Betrayer of Worlds (6 page)

Many years later, so that Nessus could deliver the autodoc to Hearth’s scientists, he had invented a fable about a Fafnir crime syndicate offering the autodoc for sale. The story served a second purpose, because crooks did not give receipts. He had needed an explanation for some of the General Products wealth he had redirected. Always for the benefit of Hearth and herd—as
he
perceived it.

Louis gave his complete attention to a plate of potatoes and seared meat. He paused before tackling a cheese omelet. “Then why doesn’t it look like the ’docs I’ve used?”

“It was a prototype, Louis. Your father was short and he had sized the autodoc for himself. When it came under Citizen control, we replaced the intensive care cavity.” Longer, wider, and deeper, the cavity would now physically accommodate any human, even the tallest Belter or Wunderlander. Someday it would be reprogrammed to handle a Citizen. “And a good thing, too. You are taller than Carlos.”

Louis twitched. “When I was young, my . . . stepfather was
much
taller than Carlos. Somehow they became the same height. Did that have something to do with this autodoc?”

“Carlos and Beowulf have complicated stories. Beowulf, of course, was a—”

“The history lesson can wait.” Louis pushed away his tray. “I’m still waiting to hear what you expect me to do.”

A padded Y-shaped bench was the main piece of furniture in the relax room. Suddenly too tired to stand, Nessus half collapsed onto it. Merely to describe this mission would take all his strength.

A trill to the ship’s computer authorized its Voice to respond to Louis—with limited access to data. Man and machine could continue to talk when, very soon now,
he
must hide in his cabin. A second trill evoked a hologram. From the corner of an eye Nessus saw Louis blink.

Five globes now hung over the relax-room table, each sphere marking a corner of an equilateral pentagon. Four of the worlds showed large blue oceans and skies flecked with cloud, their continents lush with farm and forest. Earth-like, Nessus knew—even though Louis would no longer fully appreciate that—except for their necklaces of artificial suns. These planets flew free of any star.

The fifth world was of similar size, but there any similarity ended. No artificial suns orbited this world; it blazed with its own light. Only scattered small parks interrupted continent-spanning cities. Beholding Hearth, his hearts skipped beats.

“The Fleet of Worlds,” Nessus said.

“The glowing world, that’s Hearth. That’s your home.”

“Yes.” The home of all Nessus held dear. “The Concordance holds sway on Hearth and its Nature Preserve worlds.”

“Hearth is different,” Louis muttered to himself. He stared at the image, considering. “No sun. So the Puppet . . . Citizens are taking their
worlds
away from the core explosion?”

“Our worlds are safe and familiar.” Nessus moved a neck in sinuous waves, the gesture encompassing the ship. “Sane beings do not fly
this
way.”

“So, they travel in normal space.” Louis pondered some more. “No matter how safe the worlds are, what dangers loom in their path?”

A minute, no more, and Louis had focused on the essential problem. He was his fathers’ son—in quickness of mind, at the least. Nessus permitted himself a moment of hope. “That is the question, of course.”

“What am I to be, then,” Louis asked. “An advance scout? Expendable?”

“More than a scout, certainly. A problem solver. I like to think not expendable, because I will accompany you.”

“You went to a great deal of trouble to find my fathers. I don’t believe you would do that for some theoretical danger. What has you scared more than usual?”

Nessus replaced the Fleet with another image: of a five-limbed creature
scuttling about an ocean floor. In human terms, the being somewhat resembled a starfish crossed with an octopus, or perhaps five tube worms fused together at their tails. One “worm” directly faced the camera, revealing the limb to be a hollow tube, its aperture slowly pulsating. From deep inside the hollow, past rings of sharp, closely packed teeth, eyes and less obvious sensors peeked.

He said, “It’s a Gw’o, no bigger from tip to tip than the length of your arm.”

“It doesn’t look scar . . .”

Louis trailed off as Nessus, with another tone burst, replaced the holo again. Now an industrial complex sprawled across a plain of ice. An upwardly curved track, an electromagnetic launcher, hurled a ship into the sky. The vessel lit its fusion drive and raced away. Except for running faster than real time, the video was untouched.

Nessus said, “The Gw’oth broke through the ice of their ancestral ocean less than two Earth centuries ago. Before that, their technology was stone tools. Now they have fusion and hyperdrive.”

“Two centuries,” Louis echoed.

If Nessus had done his edits properly, Louis would no longer remember Earth’s orbital period. That memory should be gone, along with every other memory that could conceivably point his way home without Nessus’ help.

Nessus said, “We recently discovered that the Gw’oth have established a colony in the Fleet’s path.”

Prevent a war.

Louis ran laps around the passenger deck, his rejuvenated body demanding
action.
Compared to his father’s (!) autodoc, boosterspice was scarcely a step beyond exorcisms and leeches. Louis seethed with wonderment and unwonted energy.

And more than a trace of worry. Had he not just gotten
out
of a war?

The worry could wait. Nessus said they had a long flight ahead of them.

Louis picked up the pace, his boots pounding the deck. He was young again! He had so much energy to burn off.

And less wholesome urges to fight off. Some dark recess of his mind demanded pills, something to take off the edge. The body could be cured. Had been cured. Bad habits? Those, he would have to break.

He began running flat out. The jumpsuit wicked away sweat as fast as he produced it. Nanofabric? The cloth was yet another wonder of Puppeteer tech.

If the energy of youth and the challenges before him could not distract him, free him, nothing ever would. Voyage far beyond Known Space. Prevent a war between the frighteningly advanced Puppeteers and a whole new alien race. He had embarked, surely, on an adventure to rival anything even the infamous Beowulf Shaeffer had ever endured.

(“Too bad you won’t remember it,” taunted that part of Louis still craving a pill. Too bad you’ll never be able to tell your father what you’ve done.)

Louis ran and ran, till sweat rolled down his face and his chest heaved—

To the second star to the right and straight on till morning.

From the comparative safety of his locked cabin, Nessus listened to unending thuds. The footfalls came faster and faster as Louis burned off his excess energy, or sublimated his innate aggression, or worked up his nerve. Would Louis succeed?
Could
Louis succeed? Nessus had his doubts. Not even Beowulf Shaeffer had been Nessus’ first choice.

If only Carlos Wu’s autodoc healed minds half as well as it healed bodies.

At his best, Sigmund Ausfaller was exceptional. His innate paranoia found connections no rational mind could. His brilliance found opportunities amid the direst of circumstances. In the years Nessus had known the man, Sigmund had had adventures to rival anything even Beowulf Shaeffer had accomplished. And so Nessus had abducted Sigmund, his memory, like Louis’s, stripped of all knowledge of the location of Human Space.

But Sigmund was broken. His last adventure had left him adrift in deep space in the crippled stub of a ship. Sigmund was half mad when help finally arrived. He was too scarred, mentally and emotionally, ever again to set foot aboard a spaceship.

Louis would have to serve.

Louis sat in the copilot’s crash couch, a drink bulb of Kona coffee in hand and a plate of scones at the ready. Whatever complaints he might have, the repertoire of
Aegis
’ synthesizer was not among them.

The couch where Louis sat could have been purchased on any human world. Almost certainly it had. Everything else on the bridge—the control consoles, the pilot’s couch, even the padded rim of the hatchway—looked half melted. Corners and edges must be unnecessary risks. A person could bang his knee.

He savored a bit of scone. (“Substituting one appetite for another,” an inner voice mocked.) Ignoring the scorn, he took his time chewing. When the subtle flavors had faded, he called out, “Voice. Show me one of the Gw’oth ensembles.”

The holo that popped up was disgusting: a Gordian knot of flesh, writhing and pulsating. The Gw’oth came in every color of the rainbow, and in infrared Louis could not see. Hues and patterns changed in real time for reasons he could not fathom.

“A Gw’otesht, sir,” Voice intoned. “Specifically a Gw’otesht-16. As this ensemble is configured, it is optimized for four-dimensional simulation.”

Voice was the shipboard artificial intelligence. Amid technological marvels from stepping discs to the programmable nanofabric of Louis’s jumpsuit, Voice was an anomaly. Nessus had acquired a human crash couch; he could as easily have purchased a far more capable AIde on any human world. He hadn’t. Why not?

Because cowards do not build their possible successors. Interesting that Nessus would use even an out-of-date AI. . . .

A puzzle for another time, Louis decided. He said, “And other ensembles, entailing different connectivities, suit other problems. So an octuple
wherein each Gw’o uses three tubacles to connect to three other Gw’oth would tackle 3-D problems. Static modeling of molecular bonds, for example.”

“A Gw’otesht-8. Indeed, sir.”

Louis smiled at a crazy notion: an English butler had taught Voice its mannerisms. “Call me Louis, please. And these biological computers drive the Gw’oth’s rapid advancement?”

“Yes, Louis.”

“And yet they disclosed this information.” Louis stopped, frowning. “Or did they?”

A long pause ensued. Voice consulting with Nessus about what information could be disclosed? “A previous scouting mission penetrated the Gw’oth computer networks. This imagery came from a Gw’oth data archive.”

Puppeteer spies: not a surprise. But scouting seemed like a dangerous undertaking. How many Puppeteers would run the risk?

Louis asked, “Was Nessus there?”

“Indeed, Louis.”

“Voice, show me those mission reports.”

Another pause. More consultation?

“Keeping busy, I see.” Nessus stood just outside the bridge, half in, half out of the hatch, one head held high and the other low. Ready to flee in any direction?

“Yah.” And you don’t like the direction my studies are taking me. Why?

“Are you ready to take a break? I thought it was time that I share some more of your family’s history,” Nessus said.

Louis gestured at the Puppeteer-friendly crash couch. “I’m all ears.”

Nessus’ manic-depressive cycle had him holed up in his cabin. Again. He responded, sometimes, to questions.

With the bridge to himself, telling himself he was bearing the long flight better than Nessus, Louis set out to relax. He sprawled across the copilot’s couch, sipping from a drink bulb. His latest coffee experiment involved a Tanzanian blend. His notepad lay on the console ledge, the visible page half filled with pen-and-ink sketches. The threat of war did not impress the laws of physics. Like it or not, the long flight to Hearth left more than enough time to savor
and
study.

Not just anyone could relax on the bridge of a starship. Few objected to the speed of hyperdrive: a light-year every three days. Hyperspace was another matter entirely. Less-than-nothingness lurked just beyond the ship’s hull. Instruments revealed nothing about the space behind space. Theoreticians disagreed on what hyperspace was.

On commercial starships, passengers turned to liquor, pills, and sex—to anything that helped them forget or deny or ignore where they were. Or weren’t. Semantics dealt poorly with the situation. The bridge displays, had they looked outward, would have shown less than nothing. The Blind Spot, pilots called the phenomenon. For many people, the wall surrounding a window or active view port seemed to come together. It was as though the port—and whatever it purported to show—did not exist. For other observers, the mind blanked out entirely. People had gone mad staring into the Blind Spot, forgetting where—and even that—they were.

He tried to forget having thought of pills.

The ancient race of Outsiders, from whom humans and every other known starfaring race had purchased hyperdrive shunts and instantaneous hyperwave radio, priced underlying theory separate from the designs. The designs, without explanation, were expensive enough.

Only it was no longer every known race. The Gw’oth had evidently invented hyperspace technology independently, from observations taken in flight. Surreptitious observations, apparently. Nessus was less than forthcoming about why Gw’oth had been aboard a Puppeteer ship.

So much for a break from study and worry.

“Voice,” Louis said, “resume instruction.” A holo popped open, text and images scrolling past at a quick-skimming rate. From time to time Louis would insert a hand into the holo, speeding or slowing the scroll rate with a gesture. A virtual tap-tap would open auxiliary displays with related information.