Deadman Switch

Chapter 23

For a long moment we all just stood there. Eisenstadt was the first to move; and, predictably, it was to me he turned, an uncertain thunder in his expression. "If this is some sort of game, Benedar..."

The reflexive accusation died midway, and he swallowed hard. Even to him, it had to be clear that this was no trick. The odd blankness in the two Seekers' eyes, the subtle contorting of their faces, the abnormal timbres in their voices—none of it could have been faked. "It's no game, sir," I murmured. "They're in contact—somehow—with the thunderheads."

Eisenstadt exhaled between his teeth in a snake-like hiss. Adams and Zagorin were still sitting as they had after delivering their message, faces and bodies frozen as stiffly as normal human muscles could handle. Waiting for Eisenstadt's response... "Aren't you going to say something?" I prompted him quietly.

Eisenstadt's jaw tightened. "I... greet you as well," he managed. A touch of annoyance crossed his face as some of the initial shock faded and he abruptly realized that he was now speaking for posterity. And not doing a particularly memorable job of it. "I am Dr. Vlad Eisenstadt, representing the Four Worlds of the Patri and their colonies," he continued, somewhat more firmly this time. "Who, may I ask, have I the honor of addressing?"

A moment of silence. Then Adams and Zagorin spoke, again in that oddly hoarse whisper, and again in unison. "My identity can... not be put into this... kind of speech. We are..." The voices faded.

Eisenstadt leaned forward slightly, cocking one ear forward. "I'm sorry; what was that?"

"They can't answer," Calandra spoke up, a slight wavering to her voice. Her face—what I could see of it—looked both awestruck and more than a little shaken. "Their faces—watch their faces and the way their throats contract. Whatever the word is, they simply can't pronounce it."

Eisenstadt pursed his lips, considering. "With your permission, then," he said, "we'll continue to call you by our name for you: thunderheads. Unless that word should be used to distinguish between you and your physical hosts. They are just hosts for you, aren't they?"

A pause; and when Adams and Zagorin spoke again, I could hear a slight hesitation in their voices. "Not hosts. Bodies... homes... fortresses. Safety. Life."

"Ah," Eisenstadt nodded, a bit cautiously. "Yes—bodies." He considered. "You mention safety. What kind of safety do these bodies provide you?"

Silence. To me it was obvious that Eisenstadt was fishing for details about the thunderheads' defenses. Perhaps it was obvious to the thunderheads, too. "I don't think they're going to answer," I murmured after a minute.

"Afraid to?" he asked. "Or just a lack of vocabulary?"

I considered. "Afraid or distrusting, I'd say. The sense here is different than it was when they were trying to find a way to describe their body-homes, so I don't think it's a vocabulary problem."

He grunted and turned to Calandra. "You agree?"

"That the senses were different in the two instances, yes," she nodded. "Whether the emotion behind it should be interpreted as fear or something else, I don't know."

"I thought you Watchers were supposed to be able to read anybody you wanted to," he grumbled.

"Anybody human," she corrected him softly. "At the moment... they aren't."

The muscles in Eisenstadt's cheeks tightened... and abruptly his sense, too, changed. "Yes, well, maybe you religious types believe in demonic possession," he said, almost briskly. "But I don't. You—Smyt—swivel Adams around a little so that he and Zagorin can't see each other."

I frowned as Smyt and one of the other techs moved to obey. "Sir, there's no way they can be cueing each other. The synchronization is just too close."

"We'll see about that, won't we?" Eisenstadt said coolly. For just a minute, I realized, he'd been caught up in the same sense of awe and wonder as Calandra and I over what was happening; but that minute was over, and now the scientist in him had re-emerged, hard-headed and skeptical. "What kind of readings are we getting?" he added over his shoulder to the techs at the monitors.

"Weird ones," one of them reported. "Heart rate, blood pressure, and cell metabolism index are way down. Neuron and brainwave patterns—" he hesitated. "Frankly, Doctor, I don't know how to read this. There are strong elements of mental hyperactivity—localized at highly unusual sites—but there are also elements of deep sleep. Really deep sleep—just barely this side of comatose. By all rights, they should both be flat on their backs, snoring away."

Eisenstadt chewed at his lip. "Does any of it correspond to other known forms of meditation?"

"Not that I can tell. Of course, the records we've got here weren't designed to be an exhaustive listing."

"Sir," another tech put in, "it looks like their metabolic rates are still going down. Gradually, but noticeably."

"Potentially life-threatening?" Eisenstadt asked.

"I... don't know. Possibly."

Eisenstadt nodded, a slightly sour expression on his face. "You—thunderheads—are you still there?"

Adams's and Zagorin's faces contorted slightly in unison. "Where is there?"

"I meant are you still... in contact with us." Eisenstadt took a careful breath, his emotional resistance to accepting all this at face value fighting visibly against the recognition that we could be running up against a time limit. "We'd like to learn more about you—sharing knowledge of us in return, of course. Part of the study we would like to do—"

"We have no desire to... learn more about you."

Eisenstadt floundered a second, his line of thought bent by the interruption. "Yes. Well. Part of the study we would like to do would involve a dead thunderhead and a procedure called dissection. Would it be possible for us to have—?"

"There is no death."

Eisenstadt took a careful breath. "Ah... yes. Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. What we'd like—"

"Body-homes may die. We do not."

"Yes—that's what I meant," Eisenstadt tried again. "It's one of your body-homes that we'd like to study. If you could indicate an unused one for us and give us permission—"

"You may have a drone to... study."

Eisenstadt paused in mid-sentence. "A drone? What's that?"

"Body-home grown from ster... ilized seed for use of... any who needs it."

For a moment Eisenstadt seemed taken aback. "What do you mean, any who needs it? Don't all of you have your own body-homes?"

Again, the answer was silence. "They told us their body-homes can die," Calandra reminded Eisenstadt softly. "Perhaps growing spare bodies is their version of immortality."

Eisenstadt threw her a sharp look. "Let's try and keep metaphysics out of this," he growled at her... but behind the words I could hear his acute uneasiness with the idea. "All right, thunderhead, we accept. Can you point one of these drones out to us?"

A slight pause. Then, in unison as always, Zagorin and Adams each raised an arm and pointed. "There," they whispered. "Two thousand four hundred... eighty-seven heights."

"Which heights?" Eisenstadt asked. "Ours, yours? These mountains'?"

"Doctor!" one of the monitors called before the Seekers could answer. "Getting cardiac runaway in Adams!"

"Adams! Break contact!"

It took me half a second to realize that the shout had come from me. The twisted expression on Adams's face—the sudden tension throughout his body—it almost literally screamed to me of lethal stress. I took a step toward him—

And was brought up sharply by Eisenstadt's hand on my arm. "Doctor—!"

"Let's wait and see what the thunderheads do," he told me, his voice rigid. "Whether or not they release him on their own."

I twisted my head to stare at him, not believing it. "And if they don't?" I snapped.

His eyes stayed on Adams. "We need to know what kind of value the thunderheads place on human life. This is as good a time as any to find out."

Because Adams was a Halloa. A religious fanatic... and therefore expendable. I clenched my teeth hard enough to hurt and turned back to the Seekers. Adams's stress was still growing—becoming critical— "Thunderhead!" I shouted. "You're killing him! Let him go!"

For a long second nothing happened. Then, abruptly, the alien sense was gone from both Adams and Zagorin. Zagorin slumped, breathing hard through slack lips—

As Adams collapsed, unconscious, to the ground.

—

The physician on Eisenstadt's team was young, brisk, and—unlike many I'd known—perfectly willing to admit to a certain degree of professional ignorance. "If you want the bottom line," he said, shaking his head, "it's that I can't tell you what exactly happened to him."

Eisenstadt glowered. "And that's the best you can do?"

"Oh, no," the physician said, undaunted by his superior's displeasure. "I said I didn't know what happened; that's not to say I can't treat the results." He leaned over his desk to call up a display. "Here, for instance, he shows signs of having had a mild stroke—we're already cleaning up the damage there." Another display. "Cardiac trauma. We'll probably wind up having to rebuild parts of his heart, but for the moment he's perfectly stable. Ditto for the other bits of scattered damage he sustained."

Eisenstadt nodded. "What about the woman?"

The physician shrugged. "Mild stress-related traumas in heart and central nervous system. No permanent damage, though."

"Why not?" I asked. "Because she's younger than he is?"

"That's a large part of it," the physician nodded. "Mr. Adams also had a definite predisposition to cardiac problems going into... whatever it was he went into."

"Which the stress then triggered," Eisenstadt nodded, ignoring the physician's thinly veiled curiosity. "Could you say, then, that any normally healthy person, having undergone the same stress, would come out of it all right?"

The physician cocked an eyebrow. "I'd hardly say that, Doctor—certainly not with just two casepoints to extrapolate from. It could just as easily be that Ms. Zagorin has stronger than average resistance to whatever it was happened to the two of them."

Eisenstadt considered that a moment. "All right, then," he said slowly. "Having seen what this stress does... would it be possible to somehow pretreat someone so as to minimize the resulting damage?"

The other shrugged. "If the results of the stress remain consistent, certainly. Again, having seen only two casepoints I can't guarantee that the next person won't develop something entirely different."

Eisenstadt's lip twisted. "I suppose it's a chance we'll just have to take. When can we see Ms. Zagorin?"

The physician called up another display. "Give her another few minutes, anyway," he said. "No permanent damage doesn't mean that the thing wasn't traumatic for her. Besides which, the longer you give us to wash the preventatives and diagnostics out of her system, the more coherent she'll be."

Eisenstadt nodded. "Thank you," he said.

We left the office. Calandra, along with her usual pair of Pravilos, was waiting out in the hall; without even looking at her, Eisenstadt took her arm and led the two of us down to an empty conference room. "Wait outside," he told the Pravilos briefly. Ushering us in, he closed the door.

For a long minute he just looked at us, a whole range of conflicting emotions following each other across his face. "Well?" he growled at last, somewhat reluctantly. "Let's have your opinions."

Not our report, I noted, but our opinions. Boldfacing the subjectivity of our talents. Still, he had asked, and even grudging interest was a step up. "Both Shepherd Adams and Shepherd Zagorin were in contact with one or more of the thunderheads," I told him. "There simply isn't room for fraud or error in what happened out there."

He snorted. "Much as I might wish it were otherwise, I have to agree. Assuming, of course, that the search teams find a dead thunderhead in the direction they gave us. So. The thunderheads are alive and sentient and they really can travel out of their bodies. What can you tell me about them?"

I gestured Calandra to go first. "They're clearly intelligent, first of all," she said slowly, forehead furrowed in thought and memory. "I'd guess they've been studying us for quite some time. At least as long as the Halo of God has been here; possibly since the first colonists arrived at Solitaire."

"What makes you say that?" Eisenstadt frowned.

"Their ability to use human speech apparatus to communicate, for starters," Calandra said. "Besides that—" She hesitated, looking at me.

And a piece fell into place. "The general paranoia on Solitaire," I said. "It's a subconscious resistance to the thunderheads' presence, isn't it?"

Her eyes were oddly haunted. "I think so, yes."

I could see Eisenstadt debating whether or not to pursue this line further, deciding to shelve it for the moment. "All right; so you think the thunderheads are intelligent and that they've been studying us. What else?"

Calandra took a deep breath. "Obviously... they're also the ones who've been guiding our ships to Solitaire for the past seventy years."

The muscles in Eisenstadt's jaw tightened... but the thought was clearly not a new one to him. "They're certainly the most likely candidates," he admitted. "You have anything on that besides guesswork?"

"The way their arms moved," I said slowly, replaying the contact in my mind's eye. "The muscle sequences they went through when they pointed the way to the dead thunderhead." I focused on Eisenstadt, found him looking intently back at me. "It was virtually identical to the hand movements I saw in the Bellwether's... on our trip into Solitaire system."

His eyes bored into mine. "You certain?"

"As certain as I can be," I said.

"So why, then," he asked softly, "has it taken them this long to communicate with us?"

I shook my head. "I don't know."

He pursed his lips, and for a moment the room was silent. "What about Zagorin?" he asked at last. "Could she have picked up anything herself during the contact, or was she acting purely as a medium?"

"No idea, sir." I looked at Calandra. "You?"

She shook her head. "You'll just have to ask her yourself."

He nodded, an odd reluctance evident in his sense. "Yes, I'd planned on doing that. I just thought—well, never mind." He seemed to brace himself. "I suppose that... now that we know how to get through to the thunderheads, your part in this is pretty much over."

He stopped... and I saw what it was he couldn't allow himself to say. "With your permission, Dr. Eisenstadt," I said into the silence, "Calandra and I would both very much like to continue on with this. Having gone this far, we'd like to see it through." I looked at Calandra, saw she understood what I was doing, and why. "Curiosity aside, we might still wind up being of some use to you."

Relief virtually flooded into Eisenstadt's sense, all the confirmation I needed that my reading of him had been correct. To verbally acknowledge our worth and ask us to stay on had been a sacrifice of humility he hadn't been willing or able to make. But now that pride had been satisfied—now that he could see himself as doing us a favor, instead of the other way around—he could get what he'd wanted all along. "You might be of some value, at that," he agreed. "I'll pull some strings with the governor, see what she can do. In the meantime—" he glanced at his watch—"let's go talk to Zagorin. See what she remembers about her contact. If anything."

I nodded, and together we left... and it wasn't until we were out of the room that the significance of what I'd just done suddenly struck me. Barely two months ago I'd felt real agony over the ethics of using my Watcher insight to manipulate people to my wishes; now, I'd done precisely the same thing to Eisenstadt without the slightest qualms or hesitation.

For the best of motives, of course: those of protecting Calandra's life. No one can have greater love than to lay down his life for his friends... I let that scripture run over and over through my mind as we walked down the hallway with the two Pravilos. And tried to ignore another saying, nearly as old, nagging at the back of my mind. A saying that spoke of the road to hell... and how that road was paved.