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as long as I want it to. Want to hear how well it works now?"
A word of command amplified the sound of
Micaya's artificial heart beating vehemently, the pulse rate going up to
support the demands Polyon was making on the rest of her system. The
desperate, ragged double beat echoed through the cabin, droned and drummed and
shrilled through a complete transi-
tion loop, and no one spoke or moved.
For a heartbeat, no more, Nantia found silence and darkness a welcome relief
from the stabbing pain of the input from her rogue sensors. Is this what Sin-
gularity is like for softpersons? But no, it was worse than that. In the
confused moments before she shut down all conscious functions and disabled her
own sensor connections, she had been aware of something much worse than the
colorshifts and spatial distortions of
Singularity; the malevolence of another mind, in-
timately entwined with her own, striking at her with deliberate malice.
He means to drive me mad. If I enable my sensors ogam, he'll bleak desperation
of die thought came from somewhere iar back in her memories. When, how, had
she ever felt so utterly abandoned before? Nantia reached out, un-
thinking, to search her memory banks # then stopped before die connection was
complete. If sensors could be turned into weapons to use against her, could
not memory, too, be infiltrated? Access the computer's memory banks, and she
might find herself "knowing"
whatever this other mind wanted her to believe.
Is it another mind ? Or a part of myself? Perhaps Fm mad already, and this is
the first symptom. The flashing, dis-
orienting lights and garbled sounds, the sickening whirling sensations, even
the conviction that she was under attack by another mind # weren't all these
symptoms of one of those Old Earth illnesses that had ravaged so many people
before modern electrostim and drug therapy restored the balance of their tor-
tured brains? Nancia longed to scan just one of the
encyclopedia articles in her memory banks; but that resource was denied her
for the moment. Paranoid schizophrenia, that was it; a splitting off of the
mind from reality.
Let's see, now # she reasoned. IfTm mad, then it's safe to look up the
symptoms and decide that I'm mad, except that presumably I won't accept the
evidence. And ifTm not mad, I
daren't check memory to prove it. So we'd better accept the working hypothesis
that lam sane, and go on from there. The dry humor of the syllogism did
something to restore her emotional balance. Although how long I will remain
sane, urtder these circumstances...
Better not to think about that. Better, too, not to remember Caleb's first
partner, who had gone into irre-
versible coma rather than face the emptiness that surrounded him after the
synaptic connections between his shell and the outside world had been
destroyed. As a matter of sanity, as well as survival, Nancia decided, she
would make the assumption that somebody had done this to her, and concentrate
on solving the puzzle of who had done it and how they could be stopped.
300
Anne McCaffrey fcf Margaret Ball
PARTNERSHIP
301
A natural first step would be to reopen just one sen-
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sor, to examine the bursts of energy that had come so dose to disrupting her
nervous system.... I can't! the child within her shrieked in near-panic. You
can't make me, I won't, I won't, fUstay safe in here forever.
That's not an option, Nancia told herself firmly. She wanted to say it aloud,
to reassure herself with the sound of her own voice; but she was mute as well
as deaf and blind and without sensation, floating in an absolute blackness.
Somehow she had to conquer that panic within herself.
Poetry sometimes helped. That Old Earth dramatist
Sev and Fassa were so fond of quoting; she had plenty of his speeches stored
in her memory banks. On such a night as this . . . Nancia reached unthinking
for memory, stopped the impulse just in time. She didn't know that speech; she
had stored it in memory. Quite a different thing. Try something else, then.
Icouid be bounded in a nut-
shell, and count myself king of infinite space, were it not that 1
have bad dreams.... Not a good choice, under the cir-
cumstances. Maybe ... did she know anything else?
What was she, without her memory banks, her sensors, her powerful thrusting
engines? Did she even existatall?
That way lies madness. Of course she existed.
Deliberately Nancia filled herself with her own true
memories. Scooting around the Laboratory Schools corridors, playing Stall and
Power-Seek with her friends. Acing the math finals, from Lobachevski
Geometry up through Decomposition Topology, play-
ing again, with all the wonderful space of numbers and planes and points to
wander in. Voice training with Ser Vospatrian, the Lab Schools' drama teacher,
who'd taught them to modulate their speaker-
produced vocalizations through the full range of human speech with all its
emotional overtones. That first day they'd all been shy and nervous, hating
the recorded playbacks of their own tinny artificial voices;
Vospatrian had made them recite limericks and non-
sense poems until they broke down in giggles and forgot to be self-conscious.
Goodness, she could still remember those silly poems with which he'd started
off every session....
And quite without thinking or calling on her artifi-
cially augmented memory banks, Nancia was oft jjtfc
!$" The farmer's daughter had soft brown hair, ? ? Butter and eggs and
a pound of cheese, ' 1 And I met with a poem, I can't say where, Which
wholly consisted of lines like these...."
There was a young brainshxp of Vega.... "
"Fhairson swore a feud against the clan MTavish;
Marched into their land to murder and to rafish, for he did resolve to
extirpate the vipers
Withfour-and-twenty men andftue-and-thirty thirty pipers..."
Nancia went through Ser Vospatrian's entire reper-
toire until she was giggling internally and floating on the natural high of
laughter-produced endorphins.
Then, floating quite calmly in her blackness, she set about testing her sensor
connections one by one.
She got the mental equivalent of burned fingers and light-blinded eyes more
than once during the testing process, but it wasn't as bad as she had feared.
The lower-deck sensors were completely useless, as were her navigation
computer and the new mathematics and graphics co-processors she'd just
invested in.
Everything, in fact, that contains hyperchipsfrom Shemati...
and with that deduction, Nancia knew just who was striking at her and why.
She opened the upper deck sensors one by one, first taking in the sleeping
bodies tumbled in the pas-
302
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Anne McCaffrey & Margaret BaU
sageway and cabins. Sev, slumped over the isometric spring set in the exercise
room with his hands and feet still in the springholders; Alpha, strapped in
her cabin-
Blaize, floating just above the passageway deck, with an angelic expression on
his sleeping face and a nasty bruise coming up on his chin.
Mutiny. And somebody released sleepgas. But which side}
She opened the control cabin sensors slowly, cautious-
ly. The port side sensors wavered and gave an erratic display. Somehow
Polyon's hyperchips must be work-
ing to contaminate the entire computer system. 2 don't have much time.... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]