Voyagers III - Star Brothers (12 page)

He could almost feel the hosts of nanometer symbiotes in his blood and tissues assimilating the wine and food of his dinner with Ilona Lucacs. My alien brother protects me so well that I can’t get drunk, he said to himself. He felt a wry laughter deep in his mind and remembered that he was never by himself. And never would be.

Lifting his left arm so that his wrist communicator was above his mouth, he phoned Jo in Hilo. Her computer replied that she was in a meeting, but his call would be added to her list of messages.

“I love you Jo,” he said to the machine. “And my virtue is still intact.”

He did not feel the need for sleep. Ilona Lucacs was addicted to electrical stimulation of her brain’s pleasure center. That was the real hold her superiors had on her. He pictured her in her room now, sprawled on the narrow hotel bed, the small case that looked like a portable computer lying open on the floor, wires as thin as spider’s silk leading from it to electrodes pasted on her forehead, all the world forgotten as a current of pure pleasure flowed through her brain.

No need for sex. No need for food or drink or anything. As long as the current flowed she was in ecstasy.

The machine must be programmed to turn itself off, he thought. Otherwise she runs the risk of killing herself.

I could get her off the addiction, he told himself. But what kind of harm would I be doing if I just overpowered her addiction with my own commands? Would that destroy her? It might, he decided.

He asked his star brother how he would handle the problem if he became addicted to direct stimulation. It’s not like drugs or other chemicals, he pointed out. It’s direct electrical stimulation of the pleasure centers.

His star brother’s answer was immediate. Stop the neural impulses of the pleasure center. No discharge of those nerves, no sense of pleasure. And therefore no addiction.

It’s simple when you have a few trillion symbiotes inside you, Stoner said. And his star brother agreed.

Then he sat bolt upright on the bed, a powerfully-built man in his middle years with a strong black beard and a look of sudden revelation on his face. The question that had eluded him ever since he had met Ilona Lucacs finally reached the surface of his mind.

What else is she after? If they’re into biochips, they’re only a step or two away from nanotechnology. From building the kind of self-replicating machines that course through my body.

She knows! Or at least she suspects the truth about us. She
does
have a hypothesis about me and it’s damned accurate.

The thought filled him with unease. Why? he asked his star brother. What is there to be afraid of? He knew the abstract worry that nanotechnology would cause a new and irresistible population explosion. Reduce the death rate to nearly zero overnight, yes, but it takes generations to reduce the birthrate. With symbiotes protecting their health and extending their lifespans, the human race could populate itself into extinction, bury the planet Earth in human flesh, even swamp the entire solar system.

That much Stoner knew. He had worked for fifteen years to prepare the way for nanotechnology, to get the human race to control its numbers
before
this gift from the stars raised them to the next level of their evolution.

But the growing terror he felt at the realization that others were developing nanotechnology on their own was beyond all rational, reasonable fear. What is it? he asked his star brother.

His star brother did not reply.

“WE must be ready to strike when Stoner returns to Hilo.”

Li-Po Hsen listened carefully to his chief of security. The woman’s flat round face was as impassive as the westerner’s stereotype of the inscrutable oriental while she briefed Hsen in precise detail on her plan for abducting Stoner from his own home.

“The man Tomasso will tell us when he returns?” asked Hsen.

“Yes,” the woman acknowledged. “It should be within the next day or two. That gives us very little time to prepare.”

The tabletop display screen glowed in Hsen’s darkened office with an engineering drawing of the house outside Hilo. The security system wiring was shown in red.

“There is no way to override the security system,” she said. “It has its own power source inside the house.”

“Corrupt one of the servants, perhaps?” Hsen suggested.

“There are only six human servants, all of them drawn from Ms. Camerata’s family in southern Italy. It would be difficult to sway them, especially with so little time available.”

“What then?”

“Overwhelming force. We will require a mercenary attack force of at least twelve men. Twenty would be much better.”

Hsen nodded. “But how will you get that large a number into the main house without raising an alarm that will bring Vanguard security forces from the outlying buildings?”

“They must get in and out before the Vanguard security teams can react.”

“Yes, but how?”

For the first time since Hsen had known her, the security chief smiled. Only slightly, but the corners of her mouth definitely curved upward.

“They will arrive from the sky, like angels,” she said. “And depart the same way.”

Stoner met Ilona Lucacs for breakfast in their hotel’s coldly efficient automated cafeteria. One entire wall consisted of gleaming metal and glass display cases, shut tight until a guest touched the button that popped that window open. No warmth of cooking, no odor of food. As hermetically sealed as a space capsule, Stoner thought. And just about as appetizing.

Other hotel guests already half-filled the austere cafeteria, chattering and clattering, the noise of their talk and eating echoing almost painfully off the bare walls. Stoner and Dr. Lucacs went through the line wordlessly, making their selections, little sighs of air gushing out when a window snapped open.

Stoner studied her face closely. She seems to have slept well. No bags under her eyes, no nervous fidgets. He realized that she combed her honey-colored hair down over her forehead in bangs that almost reached her brows. Must paste the electrodes to her forehead, he thought. Or maybe she uses some sort of helmet that fits over the top of the head.

Just the slightest touch of a delicate probe into her mind. She flinched instantly, but Stoner saw the flicker of a vision. Ilona Lucacs had shaved off all her hair so that the electrodes could be planted firmly against her scalp. She wore a wig to hide her baldness.

They sat at a small table along the far wall. Ilona wore a fresh blouse of nondescript beige beneath her same tweed suit. Stoner had no other clothes except the denim jacket, jeans, and light blue cotton twill shirt he had arrived in. They had been cleaned overnight by the hotel’s robots, and he had instructed the hotel computer to buy two complete changes of clothes for him.

He watched her picking at the eggs and sausages she had selected, then asked, “Do you want to get off the stimulation?”

“Off the juice?” Ilona’s expression showed mild amusement. She had expected this. “Why should I want to get off it?”

“It’s an addiction, isn’t it?”

“It has no harmful side effects.”

“None?”

She spread her hands. “None at all.”

Stoner leaned back in his chair and realized that she had spent the entire night in electrical ecstasy. The glow of it was still in her face. But she had no appetite for food.

“Do you program the input yourself?”

“Yes, of course.”

“How long do you stay plugged in?”

She looked away without answering.

“How long was it when you first started?” he asked. “How long was it a week ago?”

Ilona refused to meet his gaze.

“It gets a little longer every night, doesn’t it? You turn those dials just a bit higher every time. Just a little longer each time. Just a little more current.”

“This is really none of your business, Dr. Stoner,” she said, her tawny eyes snapping. “I can take care of myself.”

He jabbed his fork into the thin, cream-covered pancake on his plate. “Sure, you can take care of yourself. Until one morning you don’t get out of bed. Until they break down the door of your apartment and find that you haven’t eaten in three or four days. Find you in the midst of your own shit, dehydrated and starving. Maybe they won’t find you until you’re dead.”

Her nostrils flared angrily. But she controlled herself immediately and said, “I can handle the juice. I always check the cut-off time before I put on the electrodes.”

Stoner made up his mind. “You want me to go to Budapest with you?”

Startled by the abrupt change of subject, “Yes, of course. That is why I came here.”

“I’ll do it only if you allow me to help you get off the stimulation.”

She tried to laugh. “Really, Dr. Stoner, that is rather ridiculous.”

“That’s my deal. Take it or leave it.”

Those lioness’s eyes took on a sly, almost smirking look. “Very well. If that is what it takes to bring you to Budapest, I accept your terms.”

“We can leave this afternoon, as soon as I finish making the arrangements for the funeral and the reading of Professor Markov’s will.”

“Fine.”

She had no intention of letting him or anyone else take away her pleasure machine. She regarded him with the amused contempt that the young have always shown when their elders throw morality at them. Stoner knew this.

He also knew that somewhere in Budapest, Ilona Lucacs had a friend who had deliberately started her on her addiction, a friend who was moving toward the kind of nanotechnology that his star brother represented. And for some reason, his alien symbiote desperately feared that development. It was a strange sensation. Stoner had never felt fear in his star brother before.

Despite his little cache of Moondust, Paulino Alvarado was miserably sick all the long hours he was in space. He had travelled from Peru to the Brazilian spaceport at Belém aboard a Panavia jet, forged papers and money for bribing customs officials in his wallet. With a fresh hit of Moondust bolstering him, he had walked through the spaceport’s boring routine of a perfunctory physical examination and the endless signing of liability waivers. The medics did not detect the Moondust in his blood; it was designed to be untraceable. Only its absence created metabolic imbalances.

Then he had joined two dozen other men and women in the spare, stripped-down passenger compartment of a Pacific Commerce spaceplane. This was no tourist flight; most of the sleek rocketplane’s interior space was devoted to cargo for the Vanguard Industries base on the Moon. The passengers were mostly new hires; no comforts were wasted on them beyond the minimum required for safety. Their compartment was strictly utilitarian, windowless, scuffed and stained by years of ferrying men and women into space.

The instant the plane’s engines cut off, Paulino felt his guts drop away and he became thoroughly, wretchedly sick. He felt as if he were falling, and even though he gripped the armrests of his narrow seat with white-knuckled desperation, a primitive voice inside his brain told him he was plummeting madly toward infinity. He swallowed another pill dry, but instead of helping, it enhanced every physical sensation to the point where Paulino felt like screaming. He barely controlled himself.

For only a few moments, when the ship’s payload pod was detached from the spaceplane and boosted on a high-energy trajectory toward the Moon by an orbital tug, did the panic of falling disappear. To be replaced by a bellowing surge of thrust that crushed Paulino into his seat with the weight of demons on his chest.

Then it was weightlessness again, and Paulino retched into the bags they had given him until he thought he would puke up all his guts. How many thousands of Yankee dollars was he vomiting up? The contents of the paper bags were worth a small fortune.

Others were puking too. The cabin stank of vomit, and it only took one miserable person’s sickening noise to start everyone upchucking all over again.

Finally the pod touched down on the dusty surface of the Moon. Not that Paulino could see anything in the windowless compartment. But he felt a jarring thump and then the sense of weight returned. Not like home, but suddenly his stomach returned to where it should be (sore from the hours of retching) and the screaming panic in his mind went away. Even the stench seemed less acrid, less sickening.

It was easy to tell the new hires from the veterans as the passengers got up from their seats and made their shaky way toward the hatch. Paulino and his fellow newcomers were ashen faced, their legs were wobbly, their hands trembling. Even though they lunged desperately at the hand grips set into each seat back along the plane’s narrow aisle the low lunar gravity made them stumble and stagger. They looked awful, and the veterans grinned at them and joked to one another.

“Lookin’ kinda green there, rookie.”

“Don’t worry, kid. A couple minutes out in the sun will give you a nice tan. Right down to your bones.”

It was difficult to walk. He felt so light that he lurched or hopped every time he tried to take a step. The veterans laughed at the newcomers’ clumsiness.

“You’ll get used to it, kids.”

“If ya don’t break yer asses first!”

Again Paulino stood in line and signed the papers put before him. This time, however, there were no human beings on the other side of the desks; only computers with interactive programs on their screens. And no chairs. The desks were chest-high; the newcomers signed and walked along as if they were on an assembly line. Paulino moved cautiously, as though teetering on the edge of a precipice, hardly looking at his surroundings. In truth there was little to see.

Vanguard Industries had established a mining center dug into the outer wall of the eighty-kilometer-wide crater Archimedes, on the shore of the broad Mare Imbrium. The base was almost entirely underground, and for his first few hours on the Moon, Paulino was guided through a maze of tunnels and winding, curving corridors, stumbling and bouncing foolishly with every step he attempted to take.

When at last he was left alone in his quarters, a spare, spartan cell deep underground, he gave no thought to where he was, or what he had seen or failed to see, or to his miserable past or his dubious future as a drug pusher. He swallowed a bit of Moondust, collapsed onto the narrow bunk and fell immediately asleep. He was so exhausted that, for once, he was not tormented by the nightmare visions of his village being destroyed. He did not dream at all.