The Cyborg from Earth Page 11

  "The stable transuranics?" Hooglich suggested. "Or the Cauthen starfires?"

  Connie shook her head. "You need the Logans and the nannies to collect transuranics on a commercial basis. Sol government won't use either, so it's cheaper for them to buy from us. As for starfires, they lead to so much trouble from the space sounders, no one in her right mind tries to collect them anymore. It's a mystery why Sol might want to stir up war. We have a hundred thousand people here in the whole Cloud, they have ten billion on Earth alone. They could ship every one of us there and not even notice a difference. We do have ten million smart machines. But they don't want any part of those."

  "I tell you." Russo stood up and stamped his boot on the floor. "It's right underneath here. This is what they want."

  "The Anadem field?" Hooglich asked.

  Russo nodded vigorously. "Isn't this something the Cloud has refused to sell—refused to admit you have, almost?"

  "We have refused to sell," Connie said. "But that wasn't my decision to make. It's Simon Macafee's invention, and he has made his position clear. He'll give it for use free in the Cloud, but he won't let it be sold or given to Sol. I can't see how they'd use it if they had it. Are there free-space colonies in the Sol system?"

  "Some. Mining mostly." Hooglich scratched at her head. Her hair, to Jeff's eyes, had not been combed since the last time he saw her. "No, it's the Space Navy that would be most interested in the Anadem field. If you had a neutralizing field for acceleration, you could make fast transits at ten G or more, and your crew would never feel it. Russo's right, that might be a reason to start a war—so you could come here and grab the Anadem field, and no one able to stop you. Once Earth had the secret, what could the Cloud do about it? There's an old saying:"—she switched to her Pool accent—" 'Big sticks, good arguers.' But there's still a problem. The people on Earth don't start wars easily. You'd have to give them a reason—a better reason than a new invention, or the loss of a small ship like the Aurora."

  The others were nodding. Obviously, they knew something that Jeff didn't. In the past few days, the Anadem field had apparently gone from navy rumor to hard reality. But he knew something that maybe would be news to them. The Space Navy didn't build its own ships, not one of them. They were constructed under contract. And by far the biggest and most successful contractor, ever since the time of Great-grandfather Rollo Kopal, was Kopal Transportation.

  Jeff opened his mouth and found himself reluctant to speak. It had been drilled into him since he was a toddler: He was a Kopal, and he wasn't supposed to tell outsiders anything about the company operations or business.

  "Maybe we can talk to Macafee," said Hooglich at last. "See if he'll change his mind."

  "Maybe we can," Connie agreed. "And maybe we can't. The first job will be to find him."

  "Isn't he here, at Confluence Center?"

  "I don't know. I can't even guarantee that he's alive. We never track people who don't want to be tracked, and he's been a solitary for years and years, a kind of wandering hermit. No one knows where he came from, nobody knows where he goes. One time he vanished for a couple of years, and all he said when he came back was that he had been out among the reefs, studying them and everything to do with them. He's shy with people, but every now and then he pops up with some new gadget and gives it to us. We got the Anadem field that way. If he wanted to, he could have made a fortune. But he doesn't care. He wants privacy, and we give him that in return for what he gives us."

  "Privacy," Russo said. "Isn't this more important than privacy? Suppose the main CenCom fleet comes through the node. It has enough weapons to turn the whole of Confluence Center to plasma."

  "If the main fleet comes through, I'll certainly worry about that. Maybe we'll just surrender and get it over with. Meanwhile, I need to think." Connie Cheever pulled a black oblong toward her from the middle of the table, pressed the side, and spoke into it. "Lilah, I said I'd see you at dinner, but are you free now? If you are, I'd like you to take Ensign Kopal, feed him if he needs it, and show him around the Center while the Logans make accommodations. If you're not here in five minutes, I'll get someone else to do it."

  Lilah appeared suspiciously fast, only a few seconds after Connie Cheever's call. Jeff decided that she must have been lurking outside the door. Maybe she was trying to listen, and maybe she had succeeded. Security seemed far less tight than at Kopal Manor, where closed doors were the rule for all important conversations.

  In any case, Lilah's arrival was too rapid for Jeff. He wanted time with Hooglich and Russo. While Lilah was still at the door he turned to Hooglich as she was levering her bulk out of her seat. "The Anadem field," he said rapidly. "People keep talking about it, but I don't know how it works."

  "Join the club. Me and Russo talked earlier. We know what it does, but we don't understand how it works, either."

  "But what is it?"

  "I can tell you that." Hooglich sat down again. Connie Cheever and Russo had left, but Lilah was waiting impatiently at Jeff's side. He ignored her and a strange moment of dizziness, and kept his attention on the big woman.

  "Take two solid rings of matter," Hooglich said. "Make them the same size, and place them one above the other with the same center, like this." She drew what she had described.

  "Got it?"

  "Sure." Jeff struggled to concentrate. "What are they made of?"

  "The Anadem field here works with solid carbon rings, because there's plenty of that in the Cloud; but apparently you can use pretty much anything.

  "The region between the rings can contain any kind of material, but let's suppose that it's vacuum. In practice it makes no difference what it is, because the Anadem field doesn't care. Here's what a cross section of the rings looks like, if you make the cut through their centers." She drew another simple picture underneath the first.

  "All right?"

  "All right." Jeff was aware of Lilah fidgeting at his side, but he couldn't attend to that. He was having trouble concentrating, and what Hooglich was saying was important. "How big are the rings?"

  "Any size you like to make them. For Confluence Center, they are big enough for the main structure to sit in between the rings, like meat in a sandwich. For a Cloudship they normally fit around the middle part, where crew quarters are. Are you going to keep interrupting?"

  "Not a word." He realized that he was repeating what Lilah had said to her mother, and she was scowling at him.

  "The Anadem field is produced by a resonance between the rings" Hooglich added a set of spiral lines to her drawing. "It's a vector field, and it produces a body force. That means a force like gravity or acceleration, one that acts on every piece of material. But it's not gravity. The force is strong right between the rings, and falls away fast as you get farther from them—much faster than the gravity inverse square law. It looks like this, where the arrows show the direction of the force and their length shows the force strength." She took another sheet, repeated the cross-sectional drawing of the rings, and added to them a lot of arrows. They were long and straight in the cylindrical region directly between the rings, and shorter in the middle. Outside the ring region they rapidly dwindled away to nothing.

  "With the Anadem field switched on at Confluence Center, in the region between the rings you have a force pulling you to the floor, the way we do now. It feels like gravity, but as I said, it isn't."

  "So one ring is down below us, and the other one is up above our heads?"

  "That's right."

  "Why did Russo stamp his foot on the floor?"

  "What do you expect him to do, stamp his foot on the ceiling?" Hooglich waved her arm. "Go on, out of here. You're at the silly stage."

  Jeff stood his ground. She was right. He was approaching the limits of patience for Mercy Hooglich, and some other limit for himself. But there was a mystery to be explained. "Just one more question."

  Hooglich wrinkled her nose. "I don't know about that."

  He took it as agreement and said,
"You and Russo seem to think that the Anadem field would be a great thing for the Space Navy, because a ship could make trips at higher accelerations. I don't see how. Wouldn't the field just make you feel heavier?"

  "I said you'd reached the silly stage, and that proves it." She took the last sheet she had drawn on and handed it to Jeff. "Go figure for yourself. I'm out of here."

  She left him staring at the page with Lilah tugging at his arm and saying, "Thank Heaven, I thought you'd never stop. I've been waiting for you forever"

  Jeff saw the answer in five seconds, but by that time Hooglich was gone. He stuffed the page into the pocket of his pants. He wanted to follow her and explain that he wasn't a total fool, even though his last question made him look like one. He couldn't do it, because suddenly he was feeling a great weakness. He wanted to lie down somewhere, anywhere, on the floor, on the table if he had to. It wasn't hunger, it was something else.

  Lilah didn't seem to notice. She took his arm, and he had no strength to resist. "This way," she said, as she pulled him along. And then, "Well, what do you want?"

  Jeff found that his eyes had somehow closed. He opened them and saw that she was not talking to him. Billy Jexter had popped up from nowhere.

  "You said I couldn't come to your meeting," Billy said, "but it's over now."

  "How do you know?"

  "I was listening. I heard everything."

  "You little sneak." Lilah didn't ask how. Jeff wondered if people in the Cloud knew what a private conversation was. His eyes closed again, beyond his control.

  "This is another meeting that doesn't need you," Lilah was saying. "We're going to my rooms. So you can just go away again."

  "What's wrong with him?" Billy said.

  Jeff tried to open his eyes. He couldn't do it. He heard somebody saying in an excited voice, "He's falling over," and "Look out!" and "Catch him!" He wondered who they were talking about.

  And then it didn't matter anymore.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE nanomachines were efficient, but they were not intelligent as a human is intelligent. Their function—their only function—was to preserve the life of the body into which they had been injected, and they did that single-mindedly. If they must modify a human radically in order to succeed, they would do it.

  Jeff had been a difficult case. Without massive changes, he would die. The nannies did not hesitate. Lungs and heart were replaced by powerful pumps of resilient plastic. Eyes were eaten away by strong acid solvents, and crystalline sensors, more sensitive and adaptable than human retinas and lenses, grown in their place. The entire digestive system was disposed of, and a small nuclear power pack installed in the belly as energy source. Taloned metal claws, a superior alternative to human hands, formed the end of the tough inorganic sinews and cables of modified arms. Finally, a glittering and metallic exoskeleton replaced tender skin. Now the host could survive anywhere, even in a hard vacuum. His new home would be outside, naked under the silent stars.

  Jeff became conscious slowly, knowing what had been done to him. He lifted his arm and opened his eyes, expecting to see a taloned paw outlined against the glow of the Messina Dust Cloud.

  What he saw was his own familiar right hand, trembling with tension. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt of pale brown that ended at the wrist. A perfectly normal wrist. Above him, no more than two feet away, the blind face of a display screen peered down. He gasped, dropped his arm to his side, and closed his eyes again. The nightmare was just that, the product of his own imagination. The fear of Cyborg Territory had been planted deep.

  He lay for a few minutes, eyes closed. It seemed to have become a way of life: the slide into unconsciousness in one place, the awakening somewhere completely different with no certainty of his own condition.

  He felt fine; rested and not sick or hungry or thirsty. He no longer trusted those feelings. Maybe he was not a cyborg in external shape, but he lacked the final say in control of his own body The micromachines decided what he would do, when he would eat, whether he would sleep or wake.

  He heard the creak of a chair to his left. He opened his eyes and looked that way. He thought he might see Tilde, or Hooglich, or maybe even Lilah or Connie Cheever. Instead he was staring into the bright eyes of Billy Jexter, only a foot away. The dark head nodded. "Hi. I've been watching you. Hooglich said to call her the second you looked like you were going to wake up. So I did."

  "What happened to me?"

  "Dunno. But Galen says you ignored the warning signals. You tried to override the nannies. That never works, and you passed out."

  "I don't know Galen. Do I?" Jeff at the moment was not sure of much.

  "Dunno. Galen's a Logandoc. Galen delivered me when I was born, Lilah says. But I don't remember that."

  Mention of Hooglich had Jeff feeling for his pocket. Neither the page she had drawn on nor the pocket itself was there. Someone had changed his clothes. He started to sit up, then had second thoughts. He didn't want to collapse again. "Is it all right for me to get up?"

  "Dunno. But Galen says the nannies are done with you. You won't fall over, if that's what you're worried about."

  Jeff eased himself off the bed. "How long was I unconscious?"

  For a change, Billy had an answer. "Since last night. It's morning now. Want to know a secret?"

  "Where are my old clothes?"

  "Dunno. Maybe Lilah took 'em. She's been in and out of here ten times while I've been watching you. She wants to talk to you." Billy came closer. "I have a secret. I know something you don't know."

  The look on Billy's face said that he was bursting to tell, if someone would just ask. Jeff deliberately didn't. He wasn't interested in the secrets of a six-year-old. He had his own problems. He was a failure—again—and this time he had been labeled a deserter. He couldn't even send a message to his mother, explaining what had happened and defending his name.

  Again he thought of her burn-scarred face and months-long struggle to breathe, and of the awesome power of the nannies. Nanomachines could have cured her in days. Did the people of the Messina Dust Cloud have it right, and Earth's government have it all wrong?

  Yes, in his opinion, but it was a dangerous thought. Was it even the thought of a traitor?

  "Am I a prisoner here?"

  "Huh?"

  Billy obviously wasn't the person to ask. The idea of prisons and prisoners didn't seem to have reached the Messina Dust Cloud.

  Jeff moved away from the bed and prowled around the room. It was sizeable, maybe four meters square, windowless and simply furnished with bed, desk, terminal, easy chair, and a small autochef. He saw a small heap of things sitting on the desk. It was the contents of his pockets: a locket with a picture of his parents, a couple of pens, an old compass which had no possible value in space, a small brass weight shaped like a sea horse, his personal computer, and the sheet of paper, several times folded, that Hooglich had given him. They were the only signs of anything personal in the room. The walls were a plain buff in color, leading to a sterile overall effect, as though no one had ever lived here. The empty cabinets and cases along one wall seemed to confirm that.

  There were two doors, in opposite walls. The first could be locked from the inside. The second led to a small bathroom. Jeff peered in and felt a sudden and overwhelming urge to use what he saw.

  Billy was sitting cross-legged on the bed when Jeff came out. He had a self-satisfied expression on his face. "Said you would, didn't I? Did it hurt?"

  Jeff took his cue from Lilah. "No. But what I'm going to do to you will."

  Billy was off the bed and at the outer door before Jeff could add, "Whose room is this, anyway?"

  "Why, it's nobody's." Billy understood from the question that the threat had been withdrawn, and he stepped back to the middle of the room. "What I mean is, it's yours. The Logans put it together for you. They'll put your stuff in later and decorate it any way you want. Don't you like it?"

  "It's perfectly fine." Jeff had no "stuff," m
ore than what he stood up in or what sat on the desk. The rest of the things he had brought with him to space had been left on the Aurora. But he had another idea to struggle with. From the sound of it, the interior of Confluence Center changed all the time. Connie Cheever had mentioned that the loner Simon Macafee could be holed up in a place specially made for him by the Logans. It wouldn't be difficult to fabricate new living areas anytime you wanted to, when a hundred smart machines served ever human. And there was plenty of interior space. How much?

  He could have gone over to his computer, but it wasn't worth it. Jeff stood and did the calculation in his head. If the main body of the Center was a cylindrical disk two kilometers across and half a kilometer thick, then, even without the external corridors, that provided a volume of a billion and a half cubic meters. Be generous and allow a space of a thousand cubic meters for each apartment and its support facilities. You had enough room for a million and half people. Connie Cheever had said there were only a hundred thousand in the whole Messina Cloud. Confluence Center was nowhere near capacity.