Mute (12 page)

“No!” she exclaimed, horrified, “It can’t be!”

“It can be. My own father was onplanet a month before—”

“You’re stretching the case,” the Captain interjected. “Most ships carry the improved shielding now, so that the mutations lack viability. After a month, very few survive, so even if they are not expelled from the body they can’t cause mutation.”

“Can you guarantee that her husband’s ship did have that improved shielding?” Knot asked evenly.

The Captain was silent.

Knot returned his attention to the woman. “As I was saying, my parents used the same system. I was conceived 35 days after my father’s excursion in space, according to the records.”

“And I was conceived twenty days after,” Finesse called, galled by this line of attack.

Stenna grabbed desperately at the proffered straw. “And she’s obviously normal! Freak chances happen, but the overwhelming probability—”

“Which brings up my second point,” Knot said, getting set to close his trap. “How long is your day on Planet Vermiform?” He happened to have a notion, because he had once placed a mutant from that planet.

“A day is a day, dolt! What—”

“Not in terms of the human system. The galactic standard is the Earth day, but local standards conform to the cycles of their own planets. Some days are longer than Earth’s; others are not.”

“No!” she cried again, stricken. “Vermiform has short days—”

“Which translates into less time per day. So your probability of bearing a mutant baby has just escalated again, because you did not really wait a full thirty Earth-days. So that means—”

“Never!” she screamed, lunging at him. The lady telepath put her hands to her head.

Knot moved aside, and Stenna missed him. She grabbed at her own hair, suddenly drawing out a long, wicked hatpin. She turned on the Captain, who stood closest, stabbing him. Of course the pin passed right through the holograph without resistance.

There was another reason for the segregation of crew from passengers. Stenna collapsed, sobbing.

The man who had been behind Knot muttered: “You
are
a freak! But she asked for it. A pox on both.”

“What’s the matter with the telepath?” Finesse asked, going to the woman.

“It’s all right, all right,” the telepath said, still holding her head. Her face mask had become dislodged; she had become contaminated by interaction with the passengers. “An emotional overload—I was tuned to her mind when she exploded—oh, it hurts! I won’t be able to function telepathically for days!”

“You are relieved from duty,” the Captain said, concerned. “Debark to the orbiting port and report to their med officer.”

Finesse nodded as the telepath left. “Which explains what was scheduled to happen in space. Stenna was going to realize that her worst nightmare was coming true—that she carried a freak fetus—and her reaction would wipe out the power of the telepath who was going to guide the ship to port. We would have been lost in space.”

“But the woman has not conceived a mutant!” the Captain protested. “Our clairvoyants check routinely for such things, to make sure no blame for mutancy is fixed unfairly.”

“Perhaps you should have reassured her at the outset,” Finesse said gently. “This small misunderstanding has delayed your flight, tormented one passenger, and knocked your telepath out of commission. It could have been much worse.”

“Affirmative,” the Captain agreed, shaken.

Finesse returned to Stenna “Your baby is normal,” she said. “The clair checked it. The odds may have been against you, as they were against my own parents, but it is all right. Do you hear me?”

Stenna looked up at her. “N–normal?”

“Normal,” Finesse repeated firmly. “It happens all the time. Some mutes are conceived after the ‘safe’ period, like Knot here.” She shot Knot a dark look. “But some are sired by spacefaring men well within the critical month, like me. As you can see, I’m completely normal, and so is your own baby.”

“Normal...” Stenna repeated, hope returning. “The clair says it?”

“Yes. Now you can rejoin your husband, secure in that knowledge.” Finesse stood and looked across at Knot again. “And you, you freak—”

Volcanoes! Novas! Planetbuster bombs!
Hermine thought.

All I did was solve the riddle,
Knot thought innocently.

It was the way you did it. You brutalized a normal.

I comeuppenced a bigot.

“Now don’t you start in, miss,” the man behind Knot said. “Can’t blame the man for not liking being called a freak. I called him that myself, but I shouldn’t have. I didn’t like it much when people made ignorant remarks about my daughter.”

“The precog has now cleared this ship for travel,” the Captain said. “A substitute telepath is boarding. Please take your seat.”

They took their seats, subdued. Stenna was silent, not looking at Knot—and Finesse was the same. He was back in the mutant enclave.
Normals,
he complained to Hermine.
They’re all alike.

Yes,
the weasel agreed, enjoying the by-play.

They don’t object to mutants, so long as the freaks keep their places.

True.

And if a mutant ever has the temerity to talk back—

Volcanoes! Novas! Explosions!

Right, freak!

Finesse looked straight ahead, refusing to acknowledge any of this, though Knot was sure Hermine was gleefully filling her in. Weasels did seem to have a predatory sort of humor.

The ship got under way at last. A stasis field encompassed them, and acceleration commenced at 100G increasing as they cleared the immediate environs of Planet Nelson.

The holo-Captain appeared. “This is a recording, this time, folks. I’m locked in stasis the same as you are, at the moment. The entire ship is in stasis; we wouldn’t want anything to fall off, ha-ha! We are now clearing the local stellar system, advancing our acceleration smoothly to approximate one million gravities. Without the stasis field we would all be in sad shape. Stasis, as much as any other thing, is responsible for the development and maintenance of the galactic empire of man. You can put that in your next term paper on the history of life.

“It will take us about ten minutes to reach lightspeed. Don’t worry, you can survive it; diskship stasis fields are carefully tailored to protect the life processes despite almost total immobility. After we achieve C—that’s lightspeed—we shall use the tachyon drive to assume short-hop travel velocity. Sit tight; the stasis field will release when we go to tach-one.” He smiled, as though making a small joke, but Knot did not fathom the humor and was sure most other passengers missed it also.

Implied pun on mach one, the speed of sound through Earth-type atmosphere,
Hermine thought.
Finesse told me.

Oh. That must have been a common term back when the velocity of sound through air seemed to be the absolute limit. No wonder he had missed the reference. Still, it showed how one became acclimatized to the contemporary state of the art.

Still, Knot was not yet used to trans-galactic velocity. He had thought the acceleration of the planetary shuttle was fierce. This diskship’s drive was of another magnitude. He wished he could look out the portals, but of course there were none, and if there had been, the stasis would have prevented him from looking, and had he surmounted that problem there still would have been nothing out there he could visually assimilate. Trans-lightspeed was a different universe.

“You may wonder at the strength of our propulsion,” the holo-Captain said. Knot could see him fuzzily, since his eyes were aimed that way but could not focus. The stasis field did not seem to interfere with sound. He knew that the holo-recording was intended to distract and entertain the passengers, who might otherwise panic in the extended stasis and do themselves emotional harm. As it happened, he
had
just been wondering about the propulsion; he was a typical first-time passenger.

“We use a psionic drive,” the recording continued. “The technical aspects are complex, so I’ll use an analogy. The normal chemical propulsion is reactive; it is like firing a rocket with the exhaust being shoved back as the rocket shoves forward. This psionic drive is like climbing a ladder; no mass is expended. We are climbing very rapidly, of course, and the ladder we are using is the framework of space itself, in the region of our galaxy. It is the same ladder light uses—but we shall soon be leaving light behind. This drive is made possible by the efforts of psionic mutants, who create the fuel, relate to the framework, and orient telepathically on our destination. Yes, it is quite fair to say that this trip would be impossible without mutants.”

And what did bigoted Stenna with the nonmute baby think of that? Knot asked himself smugly. She hated mutants, but was dependent on them. Was she closing her mind to the Captain’s canned message? No—she accepted mental mutation as a necessary evil; it was physical mutation that bothered her. Yet of course the two types occurred in equal numbers. So normals like her simply ignored or shut out the physicals, while accepting the largesse of the mentals. No doubt it had ever been thus.

The stasis released. “We are now in tach,” the Captain announced. “The normal interactions of mass no longer apply to this ship with respect to the galaxy. We shall maintain token artificial gravity of one-quarter norm until we depart the galactic disk. As far as conventional space time is concerned, we no longer exist; but as far as
we’re
concerned, the galaxy no longer exists. So we shall simply proceed as if we are the only people in the universe, and hope we all get along together. You may leave your seats and mingle freely.”

Just as the normals preferred to ignore the mutants, the ship was ignoring the rest of the universe. Ah, well; the universe would re-manifest in due course.

The passengers got up and stretched. “I hate that stasis,” the man behind Knot said, then glanced at him with mild surprise. “Hello, I don’t believe we’ve met.”

He had forgotten already? After only ten minutes? “I’m Knot,” Knot said. “With a sounded K.”

“I’m Manfred. Pleased to know you.” The man moved on, mingling, satisfied with this one-minute depth of mutual knowledge. It occurred to Knot that wealthy normals probably traveled in space largely for the joy of socializing with others of their ilk, in the temporary isolation of deep space. Perhaps it helped them relinquish their inhibitions and opened a new universe of possibilities. Why should spouses be true to spouses when the universe no longer existed?

Finesse looked at Knot, startled. “You’re here?”

“Where else?”

“But I don’t remember—”

“I suspect the stasis served in lieu of separation,” he murmured. Could his psi have more direct ties to the universe than he had supposed?

“I—it must have,” she agreed, catching on. “The episode of the pregnant woman must have helped distract me. Good thing you weren’t involved in that.”

“Good thing,” Knot agreed. His psi power sometimes acted in marvelous ways.

Ooo, naughty!
Hermine chided him gleefully.

How come you remember?

Because I read your memory. Your mind is weasel-like.

Oh, really not that good,
he thought, chuckling mentally.

Knot was tempted to introduce himself to Stenna, but resisted. The passengers’ memory of him should not yet be beyond recall. If he made an issue of it he could restore it. That would put him in bad repute, so seemed pointless. Of course, they would forget again when he left them at the conclusion of the voyage. Only by means of a key reminder from outside, such as Finesse’s recorder, or a call from Knot himself, could the forgetting be reversed. Anonymity pursued him always.

Except for the CC record of his new number, he thought darkly. But CC had already known about him, he reminded himself; the CC number made no difference. It was merely symbolic. CC had sent Finesse to rout him out; he had been doomed from that moment. The fish had not been able to resist taking the bait.

“We are now approaching the first right-angle turnabout,” the holo-Captain announced. “Stasis will re-establish momentarily; no need to resume your seats.”

There was a brief freeze and wrench. “All done. We are now in maindrive, proceeding across the face of the galaxy at approximately one thousand light years per hour. This hop will last twenty hours. Please avail yourselves of the facilities aboard ship. We do not have tennis courts and swimming pool the way the larger liners do, but our ‘indoor’ entertainments should suffice for a while.”

Finesse glanced at Knot, startled. “You’re here? I don’t remember—”

“Ask Hermine,” he murmured. No doubt about it: a few minutes of stasis had the same effect as a few hours of ordinary time, with respect to his own psi power. The brief flash of stasis just now had been enough to wipe out the few minutes’ impression he had just made since the prior stasis. He would have to figure out ways to apply that effect to his benefit. Maybe if he obtained a portable stasis unit—

“Ah, yes,” Finesse agreed, evidently in touch with the weasel. “You are very—interesting, Knot.”

“I certainly am,” he agreed.

The remainder of the voyage was uneventful, largely because Finesse did not have occasion to review her recording and refresh her memory on the initial episode with Stenna. They did avail themselves of the ship’s facilities, and these were indeed adequate. There was a fine gaming room in which the passengers wagered against machines, setting the risk levels wherever they chose. There were private compartments with very soft floors, where men could dally with other men’s women, or vice versa. There were also, as Mit warned, holo-pickups; for a price the neglected spouses could watch what their legal partners were doing in their supposed secrecy. It seemed the diskship had evolved very specialized tastes in amusement. The amazing thing was, the way all this was accepted; Knot saw one woman observing her husband in action via the holo, and when he emerged from his endeavor she acted exactly as though nothing at all had happened.