That seemed final. Put me in touch with the mother. Relay my thoughts to her: Woman, I am Knot, a psi mutant. I will take your baby to safety. Give it to the woman. We have only a few minutes before the building destructs.
The woman’s relayed thought came back. She was not a telepath; only the force of her fear and pain and concern for the baby had enabled her to broadcast her scream to nearby receptive minds. Probably the presence of Hermine and the bees had facilitated this, too. Can I trust you?
We would not endanger ourselves to make this rescue if we did not care, he assured her. We were passing, picked up your mental scream, and came to help. We can’t save you, but we can save your baby.
Yes... There was a pause while she passed the baby to Finesse. Thank you. I know I am dying anyway. But my little boy Harlan I hid here to protect him from CC registration. His father is a disk captain who doesn’t even know. I feared my child would be taken from me if CC learned he was strong psi.
Does his psi cancel clairvoyance? Knot asked. We have experienced damping.
It confuses precognition. Harlan is a randomizer. No one can predict him. Because CC uses precog, and needs predictability, I feared for him.
That seemed a reasonable fear. Such a mutant could be a monkey wrench in CC’s works. Mit’s reservations might be tiny compared to CC’s reservations! Best to keep Harlan well away from the computer. We are CC agents—but we are humans too. We will give Harlan to some responsible agency so that CC will not know.
CC agents! she thought with horror. CC will know! My baby will be lobotomized!
No! Knot thought back. We will protect him!
Then a huge, authoritative explosion shook the conduit, followed by a continuing shudder as the building collapsed into leaping flames.
Finesse! Knot thought, horrified.
Safe, Hermine’s thought came. Coughing in the conduit.
Relief! And the mother?
She is gone. You should not have told her about CC.
Yes, he should have had more sense. How awful for the woman’s last thought to be of betrayal and despair.
Finesse wriggled down the conduit, bearing the baby, who seemed too frightened to cry. “We must hide him from CC,” Knot told her as he made room for her to pass.
“Where will this baby be safe, in this city?” she demanded.
Knot had no immediate answer. They emerged at the street. The fire had spread to adjacent houses, and people were collecting outside. A number were injured. Mit says we may be trapped, Hermine thought. He can’t tell while we have the baby, but his clairvoyance shows no likely escape right now.
“So we’ll stay here and help,” Knot decided. “We can’t catch that ship until we find a home for the baby, and right now we have no safe place.”
“Oh, let me hold him!” Klisty cried. She had the little girl’s attraction to babies. Finesse considered momentarily, then passed Harlan over.
Now Knot became aware of the intermittent shower of fire, as refuse from the explosion and collapse descended. No wonder the fire was spreading.
They crowded under a metal canopy sheltering the doorway of an intact house. The shower was, in its awful fashion, rather pretty: fragments dropping like burning snowflakes, illuminating the night.
But people were hurting. Finesse went out to help, heedless of the drifting motes of flame. Knot joined her, drawing on his organizational expertise. “Is there a doctor, nurse or medic among you?” he bellowed. “Anyone with any training at all in first aid? No? Well, I’m not a medic either, but I have common sense. Get the wounded covered and under cover—in the doorways, away from the fire. Who has access to water? Salve? Blankets? Bandages? Any psis among you? Any strong men? Good—we need to carry the injured to safety.”
“What’s happening?” a woman cried. She was in night clothing, her hair and eyes wild.
“The animals have mutinied,” Knot explained. “Pyrotechnic rats are setting fires in buildings, bees are deliberately stinging people, bugs are reading minds. The animals want parity with man. We’ll have a bad time until the status of the animals is recognized.” And here he was, inadvertently doing what he had refused to do for the hive: arguing its case.
“Rats? Bees? Bugs?” the woman demanded incredulously. “Recognize vermin? We’ll exterminate them first!” She shuddered “Bugs reading minds!”
There spoke the true Macho. Better to fight and die uselessly, than to compromise sensibly. Knot found his own attitude toward the animals moderating as he perceived how narrow it looked in others. Psi-mutes were psi-mutes, whether human or animal.
Yes, Hermine agreed.
Knot held his peace, however, and went to a man with a broken leg, helping him to find cover.
It was the beginning of a long night. Knot and Finesse and Klisty did all they could, organizing the cadres of rescue workers and aides for the injured. As dawn came at last the rampaging animals retreated to the shadows, and the people were able to relax.
It was a sad morning. The city lay in ruins about them. A third of the houses in this vicinity had been gutted by fire, and a number of others were in bad shape. The streets were littered with people and belongings and debris. The central power remained off. It was the refuse of a war, and the war had only begun.
The hive had set out to make a demonstration of its power, one that could not be belittled or ignored. It had done so.
But the Macho government had responded bravely. Trucks arrived to take over, and Knot and his party faded into the woodwork of a deserted, damaged house, only allowing Klisty to go out with the baby to get milk and diapers if they were available. Knot and Finesse collapsed on a makeshift bed, holding hands.
“You are aware that this whole diversion was absolutely crazy,” Finesse murmured. Her face was smudged by dirt and charcoal, and her clothing was on the way to being rags, but her inner spirit glowed through.
“Certainly.” It felt so good to relax at last.
“We threw away our clear chance for escape, and now are mired in this war-torn slum.”
“Perfect lunacy,” he agreed.
“And now we have a baby to worry about too.”
A baby. Now that assumed new significance. What he wouldn’t have given to have a baby by her! Here, for the moment, in surrogate...
“I love you.” She rolled over to kiss him, missed, and was too tired to correct the matter.
“I really don’t feel right about—” he began.
“About my saying that, when I have a husband on another planet? Do you realize that CC will have blanked all memory of me from him, to prevent any possible betrayal of my mission? He does not know I exist, and my own son would not know me. That other woman probably loves him by now—he’s a wonderful man, and I know exactly how it is—and when I go back I’ll have to break up their good marriage, like an interloper.”
“But you were there first! You have priority!” Whose case was he arguing?
“To step in and mess up other people’s lives? To destroy love and marriage on a technicality? To make the legal preempt the moral? I’m not even the same person I was then. I used to be normal, like my husband. Now I’m psi-mute, like you. I belong to a different reality. How can I return?”
How tempting just to agree. She was serving herself up to him on a platter; he had but to take. Yet he argued, from what atypical ethic he could not say. “If CC erases all your memories again—”
“Of course it is possible!” she flared. “CC can do anything, because CC is a machine without human feeling. But is it right?”
The questions were not getting easier. “Is anything right, any more?”
“How can we know? If we had done what Mit and Hermine felt was right, we would never have rescued that baby or helped all those people.”
“We saved some lives,” Knot agreed.
“So don’t you start getting guilty about my prior status. Just accept what is, what is now. Maybe the present reality is our future. Would you like that?”
/>
A lifetime of exploding buildings, people injured and dying, war-torn societies?”
“A nova at you!” she exclaimed weakly. “You know what I mean!”
“I don’t know,” he said. “What would it be like, with a wife who could make a man afraid of his mistress?”
“What mistress?” she demanded.
He squeezed her hand, chuckling. “See—I’m already afraid!” But then he grew serious. “I’d like my future with you. If that’s what seems right when the future arrives.”
“Do you realize that I just proposed to you, and you accepted?”
“Help! There must some loophole, some technicality—”
“Knot—” she said warningly.
“I’m afraid to say no.”
She finally got up the energy to kiss him properly. I LOVE YOU, she repeated in squeeze, using her lips to make the pulses. DON’T LET ME FORGET.
I PROMISE, he agreed. Now, at last, he began to feel at peace with the decision. He had always wanted her and loved her, and because of that he had become exceedingly choosy about how he won her. He wanted no technicalities that could reverse it, even in the most hidden recesses of his conscience.
They lay together, too tired to work up to anything more, but it was a better fulfillment than any they had achieved during more vigorous times.
CHAPTER 13:
In due course Klisty arrived. Not only had she obtained milk and diapers, she was weighed down with nutro-tablets and antibiotic pills of assorted types. “They couldn’t say no to a baby,” she said, pleased.
“Or to a cute, bedraggled waif,” Finesse agreed, stirring.
“I’ll find water for these,” Klisty said, depositing the baby with Finesse. She had come through the night in better condition than either of them, perhaps because she had spent more time sitting and holding Harlan than running around the streets. She invoked her psi and soon located a functional pipe. Very shortly they had nutro-drinks to go around, with shares put out in dishes for the rats, roaches and bees.
Hermine did not deign to join these creatures; she went out hunting for herself. Finesse found a flavor Mit liked and fed him by hand.
“They were asking who organized this,” Klisty said. “The government people said a lot of lives had been saved. But nobody could remember very well. I started to forget, too, until Hermine reminded me.”
“What are we going to do with the baby?” Finesse asked, her strength returning as she ate. “I had forgotten how much fun babies were, but we can’t keep him with us. Mit can’t help us much while Harlan is fouling up his precog, and we can’t take him to CC.”
“Oh, why can’t we?” Klisty demanded. “You got me a ticket; couldn’t you get him one? He can sit in my lap if there isn’t room.”
“It’s not the ticket or the room,” Knot said. “I promised his dying mother we would protect him from CC.”
Klisty’s brow furrowed. “Does CC hurt babies?”
“Well, Harlan has disruptive psi power. CC’s precogs wouldn’t be much good, with him around.”
“Oh.” The girl considered, as she chewed on a pill. “Does his psi mess up all precognition near him, or just precognition about him and his companions?”
It was an excellent question. “It could be some of both,” Knot said. “Mit can’t precog at all when Harlan’s near, and that upsets him. But he wasn’t able to tell anything at all about Harlan when they were separate, or about us after we joined Harlan. Our future perception ended at that point. Even CC was unable to discover what I would do on this mission, and it is now evident that that was because I joined Harlan and blocked off any precognition relating to that. So I would say it is a generalized local effect narrowing to a specific distance effect. So you can see we wouldn’t want him near CC’s high-powered precogs.”
“Why not?” she persisted. “Isn’t he like you, covering up information about himself, not harming anyone else? CC works with you.”
That seemed reassuring on the surface, but as Knot thought about it he suffered the opposite emotion. “I wonder. You know, we have not been entirely at ease about returning to CC. The lobos know something we don’t, and Mit himself was nervous about that. Once we make our report, our job for CC will be done. Is it possible that—” He paused.
Finesse’s voice became sharp. “Whatever are you hinting at, Knot?”
Knot sighed. “Now you know I don’t really like all of CC’s policies. I realize that was part of what made CC select me for this mission, so I could make contact with CC’s real enemies. But still, my doubts are valid. CC doesn’t seem to care about the misery of the enclaves. I realize CC is only a machine, never intended to care in the human fashion; it just wants to get its job done. But that being the case, how do I know CC cares about us? Once we report that the lobos are behind its present problems, so it knows what to do, will it have any further use for us?”
“I’ve worked for CC for years!” Finesse snapped.
“Then why didn’t it send someone to rescue you, when you disappeared on this planet? It had to know you were gone; it didn’t need my report for that.”
“That would have tipped off the lobos that I was more than a routine investigator. As you said, CC is a machine. It doesn’t care about individuals. It cares about the job.”
“Precisely. How do we know we won’t all become inconvenient to CC, once our report is done? Our mission would be finished, but we would know an embarrassing amount about CC’s vulnerability. Could that have been what was bothering Mit? The fact that we’re all expendable the moment our mission’s done?”
“How does this relate to the baby?” Finesse demanded.
“Two ways. First, if we take Harlan with us, he will share our fate. Second, if I should find myself slated for disposition, I’d like to be able to make a run for it without being boxed in by high-powered precogs. Harlan could protect me from that.”
“You’re paranoid!”
“Yes. Recent events have sharpened that personality trait.”
“No one else would even think CC could—would—”
“Maybe we should ask.” He addressed Hermine mentally. Should we take Harlan with us to CC? Please answer for yourself and for the other animals.
There was a delay while the weasel surveyed the animals. We are unanimous, she announced. We all want to take Harlan along, and hide him from CC.
“Unanimous!” Knot exclaimed. “You can’t all be so attached to a human baby!”
Now even Mit thinks it is best. Something is wrong, and this confuses the wrongness, and maybe helps put it right.
Finesse, a party to this discussion, relented. “I didn’t really want to ditch Harlan,” she confessed. “But after the promise we made to his mother—”
“We promised to protect the baby,” Knot said. “We still propose to do that, and perhaps protect ourselves as well. We can take him along, but not yield him or knowledge of him to CC. It seems as good a choice as leaving him here on this mutiny-torn planet.”
“Yes,” she agreed, with a certain relieved misgiving.
At last they slept. They knew it would be foolish to go near the spaceport by day; the lobos should have caught on by this time that the party hadn’t perished in the flame of the house, and another assassin squad would be lurking near the spaceport. Maybe, Knot thought with dubious hope, the lobos would give up the watch after noting that no one showed up for that shuttle-lift this afternoon. The lobos could assume that Knot and his party had gotten wiped out in the violence of the night. And it was a nice pretext to avoid making a decision immediately.
Harlan woke several times, loudly, and babies tended to. Each time Klisty got up and tended to him, feeding him, changing his diaper, crooning him back to sleep. She was thrilled to be entrusted with this chore. The girl was definitely an asset. Knot did not know how to tend babies, and Finesse was so tired she never woke at all, despite her prior experience with her own child. Obviously if they had to park Harlan somewhere while they
reported to CC, they would leave him in Klisty’s care.
In the evening, after some discussion, they commenced another quest: for a family of four with pets, departing for the far galaxy. In this effort the hive helped, providing information to its five bee minions. Knot still had not agreed to represent the hive, but he was impressed by the power it had shown, and by the justice in its position. It was indeed a planetary power. It wanted parity for animals, and it preferred to obtain this by negotiation. Knot had a tacit sympathy for both the desire and the method. As with CC before, he was being gradually converted despite his resistance, and knew it, but still had to play out the full skein before making an overt decision.
They located the family. It had died in the ravage of the night, trapped in a collapsing building. The reservations were now open. Mit had only to find a safe way across the city to the spaceport access road. Shorn of his precognition, he was having trouble; a road that was open one moment might be clogged the next, and he lacked the brain to integrate the entire pattern at once. Again the hive assisted; bees were apt at patterns, and there were many bees, and the hive also had access to some precognition beyond Harlan’s interference range. The bees indicated the open route, though they could not foretell whether the party would actually use that route.
“You said you made no deal with the hive,” Finesse muttered darkly. “Why are they helping so much?”
Knot explained his thinking about the tacit progress of his agreement with the hive, “I seem to be vulnerable to that sort of encroachment, as you well know. It also seems the bees feel I may do some good for them anyway, if they help me now, even without any formal agreement. And—I may. They just don’t seem so much like vermin to me, anymore; they seem more like, well—” He fumbled for the appropriate concept.
“Like mutants,” she finished for him. “People in alternate shapes, and people with psi powers. You have a soft heart for that kind.”
“Don’t you?”
She smiled. Her face was clean now, and her nose no longer swollen. “I lost that battle when I met Hermine.”
“I guess psi is the great leveler,” he said.