborg freak making a move that wasn't part of the transformation illusion, right arm darting towards her belt. Polyon snapped out a command and the freak's prosthetic arm and leg danced in their sockets, twisting away from the joining point; her flesh-and-blood torso followed the agonizing pull of the synthetic limbs and she rotated half out of her seat. Another command, and the prostheses dropped lifeless and heavy to the floor, dragging the body down with them. Her head cracked against the support pillar under the seat. Polyon stepped forward to take the needler before she recovered. Space stretched away from him, but his arm stretched with it, and the solid heavy feel of the needler reassured him that his fingers, even if they momentarily resembled tentacles, had firm hold of the weapon.
With the next normspace pass he was erect again, holding the needler on Forister. "Over there." With a jerk of his head he indicated the central column. Somewhere behind there the brain of the ship floated within a titanium shell, a shrunken malformed body kept alive by tubes and wires and nutrient systems. Polyon shuddered at the thought; he'd never understood why Central insisted on keeping these monsters alive, even giving them responsible positions that could have been filled by real people like himself. Well, the brain would be mad by now, between sense deprivation and the stimuli he'd ordered its own hyperchips to throw at it; killing it would be a merciful release. And it would be appropriate to kill the brawn at the foot of the column.
But not yet. Polyon was all too aware that he didn't know everything there was to know about navigating a brainship. He would need full support from both computers and brawn if he was to get them out of this transition loop alive.
He studied the needler controls, spun the wheel with his thumb, glanced at Darnell and Fassa. Which of them dared he trust? Neither, for choice; well, then, which was more afraid of him? Fassa had been showing an uppity streak, asking him questions when she should have been listening. Darnell was still green-faced but appeared to be through vomiting. Polyon tossed him the needler; it floated through normspace and Darnell caught it reflexively just before the transition shrunk it to a gleaming line of permalloy.
"If either of them makes a move," Polyon said pleasantly, "needle them. I've set it to kill . . . slowly." In fact he'd left the needler as Micaya had it, set to deliver a paralyzing but not lethal dose of paravenin; but there was no need to reassure his captives overmuch. "Now . . ." He removed his uniform jacket, draped it neatly over the swivelseat where Micaya had been sitting, and sat down in Forister's chair before the command console. Transitions exaggerated the slight flourish of his wrists into a great ballooning gesture, spun out his sleeves into white clouds of fabric that floated over and dwarfed the other occupants of the cabin.
"What do you think you're doing?" Forister cried. His voice squeaked through the fourth transition space and fell with a thud on the last word.
Polyon smiled. He could see his own teeth and hair gleaming, white and gold, in the mirror-bright panel. "I," he said gently, "am going to get us out of Singularity. Don't you think it's time somebody did it?"
His reflection narrowed, gave him a squashed face like a bug, dulled the bright gold of his hair and turned his teeth to green rotting stumps. The control panel shrank under his hands, then swelled and heaved like a storm-tossed sea. As normspace approached Polyon darted in, tapping out one set of staccato commands with his right hand, passing the left over the palmpad to call up Nancia's mathematics coprocessors, rattling out the verbal commands that would bring the whole ship around, responsive to his commands and ready to sail the subspaces out of this Singularity.
She was sluggish as any water-going vessel lacking a rudder and taking in water, half the engines obeying his commands, the other half canceling them. The mathematics co-processors came online and then disappeared before he'd entered the necessary calculations, shrieking gibberish and sliding away in a jumble of meaningless symbols. The moment of normspace passed and Polyon ground his teeth in frustration. In the second transformation the teeth felt like squishy, rotting vegetables inside his mouth, then in the third they became needles that drew blood, and by the time normspace returned he had learned not to give way to emotion.
He made two more attempts at controlling the ship, waited out three complete transition loops, before he pushed the pilot's chair back from the control panel.
"Your brainship is fighting me," he told Forister on the next pass through normspace.
"Good for her!" Forister raised his voice slightly. "Nancia, girl, can you hear me? Keep it up!"
"Don't be a fool, Forister," Polyon said tiredly. "If your brainship were conscious and coherent, she'd have brought us out of Singularity herself."
He used the remaining seconds in normspace to tap out one more command. The singing tones of Nancia's access code rang through the room. Forister's face went gray. Then the transition spaces whirled about them, monstrously transforming the cabin and everything in it, and Polyon could not tell which of the distorted images before him showed the opening of Nancia's titanium column.
On the next pass through normal space he saw that the column was still closed. Transition must have garbled the last sounds in the access sequence. He typed in the command again; again the musical tones rang out without their accompanying syllables; again nothing happened.
"You'd better tell me the rest of the code," he said to Forister on the next normspace pass.
Forister smiled—briefly; something in the expression reminded Polyon of his own ironic laughter. "What makes you think I have it, boy? The two parts are kept separate. I didn't even know how to access the tone sequence from Nancia's memory banks. The syllables probably aren't encoded in her at all; they'll be on file at Central."
"Brawns are supposed to know the spoken half of the code," Polyon snapped in frustration.
"I asked to have it changed just before this run," Forister claimed. "Security reasons. With so many prisoners on board, I feared a takeover attempt—and with good reason, it seems."
"I do hope you're lying," Polyon said. He clamped his mouth shut and waited through the transition loop, marshaling his arguments. "Because if Central's the only source for the rest of the code, we're all dead. I can't tap the Net and hack into the Courier Service database from Singularity—and I can't get us out of Singularity without neutralizing the brain."
"You mean, without killing Nancia," Forister said in a voice emptied of feeling. His eyes flickered once to the cabin console. Polyon followed the man's gaze and felt a moment of fear. A delicate solido stood above the control panels, the image of a lovely young woman with an impish smile and clustering curls of red hair.
Polyon had heard of brawns who developed an emotional fixation on their brainship, even to the point of having a solido made from the brainship's genotype that would show how the freakish body might have matured without its fatal defects. He hadn't guessed that Forister was the sentimental type, or that he'd have had time to grow so attached to Nancia. The idiot might actually think that he'd rather die than kill his brainship.
"There's no need to clutter the problem with emotionalism," Polyon told him. How could he jolt Forister out of his sentimental fixation? "With partial control of the ship to me and partial control to Nancia, neither of us can navigate out of Singularity."
Damn the transition loop! Forister had caught on to the rhythm by now; and the necessary wait while three distorted subspaces composed and decomposed around them gave him time to think.
"I've a better suggestion," the brawn said. "You say you can navigate us out; well, we all know Nancia can. Restore full control to her, and—"
"And what? You'll drop charges, let me go back to running a prison factory? I've got a better career plan than that now."
"I wasn't," said Forister mildly, "planning to make that offer."
The rhythm of collapsing and composing subspaces was becoming natural to them all; the necessary pauses in their conversation no longer bothered Polyon.
"I had something like your own offer in mind," Forister continued at the next opportunity. "Release Nancia's hyperchip-enhanced computer systems, and she'll get us out of Singularity—and you'll live."
"How did you guess?"
Forister looked surprised. "Logical deduction. You designed the hyperchips; you tricked me into running a program that did something peculiar to Nancia's computer systems; the failure reports I read just before you came in showed precisely the areas where she has had hyperchips installed, the lower deck sensors and the navigation system; you've since exercised voice control on Micaya's hyperchip-enhanced prostheses. Clearly your hyperchip design includes a back door by which you can personally control any installation that uses your chips."
"Clever," Polyon said. "But not clever enough to get you out of Singularity. I assure you I'm not going to restore full computing power to a brainship who is probably mad by now."
"What makes you think that?"
Polyon raised his brows. "We all know what sensory deprivation does to shellpersons, Forister. Need I go into the details?"
"Take more than a few minutes in the dark to upset my Nancia," Forister said levelly.
Polyon bared his teeth. "By now, old man, she's had considerably more than that to deal with. The first thing my hyperchip worm does is to strike at any intelligence linked to the computers in which it finds itself. The sensory barrage would make any human break the link at once. I'm afraid that 'your' Nancia, not being able to escape the link that way, will have gone quite mad by now. So—I think—if you want to live—you'll tell me, now, the rest of the access code."
"I think not," Forister said calmly. "You've made a fatal error in your calculations."
The transition loop stifled all talk for the endless winding, looping moments of passage through shrinking and distorting spaces. Polyon ignored the sensory tricks of spatial transformations and thought furiously. When normspace returned, he reached up from his chair to grasp the solido of Nancia as a young woman. Deliberately, watching Forister's face, he dropped the solido on the deck and ground the fragile material to shards under his boot-heel.
"That's what's left of 'your' Nancia, old man," he said. "Are you going to let your love for a woman who never lived kill us all?"
Forister's face was lined with pain, but he spoke as evenly as always. "My—feelings—for Nancia have nothing to do with the matter. Your error is much more basic. You think I'd rather set you free with the universe in your control than die here in Singularity. This is incorrect."
He spoke so calmly that it took Polyon a moment to understand the words, and in that moment the transition loop warped the room and disguised the movements in it. When they passed through normspace again, Fassa del Parma was standing between Forister and Darnell, as if she thought she could shield the brawn from a direct needler spray.
"He's right," she said. "I didn't have time to think before. You're a monster."
Polyon laughed without humor. "Fassa, dear, to righteous souls like Forister and General Questar-Benn we're all monsters. I should have remembered how you sucked up to them before, helping them trick me. Did you think that would save you? They'll use you and throw you away like your father did."
Fassa went white and still as stone. "We don't all take such a simple-minded view of the universe," Forister said. "But, Fassa, you can't—"
Darnell's fingers were twitching. Polyon nodded. Slowly, too slowly, Darnell raised the needler. He gave Forister ample time to grasp Fassa by the shoulders and spin her out of danger. As Forister moved, the cabin seemed to lurch and the lights dimmed. Gravity fell to half-normal, then to nothing, and as Fassa spun into midair the reaction of Forister's thrust pushed him in the opposite direction. The spray of needles went wide, but one bright line on the far edge of the arc stung through Forister's sleeve and bloodied his wrist. The blood danced out across the cabin in bright droplets that the transition loop pulled out into bloody seas; Polyon watched a bubble the size of a small pond float inexorably toward him, settle around him with a clammy grip, then shrink to a bright button-sized stain on his shirt front.
Fassa floated back to grasp Forister's flaccid body and cry, "Why did you do that? I wanted to save you!"
"Wanted him—to kill me," Forister breathed. The paravenin was fighting the contractions of his chest. "Without me—no way to get Nancia's code. Trapped here, all of us—better than letting him go? Forgive me?"
"Death before dishonor." Polyon put a sneering spin on the words, letting the maudlin pair hear what he thought of such brave slogans. "And it will be death, too. See how the ship's systems are failing? What do you think will go next? Oxygen? Cabin pressure?"
In the absence of direct commands, gravity and lighting should have been controlled by Nancia's autonomic nervous functions. Forister groaned as the meaning of this latest failure came through to him.
"She's dying anyway. With or without your help," Polyon drove the point home. "And you're not dead yet. I lied to you. The needler was only set to paralyze. Now let's have the access code before Nancia stops breathing and kills us all."
Forister shook his head with slow, painful twitches.
"Come here, Fassa, dear," Polyon ordered.
"No. I stay with him."
"You don't really mean that," Polyon said pleasantly. "You know you're far too afraid of me. Remember those shoddy buildings you put up on Shemali? You replaced them free of charge, remember, and I didn't even have to do any of the interesting things we discussed. But if I'd threaten you with flaying alive for cheating me over a factory, Fassa, just think for a moment what I'll do to you for interfering with me now."
The transition loop was almost a help; the pauses it forced gave Fassa time to consider her brave stand.
"Go on, Fassa," Forister urged when normal speech was possible again. "You can't help me now, and I've no wish to see you hurt for my sake."
"Thank you for the information," Polyon said with a courteous bow. "Perhaps I'll try that next. But I think we'll begin with an older and dearer friend for quick results. Darnell, bring the freak—no, I'll do it; you keep the needler on Fassa, just in case she gets any silly ideas."
Holding onto the pilot's chair to keep himself in place, Polyon turned and aimed a loose kick at Micaya Questar-Benn. The cessation of ship's gravity had freed her of the artificially weighted prostheses that held her down, but the arm and leg were still flopping loose, free of her control. She was as good as a cripple—she was a cripple, disgusting sight.
"I want Forister to get a good view of this," he told her politely. "Lock prostheses."
This to the computer; a signal to the hyperchips clamped Micaya's artificial arm and leg together.
"Lay a finger on Mic—" Forister threatened, struggling vainly against the effects of the paravenin.
"I won't need to," Polyon said with a brilliant smile. "I can do it all from here."
A series of brisk verbal commands and typed-in codes caused the portion of the ship's computer that Polyon controlled to transmit new, overriding instructions to the hyperchips controlling Micaya's internal organ replacements. The changes had the full duration of a transition loop to take effect. When they returned to normspace, Micaya's face was colorless and beads of sweat dotted her forehead.
"It's amazing how painful a few simple organic changes can be," Polyon commented gaily. "Little things like fiddling with the circulation, for instance. How's that hand, Mic, baby? Bothering you a bit?"
"Come a little closer," Micaya invited him, "and find out." But now Polyon had drawn attention to her one remaining hand; they could all see how it had changed color. The fingernails were almost black, the skin was purplish and swollen.
"Keep it like that for a week," Polyon said, "and she'll have a glorious case of gangrene. Of course, we don't have a week. I could trap even more blood in the hand and burst the veins, but that might kill her too fast. So I'll just leave it like that while you think it over, Forister, and maybe we'll start working on the foot as well. Fortunately, the heart's one of her cyborg replacements, so we don't have to worry about it failing under the increased demands; it'll go on working . . . as long as I want it to. Want to hear how well it works now?"
A word of command amplified the sound of Micaya's artificial heart beating vehemently, the pulse rate going up to support the demands Polyon was making on the rest of her system. The desperate, ragged double beat echoed through the cabin, droned and drummed and shrilled through a complete transition loop, and no one spoke or moved.
For a heartbeat, no more, Nancia found silence and darkness a welcome relief from the stabbing pain of the input from her rogue sensors. Is this what Singularity is like for softpersons? But no, it was worse than that. In the confused moments before she shut down all conscious functions and disabled her own sensor connections, she had been aware of something much worse than the colorshifts and spatial distortions of Singularity; the malevolence of another mind, intimately entwined with her own, striking at her with deliberate malice.
He means to drive me mad. If I enable my sensors again, he'll do it. And if I stay floating in this darkness, that will do it too. The bleak desperation of the thought came from somewhere far back in her memories. When, how, had she ever felt so utterly abandoned before? Nancia reached out, unthinking, to search her memory banks—then stopped before the connection was complete. If sensors could be turned into weapons to use against her, could not memory, too, be infiltrated? Access the computer's memory banks, and she might find herself "knowing" whatever this other mind wanted her to believe.
Is it another mind? Or a part of myself? Perhaps I'm mad already, and this is the first symptom. The flashing, disorienting lights and garbled sounds, the sickening whirling sensations, even the conviction that she was under attack by another mind—weren't all these symptoms of one of those Old Earth illnesses that had ravaged so many people before modern electrostim and drug therapy restored the balance of their tortured brains? Nancia longed to scan just one of the encyclopedia articles in her memory banks; but that resource was denied her for the moment. Paranoid schizophrenia, that was it; a splitting off of the mind from reality.
Let's see, now—she reasoned. If I'm mad, then it's safe to look up the symptoms and decide that I'm mad, except that presumably I won't accept the evidence. And if I'm not mad, I daren't check memory to prove it. So we'd better accept the working hypothesis that I am sane, and go on from there. The dry humor of the syllogism did something to restore her emotional balance. Although how long I will remain sane, under these circumstances . . .
Better not to think about that. Better, too, not to remember Caleb's first partner, who had gone into irreversible coma rather than face the emptiness that surrounded him after the synaptic connections between his shell and the outside world had been destroyed. As a matter of sanity, as well as survival, Nancia decided, she would make the assumption that somebody had done this to her, and concentrate on solving the puzzle of who had done it and how they could be stopped.
A natural first step would be to reopen just one sensor, to examine the bursts of energy that had come so close to disrupting her nervous system. . . . I can't! the child within her shrieked in near-panic. You can't make me, I won't, I won't, I'll stay safe in here forever.
That's not an option, Nancia told herself firmly. She wanted to say it aloud, to reassure herself with the sound of her own voice; but she was mute as well as deaf and blind and without sensation, floating in an absolute blackness. Somehow she had to conquer that panic within herself.
Poetry sometimes helped. That Old Earth dramatist Sev and Fassa were so fond of quoting; she had plenty of his speeches stored in her memory banks. On such a night as this . . . Nancia reached unthinking for memory, stopped the impulse just in time. She didn't know that speech; she had stored it in memory. Quite a different thing. Try something else, then. I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. . . . Not a good choice, under the circumstances. Maybe . . . did she know anything else? What was she, without her memory banks, her sensors, her powerful thrusting engines? Did she even exist at all?
That way lies madness. Of course she existed. Deliberately Nancia filled herself with her own true memories. Scooting around the Laboratory Schools corridors, playing Stall and Power-Seek with her friends. Acing the math finals, from Lobachevski Geometry up through Decomposition Topology, playing again, with all the wonderful space of numbers and planes and points to wander in. Voice training with Ser Vospatrian, the Lab Schools' drama teacher, who'd taught them to modulate their speaker-produced vocalizations through the full range of human speech with all its emotional overtones. That first day they'd all been shy and nervous, hating the recorded playbacks of their own tinny artificial voices; Vospatrian had made them recite limericks and nonsense poems until they broke down in giggles and forgot to be self-conscious. Goodness, she could still remember those silly poems with which he'd started off every session. . . .
And quite without thinking or calling on her artificially augmented memory banks, Nancia was off.
"The farmer's daughter had soft brown hair,
Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese,
And I met with a poem, I can't say where,
Which wholly consisted of lines like these. . . ."
"There was a young brainship of Vega. . . ."
"Fhairson swore a feud against the clan M'Tavish;
Marched into their land to murder and to ravish,
For he did resolve to extirpate the vipers
With four-and-twenty men and five-and-thirty pipers . . ."
Nancia went through Ser Vospatrian's entire repertoire until she was giggling internally and floating on the natural high of laughter-produced endorphins. Then, floating quite calmly in her blackness, she set about testing her sensor connections one by one.
She got the mental equivalent of burned fingers and light-blinded eyes more than once during the testing process, but it wasn't as bad as she had feared. The lower-deck sensors were completely useless, as were her navigation computer and the new mathematics and graphics co-processors she'd just invested in. Everything, in fact, that contains hyperchips from Shemali . . . and with that deduction, Nancia knew just who was striking at her and why.
She opened the upper deck sensors one by one, first taking in the sleeping bodies tumbled in the passageway and cabins. Sev, slumped over the isometric spring set in the exercise room with his hands and feet still in the springholders; Alpha, strapped in her cabin; Blaize, floating just above the passageway deck, with an angelic expression on his sleeping face and a nasty bruise coming up on his chin.
Mutiny. And somebody released sleepgas. But which side? She opened the control cabin sensors slowly, cautiously. The port side sensors wavered and gave an erratic display. Somehow Polyon's hyperchips must be working to contaminate the entire computer system. I don't have much time. . . .
Even less time than she'd thought, Nancia realized as she took in the standoff in the control room. General Questar-Benn disabled—of course, the hyperchips in her prostheses—and Darnell holding her needler on a defiant Forister while Polyon sat in the pilot's chair and played his commands on the computer console. That, at least, she could do something about. Nancia struck back, sending her own commands to the computer, disabling the console section by section, garbling Polyon's commands as they came in. He tapped out a sequence she did not know; she traced it to its source and with shock recognized her own access code. The musical tones were already sounding in the cabin. But the accompanying syllables weren't stored in the same location. . . . They have to be somewhere, though. In some part of memory not accessible to my conscious probe. Otherwise my shell wouldn't recognize and open to them. Nancia felt proud of herself for figuring that out, then cold and sick as she wondered how long it would take Polyon to make the same deduction. And if the syllables aren't where I can consciously retrieve them, how can I block Polyon against doing so?
She felt queasy from the repeated looping through four decomposition spaces, but there was no safe way to leave the loop until she regained full computing and navigational facility. First, let's repair the damage. . . . Nancia worked furiously, permanently disabling the sections of her computer system that had been contaminated by the Shemali hyperchips, finding alternative routings to access the processors that remained untouched. At the same time the worm program unleashed by Polyon squirmed deeper into her system, changing and mutating code as it went, erasing its own tracks so that she could only tell where it had been by the sudden flares of disorienting sense input or the garbled mathematics where it had been. She had to find and stop that code before she could do anything else.
Deep in the intricacies of her own system, Nancia agonized as Darnell struck down Forister.
Don't listen. Don't think about that. She would need all her concentration to disable Polyon's rogue code, more concentration than she'd ever brought to bear on the comparatively trivial problems of subspace navigation. Nancia remembered Sev Bryley's training in relaxation and deliberately, slowly calmed herself, drawing energy away from her extremities and centering her consciousness on the internal core of light where she existed independent of computer and shell and ship. With some remote part of her awareness she sensed the failure of gravitational systems and the dimming of lights, the shock and concern of her passengers, but she could not afford to divert consciousness to those semi-automatic functions now.
The automatic datacording routines Nancia had set up continued to operate as Polyon began Micaya's torture. Nancia could not counter his commands without breaking her trance; she could not even restore gravity and lights to reassure Forister. Ignoring Micaya's pain was the hardest thing she had ever done. For the moment, Micaya does not exist. Nothing exists outside this place, this moment, this center. There was the rogue code; she annihilated it in a blaze of energy, destroying deep memory in the process; like an amputation, she thought, the shaft of pain and the nagging ache afterwards. Now to restore lost functions . . . Ruthlessly she cut back on the frills and luxuries of her programming, reducing the power that normally fed her autonomic functions. Lights dimmed even further in the control cabin, and the softpersons made comments about an acrid smell in the air. They would just have to put up with it; she needed that processing power to restore her crippled nav programs. Three of the four major math coprocessors were lost; the graphics processor could double for one of them. No time to think about the others. Nancia erased unnecessary programs and dumped others to datahedron, making space in what little remained of her memory for the processes she had to have. Would that be enough? No chance for tests, no time for second thoughts. She struck back, once, with everything she had; felt hyperchips shriveling to blank bits of permalloy, felt inactive sensors and processors become dead weights instead of living systems.
Some animals will gnaw off their own limbs to get out of a trap. . . .
No time to mourn, either. With the "death" of the hyperchips within Nancia's system, the transmissions that tortured Micaya's cyborgans ceased. The sound of her amplified heartbeat ended between one drum beat and the next. Forister groaned. He thinks I'm dead. He would be reassured in a moment. Nancia activated full artificial gravity; Darnell fell to the deck from his wall perch, Fassa went to her knees. Polyon staggered but remained standing. Nancia beamed commands to the tanglefield wires. Darnell, Polyon and Fassa were frozen in place, nets of moving lights encompassing the tanglefield keys at their wrists and ankles and necks. Finally, Nancia spared a little power to bring up the cabin lights and freshen the air.
"FN-935 reporting for duty," she said. "I apologize for any temporary inconvenience. . . ."
"Nancia!" Forister sounded close to tears.
"General Questar-Benn, can you take the pilot's seat?" Nancia requested. "I may need a little help to navigate us out of Singularity."
"Do my best." Micaya's breathing was still ragged, and she leaned heavily on the chair beside her, but she limped to the pilot's seat without help, the prostheses once again responding to her own brain's electrical impulses. "What can I do?"
"I am operating with only one mathematics coprocessor," Nancia told her, "and my navigation units are nonfunctional. When I start the drives, we will move out of this transition loop and into the expansion of whatever subspace we happen to be in. I'll try to maintain a steady path through the subspace options, but I may need you to aid in the navigation. Since the graphics processor is undamaged, I will throw up images of the approaching subspaces. Rest your hand on the palmpad and give me a direction at each branch."
"Do my best," Micaya said again, but Nancia noticed it was the prosthetic hand she rested on the palmpad; the other hand was still an ugly purple color, with blackened moons on the swollen fingertips. She remembered what Polyon had said about gangrene. How much had his hyperchips accelerated Micaya's metabolic processes? Get her to a medic . . . but I can't do that unless somebody helps me surf out of Singularity . . . and we daren't wait for the paravenin to wear off Forister. . . .
Then Nancia had no more energy to spare for worrying about Micaya or anything else but the waves of transformations that broke over her head, tossed and tumbled her gasping through subspaces that deformed her body and everyone within, streams of calculations that escaped her processors. Lost and choking, she sensed a firm hand guiding her upwards . . . out. . . . She crunched the last numbers into a tractable series of equations and broke through the chaos of uncountably infinite subspaces into the blessed normalcy of RealSpace.
Before she had time to thank Micaya, a tightbeam communication assaulted her weakened comm center. "Back so soon, FN? What's the matter? I thought you were headed for Central."
It was Simeon, the Vega Base managing brain. "We had a small virus problem," Nancia beamed back. "Returned for . . . repairs."
The rest of the story could wait until she had absolute privacy. There was no need to alert the galaxy to the fact that an unknown number of their computer systems were contaminated by Shemali hyperchips.
"Is everything under control now?"
"You could say that," Nancia replied dryly, turning up her remaining sensors and looking over her internal condition. Half her processors burned out, sleeping bodies littering the passenger quarters, three High Families brats secured in tanglefield and mad as hell, Forister twitching with the pins-and-needles of paravenin recovery, and a crippled general bringing them safe into RealSpace—
"Yes," she told Simeon. "Everything's under control."