The Mind Pool (31 page)

He turned his head and stared down at the purple-black vibrating mass. The contact was not at all unpleasant. In fact, that gentle thrumming touch against his skin began to feel surprisingly warm and reassuring. After a few more moments, free components who had not been part of the Tinker Composite when Chan sat down flew across and made additional connections. Soon Chan’s whole body, from feet to shoulders, was embedded in the largest purple swarm he had ever encountered.

He felt very relaxed now, but not sleepy. The pressure around him was just enough to be noticed. But the pilot’s words drifted back to Chan. If a Tinker chose to swarm on something as a means of restraint, it could be formidable. Shikari had its own way of neutralizing aggression.

He watched as a final few components flew in to attach themselves. “Do you feel different, when more units attach?”

There was an experimental whistle from the speaking funnel. “Of course.”

After a long silence, Chan realized that the Tinker had given its full answer. “I don’t mean more
intelligent.
I know that’s true. What I mean is, do you feel that you are a different individual when your size is increased so much?”

The Tinker was silent for an even longer period. “That is a difficult question.” Even its voice was slower and deeper in pitch. “We are also not sure that it is a meaningful one. We are what we are, at the moment. We cannot feel what we
were
or
will be.
We will answer your question with a question. Every second, according to information that we have received concerning humans, some of your brain cells die. Do
you
feel different when those units of intellect are removed from you?”

“It’s not the same. In the case of a human, every brain cell has been there since childhood. We do not add units.” (And brain cells are only a part of the story—should I tell Shikari how
recently
I achieved real use of my brain?) “We lose cells slowly. But to change, recombine, and add or subtract units, constantly and quickly, as you do . . . it is hard for me to comprehend how you retain the sense of a single identity during a time of major change.”

The Tinker rippled suddenly against Chan’s body. A cascade of about five hundred units flew away to settle on the ground as individual components.

“Like that, you mean?” There was a breathy rattle from the voice funnel, as though the Tinker was practicing a human laugh. “There is more than enough capacity for continuous thought, even when no more than five hundred components are present. Remember, each of the units that form us possesses nearly two million neurons.”

“That sounds like very few.”

“Few compared with a human, or a complete Composite. But compare one of our components with one of your honeybees. It has no more than seven thousand neurons, and yet it is capable of complex individual actions.”

There was another whir of tiny wings as the units came flying back to rejoin the mass around Chan’s body. The voice funnel wheezed, in a more successful attempt at a human sigh.

“We have far to go,” said Shikari, “before we can really understand each other. When first we encountered humans we marvelled at your strange structure. How could intelligence be
delegated,
to reside in some special chosen group of cells within your body? Within us, each component carries an equal amount of our intelligence. But now much of your thinking power lies here”—Chan felt a gentle pressure on his midriff—”or
here.
” The touch moved to the calf of his left leg. “What intelligence lies in these parts? What are the thoughts of an arm, or a lung? You will say, none. We cannot comprehend that. Yet we know it is true that a human can be reduced to less than half its size, lacking arms and legs, and have its intelligence continue unchanged!”

“Less than that. There have been successful human brain transplants, and no lessening of thinking ability.”

“Who would believe such a thing, if we had not encountered it?—If humans had not arrived on Mercantor, and proved it to us.” There was a rustle of veined wings, and Shikari settled to a tighter mass. “Intelligence. It is indeed a mystery. But this—closeness and warmth—is without a doubt the
best
part of intelligence.”

While Chan and Shikari had been talking, full night had arrived. The pursuit team had set up its camp in a clearing, surrounded by the dusty blue-green vegetation of Barchan’s polar region. In the past few minutes the air temperature had dropped thirty degrees. Shikari was like a warm, soft blanket swaddling Chan up to his chin. He raised his head and stared up at the sky. Eta Cassiopeiae’s brighter component had set, and the smaller sun of the binary was not yet risen. STcatlan, home planet of the Pipe-Rillas, was a bright point close to the horizon. Barchan’s dingy little moon sat above it in the sky, a shrunken irregular raisin.

Chan shivered. The night air was still warm. The tremor was one of apprehension. Three months ago he had lived in the quiet cocoon of the Gallimaufries, happy, ignorant, and near-brainless. Leah had shielded him from every danger. Now he was wandering the surface of an alien world, eighteen lightyears from home. He was not sure that he would ever see another sunset. Leah was even farther from Earth and facing much greater danger. By now she would be landing on Travancore, to face not a Simmie Artefact but the real Morgan Construct.

Given a choice, would he go back? Back to his mental vacuum, to the halcyon days of flowers and games?

One man had been the agent for all those changes, including the agony of the Tolkov Stimulator. If Chan closed his eyes ne could see the face in front of him. Esro Mondrian deserved the blame—or the credit—for everything that had happened to Chan.

Turn back the clock? Chan stared up at Barchan’s solitary misshapen moon, and wondered: about Esro Mondrian, about Shikari, about intelligence, about himself.

By the time that the silver spark of S’katlan was sinking to Barchan’s dusty horizon, Chan had an answer. No matter what happened here, he would not choose to go back to his old life. Whatever burden the mixed blessing of self-awareness and intelligence brought with it, he wanted to carry it.

With that knowledge the urge for revenge on Esro Mondrian lost its focus. If the man had earned Chan’s hatred, perhaps he had also earned his gratitude. He had dragged Chan, reluctant and screaming, into the bright wond of responsibility. . . .

Chan drifted away to a mental state that was both remote and infinitely satisfying. His reverie was at last interrupted when the dark bulk of the Tinker stirred against him. He opened his eyes and discovered, incredibly, that a hint of dawn was already in the sky. Where had the night gone?

“Listen.” It was the voice of Shikari, deep and contented as a purring cat. “Do you hear it? The sound of the aircar. The others are returning, and we are sad. Our time of peace and closeness soon must end.”

Chapter 23

Measured on any of the standard scales of human intelligence, Luther Brachis would score in the top tenth of one percent. He always dismissed that fact as of trivial importance. Success in his job was not a function of intelligence. At least three other qualities were far more critical.

They were the three P’s: Persistence, Paranoia, and Persuasiveness. And when Lotos Sheldrake pointed out that persistence was no more than Luther’s word for pigheadedness, and that extreme paranoia was more likely to be a component of failure than success, he just laughed. According to Luther Brachis the fourth important quality, not easily captured in a single word, was the ability to know which of the other three to apply in any given situation.

The first move to counter the strange legacy of the Margrave had been taken even before Luther was carried away from
Adestis
headquarters for medical treatment.

It was clear that he had been attacked by an Artefact, one that Fujitsu had chosen to make in his own image. It was dead, but there could be dozens more. They might be stored anywhere in the solar system, and they might look nothing like the Margrave. It was quite possible that the Artefacts did not contain any of Fujitsu’s own DNA, though Luther’s own assessment of the Margrave’s personality made him think otherwise. The Margrave surely wanted to be
involved
in his own revenge, in the only way possible. So Fujitsu would have used much of his DNA, regardless of the Artefact’s external appearance.

Which left the delicate and difficult problem: How could Brachis defend himself against future attacks?

He was now willing to acknowledge the truth of Fujitsu’s claim; the other man’s arm was indeed long, and it was reaching for Luther Brachis beyond the grave.

The case of Earth had been handled easily. Through the Quarantine service there was information on all individuals shipping up from Earth. It was easy to set tracers on every one of them, and make sure that none approached within a kilometer without triggering his alarm system.

But suppose that an Artefact had been stored elsewhere? Two off-Earth facilities had to be checked: the Enceladus catacombs, and the Hyperion Deep Vault.

As soon as Brachis was released from the hospital he set out to examine both possibilities. It was a task that he proposed to carry out personally. Godiva had tried to get him to delegate, arguing that he was still weak from his injury. Brachis would not listen.

“This gets my personal attention. Fujitsu deserves no less because he is one of humanity’s unsung geniuses. You can come along with me, if you want to.”

Godiva shivered, a trembling of rosy flesh. “Not for a fortune! I’ll travel with you, but I won’t go down into the vaults. All those horrible frozen semi-corpses—and maybe some of them not even real people! That’s not for me, Luther.”

Brachis knew better than to argue with Godiva on such things. He went ahead. The catacombs of Enceladus were relatively small and very well organized. He was able to inspect them from end to end in one marathon session, and at the end of it felt comfortable that there were no future surprises in store for him there. But he knew that the Vault of Hyperion was going to be another matter entirely.

Early explorers of the solar system had more or less ignored Hyperion. The seventh major satellite of Saturn was a lumpy, uneven hunk of rock, whose dark and cratered exterior suggested that it was the oldest surface in the whole Saturnian retinue of moons. There were few volatiles of any kind, little water, and probably no interesting minerals. So it had been a no-hope old explorer, on his last trip out before his lungs rotted and caved, who first explored the Hyperion meteorite craters. Raxon Yang had discovered an odd structure at the bottom of one of them, a ragged-edged tunnel that seemed to zigzag deep below the moon’s battered surface.

Old Yang had nothing better to do. He followed it, down and down: three kilometers—four kilometers—five kilometers, past the point of sanity and past any hope of useful metal deposits. At last, seven kilometers below the surface, he came to the upper face of the Yang Diamond.

At the time he had no idea what he had found. The tunnel at the lower end was only a meter across, hardly enough to wield his instruments. He knew that it was some form of crystallized carbon all right, as soon as his tools found it hard to cut and he made the first assay. But that was all he knew.

Yang carved out a half-meter sample, as big as he could handle, and dragged it slowly back to the surface for inspection. On the way he set up his claim marker and the usual array of booby traps. The chance that anyone else would come along for years was slim indeed, but habits die hard.

It was diamond. Clear, pure diamond. Raxon Yang headed back to Ceres. That was in the early days, when the reconstruction of the planetoid was still a dream for the future. Ceres was on the frontier, a sprawling and violent trade center for the system beyond the Belt.

Raxon Yang hawked fragments of his sample to the assortment of crooks and villains who controlled the investment capital supply on Ceres. They tried all the usual techniques—swapping his samples for others, trying to trick him into revealing the location of his find, telling him that the diamond was of inferior quality and hardly worth the trouble of mining.

Old Yang had heard it all before. He waited. Finally they came around and gave him what he needed in exchange for a thirty percent interest in the claim. Yang completed formal filing, bought equipment, hired specialists, and set off on a devious and complex trajectory to Hyperion.

And
still
Yang did not know what he had found. The analyses had confirmed that the sample was diamond of the finest and purest water, perfectly transparent and free of all faults and discolorations. He had naturally emphasized that in his sales arguments to the backers: here was a carbonaceous body (he did not tell them
which
body), struck by a high-velocity planetoid with an impact that generated great heat and tremendous pressure. The result: a large diamond.

But how big was large?

Raxon Yang really had no idea. He didn’t put much stock in his own sales pitch—that was meant for the investors. Down in his crater there might be a diamond ten or twenty meters across, more than enough to make a nice profit for everyone.

He learned the truth on his second descent, when he turned on the seismic analysis tools. The Yang Diamond had the overall shape of a forty-legged octopus. Its head, seven kilometers below the moon’s surface, was almost spherical and fourteen kilometers across. The legs ran out and down, each one half a kilometer wide and thirty to forty kilometers long.

Raxon Yang collapsed in the tunnel when the probes revealed the extent of his find. He was carried back to the ship, tied down on a bunk, and flown to Luna for medical treatment—the best medical treatment that the solar system could offer, because Raxon Yang was now its wealthiest citizen.

Two years later he was dead, murdered by the diamond cartel. It was done for revenge, rather than gain, because he had unintentionally ruined them. The Yang Diamond contained ten million times as much high-quality crystallized carbon as every other known source combined.

The old explorers never married, and Raxon Yang was no exception. At the moment of his death, the squabble over ownership and inheritance began. Would-be illegitimate offspring popped up everywhere from Mercury to Neptune. If all the claims were valid, Raxon Yang would have been engaged in sex for every waking moment of his life.