Ruins

CHAPTER 6 Inside the Starship

“I’m coming with you,” said Rigg.

Umbo was not surprised. Rigg might talk about how he was tired of being in charge, but he would never stop thinking that everything was his business.

But Rigg was right, too. Whatever Vadesh had in mind, Loaf should not go alone with him into the mountain, into the starship. Only it wasn’t Rigg who should go with him, it was Umbo, who had been Loaf’s companion during all the time that Rigg was in captivity.

“I’ll do it,” said Umbo. “Not you.”

Rigg looked at him steadily. “Someone should stay outside, so that whatever happens in there doesn’t happen to everybody.”

“Then you stay outside,” said Umbo.

“I’m happy to stay outside,” said Olivenko. “I can wait for Param Sissaminka and explain what’s happening.”

“Good idea,” said Umbo.

“Except that first somebody needs to explain to me what’s happening,” said Olivenko.

“Umbo and I are going into the starship with Loaf and Vadesh,” said Rigg.

“For once can’t I do something without children tagging along?” said Loaf.

Umbo felt slapped.

“I think I should carry the jewels,” said Rigg.

“Whatever we’re going to do with them,” said Loaf, “I think I can do it.”

“You trusted us with the jewels before,” said Umbo. “We didn’t let you down.”

“It’s not you that I don’t trust,” said Rigg.

“It’s me,” said Vadesh. “Ram lied to him so constantly that it’s no wonder he doesn’t trust someone with the same face. I don’t care who holds the jewels.”

“Then I’ll hold them,” said Umbo.

“The last time you had them,” said Rigg, “you hid one.”

“I was experimenting with timeflow,” said Umbo.

“Why not experiment with letting a grownup do a man’s job?” said Loaf.

“And where would we find a grownup?” said Umbo.

Loaf laughed at him. “Such a youthful thing to say. Very refreshing.” He turned to Vadesh. “Lead the way.”

“I’ll wait here for Param,” said Olivenko.

Umbo felt a pang of jealousy. Completely irrational, but the thought of leaving Param alone with this handsome young scholar-soldier bothered him. So Umbo defied his own feelings and simply turned his back and walked toward the door.

“Not that way,” said Vadesh. “It’s farther in.”

“But we’re far from any mountain,” said Umbo.

“We’re already on the shoulder of the mountain,” said Vadesh, “and not all roads are on the surface of the world.”

They walked through a door in the far end of the water room, and found themselves in a huge space filled with machines of inexplicable purpose. They all seemed to be made of the same kind of impervious metal that the outside walls were made of, that the surface of the Tower of O had been made of. Umbo knew that the Tower of O had been attacked in every possible way, not by warriors, but by researchers trying to understand what it was made of. Heat was one of the many things it didn’t respond to. So how could the metal—if it was metal—be poured into molds in order to be shaped into machine parts?

And what did the machines actually make? Huge moving parts were visible, but none of the things they actually worked to make. Umbo wanted to see it moving, partly because he wanted to watch them move, and partly to see what came out of the end of each machine.

Umbo knew he was lagging behind the others, but he could hear their footsteps and they were not far ahead. He would catch up. He just wanted to figure out how this one machine worked.

And then he was aware of someone standing beside him. He turned and saw himself.

The self he saw was bloody, his ear half torn away, his arm broken, his face contorted with pain. As soon as his vision-self saw that he was looking at him, he held up his good arm and whispered, “Stay here. Do nothing.”

And then he was gone.

Umbo’s first impulse was to shout after Rigg and Loaf to stop. But he couldn’t hear their footsteps now. He wasn’t sure where they were, or if they would hear him. His broken, bleeding future self had said to do nothing. The future self presumably cared as much about Loaf and Rigg as Umbo did right now, so if he said to do nothing it was presumably because there was nothing useful to be done. If Umbo couldn’t trust his own future judgment in such a matter, whom could he trust?

How much of nothing was he required to do? Could he go back to Olivenko and warn him? Warn them, if Param had come out of hiding and caught up?

Surely that didn’t count as “something”—he could surely go back.

Yet every instinct pushed him forward, to follow Rigg and Loaf and see what was about to happen to them.

But it might be that nothing would happen. It might be only Umbo himself who was in such danger. Stay here, do nothing. If a future self came back to warn him, Umbo had no choice but to obey.

He stayed in place. He did nothing.

A few minutes later, he heard footsteps. He saw Param coming through the factory, and then Olivenko following her.

“Where did they go?” demanded Param.

“I don’t know,” said Umbo.

“Why aren’t you with them?”

“Because I came back from the future to warn myself not to go on.”

Param paused a moment, blinking slowly while she processed the implications of his statement.

“Do you have any idea why?”

“I only know that I never come back and warn myself unless it’s really important that I do exactly what I tell myself to do,” said Umbo.

“What about me?” demanded Param.

“Whatever the danger is, it probably already passed,” said Umbo.

“Danger?” asked Param.

“Probably?” asked Olivenko, who had just caught up.

“My future self was a mess. Broken arm, ear half gone, bleeding from a lot of places.”

“So you let my brother go on without a warning?” demanded Param.

“I did what I told myself to do,” said Umbo. “My future self could have given warning while we were still together. He came to me the very first moment that I was alone.”

“So the warning was for you,” said Olivenko. “Not Rigg and Loaf.”

“What if your future self is a lying traitor?” asked Param.

“What if your present self is an accusing idiot?” asked Umbo. So much for making a good impression on Param.

“So you’re just going to do what you’re told,” she said. “Hang back, like a coward.”

Resentment got the better of him. “Better than hiding the way you did,” said Umbo. “Turning invisible when there were things to decide. That was so brave of you.”

“If my brother gets hurt because you—”

“If I didn’t warn my friend Rigg,” said Umbo, “it was because he didn’t need a warning.”

“Or because a warning would do no good,” said Olivenko.

“You think Rigg is dead?” demanded Param.

“I think Umbo told us to wait here,” said Olivenko.

“And he’s boss of the expedition now?”

“Not me,” said Umbo. “My future me.”

“He must be from a long time in the future, if he’s smart enough to know what’s best for us to do.”

Umbo stood aside and gestured for her to go on. “By all means, find Rigg and save him, or die trying. I saw the condition my future self was in. You didn’t. So go ahead.”

“Stop it,” said Olivenko. “Neither of you knows anything, but future Umbo knew something, and that’s more than we know, so we’re going to do what he says.”

“You can’t stop me,” said Param.

“Think, Param,” said Olivenko. “You move far slower when you disappear. Whatever danger there is will be over by the time you get there.”

“Get where?” asked Umbo. “I could hear their footsteps, and suddenly I couldn’t. Yet they didn’t turn back to look for me. I think they went into some kind of passage and closed the door behind them.”

“It can’t hurt to look for that passage,” said Olivenko.

“I can think of lots of ways it can hurt,” said Param, “but I’m doing it anyway.” She strode out into the room.

“They were walking that way,” said Umbo, pointing.

“When you last saw them,” said Param.

“They were furtive. Walking near the wall. It’s a door in the wall.”

It turned out to be a stairway leading down into the floor, hidden in the shadows behind a tall piece of machinery.

“They’re looking for a starship, and they go down into the ground?” said Olivenko.

“We should, too,” said Param.

“We should wait,” said Umbo.

“They’re in danger.”

“And we’re safe,” said Umbo.

“How do you know that?”

“Because if it wasn’t safe for us to stay here, my future self would have told me to run like a bunny.”

“So something dangerous is happening down those stairs somewhere, and you’re going to sit here and do nothing?”

“That’s what I told myself to do,” said Umbo, “and I’ve decided to trust myself. Do what you want.”

What she wanted, after fuming and complaining a little longer, was apparently to pace back and forth but never go down the stairs.

Rigg noticed when Umbo fell behind, but he assumed that he would catch up. Rigg felt the same sense of awe at the huge machines, but he knew that if both boys stopped to look at them, Vadesh would be alone with Loaf and that’s what Vadesh wanted. Which meant that was the thing Rigg couldn’t allow to happen.

As usual, thought Rigg. Umbo feels free to be a child, easily distracted from the task at hand, while I keep my mind on what has to be done. But later, Umbo will resent me for taking responsibility.

I don’t take responsibility, I’m just left with responsibility in my hands and no one to help me carry it.

Which wasn’t fair. Loaf was there, wasn’t he? But Loaf was playing the risky game of taking Vadesh at his word, testing him.

At the bottom of the stairs was a tunnel, and in the tunnel there was a kind of wagon, though it had nothing to pull it and no cargo. But there were benches at the front and back, so people were meant to ride. Vadesh stepped onto the wagon and Loaf followed him.

“Umbo’s not here,” said Rigg.

“You wait for him and take the next wagon,” said Vadesh.

Rigg understood immediately that what Vadesh was really saying was good-bye. So he bounded onto the wagon. It was already moving forward when his feet hit the floor, accelerating so quickly that Rigg fell over and slid to the back of the wagon. Vadesh had somehow given the wagon the command to go while Rigg was still standing on the platform. If he had hesitated, if he had tried to call out to Umbo, anything but board the wagon at the instant that he did, Vadesh would have left him behind.

It’s Loaf he wants, because Loaf has the jewels.

Or maybe it’s the other way around—I have something Loaf doesn’t have. Something Vadesh fears. I have knowledge. I was trained by an expendable, and Loaf was not.

What did Father teach me that Vadesh should fear? Whatever it was, Rigg was not aware of it. Everything Rigg could remember had to do either with trapping animals and surviving in the wilderness, or the training in politics, economics, languages, and history that had enabled him to thrive in Aressa Sessamo. If nearly getting killed a dozen times could count as thriving.

And science. Father had taught him biology, physics, astronomy, engineering. As much as Rigg could absorb. Useless things that suddenly became useful when he was getting tested by leading scholars to determine whether he could have access to the library.

Useless things that suddenly became useful. But Father couldn’t have known that I would face such a board of examiners. Could he?

One thing Father did know, though, was that one day I would face another expendable. If every wallfold contained an expendable like Vadesh and Father himself, and if the jewels somehow allowed their owner to control the Walls and take them down, Father must have taught him what he needed to know to deal with the threat of someone like Vadesh.

But all of Rigg’s language and negotiation skills had to do with humans, and Vadesh wasn’t human. He didn’t want what humans wanted, he didn’t fear what humans feared.

What did he fear? Surely the worst thing had already happened, when all the humans in his wallfold had died. What could Rigg do now that would make Vadesh want to be rid of him?

It was a joke that expendables had to obey humans. Father didn’t obey anybody, and Vadesh only pretended to comply with human commands, when he bothered even to pretend. I have no power over him. No way to make him do anything he doesn’t want to do. Because he knows more than me, I never have enough information to give him a command that he can’t weasel his way out of. Even now, we have only his word that this wagon leads where he says he’s taking us, or that the jewels can even do what he says they do.

And it bothered Rigg more and more that the two jewels that mattered—the ones that Vadesh had identified as controlling the Wall of Vadeshfold and the Wall of Ramfold—were clutched in Loaf’s fist instead of being in the bag with the rest of the jewels. It sounded like nonsense, the idea of the jewels being attuned to anyone who had grown up in the wallfold. That seemed wrong. But it was true that Vadesh must have a set of jewels of his own, and he couldn’t do anything with them or he would have done it, so apparently he did need a human to do whatever he was planning to do.

Where was the lie? More to the point, where was the truth hidden within the lie?

Meanwhile, the wagon began to move so fast that Rigg had no concept of their speed. He didn’t know how to measure it. He knew that he could normally walk a league in about an hour; he could run much faster, but in short bursts. This wagon was going so fast that even the fastest horse couldn’t keep up with it. So as the minutes wore on, the tunnel gradually taking them lower and lower, moving in a nearly straight line, Rigg couldn’t begin to guess how far they had traveled, how many leagues beyond the factory where they had boarded the thing.

Yet however fast the walls of the tunnel went by, there was something wrong.

Oh, yes. The wind. There wasn’t any. Moving at this speed should be blowing air past their faces faster than any gale. Yet the air was as still as if they were inside a closet.

Rigg put a hand toward the edge of the wagon. Nothing. No wind. He reached farther, half expecting to reach some invisible barrier. Glass, perhaps, only too clean and pure for him even to see it.

Instead, he reached his fingers just a bit farther and suddenly they were being blown backward. He had to press forward just to keep them in place. He pulled his hand away from the edge, and the wind was gone.

“It’s a field,” said Vadesh. “A shaped irregularity in the universe, a barrier. Air molecules pass through it only slowly, so that our movement doesn’t affect the air inside the field except to make a gradual exchange of oxygen.”

Oxygen. “So we can breathe.”

“Exactly! If the field were simply impenetrable to air, we’d suffocate as we used up the oxygen. Ram taught you well.”

He didn’t teach me about fields. Or about wagons that could move this fast.

“The Wall is a field, too, you said,” Rigg answered.

“Not a physical barrier, though. The Wall is a zone of disturbance. It affects the mental balance of animals, the part of the brain that can feel a coming earthquake or storm. The sense of wrongness. It makes an animal feel that everything that can be wrong is about to go wrong, which fills them with terror. They run away.”

“That’s not how it felt to me,” said Rigg.

“Oh, admit it, that was part of the feeling,” said Vadesh. “But you’re right, humans have deafened or blinded themselves to a lot of that sense, because you depend on reason to process and control your perceptions. Reason cripples you. So you find reasons for feeling that disequilibrium inside the Wall. And the reason is hopelessness, despair, guilt, dread. Everything that prevents you from intelligent action.”

“But we went through it,” said Loaf.

“You went through it before it was there,” said Vadesh. “Cheating.”

“We went back to get Rigg,” said Loaf. “We brought him out.”

“Very brave. But you penetrated only about five percent of the Wall when you did that. The weakest five percent. No, the field does its job very well.”

“So there are different kinds of fields?” asked Rigg.

“Many of them, my young pupil. I can’t believe your supposed father never explained any of this. Why, one-third of the controls of the starship dealt with field creation and shaping and maintenance. No aspect of starflight would be possible without it. We couldn’t even have crashed into this world and created the night-ring without fields.”

“I don’t even wish I knew what you’re talking about,” said Loaf. “I just want this thing to stop moving.”

“When we get there. Not much farther.”

“You crashed into this world,” said Rigg.

“There was no moon,” said Vadesh. “And we needed to hide the starships anyway. By slamming into the planet Garden at just the right angle and velocity, with nineteen starships at once, we were able to slow the rotation of the planet enough to make each day long enough for humans to survive.”

“And you worked all this out?” asked Rigg.

“Oh, not me,” said Vadesh. “That’s not what expendables are for. We don’t have minds capable of the kind of delicate calculation that starflight and major collisions require.”

“So who did?”

“It was done automatically. Starships are equipped that way. What matters is that a collision like that would have reduced the starships to vapor, even though they’re made of fieldsteel. But starships also generate protective fields around themselves that obliterate any mass that tries to collide with the ship. With that field turned on, we never actually collided with anything. The field collided with the planet Garden, and only the stone of planetary crust exploded into dust. Millions of tons of it. Filling the air. Killing most life on the planet. But nothing on the ship itself even got warm, let alone hot enough to explode.”

Rigg thought through what Father had taught him of physics. He remembered how the acceleration of the wagon had knocked him off his feet and slid him backward just a few minutes before. “Stopping that abruptly would pulverize everything on the ship anyway,” said Rigg.

“Another point for Ram as teacher of little boys,” said Vadesh. “The entire starship also dwelt within an inertial bubble. All the energy of our sudden stop was dissipated into the surrounding space. Which accounted for even more of the heat and dust. Fields are everything, boy, and your supposedly loving father taught you nothing about them. I wonder why.”

Vadesh didn’t seem to understand that increasing Rigg’s mistrust of his father only increased his mistrust of Vadesh himself, who was, after all, the same creature, an identical machine. He was assuring Rigg, in effect, that expendables lie. As if he needed more proof of that.

The wagon began to slow.

“I can feel us slowing down,” said Rigg.

“Thank Silbom’s right ear,” said Loaf.

“There’s no reason to install and maintain an inertial bubble field on a mere wagon—it never moves fast enough to need it,” said Vadesh. “Really, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you’re required to do it. Not worth the time or energy.”

The wagon came to a halt.

So did the tunnel. It simply ended. The walls on every side were of smooth stone. There was no door, no sign, not even a loading dock.

Vadesh bounded from the wagon. “Come along, lads,” he said.

“Lads?” said Loaf.

“He thinks he’s making friends with us,” said Rigg.

“He’s a bit of a clown, isn’t he?”

“He wants us to think so,” said Rigg. “Or else he wants us to think that he wants us to think so. I’m not sure how complicated it gets.”

Vadesh—who could hear everything they were saying, Rigg never allowed himself to forget that—was standing on the ground near the end of the tunnel. “Come along, the door only opens for a few moments and I’d hate to have either of you get caught in it when it slides shut.”

As they got off the wagon, it immediately whisked away back down the tunnel.

“No return trip?” asked Loaf.

“I can always call it back,” said Vadesh. “And there are many other ways to make the same journey.” Vadesh turned to face the wall. He said nothing, made no gesture—but he did face the wall. Why, Rigg wondered. Was he communicating some other way?

Apparently so, because the end of the tunnel was suddenly gone. What had seemed to be smooth stone was now a continuation of the tunnel. The wagon could have kept going. Only now, beyond where the tunnel had ended, there was an obvious station, with loading dock, stairway, and other doors, not disguised at all.

Here, though, the stairway went farther down rather than returning toward the surface. They had come down to get to the tunnel at the other end, and had traveled steadily downward since then, if Rigg’s directional sense was at all reliable in a place like this and at such a speed. And yet their destination was lower still.

But they did not take the stairs. “Down,” said Vadesh, and a set of doors opened to reveal a smallish room. Vadesh walked in. Loaf and Rigg followed, and then the doors closed. Rigg could not understand why they would enter such a room, which had no doorway other than the one they had come through.

“It’s an elevator,” said Loaf. “It’s on pulleys. The whole room goes up and down, with counterweights to balance us. Some of the taller buildings in O have them, and a bank in Aressa Sessamo had one, too.”

“Very good,” said Vadesh. “Only there’s no counterweight.”

They plummeted.

“Exhilarating, isn’t it?” asked Vadesh.

Rigg and Loaf were both clutching at the wall, filled with panic.

“Oh, sorry,” said Vadesh. “I forget how sensitive humans can be.”

Suddenly the sensation of falling went away. “Now we have a mild inertial field. You have to understand that humans knew about this sort of thing when we first built the colony. They used to enjoy riding the elevator down without the field. They enjoyed the thrill.”

“Then they weren’t human,” said Loaf.

“Oh, people get used to so many things,” said Vadesh, “if they only give themselves the chance.”

The doors opened. There was a bridge in front of them, spanning a gap of about six meters. On the other side was a smooth, convex surface of fieldsteel, exactly like the surface of the Tower of O.

As they stepped onto the bridge, Rigg looked to left and right, up and down. “It’s the Tower of O, lying on its side,” he said.

“Let’s say that the Tower of O, as you describe it, was probably intended to be a monument to a starship. Not the real thing. Come along. Ship, open!” said Vadesh.

A gap appeared in the side of the ship, right where the bridge ended.

“Welcome to the starship that brought humanity to Garden,” said Vadesh.

“One of nineteen,” said Rigg.

“It began as a single ship,” said Vadesh. “We had an accident. The physics of it is beyond you, I promise you.”

“You never know how much Father taught me,” said Rigg.

“I know he didn’t teach you that, because even the ship’s computers don’t understand it. Nineteen computers brought one ship into the folds of space, but brought it out again in nineteen slightly different locations. Oops.”

“And where on this starship are you taking us?” asked Rigg.

“To the control room. To the place where all the decisions were made. Where Ram Odin plunged the human race toward its first successful colony on an earthlike planet.”

As they walked along narrow passages, Rigg got the distinct impression that something was helping them move—that each step took them farther than it should, that their bodies were somehow lighter here. Another field? Probably.

A door opened and they stepped into a spotlessly clean room, walls and floor and ceiling all the same light-brown color. Along one wall there was what seemed to be a track, rather like the passage that the wagon had run along, only much narrower. There were doors at both ends.

In the middle of the room was a table, about as long as Vadesh was tall. Dangling from the ceiling were three lights, surrounded by what looked like arms or tentacles. Vadesh raised his hand and the lights all moved toward it. Also, a seat emerged from under the table and slid into position in front of the table.

“This is where the ship was controlled?” asked Rigg.

“You see the track there—I know you noticed it, Rigg, you’re such a clever boy. There are really three control centers—one for navigation through space, one for controlling all the systems internal to the ship, and one for field generation. Whichever one the pilot needs is brought in along that track and placed on the table here. Very quick and completely automatic. The pilot sits here and the controls come to him.”

Lies, Rigg was sure of it. The system seemed unwieldy. Why would controls be hidden away? It made no engineering sense.

The table was about the size of a human body—just long enough, just wide enough. Rigg looked up at the arms surrounding the lights. Vadesh was controlling the movements of those arms right now. What was on the ends of the arms? Tools of some kind. Hard to guess their purpose.

“Have a seat,” said Vadesh to Loaf.

“Don’t,” said Rigg.

“Now, Rigg,” said Vadesh. “I thought you said you weren’t in charge of the expedition anymore.”

“It’s not what he’s telling us,” said Rigg.

“How would you know?” asked Loaf. “You’ve never seen a starship. How do you know anything?”

“It makes no sense,” said Rigg.

“Nothing has made any sense since I met you,” said Loaf. “But if this is the way to take down the Wall and get home, then I’m going to sit down.” Loaf sat.

At once the chair moved—but only a little, to take Loaf’s height and weight into account. Then it held still.

“You see?” said Vadesh. “It adjusts to the pilot. Which it thinks you are, since you have a jewel for this starship.”

Rigg wanted to ask Loaf for the jewels, but he didn’t want to test Loaf’s friendship. Nor did he want to find out just how determined Vadesh was to keep them out of Rigg’s possession.

“Shall we bring in the controls for the field generators?” asked Vadesh.

“If that’s what will let me bring down the Walls and get home,” said Loaf.

“You have to hold up the jewels—just hold them up, palm open—and command the starship to bring in the controls.”

“What do I say?” asked Loaf.

“Try, ‘Bring in the field controls, ship,’ ” answered Vadesh.

At that moment Rigg made a connection. Vadesh was telling Loaf to speak to the ship and give it an order. Father had taught Rigg a special command language. He had said it was a way to rule the stars. It wasn’t a real language at all, of course. Just a series of numbers and letters, which Rigg had had to memorize and repeat every few days, then weeks, then years. Father wouldn’t tell him how they might rule the stars, and no matter how many times Rigg repeated the sequences that Father called “words” in this command language, the stars never did anything. Rigg had called him on this once, and Father had looked at him as if he were a child—which he was—and said, pityingly, “It doesn’t work here,” as if Rigg should have known that.

Now Rigg was inside a starship. And an expendable just like Father was telling a human to issue commands.

Loaf had already spoken the command while Rigg was thinking back and making the connection. One of the doors opened and a low cart slid in along the track, then transferred automatically to the table in front of where Loaf was sitting.

Loaf looked at the array of instruments rising from the control panel; as he did, he lowered the hand holding the jewels, but kept it open.

Rigg stepped closer, as if to look at the controls as well. He even pointed toward something with his left hand, reaching across Loaf’s body to do it. “I know this part,” murmured Rigg. As he did, he grasped the jewels in his right hand.

Maybe the business about the jewels had all been nonsense, but maybe not. Rigg wanted them in his hand when he spoke the words of command. And Loaf made no protest.

Father had told him that the first and most important word was named “Attention,” and Rigg began to recite it.

“F-F-1-8-8-zero-E-B-B-7-4—”

Vadesh glanced down, saw that Loaf no longer held the jewels, and then reached out to the control panel and touched a certain spot on the side.

The whole top of the control panel flipped back out of the way, revealing an open box.

“3-3-A-C-D-B-F-F—”

In the box was something alive. A facemask.

He’s going to flip it up onto one of us, Rigg knew at once. He could try to prevent it, but that was useless, Vadesh was too strong, he had proven that already. So all Rigg could do was finish the word of Attention. For it was clear to him now that this was what Vadesh had feared—that Rigg would start reciting this sequence while holding the jewels. Beginning the word had prompted Vadesh to act; finishing the word was the only thing that Rigg could do.

So when Vadesh did indeed flick out a hand, quicker than either Loaf or Rigg could react, Rigg did not let it stop him or mix up the word.

“1-zero-5. Attention.” Rigg hadn’t known whether that was just a repetition of the name or part of the word, but he said it all just as Father had taught him to recite it.

The facemask flipped up out of the box and slapped wetly onto Loaf’s face. Loaf’s whole body stiffened, shuddered.

“Ready,” said a gentle voice that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.

“4-A-A-3, I am in command,” said Rigg.

“You are in command,” said the nowhere voice.

Vadesh pushed Loaf backward off the chair and lunged toward Rigg.

“Protect me from the expendable!” cried Rigg.

Vadesh stopped instantly, still posed in mid-lunge.

Loaf lay on the floor against the back wall. His face was completely covered by the facemask.

“2-F-F-2. Information. What is this room?”

“Revival and medical chamber,” said the voice.

“What is its purpose?”

“To bring humans out of stasis and revive them. To treat any maladies that have arisen.”

“Can it treat my friend Loaf?”

“I do not know.”

Rigg had no idea who he was talking to. “Who does know?”

“I do not know.”

A machine. The voice had to come from a machine. Probably the ship’s computers. One of the nineteen. Or all of them. Whatever it was, it had power over the expendable, who was still posed where he had stopped, one hand on the seat, the other on the box that had contained the facemask.

“How can you find out whether you can help Loaf?”

“Identify Loaf and let me examine him.”

“He’s the only other human in the room,” said Rigg. “You have my permission to examine him.”

“He is too far from the table,” said the voice.

“I can’t lift him onto that,” said Rigg.

There was Vadesh. Vadesh could lift him up easily. But Vadesh was only held in place by the ship’s computer, if that’s what the voice was. “Who are you?” asked Rigg.

There was no answer.

“2-F-F-2. Whose voice am I hearing?”

“This is the voice of the composite decision-making module of the human interface unit.”

“This expendable is between Loaf and the table, and there’s this box on the table that’s in the way. What can you do about that without waking up the expendable?”

“Nothing,” said the voice.

Rigg thought again. Maybe there was something wrong with the way he had phrased the command.

No, he needed a new command. “7-B-B-5-zero, Analyze. How can I get Loaf to where you can safely examine him, without letting this expendable harm him or me in any way?”

In reply, Vadesh abruptly stood up and wordlessly touched the box. It closed, then slid back onto the cart, which zipped along the track and out the door. Then Vadesh strode to Loaf, lifted him easily, and laid him on the table.

“You’re making a mistake,” said Vadesh mildly.

“Keep the expendable silent,” said Rigg.

Vadesh said nothing more.

“Make him stand back against the wall and turn his back to me,” said Rigg. He didn’t want Vadesh out of his sight, but he also didn’t want him watching.

Vadesh did exactly what Rigg had demanded.

I can’t command Vadesh directly, Rigg now understood, but the ship’s computers can. By controlling them, I control the expendable.

“Please examine my friend,” said Rigg.

All the floating lights plunged downward toward the table where Loaf lay. The arms reached down and around so rapidly that Rigg could not follow their movements, though he could see that some of them pulled Loaf’s clothing from his body while others poked him or slid along the surface of his skin.

Almost at once, two of the lights homed in on the facemask, while the other continued the scan of the rest of Loaf’s now-naked body. Probes reached down to sample the facemask, which seemed to recoil from some of the arms, but then flexed upward toward some of the others, as if trying to catch and absorb them. Those probes retracted, the arms taking them away to renew their approach from other angles.

Some of the arms tried to pry up the edges of the facemask. That was the first time Loaf made any kind of reaction. His body twitched as if he were startled, and a sharp high cry came from under the facemask.

“Can he breathe?” Rigg asked.

“There is no open passage for his lungs to take in air, but his blood is fully oxygenated,” said the voice. “This is the parasite called ‘facemask’ and it is irrevocably attached to your friend Loaf. It has already penetrated his brain so deeply that it cannot be extracted without causing seizures and death. But it has taken over oxygenation. Your friend will not die.”

Rigg was tempted to say, “Kill them both,” because he believed that was what Loaf would want.

But Loaf’s life did not belong to Rigg; nor did it belong entirely to Loaf. It belonged in part to Leaky, and if she were in the room, Rigg doubted that she would decide so quickly that Loaf’s life should end here and now.

“If Loaf were to die,” Rigg asked, “what would the facemask do?”

“Transfer to another host, if one could be found quickly enough, or it would die.”

“You’re familiar with this parasite?” asked Rigg.

“The expendable has been breeding them for a hundred thousand generations. This is type Jonah 7 sample 490.”

“What was the expendable breeding for?”

“I don’t know.”

Wrong question. “What are the traits of this facemask type that makes it different from other facemask types?”

“The Jonah strain has been the expendable’s sole focus for eight thousand years. Type Jonah 7 emerged more than three thousand years ago. This type differed from the rejected types by being able to reach adulthood without a host, by being exceptionally quick to attach to the host, by being prepared to recognize and bond closely with a human brain, by being ready to co-metabolize with human blood of any type, and by bonding with higher-function parts of the brain, as well as the brain root and spinal column.”

Rigg tried to think these things through. Vadesh believed that symbiosis between facemasks and humans was good, but he had also talked about the facemasks working for instead of against civilized behavior.

“7-B-B-5-5,” said Rigg. “Prediction. What will happen to Loaf if this facemask remains attached to him?”

“He will survive.”

“Beyond that?”

“Jonah-type facemasks have never been tested on humans. There is no data.”

“And you don’t know how Vadesh expected this to turn out?”

“Vadesh is dead,” said the voice.

Rigg looked at the expendable. “He can’t die. Can he?”

“You call the expendable Vadesh. He cannot die.”

“So whom did you mean when you said Vadesh is dead?”

“The founder of this colony. The expendables call each other by the name of the wallfold. This is Vadeshfold. Now I understand you. No, I do not know Vadesh’s expectations. He used us for storing data but not for analysis beyond a primitive level. He did not discuss or share his thinking with us.”

“Will Loaf be safe if I leave him here?”

“He will need nutrition within a few hours. Would you like me to supply nutrition?”

“Yes,” said Rigg.

“Waste elimination as well?”

When Rigg said yes, arms began to attach devices to Loaf’s body.

“Can you keep this expendable here, immobile?”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“Forever.”

“Then keep him here, immobile, until I tell you to do otherwise.”

“Yes.”

“Now tell me, am I controlling you because I knew the codes, or because I have these jewels?”

“What jewels?” asked the voice.

Rigg opened his hand. A light moved toward his hand and an arm scanned the jewels.

“These are command module jewels. The red teardrop controls the starship of Ramfold. The pale yellow pentacle controls the starship of Vadeshfold.”

“But right now you are obeying me because I spoke to you in command language.”

“You said the codes,” said the voice. “You are acting commander of this vessel.”

“Acting commander,” said Rigg. “Who is the real commander?”

“Ram Odin,” said the voice. “He is dead.”

“So as the acting commander, I’m the only commander, right?”

“Unless someone else knows the code.”

“Does Vadesh know the code? The expendable?”

“I know whom you mean by Vadesh now. Yes, he knows the code.”

“Can he use it to control the ship?”

The voice seemed to Rigg to be almost offended. “Expendables do not control us. We control the expendables.”

“Not very well,” said Rigg.

“Your judgment is misapplied,” said the voice. “Expendables are designed to have almost complete freedom of movement and judgment. They can draw on our data but we do not interfere with their decisions until and unless we are ordered to by a human commander.”

“Vadesh told us this was the control room,” said Rigg.

“That was not true.”

“Is there a control room? A place where I can use this jewel?”

“Yes.”

“Can you take me there?”

At once Vadesh came alive, turning from the wall and heading for the door through which Rigg and Loaf had entered the room. “Follow the expendable,” said the voice.

After one last look at Loaf, lying on the table under the lights, hoses attached to him, the facemask covering his face, Rigg followed Vadesh out into the corridor.