Space Eater (9 page)

PoorMick y doesn’t really
understand
these matters, of course. Now Birch,” she blinked hard, “that bastard Birch vetoes all the best experiments. I
told
him, the worst has already been done with the big gateway back when, and we’re still here. Don’t you think so?”

“We’re here all right,” I said. “I didn’t understand the rest.”

Wui flopped down facing us, making a triangle on the floor. (Corman was talking to Ngabe now, and looked interested; Patel and the techs had taken a bottle away to their private corner.) “What’s she telling you, Ken? Nothing classified, I hope.” Wui was now speaking very slowly and carefully.

“I was telling him about the need for more pure research. I just don’t accept that there are things we shouldn’t tamper with. Rik Birch is so hidebound. We should have grown out of that twentieth-century attitude by now, don’t you think, Ken?” Every time she finished a sentence she tapped me on the knee.

Wui: “Birch ... Birch couldn’t care less and you know it. He’s a yes-man. That’s what I don’t like, he puts on all this earnest stuff and he just rubber stamps everything that comes down from Central. Have

‘nother drink.” This time Wui spilled a lot of gin on the floor as he poured.

I felt very subtle and cunning, even though the room was starting to sway, as I asked: “What do
you
think about Tunnel, then,Mick y? What’s Birch not telling us?”

“Wheels within wheels,” said Ellan and giggled. “Give the man a medal. The Thingswithwhichmanshouldnot Medal. Birch’s
rectitude
has its little loopholes, doesn’t it,Mick y? Like the loopholes in space. That’s a joke, probably.”

“So there’s a cover-up, isn’t there? Corman and I aren’t the whole story? We’re just a political what-d’you-call-it, something to shut up the peaceniks while—“ Something went
click
in my head so clearly I could almost hear it: the sound of a safety catch being flipped off. Everything stood out small and clear and bright, like the view down the wrong end of telescopic sights. “That’s it. Christ, that’s it. We’re the delaying action, we make with the sweetness and goodwill while you keep working on the final solution. That’s what they called it in the old wars...”

Wui was shaking his head so hard he nearly fell over. “Oh God, this is terrible. What are you doing working all this out? You’re supposed to be a Forceman obeying orders tick tock tick tock, none of this bloody analysis. And you’re wrong,
wrong
. At least mostly...”

“I can even see how you’re going to do it. Everyone keeps telling me how much weapon potential there is in this AP junk. You’re going to touch off their sun, aren’t you? Of course, that’s it. Beta Corvi goes nova just about five minutes after you figure out how to do it without setting off another billion at the same time.
Blooey
goes your problem and Central’s problem and all the problems the poor sods out there have got,
including
”—I waggled a finger at him in triumph—“including the tiny little business of Rossa Corman and stupid Jacklin.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say,” Ellan said in a sleepy voice. Behind her, Patel was loudly telling the world about a batch of fruitjack that went wrong when some preservative in the juice killed off his yeast. Real exciting stuff.

“You don’t know how wrong you are,” said Wui, who was sweating slightly. “Yes, there is a sort of final contingency plan, final solution if you like, nothing so gross and bloody coarse as you think. Much, much cleverer. You two are important, else they wouldn’t be sending you. Comp knows why, Central knows maybe, Birch just knows you’re important and it bugs him not knowing why. I can’t put it together.

Force zombie killer damn expensive; special Comm talent more expensive, oh shit. Not supposed to undermine morale. Sorry. But I’ll tell you the real secret. We convinced Central too bloody well MT’s dangerous. This shot has to come off because next week, next month, they’ll be closing down Tunnel...”

The walls were reeling, and thick layers of something not quite transparent had got between me and people’s faces. “Everything’s just fine, you say. You don’t know why, you don’t know anything about what Central’s got planned, you’re just sure it’s fine, yeah.” Suspicion. They were pumping me for vital, secret data. They’d doped me, maybe. “Something in the drinks ... what’s in the drinks?”

Wui didn’t look too good either. Flushed, moving in jerks, voice a long way off. I turned to check on Ellan: she had a steady smile like a carbon arc that was beaming between us off into space. Wui said:

“Drinks loaded with C2H5OH the wonder drug. Puts hairs on your chest. You got to trust someone.

Hell, even times you have to trust bastard Birch. Central, too, they may spend all the time worrying about U.S. nationalism, Soviet revivals, or Africa wanting the rest of the world which they don’t, they blather about that but the strategy comp’s an old one and a big one, it’s got a good head on its shoulders—hey, that’s a joke, head on its shoulders...” He hiccuped. “Comp planned this one to please everyone, maximize human life and all the rest. Whatever they do to you, remember that. Try some rum now.”

“I think I’ll just ... sit here a bit.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Africa’s great problem,” Ngabe was saying somewhere, “is that too often our tribal links cross national boundaries. For example, the Ibo—“

Ellan twitched and suddenly seemed to notice we were still next to her. “You know, the
gravitic
properties of the minigate offer a fascinating range of, of, things to do with it. Compression of the potential hill ... and then the state of the conservation laws should the one-point-nine-centimeter circular aperture become contiguous with an event horizon ... Now, the entropy question is an important one in this case, but setting that aside, it might be like pinching off—“

“Yes, Cathy,” I said without much enthusiasm.

“Shut up, Cathy,” Wui said carefully and casually. “We don’t want any of that stuff tonight. The skeleton of pure maths mustn’t invade our feast, ha ha. Ken, lemme tell you, beware of our Cathy, the merest sip of fruitjack and it’s theory of numbers. Half a glass turns on the advanced tensors and whatsit, general relativity; any more than that an’ she sprouts the Meckis & Canning AP matrices, looks pretty on realtime display but don’t help too much when it’s time to press the button, find out if you’ve wrecked space/time or not ... Ah hell, whatstheuse. Be
quiet,
Cathy. Got to get sleep...”

“The big D,” Ellan was saying softly to nobody. “The devourer. Not black, though, not black at all...”

She had a pretty way of talking about dying, you had to give her that.

I decided then to stand up, which might have been a mistake. Any moment I expected the TILT light to go on and the whole room to go dead while I rattled down to the floor and through a black hole into the dark. Ngabe was still talking to Corman, sitting by her on the bunk, but I hadn’t heard her reply for a while. Patel saw me get up and decided to show he could do it too. I’d never seen a face quite that color before; he lurched across to the hand basin just in time, and stood there heaving.

Wui stood up too. “What’s your final contingency plan then?” I said.

“Can’t tell you. Sorry, Ken, would if I could, just can’t tell you. G’night.”

He more or less fell against the door and somehow opened it in the process. Two of the techs held him up, helped him out. Ngabe said, “Myself also, I must sleep. Thank you,” and followed quietly. Corman looked at me and shrugged. “I have just heard sixty-three separate reasons why this country is almost intolerable to a man from the civilized world.”

The colder air from the corridor made me feel slightly more functional, though there was still a thin whine in my head. “I’ve heard a few reasons why we shouldn’t ever get distrustful of anyone. Only most of them boil down to ‘because I say so’ from darling Wui. Goodnight, everybody—“

Ellan was still sitting, beaming at where Patel was imitating a recycling plant. I went out, and Corman came after me. It was a little hard to walk in a dead-straight line, and it seemed to get harder when I made a point of trying to; I hoped it didn’t show. What still showed was where my inhibitions had dissolved in Wui’s rotgut: “Why are you here anyway?” I heard myself asking Corman.

She took it seriously enough. “Here, now, because you and Wui came knocking on my door. But you mean here on Tunnel, on operation Kraz?” I nodded. “It’s not an easy question to answer. They warned me in Comm that I’d be volunteering for ‘high hazard and extreme likelihood of termination’—such a lovely way they do have of putting these things. So naturally I volunteered.”

I slowed down, wondering if I’d walked so fast as to miss a step or six in the logic. “You ... You don’t want to come back?”

“That is a dreadfully precise statement. Yes, absolutely yes. I don’t insist on termination but I very much want not to come back. You must know the way it is in Comm.”

“Look, I didn’t know there was any such thing as Comm Aux until a few days back. All I know now’s the name and a few oddball things they’ve been saying here. Let me guess: it’s a special talent arm, one of those weird parapsych units, something like that. Astral radio, Wui said the other day.”

“Correct again, Forceman Jacklin—oh, Ken if you prefer.” (I must have wrinkled up my nose. Jacklin, yes, but “Forceman” gets me down.) “Now ... I think the sensitizer should have taken effect by now. The story is that a link between you and me might be useful if we’re separated: but I’m afraid the real idea is for you to be a loyalty monitor making sure I transmit nothing but the truth ... Are you very drunk? Surely not enough to cancel reception, anyway: so let me give you a private demonstration.” She slid up her left sleeve carefully, and I saw the forearm was pocked as if by dozens of injections. Maybe she doped? No, she’d said—

“See this pin,” she said, pulling one from the lapel of her issue tunic. She held it poised over her arm.

“Ready?”

“Ready for what?”

Corman didn’t say anything, but the hand holding the pin went up and down like a piece of machinery stabbing—her arm? my arm? I grabbed hold of my own left arm, whose sleeve was most definitely
not
rolled up, but where there came a sudden pattern of tiny pains, a dotted pain-line down my forearm just like the dotted line of blood points coming up on hers. I pushed my sleeve up and gaped at where, even in this weary yellow light, there were no marks to be seen.

“I transmit,” she said. “They use me for special applications, myself and a very few others. Central allocated just one of us for this operation, one Comm Aux freak. We’re less reliable than radio, of course, being mere flesh and blood, but because we’re not radio, the AP jammer doesn’t block us. Also because we’re not radio, 162 light-years won’t delay the messages...”

I thought about it and wasn’t sure I liked it. “You sit there sticking pins into yourself and send ... Morse messages? Sounds, well, strange.”

“The pin is simply for demonstration, for testing. Testing, one, two, three,” she said and laid three specks of pain in a triangle on the back of my left hand. Three specks of blood on her own. After the sudden, tiny stabs there was a faint residual ache that faded faster than if I’d stuck pins in myself.

“OK, I believe you. No need to shoot yourself full of holes.”

A smile. “Why, congratulations. I’ve known new officers from Command take the sensitizer and have me or one of the others make her hands into pincushions all day. ‘Do it again,’ they grumble. ‘You can’t fool me like that ... it’s hypnosis, isn’t it? Stands to reason.’ Thank you for your credulity...”

“I’m drunk, remember. Drunk to the point where I nearly believe Wui’s line about how everything’s just lovely and don’t worry your little head about ordinary boring routine like tomorrow’s jaunt. Say, though, if you don’t use a pin for military comm work -- ?”

“Military and diplomatic, Ken. Why, a tiny pinprick hasn’t the power and reliability, you see. To push secret material through, we need a loud clear signal, don’t we? The receiver person might
imagine
a pinprick, or she might
miss
a feeble thing like a pinprick. Isn’t it lucky that the clever people in Comm have nerve inductors and suchlike electrical ingenuities to ensure a clear,
strong
signal?” She shivered slightly, maybe from the damp air that moved sluggishly down the dim corridor.

“Pain used to bother me a good lot when I got into the Force first,” I said. “Got used to it after a little while. Pain threshold goes up, conditioning helps you ignore it, and I suppose there are drugs too if you need them.”

“Ah, but think about it. The transmission depends on what I
feel
and so I have to feel it properly.
Our
pain threshold is kept down, conditioning helps us notice it more carefully, and yes, there are drugs for us too, but another sort. That’s my way of being used to pain. Most people don’t undergo much pain from day to day. Forcemen learn to ignore it. We look right into its heart—“

She was talking in faster and faster jerks. I had a ghastly view down a red-lit tunnel into my own dream where the pain couldn’t be ignored. Suddenly it didn’t seem at all funny that Rossa looked on everything with that stiff frozen face.

“Do Comm Aux personnel ever kill themselves?”

“Sometimes. It does no good, of course.
You
should know that.”

“Oh. Oh, I see. And the next best thing is—a high-hazard mission.”

The ice-jam in her face broke up for half a second and another smile came through. “I can’t imagine why they say all Forcemen are dim brutes like bears. Or is this just the drink talking? I really must be a little off sober myself to be saying all this. Good night, Ken—and I suppose I’ll be seeing you tomorrow.”

We’d slowed to a halt outside her door, and now she opened it. I checked my watch. “It’s after midnight. Suppose I’ll see you later today. Maybe ... well, maybe tomorrow will never come. Good night...” I supposed I had to say it: “G’night, Rossa.”