Partnership (7 page)

ifvou get a drop of Ganglicide on one finger while you're n Shemali, your arm will look like it's been through a per snredder by the time the shuttle delivers you to Bahati. Do try to keep it away from your pretty face."

Polyon's handsome features betrayed only slight uneasiness, but there was a knowing look in his eyes.

«you—had to interrupt your research rather suddenly, didn't you?"

Alpha silently cursed all interfering, gossiping old relatives and friends. Never mind. "More's the pity,"

she sighed. "I was just getting into the most interesting cases. You know, when Ganglicide goes into its gaseous form it attacks nerves and brain synapses. Has much the same effects on them that it has on the skin; we dissected a really fascinating case, a senior assembly tech from Shemali, as it happens. The inside of his head looked like a wet blue sponge. Of course, by the time the Ganglicide got that far he was too far gone to know or care what was happening to him. A mercy, really.

Not that we'll ever really know how long he felt the pain. Ganglicide goes straight to the pain receptors, you know; we can't block the effects with drugs. And towards the end he was screaming continuously. Like an animal dying under torture." She licked her lips and regarded Polyon. He was standing quite still, two fingers beating a nervous tattoo on the command panel behind him. The dance of his fingertips on the sensitive pressure pads made the SPACED OUT screen on the far side of the room shift back and forth jerkily, displaying alternate images of deep space and of a flaming labyrinth where molten lava menaced the hapless play icons.

"If you're nice to me," Alpha added, "I'll promise to kill you before the Ganglicide eats out your brains. No human being should have to die like that"

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Anne McCaffrey fc? Margaret Ball

"Oh, I'll be nice to you," Polyon said. His voice ivas still even; he thrust off from the control panel with HVQ

fingers and floated across the room. As he came closer Alpha recognized the look in his eyes. Not frightened Wary. Like a hunter waiting for his quarry to burst from cover. And as he reached out to encircle her wrist with strong, blunt fingers, the look changed to a light of triumph. "I think we can be very nice to one another lovely Alpha. It's so kind of you to take an interest in my career." His voice changed on the last words, mocking, savagely amused. "But enough about me.

Tell us about yourself, why don't you?" He gestured towards Darnell and Fassa, floating through the open door to join them. "We'd all like to hear about your interrupted research. And why one of the school's brightest young medical researchers chose to donate five years of public service to an obscure clinic on Bahati You're too modest, Alpha."

Alpha tossed her head and tried to pull away from Polyon, but he was too strong for her. "There's nothing to tell, really. I was tired — wanted a change of scene. That's all."

"Is it?" Polyon murmured. "Funny. The way I heard it, there were some other people who wanted to change your scene. The newsnibblers never beamed the story, did they? Can't have scandals about a High Families girl going out as entertainment bytes. But I fancy our friends on board here would find the story very entertaining."

Alpha stared up at Polyon, looking for a hint of compassion in the sharp planes of his face and the ice-blue eyes that had seemed so attractive a moment ago. "I did nothing to be ashamed of," she whispered. "The tradition of scientific experiments — "

"Does not include testing Ganglicide on unwitting subjects." His voice was so low the others could not hear it

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Charity cases," Alpha defended herself "Streetbums.

ne of them were so far gone on Blissto they didn't even ow what was happening to them. They were incurable __ nothing but an expense to the state as long as they Kved. I did diem a favor, making sure their lives ended for some purpose."

"Somehow," Polyon murmured, "I don't think the court would have seen it that way. But then, you never did come to trial, did you? Hezra clan and Fong tribe wouldn't let that happen. Private settlement in the med school offices, records sealed."

«How — did you find out?" Alpha gasped. He was very close to her now, his voice the subtlest vibration of sound from lips that almost brushed her cheek. The raw power of his will and his anger wrapped about her. She felt weak from the spine out. His smile made her shiver.

"That's my little secret," he told her, still smiling. His face and gestures might have been those of a courtship; Alpha realized that the others in the room might imagine they were flirting. That was a relief.

Anything was preferable to having her humiliation made public before these people who were to be her constant companions for the next two weeks—having them see her as the disgraced failure she was, instead of the successful young researcher with a social conscience she pretended to be. "You were lucky to get off with five years of community service on Bahati, weren't you?" Polyon commented, stroking her cheek with his free hand. "A commoner would have been doing time. Hard time. Who knows, gorgeous, you might even have wound up on Shemali — getting a chance to check out Ganglicide at first hand, so to speak. Wouldn't our innocent litde friends love to hear the story?"

But he was still speaking in a low voice, head partially turned away from Fassa and Blaize and Darnell, 52

Anne McCaffrey & Margaret Ball

who had grouped together in the far corner of the cabin and were pretending deep interest in a round of SPACED OUT.

"What—do you want?"

"Cooperation," Polyon said. "Only a little —.

cooperation."

Blindly, drowning in a sea of air that somehow gave her nothing to breathe, Alpha turned her face up to meet Polyon's parted lips.

"Not that sort of cooperation," Polyon told her, laughing gently, "not yet," His eyes measured her with a cold glance that made her more afraid than ever —

and, somehow, more excited too. "Maybe later, if you're a good girl. You were too uppity before, you know that, Alpha? Now you're the way I like my women. Quiet. And respectful. Stay that way, and we won't have to discuss any—ah—painful subjects with the others. Come with me and follow my lead. That's all I expect of you — for now."

Submissive, head bowed, Alpha drifted towards the three SPACED OUT gamers in Polyon's wake. They were still pretending to be totally involved in the game, but she felt sure they had avidly witnessed her humiliation.

She would pay them back. That was certain, she vowed. Fassa, Darnell, Blaize — they would all learn not to laugh at her.

She didn't even think of retaliating against Polyon.

/

Nancia quietly transferred the recording of the scene she'd just witnessed to an offline storage hedron.

Having those bits in her system made her feel... dirty.

As if she were somehow implicated in Polyon's sadistic games.

Perhaps she should have interfered. But how ...

and why? Alpha was just as bad as Polyon, worse even, to judge from what he'd revealed of her unauthorized PARTNERSHIP

medical experiments. The two of them deserved each other. Blaize was the only one of the bunch she would care to talk to. The litde redhead reminded her of Flix __- and unlike the others, he didn't seem to have anything wrong with him that a few years away from family pressures wouldn't cure.

And what, exactly, Tvitt you say if you do interrupt? Nancia couldn't answer her own question. She was a Courier Service Ship, not a diplomat! She wasn't supposed to interfere with her passengers! She should have had a brawn on board — an experienced brawn —

to break up nasty scenes like the one she'd just witnessed, to keep these spoiled young passengers happy and away from one another's throats for the two weeks of the trip. It's not fair! Not on my very first voyage!

But there was nobody to hear her plaint. They were still five days away from Singularity and the decomposition into Vega subspace.

At least I can keep evidence recordings going, Nancia thought grimly. If one of the little brats drives another over the edge, there'll be plenty ofdatahedra to show what happened. But at the moment, the five passengers seemed to be getting along reasonably well. Perhaps his sadistic games with Alpha had momentarily satiated Polyon's need for command and control; he had taken a play icon and seemed absorbed in that silly role-playing game. Nancia relaxed . . . but she kept her datacorders running.

"Why can't I get past the Wingdrake of Wisdom?"

Darnell griped. He had chosen Bonecrush again, but his mighty-thewed play icon was backed into a corner where a winged serpent hissed menacingly at him every time he tried to move.

"You should have bought some intelligence for Bonecrush at the Little Shop of Spiritual Enlightenment," Polyon commented. His fingers flicked carelessly at the screen as he spoke, sending Thingberry the Martian Mage to spin an apparently pointless web in the night sky above Asteroid 66.

"I didn't know you could buy intelligence." DarneU's lower lip protruded in a definite pout "That wasn't in the rule book."

"A lot of things aren't in the rule book," Polyon said,

"including most of what you need to survive. And information is always for sale... if you know the right price. Anything from the secrets of Singularity to the origins of planet names."

"Oh. Encyclopedias. Libraries, Anybody can buy the Galactic Datasource on fast-hedra," Darnell whined.

"But who has time to read all that crud?"

"The price of some kinds of information," Polyon said, "is more than the cost of a book and the time to read it. I could print out the rules of Singularity math for you, but you haven't paid the price of understanding it — the years of space transformation algebra and the intelligence to move the theories into multiple dimensions."

"Oh, come on," Blaize challenged him. "It's not that PARTNERSHIP

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compjjcated. Even I know Baykowski's Theorem."

"A continuum C is said to be locally shrinkable in M

if and only if, for each epsilon greater than zero and each open set D containing C, there is a homeomorphism h of M onto M which takes C onto a set of diameter less than epsilon and which is the identity on M ___ D," Polyon recited rapidly. "And it's not a theorem, it's a definition."

Nancia quietly followed the discussion with mild interest. The mathematics of Singularity was nothing new to her, but at least when her brat passengers were talking mathematics they weren't trying to drive each other crazy. And she was impressed that Polyon had retained enough Singularity theory to be able to recite Baykowski's Definition from memory; common gossip among the brainships in training was that no softperson could really understand multidimensional decompositions.

"The real basis for decom theory," Polyon lectured his audience, "is what follows that definition. Namely, Zerlion's Lemma: that our universe can be considered as a collection of locally shrinkable continua each containing at least one non-degenerating element."

Fassa del Parma pouted and jabbed her play icon across the display screen in a series of short, jerky moves.

"Very useful information, I'm sure," she said in a sarcastic voice, "but do the rest of us have to pay the price of listening to it? All this theoretical mathematics makes my head hurt And it's not as if it were good for anything, like stress analysis or materials testing."

"It's good for getting us to the Nyota system in two weeks instead of six months, my dove," Polyon told her. "And it's really quite simple. In layman's terms, Singularity theory just shows us how to decompose two widely separated subspace areas into a sequence of compacted dimensionalities sharing one non-degenerating element. When the subspaces become 56

Anm McCaffrey & Margaret Ball

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singular they will appear to intersect at that element —.

and when we expand from the decomposition, pon|

out of Central subspace and into Vega space we go."

Nancia felt grateful that she'd resisted her impulse to join in the conversation. Her Lab Schools classmates had been right about softpersons. Polyon knew all the right words for Singularity mathematics, but he'd gotten the basic theory hopelessly scrambled. And clearly he didn't understand the computational problems underlying that theory. Pure topological theory might prove the existence of a decomposition series, but actually forcing a ship through that series required massive linear programming optimizations, all performed in realtime with no second chances for mistakes. No wonder softpersons weren't trusted to pilot a ship through Singularity!

"I agree with you," Alpha told Fassa. "Bo-ring. Even the history of Nyota is better than studying mathematics."

"You'd think so, of course," Fassa said, "seeing that it was discovered and named by your people." The small grin on her face told Nancia that this was a jab of some sort at Alpha. Hastily she scanned her data notes on the Nyota system, but nothing there explained why the Hezra-Fong family should take a particular interest in it

"Swahili is a slave language," Alpha said haughtily.

"It has nothing to do with the Fong tribe. My people come from the other side of the continent — and we were never enslaved!"

"Will somebody give me a map of this conversation?" Darnell said plaintively. "I'm more lost than I was during Polyon's math lecture."

"This particular information," Alpha told him, "is free." She drew herself up to her full height, several inches taller than Fassa, and favored the top of her sleek, dark head with a withering glare, "The system we're going to was discovered by a Black descendant of the American slaves. In a burst of misguided enthusiasm, he decided to give the star and all the planets names from an African language. Unfortunately, he was so poorly educated that the only such language he knew was Swahili, a trade language spread along the east coast of Africa by Arab slavers. He called the sun Nyota ya Jaha — Lucky Star. The planets' names are fairly accurate descriptions, too. Bahati means Fortune, and it's a reasonably decent place to live —