The Mind Pool

“Oddities, you mean?” Phoebe was trailing after Luther Brachis, turning now and then to stare at the quiet bulk of the green balloon behind. “I know. When I’m not working I go cruising around. There’s a million of them, things you never see anywhere else. And so old. It’s a ridiculous thought, but as you move around the Dump you have the feeling that every great failure of the solar system has quietly made its own way here. People as well as equipment. It s scary.”

“I know what you mean. ‘And all dead years draw thither, and all disastrous things.’ ”

“Why, Commander.” Phoebe wanted to change the gloomy mood that seemed to be creeping up on both of them. “Do I detect a quotation — and one that’s not from Von Clausewitz’s On War? Someone has been civilizing you. And you’re looking different. What’s happening to the old Luther Brachis?”

But he would not respond. He made another subject switch of his own. “The trouble is, there’s no explanation for the Construct behavior that we’ve been finding.”

Phoebe sighed. No joking today. “That’s not true. I can suggest two explanations.”

“Let’s hear them.”

“All right. I don’t much like either of them. But Number One, the Construct has been damaged to the point where it is not functioning in any consistent way. In other words, it’s crazy.”

“Then it’s in the right place.”

“No insulting remarks about Sargasso Dump guards, you said. If I’m not allowed to say they’re crazy, nor should you.”

“Point made. All right, Phoebe. What’s Number Two?”

“It’s functioning just as it was intended to.”

“And we can’t understand it. Are you saying that the Morgan Constructs are a lot smarter and more complex than anyone ever suspected?”

“I didn’t know I was. But I seem to be.”

And now Phoebe wished that the conversation had stayed with the forlorn relics of the Sargasso Dump.

Chapter 10

“No!” The scream boomed through the rocky chambers, resonating on and on. “No, no, no, NO!”

“Chan! Wait for me.” Tatty was running as fast as she could, but the screams ahead of her were fading. Somehow he had escaped again, racing off through the maze of interior tunnels.

She slowed her pace. He could not get away for long, not with the Tracker to reveal his distance and direction. Even so, the folded corridors of Horus made the search a tedious business. And it was not only the corridors themselves. Ten generations of burrowing and excavating had left behind an astonishing legacy of debris: broken tunneling equipment, old food synthesizers, obsolete communicators, mounds of broken supply containers. When the last members of the sect left Horus, they had found few things worth hauling back for use elsewhere. Now the whole mess formed an obstacle course, to be climbed over, moved aside, or burrowed through.

Tatty plowed on. Chan had been crying when he ran, and with the hardest part still to come she felt close to tears herself. When she caught Chan she would have to give him his medication and drag him back for a session with the Stimulator. More and more, that seemed like a pointless exercise.

She forced herself on, grimy and tired. Even before Kubo Flammarion left Horus, Chan had been getting hard to handle. He was bigger, faster, and much stronger than Tatty. Sometimes she could manage him only by using a Stunner, slowing and weakening him enough for her to catch and overpower him.

“Cha-an!” Her cracking voice echoed off rocky walls. “Chan, come on. Come back home.”

Silence. Had he found a new hiding-place? Maybe he was becoming more intelligent, just a little; or maybe it was her wishful thinking. Every day she stared into those bright blue eyes, willing them to show more understanding; every day, she was disappointed. The innocence of a two-year-old gazed back at her, unable to comprehend why the woman who fed him, dressed him, and put him to bed was the same woman who tortured him.

Tatty kept going. Most of the burrows on Horus terminated in dead ends, and after a while Chan, no matter how he tried to escape, would finish in one of them. Usually the same ones. He lacked the memory and intelligence to learn the pattern of the paths. Tatty peered at the Tracker. She was getting close. He had to be somewhere in the next chamber. She saw a pile of plastic sheets draped over powdered rock. He would be behind that, cowering brainlessly with his face pressed to the dirt. Tatty lifted the stunner and crept forward the last few yards.

He was there. Weeping.

It broke her heart to take him back to the training center. She knew she would not need the Stunner, for once she took hold of him his resistance disappeared. He allowed himself to be led along by the hand, passive and hopeless.

When he saw the Stimulator he began to cry again. She sat him in the padded seat, grimly fitted the headset and the arm attachments, and turned away as the power came on. The screams of pain when full intensity was reached were awful, but she had learned to stand those. It was later, when the treatment was over and she released Chan and tried to feed him, that Tatty always felt ready to faint. He would crouch in his chair, sweaty and panting, and look up at her pleadingly. The face was that of a tormented animal, exhausted and uncomprehending. She felt she was torturing a helpless beast, punishing it pointlessly again and again for a reason it did not understand — would never be able to understand.

She worried, always, that she was not using the Stimulator correctly. Kubo Flammarion had instructed her in the use of it before he left, and told her that Mondrian would give more detailed advice when he came to Horus.

He had never come. There had been not even a message. Day after day, Tatty did her best to follow Flammarion’s instructions, in his three-fold way of Machine, Medication, Motivation.

“The Stimulator won’t work by itself,” he said. “You have to follow the right drug protocol, night and morning. But more important than that, you have to be involved. You have to bond with Chan, link to him and somehow make him want to learn.”

“And how am I supposed to do that, when he doesn’t understand even the idea of learning?”

Flammarion had scratched his scurvy head. “Beats me. All I can tell you is what they told me. If he doesn’t have motivation, he’ll never develop. But where there is motivation, the Stimulator can work what looks like a miracle. Here, how about using Leah’s picture?”

Flammarion had produced from a packet of papers a grimy image of Leah, part of her official identification when she was inducted for Pursuit Team training. “Chan loves her more than anything in the world,” he said. “If you show him this every time you use the Stimulator, and tell him that Leah wants him to learn — maybe that will help. And tell him that when the treatments are over, he’ll be able to go and see Leah,”

Tatty took the picture. Every day, after the injections and after the stimulator session, she made her speech. “Look at Leah, Chan. She wants you to learn. And you’ve got to want to be more intelligent, too. Just a little bit more, every day. And soon you’ll be able to go and see Leah, and she’ll come and see you.”

Chan stared at the image and smiled. He certainly knew who it was. But that was the only response. The days wore on, all the same, and at last Tatty gave up hope. She should stop trying, stop torturing. Chan would never learn.

She brooded on her own situation. No visit from Esro Mondrian. No calls, not even a message. He had talked her into leaving Earth, duped her into doing what he wanted, as he could always do — and then forgotten about her until the next time she might come in useful.

She took the initiative, placing calls to him and to Kubo Flammarion. She could never get through to either of them. But one day, after many attempts, she managed to pass the shielding layers of guard and assistants and found herself talking to Mondrian’s private office on Ceres.

“I’m sorry.” One of Mondrian’s personal guards took the call. “Captain Flammarion is in a meeting, and Commander Mondrian himself is not here.”