The Sea is Full of Stars

glimmerings of real hatred. With that came some wisdom, at least; now, at last, she could taste what Jeremiah Wong Kincaid must feel. But Wallinchky was as evil as she could imagine, and he had been in Kincaid’s power, as it were, and was instead used merely as a tool. If Wallinchky wasn’t evil enough to be an end object in himself, then what must that Hadun creature be like?

She didn’t get over it, but began to learn to cope with it, much to Ming’s relief.

Finally, Angel had to ask, “How did he do what he did? How can it be possible to do that to someone?”

“He’s got us hooked into the neural net running this entire complex,” Ming guessed. “We’re like any of the automated stuff here, from the cleaning machines to the medlab stuff to the rest of the automated place. I have tried to walk down certain hallways here, or enter certain rooms, and I simply cannot. It’s not willpower—my legs just will not do it. Just after that time you tried harming yourself. You couldn’t. We’re a part of this place now, just like the furniture. There was a lot done to us internally, as well as giving us these limbs and eyes.”

“But—I can understand how it stops us, but how did it get me to do—that? I mean, I had never even done it before.”

“Programming. We were ordered to go in there, ordered on the bed, and then a routine was run that not only gave us exactly what we were to do, but provided the proper hormones and other brain chemicals to trigger it all.”

“Is this what he does to the others who work for him?”

Ming shrugged. “Probably he has ones like us in all his dwellings, but we’re not real portable this way. We’re not just prisoners in this place, we’ve literally become a part of it. It is, I suspect, what he does to people he wants to keep around but who are too ‘hot’ to travel. My people will be looking for me, yours for you. Our genetic codes are on file. So, as he said, we’ve become part of his collection.”

It was not the most pleasant of thoughts.

It also became clear that whatever the medical program was doing, there was no sign of regeneration procedures— requiring either sequestering in a tank or removal of each artificial limb one at a time and giving it intensive treatment—and transplanting specially grown limbs from living tissue also didn’t seem to be in the cards. Instead, the artificial limbs appeared to be integrating into their nervous systems, so that they now felt almost normal, even if they still looked very strange. They exercised in an elaborate exercise room at least a couple of hours a day; this was not a choice. It obviously wasn’t to build up leg and arm muscles, but it got the heart pumping and made them tight in the stomach and very firm in the breasts. They were also growing hair; for Angel, it was a strange sensation, since apparently there was a genetic trait against it in her sect. It itched at first, but then began to come in at a rate much faster than normal growth. It was straight, thick, wiry, and jet-black.

What was most odd, although to them a relief, was that they rarely saw anyone else. There was little sign that Wallinchky, or Ari, or the others, were anywhere nearby. It was like being trapped in a public building. Of course, they couldn’t go into many areas, so it was unclear if they were alone or not. Certainly the central computer was running things.

They did go wherever they could, studying and almost memorizing much of the great art and sculpture the place contained. It was some time before Angel could bring herself to go into the sculpture garden again, but after a while they went farther, to an unnoticed anteroom of the great hall that looked out upon the vast dead world beyond.

It was a beautiful if daunting landscape, all oranges and purples and filled with twisted rocks. The sky was never normal looking, but always dark, a very pale blue through which nearby stars could be seen in the daytime and was jet-black at night.

They sat there and looked out and tried to imagine they were beyond this prison, and you could almost completely clear your mind and believe it now and again. Of particular dreamy speculation was a formation well off toward the horizon that seemed to be almost by itself, but framed by twisted mountains and untouched by craters big and small, or at least apparently so from this distance.

It looked like some dark, mysterious alien city, abandoned in the eons but clinging on, refusing to crumble to dust.

Was this a place where angels and powers greater and lesser once convened before the creation of Adam? Was this once a garden as Earth had been in those most ancient of days? And was the serpent now returned to look upon the desolation it had created?

“That’s quite poetic,” Ming commented dreamily. The worst part of this wasn’t the anticipation of more horrors, it was the sheer boredom.

“Huh? What’s poetic?”

“About the places where angels met before the Creation, and how this was all that was left of the devil’s lair.”

Angel shook her head slowly in wonder. “I didn’t think I spoke aloud.”

Ming was startled. Am I going nuts or what? I’m not sure she said it aloud, either.

I didn’t. What s happening here?

“I think,” Ming answered thoughtfully, “we’re reading each other’s thoughts. Telepathy. Never had it in my family. You?”

“I—We can sometimes tell what someone is going to do a split second before they do it. It was thought that it might be a kind of very limited telepathy. It saved me from Tann Nakitt’s fangs. But not—this.”

It’s the neural net connection, I think, Ming guessed. We’re both using identical transmitters and receivers implanted in us. Just as it can send and receive, so can we between ourselves. I doubt if it works with anyone but us. Keep your thoughts open. Do not speak of this again aloud. It is possible that our master never suspected this, and if we can keep it from him, it might work to our advantage.

Once this new channel of communication was open, it remained open no matter what, and seemed to extend itself. All thoughts, knowledge, feelings, and fantasies of the one were open to the other. It was quite strange, but stranger still because there still was no true meeting of minds. The two had backgrounds too different, and knowledge, experience, and beliefs so different that there was a point beyond which each could not go without losing perspective entirely.

But there was an underlying suspicion that somehow this was another computer subroutine; that in some way the computer itself was causing this, and it was a new stage in whatever their ultimate fate was to be. This suspicion was reinforced by the mandated routines they were forced to follow, but also by the times during each waking period when they would lose control of their emotions. It might be crying jags, or sexual arousals, love, hate, or fear; clearly, something was playing them like an instrument and recording the results. Thus, it seemed likely that this telepathy was merely a by-product, and that perhaps their memories, their personalities, were really in storage inside the larger computers, and that they were as much operating as inhabiting their bodies.

Ming was particularly concerned about this, since she knew a lot about the usual techniques of mind control. What worried her, and through her both of them, was whether they would know they were being remade according to someone else’s direction. There were periods, even now, some of apparent length, that were totally blacked out. There were other times when they were fully conscious, but essentially passengers in their own bodies, doing things and going places without any control on their part.

The only time that seemed genuinely theirs, with no manipulation, was the time they reserved when they were not being ordered to the infirmary or exercise hall, and just sat together, staring out at the ever-fascinating alien landscape with the unchanging stars all around.

And then there was the one time when they both were simply staring outward and it seemed suddenly as if something was alive out there. It wasn’t a shape, but more a sense of something else beyond the compound, beyond the dome and superinsulated windows, something centered in that strange citylike place way out there but wasn’t just there. Some kind of—energy. That was the only way to explain it. In many ways it seemed like they had a sudden awareness of a second, much larger and more powerful neural network. The compound had a centralized computer and a series of thousands of smaller units with more specialized interests, all tied together at the speed of thought, combining their power to make a unified whole that could in some ways think, make basic decisions, and run all that needed to be run; even them. They could feel their master, could sense the connections, but could not reach it as it could reach them.