Читать книгу Triad - Sheila Finch - Страница 8

CHAPTER THREE

Torchlight flickered fitfully...tall houses threatened...the dark street tunneled. He ran endlessly...the houses leaning over...arriving nowhere, fear gnawing at his innards. A door opened...light knifed out across the darkness...the houses vanished. A line of women advanced on him...arms swung in unison...faces gleamed under oiled skulls. He was arguing now, but darkness devoured his words. Still the women advanced. He knew they would march across his body and leave him dying. He screamed.

And broke out of the dream.

Zion Marit sat up, soaked with sweat, his heart still pounding. He groped for the controls that operated the light in his cabin and succeeded in knocking a small pad off the table beside his bunk.

“Is something troubling you, Civilian Marit?”

“No, HANA. Just a bad dream.” Like a mother, he thought, responding to her child’s cry in the night. That wasn’t so farfetched, given this type of biocomputer.

“Have you had it before?”

“Yes.”

“Do you wish to talk about it?”

“I’ll write it up.”

The small green light on the unobtrusive panel above the table glowed at him, and he absorbed its mute reassurance. Nothing could be too terrible while the computer was keeping watch over them. He lifted the stopper from the water jug and poured into the beaker. It was a little after midnight. He’d spent the evening in Lil’s cabin, both of them indulging in some much-needed mood improvement—though the accident that injured her hip had put a temporary crimp in Lil’s style. He must have tumbled straight into this nightmare the minute he lay down to sleep. The cold liquid chased the lingering mood of the dream out of his head. Wide awake now, he swung his feet over the edge of his bed.

“Would you like me to help you unravel your dream?”

He smiled. “I like your imagery. But there’s nothing particularly complicated to unravel. I can deal with it myself.”

“As you wish,” HANA said.

What happened to Lil had to have been an accident, of course. Both he and the LangSpec had had a lot of physical contact with the Ents yesterday, and there’d been no suspicion of violence. But Madel—the kind of MedSpec who always followed the rules, he could tell—had insisted on a day’s delay before they went down again. She and Lil would be running behavioral analyses with HANA. He’d fretted at the delay, but Madel hadn’t listened to him. “There’s no hurry, anyway,” Lil told him. “We’ve got lots of time.” The LangSpec indicated she’d be glad to use the day going over her data with HANA.

He was the one obsessed with time now.

He retrieved the pad from the floor and opened it up. HANA probably disapproved of such antiquated activity as writing when it could have provided him with the same service much faster and with less effort. Yet for him, the act of taking stylus in hand and forming symbols on a page was far more intimate an activity than dictating to a notebox or a computer. Slow as it was, he found it freeing, allowing him the leisure to explore emotions he’d otherwise manage to keep hidden from himself. That was the way he thought—with his hands, making the abstract concrete. Art for him was a way of exploring his own mind.

Besides, this time he didn’t want to let HANA see what he was writing until he’d finished encoding it.

He wrote carefully in a neat script that differed from print only by the slant and final curve he gave to the letters, exploring the origins of the dream in a letter to other young men back on Earth. He would never know if it was received, or if it was, if it made any difference. But he had to write.

He’d been quite young when he’d first realized the world was made up of two kinds of citizens: those who knew themselves to be superior and necessary, and the second kind who were merely tolerated. Later he noticed the difference was anatomical. But it hadn’t seemed too much of a tragedy until much later still, when he’d become aware that some of the members of the first group planned to eliminate the second group altogether.

The first time he’d seen clones he’d been fascinated by the mirror images they presented. Did they think alike? Dream alike? If they were to paint or sculpt, would the work of one resemble that of the others the way their expressions echoed each other? After a while, he realized that the clone groups were always females. But he’d been on the verge of adulthood before he understood that in their existence was the denial of the need for his.

His memories flowed steadily in the idiosyncratic code he’d devised ahead of time, to be translated by a few trusted lieutenants. If he could have spent his life at the art school in Cuzco, where CenCom had sent him when he was twelve, he would have been content. His days would have been filled giving life to the visions that spun endlessly in his imagination. In the thin air of that high city, surrounded by ghosts of lost civilizations, he would have pursued his art and taught others in a quiet peace that might have lasted until he was old and white-haired like his teachers. Time had been his to play with, and it had been endless. But the coming of the clones disrupted his world. He’d left the mountains to find the answer to the question they posed: if there was no need for his existence, then what was its meaning?

He set the stylus down and gazed about him. Smooth, gently curving walls met his gaze, practical surfaces, functional hatches where he’d stowed the few possessions he’d had time to bring with him, sterile colors. Everything spoke of economy and efficiency; function led esthetics in starship design. His fingers itched to rearrange, repaint.

“Do you need something, Civilian Marit?”

“No.”

He could see how this constant concern for his welfare could soon become annoying. He didn’t want to know how they built biocomputers, but something suggested HANA’s brain was female.

He picked up the stylus and continued. The topic needed reinterpretation. And the group of young men in the cell he’d recruited would benefit from his insight.

“Civilian Marit,” HANA said severely, “you need a sleep period in order to function effectively.”

He paid no attention. Once he’d realized what was happening, he’d moved to oppose it. In Cuzco there’d been others who shared his beliefs, some male, some female, people who worried about the danger of a computer-planned humanity. A tall girl with long blond braids had recruited him, reaffirming in the high, sweet darkness under the spinning stars that nature had been right after all.

Her name was Kari, and he’d never see her again. At the thought, the old anger churned in him.

“Civilian Marit, I really must insist....”

He could, if he wanted to, use memory-stim to recapture the scene with Kari in full detail. He could attach the tiny electrode to his scalp, and HANA would do the rest. All the poignancy and pain would be his to taste again and again—

He didn’t want to.

Afterward, he’d begun to speak out. No one listened at first. Then as time went on the wrong ones listened. The first time he’d been the recipient of violence, he was convinced it was an accident. One of the advantages of belonging to a powerless minority was being indulged in outrageous behavior; men weren’t expected to make sense. But the next time, a young girl had thrown stones.

A knock sounded at his door, but he barely noticed. Scenes of the past engulfed him—there but not there, like a holographic tableau into which he’d blundered. His life had been in danger. And then, at the moment when he’d faced the most serious threat to his safety, at a rally in Nairobi that got out of hand, he’d been seized by CenCom’s security forces and whisked away into custody.

“Would you prefer me to open your door?” HANA asked.

“What?” he said. “Oh. No, I’ll....”

He was certain CenCom intended to jail him. Instead, it lectured him on the importance of the artifacts to be found on a strange planet in some backwater arm of the galaxy, and loaded him unceremoniously onto the freighter Ann Bonny just as she was about to lift off. Did it realize it had saved his life.

And if it did, why?

The knocking resumed, so insistent this time he couldn’t ignore it.

“Come in.”

The door slid open and he saw the pale complexion and almost colorless hair of Shelly Matiz in the opening. She glanced cautiously around first, as if searching for hidden occupants; her stocky figure was stiff and tense. The door closed behind her. He waited curiously for her to reveal what was so important she had to come in person.

“Marit.”

He acknowledged with a slight inclination of his head. Something about Shelly was familiar. He’d thought it as soon as he’d met her after boarding. But everyone except a small, necessary crew had gone into cold sleep and there hadn’t been time to pursue the thought any further.

“You going down again, when Madel gives the okay?”

“Yes, Yeo Matiz. That’s my plan.”

Her body betrayed her tension in a series of almost imperceptible jerkings and twitchings. They were all tense right now. Riding so close to that alien ruin was unsettling, and Shelly was no more immune than he to its psychic effect. Nevertheless, he watched her cautiously. Something about her face haunted him.

“Is there something you wanted to have me do for you?”

“Your kind can’t do anything for me, Stud!”

The reply was contemptuous, yet it wasn’t unusual and he’d heard worse in the past. A memory surfaced suddenly. He had indeed seen Shelly Matiz before he’d been sent to the Ann Bonny.

“Know who you are, Marit,” she said. “Know all about you and your activities. Don’t know how you managed to get CenCom to assign you to us. But I recognized you at once.”

She’d been a face in the crowd at that last rally. He’d noticed her because of the blue Commerce Fleet uniform, a rarity anywhere too far from Homeport where the ships landed. He waited, aware of the all-seeing and all-hearing presence of HANA, and suddenly glad for it.

“Came to warn you,” Shelly said. “You probably feel safe. But CenCom can’t protect you on that planet down there.”

“I have no wish to offend anyone, Yeo Matiz,” he said carefully. “If my actions so far—”

“Your actions are disgusting!” The bone-white features were crisscrossed with a thin, angry network of red.

“I don’t know what—”

“Don’t think I haven’t seen the way you talk to Dori. Don’t think I haven’t noticed the way you lean toward her all the time. Think it’s all right out here to flaunt your body, don’t you, Stud?”

He watched her cautiously, saying nothing, aware that anything he said might upset her precarious control. When he was ready to fight, he’d pick a better time and place than this.

“Stay away from Dori, Stud. Or I’ll make you pay for it.”

Abruptly, she turned and strode out of the cabin, the door barely having time to open for her. He stared after her. He’d met Shelly’s type before, the extremists who would’ve been happy to stick the knife in men wherever they encountered them. But he hadn’t expected problems with them out here, where the darkness of space between the stars seemed to obliterate petty quarrels. Only this was no petty quarrel to them. Women like Shelly placed the sanctity of a male life somewhere below their concern for the caterpillar that crawled across their path.

The irony was that there was nothing about Dori Tsing’s glacial hardness that he found even momentarily interesting. Shelly apparently didn’t share that evaluation.

Her visit only served to underline the urgency of his letter. He picked up the stylus again.

Five hundred years ago, two things had happened. A new generation of high-speed supercomputers were developed, as much like what went before as Homo sapiens resembled Australopithecus. And a small Swiss drug company had developed a reliable spermicide that was XY specific.

Pioneering women began to refuse to bear male children. The computers supported this aim because it was logical; males weren’t needed in the same numbers as females. The male birthrate declined. The social custom of marriage broke down—it had been waning in any case, at the end of the twentieth century. Computerized technology meant more women could work at home and keep an eye on their daughters at the same time; crèches helped those who didn’t. Women, with the aid of the computers, took control.

Not that males had given up their power without a struggle. A number of bloody male/female battles scarred the record, and even a couple of limited nuclear attacks that had the effect of seriously weakening the influence of the superpowers and isolating population groups in some parts of Africa and the American Southwest. But on the whole, the transition had been peaceful. Perhaps, as one of his teachers suggested, men had tired of the roles of provider and protector after so many centuries. There were certainly advantages to being a sought-after minority.

He smiled, thinking of other, more immediate advantages he’d personally exploited. I should’ve been born in an earlier century. Maybe the nineteenth, both the last bastion of male supremacy in Europe, and a time when he could have enjoyed playing the “romantic artist” role. Now that would have been living.

Luckily he’d been born in this one. He knew himself only too well. How would he ever have settled down to work if he’d been free to follow the siren song of the hormones in his youth? Just as well the women had gained power.

The biggest difference this made, so the history cubes instructed, was that female-dominated governments rejected absolute answers and became more deeply committed to compromise than ever before. Male input was considered interesting, but too simplistic and polarized to be very useful.

Then CenCom came into being, a vastly superior biocomputer that soon absorbed the network of lesser computers into itself. CenCom became the teacher, protector, trusted advisor and friend of humans. Only very slowly had anyone begun to notice the danger that the computer might become their ruler too. Cloning was not an interesting experiment, as some thought. It was the beginning of a computer-dominated evolution.

He stopped writing again, for there was no use in pawing at old wounds. This “letter” wasn’t going to reach anyone, let alone his own cell. Now there’d be an endless repetition of the traits a machine found acceptable, and the elimination of those it disliked. But he wasn’t on Earth any more. If and when he ever reached home again, the issue would have been resolved one way or another decades before.

He was an artist, better at communicating with his hands than his words. He was used to responding to the nonverbal messages of art. Beside the small pad on the bedside table lay a ring of polished beads from Ithaca 3-15d. He set the stylus down and picked them up, caressing the minute indentations thoughtfully with his thumb and forefinger. They warmed immediately under his touch. He was aware of a small, pleasant tingling sensation, as if something in their composition caused a reaction when it came in contact with human skin.

The planet was intriguing. Under other circumstances, he could have worked here. But it hadn’t been his choice to come, and work remained back on Earth.

He’d get the shelter built as fast as possible and stay down on the planet’s surface. Whether he liked the idea or not, at least he’d be away from Shelly’s jealous eyes. As for Dori, he’d be glad to have as little to do with her as practical. No one on board really lit fires in his blood, but it was comfortable being with Lil, and that helped on a long voyage.

Inaction stifled him. He had to be doing, and there was something he could do. He could persuade Carli to take him and his equipment down tomorrow while the others were working with HANA. He could get started on the shelter.

He sat on the bed, feeling tiredness rising up through his bones. His eyelids drooped.

“Civilian Marit,” HANA said. “I think I should tell you something about Yeo Matiz.”

“Yes, HANA?”

“The reason she was in Nairobi on furlough when she heard you address the crowd on the subject of male equality was that she’d been to the Wild Game Preserve. Yeo Matiz is an accomplished hunter, and in addition to her skills as a shuttle pilot, she’s an excellent markswoman.”

The computer paused. “I hope this information is useful to you. Now, you really must get some sleep.”

“Thanks,” he said grimly, and lay wide awake in the darkness.