The Mind Pool

Chapter 33

It was late when Luther and Godiva came home to their living quarters on the ninety-fourth level of Ceres. They were both tired. He had taken her on a long-postponed sight-seeing tour, pausing at the high-mag viewing ports of the outer shell so mat he could point out the many worlds of the solar system, and far beyond them the scattered stars of the Stellar Group.

It was all old hat to Luther. He could not remember a time when he was not familiar with everything that they saw. It was a shock to find that Godiva, raised in the dark subterranean runs of the Gallimaufries, had only the vaguest idea of planets, moons, and stars. She didn’t know the difference between them. She had never heard of Oberon Station, or Cobweb Station, or even the Vulcan Nexus. She seemed to believe that all the asteroids were as developed and cosmopolitan as Ceres. Most startling of all, she had no idea of distance; to Godiva, the Oort Harvester was as near (or as far) as the remote Angel world of Sellora.

She had laughed at Brachis’s astonishment and disapproval. “What does it matter, Luther. Who cares how far away any of them are, when you can get to all of them in nothing flat using the Martin Link.’

“Well, yes, that’s true. But the distance …” Brachis stopped. Godiva was uniquely Godiva. Time and space meant nothing to her. And when he thought about it, he was not sure that she was wrong. “Close” points were really ones that could be reached quickly through a series of Mattin Links. “Distant” points were all others. Luther allowed Godiva to take his hand and they went on, drifting through the endless outer corridors of the planetoid. The original one-hour tour continued through a long and pleasurable day and evening. The corridor was deserted when Brachis paused at their apartment door and made his usual thorough inspection of the settings. All the seals were unbroken, and there had been no callers. He carefully slid back the heavy door and they went on through into the hallway.

The advent of Godiva had changed Luther’s life completely. Before she came up from Earth he had lived in a sparsely furnished single room. That had been abandoned in favor of a luxury apartment. The main living-room, dining area and kitchen were off the hall to the left, the bedroom, bathroom and study to the right.

“Hungry?”

Godiva shook her head. She yawned, stretched, and slipped off her light wrap. She gave Luther a smile of sleepy suggestion, dropped her bag onto the hall table, and went through the bedroom to the bathroom.

He took off his uniform, sat on the broad bed, and pulled off his boots. Naked, he walked through to the study and sat down at the communications terminal. He was tired, but as always he had to make his evening check for messages.

He switched on. As he did so there was a sudden high-pitched hissing sound. An intense pain like a hornet’s sting burned his left cheek. Brachis saw a little puff of vaporized blood blossom out from below his eye. He shouted at the pain and jerked upright. As he did so there was a second sting by his right nostril, and another sudden puff of bright red.

He jumped to his feet. His first thought was that there had been some sort of short circuit in the communications terminal, showering him with specks of hot metal. The hiss that went with each blow seemed to come from the top of the display unit. As Brachis looked that way three more jolts hit him, one on the chin and two above his right eyebrow. He lifted his hand to his face, and saw them: four miniature figures, crouched behind the front lip of the display. Each manikin was no more than an inch and a half tall. Each carried a weapon pointed at Luther’s face.

They were after his eyes! He covered his face with his left forearm, in time to block three more shots.

Adestis simulacra — at the maximum size permitted, and hunting him.

Luther swept his right arm across the top of the display, knocking the minisims to the floor. As he completed the movement a hail of shots from behind made him shout with pain and spin around. On the desk at the far side of the room, half-hidden behind a jumble of data cubes, stood another group of tiny figures. At the same moment a rattle of shots came from a new direction, over to his left. Explosive projectiles riddled his left arm and hip with thumbnail-sized craters.

Brachis roared with pain and ran across the room. He had both arms in front of him to shield his eyes — if they blinded him he was finished. Halfway to the door he felt another hail of shots in his groin and belly. The simulacra in ambush by the exit had chosen a different target.

He stopped and spun around again. The attack was obviously well-organized. They had planned for his natural reaction, to run for the door. They would expect him to cover his eyes, and now his genitals. If they knew his habits at all, they had known that he would walk through naked to check the communicator. While he hesitated in the middle of the room, another half dozen projectiles stung his face and neck. They were flaying him, systematically ripping the flesh from his body with a hail of tiny shells.

He needed time to think. Luther dived to the left, rolled across the floor, and came upright close to the wall. He smashed his hand at the lighting panel. With the door to the bedroom closed, the study was plunged at once into darkness. The hiss of shots went on, out the attacking simulacra no longer had a target.

Brachis dropped to the floor again, and went shuffling on hands and knees across the room. He had a brief advantage now. He could track the minisims by the uvarovite-garnet glint of their crystalline green eyes, glowing in the dark. They were moving about in confusion. He knew it could only be a temporary respite. The attackers must have allowed for darkness, too.

He felt his way back to the display and slapped the Emergency switch on the communications panel. That would bring help — but far too late. Another half minute of those explosions on his skin, and the rescuers would find him a sightless, skinless eunuch. He was filled with a new and terrifying thought; Suppose that Godiva came out of the bathroom and wandered through into the study to look for him? A shout to keep her out might have exactly the wrong effect.

He was still standing upright by the emergency switch when an orange light appeared on the other side of the room. It was an aerial flare, ignited near the door. That was where the maximum cross-fire would have hit him if he had tried to escape that way. But the orange flare was enough to illuminate the whole room. He was visible again.

Another crackle and hiss from miniature weapons — another hail of blows and blaze of pain across his body. He couldn’t take much more. He dived, rolled again, and came up near the desk. As the attackers there fired point-blank into his unprotected chest and side, he hit a sunken wall panel with the palm of his left hand.

The Fire Protection System came on in a fraction of a second. High pressure jets of water and emulsifier cross-crossed the room from floor to ceiling, while the loud warning tone of a bell sounded through the apartment and its nearest neighbors. The emergency low-power wall lights filled the study with sickly green.

Spray and foam filled the room. The miniature weapons at once went silent.

Another reprieve — but for how long?

Luther could not wait for help. He had to do this himself. He hurled himself across the study, soaking and bloodied. He ran first for the place where the attackers had been most dense. Water hit him from all sides, stinging his wounds, sluicing down his ripped skin. He welcomed it.

The minisims were trying to regroup, struggling to stand amid the bombardment of water drops and frothy foam. Ignoring the pain in his hands, Brachis smashed them flat and crushed them one by one between thumb and fingers.

The study door slid open and Godiva appeared. She was naked except for a pair of gauzy briefs. “Luther!”

He ignored her and ran back across the room, a scarlet Nemesis that left bloody, puddled footprints behind him in the carpet. The first group who had attacked him were on the floor by the communications unit, trying to point their weapons up at Luther while a quarter-inch flood of water surged and tugged at their legs. He stomped every one of them, wincing as the angular figures cut into his soft flesh.

A final scatter of shots came from his right. He headed that way, smashing and devastating with bare hands and feet anything that moved.

And suddenly it was over.

By the time that help arrived the sprinkler system was off and the study a junkyard of flattened simulacra. Godiva took Luther through to the bedroom and began to apply antiseptics and surrogate skin. He lay faceup on the bed, his face, chest, and belly an eroded mass of raw wounds connected by shreds of loose skin. He swore continuously as Godiva smoothed on the yellow synthetic flesh. He waved away the emergency service staff. They went back into the study and started to clean up the mess, suctioning the room clean and dry. They were still at it when Esro Mondrian arrived.

Godiva had finished Luther’s left side and was telling him to turn more to the right. He was ignoring her, and talking furiously on a handset.

“Useless!” he growled to Mondrian. “They don’t know one damned thing. Adestis Headquarters won’t have regular staff there until tomorrow, and maintenance can t even tell me if simulacra are missing, never mind what sort. Ouch!” He winced as Godiva began to patch skin onto the ball of his right thumb.

“Does it matter how many?” Mondrian picked up one of the flattened simulacra from the heap at the bedside and inspected it. “I didn’t know they made them this big. What are they used for?”

“To hunt the biggest game. Scorpions and crustaceans, mostly. They can operate under water, but luckily for me they were never designed to handle a rainstorm.”

“But the real question isn’t the minisims. It’s who was handling them. Did you ask?”

“Adestis Headquarters can’t tell me that, either.” Brachis touched his finger tenderly to the biggest wound on his face, a one-centimeter crater in the middle of his left cheek. “But I know the answer without being told. It’s that bastard’s Artefacts again, it has to be.”

Mondrian was studying Brachis’s pitted and furrowed skin. “Someday, Luther, you must tell me just what you did to earn such undying enmity from Fujitsu that his heirs would try to give you more craters than the surface of Callisto.”

“Never mind what I did. The worst thing I did was, I underestimated him. For that, I deserve everything I’ve been getting.”

“You told me that you had everything locked up tight here in the apartment, so nobody and nothing could get in. What went wrong, Luther?”

“The oldest mistake in the world. It proves the point that I tell every trainee for Survey basic training: It’s the things you don’t expect that get you. I set up this apartment so that nothing could get in through the door without me knowing. Nothing can burrow through the walls or floors or ceilings. I put in a sniffer system to sound an alarm if anything poisonous or radioactive was blown in as gas or dust through the air supply ducts. What I didn’t expect was that something smart and dangerous could actually walk in along the ducts. The openings are only a couple of centimeters across.”

“Big enough.” Mondrian glanced from the simulacrum he was holding to the other man’s battered body. “I’m amazed to see how much firepower one of these things can carry. Surely you don’t need to hit that hard, even for scorpions.”

“They were carrying the absolute top of the weapons line. It took two minisims to handle some of the guns.

That’s the sort of equipment that Adestis normally gives only to a group that they judge to be inexperienced and scared shitless. One shell from the big guns would do for a scorpion. It damned near did for me.”

“Last time we met you told me you thought you had located and destroyed every artefact that the Margrave left. Obviously, you were wrong.” Mondrian nodded his head to the heavy apartment door and its protective locks. “But if you thought you’d got them all, why did you bother with such an elaborate security system?”

“My guardian angel insisted.” Brachis pointed an index finger, its nail half blown away, at the near-nude Godiva. “You’re right, I thought I’d killed the lot. Now I have to start over.’

During the first few frantic minutes, Godiva had been totally absorbed in her work on Luther. She was still wearing only her thin panties and had not thought to put on more clothing. Her only worry was to patch new skin, carefully and completely, onto every one of his wounds. She had not seemed to notice the arrival of Esro Mondrian. But now, directly introduced into the conversation, she seemed to become aware of her own near-nude condition. She applied a final patch to Luther’s shoulder, stooped to kiss him quickly on the lips, and headed for the bathroom. “Ten minutes,” she said. “To put on a robe and dry my hair. Please don’t let him get into more trouble while I’m gone, Esro.”

Her departure created a gap in the conversation of the two men. Brachis, tough as he was, felt drained and distant. With Mondrian silent, he began to think again of the Artefacts. How many more were there? How could he hide from them, how could he destroy them?

His mind drifted back to the silent surface of Hyperion. As soon as he had arranged for delivery of the volatiles, the seven items had been delivered to him as promised from storage. The crew who brought them returned at once to the Deep Vault. They did not look back. They had no interest in knowing — or perhaps they suspected only too well — what Brachis intended to do with his purchase.

The logical thing was to flashfire the seven containers at once and leave the airless surface of Saturn’s moon with minimal delay. Only some dreadful driving streak of curiosity forced Brachis to open them, and thaw the contents.

The first four varied in appearance, but they were recognizably in the image of the Margrave. Brachis fired them at once. Two more were younger, clean-shaven, and fatter. It took the DNA match to prove that they too derived directly from Fujitsu. When the eight million degree flame passed over them, they too were gone in an eyeblink flash of purple light.

It was the seventh and final box, where identification in the Deep Vault had been the poorest, that would linger forever in Luther’s memory. The casket held a young girl in her early teens. Naked, clear-skinned, and fair of face, she was barely past puberty. Her countenance still had the purity and innocence of a child, but when those young breasts and slender hips matured into womanhood she would be like a younger Godiva Lomberd.

The container gave her complete identification, along with her DNA sequence. It differed from the Fujitsu line in every significant detail. She was the oldest daughter of a deposed royal, from a bend sinister line that was now long extinct. Whoever had committed her to the Deep Vault of Hyperion had purchased, for whatever reason, a perpetual endowment of the highest quality. For four hundred and forty years she had Iain in frozen silence, dreaming of whatever phantom shadows might flee through a brain held at the temperature of liquid helium. Left now on the surface, she would die — or, worse yet, waken and die — on the barren, airless wilderness of Hyperion.

Brachis had made no contingent plans for his purchases from the Deep Vault. Even if he were desperate to do so, it was impossible to save her. He groaned, cursed, and stared around him at the black-shadowed plain. It taunted him, with its emptiness and uselessness. At last he shuddered in his suit, breathed deep, and raised the fusion torch. Subnuclear fire reached out to caress the pale young body. As it consumed her bare breast, Brachis fancied that she sighed, opened dark-blue eyes, and stared up at his face …

“Luther!” Mondrian was leaning over him, snapping his fingers in front of his face. “Come on, pull out of that. I think we have to let the medics take a look at you, even if you don’t want it. Just how much blood did you lose in there? The water could have sluiced a couple of liters down the drain and we’d never know it.”

“I’ll be all right.” Brachis struggled to a sitting position. “But I’m wondering where we go from here. Just think what would have happened if Godiva had come with me into the study, instead of heading for the bathroom. She doesn’t have any of our training in survival. I don’t think I could have saved her. But I know I would have tried, and that would have been the end of both of us.”

“Want to send her back to Earth for a while, until we’re sure the Fujitsu Artefacts have been taken care of once and for all?’

“She won’t go. We’ve been through all that, half a dozen times. Anyway, I’m not sure that Earth would be safe. If our contract is known there, they could go through her to get to me.” Brachis rubbed at the thickened synthetic skin on the back of his right hand. That hand was still regrowing, and the delicate real skin was beginning to itch furiously as the chemical bond of the newly applied synthetic became complete. “It’s an impossible problem. She won’t leave me, and I can’t protect her. The next hit could come from anywhere. Poisoned food, assassins, sabotaged transport equipment, faulty airlocks, anything.”

“As you said once before, Luther, you found yourself a genius. Fujitsu has been two steps ahead all the way. But I have a suggestion for you.”

“No hidden agendas, Esro.” Brachis spoke wearily, as Godiva appeared from the bathroom. I’m not up to them at the moment. Just tell me how we are going to make her safe.”

Godiva had dried her blond hair and restyled it to an ancient form, so that it hung over her forehead and partly hid one eye. She drifted across to Brachis, inspected his wounds, and nodded in satisfaction. She sat down at his side without a word. Her short tunic left arms and legs bare, and her skin glowed from a vigorous toweling.

Mondrian studied the two of them closely. He was sure that he was missing something about their relationship, but in spite of all his efforts he could not begin to guess what.

“We all have hidden agendas, Luther. But this time I think that you and I have common interests.”

“Persuade me.”

Mondrian nodded in acknowledgement. It was one of his own favorite lines. “I’ll try. Let’s start with a question: What would be the safest place in the universe for you and Godiva? Not just the safest place in the solar system, but the safest place within the entire Perimeter.”

“I don’t know. Not here, that’s for sure, no matter how much protection we pile on for us.”

“And certainly not down on Earth, for either one of you. I agree with you, if Fujitsu’s Artefacts are there they might try next for Godiva. But there’s one place that even the Margrave won’t be able to get to: the Q-ship, in orbit around Travancore. The Link coordinates to that are known only to three people in the universe: you, me, and Kubo Flammarion.”

“It should be safe enough, I’ll buy that.” Brachis was visibly weakening, while Godiva was frowning at Mondrian. “But we’ve got the blockade in position, which means once you go there you can’t come back. It would mean a one-way trip until a pursuit team finishes off the Construct. Suppose that takes years? Go to Travancore, and you could be stuck on the Q-ship until you die of boredom.”

“There are worse fates.” Mondrian surveyed the other man’s battered body. “Stay here, and it’s certainly not boredom you’ll be dying of. In any case, I don’t think the action on Travancore will take long, otherwise I wouldn’t be going out there myself. My original plan was to take Captain Flammarion with me, while you stayed in charge at Anabasis Headquarters. But after what just happened here, it makes sense to switch that, and leave Kubo on Ceres. I assume you trust him?”

“He’s your man, and that won’t change. Other than that, he’s a rock. But I’m a devil of a lot better in a crisis.”

“Which we certainly have at Travancore. But Kubo can stay here, give information to nobody, and send us anything that we need through the Link.

“What about Godiva?”

“Whatever you like. With you out of the way, I don’t really think she’ll be in danger anywhere.”

“It makes no difference. Godiva spoke for the first time since her return. “Where Luther goes, I go.”

“And I won’t go without you.” Brachis tried to smile, and produced only a pained grimace as the artificial skin on his face stretched in unfamiliar directions. “All right, so we both go. And the sooner the better. I’m tired of being chipped away, bit by bit.”

“Very good.” Mondrian stood up. “I will notify Captain Flammarion. We’ll leave as soon as you are physically able to do so.”

“I’m able now. I was planning another trip out to the Sargasso Dump, but that can wait awhile. We’ll be ready tomorrow morning.”

“I won’t approve that. You will not be sufficiently recovered.”

“Esro, you don’t need to approve. You seem to forget, you don’t outrank me any more in the Anabasis.”

“Don’t think I am unaware of that. Sometime you must tell me what you promised Lotos, to work that deal. But for the moment” — Mondrian stared at Brachis, and saw new pallor around his eyes — “Godiva, he needs a doctor even if he doesn’t want one. Luther, if you tried to stand up you would fall over.”

“Would I? Just watch me, then.” Brachis swayed to his feet, shaking his head when Godiva tried to help him. “No doctors.” He hobbled away to the bathroom. “Tomorrow morning, Esro. We’ll be ready.”

Godiva sighed, and sat down again opposite Mondrian “Stubborn! But what happened to you, Esro? You look nearly as bad as Luther. “I’m fine.”

“You are not.” She leaned close and peered into his eyes. “Are you taking Tatty with you to Travancore?”

“No.’’ Then Mondrian’s own control failed, and he had to ask the question. “Godiva, what made you suddenly ask about Tatty? I didn’t even mention her name.”

“I know. You didn’t need to.” Godiva gave him a satisfied smile. “Esro, if I understand anything in the whole universe, it’s men’s emotions. Luther couldn’t see it, but I can. You’re radiating misery. Have you two been fighting?”

“That’s too dignified a word for it.” He smiled, but his eyes were bleak. “There was no fight. We were down in her apartment on Earth, and I wanted her to come back to Ceres with me. She said no. Then she dumped me, simple as that. She says she never wants to see me again, after what I did to her.”

Godiva took Mondrian’s hands in hers. He felt a flow like electricity along his forearms — a tingle that Tatty said could be felt only by men, and had termed “The Godiva Effect.”

“I’m sorry, Esro.” Godiva squeezed his hands. “Maybe she’ll change her mind. I’ll talk to her. But right now I’d better go and see what’s keeping Luther. I think he needs more help than he’ll admit.

She stood up and went across to the bathroom without looking again at Mondrian. Decency demanded that such pain and misery be permitted at least privacy.