he was still a machine.
It gave him a rather different perspective, and that could produce interesting results. For instance, it was axiomatic to Dahak that the Fourth Imperium was the preeminent font of all true authority, automatically superceding such primitive, ephemeral institutions as the United States of America.
But MacIntyre saw things a bit differently, and Dahak had been taken aback by his stubborn refusal to swear any oath that might conflict with his existing one as a naval officer in the service of the said United States.
In the end, he’d also seemed grudgingly pleased, as if it confirmed that MacIntyre was a man of honor, but that hadn’t kept him from setting out to change his mind. He’d pointed out that humanity’s duty to the Fourth Imperium predated its duty to any purely terrestrial authority—that the United States was, in effect, no more than a temporary governing body set up upon a desert island to regulate the affairs of a mere portion of a shipwrecked crew. He had waxed eloquent, almost poetic, but in vain; MacIntyre remained adamant.
They hammered out a compromise eventually, though Dahak accepted it only grudgingly. After his experience with the conflict between his own “Alpha Priority” orders, he was distinctly unhappy to have his new captain complete his oath “… insofar as obedience to Fleet Central and the Fourth Imperium requires no action or inaction harmful to the United States of America.” Still, if those were the only terms on which the ancient warship could get itself a captain, Dahak would accept them, albeit grumpily.
Yet it was only fair for Dahak to face a few surprises of his own. Though MacIntyre had recognized (however dimly) and dreaded the responsibility he’d been asked to assume, he hadn’t considered certain other aspects of what he was letting himself in for. Which was probably just as well, since he would have refused point-blank if he had considered them.
Like “biotechnic enhancement.” The term had bothered him from the start, for as a spacer he’d already endured more than his share of medical guinea pigdom, but the thought of an extended lifespan and enhanced strength had been seductive. Unfortunately, his quaint, twenty-first century notions of what the Fourth Imperium’s medical science could do had proven as outmoded as his idea of what a “ship” was.
His anxiety had become acute when he discovered he was expected to submit to a scalpel-wielding computer, especially after he found out just how radical the “harmless” process was. In effect, Dahak intended to take him apart for reassembly into a new, improved model that incorporated all the advantages of modern technology, and something deep inside had turned nearly hysterical at the notion of becoming, for all intents and purposes, a cyborg. It was as if he feared Doctor Jekyll might emerge as Mister Hyde, and he’d resisted with all the doggedness of sheer, howling terror, but Dahak had been patient. In fact, he’d been so elaborately patient he made MacIntyre feel like a bushman refusing to let the missionary capture his soul in his magic box.
That had been the turning point, he thought now—the point at which he’d truly begun to accept what was happening … and what his own part had to be. For he’d yielded to Dahak’s ministrations, though it had taken all his will power even after Dahak pointed out that he knew far more about human physiology than any Terran medical team and was far, far less likely to make a mistake.
MacIntyre had known all that, intellectually, yet he’d felt intensely anxious as he surrendered to the anesthesia, and he’d looked forward rather gloomily to a lengthy stay in bed. He’d been wrong about that part, for he was up and about again after mere days, diving head—first into a physical training program he’d discovered he needed surprisingly badly.
Yet he’d come close to never emerging at all, and that memory was still enough to break a cold sweat upon his brow. Not that he should have had any problems—or, at least, not such severe ones—if he’d thought things through. But he’d neither thought them through nor followed the implications of Dahak’s proposed changes to their logical conclusions, and the final results had been almost more appalling than delightful.
When he’d first reopened his eyes, his vision had seemed preternaturally keen, as if he could identify individual dust motes across a tennis court. And he very nearly could, for one of Dahak’s simpler alterations permitted him to adjust the focal length of his eyes, not to mention extending his visual range into both the infrared and ultraviolet ranges.
Then there was the “skeletal muscular enhancement.” He’d been primitive enough to feel an atavistic shiver at the thought that his bones would be reinforced with the same synthetic alloy from which Dahak was built, but the chill had become raw terror when he encountered the reality of the many “minor” changes the ship had wrought. His muscles now served primarily as actuators for micron-thin sheaths of synthetic tissue tougher than his Beagle and powerful enough to stress his new skeleton to its limit, and his circulatory and respiratory systems had undergone similar transformations. Even his skin had been altered, for it must become tough enough to endure the demands his new strength placed upon it. Yet for all that, his sense of touch—indeed, all his perceptions—had been boosted to excruciating sensitivity.
And all those improvements together had been too much. Dahak had crammed the changes at him too quickly, without any suspicion he was doing so, for neither the computer nor the human had realized the enormous gap between the things they took for granted.
For Dahak, the changes that terrified MacIntyre truly were “minor,” routine medical treatments, no more than the Fourth Imperium’s equivalent of a new recruit’s basic equipment. And because they were so routine—and, perhaps, because for all the power of his intellect Dahak was a machine, inherently susceptible to upgrading and with no experiential referent for “natural limitations”—he had never considered the enormous impact they would have on MacIntyre’s concept of himself.
It had been his own fault, too, MacIntyre reflected, leaning forward to massage the persistent cramp in his right calf. He’d been too impressed by Dahak’s enormous “lifespan” and his starkly incredible depth of knowledge to recognize his limits. Dahak had analyzed and pondered for fifty millennia. He could predict with frightening accuracy what groups of humans would do and had a grasp of the flow of history and a patience and inflexible determination that were, quite literally, inhuman, but for all that, he was a creature born of the purest of pure intellects.
He himself had warned MacIntyre that “Comp Cent” was sadly lacking in imagination, but the very extent of his apparent humanism had fooled the human. MacIntyre had been prepared to be led by the hand by the near- god who had kidnaped him. Aware of his own ignorance, frightened by the responsibility thrust upon him, he had been almost eager to accept the role of the figurehead authority Dahak needed to break the logjam of his conflicting imperatives, and as part of his acceptance he had assumed Dahak would make allowances in what would be demanded of him.
Well, Dahak had tried to make allowances, but he’d failed, and his failure had shaken MacIntyre into a radical re-evaluation of their relationship.
When MacIntyre awoke after his surgery, he had gone mad in the sheer horror of the intensity with which his environment beat in upon him. His enhanced sense of smell was capable of separating scents with the acuity and precision of a good chemistry lab. His modified eyes could track individual dust motes and even choose which part of the spectrum they would use to see them. He could snap a baseball bat barehanded or pick up a sixteen- inch shell and carry it away and subsist for up to five hours on the oxygen reservoir in his abdomen. Tissue renewal, techniques to scavenge waste products from his blood, surgically-implanted communicators, direct neural links to Dahak and any secondary computer the starship or any of its parasites carried…
The powers of a god had been given to him, but he hadn’t realized he was about to inherit godhood, and he’d had absolutely no idea how to control his new abilities. He couldn’t stop seeing and hearing and feeling with a terrible vibrancy and brilliance. He couldn’t restrain his new strength, for he had never required the delicacy of touch his enhanced muscles demanded. And as the uproar and terror of the quiet sickbay had crashed in upon him so that he’d flailed his mighty limbs in berserk, uncomprehending horror, smashing sickbay fixtures like matchwood, Dahak had recognized his distress … and made it incomparably worse by activating his neural linkages in an effort to by-pass his intensity-hashed physical senses.
MacIntyre wasn’t certain he would have snapped if the computer hadn’t recognized his atavistic panic for what it was so quickly, but it had been a very near thing when those alien fingers wove gently into the texture of his
