The Mind Pool

Chapter 31

The Mattin Link blurs the definition of the word “simultaneous,” so much so that the Angels have become the ultimate arbiters of time disputes. According to their standards, at the moment when Chan was staring incredulous at the apparition of Leah Rainbow in Travancore’s abyssal tunnels, Esro Mondrian stood in a corridor deep in the Earth warrens. He was at the door of Tatiana Snipes’ apartment. Three times he had lifted his hand to insert a key in the coded lock, and thrice he had hesitated and pulled back.

Tatty watched through the hidden screen. A mystery. What was wrong with Mondrian? Thoughtful and brooding, yes; indecisive, never.

At the fourth attempt he completed the sequence and the door opened. Mondrian stepped inside and stared around him. Less than a year ago this had been his favorite haven. He knew he could come here, shut out the cares of the whole of deep space from the Dry Tortugas to the Perimeter, and do his deepest thinking and planning.

Tatty had respected that need for privacy, for inner space. She knew when he was working, knew when he needed relaxation. She never intruded at the wrong time. She had been hooked on Paradox, its barbs set deep in her soul, but Mondrian would never see her take a snot. Tatty was infinitely discreet.

And now?

Mondrian, who made a god of accurate information, did not know. The apartment was no longer a place of peace and sanctuary. He stared around again, seeking the changes. Tatty was far more independent, he knew that. She had broken the Paradox habit, as far as anyone ever did. The scars of those barbs would still be within her, but no longer did the arrays of little purple ampoules decorate every room. And no longer was Mondrian’s every wish her command.

She had lived through Chan’s transformation in the Tolkov Stimulator. Was it that searing experience, affecting everything about her, that had made the difference? She refused to talk about it then. But would she change her mind, and talk about it now?

Mondrian did not know. That was the worst thing of all, Tatty had become unpredictable. He was no longer sure how she would react to his words, what she would say or do.

He knew the right solution. What cannot be controlled or destroyed must be banished. He had to make a complete break with Tatty. But he was not able to do it.

Mondrian stood at the threshold, thought of weakness, and felt an emotion he could not name. “I have them.” Tatty approached to lock the door behind him. “Are you ready to begin?”

Mondrian nodded. “Any time you want to.” It was there again, the change in her. No word of affection, or even of greeting. No tenderness, no loving touch. He pushed his own feeling of disappointment into the background. What had to be done was too important.

“It won’t all be bad, Esro.” She had sensed but misunderstood his black mood. “Just think of it as Earth sightseeing.”

“Most of it will be. But if Skrynol is right, one of those scenes is likely to jump out and murder me.”

“How will it affect you?”

“Skrynol cannot say. And if a Fropper doesn’t know, I wont even try to guess.” Mondrian gestured to the phial of anesthetic spray that Tatty had tucked into the waistband of her black trousered suit. “Keep that close to you, but don’t let me get my hands on it. I hope I won’t even try, but Skrynol says what we are after goes so deep that I may try murder or suicide before I’ll let it come up to the surface.” He sat down on the long reclining chair and leaned back in it. “No point in waiting. Go ahead as soon as you like.”

Tatty taped his wrists tight to the chair’s arm-rests. She attached electrodes to palms, fingertips, and temples, and microphones to his throat and chest. Finally she sat down where she could see the camera displays and Mondrian’s face.

Tatty turned on the recordings. Since he had given her no preferred order for the list of sites, she had made her own. The scenes of his early childhood were covered systematically, linking around the planet in a cross-cross pattern that spanned Earth from pole to pole. As the fancy struck her, at each location she had made her own voiceover on the three-D recordings, and added characteristic local sounds and smells.

She began with an area that sat firmly at the center of her own personal nightmares. Maybe Mondrian would share her horror of it. The Virgin lay in what had once been the American West. It formed a dumbbell of total devastation, a thousand miles long and three hundred wide. The Virgin’s Breasts were located at Twin Strikes, in the north. Matching ten-mile craters at the two points of ground zero defined the nipples. The broad hips to the south were formed by the fused circular plain of Malcolm’s Mistake. Tatty had flown over both areas, then set the car down midway between the two. “The Virgin’s Navel,” said her calm commentary. That was all. The place spoke for itself. The Navel was the most scarred and desolate spot on Earth’s surface.

In the first few years, before the fusion glows began to fade, the experts made their measurements and their predictions: Earth life-forms would not return to the Virgin’s Navel for more than a millennium.

They had been wrong, outrageously wrong. The first seeds had germinated in less than a decade. Within a generation, crocuses were blooming along the Navel’s steep banks and within the deep, damp floor.

And yet in some ways the experts had been vindicated. Today the Virgin teemed with its own plants and animals.

But no birds sang, no bees buzzed, no coyotes howled. The purple-veined crocuses, their blossoms reaching taller than a tall man, were all carnivorous. Life at the Virgin’s Navel was abundant; but it was silent and fierce, and it felt alien to Earth.

The camera scanned steadily across the rugged landscape. Mondrian looked on silently, while Tatty shuddered again at the scene that she had recorded, at plants stunted or grossly overblown; at misshapen animals that parodied Nature.

At last Mondrian spoke. “Did you know that you can see the outline of The Virgin from the Moon? I don’t think it’s the color of the ground. It must be the altered vegetation.”

His voice was calm. Tatty cut short the presentation. Much more of that scene, and Mondrian would have to use the anesthetic on her.

She moved to another one of her private hates. Mondrian had recalled being taken to the Antarctic when he was little more than a baby. He had unpleasant memories of it. So had Tatty, but hers were recent. The travel guides spoke only of the bursting polar summer, with the new hybrid grains running their full course from germination to harvest in less than thirty days of twenty-four-hour light. Tatty had come away with different visions. Of savage winds, age-old ice, and cruel black water lapping at the edge of the ice cap. Beyond the surf the killer whales waited, until the current crop of frozen corpses whose storage payments had not been made were brought from the frigid Antarctic catacombs and dropped into the dark water. To the orcas, humans were nothing more than a frozen, or occasionally clumsy and noisy, form of seal.

Her images did not catch that. The corpse drops were made when no observers were present. But she knew that they happened, and her recordings did catch to perfection the desperate haste of the short summer, as Nature raced to fill a complete cycle of seasons in a few short weeks of continuous sun. The rate of plant growth was so fast, it created an illusion of time-lapse photography.

Mondrian watched, as the field of view scanned across a great flock of emperor penguins standing at the water’s edge. Still he seemed fully relaxed. “If you don’t like it there now,” — he had seen the expression of Tatty’s face — “you ought to go there in winter. Can you imagine the life of one of those birds? They mate when it s a hundred below. Then they stand right there through the blizzards, balancing the egg on their feet.”

Tatty gave him an angry glare as the display left Antarctica. Mondrian seemed to be enjoying himself.

She moved on to Patagonia. To her surprise, that far-off tip of South America had proved to be fascinating, her second favorite of the dozen places she had visited. When Mondrian first told her what he needed it sounded like an impossible job, hundreds of millions of square kilometers to be surveyed.

He had — as usual — persuaded her that she was wrong. For although the centuries-long exodus from Earth had provided a safety valve against population growth, it had never been quite enough. Those left behind could always breed faster than people could leave. As most of the planet gradually became more densely peopled, it also became more homogeneous. There was no need for Tatty to make recordings of BigSyd or Ree-o-dee, because in all essentials they were identical to Bosny or to Delmarva Town. Mondrian’s wilderness memories could not be hiding there.

The only remaining candidates were the equatorial and polar reservations, plus a few other areas of Earth that were still sparsely populated for other reasons. The Kingdom of the Winds, which Tatty was showing now, was a good example. People could live there, in the bleak Patagonian shadow of the Andes; but few would choose to. The west winds that blew with incessant gale force from the cold mountain peaks created a psychological vacuum. Every generation the area was settled; every generation the settlements were abandoned after a few years.”

But this too was not the source of Mondrian’s trauma. He stared at the wind-scoured landscape without enjoyment, but also without emotion. Tatty studied his impassive face. Couldn’t he see the beauty, of dark mountain lakes, of tangled forests of cypress, redwood, and Antarctic beech? Apparently not. She reluctantly moved on to the next location.

She had little hope for this one. She had never visited the great African game preserves before, but what she had seen on her recent trip had captivated her completely. She could not imagine this as a source of horror for any visitor.

Here was mankind’s first home. Earth’s remaining large herbivores and carnivores still lived here in natural conditions, grazing and prowling as they had for millions of years, except for one difference: their control implants made them harmless to humans.

Tatty had wandered on foot for many hours, savoring and recording the sights, sounds, and smells of the open plain. She loved to watch the herds break and wheel across the dusty ground as they responded to real or imagined danger. This was lightyears away from life in the Gallimaufries, a wonderful therapy after her confinement on Horus. She had brought no Paradox with her, and for the first time in years she had not craved it.

Mondrian did not seem to share her pleasure. He was lolling in his chair, apparently half-asleep as the images roamed back and forth across the rolling ground. Tatty prepared to move on to another region, but recalled that one of her own favorite memories was captured in a shot that came just a few seconds later on the recording.

“Watch this,” she said. “Here it comes. Ngorongoro Crater — isn’t that spectacular?” The display showed a majestic volcanic peak with the evening sun behind it. The broad red face of Sol was already on the horizon, sinking rapidly to an equatorial sunset. The great plain of Serengeti and the reservation lay beyond, dusty green and tan in the fading light.

“Beautiful!” said Tatty. She watched, as daylight bled away into a purple dusk, then turned at last to Mondrian. He was rigid in his chair, limbs trembling. She saw the protruding eyes and straining, swollen-veined countenance, and grabbed for the anesthetic.

It was not necessary. Before she could pull out the phial Esro Mondrian uttered a terrified whimper. While she watched, the spasm ended. He sighed, and sank low into the chair.

His eyes flickered once, and slowly closed; Mondrian slept. Tatty stood alone within the little circle of light, wondering what she was getting herself into. Her heart was racing, and she was perspiring profusely. At this depth in the basement warrens the circulators and coolers did little more than make the air marginally breathable.

She held the light higher and stared around her. This had to be the right place. But she was nowhere. She stood halfway down a long, deserted corridor, with no side branches visible in front or behind her.

Tatty bent her head to check the Tracker reading one more time. It was showing exactly zero. The little red trace arrow had disappeared. It was useless! And when she started out she had imagined that she was being so clever and cunning.

Mondrian had taken over an hour to emerge from his catatonic trance — an hour during which his pulse had slowed almost to zero, and she had been forced to inject adrenalin and powerful heart-stimulants. As soon as he became conscious he would not stay, would not even wait to recuperate. He grabbed the recordings that she had made and struggled to the apartment door. He looked like a corpse, but he would not say where he was going — not even when she did what she had never done, lost her temper, and shouted and stormed at him.

All he would say was that he had to leave at once. And it was so obvious where he was going! He was heading for a meeting with Skrynol, to see if the Fropper could make sense of what had just happened.

In the middle of her tirade, Tatty thought of the Tracker. It was still in Mondrian’s light travel bag, the only luggage that he ever carried down to Earth with him. She sneaked it out when he was re-setting his apartment ID key, and hid it away out of sight. Mondrian might not ask her help with the Fropper, but he was going to get it anyway! She could describe his appearance when he was unconscious, and what he had said as he fought his way back to consciousness.

Except that now she did not know how to find the Fropper. She felt like an idiot. As soon as Mondrian left her apartment she had turned on the Tracker. When the moving arrow stopped, she fixed the setting and set out in pursuit. Mondrian had stayed in one place for over an hour, then began to retrace his steps. Tatty hid until he went past her, then started forward again to his first stopping place.

Forward — to nowhere! Mondrian had certainly not had a Fropper session standing in this tunnel.

Was there some trick to using the Tracker, some technique that she had failed to understand?

She stared around her at the walls of the corridor. It was high and narrow, no more than a couple of meters across and lined with tremendous air-pipes. According to Kubo Flammarion, the Tracker should be accurate to better than twenty feet. That was just impossible. The runnel extended monotonously away in both directions for fifty meters or more.

She peered down one more time at the Tracker, bringing her lamp closer to the instrument. As she did so that light was suddenly plucked upwards from her hand. It at once went out.

Tatty screamed. She had been plunged into absolute darkness. She staggered backwards, until she ran into the hard wall of the tunnel. She grabbed at the warm, padded air-pipes, the only familiar thing she could find. As she did so, something caught her around her waist. She was lifted easily off her feet, up and backwards over the pipes, and placed down gently on a soft surface — where no soft surface could be. Thick bindings snapped into place around her wrists and ankles.

“It is not necessary to scream or struggle,” said a cheerful voice high above her. “Nor is it productive to do so. Such actions are quite pointless, since you are in no conceivable danger.”

Tatty drew in a deep breath, ready to scream anyway. Before she could begin, a dim red glow filled the air. It gave her a first faint view of her surroundings. Instead of screaming, she gasped, gaped, and stared around her.

She was in a thiefhole!

The secret rooms were almost a legend, mysterious pockets scattered through the deepest reaches of the basement warrens. They were the Scavvies’ final sanctuary, the hiding places for hunted criminals and contract-breakers. Their locations were passed on only by word of mouth, from one generation to the next. Earth’s official authorities found it best to deny their very existence, since they were unable to locate and destroy them.

Tatty had never been in a thiefhole before, but she knew it at once from Gallimaufry rumor and descriptions. This one was tucked away behind the main air-pipes. The room was ten meters long, five meters high, and less than two across. A crude tap to the basement power lines in one corner fed the glowing fluorescents. They had been modified, to throw a murky red light through the long room. Another tap, this one to the air-pipes, provided just enough circulation to keep the air breathable. On the far wall stood an ancient food synthesizer, not apparently in current use. Next to that was a long painted screen of dull silver, shielding part of the room from view.

“You know where you are?” said a gentle voice from behind the screen.

“Yes. I am in a thiefhole.” Tatty tried to keep the tremor out of her voice.

“Exactly so. With your permission, then.” The light suddenly snapped off — without her permission. Tatty felt chilly electrodes attach to her body, and something else that she could not identify. She shivered.

“These are for my convenience, not for your discomfort,” said the cheerful voice. “You will not be aware of them after a few moments. Do not worry, the lights will return shortly.”

“Who are you?”

There was a high-pitched laugh in the darkness. “Now, Princess Tatiana Sinai-Peres, you know very well who I am, as surely as your name is Tatty Snipes. Otherwise you would not be here.”

“You are Skrynol. The Fropper who has been treating Esro Mondrian.”

“Indeed I am.”

“Well, you may call it treatment if you want to.” Tatty’s courage was returning, and with it anger. “So far as I can see, you’ve been making him worse. God, I wish I had never mentioned your name to him. Put some damned lights on in here! You may be able to see in the dark, but I cannot.”

“Your wish is my command.” The lights came on again, but there was no sign of Skrynol. “Even if you had not brought him,” said the voice behind the silver screen, “someone else would have. It was absolutely necessary that I should meet him, and absolutely essential that I should treat him. Tatty Snipes, can you describe Esro Mondrian to me? How well do you know him?”

“As well as I know anyone!” But then some tone in Skrynol’s gentle voice made Tatty think again. She had not asked herself those questions for a long time. “He is the most intelligent and hard-working man that I have ever met,” she said at last. “But sometimes I wonder if I know him at all. Sometimes I think that he is genuinely fond of me. And sometimes I think that he is a monster, somebody who cares for no one and who will use anything and anyone for his own purposes.”

“Yet you are longtime lovers. And still you work for him!”

“I know.” Tatty’s laugh was harsh self-mockery. “You don’t need to tell me what a fool I am. It’s my own fault — but sometimes I think Esro can persuade me to do anything if he tries hard enough.”

“You do know him, very well. But there is one thing that perhaps you do not realize about him. Mondrian is in some ways the most valuable person in the solar system. He is also the most dangerous human in the Stellar Group. Esro Mondrian is the reason — the sole reason — that I am here on Earth.”

Tatty saw a monstrous shadow cast from behind the screen. Then a worse reality appeared, a gigantic stooped body shuffling forward on multiple jointed legs. She shrank back, as the Pipe-Rilla came slowly forward and squatted at her side.

“I have decided that I will gain nothing by concealing the truth from you.” Skrynol’s mild and cheerful voice did a lot to offset the Pipe-Rilla’s frightening appearance. “I know that you are afraid, but there is truly no reason for fear. I will not harm you. Come, Tatty Snipes, you are a brave woman and you know that we are a peaceful species. I need your help.”

Tatty stared at the long body crouching next to her. It had been strangely modified from the picture-book form, with fleshy forelimbs replacing the usual clawed ones. “I don’t see how I can possibly help you.’’

“I do.” The tall body stretched higher and leaned away, sensing her discomfort at its closeness. “Let me at least describe to you the problem. The Stellar Group members have been studying the human species for centuries — as intensively as humans have I am sure been studying us. In each generation, we strive to identify those humans whom we believe have unique powers for good or evil. Our record of such behavior prediction is excellent, but occasionally we find an anomaly, a human being who seems a total enigma. Such an individual must be watched closely, so that the potential for harm is never realized. And in the case of Esro Mondrian, we have the extreme anomaly: a human of exceptional abilities, whose own compulsions are so strong that they could lead him to self-destruction. And far more than that. Those compulsions imply danger for the whole of the Stellar Group.”

“That’s ridiculous. I said I don’t understand him fully, and I don’t. But I’ll tell you one thing that I am sure of. Esro likes you — Pipe-Rillas, and Tinkers, and Angels.”

“I agree. It makes no difference. Mondrian is not a simple man. There are others, like Commander Brachis, who hate all aliens in a direct and predictable way. We can allow for that, plan for it, and live with it. Mondrian is far more difficult. He likes us, but in some ways he cannot tolerate us. At a deep level he cannot stand the threat that the Stellar Group represents to him.”

“How can you possibly be a threat to Esro?”

“We do not know. Mondrian remains a mystery, even after all my work with him. In such a situation, the human solution might well be that we must destroy him. But that avenue is not open to our kind. We must help Mondrian. We must find the source of that destructive drive, and we must eradicate it from him. That is where you can assist us.”

“You don’t understand. I’ve tried to help Esro — God knows I’ve tried. But I can’t reach him, really get through to him. He’ll never tell me what ails him.”

“If it makes you feel better, I too have been unable to penetrate that shield, although my whole life and training have been for just such a purpose. But in my sessions with Mondrian I have become sure of one thing: he is torn apart by conflicting drives. He has the capacity for love, but it is drowned by internal fear. He is obsessed by the escaped Morgan Construct. Do you know why?”

“The Construct has to be destroyed. He’s been working for that, night and day.”

“He has been working, yes. Work is his life. But did you know that Mondrian originated the program for the Constructs? It was begun at his initiative. When the escaped Construct became a danger to everything in the Stellar Group, the ambassadors reluctantly decided that it must be destroyed. I do not question their decision. But I know that the decision to leave Esro Mondrian in charge of the operation was an awful mistake. He needs the Construct.”

“He is trying to destroy it!”

“Is he? I am not so sure. Suppose he has been choosing pursuit teams to control the Construct, rather than kill it? I know this: Mondrian will never allow the last Construct to disappear, if there is any conceivable way to save it. He needs it in some urgent mode, far below the conscious levels of his brain. His need stems from the early experience for which I have been probing. Thanks to your work, I now know that it happened in Africa. But it lies so deep-rooted that I despair of reaching it. The nature of his torment remains hidden. The compulsion continues … unless you help me to bring its cause to light.”

“I already told you, I can do nothing with Esro.”

“I disagree. Permit me one question. He has used you, over and over. You are a person with strength and a considerable intellect. Why do you continue to help him, knowing that he will use and abuse you again?”

Tatty found to her surprise that she was crying. Salt tears mingled with sweat and ran down her cheeks onto her upper lip. “1 don’t know. I suppose it’s because — because I have no one else. Without Esro, I have nothing. I have no one. He is all I have.”

“Possibly.” A soft forelimb came forward to stroke Tatty’s hair and dab at the tears on her cheeks. “But there is another explanation. Suppose that you stay because you know that you are all that he has. If not you, to whom would he turn for comfort? If not you, whom would he ask for help? You know that you love him. Ask yourself, do you want Mondrian destroyed?”

“No!” Tatty tried to sit up, but the bindings still restrained her. “I mean, I don’t know. Many times I’ve cursed him and wished him dead.”

“And always, you have relented. Always, you have been his support. If you really want to help Mondrian — and I have to tell you, it may be impossible, and already too late — then you must do the one thing that can make his treatment more effective: Remove your support. Tell him that it is all over, that he cannot come back to you and expect to be forgiven. Tell him that now he has no one\”

Skrynol reached forward and unclasped the bindings that held Tatty. She leaned forward, to place her open hands wearily to her face. “Suppose I did that? What good could it do him?”

“Perhaps it would do nothing. Perhaps he is past all help. But perhaps it would give me that little window, the chink of vulnerability that I need to treat him successfully. I admit it frankly: I am desperate, seeking any sort of lever. Your abandonment of him might provide it to me.”

Skrynol helped Tatty to her feet. She stood leaning against the giant skeletal figure. “Do you think it will succeed?”

“No, I do not. I believe that it will almost certainly fail.” The Pipe-Rilla gave an imitative human shrug of her narrow body. “But what choice do I have? Since it is the only course left to me, it must be attempted.”

Skrynol reached down to take Tatty’s hand, like an adult leading a small child. “Come. Let us away from here. If you are to have your confrontation with Mondrian, it must happen before he again leaves Earth.”

Tatty took a final look around the thiefhole as they moved on into stygian darkness. “Aren’t you going to tell me to keep this a secret? Suppose that I were to tell someone of this meeting. Wouldn’t it destroy all your plans?”

“Tell anyone.” Skrynol chuckled, but there was no humor in the cheerful voice. “You may tell anyone you like, Tatty Snipes. Who do you think would ever believe you?”