The Gap into Madness: Chaos and Order (57 page)

And
why!

After
no more than a heartbeat or two, however, she found that she no longer needed
to yell. Her anger had served its purpose: it had denatured some of her fear.
Unwittingly Davies had goaded her into becoming ready for the next step.

Without
transition her hearing cleared. The drumming thunder and the echo of shouts
were gone. She could hear Davies’ urgency and Angus’ clenched, constricted
respiration. The small electronic insistence of the command systems reached
her; the phosphors humming in the display screens; the background susurrus of
the air-scrubbers. And behind them, almost masked by tangible reality and emotional
distress, she identified the subliminal crackle of treachery.

Once
again she faced Angus.

He
remained still, dumbly aching. His datacore denied him the means to articulate
his appeal. If she didn’t ask him the right question, he would never be able to
tell her the answer.

“All
right,” she said as if she, too, were sure. “We countermand Nick. He
countermands us. We get a stalemate. You get paralysed.

“What
alternatives do we have?”

Just
for an instant Angus dropped his gaze as if he couldn’t bear what he had to
say. But then he brought his yellow, pleading eyes back to her face.

“Kill
me.”

Suddenly
bitter, Morn snapped, “Not counting that one.”

A spasm
like an outbreak of pain pulled at the corner of his mouth. “Help me.”

“‘Help’
you?” She didn’t let go of her bitterness; she needed it. “What does
that
mean?”

“Help
me,” he said, picking up the words like litter off a ruined street, “get away.
From my datacore.”

His
eyes spilled tears which meant nothing to him.

A flush
of instantaneous panic set fire to Davies’ skin. He opened his mouth to start
shouting.

Morn
forestalled him.
It’s not that simple.
The same memories which stung her
son cried through her, demanding terror. To combat them, she clutched at Angus’
extremity; at the helpless appeal on his face. She remembered the rending
anguish with which he’d wailed,
I am not your
fucking
SON!

“Somehow,”
she answered like acid, “I knew that was coming.” Her deepest dread had told
her. “Help you get away from your datacore. Set you free. So you can make your own
decisions.

“How?”

Electronic
emissions stifled the spasm in Angus’ cheek. They held him still as if he’d
been sculpted in bone.

“You
can cut it out. I’ll tell you how.

“But if
you do that,” he went on, not hurrying, not emphasising what he said in any way,
“you’ll lose me. Everything in my databases, all the extra things I can do. I’ll
just be — “ His programming allowed him a stiff shrug like a wince. “The whole
system will freeze if you pull the chip. Some of the stasis commands are
hardwired. My zone implants act on them automatically. I’ll lock up, and you
wouldn’t be able to reach me. Eventually I’ll die.”

He
stopped.

Davies
watched her in dismay.

“Or?”
she prompted grimly.

“Or,”
Angus replied through a throat congested with wildness, “you can help me change
it.”

“
Change
it?” Davies had moved to the nearby rail of the companionway: he couldn’t
hold down his protest without some anchor. He had Morn’s anger, her primal,
necessary outrage: he’d suffered her hurts everywhere except in his own body. “That’s
impossible.” He needed it to be impossible. “You can’t rewrite those SOD-CMOS
chips. They can’t be altered. If they could, what’s the point of having them?”

But his
anger wasn’t hers: not really. Her share of his mind stopped in an Amnion
crèche on Enablement Station. From that moment until Angus had freed him, he’d
spent all his time as a prisoner; isolated from her.

While
she —

“Why
are we even listening to this?” he went on hotly. “You won’t help him. You
can’t.
Not after
Bright Beauty.
You’re just getting his hopes up for nothing.
He probably already knows what he’s going to do to you — to both of us — as
soon as he’s free.

“
Stop
this,” Davies insisted; demanded; begged. “Give him orders. Or let me do
it. Nick is the real problem. Let’s start getting ready for
him.
”

She
shook her head.

While
her son had been a prisoner, she’d taken over
Captain’s Fancy
, held the
whole ship and most of Enablement hostage, to get him back. Later, locked in
her cabin and nearly autistic with dread, she’d sat pulling her hair out for
hours until Sib Mackern had found the courage to release her. More than once,
she’d been through withdrawal. And then Nick had delivered her to the Amnion.
With their mutagens in her veins, she’d sat waiting for the ribonucleic
convulsion which would deprive her of her humanity as well as her mind.

Her
anger was of another kind.

“Davies,”
she said distinctly, “shut up. We need to hear this. We need to know what our
choices are.

“‘Change
it’?” she asked Angus.

He hadn’t
reacted to her exchange with Davies. His attention had contracted until it
included only his need, his supplication, and her: there was no room for
anything else. As soon as she spoke to him, he answered, “I can edit it. If you’ll
help me get at it.”

“How?”

She
meant, How can you do that? But she also meant, How can you conceivably know
how to do that? How is it possible that you can do a trick which no one else in
human space can even imagine?

He
seemed to understand her. “The Amnion taught me.” Each word cost him an effort,
as if he had to bring it to the surface from a terrible depth. Or as if he
dreaded her reaction to it.

In a
dead voice, the voice of a machine, he explained, “It was years ago. I hijacked
an orehauler.
Viable Dreams.
Crew of twenty-eight. But I didn’t kill
them. I wasn’t after their cargo.”

Abruptly
Morn wanted him to stop. She felt herself growing colder, as if the void
through which the swarm plunged were leaking into the ship. She didn’t think
she could bear to hear more.

“I took
them to Billingate,” he went on mechanically, “and sold them to the Amnion. All
twenty-eight of them.

“As far
the Amnion were concerned, that was the richest prize any illegal ever offered
them. They paid me by teaching me how to edit
Bright Beauty’s
datacore.”

Strange
chills started in the core of her belly and spread outward, making her bones
tremble, her heart shiver. Nick had given her to the Amnion. He’d tried to give
Davies. But Angus had sold
twenty-eight
—

He
produced another stiff shrug. “That’s the only reason Com-Mine Security didn’t
execute me while they had the chance. The only reason I’m here. Like this.” His
tears didn’t mean that he was weeping. They were the essential sweat of his
anguish. “
Bright Beauty’s
datacore didn’t have any evidence they could
use.”

Chills
reached her shoulders, shuddered along her arms. Somehow she’d been touched by
a piece of absolute cold — the utter and irredeemable ice of the abyss.

A man
who’d sold twenty-eight human beings to the Amnion wanted her to give him back
his freedom.

“You
bastard,” Davies panted through his teeth, “you vile bastard. How do you live
with yourself? How can you stand it?”

Angus
didn’t reply; but Morn knew the answer. Her comprehension was as intimate as
rape. He didn’t stand it. He’d spent his whole life fleeing from himself,
running from violence to violence in an obsessed effort to escape his own
darkness.

“How?”
she repeated. Her voice quivered as if she were hypothermic. “How do you do it?”

Her
question was entirely unlike her son’s.

Angus
understood her. “SOD-CMOS chips don’t change state,” he recited. “They add
state. Physically, they can’t be edited. Everybody knows the only way to affect
them is, write in a filter that masks some of the data during playback. The
data is still there. It just doesn’t show.

“But
that’s useless. The filter shows. It plays back along with the rest of the
data. Everybody knows that, too.”

Morn
shivered as if Angus were sneering at her.

“The
trick,” he continued inflexibly, “is to write a
transparent
filter. It
shows, but nobody sees it because everything else looks normal. But even that’s
impossible. The chip only
adds
state. Everything in it is linear.
Sequential. Even a transparent filter becomes obvious because it was written
after the data it masks. Otherwise the filter wouldn’t work.”

He
seemed to pause involuntarily, caught at the cusp of a logic-tree; trapped
between UMCP programming and his own desperation. The colder Morn felt, the
more his face streamed . with sweat. His eyes rolled, giving off glints of
yellow.

“Go on,”
Davies muttered. He sounded out of breath, almost exhausted; strained taut. “Don’t
stop now.”

Abruptly
Angus said, “Unless you know how to write a filter that looks exactly like the
lattice of the chip itself.” His voice scraped like a rusty blade in his
throat. “Now it isn’t transparent, it’s invisible. You can’t see it during
playback because it’s just like the physical chip — and you never see the
physical chip. You only see the data.”

Morn
clasped her arms around herself to contain her shivers, but they were too
strong. Long tremors shook her. Her teeth clicked against each other until she
clenched them tight.

“I can’t
do that,” Angus told her, “but the Amnion can. Their instruments and coding are
that good. All they did was teach me how to use the information.”

His
eyes oozed need like running sores.

“If my
datacore and
Bright Beauty’s
were made the same way,” he finished, “if
the lattice is the same, I can write in a filter to block my priority-codes.
Mask them. Nobody else will be able to give me orders.”

Full of
gelid, shivering detachment, she thought that probably they
were
made
the same way. The UMCP was humankind’s only authorised supplier of SOD-CMOS
chips. She couldn’t think of any reason why their manufacturing methods might
have changed.

“Shit.”
Davies stared at Angus in horrified fascination: despite his instinctive
rejection, he’d been snagged by what Angus proposed. “Can you go deeper? Can
you filter the original programming? Substitute your own?”

Angus
shook his head. “No.” He treated the question as if it came from Morn. “I don’t
know what code it’s written in. I can only work with data I recognise.”

“Like
your priority-codes,” Davies said for him.

“Like
my priority-codes,” Angus acknowledged stiffly.

No,
Morn groaned to herself. She couldn’t do it. It was too much. Absolutely too
much. How often had he abused and humiliated her — raped her — hit her? Davies
was right: she couldn’t set Angus free.

Yet
there was one more question she had to ask, in spite of her dismay and the
tearing cold. One more crucial detail —

“Angus,
who knows you can do this?”

Which
one of the plotters and counterplotters back at UMCPHQ could have planned for
this?

Now he
didn’t respond. An ice of his own held him frozen. Thronging with supplication
and agony, his gaze clung to hers, but no sound came from his mouth. He’d run
into one of his prewritten restrictions, and his zone implants closed his
throat. He might have been strangling on words he couldn’t say.

Harsh
with self-coercion, she rasped, “Isaac, this is Gabriel priority. Answer my
question.

“Who
knows you can do this?”

A shrug
like a spasm shook him. “Warden Dios.” He might have been shouting, crying,
I’m
not your son.
“As far as I know, he’s the only one.”
I am not your
fucking
SON!
“But he didn’t make me explain it. And he said he couldn’t tell anyone
else. Too dangerous. He used the word ‘suicide’.”

Suicide?
Morn paused as if she’d fallen into the still point between one wave of chills
and the next. This gambit — giving Angus’ priority-codes to Davies, cursing her
and her son with the burden of decision — had been set in motion by Warden
Dios. But it wasn’t aimed at Hashi Lebwohl. Or Min Donner. They were his
subordinates: they simply weren’t strong enough to threaten him. There was only
one power in human space great enough for that.

Only
Holt Fasner could destroy the director of the UMCP.

She was
in the early stages of zone implant withdrawal. Prolonged doses of cat had
postponed the crisis; but now it’d caught up with her, sinking its claws into
her nerves, drawing her chills into a high-pitched wail of cold.

Warden
Dios had given Davies control over Angus.

Why?
What did he want from her son? What did he think Davies could do to save him
from the Dragon?