The Gap Into Vision: Forbidden Knowledge

  Between one gulp for air and the next, she stopped crying. The zone implant began to reassert control.

  “That’s better.” Vector’s voice seemed to reach her through a veil, as if it were muffled by kindness. “Any minute now you’ll be able to think again. If you don’t fall asleep first. Or just drop dead. You could kill yourself the way you’re going.

  “Do you play cards?”

  She didn’t react. All she cared about was the black heat of the coffee, the flaming hurt in her mouth.

  “I know this seems like an inopportune moment for conversation,” he explained in his mild way, “but I want to reach you while you’re still—still accessible. You’ve been deaf and blind for weeks now. This may be my only chance.

  “Do you play cards?”

  The retreat of her grief left her exposed to exhaustion. Numbly she nodded. “Poker. A little. In the Academy. I wasn’t good at it.”

  Apparently she’d given him some kind of permission. He seated himself, picked up a mug of coffee, and said casually, “It’s interesting how some games endure. Chess, for example. And poker—as a species, we’ve been playing poker practically forever. And then there’s bridge. I’ve seen gaming encyclopedias that don’t even mention whist—which is where bridge came from—but back when I worked for Intertech we used to play bridge for days. Orn was particularly good at it.

  “Bridge and poker.” Vector let out a nostalgic sigh. “The only time life is ever pure is when you’re playing games like that. That’s because they’re closed systems. The cards, and the rules—and the ontological implications—are finite.

  “But of course poker isn’t really a card game. It’s a game of people. The cards are just a tool for playing your opponents. That may be why you weren’t good at it. Bridge comes much closer to direct problem solving—the extrapolation of discrete logical permutations. You can’t ignore who your opponents are, naturally, but you win with your mind more than your guts.

  “You’re trying to win this one with your guts, Morn. You need to use your mind.”

  Morn drank more coffee. She didn’t say anything: she didn’t have anything to say. Instead she concentrated on the pain in her throat.

  “We have a maxim in bridge,” he continued. “If you need a particular card to be in a certain place, assume it is. If you need a particular distribution of the cards, assume it exists. Plan the rest of your strategy as if you have a right to be sure of that one assumption.

  “It doesn’t always work, of course. In fact, you can play for days without it working once. But that’s not the point. The point is, if your assumption is false you were going to fail anyway. That assumption represents the one thing you have to have in order to succeed, so you might as well count on it. Without it, there’s nothing you can do except shrug and go on to the next hand.”

  Morn was adrift in a void of exhaustion and overdriven synapses, anchored only by coffee and her burned tongue. Nothing Vector said made any sense. His little lecture sounded oddly purposeless, unmotivated. And yet he delivered it as if it were important somehow; as if he thought she needed it. With an effort, she resisted the impulse to switch off her black box and let herself collapse.

  The electrical coercion in her brain seemed unable to master her fatigue. Nevertheless it reduced her numbness a bit. She cleared her throat and murmured thinly, “Whose watch is this? I don’t even know what day it is.”

  Vector consulted a chronometer built into the food-vend. “Liete’s on for another hour. Then it’s Nick’s turn.” He hesitated momentarily before adding, “You missed your last watch, but Nick told Mikka to let you stay with what you were doing. He may treat you like shit, but he’s counting on you.”

  Treat you like shit. That touched a sore place in her. A small sting of anger spread outward from the contact. The effect of the zone implant grew stronger. Nick did indeed treat her like shit. She had every intention of making him pay blood for the privilege.

  “So your advice”—she was too tired to speak distinctly, but she did her best to articulate every word—“is to just assume I can cure this virus. Assume there’s something I can do that doesn’t depend on skills or knowledge I haven’t got.”

  In response Vector raised his mug like a salute. Smiling gently, he said, “If you heard me say all that, there’s hope for you yet.”

  “In that case,” she replied, trying not to mumble, “our entire approach has been wrong from the beginning. We have to assume that everything we’ve done so far is wrong.”

  He nodded noncommittally. “Do we? Is that the only assumption that gives us a chance?”

  She ignored him. Maybe fatigue was what she needed to take the edge off the zone implant’s effect: maybe she’d been blinded by her own urgency, artificial and otherwise. Now she seemed to feel neurons which had been pushed to the point of shutdown come back on line. She was starting to think again.

  “Where’s Mackern?” she asked as if she had a right to expect Vector’s help.

  He studied her without adjusting his smile. “He’s on with Nick in an hour.”

  So what? If Mikka could do without her, Nick could do without Mackern. “I need him.”

  Vector shrugged. Lifting himself stiffly to his feet, he moved to the intercom.

  “With your permission, Nick,” he told the intercom, “Morn wants to talk to Sib Mackern. She says she needs him.”

  Obliquely Morn realized that she’d never heard Mackern’s first name before.

  Nick’s voice came back: “Where?”

  “In the galley.”

  “I’ll send him.” The intercom clicked off.

  The data first arrived only a minute or two after Vector sat down again. He must have been somewhere nearby when he received Nick’s orders.

  “You wanted to talk to me?” he asked Morn. The idea appeared to aggravate his uncertainty. Whatever he used instead of self-confidence to keep him going was as nearly invisible as his pale mustache.

  She needed time to get her thoughts in order. For a moment she said nothing. Vector urged Sib Mackern to sit down. He offered the data first coffee. Sib preferred to remain standing; he refused the coffee.

  Both men watched Morn as if they wanted to witness the exact moment when she fell asleep.

  Sleep, she mused. Rest and death. She needed both—not necessarily in that order. But not yet.

  “Sib.” She pulled up her attention with a jerk. “What kind of name is that?”

  “It’s short for Sibal,” he replied, too nervous to give her anything except a straight answer. “My mother wanted a girl.”

  “Oh, well,” Vector sighed. “If you were a girl, she would have wanted a boy. None of us ever win with our mothers.”

  “Sib, I need you.” Morn had no energy to spare for Vector’s sense of humor. “Nobody trusts me. Nobody is going to do what I tell them. I haven’t got access or authority. And I’m”—she could hardly hold up her head, despite the zone implant’s emissions—“too tired to do anything myself. I need you.”

  He didn’t commit himself. “Nick told me to help you.”

  “Sib, you know more about computers than I do.” She brushed aside a demurral he didn’t make. “If you wanted to plant a virus aboard, how would you go about it?”

  His gaze flicked to Vector, back to her. “I don’t understand.”

  Unable to explain herself better, she repeated, “How would you go about it?”

  “If I knew how to plant a virus,” he objected, “I might be able to cure this one.”

  Morn stared her desperate and conflicted weariness up at him and refused to let him off the hook.

  “But if I knew how—” He faltered; his mustache looked like a streak of dirt bleeding into his mouth at the corners. After a moment he began again more strongly. “If I knew how, I could just sit down at the data board and write it in. But that would be the hard way.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s an incredibly complicated job. I would have to study the entir
e system to find the right place for the virus. That takes time. A lot of time. And the coding for the virus has to be enormously complex—as well as enormously subtle. Otherwise it shows. Or it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. Which takes more time. Somebody would almost certainly catch me.”

  Rather helplessly, he added, “You know that.”

  She dismissed the issue of what she did or didn’t know with a twitch of her hand. “What would be the easy way?”

  “Write it all ahead of time,” he said more promptly. “Bring it aboard on tape—or in a chip. Then I could just copy it into the system whenever I had a minute to spare.”

  “Fine,” Morn murmured as if she were dozing. “You can write it all ahead of time. You can copy it in seconds. But you still need to study the system. You can’t design your virus until you know the system.”

  The data first nodded. “Sure.”

  “Vector, did Orn ever have a chance to study Captain’s Fancy’s systems before you joined ship?”

  The engineer’s gaze was quizzical. “Not that I know of. I can’t be sure, but I don’t think so.” Then he added, “Nick would know.”

  She also dismissed the issue of what Nick did or didn’t know. “Assume it. Assume he couldn’t write the virus until he knew the system—and he couldn’t get to know the system until he joined ship.”

  A small frown creased Vector’s round face. “You’re saying he must have written the virus after he and I came aboard.”

  “No. Sib’s right.” Fatigue made everything hard to explain. “He was new. Nobody trusts new people. Nobody would let him spend five or ten uninterrupted hours at the computers without challenging him.” Not Mikka Vasaczk. And certainly not Nick, whose instinct for trouble was as searching as a particle sifter. “He would have to do the work in little bits and pieces, while nobody was looking. It might take him weeks.

  “But he said”—it was astonishing how clearly she remembered this—“he said, ‘I put a virus in the computers—the same day I came aboard.’ The same day, not weeks later.”

  “He may not have been telling the truth,” Vector observed.

  “Assume he was. Now we have a virus that couldn’t have been written earlier and wasn’t written later.”

  Vector studied his coffee as if it could cure his perplexity. “So what are the alternatives?”

  “Hardware,” Mackern breathed. He sounded like he was about to be sick.

  Morn turned her tired gaze on him and waited.

  “But that’s impossible,” he protested to himself. “I mean, it’s not technically impossible. He could hardwire a virus into a chip or a card. Or a mother-board-that would be the most versatile. It would do the same thing as a program virus. He could order it dormant or activate it whenever he wanted.

  “He could do the work before he came aboard. Then he would only need five minutes alone in the core to substitute his chip, or whatever.

  “But it’s still impossible.”

  Vacillating between sleep and concentration, Morn asked, “Why?”

  “For the same reason he couldn’t write the virus ahead of time,” Sib replied. “There are too many different kinds of computers, as well as too many different kinds of programs to run them. He couldn’t hardwire a compatible chip unless he already knew exactly what equipment we have. And we’re assuming he couldn’t know that before he joined ship.”

  “Not to mention the expense,” Vector put in. “Ordinary sods like us can just about afford a hard-memory chip or two for systems like these—if we’ve got steady jobs and we like to save. Mother-boards might as well be on the other side of the gap.”

  “But not,” Morn murmured as if she’d decided on sleep, “interface cards.”

  The data first opened his mouth; closed it again. A wince in his eyes made him look like he was afraid of her.

  “What do you mean,” Vector inquired tentatively, “‘not interface cards’?” He gave the impression that he doubted she could answer the question.

  “Not everything.” Without quite realizing it, she’d slipped her hands into her pockets; her fingers rested on the keys of the zone implant control. She was so familiar with it that she could use it without looking at it. “Not expensive.” Probably she should have felt brilliant, victorious: she should have felt that she’d achieved a breakthrough that would redeem her. But she lacked the energy for so much emotion. As soon as she finished what she was saying, she would turn off the control and let herself rest. “And not impossible.”

  “Morn”—Vector leaned forward, touched her arm—“you’re drifting. Try to stay with us a little longer.”

  With an act of will which the zone implant itself made possible, she took her fingers off the control.

  “They aren’t expensive,” she said dimly. “If they were, ‘ordinary sods’ couldn’t afford to expand or upgrade their systems. And they can be hardwired like a chip, or a mother-board.” Especially in this case, when all that was needed was a relatively simple embedded wipe command with an on-off code. “And there’s no compatibility problem. Interface cards are standardized. That’s why they can be cheap. They plug into standard slots—they run on standard operating systems. If you want to interface two computers, all you have to do is look at them, see what they are. Then you set a few dip-switches on your cards, plug them in, and connect the leads.”

  As she spoke, Sib began to nod, ticking off points in his mind when she made them.

  She forced herself to continue. “All our computers seem to function fine independently. And they all wipe when we link them up. He could probably change out every interface card in the core in fifteen minutes.

  “Has anybody searched his cabin?”

  Vector’s eyes were wide and round, as blue as surprise. “Not that I know of. Why bother? He wasn’t likely to leave a virus-owner’s manual lying around.”

  Waves of sleep rolled through her and receded again as the zone implant fought them. She waited until one of them passed; then she said, “You might find something interesting if you did.”

  Mackern went on nodding as if he couldn’t stop. “It’s worth a try.” Vector was back at the intercom before Morn noticed that he’d moved. She eased her fingers onto her black box again as he keyed the intercom and said, “Mikka?”

  The command second took a minute or two to answer. When she replied, she sounded grim and unreachable. “I’m sleeping, goddamn it. Leave me alone.”

  Unflappable as ever, Vector said, “We’re in the galley. I don’t think you want to miss this, Mikka.”

  By the time Mikka arrived, Morn was deep in dreams, cradling her head with her arms on the galley table.

  When Vector nudged her awake, her brain was gone, lost in unnavigable weariness. She could focus her eyes on him—she was able to recognize Mikka and Sib standing behind him—but she had no idea what they wanted.

  “Come on,” the engineer said gently. “You don’t want to miss this.”

  Where had she heard that before? She couldn’t remember.

  There were other things she couldn’t do as well. She couldn’t protest. Or resist: all her resistance, every bit of her independent self, had fallen away into a black abysm of sleep. Numb and disconnected, she let Vector urge her up from her chair; she let him and Mikka take her out of the galley between them.

  Out of the galley to the bridge.

  Nick was there with his watch—Carmel and Lind, Malda Verone, the helm first. Sib Mackern’s place at the data station was empty, but he didn’t move to take it; he stayed beside Mikka with Vector and Morn as if the four of them were joined in an obscure pact.

  Nick faced them tightly. Morn couldn’t read his expression, and didn’t try. If Mikka and Vector had let go of her, she would have slumped to the deck.

  “That took you long enough,” he said. She couldn’t read his tone, either. “What the hell’s going on?”

  “I’ll spare you the details,” Mikka answered brusquely. “Morn thinks she’s figured out this virus.
She convinced Vector and Mackern. They persuaded me to search Vorbuld’s cabin.

  “For some reason, he kept a box of interface cards in his locker. They look normal to me, but Mackern says he thinks they’ve been doctored. He thought we should replace all the interface cards in the core.” Morn felt the command second shrug. “He’s data first. I let him do it.

  “He got a new set of cards from stores and changed out the old ones. Just to be on the safe side, I watched him do it. The old cards are all out. The new ones were sealed before he opened them, so they haven’t been tampered with.

  “If he’s right—if Morn is right—the virus is gone.”

  “If you don’t mind”—now Morn could hear Nick’s sarcasm—“we’ll test that a few times before I believe it.

  “Mackern,” he ordered, “the rest of you, get to work. I want to re-create the tests we ran the first time—I want to do exactly the same things that triggered those first wipes.”

  Maybe he went on talking. Or maybe not. Morn couldn’t tell: she was asleep again.

  Vector and Mikka kept her on her feet; they held her approximately at attention while all the original tests were set up and repeated. But she didn’t return to a state which resembled consciousness until Vector shook her and said into her ear, “Everything works, Morn. You were right. You did it.”

  Did it. Oh, good. She wasn’t sure she knew what he was talking about.

  But then the odd, constricted glare Nick fixed on her pulled up her head, made her take notice of him.

  “You win.” He looked at her as if winning were the most dangerous thing she could have done. “We had a bargain. You kept your end of it. I’ll keep mine.

  “You can have your damn baby.” The concession came out as a snarl. “And you won’t have to do it on Thanatos Minor. Vector says the gap drive will get us into tach and out again one more time. He doesn’t want to stake his life on it, but he’s willing to risk his reputation.” Nick rasped the word like a curse. “I’m going to do both for you.”

  His eyes blazed with murder or wild joy, she couldn’t tell which.