He awoke five hours later, feeling completely refreshed except for his eyes. They felt hot, burning.
("You may return those disks anytime you wish,") the voice said.
"Lost interest already?" Dalt yawned, stretching as he lay on the bed.
("In a way, yes. I read them while you were asleep.")
"How the hell did you do that?"
("Quite simple, really. While your mind was sleeping, I used your eyes and your hands to read. I digested the information and stored it away in your brain. By the way, there’s an awful lot of wasted space in the human brain. You’re not living up to anywhere near your potential, Steve. Neither is any other member of your race, I gather.")
"What right have you got to pull something like that with my body?" Dalt said angrily. He sat up and rubbed his eyes.
("Our body, you mean.")
Dalt ignored that. "No wonder my eyes are burning! I’ve been reading when I could have been – should have been – sleeping!"
("Don’t get excited. You got your sleep and I built up my vocabulary. You’re fully rested, so what’s your complaint? By the way, I can now tell you how I entered your head. I seeped into your pores and then into your scalp capillaries, which I followed into your parietal emissary veins. These flow through the parietal foramina in your skull and empty into the superior sagittal sinus. From there it was easy to infiltrate your central nervous system.")
Dalt opened his mouth to say that he really didn’t care, when he realized that he understood exactly what the voice was saying. He had a clear picture of the described path floating through his mind.
"How come I know what you’re talking about? I seem to understand but I don’t remember ever hearing those terms before… and then again, I do. It’s weird." ("It must seem rather odd,") the voice concurred. ("What has happened is that I’ve made my new knowledge available to you. The result is you experience the fruits of the learning process without having gone through it. You know facts without remembering having learned them.")
"Well," Dalt said, rising to his feet, "at least you’re not a complete parasite."
("I resent that! We’re partners… a symbiosis!")
"I suppose you may come in handy now and then." Dalt sighed.
("I already have.")
"What’s that supposed to mean?"
("I found a small neoplasm in your lung – middle lobe on the right. It might well have become malignant.")
"Then let’s get back to the doc before it metastatizes!" Dalt said, and idly realized that a few hours ago he would have been worrying about "spread" rather than "metastasis."
("There’s no need to worry, Steve. I killed it off.")
"How’d you do that?"
("I just worked through your vascular system and selectively cut off the blood supply to that particular group of cells."
"Well, thanks, Partner."
("No thanks necessary, I assure you. I did it for my own good as well as yours – I don’t relish the idea of walking around in a cancer-riddled body any more than you do!")
Dalt removed his serf clothing in silence. The enormity of what had happened in that cave on Kwashi struck him now with full force. He had a built-in medical watchdog who would keep everything running smoothly. He smiled grimly as he donned ship clothes and suspended from his neck the glowing prismatic gem that he had first worn as Racso and had continued to wear after his cultural-survey assignment on Kwashi had been terminated. He’d have his health but he’d lost his privacy forever. He wondered if it was worth it.
("One other thing, Steve,") said the voice. ("I’ve accelerated the growth of your hair in the bald spot to maximum.")
Dalt put up a hand and felt a thick fuzz where before there had been only bare scalp. "Hey! You’re right! It’s really coming in!" He went to the mirror to take a look.
"Oh, no!"
("Sorry about that, Steve. I couldn’t see it so I wasn’t aware there had been a color change. I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do about that.")
Dalt stared in dismay at the patch of silvery gray in the center of his otherwise inky hair. "I look like a freak!"
("You can always dye it.")
Dalt made a disgusted noise.
("I have a few questions, Steve,") the voice said in a hasty attempt to change the subject.
"What about?"
("About why you’re going down to that planet tomorrow.")
"I’m going because I was once a member of the Federation cultural-survey team on Kwashi and because the Star Ways Corporation lost an experimental pilot brain down there. They got permission from the Federation to retrieve the brain only on the condition that a cultural-survey man does the actual retrieving."
("That’s not what I meant. I want to know what’s so important about the brain, just how much of a brain it actually is, and so on.")
"There’s an easy way to find out," Dalt said, heading for the door. "We’ll just go to the ship’s library."
The library was near the hub of the ship. Dalt closed himself away in one of the tiny viewer booths and pushed his ID card into the awaiting slot. The flat, dull tones of the computer’s voice came from a hidden speaker.
"What do you wish, Mr. Dalt?"
"I might as well go the route: Let me see everything on the brain project."
Four microdisks slid down a tiny chute and landed in the receptacle in front of Dalt.
"I’m sorry, Mr. Dalt," said the computer, "but this is all your present status allows you to see."
("That should be enough, Steve. Feed them into the viewer.")
The story that unraveled from the disks was one of biologic and economic daring. Star Ways was fast achieving what amounted to a monopoly of the interstellar warp-unit market and from there was expanding to peristellar drive. But unlike the typical established corporation, SW was pouring money into basic research. One of the prime areas of research was the development of a use for cultured human neural tissue. And James Barre had found a use that held great economic potential.
The prime expense of interstellar commercial travel, whether freight or passenger, was the crew. Good spacers were a select lot and hard to come by; running a ship took a lot of them. There had been many attempts to replace crews with computers but these had invariably failed. Barre’s development of an "artificial" brain – by that he meant structured in vitro – seemed to hold an answer, at least for cargo ships.
After much trial and error with life-support systems and control linkages, a working prototype had finally been developed. A few short hops had been tried with a full crew standing by, and the results had been more than anyone had hoped for. So the prototype was prepared for a long interstellar journey with five scheduled stops – with cargo holds empty, of course. The run had gone quite well until the ship got into the Kwashi area. A single technician had been sent along to insure that nothing went too far awry, and, according to his story, he was sitting in his quarters when the ship suddenly came out of warp with the emergency/abandon ship signals blaring. He wasted no time in getting to a lifeboat and ejecting. The ship made a beeline for Kwashi and disappeared, presumably in a crash. That had been eight months ago. No more information was available without special clearance.
"Well, that was a waste of time," Dalt said.
"Are you addressing me, Mr. Dalt?" the computer asked.
"No."
("There certainly wasn’t much new information there,") the voice agreed.
Dalt pulled his card from the slot, thereby cutting the computer off from this particular viewer booth, before answering. Otherwise it would keep butting in.
"The theories now stand at either malfunction or foul play."
("Why foul play?")
"The spacers’ guild, for one," Dalt said, standing. "Competing companies, for another. But since it crashed on a restricted splinter world, I favor the malfunction theory." As he stepped from the booth he glanced at the chronometer on the wall: 1900 hours ship-time. Jean would be waiting.
br /> THE CAFETERIA WAS NEARLY DESERTED when he arrived with Jean and the pair found an isolated table in a far corner.
"I really don’t think you should dye your hair at all," Jean was saying as they placed their trays on the table and sat down. "I think that gray patch looks cute in a distinguished sort of way… or do I mean distinguished in a cute sort of way?"
Dalt took the ribbing in good-natured silence.
"Steve," she said suddenly. "How come you’re eating with your left hand? I’ve never seen you do that before."
Dalt looked down. His fork was firmly grasped in his left hand. "That’s strange. I didn’t even realize it."
("I integrated a few circuits, so to speak, while you were asleep,") the voice said. ("It seemed rather ridiculous to favor one limb over another. You’re now ambidextrous.")
Thanks for telling me, Partner!
("Sorry. I forgot.")
Dalt switched the fork to his right hand and Jean switched the topic of conversation.
"You know, Steve, you’ve never told me why you quit the cultural-survey group."
Dalt paused before answering. After the fall of Metep VII, last in a long line of self-styled "Emperors of the Outworlds," a new independent spirit gave rise to a loose organization of worlds called simply the Federation.
"As you know," he said finally, "the Federation has a long-range plan of bringing splinter worlds – willing ones, that is – back into the fold. But it was found that an appalling number had regressed into barbarism. So the cultural surveys were started to evaluate splinter worlds and decide which could be trusted with modern technology. There was another rule which I didn’t fully appreciate back then but have come to believe in since, and that’s where the trouble began."
"What rule was that?"
"It’s not put down anywhere in so many words, but it runs to the effect that if any splinter-world culture has started developing on a path at variance with the rest of humanity, it is to be left alone."
"Sounds like they were making cultural test tubes out of some planets."
"Exactly what I thought, but it never bothered me until I surveyed a planet that must, for now, remain nameless. The inhabitants had been developing a psi culture through selective breeding and were actually developing a tangential society. But they were being threatened by the non-psi majority. I pleaded for protective intervention and early admission to the Fed."
"And were turned down, I’ll bet."
"Right. And I might have gone along if I hadn’t become emotionally involved with the psis. That was the first rule I broke. Then I found myself in the middle of a crisis situation that pushed me over the edge. I took decisive action on my own, then resigned."
"Before you were fired."
"Right again, I broke half a book’s worth of rules on that planet. But I can see the Fed’s reasoning now. They knew the psi culture wasn’t mature enough to withstand exposure to interstellar civilization. They were afraid it would be swallowed up and lose its unique qualities. They wanted to give it another few centuries in isolation before opening it up. And they were right in theory. But they weren’t on that planet. I was. And I knew if things kept on the way they were going, the psi-folk would be wiped out in less than a generation. So I… did something to make sure that didn’t happen."
"No hard feelings, then."
"Not on my part. I’ve come to see that there’s a very basic, very definite philosophy behind everything the Federation does. It not only wants to preserve human diversity, it wants to see it stretched to the limit. Man was an almost completely homogenized species before he began colonizing the stars; interstellar travel arrived just in time. Old Earth is still a good example of what I mean; long ago the Eastern and Western Alliances fused – something no one ever thought would happen – and Earth is just one big faceless, self-perpetuating bureaucracy. The populace is equally faceless.
"But the man who left for the stars – he’s another creature altogether. Once he got away from the press of other people, once he stopped seeing what everybody else saw, hearing what everybody else heard, he began to become an individual again and to strike out in directions of his own choosing. The splinter groups carried this out to an extreme and many failed. But a few survived and the Federation wants to let the successful ones go as far as they can, both for their own sake and for the sake of all mankind. Who knows? Homo superior may one day be born on a splinter world."
They took their time strolling back to Dalt’s quarters. Once inside, Dalt glanced in the mirror and ran his hand through the gray patch in his hair. "It’s still there," he muttered in mock disappointment.
He turned back to Jean and she was already more than half undressed.
"You weren’t gone all that long, Steve," she said in a low voice, "but I missed you – really missed you."
It was mutual.
III
SHE WAS GONE WHEN he awakened the next morning but a little note on the night table wished him good luck.
("You should have prepared me for such a sensory jolt,") said the voice. ("I was taken quite by surprise last night.")
"Oh, it’s you again." Dalt groaned. "I pushed you completely out of my mind last night, otherwise I’d have been impotent, no doubt."
("I hooked into your sensory input – very stimulating.")
Dalt experienced helpless annoyance. He would have to get used to his partner’s presence at the most intimate moments, but how many people could make love knowing that there’s a peeping tom at the window with a completely unobstructed view?
("What are we going to do now?")
"Pard," Dalt drawled, "we’re gonna git ready to go below." He went to the closet and pulled down from it a worn leather jerkin and a breastplate marked with an empty red circle, the mark of the mercenary. Stiff leather breeches followed and broadsword and metal helm completed the picture. He then dyed his hair for Racso’s sake.
"One more thing," he said, and reached up to the far end of the closet shelf. His hand returned clutching an ornate dagger. "This is something new in Racso’s armament."
("A dagger?")
"Not just a dagger. It’s–”
("Oh, yes. It’s also a blaster.")
"How did you know?"
("We’re partners, Steve. What you know, I know. I even know why you had it made.")
"I’m listening."
("Because you’re afraid you’re not as fast as you used to be. You think your muscles may not have quite the tone they used to have when you first posed as Racso. And you’re not willing to die looking for an artificial brain.")
"You seem to think you know me pretty well."
("I do. Skin to skin, birth to now. You’re the only son of a fairly well-to-do couple on Friendly, had an average childhood and an undistinguished academic career – but you passed the empathy test with high marks and were accepted into the Federation cultural-survey service. You don’t speak to your parents anymore. They’ve never forgiven their baby for running off to go hopping from splinter world to splinter world. You cut yourself off from your homeworld but made friends in CS; now you’re cut off from CS. You’re not a loner by nature but you’ve adapted. In fact, you have a tremendous capacity to adapt as long as your own personal code of ethics and honor isn’t violated – you’re very strict about that.")
Dalt sighed. "No secrets anymore, I guess."
("Not from me, at least.")
DALT PLANNED THE TIME of his arrival in Bendelema Duchy for predawn. He concealed the shuttle and was on the road as the sky began to lighten. Walking with a light saddle slung over his shoulder, he marveled at the full ripe fields of grains and greens on either side of him. Agriculture had always been a hit-or-miss affair on Kwashi and famines were not uncommon, but it looked as if there would be no famine in Bendelema this year. Even the serfs looked well fed.
"What do you think, Pard?" Dalt asked.
"Well, Kwashi hasn’t got much of a tilt on its axis. They seem to be on their way to the second b
umper crop of the year.")
"With the available farming methods, that’s unheard of… I almost starved here once myself."
("I know that, but I have no explanation for these plump serfs.")
The road made a turn around a small wooded area and the Bendelema keep came into view.
"I see their architecture hasn’t improved since I left. The keep still looks like a pile of rocks."
("I wonder why so many retrograde splinter worlds turn to feudalism?") Pard said as they approached the stone structure.
"There are only theories. Could be that feudalism is, in essence, the law of the jungle. When these colonists first land, education of the children has to take a back seat to putting food on the table. That’s their first mistake and a tragic one, because once they let technology slide, they’re on a downhill spiral. Usually by the third generation you have a pretty low technological level; the stops are out, the equalizers are gone, and the toughs take over.
"The philosophy of feudalism is one of muscle: Mine is what I can take and hold. It’s ordered barbarism. That’s why feudal worlds such as Kwashi have to be kept out of the Federation – can you imagine a bunch of these yahoos in command of an interstellar dreadnaught? No one’s got the time or the money to reeducate them, so they just have to be left alone to work out their own little industrial revolution and so forth. When they’re ready, the Fed will give them the option of joining up."
"Ho, mercenary!" someone hailed from the keep gate. "What do you seek in Bendelema?"
"Have I changed that much, Farri?" Dalt answered.
The guard peered at him intensely from the wall, then his face brightened. "Racso! Enter and be welcome! The Duke has need of men of your mettle."
Farri, a swarthy trooper who had gained a few pounds and a few scars since their last meeting, greeted him as he passed through the open gate.
"Where’s your mount, Racso?" He grinned. "You were never one to walk when you could ride."