virus in the cryovial? Her lips thinned.
The main computer hummed an attention tone, and Carol dragged her thoughts back to the present. 'Carol? I am ready to begin work.”
Bruno's voice was higher, oddly cadenced. The correct inflections were still there, peppering words and syllables, yet the nuances were almost too studied. It was as if he was trying to sound human.
She looked over at Bruno. The restraints had soundlessly retracted back into his crash couch. His eyes, still slightly wide, turned toward her, pupils black and enormous. She held back a familiar look of distaste and pain at that gaze.
The eyes were only part of it, Carol thought. His face was almost completely slack, like a poorly fitted mask. During Linkage, Bruno had other cool concerns than operating his facial musculature.
He sat calmly in the crash couch, the thick interface cable connecting his mind to the Sun-Tzu's computers slowly waving in the microgravity like a marine creature. She felt the usual conflicting emotions: love for Bruno, and discomfort at this alien Linked self.
Her hand reached over to touch his face, hovered, withdrew. 'I assume the Linkage is complete?' Her tone was cool and professional, and each calm syllable cost her dearly.
'Yes,' Bruno replied. 'I can see again,”
While Bruno was Linked, he could see across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, using Sun-Tzu's complex and powerful sensory array. She knew that Bruno's sensorium was completely different from the minor chipping-in that any Belter pilot used from time to time for convenience. This was no mere telemetric readout of drive parameters or navigation control via the optic nerve.
Bruno in the fully Linked state perceived everything, all at once. The torrent of data fed directly into his brain and mind.
He called it the All. She had no more chance of understanding her lover's computer-augmented perceptions than an earthworm could understand a rainbow.
She turned away, pretending to study the holoscreen status reports. Even for someone as tough as Carol knew herself to be, as familiar as this scenario had become, the situation was almost unbearably painful.
Carol knew that Bruno's mental state was getting worse. And the process would continue inexorably. More and more, flashes of the cybernetic Bruno peered out from behind his eyes, even in his un-Linked state.
It was an inevitable process. The Linked Bruno was not human. The computer left more of itself behind with every full Linkage Bruno experienced. Each time he emerged from the autodoc after severing himself from the computer, there was less and less remaining of the Bruno she loved. His personality was slowly leaching away into a sea of silicon.
And yet he wanted Linkage, craved it.
Carol made a face. Perhaps she was being unfair. She wondered how she would feel and act, after conversion by the virus in the cryovial, with the odd name. Tree-of-Life. She knew that her feelings about full Linkage were a little irrational because, at least for now, Bruno could un-Link.
There would be no such return to humanity for Carol, once the Sun-Tzu reached Wunderlander space. Not once she awakened the crew in coldsleep, opened the cryovial in the sealed compartment of Dolittle, and initiated Project Cherubim.
She squared her shoulders. The trick, Carol knew from long experience, was to dissociate her command self from her personal self. She looked at Bruno and said coolly, 'So, Tacky, do you still think that your ghost blip is actually a kzin ship?”
Bruno continued to stare directly at her, hardly moving, his pupils expanded to turn his normally grayish eyes into pools of blackness. It made Carol very nervous.
'Well?' she persisted, ignoring the creeping sensation crawling up and down her spine.
'Interesting,' Bruno said, with a ghastly imitation of an un-Linked smile. 'You keep your feelings from your voice. Or nearly so. But I can read your tones and stress patterns perfectly. Your facial gestures are quite clear when compared with contour bitmaps of earlier visual records. Biotelemetry is also accessed; your skin conductance and pupillary action concur with my conclusion.' The alien smile faded. 'I make you nervous.”
Carol kept her own face stiff, in counterpoint to his own slack features. 'Yes,' she said evenly, barely keeping the sarcasm from her tone. 'It certainly takes an incredible intellect in full Linkage to conclude that fact.”
She watched Bruno for a moment, who said nothing.
'Humor, I would assume,' he finally said flatly.
Carol tried again. 'You certainly do make me nervous. You make everyone nervous when you're Linked. All Linkers do. This can't be the first time you've noticed.”
His face became completely immobile – mimicking her? 'Quite correct; I apologize. But do recall that I am still partly the Bruno you know, and that portion of my Whole cares very much what you think and feel.”
Carol blinked at his odd terms and changing syntax. Still, she found his strange words reassuring: even while Linked, part of the Bruno-machine chimera remained the Bruno she loved.
'Thank you,' she replied calmly, trying to focus. 'But now it is time to get to work. Could you please look at the holoscreen, access the relevant data, and tell me what our putatively feline friends are doing, now that we have shut down the drive?”
Bruno chuckled slightly, too studied and deliberate. 'You seem to forget – or refuse to accept – the properties of Linkage,' he told her without rebuke. 'In multitasking mode I do not require my optic nerves to read or interpret data.”
This was true, Carol knew. Data was pouring back and forth furiously through the interface cable, directly between Bruno's chipped-in hybrid brain and the main computers of the Sun-Tzu. It was still a little disconcerting to Carol to realize that a full Linker had his or her attention in many places, simultaneously.
And still more disconcerting to know that the Linked Bruno spoke to her with only an infinitesimal portion of his Transcended consciousness. The rest of him was… elsewhere. Everywhere.
'So why are you looking at me, ummm?' she murmured, a little curious despite herself.
'Because I enjoy watching you, Carol, Linked or un-linked. It accesses many pleasant memories and associations in the human portion of my larger Self. But I can encompass much more about you while I am Transcended.' He paused, then moved his head to face the holoscreen. 'I perceive that you are still disturbed by my actions. I will face forward.”
'Well, I… ' She felt vaguely uncomfortable, as if she had insulted Bruno at a cocktail party.
'To answer your question more directly, the signals we have been discussing almost certainly emanate from three kzin warships of the Raptor class, stealthed. Probability equals zero point nine nine eight. Third Fleet, I would predict; there are no improvements over that design detectable.”
'How can you be so sure?' Carol asked him quickly. She and the un-Linked Bruno had examined the data carefully; there was certainly nothing as straightforward as the Linked Bruno's answer would suggest.
Carol remained a bit suspicious of the black-magic aspects of Linkage.
Bruno paused a moment, then spoke flatly. 'Please define for me in objective, nonhuman-oriented terms the tastes 'sweet,' then 'sour,' please.”
'Uh, well… “
His cheek twitched as he stared intently at the blinking red blur on the upper portion of the holoscreen. Was it a smile? A stray emotion filtering past his machine consciousness?
'Sensoria are usually difficult to describe in precise terminology without experiential referents,' he continued. 'Even for simplistic intelligent system networks. Suffice it to say that the anomalous signals 'taste' like three kzin warcraft to me, again, little different from the Third Wave warcraft in our databases.”
Carol decided to take his word for it. Taste. After all, this was why Bruno had been selected as pilot of the Sun-Tzu in the first place. If Carol didn't trust Bruno's Linked observations, why was he aboard?
It still stank of black magic to her. Would she see reality as differently as the computer-Linked Bruno did, once she was converted by the virus in Dolittle?
Carol pursed her lips and thought a moment. 'So you would have no objections,' she asked carefully, 'if we point the antimatter reaction chamber toward them and see what they do?”
'On the contrary, I very much wish to verify my… intuition… “
'Make it so,' she ordered formally. A schematic of the Sun-Tzu appeared in the main holoscreen window, with x-y-z coordinates in glittering red. Attitude jets flared on the schematic, slowly turning the spacecraft, and Carol
