The Infinity Link (22 page)

Mardi's face turns rigid. "Dear God. Is she—I mean, is she all right? What happened?"

He swallows. "I can't tell you. Security and all. But it's not that serious, I mean, she isn't dead or anything. She's at the infirmary out at the institute, and she can't really commun—call you, I mean."

"But she's not—"

"No, not really." His words are tripping off his tongue now, and he's not sure what he's saying; maybe he shouldn't have told her, but
somebody
has to know. He clears his throat noisily. "Listen, I can't tell you any more, but the reason I called is because of her gerbils."

"I was wondering," Mardi says. "I thought she didn't want to talk to me, and I was kind of hurt."

"No, no—nothing like that. She
can't
call you, she would if she could, but this security stuff you can't imagine. But I want to talk to you about—"

"I'm glad. I'm really glad," Mardi says. She's suddenly flustered. "That sounds terrible. I'm not glad she got hurt, I mean—of course not. But I wouldn't like to think she wasn't calling just because—"

"No, look," Hoshi says, and he's starting to get desperate, because Mardi won't shut up and let him talk. "It's not like that at all, and
I have to talk to you about the gerbils!"

"What? Gerbils?"

"Right. Do you know anything about taking care of gerbils? I promised Mozy I'd take care of them, and—I have to go away for a few days, maybe longer, I was wondering—well, could you take it over while I'm gone?" He pauses. She looks at him. "I don't know who else to ask."

She shrugs. "I guess so."

"Do you have a key?"

"To her apartment? No."

He kneads his eyebrows for a moment. "All right. Here's what we'll do." He's going nonstop now, and as he talks, he's already furiously planning ahead. He really does have to get away, he didn't fully realize it until he said it to Mardi, but he can't hang around here, he has things to work out, things to do.

There's a pang of guilt he feels about leaving the gerbils, not taking care of them the way he promised, but what else can he do? In the eyes of Heaven, he has much to answer for, but the gerbils shouldn't be a major factor. The main thing is that they're okay. He has to feel absolutely sure that they're okay.

When he's off from talking to Mardi, he turns back to the cage and frowns. It smells, it's probably filthy—but what does he know about cleaning a gerbil cage? He never had a pet like that, or he'd know. They'll be okay. Just put in some food from the box here. They've got water. Good.

He leaves the lamp on, and locks the door carefully on his way out, then places the key out of sight on the molding ledge over the door. Hurries back along the corridor of shadows to the elevator. It's quiet in the hall now. He's halfway down in the elevator when he remembers the security tail that may have followed him.

He stabs the button for Floor Two. Gets off and takes the stairwell, all the way to the basement level, then out into a dingy corridor. Got to be a rear exit somewhere, he thinks. Dank here, probably a maintenance level. Probably cleaned about once a year. His footsteps echo alarmingly. There's an exit sign, down at the far end. Up five steps and there's the back door, a fire exit. Shove it open.

He's out in the night again, pulling his coat closed around him. He's behind the building. Unobserved. He cuts across to the next block and keeps walking. He has such a lot to do.

(All that time, you lied to me . . .)

(No . . . Mozy . . . listen . . .)

(
You lied to me!
)

Her words hung like sculpted stone against the dark and the silence. She stared at him, astonishment still ringing in her thoughts, anger choking her.

The analytical frame of mind had fled. She was poised at a precipice—hysteria, rage, despair all echoing around her, pushing her one way and another, threatening to topple her over the edge. She gazed fearfully at Jonders. His face was etched against the dark, glowing with a perilous light. The face had lost its human quality, was transformed into a demonic puppet's head gaping at her from a black stage, illuminated by only a single invisible spotlight.

In the spotlight: the liar, at last speaking the truth.

The truth
: David Kadin was no man. David Kadin was a cybernetic intelligence. He was a composite personality, synthesized from lifeless bits—an artificial creation designed to ride a robot probe into the deeps of interstellar space. Conceived and born in the Sandaran Link Laboratories, Kadin was a silicon pilot, a space commander bred of hologrammic memory cells: humankind's emissary to the stars.

He was a deliberately tailored personality, built upon the world's most advanced artificial intelligence programs, woven and stitched with selected personality traits of dozens of project subjects (including Mozy), equipped with extensive knowledge in all fields of endeavor, and imbued with carefully crafted qualities of rationality, intuition, and judgment.

Kadin was to be the spokesman of the human race, the manager and diplomat of "first contact," should the
Father Sky
spacecraft ever encounter intelligent life from the stars.

Why hadn't they told her?
Why hadn't they told her?
She had fallen in love with a man who existed only in the memory of a computer.

(Stolen,) she snapped finally, when she was able to speak again.

Jonders's puppet head gaped at her. (What do you mean?) he said. (What do you mean, stolen?)

(You know damn well what I mean.) There was a part of
her
in Kadin, a part of her own personality, traces of her knowledge and memory and feeling. (Did you tell me what you were doing? Did you ask my permission to take a part of me and turn it into a monster, a damn tin man?)

(Mozy, don't—)

(Don't
Mozy
me. You told me you were doing studies.)

(Which we were.)

(You didn't say you were raping my mind for a part of my personality!)

(Mozy, I've explained—)

(Oh yes, you've explained.) Indeed, he had. But the explanation fell somewhat short of satisfying her.

The subjects had been, as Jonders had so delicately put it, misled. Told that the personality and memory-mapping study they were employed in was dedicated to human tachyonic teleportation, they were in fact participating in carefully designed role-playing tests aimed at the perfection of the composite personality, Kadin. The subjects' roles were twofold: to allow selected elements of their own personalities to be analyzed, profiled, and used as templates in the construction of Kadin's personality; and to train Kadin—to stimulate his growth in role-playing scenarios, and to speed the development of his diplomatic and interpersonal skills.

(Matter transmission,) Mozy said. (That was what you said we were working on.)

Jonders's jaw hung slack with dismay. (We were, Mozy. We really were,) he said finally. (Before this project even came up—but it's nowhere near—)

(But that's not what you cared about,) she shouted. (That's not why you were using us, lying—)

(Mozy, please try to understand,) said the puppet face, not moving its mouth.

(Oh, I understand.) Her mind reverberated with anger. (We were less important than your goddamned project. And what was so secret, that you couldn't tell us about it? Was this another one of your, "We couldn't tell you because it would have frightened you" pieces of bull?)

Jonders stared at her in something like astonishment, and for a moment, he looked like himself again. (I—honestly—can't answer that,) he said, in a strained voice. (That's a question I asked over and over. But it wasn't something I was given any choice in.)

(Oh, no?) she asked sarcastically.

(Mozy—please listen. There is more I have to tell you. I don't know if we'll have time in this cycle, but it's vitally important that I do—)

(Is it, now?) she thundered. (What makes you think I want to listen to anything more?)

He stared at her questioningly, and said, (Mozy, are you angry because we deceived you, or because you're disappointed to know what Kadin really is?)

This time it was she who was astonished. (How dare you—) she began, but her protest died in a reddish amber haze of dismay, a haze that grew out of empty space to obscure her view of Jonders and her surroundings, a haze that she was dimly aware was embarrassment. Damn him, damn them all. Well, what of it, suppose she was—didn't she have a right to be angry about Kadin?

She had loved him.
Damn
them. She had loved him as she had never loved in her life, and now they tell her he isn't real. She had loved a wraith, a man who was no man at all. She had loved a wraith and become one herself.

(
God damn you, Jonders!
) she screamed.

Her voice echoed in space, died in the clouds. There was no answer, and for a time that was all right with her; she wanted no answer.

Then she called to him, darkly, scorchingly. She wanted to know what else he had to say. She wanted to nail him, make him squirm. She wanted to draw blood.

Still there was no answer. The link was silent. The transmission cycle had ended.

* * *

Jonders eased himself out of the link slowly. He felt drained, and yet at the same time he was still keyed up, his mind racing to plan the next few hours. He touched the intercom and said to control, "The minute you have full signal back, I want her in the link again. All right?"

He waited for only the barest acknowledgment before cutting the circuit. He had too much to think about to waste time with banter. He had overstepped his bounds just now, and he wasn't done, either; he intended to tell Mozy more, much more. That meant he had to work quickly. Fortunately the control engineers were mostly isolated from what was actually spoken between Mozy and him. If anyone discovered what he was doing . . . .

The Tachylab transmitter could be recharged in less than twenty minutes for the outgoing signal; but the shipboard transmitter, being smaller and more compact, took nearly two hours to recharge. That meant at least a two-hour delay before he could resume a full link with Mozy. Two hours to rethink what he was doing. Two hours to avoid being questioned by Marshall or Fogelbee.

His first thought was of coffee, but he didn't want to be caught in his office or in the staff lounge, either. All right, forget coffee. He was already walking down the outer corridor, and before he was conscious of making a decision, he had pushed open the side door, for a walk outside.

He was the only soul around. Powdery-looking clouds were moving briskly across the late morning sky. The air was cool, but the sun shone brightly on the grass, and he took a deep breath and stuck his hands in his pockets, hunched his collar up around his neck to ward off the chill, and strode across the grass, down a gentle slope toward the woods and the chain-link fence encircling the grounds. From the bottom of the slope, he turned and gazed back at the institute.

The central building dominated the view, in sharp juxtaposition with the mountainside rising up behind it. The building had always intrigued him, with its peculiar asymmetrical architecture that was so full of angles and flat surfaces. It was the large oblong tower jutting out from the southwest corner of the building that set it off—a symbolic fist of determination thrusting into the sky. In that tower was the tachyon-scanning equipment, and certain parts of the primary computer system. Kadin, in a sense, lived in that tower. It was quite beautiful, really: the tower erupting out of the building like some crytalline blossom, the entire architecture jutting upward against the trees and the mountain and the sky.

Tucked away behind the main building were several other structures, including the tokamak fusion reactor dome, where power was generated for the tachyon converters and storage rings. Jonders reflected on how small that reactor was against the mountains, and how expensive it was in human resources; and he thought of those resources dedicated to the linking of this planet with an envoy of humanity far outside the solar system, and without being sure why, he was suddenly comfortable with his decision to aid Mozy—even if it cost him his job.

But his methods—those he was not so sure of. Kadin would be the one to know. Kadin lived his entire life in a universe like Mozy's, and he knew the inner structure of that world far better than Jonders, better even than the designers under Fogelbee who had been the architects of the system. Perhaps he ought to talk with Kadin once more to clarify his plan.

He was halfway around the southern wing of the building now, and he realized that he was shivering. Too many thoughts in his mind. He shook his head and strode back up the lawn and in the side door.

Lusela Burns met him just outside the Personality Lab. "I've been looking all over for you. They told me down in the pit that you were planning to do another linkup in two hours," she said, turning into the lab with him.

"Right," he said. "First I want to do a consultation with Kadin, though—and I'd appreciate no interruptions." He stopped and looked at Lusela. "Can you run interference for me?"

"Bill, what's going on around here?" she asked. "What are you doing?"

"Can't tell you right now."

"What do you mean? How can I—"

"I don't have
time
. I'll tell you later. Right now I have to ask Kadin something and talk to Mozy."

Lusela held up her hands, halting him. "That's why I was trying to find you. Marshall called. He wants you in his office at thirteen-hundred."

"
What?
Did he say what he wants?" That was just an hour from now.

"No, only that Ken will be there, and you'll be teleconferencing with Hathorne."

Jonders cursed under his breath. "I can't wait then—I'll have to do it now."

"Do what?"

He grabbed her by the arm. "I need your help. Call the communications room and tell them I'm on my way. I want a one-way link to the spacecraft, and I want it ready when I get there."

"All right, but what are you—?"

"Just do it, Lusela, just do it." He turned and hurried back down the corridor.