The Mind Pool

Chapter 16

Chan had been on Ceres before, briefly, in transit from Earth to Horus. At that time, Kubo Flammarion had taken him to his office, shown him the big displays, and let him play with the buttons and switches. Chan had skipped for five minutes around the planets and moons known to the Stellar Group; yawned; and asked for a cold drink.

Now he was there again, in front of the same console. Tatty Snipes sat on one side of him. Kubo Flammarion was on the other, scratching his head in amazement. Instead of being bored by the controls, or idly playing with them, Chan was studying the board and asking questions. Loads of them.

“What about this one?” He had flicked fast through a series of images and now paused at one of them. It was a low-orbit satellite view of a dreary gray landscape, and it showed a lot more detail than most. “It’s been flagged.”

Flammarion nodded. “Certainly has. That’s Barchan. You’ll need to know all about it, once you pass the entrance examination. The first training courses with all team members present are held there.

“Looks — what is the right word to use? — parched?’

“Sure is. Dry as a bone, almost all of it. It’s a desert world in the Eta Cass system — that’s where the Pipe-Rillas come from. Barchan is two worlds sunward of S’kat’lan, their home planet.”

“Can I live there without a suit? Is it — what is the word for that?”

“Habitable. Yes, you’ll be able to breathe the air — just — but it’s so hot you’ll wear a suit almost all the time. Want to take a look at it from ground level?”

Chan shook his head. “Later.” His eyes were already fixed on another image and his fingers danced across the board.

Tatty caught Flammarion’s eye. Get a load of that.

When Chan had no more than an infant’s mentality, there had been nothing wrong with his coordination. Now he was operating the control board faster than Flammarion.

The older man scowled and shook his head. It didn’t fool Tatty. Kubo Flammarion had no children, and never expected to. He could not conceal his pleasure and parental approval when Chan did something new and impressive.

Here’s another one that’s been flagged,” said Chan. “Where is it?”

The screen showed a verdant world, one where even the oceans were covered with a dense carpet of vegetation.

“That’s Dembricot, in the Tinker system.” Flammarion moved closer. “Move over a bit, and I’ll show you why the training supervisors flagged it for you.” He leaned across, linked in to a surface camera, and zoomed across to take a close-up view of a building nestled among tall, spiky ferns. “See that? Main training center for Team Alpha, before they headed out.”

“Team Alpha? Did you tell me about that?” Chan was worried.

Flammarion glanced questioningly at Tatty.

“Don’t worry, Chan, you’re not forgetting things,” she said. “I never mentioned it. My fault — but there s been so much to pack in.”

“Team Alpha is the first Pursuit Team to complete training,” said Flammarion. “Leah Rainbow is part of it, along with three aliens.”

“What does the name mean?”

“Nothing much.” Flammarion shrugged. “Just that it’s the first team to go out. Leah hates the name, says she’s going to change it soon as she gets the chance.”

“So Leah was right there, in that building.” Chan eyed it hungrily. “I wish she was there still, so we could use your — comm-un-i-cator? — and I could talk with her.”

“Sorry. They left Dembricot days ago. You see, Chan, they’re all done with their training. Leah came through it in fine shape, just the way you will when your time comes. Now it’s the real thing. The team’s in high orbit around a planet called Travancore. The Morgan Construct is supposed to be hiding away there, so at the moment they re not allowed closer than a million kilometers. You know, maybe I can link us to their ship — at the very least I should be able to get the one-way visuals they’re sending back to base.”

Flammarion rattled at the controls with black-nailed fingers, cursing as a mystifying succession of grainy images fled across the screens. “Rotten cheap equipment,” he said, as the picture finally steadied. “Rotten tight-fisted politicians. That’s probably as good as we’ll get. Low signal bandwidth, see.”

“Bandwidth?”

“Take too long to explain now. Just remember that low bandwidth usually means we get only so-so voice communication and a lousy picture or no picture. Like that.”

A flickering black and white image filled the display.

“No color either,” said Flammarion. “Can’t get realtime color with low bandwidth. Make the most of it. That’s a long shot of Travancore, coming from the pursuit team’s ship.’

They were again seeing the surface of a planet under high magnification, but this time from a ship far away. At first sight it was a repeat of Dembricot, a dense, horizon-to-horizon carpet of vegetation. A closer look showed differences on the speckled screen. Instead of being flat and uniform, the surface of Travancore pushed up into millions of small hillocks and hummocks, each one only a few hundred meters across.

“See ’em?” said Flammarion. “Whole planet’s like that. Pretty odd place, and I’ve seen some. Those hills are solid plant life. Surface gravity is low, but not all that low. Somehow, though, vegetation can grow six kilometers deep.

Vertical jungle, layer after layer after layer of it. Don t ask me why it doesn’t all come crashing down.”

“How can a ship land there?”

“Very fair question. It can’t — not in the usual way. There’s no solid surface to put a ship down on, and no way it could stay in one place if it tried to land. It would sink down and down, Lord-knows-how far before packed vegetation could hold up the weight. So a ship has to hover at the top layer, and drop off people and cargo, and then hit right up again.”

“I never heard of a ship doing that,” said Tatty.

“So you’re learning something as well as Chan. Flammarion was fiddling with another part of the control board as he spoke. “You can both see why Travancore makes such a hell of a good hiding place — we can’t see much with a space survey, and we can’t do a mechanized ground survey. But somewhere under all that mess, if you believe the Angels, there’s a surviving Morgan Construct.”

“Leah will go there?”

“Not until they know the planet a whole lot better — maybe in another week or two. But eventually Leah and her team have to find the Construct and destroy it.” A series of clicks came from the communicator, while a pattern of red squares appeared in the upper left corner of the display.

“Virtue rewarded,” said Flammarion. “I put in that tracer, but I didn’t really expect success. That s the signal I.D. from Team Alpha itself — we’re in contact with the ship, not just tapping the data stream they’re sending back to base.”

“You mean I can talk to Leah?”

“If our luck holds.” Flammarion started to complete the sequence. “I told her that you’d be on-line at this end.”

“Wait a minute.” Chan stood up and stared at the screen. He began to breathe very rapidly.

“And here she is.”

Flammarion had taken no notice of Chan’s request to wait. He had just managed a pretty neat trick of realtime signal patching, and he was rather pleased with himself. He turned to explain to Chan what he had done, and found himself looking at a rapidly retreating back. “Hey, where are you going? I’ve got her on the line with me right now.”

“Chan?” Leah’s dark countenance flickered onto the screen. “Chan, is that really you? This is wonderful.” The camera panned across the room and she looked increasingly puzzled. “Chan, where are you? I’ve been longing to talk to you ever since the moment I got the news.”

Tatty came forward and stood in front of the scanning camera. “I’m sorry, Leah. This is Tatty. I ought to have guessed that this might happen. Chan’s here, and he’s doing fine. But he finds it hard to talk to you.”

“Hard to talk to me?” The picture quality was too poor to read subtleties of Leah’s expression, but her voice was bewildered. “Tatty, I’ve been talking to Chan since he was practically in diapers. I can talk to him and understand him better than anyone else breathing.” The voice hardened. “What have you and Flammarion and Mondrian done to him? For all your sakes, he’d better be all right. Because if he’s not, I’ll come back from this place and scrag every one of you.”

“Calm down.” Tatty knew better than to smile and joke when Leah was in this mood. “I told you, Chan is all right. Better than all right, he’s so smart now he frightens us. And I can tell you exactly what’s wrong with him. It’s you. He finds it hard to talk to you — really — because he’s embarrassed.”

“Spacefluff!” Leah shook dark hair clear of her eyes. “Get your head screwed on, Tatty Snipes. I said I’ve known Chan since he was in diapers, but that’s only half of it. Since I was six years old, we’ve eaten together, and cried together, and slept together, and bathed together. Everything, from the first day I took him over down in the Gallimaufries. He was just like my own baby.”

“I’m sure he was,” said Tatty dryly. She was having her own “problems with this conversation. “But he’s not your baby now. He’s not anyone’s baby. He’s a man.”

It went right past Kubo Flammarion, but Leah caught it in a second. “Chan? You mean somebody—”

“Yes.”

“Who was it. Do you know who — ”

“Yes.” Tatty turned to Flammarion, who had listened to the exchange with total incomprehension. “Kubo, would you please go and bring Chan back here. Leah really needs to talk to him.”

As he left she turned rapidly to face the camera. “I was the somebody. I think you guessed that. And it wasn’t the way you think, an experienced woman seducing an innocent boy. It happened right after a Stimulator session, the one that made the big change. Leah, he needed somebody — any somebody. No, I don’t mean that. He needed somebody, but what he wanted was you. He spoke your name to me as though I was you. Maybe he even thought I was you.”

Leah’s image stared stonily out of the screen. “I see.”

“I know, Leah. I know just how you must be feeling.”

“No.” Leah shook her head. “You sure as hell don’t know how I’m feeling. You can’t. For all those years, ever since we were little children, I looked after both of us. As I grew up I had my own secret hope. I dreamed that Chan would somehow become intelligent, and grow up too, and we would become lovers.

“That was my fantasy, and by the time I was twelve I knew it could only be fantasy. He was the little boy who would never grow up. I could love Chan, but for that kind of love, sexual love, I would have to look somewhere else.” The anger faded from Leah’s voice and was replaced by a wistful tone. “There was no trouble finding sex, you see. There never is. But it wasn’t what I’d dreamed of. And now you tell me that the dream came true — but it was you and Chan, not me and Chan …”

Kubo Flammarion was entering the room, trailing a reluctant Chan along with him. But as they arrived in camera range, Leah was suddenly gone from the screen.

“Here he is,” said Flammarion. He stared at the empty display. “Well, blast it. Now where did she go?”

Tatty swiveled to face him. “Leah had to run. Her pursuit team is meeting. Let’s forget it, Kubo, it won’t work today.” She turned to Chan. I spoke to Leah. She sends you all her love, and she says she can’t wait until she has a chance to see you.”

Chan blushed with pleasure, a flood of pink across fair cheeks. “She said that? I wish I could have said the same thing to her.”

“You will. But she couldn’t stay. The program out there is really strict.”

“And it’ll get stricter,” added Flammarion, “the closer they get to descent to Travancore and the hunt for the Construct. But you shouldn’t be looking at that now, Chan — you ought to be learning all you can about Barchan, because that’ll be your next stop.”

He winked at Tatty. He didn’t know quite what was happening, but he sensed that somehow she had carried them through an awkward situation. Now it was time to get Chan thinking about something else.

Flammarion keyed in the sequence to take them back to the first image.

“Barchan,” he said. “Take a good look at it.”

The scene changed, and he leaned back in confusion. Instead of the heated dust-ball that would be Chan’s training site, the screen displayed the face of Esro Mondrian.

He nodded casually at Flammarion. “Sorry, Captain. I came in on override. I need to talk with Princess Tatiana.” He smiled at Tatty with no trace of embarrassment. “Congratulations, Princess. You did it. I knew you would. And to you, Chan” — he inclined his head — “welcome to Ceres. From all that I hear you’re going to be an outstanding member of the next Pursuit Team.”

“Which means you win your bet,” said Tatty bitterly. “I guess that’s all you care about.”

Mondrian stared at her with a surprised expression. “That’s not true, Princess, and you know it. We can talk about all that later. I called to say that I’ve arranged for us to have dinner tonight, and you’ll have the chance to meet an old friend.”

“I have no friends on Ceres — unless it’s Chan and Kubo.”

“Wait and see.” Mondrian was smiling again. “I’ll come over there and pick you up at seven. Dinner will be just the four of us: you, me, Luther Brachis — and Godiva Lomberd.”

“Godiva!” But before she could do more than say the name, Mondrian vanished from the screen. In his place were the swirling dust-clouds and umber sky of Barchan. Tatty stared at them, her fists tight-clenched.

“Damn you, Esro Mondrian.” She swung to Flammarion. “Damn that man. He ignores me for months. Then he thinks he can call up and suggest dinner, just like that, as though nothing has happened. Well, no way. I’ll see him in hell before I’ll see him at dinner.”

Tatty paused in her outburst. She had been talking to Flammarion, and so she had only just noticed Chan’s face. It was white and staring. “Chan! Are you all right?”

“Who was that man?” His voice was a whisper. “Who?”

“Him?” Flammarion, concentrated on Tatty, had not noticed the change in Chan. “He’s my boss, that’s who. Commander Esro Mondrian, head of the whole Morgan Construct operation. You want to meet him? You will, soon as your training program gets going.”

Chan was nodding. “Yes,” he said softly. His hands were clasped as tightly as Tatty’s. “I would like to meet Commander Mondrian — very much.” He glanced over to Tatty. “He wants you to go to dinner.”

“I know. I’m not going. Damn the man.”

Chan’s stare at her was more probing, an alien expression overwriting his mouth and innocent eyes. “I think you will, Tatty, he said at last. He nodded. “Yes, I think that you will.”