Cold as Ice (43 page)

"So did I." Hilda Brandt was visibly troubled for the first time since the
Danae
had bobbed to the surface of Blowhole. "We have to assume that the other six were lost, and the children with them. Of the nineteen people on the
Pelagic
when it left Mandrake, only three have survived: Jon Perry, Wilsa Sheer, and Camille Hamilton."

The rest of the people in the room had been sitting quietly, aware that they were eavesdroppers on a private dialogue. But Hilda Brandt's final words were too much for them. Everyone began to talk at once. They stopped only when they realized that she was continuing, quietly and conversationally.

"—and survived
then
, of course, only because of what they were. They floated free in space for many months—and lived. Just as they survived experiences in and below the Europan ice that would have been fatal to anyone else. I had my hopes that Camille would revive, you see, even when everyone swore that she was frozen and dead. And recover she did. After that, although I wanted Jon and Wilsa returned to the surface as fast as possible, I had less worry that their experience would prove fatal. I even allowed myself to gloat a little bit at how well I had done my work so long ago. And although I have no desire to learn by experiment, I cannot help but wonder how far their survival abilities might extend."

Cyrus Mobarak had been uncharacteristically silent. More than anyone else in the room, he understood the personalities of Battachariya and Hilda Brandt. And he had been forming his own odd conclusion. "Are you two saying what I
think
you're saying? That these three"—he swept his arm past Jon Perry, Wilsa Sheer, and Camille Hamilton—"are the result of those biological experiments on Mandrake twenty-five years ago? But you didn't know until just one year ago that they were still alive?"

"Dr. Brandt knew it more than a year ago," said Bat. "She tracked the pod trajectories long before I did. I learned it myself only very recently."

"Why didn't she know it a
generation
ago, when the pods were first found? Didn't it show up in the news media each time one was discovered?"

Bat raised dark eyebrows, as severe a criticism of naivete as he would ever offer to Cyrus Mobarak. "In a solar system still reeling and staggering after the greatest disaster in human history? We all know better than that. For years after the end of the Great War, information systems were a blind chaos. The discoveries were
recorded
, certainly, but they were not
publicized.
And I suspect that at the time, Dr. Brandt had certain other postwar priorities."

"Maybe at that time." Mobarak turned on Brandt accusingly. "But if you knew they had survived a full year ago, why didn't you say something then? You owed it to them."

"Say what, and to whom?" Hilda Brandt snapped back at him. "Think about it, Cyrus, and tell me what good it could do. I knew that I would probably tell them eventually, but only after I'd had a chance to take a good look at them and convince myself that it was the right thing to do. They've been living happy, healthy, normal lives for a quarter of a century. Are you telling me that I ought to have had them labeled as biological experiments, so that people could start treating them as freaks and monsters?"

Understanding had been dawning slowly on Jon, Wilsa, and Camille. They had heard, but they could not
believe.

Camille, sitting in the meeting from the beginning, was the first to react. "Are you agreeing with Mobarak . . . that we are just
experiments
? Human freaks, that you made on Mandrake?"

"
No
! I'm saying anything but that. You see, Cyrus, that's
exactly
the sort of thing I was afraid of." Hilda Brandt swung back to Camille and spoke with great emphasis. "You are
not
monsters or freaks, any one of you, and I should have my tongue cut out for using those words. You are human beings—
superior
human beings."

"But what did you
do
to us?" asked Wilsa.

"
Improved
you. You were modified before you were born, to give you control over your autonomic nervous system and a better interface between conscious and unconscious thought. If necessary, you three can slow or speed up your metabolic rate and reaction times. You can modify all bodily functions. You can achieve levels of muscle control impossible for anyone else. You can also—with sufficient urging—integrate data in ways that the rest of us find hard to even imagine. It's mental superiority, as well as physical. Camille, you are like other people—only you are
better
."

Nell Cotter thought suddenly of Jon Perry, with his absolute sense of position, coolly guiding the
Spindrift
through the seaquake while his fingers rippled across the submersible's controls too fast to follow. Of Wilsa at her keyboards, her fingers and toes performing as twenty independent instruments of impossible coordination and precision. And of Camille, her attention turned totally inward, performing under Hilda Brandt's direction the feats of computation that everyone—including Camille herself—had believed could never be done without a computer.

Then Nell had another vision, of ice blocks bulging beneath fair skin bloated with liquid. "You mean that when Camille was trapped and frozen—"

"—her body did what it had to." Hilda Brandt nodded. "She drank all the water that she could find. As that water froze near the surface of her body, she used the released latent heat to keep her core temperature up and allow her to remain alive. It was a form of hibernation, but Camille never knew
consciously
what was happening. Her built-in survival mechanisms took over." She turned to Jon and Wilsa. "And the same with you two. You managed with too little air, for far longer than Gabriel Shumi said was possible."

"We just sat in the ship," said Wilsa. "We fell asleep, but we didn't do anything special."

"Not special for
you
." Hilda Brandt was looking at the three fondly. "Just impossible for anyone else—until there are more people like you. And there will be—my God, what now?"

Brandt's question was not to Camille and the other two, but to Buzz Sandstrom, who had come barreling through the door as though he were trying to knock it down.

"It's Ganymede. Bad news." Sandstrom had been recovering his cockiness after Jon and Wilsa's rescue, but now he seemed out of his depth again. "We got a call from our staff there. It's all over the news media. They say the life forms in the ocean here aren't native! Somebody leaked that they're Earth forms, changed and imported."

"Hmm. I wonder who might have done
that
." Hilda Brandt stared at Bat, who shook his head. "All right, I believe you. What did you tell them, Buzz?"

"Nothing."

"Why not?"

"I'd nothing to say. Anyway, they won't talk to me. They say they'll only talk to you."

"They're feeling insecure. Go and assure them that I'm on my way." Hilda Brandt sighed and stood up, but she did not leave the room. Instead she turned to Battachariya. "Do you know what upsets me more than anything else about all this?"

"I do. It is the fear that your children may now be regarded by the ignorant as monsters and freaks."

"My
children.
They are not . . ." Brandt paused. "Well, we learn something every day. You are a phenomenon, Rustum Battachariya, did you know that? You deny emotion, yet at
understanding
emotion . . ."

She turned to Jon, Wilsa, and Camille. "He is right, of course. That is exactly how I think of you. You
are
my children, in an emotional if not in a genetic sense. I would never do anything to harm you."

And again to Bat. "You see,
that's
what hurts and upsets me, more than anything. That you, an intelligent man whom Magrit Knudsen describes as sensitive and perceptive, could be convinced that I would kill to protect the Europan environment. So convinced that you had to come rushing here to stop me from killing not a
stranger
, but someone whom I had known since birth—since
before
birth. What sort of animal do you think I am?"

"I was in error. I have already admitted that. I had not interacted with you sufficiently at the time. Also, I could not forget the assault on Yarrow Gobel."

"Which was never intended, and you should have known it!" Hilda Brandt chided Bat, like a teacher disappointed by a slow pupil. "When someone of body mass less than sixty kilos, like Inspector-General Gobel, intercepts a dose designed for someone of body mass of . . . two hundred and fifty kilos?"

"Two hundred and ninety."

"You see my point. Your memory loss would have been temporary and partial. It would have applied only to events of recent months, and you would have been back to normal long ago."

She finally went to the open door. "However, that is no excuse. I accept full responsibility for Yarrow Gobel's mishap. As I accept full responsibility for all of my actions. When I return, you will tell me what you propose to do about it. But first I must reassure the members of my staff. They think that the universe is ending. Which, of course, it is not."

She turned to Cyrus Mobarak. "It may be impossible to preserve Europa, now that word is out that our ocean is contaminated with Earth forms. So you win, Cyrus, and I lose. But winners and losers often switch. I won't give up. And I have won, too, in other ways."

She was gone before Mobarak or anyone else could comment.

25
Winners and Losers

Nell Cotter had been trained to hold her mind and her camera on the main action. When Hilda Brandt left the room, that wasn't easy. Nell sensed a change in group focus, but she was not sure of the new center.

Jon Perry and Wilsa Sheer were sitting between Nell and Tristan. Just beyond Tristan was Camille, and next to her, David Lammerman. The six were eyeing each other uneasily, ignoring Battachariya and Mobarak, who sat facing them. Nell felt Jon Perry inch away from her a fraction as she turned to look along the line of people.

She split the camera field to record the facial expressions of the three refugees from the
Pelagic
, and sought to guess their thoughts.
Together at birth, even before birth, raised for the first year or two as a unit, breathing in each other's sight and sounds and smells. No wonder Jon and Wilsa responded so strongly and immediately to each other. Then thrown out as babies into open space, alone and abandoned, to live or to die.

Six had not survived. The other three had been found one by one in the post-war chaos and raised in the totally different environments of Earth, Mars, and the Belt. They had followed separate careers, unaware of each other's existence until Hilda Brandt brought them together. But now they would begin to see themselves as like each other—and as unlike any other human beings who ever lived.

And how will others see
them? Nell realized that she had already started to think differently about Jon Perry. Would she dare a close relationship with a man who had an absolute and unnatural control over his mind and body? She recalled the report from Arenas of Jon's impossibly fast run after the carnival float. Now it was believable.

And then she felt fascination, anger at herself, and a strong affection. Jon was still Jon.
He
hadn't changed, if she had not.

Hilda Brandt is right, we are all human beings.

She forced herself to reach out and grip Jon's thigh. The muscle trembled and tightened beneath her touch, then slowly relaxed. He leaned toward her, placing his hand on hers.

No Ice Man here. I'll believe absolute body control when I feel it for myself. And if it's real, I'll bet it can be a load of fun.

But how typical am I?

Nell glanced along the line to Tristan Morgan. For perhaps the first time in his life, he was not fidgeting in his seat. He had taken Wilsa's hand in his, and he was talking quietly into her ear. She wore a lonely, wistful smile. But at least it
was
a smile. Camille and David, at the far end, were staring back at Nell, observing her and Jon as calmly as she was observing them. Perhaps one side effect of a modified nervous system was an ability to resist shocks that would stupefy ordinary people. And maybe it was catching. Nell felt fine.

She turned her attention to her camera, which was covering Cyrus Mobarak and Rustum Battachariya. For the past half hour Mobarak had said little. He was less on-stage than Nell had ever seen him. But with Hilda Brandt out of the room he was coming to life.

"Well, then. This is apparently a time for general revelation and confession." Mobarak's tone to Bat was conversational, even casual. If he were shocked or ruffled, no one would ever know it. "All secrets are to be revealed—and you never did tell me how you decided that Hilda Brandt and I had been working together. Are you willing to discuss it? Or does that remain privileged information?"

Out of the corner of her eye, Nell saw Tristan Morgan jerk forward. But she had no time to look at him, because Battachariya was already answering.

"Not at all privileged. And I fear that there was no deep insight, only a rather pedestrian chain of logic." Nell thought she detected a trace of satisfaction on Bat's face, the first that she had seen since he had joined the group at Blowhole. But he continued serenely. "After several false starts, I at last came up with identifiers for the three children of the
Pelagic
who had been found in survival pods and revived: Jon Perry, Wilsa Sheer, and Camille Hamilton. Those names shocked me beyond belief—because I learned that each of them, now grown to adulthood,
was presently in the Jovian system.
More than that, each had recently appeared here for the first time, from widely separated locations.

"By then I also suspected that all three had been the subject of biological experiments at the end of the Great War. So it was natural to conclude that someone else, a full year before me, had read the message in the
Pelagic
's flight recorder and been led to those same three names. The most logical person was surely one who had been involved in the original experiments.