The Mind Pool

Chapter 23

Measured on any of the standard scales of human intelligence, Luther Brachis would score in the top tenth of one percent. He always dismissed that fact as of trivial importance. Success in his job was not a function of intelligence. At least three other qualities were far more critical.

They were the three P’s: Persistence, Paranoia, and Persuasiveness. And when Lotos Sheldrake pointed out that persistence was no more than Luther’s word for pigheadedness, and that extreme paranoia was more likely to be a component of failure than success, he just laughed. According to Luther Brachis the fourth important quality, not easily captured in a single word, was the ability to know which of the other three to apply in any given situation.

The first move to counter the strange legacy of the Margrave had been taken even before Luther was carried away from Adestis headquarters for medical treatment.

It was clear that he had been attacked by an Artefact, one that Fujitsu had chosen to make in his own image. It was dead, but there could be dozens more. They might be stored anywhere in the solar system, and they might look nothing like the Margrave. It was quite possible that the Artefacts did not contain any of Fujitsu’s own DNA, though Luther’s own assessment of the Margrave’s personality made him think otherwise. The Margrave surely wanted to be involved in his own revenge, in the only way possible. So Fujitsu would have used much of his DNA, regardless of the Artefact’s external appearance.

Which left the delicate and difficult problem: How could Brachis defend himself against future attacks?

He was now willing to acknowledge the truth of Fujitsu’s claim; the other man’s arm was indeed long, and it was reaching for Luther Brachis beyond the grave.

The case of Earth had been handled easily. Through the Quarantine service there was information on all individuals shipping up from Earth. It was easy to set tracers on every one of them, and make sure that none approached within a kilometer without triggering his alarm system.

But suppose that an Artefact had been stored elsewhere? Two off-Earth facilities had to be checked: the Enceladus catacombs, and the Hyperion Deep Vault.

As soon as Brachis was released from the hospital he set out to examine both possibilities. It was a task that he proposed to carry out personally. Godiva had tried to get him to delegate, arguing that he was still weak from his injury. Brachis would not listen.

“This gets my personal attention. Fujitsu deserves no less because he is one of humanity’s unsung geniuses. You can come along with me, if you want to.”

Godiva shivered, a trembling of rosy flesh. “Not for a fortune! I’ll travel with you, but I won’t go down into the vaults. All those horrible frozen semi-corpses — and maybe some of them not even real people! That’s not for me, Luther.”

Brachis knew better than to argue with Godiva on such things. He went ahead. The catacombs of Enceladus were relatively small and very well organized. He was able to inspect them from end to end in one marathon session, and at the end of it felt comfortable that there were no future surprises in store for him there. But he knew that the Vault of Hyperion was going to be another matter entirely.

Early explorers of the solar system had more or less ignored Hyperion. The seventh major satellite of Saturn was a lumpy, uneven hunk of rock, whose dark and cratered exterior suggested that it was the oldest surface in the whole Saturnian retinue of moons. There were few volatiles of any kind, little water, and probably no interesting minerals. So it had been a no-hope old explorer, on his last trip out before his lungs rotted and caved, who first explored the Hyperion meteorite craters. Raxon Yang had discovered an odd structure at the bottom of one of them, a ragged-edged tunnel that seemed to zigzag deep below the moon s battered surface.

Old Yang had nothing better to do. He followed it, down and down: three kilometers — four kilometers — five kilometers, past the point of sanity and past any hope of useful metal deposits. At last, seven kilometers below the surface, he came to the upper face of the Yang Diamond.

At the time he had no idea what he had found. The tunnel at the lower end was only a meter across, hardly enough to wield his instruments. He knew that it was some form of crystallized carbon all right, as soon as his tools found it hard to cut and he made the first assay. But that was all he knew. Yang carved out a half-meter sample, as big as he could handle, and dragged it slowly back to the surface for inspection. On the way he set up his claim marker and the usual array of booby traps. The chance that anyone else would come along for years was slim indeed, but habits die hard.

It was diamond. Clear, pure diamond. Raxon Yang headed back to Ceres. That was in the early days, when the reconstruction of the planetoid was still a dream for the future. Ceres was on the frontier, a sprawling and violent trade center for the system beyond the Belt.

Raxon Yang hawked fragments of his sample to the assortment of crooks and villains who controlled the investment capital supply on Ceres. They tried all the usual techniques — swapping his samples for others, trying to trick him into revealing the location of his find, telling him that the diamond was of inferior quality and hardly worth the trouble of mining.

Old Yang had heard it all before. He waited. Finally they came around and gave him what he needed in exchange for a thirty percent interest in the claim. Yang completed formal filing, bought equipment, hired specialists, and set off on a devious and complex trajectory to Hyperion.

And still Yang did not know what he had found. The analyses had confirmed that the sample was diamond of the finest and purest water, perfectly transparent and free of all faults and discolorations. He had naturally emphasized that in his sales arguments to the backers: here was a carbonaceous body (he did not tell them which body), struck by a high-velocity planetoid with an impact that generated great heat and tremendous pressure. The result: a large diamond.

But how big was large?

Raxon Yang really had no idea. He didn’t put much stock in his own sales pitch — that was meant for the investors. Down in his crater there might be a diamond ten or twenty meters across, more than enough to make a nice profit for everyone.

He learned the truth on his second descent, when he turned on the seismic analysis tools. The Yang Diamond had the overall shape of a forty-legged octopus. Its head, seven kilometers below the moon s surface, was almost spherical and fourteen kilometers across. The legs ran out and down, each one half a kilometer wide and thirty to forty kilometers long.

Raxon Yang collapsed in the tunnel when the probes revealed the extent of his find. He was carried back to the ship, tied down on a bunk, and flown to Luna for medical treatment — the best medical treatment that the solar system could offer, because Raxon Yang was now its wealthiest citizen.

Two years later he was dead, murdered by the diamond cartel. It was done for revenge, rather than gain, because he had unintentionally ruined them. The Yang Diamond contained ten million times as much high-quality crystallized carbon as every other known source combined.

The old explorers never married, and Raxon Yang was no exception. At the moment of his death, the squabble over ownership and inheritance began. Would-be illegitimate offspring popped up everywhere from Mercury to Neptune. If all the claims were valid, Raxon Yang would have been engaged in sex for every waking moment of his life.

The lawyers feasted for twenty-seven years. At the end of that time, three hundred and eighty-four valid claimant relatives (and no direct descendants of Raxon Yang) were recognized. Each was assigned ownership of one region of the diamond, with separate rights to mine it. None declined to do so in favor of preservation.

Mining began, and went on with frantic greed. The descendants of the original three hundred and eighty-four split the regions further. Over the generations and over the centuries, the owners proliferated: thousands, tens of thousands, finally millions. Boundary surfaces were carefully drawn and ownership rights observed.

Four centuries later, it was all over. The Yang Diamond was gone, divided into a trillion separate fragments and dispersed across the system. But once the diamond had been mined out of any volume, that space became available for general occupation and rental. In place of the Yang Diamond sat a polyglot, polyfunctional melange of industries, the Hong Kong of the 26th century.

Of course, the Vault of Hyperion no longer exported diamond — for there was none to export. Instead it operated its own manufacturing industries from imported raw materials, and showed a degree of independence of central government that exceeded any civilization in the system. The storage vaults located in the major tentacles had an unmatched reputation, but they followed their own rules and they took little notice of any edicts from Ceres. In another fine display of idiosyncrasy, the colonists of the Deep Vault had banned the Mattin Link from use anywhere in their domain. When Luther Brachis went to Hyperion, he was able to Link only as far as Titan. After that he was obliged to travel the rest of the way on a laden cargo vessel. It was transporting food concentrates to the Vault residents. Despite the denials of the crew, it stank.

Brachis cursed and grumbled. Godiva took it all in her stride, wearing formal gowns for every dinner and dazzling the ship s crew with her ineffable beauty. Luther could not take his eyes from her, and somehow he was not jealous of the other men’s stares.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come with me?” he asked, on the last leg of their journey before his descent into the black depths of the Vault.

Godiva shook her head. “If you force me to, I will. But I told you I don’t want to, even before we left Ceres. I’m afraid of what I might find there.” She took his right hand in hers, inspecting it closely. The skin on the emerging fingers and thumb was soft and delicate, and the first dark imprint of nails was forming on the tips. “Please be careful, Luther. You don’t want another experience like the one that did this.”

Brachis said nothing. He would tell Godiva Lomberd anything she wanted to hear, but in his own mind there was no reassurance. He had thought about the Margrave a great deal since the Adestis encounter. Although that cunning and inventive mind demanded every respect, not even Fujitsu could see in detail what lay beyond the grave. The Margrave had not known how or when he would die, or in what circumstances. It called for an unusual intellect to make any plans for vengeance from within the tomb, but such plans could only operate in terms of probabilities — how, who, where, when? Unless Luther became sloppy, all the advantage lay with him.

The Margrave was a chess master. So was Brachis. They would both look many moves ahead, but now Luther had the supreme advantage of real-time inputs. With the catacombs of Enceladus disposed of, he had concluded that the Margrave’s preferred off-Earth haven for his other Artefacts had to be the Hyperion Vault.

The descent passed through many levels. Brachis looked carefully around him as they went down, noting the safety points and shelters. Three blow-outs and nine thousand deaths in thirteen years had made the Vault inhabitants super-cautious. Each level had its own system of locks and deadman switches.

Below the seventeenth level the grey rock walls of Hyperion’s silicon interior were left behind. To assure their own survival, the original miners had employed non-commercial impure diamond as supporting walls, buttresses, and columns. Lit by the cold light of closed ecology bioluminescent spheres, the Deep Vault was a sinister grotto of light and color. The green-white glow of marine electrophores scattered from yellow and red diamond crystals, and the whole visible spectrum shattered at sharp comers and edges.

Down forever, layer after layer, on through the jumbled settlements. The guide was an emaciated woman with a bent back and drooping shoulders. At last she paused at a branch point and gestured downwards. “Storage starts here. Well be joined by a coldtank supervisor. How much do you want to see?’

He had already answered that question, and clearly she had not believed him. “Everything.”

“Take a long time, even if you only want to look. Do you just want to look?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

She nodded. Other men and women had followed her through the coldtanks. She knew what they usually wanted. “Let’s go. Don’t talk price with the supervisor. We’ll sort all that out when we’re finished.”

The slow drift through the stacks began. Brachis insisted on seeing every chamber and examining each ID and storage unit.

It took three days. The tanks had not been laid out in logical or time-sequenced order. Even Brachis, familiar with the wilderness of interior Ceres, felt at times that the Deep Vault was even more convoluted. It was amazing to see that the supervisor knew how to navigate every dim-lit corridor and tunnel, without a computer guide.

At the end, Brachis handed his companion a list. It contained seven identifications. “These. What will it take to transfer them to my full custody?”

She managed to appear startled. Just possibly she was. “You mean transfer permanently ?”

“I mean exactly that. With no trace left in the Vault records.”

“Impossible.”

“I was told that in the Deep Vault nothing is impossible. How much?”

She rubbed at her left eye, where the reddened lid drooped to match her wilting shoulders. “Stay here. Don t move, and don’t talk to anybody even if they want to.”

She was back in less than an hour. “It may be doable. But we don’t use trade crystals.”

Brachis said nothing.

“We do need volatiles, though,” she went on. “And we’ve been having trouble with permits. If you could arrange a shipment in from the Harvester …”

“No problem. But you’ve got no Link Exit here on Hyperion.”

“Delivery to Iapetus, we’ll worry about transfer from there. Ten thousand tons, FOB Kondoport on Iapetus.”

“That’s a high price. I won’t know what I have until they’re out of cold storage.”

“Not our worry. Once they’re out, they’re yours. Records here won’t show they ever existed, so don’t think you can bring them back. Once they’re warm they rot, unless you bring them all the way back to consciousness. So you take them wherever you want. And you pay shipping charges. Far as we’re concerned, once they re out of the Vault they’re gone .”

Brachis weighed his options, and decided that he didn’t have any. Even if six out of seven were false alarms, he could not risk missing that seventh one. As for shipping charges, he did not intend that anything he took from the storage tanks would ever leave Hyperion. If Godiva asked, she would be told that the search for Margrave Artefacts on Hyperion had drawn a blank.

“How soon after I place the order for volatiles do I get them?”

“Soon as you want. Let me watch when you file the order with the Harvester, and you can take them with you right away. All seven.” She smiled, a radiant, gap-toothed smile that sent a tremor through Luther’s hardened soul. “They’ll be all yours, Commander — to do just what you like with.”