The Cyborg from Earth Read online

  "Yes, Ensign?" Captain Dufferin was a short, tubby man with a high-pitched penetrating voice. He also had a reputation as a person with his own view of new recruits. He sat on a raised dais in the control room, and stared down his nose at Jeff as though he had discovered a caterpillar in his salad.

  "It's about my cabin, sir." Jeff was already doubting the wisdom of his decision to come forward.

  "I see. What is it? A pea, perhaps, under your bunk mattress that's keeping you awake?"

  "No, sir. But the cabin hasn't been cleaned since we left low Earth orbit."

  "Indeed?" Captain Dufferin looked very serious. "It hasn't been cleaned. Not even once?"

  "No sir." Jeff knew he was being played with, and he also knew he could do nothing about it. He couldn't even turn and retreat without the captain's permission.

  "I wonder how a thing like that could have happened?" Captain Dufferin stared up to the transparent ceiling and the stars beyond, as though for inspiration. Then he leaned down so his angry red face was close to Jeff's. "Ensign, do you know the number of servants that a junior officer has on a navy ship? No? Then I will tell you. It is zero—even if your name happens to be Kopal."

  "Yes sir." Jeff was learning something new about the significance of his own last name. "I'm sorry, sir."

  "Sorry? For what?" Captain Dufferin turned away. "You will be sorry, but not yet. Go aft, Ensign. Back to your cabin. You will have plenty of time to clean it and polish your brass-work—because I don't want to see your face again until we have passed through the node."

  Jeff, panting in the high-G field, returned amidships and went into his cabin. He wasn't used to being spoken to like that, but what could he do? The whole incident completed the proof of his lack of value, even to the lowly Border Command. Except for meals, he stayed in his cabin. He cleaned. He polished.

  When he was tired of that, he lay on his bunk and tried to sleep (every position was uncomfortable), watched briefing materials on navy ships and weapons, or queried his cabin information feed. There was lots of information about the Messina Dust Cloud, its physical composition and dimensions and history. It was a region the size of the solar system, and after its discovery a hundred years ago the whole cloud had become a stamping ground for independent explorers and exploiters and traders, plus ne'er-do-wells of all kinds. The present form of government—ominously, in Jeff's opinion—was contained in files marked "Authorized Personnel Only." He soon learned that that select category excluded him. Any query with the words Cyborg Territory in it suffered the same fate. Some people knew what was happening. Jeff was not to be one of them.

  He thought he was eager for the flight to the node to finish. Then he would find out what was going on. But when the countdown to the transition at last began, he found himself not so keen.

  The response of the information feed to his new questions sounded cool and blasé. "Your concerns are groundless. The effects are all psychological. You may feel as though your body is being twisted and sheared in two, but that is all in the mind. You will emerge from the node transition in the same physical condition as you enter it."

  Which was to say, in Jeff's case you'd come out with sweating palms and a feeling that you might wet yourself. He was having trouble drawing a full breath.

  He stared at the approaching node beyond the Aurora's port. Half an hour ago it had been a tiny point of light. Now, although the drive had been cut back to a low value and the ship hardly seemed to be moving, the node shone as big and bright and cold as a hunter's moon—the moon that had been rising on the evening when Jeff left Earth. That moon was now so far away that he could see neither it nor Earth, crouched together near the tiny bright disk of the Sun. "How much longer to transit time?"

  "Seven minutes and fifteen seconds. The transition sequence has already been initiated."

  "Has there ever been any trouble with a transition?"

  "Not when the node entry was correctly initiated. The complete list of fatalities shows that they have only occurred when a ship or an individual attempted to make a transition without a suitably defined target node."

  That was what Uncle Drake had done. "Node hopping without a defined destination," Jeff's father had called it. As a game! So his reckless uncle was, in a curious sense, part of the cautionary tales of the Space Navy.

  "Do people and ships always come out where they intend to?"

  "Unless the approach velocity vector is incorrect. That has happened, and it can yield an unexpected destination. However, hundreds of thousands of node transitions are made every year, with never a problem. "The information feed changed tone. "Three minutes to node entry. Return to your bunk and remain there until transition is complete."

  The warning was unnecessary. Jeff lay supine, restraining straps already in place. But why restraining straps, if the effects were all psychological? The twists and shears were supposed to be purely imaginary. And why fatalities, for that same reason? He could breathe no more easily now than he had under two Gs of acceleration.

  "Two minutes to transition. The ships drive has been turned off until transition is completed."

  That was the answer to Jeff's unasked question. They were suddenly in free fall again, and without restraints he might drift off anywhere in the cabin and be hurt when the drive turned back on. The straps were a good idea. Less good was the response of his stomach to more free fall. He thought he had got over that in low Earth orbit, but a twinge of nausea—or was it nervousness—was gripping his insides.

  "One minute. Following node entry, the Aurora will—forty-five seconds—be automatically controlled. At entry minus five seconds, all power will be turned off, including computer power. The Aurora is automatically programmed to—twenty seconds—emerge from Node 23 in Cyborg Territory, twenty-seven light-years from Sol."

  Jeff wished he were a computer himself. It sounded so calm and certain. He, as usual, was terrified. His insides were in stressed-out turmoil. He clung to the thought of what he had been told. They were in the right place, and at the right speed. They had a well-defined destination. Nothing could go wrong.

  Except that there was a first time for everything.

  "Ten seconds. Prepare for node entry. Seven—six—"

  The lights went out. The computer was silent. Jeff waited, in frozen horror. If power never returned . . . .

  He told himself that things were fine. They were inside the node, and he could see the predicted rainbow blur of color. He felt perfectly normal. If this was all there was to it, then he had been a fool—

  Except that suddenly things were not fine. He was not fine. Not at all. He felt his stomach, already uneasy, beginning to rotate in one direction while the inside of his head went in another. He closed his eyes, then opened them again. It made no difference. He could still see the rainbow internal glow of the node, even with his eyes squeezed shut. That glow was beginning to turn, a hundred ways at once. He was riding a giant multicolored whirligig, that every few seconds chose to vanish and reassemble itself and turn all the parts of him in different directions.

  He decided that he had no choice. He was going to throw up. That's all he seemed to have done for the whole of the past two weeks; throw up onto—and into—officers' boots; throw up in bags on the way to Earth orbit; and now it was happening again, throwing up in a situation where his stomach didn't even feel connected to his mouth.

  How could that happen? His throat was here, his stomach way over there.

  It was a relief of sorts when a final spin took him off in a direction where there were no directions. Jeff felt himself twisted out of space; and in the ultimate blackness of nowhere, he felt the bliss of nothing at all.

  It seemed as though he had been unconscious for hours, but it must have been no more than a few seconds. The information feed was saying, "Transition plus one second. Node transition is successful and complete."

  "Where are we?" Jeff spoke more to prove that he was alive than for the answer.

  "Where we shoul
d be. The object directly ahead of the Aurora is the Messina Dust Cloud. To human eyes, it has a reputation as one of the most beautiful of known celestial objects."

  Jeff was staring on the forward screen at a scene unlike anything he had ever seen. The Messina Dust Cloud appeared as a great blue and purple haze, shot through with streaks and swirls of brighter colors—greens and yellows and glowing crimsons. Those rainbow lines and curves defined currents and whirlpools, which like a connect-the-dots picture provided an outline for a set of broader patterns. Jeff recognized those as the sluggish space rivers of dust and gas described by the information feed. Within them lay invisible pockets of stable transuranic elements, carried around some unseen cloud center.

  And somewhere in that hazy nimbus—not too close, Jeff hoped—lay the cloud reefs. In those regions of intense electromagnetic and gravitational fields, something very strange happened to space-time. That's where you might find the big prizes, the shwartzgeld and the Cauthen starfires. People explored the reefs for them at their peril—though it was difficult to imagine anything so gorgeous as being dangerous.

  "In spite of its beauty," the information feed said, as though it possessed a direct pipeline from Jeff's brain, "the Messina Dust Cloud is the home of great and undefined perils. Reefs and space sounders have been responsible for the loss of many ships—"

  "I know all that, and I've seen the data on space sounders. I don't want to hear it again."

  "—in circumstances which cannot be explained. They—"

  It was a relief to hear Captain Dufferin's nervous, high-pitched voice, cutting into the emotionless information feed.

  "We are clear of the node. All ship systems are in working order. Crew to the main deck."

  The Aurora was once more under drive, but now it was set to a low cruising level. The trip from Jeff's aft quarters forward, so difficult under a two-G acceleration, became an upward drift.

  He had been on the main deck only once before, when he first boarded the Aurora. At the time it seemed small and cluttered. Now nine people fitted into it easily. Almost the whole ship's complement must be present. Jeff, wondering who was flying the Aurora, realized that he had never seen a couple of these people before—not even once, not even at meals. Where had they been hiding? He went to squeeze into the only available seat, next to one of the strangers. She was a huge black woman with short frizzy hair, who showed her teeth at him. He hoped it was a smile.

  Captain Dufferin stood on an elevated platform at the far end of the long cabin, rocking backward and forward on his heels. His eyes surveyed the whole group, pausing for a split second at Jeff before running on past him.

  "I think we are all here—at last." The captain's eyes flickered once more to Jeff and away again, so quickly it was difficult to be sure. "As some of you may know, our journey out to the E-K Belt was conducted with sealed orders." The captain spoke like a machine, inviting neither question nor interruptions as he continued: "Sealed orders are used when the mission is of particular importance. The electronic scrambler that guarded our mission files was unlocked only ten minutes prior to node transition. After this meeting it will be available to any crew member who wishes to examine it. However, I have listened to it already. I now propose to present to you a brief summary of its content."

  The black woman next to Jeff wriggled on her chair—her bottom overflowed the seat—and emitted a sound that could have been either a groan or a deep breath.

  Dufferin stared down his nose at her, but went on, "Node 23 provides access to the Messina Dust Cloud and associated regions. These include the planets Solferino and Cauldron, of the star Grisel, and also the planet of Merryman's Woe."

  "Know that. Don' nee' no lecsher. Giv's sumthin new." The black woman spoke so softly and in such a peculiar accent that Jeff could only just hear and understand her. At the same time he was afraid that she might be audible to the captain. He moved a little away from her on his chair and tried to look as though he were nowhere near—not easy, when she seemed to fill the whole space around her.

  "In its earliest days of development, the Messina Dust Cloud had no real government." Captain Dufferin continued as though reading a lecture. "It was sparsely populated, and the explorers and traders operated more on a basis of mutual need than of written laws. For most of the time, they worked independently and even competitively, exchanging only essential materials and information. Part of each year was spent back at Sol, selling goods and reequipping the ships. That phase ended when production capability appeared in the Cloud, together with local markets. It was no longer necessary to make the annual and expensive trips through the node. The Cloud inhabitants began to move toward a more structured society with its own laws. They established a governing body for the Cloud, to operate under guidance from Sol. At the same time, a dangerous and perhaps fatal trend began."

  Captain Dufferin's briefing had a quality that Jeff had noticed in his uncle Fairborn. Every word and every syllable was delivered with no expression and with exactly equal emphasis. That, together with Dufferin's steady rocking backward and forward on his heels, produced a hypnotic effect; after a while you stopped listening—no matter how hard you tried, or how interesting or important the material.

  Jeff found his eyes roaming around the assembled group. Out of a total of nine people, he recognized seven, including himself and Captain Dufferin. The two strangers were the fat woman next to him and a slight, wizened man with red hair, a big nose, and the look of an angry rooster. The pair had something in common.

  What was it?

  It took a few moments, then Jeff had it. The big woman and the little man over on the right looked sloppy, with smudges of dark at wrist and elbow. They slouched in their seats and were dressed in a casual and haphazard way that no one would ever confuse with the smart style of a navy officer.

  So who were they, and what were they doing on board a Space Navy ship? Had Captain Dufferin been lying when he said there were no servants on the Aurora.

  Jeff turned back to the captain and realized that Dufferin had been speaking all this time. Tuning in again, Jeff realized that he had nearly missed something important.

  "Completely different attitude toward machines," Captain Dufferin was saying. "Development in the Messina Dust Cloud was permitted to proceed for close to a century without laws or limits. Twenty years ago, it seems that claims were made to the government of Earth, by Messina Cloud representatives, that machines had been constructed in the Cloud with an intelligence equivalent to or greater than that of humans. Naturally, our government pointed out the statutes that limit machine development and intelligence. We emphasized the natural and inevitable human antipathy toward intelligent machines."

  This time the growl from beside Jeff could not be missed. Fortunately, Dufferin was too infatuated with the sound of his own voice to be willing to stop. He merely glared in their direction and went on: "After that, it seems, there was a long period of quiet. Nothing more was said to Sol government about intelligent machines, and combinations of humans and machines were never discussed. It was with great horror that Sol government learned, less than one year ago, of highly perverse activities taking place within the Messina Dust Cloud. Contrary to all the laws of God and Man—"

  "God 'n' Man!" The woman muttered the words loudly, right, it seemed, in Jeff's ear. He wished he could turn invisible. "You hear him? Wha' 'bou' God 'n' Wimmin?"

  "Contrary to all the laws of God and Man, as I say." Captain Dufferin looked daggers—not at the woman, but at Jeff. "Contrary to those laws, researchers in the Messina Cloud have been building cyborgs, hellish mergers of humans and machines. Such actions must be stopped, and they will be stopped. We will stop them. We have received instructions from our government as to how to proceed."

  We? Jeff reviewed the head count. Assuming one person was now flying the Aurora, that gave a grand total of ten. It was hard to guess the number of Cloudlanders, humans and cyborgs scattered through the vast region ahead of them, but ther
e could be millions. And the Aurora was a small ship, armed with the Space Navy equivalent of a squirt gun.

  We will stop them. Those instructions on how to proceed must be really something. Jeff leaned back, prepared to be amazed.

  "After this meeting," the captain went on, "I will broadcast a message prepared jointly by headquarters staff of both BorCom and CenCom. It is an order to the governing body of the Messina Dust Cloud to surrender peacefully to the Aurora and accompany us back to Solspace. It warns them that a refusal to do so may involve dire consequences for the entire population of the Dust Cloud."

  Captain Dufferin paused. "Any questions?"

  There was a long pause. Jeff couldn't believe it. Apparently that was it, the whole plan. The Aurora would order the government of the Messina Dust Cloud to give in, then sit and wait. As for questions, Jeff had a hundred; but he didn't want to be the one to ask.