I frowned. “Radical Anxiety Termination … Does that have anything to do with his name, Rat …? An acronym of some sort?”
“‘The Universe is overdetermined,’” Japril quoted. “About seventy-five years ago on Rhyonon, an ideographic writing system was instituted worldwide, in an attempt to clear up the confusion of some five alphabetic systems and syllabaries that had come with the various colonial groups. Since then, all official business had been conducted in ideographics. But such slang and many old terms are best explained by one of the older scripts. The second most common language of Rhyonon as well as its seventy-five-years-now discarded alphabet are closely related to the interlingua you grew up with—though I doubt whether Rat Korga would understand the explanation.”
“I’m not truly sure I do either. Go on, Japril.”
“When doctors think they’ve eradicated a disease, they stop looking for it. So if the disease itself suddenly shows up again, they may not even recognize it; they may even mistake it for an entirely new one. We were lucky to have diagnosed the synapse-jamming for what it was as quickly as we did—since on Rhyonon it was not even considered pathological. But the location of the proper antidote, in such cases, can be even more difficult than diagnosis.”
“Why does the Web consider the situation pathological, Japril?”
“You must remember—” Japril was smiling again—“Rhyonon had no General Information system. It’s precisely those ‘anxiety’ channels which Radical Anxiety Termination blocks that GI uses both to process into the brain the supportive contextual information in the preconscious that allows you to make a conscious call for anything more complex than names, dates, verbatim texts, and multiplication tables; and it also uses them to erase an information program in such a way that you can still remember the parts of it you’ve actually used consciously.”
“What you’re saying is that Rat Korga can never get all those little neurological transmitters wired into the crevices of the top five vertebrae that will hook into whatever local GI system happens to be around.” I frowned. “Coming from a completely destroyed culture into something as complex as the Web, not to mention other worlds, and without the help of GI—that could be hard.”
“Even harder when you consider that Korga began with what you and I would call a hopelessly impoverished information battery. The thing anyone dealing with Rat Korga must remember—and ‘Rat’ you understand is … was a kind of title, and, on Rat’s own world, a pejorative title at that—is that this woman was a hugely informatively deprived individual from a generally informatively deprived world. That much was clear however we mapped the synaptic deployment. As Korga bobbed quietly in healthful juices and restorative fluids, we came to watch at, and lean against, and look through, with our palms up beside our cheeks, the slanted viewing windows—their lower sashes sloughed with froth and squamous scum.
“We had discovered the problem in three days—No, just let me go on. I don’t even want to tell you how long it took to discover the answer.”
I dared: “What was it?”
“Ynn found it—and by an accident that, as I remember now, seems no more probable than the one by which we discovered Korga himself. You and Ynn share an enthusiasm, Marq.”
“We do?”
“I mean the period some two-hundred-odd standard years ago at the height of the Family’s power and the reign of Vondramach Okk over the seventeen worlds.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call it enthusiasm,” I said. “There are some traditions among the Dyeths, yes, about the time when all that was going on. And I like her poems. But for me personally, the period’s hardly something I could even call an interest,” which is not quite accurate either. There is Dyethshome.
“Well,” Japril said, “back when you and I were more friendly than of late, you mentioned it to me enough times so that when Ynn came up with this I thought of you.”
“What exactly was it?”
“For Ynn, this period is an enthusiasm, a passion, an obsession—as, indeed, is everything connected with the life of Vondramach. Relaxing one evening in her living room, it occurred to her to run an exhaustive GI crosscheck between all the information currently at hand on Rat and all the documentation on her personal hobby, Vondramach. All she was looking for, she told us later, was metaphorical similarities that might provide an amusing hour’s musings. She sat down on her hammock, thought over the access numbers, replayed the code, lay back, and let GI do its work. Then—there it was in her mind: the access numbers to a loosely documented historical program on Okk’s youth that she had never run into before. Even for an expert, of course, there’d be thousands of those—”
“Japril,” I said, “I’ve spent all my life on worlds with extensive GI systems.”
She suddenly shook her head. “Really—you must forgive me. I’m beginning to wonder if I haven’t been closeted with Korga just a little too long. One gets into the habit with Rat of explaining everything. Anyway, there it was, beeping like mad and demanding a referential check. Later Ynn said she had been familiar with a number of loosely documented accounts of Vondramach’s youth referring to the early experiments with mind-distorting and dilating drugs, neural-tampering machines, and medical-based consciousness-bending techniques. What she hadn’t known was that before the age of twenty-three Okk had indulged in enough such to kill permanently anyone with less access to such an extreme restorative medical technology as Vondramach had available. Through self-mutilation and other fun things she’d had to replace most of her vascular, muscular, and skeletal systems, as well as a good deal of neural matter, several times over. And when the synapse-jamming techniques we’re talking about, spreading from the seventy-eighth sector, first reached Vondramach’s attention, she was fascinated by its possibilities. Even then—especially back then—it was billed as a permanent change. But things like that didn’t bother her. One morning she went in and had her brain jammed. Predictably, after a few days, she decided she didn’t like it. And there were already other things she wanted to inflict on herself. But the jamming takes place within synapses set fairly deep in the brain, kept open or closed by setting up a small, naturally self-reinforcing feedback loop that is at once extremely delicate and extremely tenacious. It can be started by the merest brush of a finely modulated gamma-ray laser over the proper chemical gradient in the myelin sheathing of the nerves adjacent to one of the cerebral pelvises. The only way to stop it, however, is to surgically excise the neural material, or to short it out totally—the side effects of which are not only unpleasant but frequently fatal. And the most disconcerting of the side effects is that the whole pattern, if it is erased in one part of the brain, tends to be remembered by the rest and—assuming you survive excision or shortout—usually reestablishes itself somewhere else almost immediately.”
“It’s one of those …?”
Japril nodded. “You don’t know that much about neural cartography, Marq.” She smiled. “And you know that the one thing we know is just how much you know about practically anything. Anyway, Vondramach Okk, unlike Korga, who only had what Marta, Ynn, and I could ferret out of GI to help, was directly in touch, even by then, with the complete medical resources of eight high-technology worlds—five of which, even at that point in her career, she officially owned. That technology had already generated the beginnings of what was to become GI’s direct neural access system. Vondramach gave an order: ‘Fix this mess, and fast …!’ or an order that boiled down to the same thing. It was the kind she had given many times before. According to this particular loosely documented report, she got what she wanted.
“We’ve borrowed it.”
“What did it turn out to be, Japril?”
SIX
Rescue Concluded
1.
“FINDING IT BEGAN WITH a reference number to a sealed storage chamber in the uninventoried sections of wing seven of the Okk Museum on Tartouhm.” (I once spent a week in a vaurine projection of one of the Okk Museum’s twenty-nine wings?
??the one where they put the Louvre, the Palazzo Vecchio, and the Vatican Library collections that Vondramach had exported, building at a time, to the wing’s lower rotunda, from the ruins of Old Eyrth during the first days of the Seventh K’Tong. [And where they’d come from before that is anyone’s guess.] A momentary memory of those six hours a day touring, absorbing the most minor fragments of the age my great-grands used to gossip about.) “We opened it up,” Japril said, “and looked inside.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Physically?”
“We sent a message to open it, had the contents described minutely, and the description and vaurines sent back. You know Vondramach Okk: when she ordered something done, she didn’t just have it done once. When she needed a prosthesis—and throughout her life, what with assassination attempts, not to mention some of her own more bizarre pastimes, she went through quite a number—she usually had between fifty and a few hundred made up, each slightly different, from among which she took her pick.” (We’ve mentioned several times how big a world is? Now imagine owning some.) “What was inside that neglected vault? A set of ornate finger rings, several hundred of them, ranging from a dozen that were small enough to fit a three-year-old child to another dozen big as bracelets for that same child.”
“What did they turn out to be?”
Japril’s left hand danced on what might have been a piece of jewelry, the key to—or the catalogue of—her personal wardrobe, or the next month’s orders for her and the spiders in her nest. “They were hard-circuitry replacements, of an astonishingly sophisticated kind given the year they were constructed, to counterfeit the usual operations of the jammed neurons. They feed the results directly back into the nervous system, but with large informative nets added in. The rings get their ‘information’ into the brain by using the sheathing impedance of the whole neural web as its general neural receptor.”
“Could you use them on Rat?”
“We wondered about that a lot. Unlike our Korga, Vondramach Okk was not, for all her failings, an informatively deprived sociopath. If anything, she was a hopelessly privileged psychopath—and by almost any account a genius. The two shared few or no deep free-afferent synaptic configurations. The rings, however, were not constructed with the individualized synapse tailoring we use today to hook the neural receivers and transmitters into children to connect them with GI, or to allow them to use mentally activatable equipment. Instead, they bombard the more complex neural webs with blanket information matrices at every free entrance point.”
“Was the technology available to recreate them for you?”
“Once we figured out what they were—with the help of the little booklet stashed down in the case—we had a set of them from among those that were the proper size shipped out.”
“The rings Vondramach wore?”
“That Vondramach wore some of, some of the time, from among some of those that would fit her. Whether she wore them permanently, or whether some more refined neurological compensation was eventually developed for her is just one of those things about her that isn’t documented.”
“I gather there were times she could get passionate about privacy. Every once in a while, so the Dyeth tradition has it, she’d destroy quite at random great portions of the records that accumulated about her—”
“—and still managed, at least for most of her adult life, to be the most documented human being in the universe.” Suddenly Japril laughed again. “But the thing you can be sure of in this day and age is that no one is the ‘most’ of anything; just the ‘most’ you happen to know about. Marq, we had the rings imported—”
“This survivor, Korga, is very important to the Web … Who was the ID on the import job, by the bye?”
“No one you’re related to, or who would be likely to let you pump them about the matter.”
“Perish the thought!”
Japril let several odd and unsettling expressions flow along her long, handsome face. “We’ve already talked of the ‘fuzziness’ about the concept of a world-survivor. But there is a simple second-rate truth that you’ve probably suspected, if not known, all along.” She settled on one with the corners of her mouth way down. “Whether the phenomenon is fuzzy or not, a growing number of people, despite all the Web has tried to do to prevent it, consider Rat Korga the single survivor of a totally depopulated world.”
“Backtrack a little, Japril.” I admit it. Vondramach had pricked my curiosity. “What sorts of information were in those rings?”
“Very basic stuff.” The corners of Japril’s mouth went back up. “Remarkably close to a first-order GI series, actually: mathematical tables, general vocabulary accretion lattices, metonymic multipliers, some spatial and temporal prompters, temporary term retainers, and mnemonic nudges—the sort of aids that would make anyone seem brighter, without necessarily influencing their basic opinions about anything.”
“‘Nothing to influence opinion,’” I quoted an early critic of the GI system, “‘and everything to alter belief.’ Were there any data reverse-retrieval systems?”
“Quite a lot.” (Those are the subconscious systems by which you decide whether other people possess a context for understanding what you want to say or not, and, if not, for adding appropriate contextual material to your own communication. Another name for it is—you guessed it—diplomacy.) “Data reverse-retrieval seems to have been one of Vondramach’s prime concerns, if one can go by the rings’ contained programs.”
“I’m not really surprised. So … these are the things that are erased from the normal brain by the synapse-jamming process?”
An even stranger expression took over Japril’s face. “These are among the things thought to be able to compensate for some of the jamming effects—back in Vondramach’s era.” The gold bar, with its two black knobs, suddenly went into a side pocket of Japril’s vest. I actually felt a regretful hitch that now I’d probably never find out what it was. “When we were checking out accounts of the synapse-jamming in the first place, we found that a number of people had advanced the theory that the jamming produced, by artificial means, the neurological state achieved naturally by certain saints, mystics, and holy women. Presumably, they would go through alternate intellectual and spiritual disciplines to get there that would perhaps produce slightly different results—at any rate, the saintly bit was the part, of course, that interested Vondramach.”
“Thanks to her Family connections, I know there were people who considered her a religious leader. But I don’t think anyone would call Vondramach a saint,” I said, “even for three days—or however long she was jammed. After you got the rings, what happened when you revived Korga again?”
“We emptied our survivor out of the slopping coffin …” The frown on Japril’s face was suddenly readable distress. “Korga stood among the supports, not holding any of them, green eyes wide. Marta walked up, took the wet wrist, and slipped one, another, and then another of the rings on one and another great finger.” Japril joined her empty hands—which was what she used to do frequently when someone from the north of my world would simply sigh. “They fit.
“It was only a blink. Marta started at it; and the head turned a fraction to see her.”
“Ynn stood among the support loops, holding Korga’s fingers, still wet with our juices, bound now with metal, like something alive … I described those great, rough hands, later, at least five times as ‘like something alive’ before Marta said to me: ‘But Japril, Korga’s hands are,’ and I had to paw over my memories of the waking to find what made me react as though they were not.
“‘Who are you?’ Ynn asked.
“The lips met, parted, halted.
“‘Rat … Korga,’ Ynn said with an inflection that questioned as much as it stated.
“‘Rat Korga …’ The repetition, in the deeper, balder, flatter voice, somehow reversed the weights of stated and questioning emphases within the single name.
“‘What are you feeling, Rat Korga?’ Marta asked from where she s
tood by aluminum and plastic struts.
“Korga turned his head to look about our strange machines (Why were most of them enameled green or yellow?), at our walls (Who decided they should be blue?), out our windows (What was the use of windows in such a moonscape?). Where those alien eyes that we had loaned now looked, we interrogated everything. The eyes turned to Maria’s, to Ynn’s, to mine. ‘I feel … more fear than I’ve felt for … many years. What do you want? Why have you brought me here?’ Korga was a terribly strong male; and the hours of our ministrations had no doubt left her body stronger. But both our native logic and borrowed expertise said that strength should have been awkward in its newness. Korga seemed so easy with that awkwardness.
“Korga looked at me; and, while I tried to untangle the survivor’s unspoken questions from mine, Ynn, on the stand, said suddenly:
“‘Your world, Rat. It’s gone.’
“Korga looked down where Ynn pressed those big fingers, heavy with new knowledge.
“Ynn stepped back, her own hands wet with what had healed.
“‘What … world …’ Korga asked in a voice whose hoarse accents already spoke to us of old wounds in that throat we hadn’t even noticed. ‘My … world …’
“And suddenly, looking at Rat—tall, naked save a handful of rings—we felt cluttered with our own accoutrements: silver suits, bright insignias, recorders, calculators, reading machines hanging at belts and wrists.
“‘Your relatives. They’re all dead.’
“Rat said, still looking down: I never had any relatives.’
“‘Your friends. They’re dead too. All of them.’
“Rat made the diagonal movement of the head up, that we had learned, in Rhyonon’s second most common language, indicated negation. ‘I don’t have any friends.’