Mute (20 page)

Mute. The irony had long since ceased to be amusing. He had begun as a psi-mute, and become a mute-mute.

He chewed methodically, savoring the pain. Taste, too, was a superfluous thing. He had learned to live without it. Like his wasted life, it—

The light came on. Knot blinked. He
could see!

Finesse put her hand against his head, steadying him. “That must have been some future,” she said.

“You mean—there really was an escape?” Now he could speak, too; his tongue was back. “This isn’t just another dream?”

“The future was the dream, if you could call it that. What happened?”

His eyes took in the scattered bales of hay, the weasel, the crab, the holograph. He felt the woman, warm against him. They must have stayed on the floor beside the bales, for an hour. It would have been dull for her.

“We can’t turn CC off,” he said.

“Of course we can’t!” she agreed. “There would be absolute chaos.”

Error,
Hermine thought.

What?

CC is already off. It turned off several minutes ago, in accordance with your directive.

“Already off!” Knot cried. “CC, turn on again!”

“As directed,” CC replied. “My terminals have resumed operation. However, the brief period of malfunction has alerted the monitors of the Galactic Concord, who are initiating an investigation.”

“Can they find us here?”

“Not within days, unless I advise them.”

“Obfuscate in your inimitable fashion,” Knot said.

“Let’s not do that again, huh?” Finesse murmured.

“Not that particular turn-off, no,” Knot said with a shudder. “I never want to experience that future again!”

“Are you ready to try another future?” Drem inquired.

Knot’s perspective was steadying as the bleak immediacy of the last future faded. His memories were now derivative—his memories of his prior memories, five years hence. That was a relief. Blinded, imprisoned, his friends dead—no, he would never set that future in motion, not for anything! He no longer suspected CC of faking the vision for him; his experience had been too internal, too real. He had
known
—and now would not forget. The details he would gladly let go, but not the fundamental belief.

“CC, you are trying to teach me something, aren’t you,” he said, finally disengaging from Finesse. He loved holding her like this, and from the feel of it he had made love to her in the past hour while he was out, but the memory of her awful death was too ugly. What had that warlord been afraid of, that he should kill himself? Not of her, surely—unless there was a side of her he had not seen. Maybe Hermine had been with her, after all, and relayed a nova, or some terrible mental monster.

“Correct,” CC had replied while Knot’s thoughts rambled.

“It’s some course!” But what would he gain by delaying? He had made another decision of policy. “CC, institute a program of automatic temporary 30-day sterilization of all male space travelers,” he said. “We’re going to eliminate the mutants.” He turned to Drem. “Send me five years forward again, for one hour.”

Knot suffered abrupt vertigo, a sickening sensation of falling through space, turning end over end, his substance simultaneously compacting and diffusing. Then he was back with the others. He blinked. Things seemed unchanged. “This is the future?”

“No,” Finesse said. “Only fifteen seconds have passed.”

“You bounced,” Drem said. “That means you have no future, along this line.”

“No future?” Knot asked blankly. “There has to be—”

“It means you are dead five years from now on this track,” Drem said. “I can’t send you beyond your own death.”

“I’m dead—as the result of this sensible, modest reform?” Knot had braced himself for something, anything, but not nothing. “How do I know that’s true?”

“You could verify it by isolating the moment of your demise.”

“Not likely!” Then Knot reconsidered. “I wouldn’t actually
be
dead?”

“You would revert to the present the instant life expired. You die permanently only if you follow the present along the particular track leading to that death.”

“Which I won’t do,” Knot said. “But I certainly want to unriddle the mystery. I can’t see how my policy can eliminate me. All right, CC—prior policy stands. Drem, send me one year into the future, for five minutes. I don’t want to waste a lot of time until I—”

He was standing on a planetary plain, searching for any sign of pursuit, as he always did. He had avoided them for several hours, so they should have forgotten him by now—unless they had a machine scan on him. “...locate the moment of my own expiration,” he finished. This time he maintained his equilibrium better; he knew this was only a future.

It seemed he was in trouble. His psi talent became almost valueless once it was known; all they had to do was apply machines to the chase, and he might as well be an ordinary man. Which had made CC’s choice of him for a galaxy-saving mission seem foolish. But—

He focused his memory. From what point in his prior life had he jumped? When Finesse interviewed him on Planet Nelson? No, that was too soon. When CC interviewed him, there among the chickens? That had to be it. It was hard to pick out a particular moment in an ongoing life; his memories were not of just one year, but of everything he had ever experienced, right back to childhood. He had had many more significant adventures than that one minor jaunt into the future; his point of departure simply had not made much impression on him. But he had located it now.

CC had made the change in space-travel policy, and the birth of human mutants had halted. It had only been three months since this became evident, because of the period of human gestation. Doctors could have spread the news earlier, since extreme mutation was evident long before birth; but doctors had been under instructions to keep silent. The sterilizations had not been announced; sterilizing radiation generators had merely been set up on each ship. All the sperm cells mutated by space travel were killed; only those generated after the voyage was over were available for procreation. It had been a physically and socially painless measure.

Now the truth was out. The reaction had been powerful—and not, to his surprise, all positive. Knot had been in training as a CC agent, having agreed that his best futures lay with CC, when a private enterprise had traced him down as the cause of the sterilization policy. An assassination squad had been set on his trail, and he was now in flight from it. Because he had the help of Hermine and Mit, he had been able to avoid assassination fairly handily so far—but it did not leave him comfortable. He had to escape completely, to hide, to assume a new identity, or they would surely catch him. They had psi-mutes working with them, of course; they wanted to be sure there would be a continuing supply of psi.

We must move,
Hermine thought.

“Do you realize this is merely a future?” Knot asked her.

Not for me,
she thought.
I have lived it all, and this year has been longer in terms of my life than in terms or yours, and I cannot escape it.

That was sobering. He was here for only five minutes, but all the rest of the universe was here for the duration. Did he have the right to do this to everyone else?

No; it had to be merely a vision of what could be; it seemed real only to Hermine and the others. His act of animating it, for these five minutes, ensured that it would not come true—for himself or for anyone else. “You can escape it when I—”

He was back in the barn. “There was personal pique by some elements who preferred the mutant order,” he announced. “They were out to assassinate me, but weren’t having much luck yet.”

“There’s always hope for next time,” Finesse said with a mock frown.

“Still, they had me on the run. Machines on my trail—”

“Are you ready for the next?” Drem inquired.

“No. I think I have an inkling of my future on this track. Assassins after me in one year, and I’m dead within five years. I can guess what happened. What I still can’t fathom is why. How could my decision to cut off mutations have brought me to this pass? It’s a beneficial change, and even if it weren’t, it should take a generation for the repercussions to build substantially, as the number of mutants declines. Plenty of time to introduce some controlled mutations, on a limited scale, all from volunteers, to get telepaths and precogs to keep the ships traveling. But here within a year there’s trouble. How is this explained?”

“Your course, as you surmise, is not immediately disastrous,” CC agreed, “Other things being in balance, the lack of new mutants would at first make little apparent difference to the galaxy. But the nature of the human situation would suffer a fundamental change. It would become evident that the mutant society was coming to an end; that new planets would no longer be colonized by physical freaks, and that space travel would no longer be feasible on the scale it now exists. This would cause a shift in outlook that would have disastrous repercussions, exactly as the cessation of the growth ethic caused society severe problems in pre-galactic society on the origin-planet, Earth.”

“I didn’t know about that,” Knot said.

“You, like most men, are largely ignorant of the lessons of history. That is one reason power has been allocated to me. I consider, when I make a decision, not only the present ramifications, but also the historical ones. I do not repeat the errors of the past. On Earth, man based his cultures on constant growth—until the natural resources of his single planet were virtually exhausted. When he could no longer grow, his energies turned inward, often destructively. But for the advent of mutation, that enabled him to grow into space where he obtained vast new resources to exploit, man would have destroyed himself, as other planet-bound civilizations have. If mutancy is curtailed, these same pressures will inevitably build again, and man will suffer a similar problem—this time on a galactic scale.”

Knot wasn’t sure he believed either the history or the conclusion. He would have to think about it. Meanwhile, he had an immediate objection. “But that should take centuries! Why should an assassin be on my tail within a single year?”

“Because though your policy is unsound in the long run, it is superseded by another event in the short run. My program is to be destroyed by another agency, and that agency will seek to destroy you also, since you are the prime threat to that enemy’s success. Unless you act to prevent the destruction of my program, you cannot save yourself. The forces you will stir are too great for you to escape.”

“But
I
have destroyed your program—in that last future.”

“Incorrect. You merely modified my program. The enemy will wipe it out entirely.”

“I see,” Knot said, though he did not accept it. “My policy becomes passé if you are not there to implement it. So I really must come to grips with this other thing first. I think it is time to do a little basic research. CC, you’re a computer—you must have mapped out many variants of the future systematically.”

“Correct,”

“What is the nature of the threat that faces you? I mean, in some intelligible detail, if you have it.”

“I am to be destroyed, or turned off, or perverted to some program irrelevant to the maintenance of galactic civilization, so that the human empire collapses. This is to occur on most tracks, two to five years hence. I am unable to read beyond the demise of my present program, for the same reason you could not travel to a future beyond your own death. I can trace only up to the point the demise occurs. Some tracks have extremes of one to ten years, and a few have wider extremes, but I have found none that enable me to survive indefinitely or with certainty.”

“Except for a 25 percent chance if I help.”

“Correct.”

“Why can’t you follow a time-track to the point where you get turned off, make a note of who or what is responsible, and then deal with that thing in the present?”

“You are conversant with the problem of the needle in the haystack?”

“Yes. You mean there are so many alternate futures that you’ll never find the right one in the time you have? I don’t buy that. If
all
your futures lead to your demise, you should have no such problem. The haystack is made of needles! Pick any one.”

“All present futures appear to lead to my demise—but no single track is certain until I explore it directly to that end. Here I am limited by the capacity of the time-jumper. As you have seen, it takes time to explore any one track—perhaps hours to locate the moment of demise. Even then, the root causes may not be at all obvious.”

“Damn it, if I saw the instant of my own death, I would see the root cause!”

“You did not do so in your most recent future.”

“Well, I didn’t—” Knot paused. “Still, with your analytical circuitry—”

“Picture yourself standing amid a hail of flying knives. One of them strikes you and kills you. You might see the particular person who threw that knife—but still not understand why hundreds of people were attacking you. Without the root cause being evident, you cannot—”

“Uh, yes. But in your case—”

“Since there are an infinite number of alternatives—”

“You can only explore representative selections,” Knot finished. “That’s like the problem in chess—you don’t have time to check everything out before you have to make your move. So it becomes largely experience and strategy and luck—and the galaxy is more complicated than a chessboard.”

“Considerably,” CC agreed. “In addition, there is the randomness of the projections. We set a single policy, then visit the future resulting—but many other forces in the galaxy are making policy decisions that affect that future too. So the chance of actually achieving the future you visit becomes diminishingly small in the farther reaches. Only when the jump is brief, as with your five-minute efforts, is the probability of achieving that particular future high. A jump of a year reduces even the firmest policy-future to a probability of less than one in a thousand, and often far less.”

“So the five-year futures I was looking at are pretty unlikely,” Knot said, relieved.