Prophets (30 page)

“I don't believe that thing is here.” Tetsami rubbed her neck, mirroring the placement of the restraint collar. “I don't even remember how far we are from Bakunin here—”

“One hundred and fourteen light-years,” Flynn said. “You've told me often enough.” He moved a rook on the small comm screen.

“Those things don't have tach-drives. It's been traveling for a couple of centuries at least.”

Flynn shook his head. “I find it hard to believe that such an advanced society would settle for sub-light speeds. Your move.”

“The Proteans were a little weird,” Tetsami agreed, castling. “Very much kept to themselves. But I think the word ‘seed' covers what they're doing, propagating themselves.”

“That slow?”

“Think of the energy a tach-drive requires for each jump. That thing is what, three meters long? They get it to speed and coast and it requires the same energy to get here as it does to get to the next galaxy. All it takes is time.”

“A
lot
of time.”

Tetsami shrugged. “I can see a little of their perspective. I mean, back when I first heard of them, I never expected to be in lockup with my great-to-the-seventh-power grandson one hundred and seventy-five years later, waiting for him to move something.”

“Yeah.” Flynn moved a knight behind his rook and smiled. “Check.”

“Christ on a unicycle,” she muttered at the screen.

“One hundred and seventy-five is one thing, millions is another—”

“Millions of what?” Robert Sheldon asked from the doorway to the barracks.

Flynn blinked Tetsami's image away and looked at his boss. The man had sandy hair gone half gray. He had four glyphs on his forehead, and like most of the people with four or more, he had a somewhat flat voice and an expression that Flynn thought of as mechanical.

“Years,” Flynn said without any explanatory comment. “Are you going to explain why Ashley security has locked me up for nearly a month?”

Sheldon walked up, shaking his head. “You're an impulsive young man.” He sat down on the bunk opposite him and next to the comm still showing the game in progress, almost precisely where Tetsami had been sitting. “And naive as well, even for knowing one of the Founders.”

Flynn squirmed a little inside at Sheldon's language. He never liked the way people used the word “knowing” someone to refer to what Flynn had come to see as ritualized psychic cannibalism. Having Tetsami with him as a separate person made the way it was
supposed
to happen, the merging of personalities, seem so
wrong
. Who the hell was anyone to deny her her own identity, or that of any of the millions of people archived in the Hall of Minds? Everyone looked at Flynn the singleton as having no respect for the ancestors of Salmagundi, but was it more respectful to see their ancestors as little more than an undifferentiated data source? No more individuals than they were themselves?

Flynn did something he usually avoided in conversation; he looked Sheldon in the eye. “Why did you have me locked up here?”

“Mr. Jorgenson, you did not have authorization—”

“That's bullshit.” Flynn stood up, and the move was fast enough for the restraint collar in his neck to send a warning pulse that fired a nasty wave of numbness down his legs and arms. “There was an impact in my survey zone, and it turns out that I had some particular knowledge—”

“Any investigation needed to be cleared before—”

“So I broke a regulation; you don't
imprison
someone for that. Sure, fire me.
But what the fuck is this?
”

Sheldon reached up and clasped Flynn's hands, lowering them. Sheldon's hands were cold and hard, like being touched by a headstone.

“Lower your voice, son. I am here as a favor to your father.”

“My father's dead.”

“Sit.”

“Are you going to explain—”

“Sit!”
Sheldon's voice changed, making Flynn realize that, up to this point, Sheldon's voice had still retained a trace of human warmth and character to it; characteristics that evaporated in the single command.

Flynn sat.

“Mr. Jorgenson,” Flynn noticed this time that Sheldon seemed uncomfortable using the address.“Do you realize what would happen to you if I did not intervene on your behalf?”

“My behalf?”

Flynn shut up.

“You may know one of the Founders, but you seem to have forgotten why they came here.”

“Contact with the decadent cultures beyond this planet is a grave assault on our purpose here. A violation of the commandments of our Founders.”

“But—”

“Please listen.” Sheldon placed his hand on Flynn's shoulder and almost sounded human. “The thing that makes us what we are, our communion with the past,
that
would be the first thing they take away from us.”

Inside Flynn's head, a quiet voice whispered to itself,
Christ on a crutch, I'm going to be sick.

“I told you what this is. You
know
it isn't some Confederacy artifact.”

Sheldon shook his head. “You are young and haven't known enough of our history to understand. We cannot allow this kind of disruption to our way of life. It matters little where this thing is from.”

“Disruption?” Flynn shook his head. “This thing is from a culture that's so far beyond the Confederacy the Founders escaped that it's nearly inconceivable. Just understanding the smallest bit of it could—”

“It could destroy everything we've built here.”

“What?”

“This arrival is too dangerous to be made public knowledge. By association, the Triad has decided that you are too dangerous as well. I intervened, out of respect for your father, to spare your life.”

Flynn opened his mouth, and nothing came out.

“You see the gravity of this now? The Triad was prepared to erase you, completely, without archival—”

Flynn could care less about the Hall of Minds. But the thought that the Triad considered killing him—the current, flesh-and-blood person—just to avoid some sort of “disruption,” that was worse than appalling. But, thanks to his boss, Flynn had stayed alive, under house arrest in the barracks by the fallen seed.

“Why are you here?” Flynn asked.

“I wanted you to know that this will be over soon.” He looked into Flynn's face. “When things return to normal, I want your promise not to make any waves. Don't make me regret helping you.”

“I—”

“Please, Flynn. Your father was my friend.”

Do you even have friends?
Flynn thought.

He didn't trust himself to speak, so he just nodded.

Sheldon let go of Flynn's shoulder and said, “Thank you.” As he got up to leave he glanced at the comm screen and said, “White has mate in three moves.”

Flynn heard Tetsami whisper inside his skull,
What are they going to do?

The next day, they had an answer.

Flynn and Tetsami watched as three tracked vehicles rolled across the clearing in the direction of the seed. The vehicles were ocher metal, squat, and carried large cylindrical power plants on their backs.

“What the hell are those?” Flynn muttered.

“Mining equipment,”
Tetsami said, an invisible presence next to him.
“We had dozens of the things when we founded this misbegotten planet.”

“Mining equipment? What for?”

“Oh.” Flynn paused. He finally said, “Fuck.”

The closed-minded bastards of the Triad were going to destroy the seed. Forget that it was the space-borne equivalent of their sacred Hall of Minds, it was
disruptive
.

Worse, Flynn knew that the debate that probably had raged in the Triad and the upper echelons of the Salmagundi leadership in the last month—and, good lord, how those old farts loved a debate—wouldn't even have touched on the moral question of incinerating a million minds or the progeny of an unimaginably advanced civilization. What would have taken a month of debate would have been the logistics of how to incinerate the damn thing.

“We should do something,” Flynn said.

“What are you asking, Gram?”

Flynn stopped speaking out loud.
“If you got some other option in mind, let me know.”

On some level Tetsami didn't blame Flynn for being pissed. When she had been young and stupid, she had the same problems with people trying to do what was best for her. She knew, on some level, the kid never really understood it when she told him how lucky he was. When Tetsami was his age, she could only wish for the kind of stability Flynn had. Back in the bad old days when she was a software hacker on Bakunin, she had barely scraped by from job to job, the last one nearly killing her.

No one ever shot at Flynn Nathaniel Jorgenson. His job didn't carry a risk of frying his brain on the wrong side of a black security program. He was able to take things like food, clothing, and shelter for granted. Until the damn Protean egg-thing showed up, all the kid ever had to worry about were the occasional stare and harsh language. Even those were low key compared to what Tetsami had gotten because of her ancestry from Dakota.

For all his angst about being the oddball, he didn't understand that just the fact she was here meant that his society accepted him. He might not be a model citizen by the bizarre rules that had evolved on Salmagundi, but he wasn't really an outcast.

Not yet.

She was still regretting opening her big mouth when she felt Flynn withdraw. She blinked, and it was her body that was blinking. She reached up and touched the restraint collar with Flynn's hands.

“Get you more trouble than you deserve,” she said, her voice now sounding like the one in her head. “Now shut up, we don't have a lot of time.”

Fortunately, she and Flynn had traded off enough that wearing his body wasn't nearly as disorienting as it could have been. In her own mind it had been seventeen years since she had a female body, or had been shorter than Flynn's 200 centimeters, her 150-year-old mental image notwithstanding.

She felt around the edge of the restraint collar and found the hatch on the control panel.

“Sonny, zip it.”

She kept her finger on the panel as she walked over to the bathroom. She would have liked to run, but the collar
would
zap them if she moved quicker than it wanted her to. She wasn't planning to give the thing the excuse.

In the bathroom she faced the mirror. She had seen Flynn's lean face, tattooed brow, and sandy hair often enough—but it still was startling to her when she was actually in control. When she was just along for the ride, somehow the reflection wasn't her.

The restraint collar was a thin toroid wrapping their neck, just loose enough to slip a finger underneath. Buried inside were some sophisticated electronics, position sensors, and a little Emerson field generator; the kind that, when it activated, interfered with human neural impulses enough to knock the victim out.

Fortunately, since bio-interfaces were universal on Salmagundi, she didn't have to worry about the damn thing being lethal. Back in her days in the Confederacy, some people didn't bother to calibrate these things to accommodate folks with wired skulls—a badly adjusted one could've cooked their brain. Techs here knew better.

That didn't mean they didn't have blind spots.

Flynn's face smiled back from the mirror as his stubby fingers and blunted nails managed to pry open the hinged cover on the restraint collar's control panel. There was little to see underneath, just a little socket to receive an optical cable—

“What are you . . .”
Flynn's mental voice trailed off as she turned and pulled a panel off the ceiling.

The fact was, for all the security people Sheldon had camped here, no one on Salmagundi really understood security. Because of the culture they developed, one that bred a conformist personality into nearly every citizen, they had all but forgotten that people like Tetsami had ever existed. Crime, such as it was, tended to be petty and personal. When these people went to the Hall of Minds, they didn't choose singletons like Tetsami to receive. They picked people who had status in living memory, or those who held the memories of a dozen others whose skills spelled their own advancement.

Tetsami, however, had a skill set that was largely forgotten about, and as such, inadequately protected against.

Behind the ceiling panel were several cables, one leading to the hidden camera that watched the interior of the barracks itself. Once she made sure that the bathroom door was locked, she reached up and grabbed the data cable. She pulled one end out of the camera socket, disconnecting it.