Destination: Void: Prequel to the Pandora Sequence (21 page)

Chapter 30

Anthropomorphic assumptions have tended to lead humankind far astray. The universe does not work by our rules.

—Raja Lon Flattery,
The Book of Ship

Somewhere in his own consciousness, Flattery felt, an accumulation of answer-bits had poured out of their storage circuits, fed into an analyzer punched for decode, and produced a terrible answer.

The ship had to be destroyed—and all its occupants with it.

As the lock hatch swung open, that one thought dominated him. He hurled himself through the hatchway and down the tube. The distance illusion that made the tube seem to contract ahead of him, filled him with a sensation that he must be growing smaller and smaller to pass through it. The thought intruded on him and he forced it aside.

He heard Timberlake close behind.

“You see that robox?” Timberlake panted. “What made it open up?”

Flattery sped on without answering.

‘That voice,” Timberlake said. “Was that Bickel, that voice? Sounded like Bickel.”

They were at the Y-branch leading down to Com-central now, then at the hatch.

Flattery opened it, slipped through. His mind raced. Kill the ship now. Destroy this wild genie they had created. Timberlake mustn’t suspect and try to stop him. And Bickel—Bickel was in quarters where he could block off that red trigger. But there was another trigger.

I must act normal,
Flattery thought.
I must wait my moment. Tim could stop me.

Prudence lay on the deck halfway between hatch and couch.

Flattery knelt beside her, becoming totally physician for the necessities of this moment.

Pulse thin, ragged. Lips cyanotic. Liver spots at her neck where it showed within the edge of the helmet seal. He loosed the hinged helmet from the back of her neck, pressed a hand there. Skin clammy.

Did she think she was fooling me? he
wondered.
She went off the AS and was experimenting on her own body. Medical stores showed a gradual depletion of serotonin and adrenalin fractions.

Flattery thought of the neuro-regulatory shifts, the psychic aches that would arise from manipulating body chemistry in this fashion. Prue’s moods and strange behavior became clearer to him.

He stood up, retrieved the emergency medical pack from its clips on the bulkhead, saw that Timberlake had taken over on the big board.

What difference does it make if I save her?
Flattery asked himself. But he returned his attention once more to the comatose woman, began ministering to her. He kept on checking her condition as he worked. No broken bones. No evidence of external injury he could detect through her suit.

Timberlake had ignored Prudence after the first glance. She was Flattery’s problem. He had darted across to his action couch, shifted the big board, keyed first for open circuits.

There was a sense of dullness in the equipment. He had to wait while servos hummed slowly about their work, while circuits balked and produced sluggish results.

He could feel his own hairline awareness of every control and instrument, his consciousness keyed up by necessity. The interrelation of every device in this room and throughout the ship was like a complicated ballet, a pattern growing simpler and simpler in his mind even through its slowness.

Timberlake made a delicate adjustment in hull-shield control, saw the resultant temperature change register on his instruments as a power shift in the radiation-cell accumulators, a minuscule shift of weight in the ship-as-a-whole brought about by adjustment in mass-temperature proton balance.

But how slow it was. And growing slower.

Timberlake swung his computer board to his left side, keyed for diagnosis, got no response.

Telltales were winking out on the big board. With an increasing sense of frenzy, Timberlake fought to find the trouble.

Dead circuits.

No answers.

Keys on the main console began locking. No power in their circuits.

The last light winked out. Every key on the board was locked tight, all the servos silent. There was no whisper of air-circulation fans, no pulse of life to be felt in the ship. Slowly, Timberlake swung his gaze to the right, staring at the hyb-tank repeaters. The lights were dead, but the physical analogue gauges still showed feeder fluids flowing in the gross ducts of the system. Room lights flickered as local battery circuits took over the job of illumination.

The hyb-tank occupants were not dead … yet, Timberlake thought. Whatever the settings had been when the board went dead, that was the balance remaining for each tank—as long as the auxiliary accumulators throughout the ship retained some power … as long as the pump motors kept running.

But the delicate feedback control and adjustment was gone.

Timberlake eased himself out of the action couch, looked around the oddly quiet Com-central. The only sound was Flattery working to revive Prudence.

Her eyelids fluttered and Timberlake thought bitterly:
What good does it do to save her? We’re dead.

Flattery sat back on his heels.
I’ve done all I can for her,
he thought.
Now
…

He grew conscious of the stillness in the room, looked up at the dead console, shot a questioning stare at Timberlake.

“Bickel’s really done it this time,” Timberlake said. “No power … computer off. Everything’s dead.”

All I need do is wait,
Flattery thought.
Without power, the ship will die.

But the effort of reviving Prudence had softened his determination. Living, after all, held its attractions—even if they were only a ship full of culture-grown flesh, clones, duplicates, expendable units.

“
You are human types, never doubt that,”
Hempstead had insisted. “
You were grown from selected cell cultures of select candidates. Clones are merely good common sense. We don’t want to lose people if the ship has to be destroyed … as the others were. We can send you out again and again.”

But if the ship died this way, it might not leave its capsule record to help the ones when came after … the next try.

“How is she?” Timberlake asked. He nodded toward Prudence.

“I think she will recover.”

“To what?” Timberlake asked. “Do you want to go see what’s wrong with Bickel?”

“Why bother?”

The question with its tone of utter submission to fate sent anger surging through Timberlake.

“Give up if you want, but if Bickel’s alive he may know what he’s done … and how to repair it.” He pushed himself away from the couch, headed for the hatch to quarters.

“Wait,” Flattery said. Timberlake’s rejection had stung him and he found this surprising.

Have I acquired a new taste for living?
Flattery wondered.
God—what is Thy will?

“You keep an eye on Prue,” Flattery said. “It was chemical shock. She should stay quiet and warm. I have her suit heaters turned up. Leave them that …”

He broke off as the hatch from quarters slowly opened.

Bickel stumbled through it, would have fallen had he not caught a stanchion. A charred block of plastic slipped from his hands, tumbled to the deck. He ignored it, clung to the stanchion.

Flattery studied him. There were dark smudges beneath Bickel’s eyes. His skin was powder white. His cheeks showed skull depressions as though they had wasted away in months of fasting.

“So your white box didn’t kill you,” Flattery said. “Too bad. All you did was kill the ship.”

Bickel shook his head, still unable to speak.

The stillness of the ship had awakened him from a sleep so deep he could still feel the fog of it clinging to his mind. A profound weariness dragged at his muscles. Movement sent odd aches angling through his body, stirring this terrible torpor.

The first thing to catch his attention as he awakened had been the mobious energizer, his clever installation to give the Ox a constant source of energy reference. A fan of gray char crackled from its broken seals and its motors lay silent. The virtually frictionless motors and spools, the thousand-year units, were blobs of fused plastic and metal.

It had taken several minutes for him to gather enough energy to move close to the unit and study it. His mind had labored over the simplest observations—charred insulation on the power leads and in the timing circuits … tape spools twisted out of line.

Slowly, it came to him: something had altered the power to the motors … and their synchronization. Something had tried to change the timing of this pulse … and its intensity.

Forcing the movement of every muscle, he had unplugged the unit, stumbled and crawled with it back to Com-central. The dead stillness of the ship pressed him as he moved.

Raj
…
Tim
…
somebody with his mind turned on … has to see this,
he thought.

But now that he had made it to Com-central, he couldn’t find the energy to speak.

Timberlake recovered the fused energizer unit from the deck, studied it.

Flattery crossed to Bickel’s side, felt the pulse at his temple, lifted an eyelid, looked at his lips and tongue. Presently, he stooped to the med-kit, removed a slapshot and pressed it against Bickel’s neck.

Energy began to burn through Bickel’s veins.

Flattery pressed a squeeze bottle against his lips. “Here, drink this.”

Something cool and tingling poured down Bickel’s throat. Flattery removed the squeeze bottle.

Bickel found a husky half-whisper that would serve him as voice. “Tim,” he rasped.

Timberlake looked at him.

Bickel nodded toward the energizer, began explaining what had happened.

Flattery interrupted: “Do you think the black box—white box transfer was completed?’

Bickel examined the question. He could feel his mind clearing under the pressure of the stimulant—and there in his memory was the sensation that the ship was his body, that he was a creature of hard metal and thousands of sensors.

“I … think so,” he said.

Timberlake held up the block of plastic. “But … it des-troyed this and … apparently shut itself down.”

A thought began stirring in Bickel’s mind and he said: “Could this be a message to us … a kind of ultimate message?”

“God telling us we’ve gone too far,” Flattery muttered.

“No!” Bickel snapped. “The Ox telling us … something.”

“What?” Timberlake asked.

Bickel tried to wet his lips with his tongue. His mouth felt so dry. His lips ached.

“When nature transfers energy,” Bickel said, “almost all that transfer is unconscious.” He fell silent a moment. This was such a delicate plane of conceptualizing. It had to be handled so gently. “But most of the energy transfers for all the enormous amount of data in the Ox-computer is routed through master programs … and total consciousness would turn all of them on, force the system as a whole to suppress some while letting others through. It’d be like riding herd on billions of wild animals.”

“You gave it too much consciousness?” Timberlake asked.

Bickel looked at the transceiver panel of the Accept and Translate system beside his own action couch.

Timberlake turned, followed the direction of Bickel’s stare.

Prudence stirred and moaned. Flattery bent to her.

But Timberlake ignored them, beginning to see the direction of Bickel’s thoughts. The ship was dying, but
here
was hope.

“All the master programs dealing with translation of symbols are monitored through feedback loops linked to the AAT,” Timberlake said. “Symbols!”

“Remember,” Bickel said, “that impulses going out from the human central nervous system have that additional integration/modulation factor added to them—synergy. An unconscious energy transfer.”

Flattery, kneeling beside Prudence, wondered why he could bring only part of his awareness to bear on ministering to her. The conversation between Timberlake and Bickel electrified him.

Something was
added
to impulses going out from the central nervous system.

The thought boiled in Flattery’s mind, and he had to force his attention onto Prudence, pressing a stimulant shot against her neck.

An addition. Gestalt addition.

To be addible, qualities had to have sufficient similarity. Otherwise, how could human sense take two superimposed sensations of a color and say one was a more intense version of the color than the other? What made one green more intense than another—to the senses? Increase in intensity had to be a form of addition. “It could be in the axon collaterals of the Ox’s high-speed convergence fibers,” Bickel said.

Flattery sank back on his heels, waiting for the stimulant to work on Prudence.

Bickel’s right,
he thought.
If you superimposed a sufficiently rapid convergence of sense data, that itself could be interpreted as intensification. One of the images would contain more bits than the other.

But bits of what? All this didn’t account for the way data overlapped in the human consciousness … awareness …

Flattery looked up at Bickel and Timberlake. They appeared lost in their own thoughts.

Prudence said: “Fmmmsh.”

Almost automically, Flattery put a hand to her temple, checking her pulse.

When I search my memory,
Flattery thought,
I find data separated against a background. Whatever that back-ground is, consciousness operates against it. That background is what gives consciousness its size and reference
—
its dimension.

“The Ox’s sense organs were modeled on ours but with a wider range,” Timberlake said.

Bickel nodded. “The differences,” he said. And he remembered the nightmare quality of those superimposed and merging globes of radiation.

“How about all that contact with the hybernating humans and livestock in the tanks?” Timberlake asked. “Has any woman ever carried that many … children … in just that way?”

“If consciousness results from combining sensations,” Bickel said.

“Of course it does!” Timberlake said.

“Very likely,” Bickel said. “And it can receive and discriminate across the entire radiation spectrum. You can’t say it hears or sees or smells … or feels. Those are just different forms of radiation.”