The Sea is Full of Stars

He settled in, setting his dorsal fin in the notch, and felt reasonably comfortable for an air-breathing environment. She slid from the chair and down into the next compartment.

“Sorry to get you here on short notice, and for this area, but it’s the only one not constantly filled with our people,” she told him. “I see you’re a week further along in your change, and I assume you noticed that everyone here is either ancient or female?”

“I noticed. In fact, I would have assumed that whatever agent was used was probably tested on the embassy here first. It would be relatively easy to do. A lot easier than polluting a whole hex. I’d love to know how that was done!”

“We’re working on it. Trouble is, if they were willing to come out and reveal themselves like this, they already probably took that into consideration. When we find them, we’ll find part of the answer at least.”

“That’s easy. Just wait. The one guy that’s left among roughly four million women will be the one. And when he demands to be king, he’ll get acclaimed, too.”

“My! You are dismal today!”

“Well, it’s playing hell with my own family and relationships. But that isn’t why you brought me here.”

“No,” she admitted. “It’s not. It’s those two strange dualities.”

“Yes? Driving you nuts, too?”

She thought a moment, trying to figure out a good way to say it. “I—I have reason to believe that one of them is an act.”

“I won’t ask you the details, but which should be simple. The originals can’t be any more along than me.”

“Well, that would be logical, I admit. But consider this: you remember the neurology report on them from back in Mahakor?”

“Sure. One’s in each half of the brain, and they can trade off some things so that her speech has improved and he can figure out a symbol. So?”

“Brain halves work in opposition. You know that. Right brain, left side, left brain, right side. Right?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Well, the female personality, Ming, was in the right and controlled the left side. You could see it. That’s one reason why she had initial problems with verbal skills. The male, Ari, was in the left and had problems with abstractions and coordination. Again, you could see it.”

“You mean that’s not the case anymore?” Shissik said.

“It’s opposite. The alleged blank one, female, is precisely the way the originals were. The older body, the still more male one, has it reversed. She’s now on the right, he’s now on the left. And, although he tried to conceal the fact and only slipped up when I reran monitor footage over and over to make sure, the male one can read Kalindan. Maybe not the great works or a manual on nuclear fusion, but well enough to read most anything around here. The female has a rudimentary knowledge, more like a first year grammar school child.”

“So? They’re not stupid. And some of that could have been exchanged in the transfer of data.”

“They aren’t that bright, not to be able to switch brain sides. I don’t even understand how they do it now, but I know the theory. Shissik, there’s no biological way they could have transferred the data from one side to the other and vice versa without going through a second party. I think our ‘Other’ here, who was right-handed, pulled Ming’s data into the right brain and then Ari’s into the left because of that, then read them back, possibly adding some modules like the basic reading, since we know she was studying it. That implies a conscious action by somebody or some thing that knew enough to be able to do that.”

“But not smart enough to conceal its expert reading abilities or know its right from its left? That’s hard to accept.”

“No, the right-left thing is now impossible to fix. There’s no empty brain capacity to use as a holding area anymore. And they concealed a lot very well. You still don’t believe me when I say I think the original is the phony, or that there is a phony, do you? So what’s a little slip that perhaps nobody noticed? Reading an all-text screen of proposals for the conference is not only natural, it’s impossible not to do if you know how.”

“All right,” he sighed. “I’ll grant the point for the sake of argument. These are bad times. Now, let me ask you a few questions. Who? And why?”

“I don’t know. Those two computerlike people who came in, suppressing the original personalities, aren’t really accounted for. The Ming memories and personality are in with the Ari memories and personality. The other one, which we are informed is an educated priest or something like that, is probably this amnesiac Amboran, but she seems to have only the personality, not the memories. Where are those memories? Why didn’t things work the usual way? I think there was something else, something that came along with them when they were transported here, came in the heads of those two young women. That something is what caused all the problems, and it wound up in the body of the one we called the Other. I think it’s trying to mask itself while it accumulates the memories, the data, from anyone else who came in. After that—I don’t know. I don’t think it’s on the Chalidang side. I don’t think it’s on our side, either, or any side but its own. But it definitely has both power and an agenda, and patience. The only question in my mind is, now that I know, what do we do about it?”

He shrugged. “If you can convince our superiors of this, then it definitely is not something with our interest at heart. That means you confine it, confront it, and, if you don’t get the right answers, you kill it.”

“There’s too much other stuff going on right now for that and you know it,” she told him. “That’s why I asked for you. I want you to talk to them and see if you see what I see. If you do, and you feel safe, you can force the issue. Otherwise they are going to introduce everyone from that second entry group into one room at one time, right here, within another day. If they all are together with whatever this is, it may be too late.”

He nodded. “All right. Why not bring your suspicious one up here and let me talk to him. In private, one on one. This may be absolutely nothing, or it just might be the key to all this stuff.”

She had anticipated him, although she did not take kindly to being excluded herself. Still, she’d called him in because this was his case and she needed an ally; by her actions, she’d determined that the resolution would be in his hands, not hers. A familiar figure came crawling in only a few minutes after Mellik left.

“Settle into the pool there opposite me, so we can speak face-to-face,” Shissik invited. “It’s comfortable.”

Ari/Ming I nodded and slid in, fitting their own fin into the slot. It was comfortable. They looked over at him and frowned, then brightened. “Inspector Shissik! How nice to see you here, but it is surprising. Is something wrong?” It sounded like An talking.

“I believe we have a bit of a problem,” he told them, sounding confident and relaxed. “You see, we know what was done, but we have no idea who you really are.”

“Oh, come on! You know us!”

“We will get nowhere if this continues. You see, you’ve made two mistakes for all your cleverness. One was to demonstrate a knowledge of reading about at my level, when I know the originals couldn’t spell ‘fish,’ and the other was to set up in the wrong sides of the brain. That leaves the Ministry with little choice in a war environment and with our race under serious attack right now by diabolically clever means. Basically, we don’t have time to fool around. Anybody who isn’t one of us and isn’t forthcoming has to be considered a traitor at best or a full-blown enemy at worst. In either case, the only solution would be to either drop you in a dark hole in the Ministry and forget you or simply have you vanish forever. Which would you prefer?”

They sat there, mouth agape, considering his astonishing charges and mulling them over in their mind or minds, whichever. Finally they, or he, or it, replied, “I assume this is all being recorded?”

He felt a tingle go straight up and down his backbone. The only weapon he’d had was the kind of threatening bluff he’d just managed, but he didn’t expect it to actually work. In fact, he had already decided that Mellik was either paranoid or had been working too hard. But the tone and tenor of the voice used to ask the question was neither Ari nor Ming nor even the alleged blank slate of the original Other. It was—well, it was distinctive, but it didn’t quite sound human. Still, he was a trained inquisitor and betrayed none of this.

“Yes. Everything in Zone—everything in the Ministry— is recorded. Not everything is ever looked at, of course, since having all the answers is no good if you do not know which questions to ask. I also cannot turn off the recording, nor on my own authority see that it is buried or destroyed. I will be a part of that