John Brunner (9 page)

Merely
saying it made her feel immensely better at once. Let the
Zygra
Company
beware—
Kynance
Foy,
armed with her
Earthside
non-specialist education,
was a different proposition from some neurotic
Nefertitian
!
(But better not say that aloud, for fear it might offend officials of that
planet's government.)

If
she could leave nothing else behind her—if they did in fact murder her—at least
she might be remembered as a legal precedent. Humming, sustained by that
vicarious form of immortality, she began to survey the surroundings in which
she found herself.

IX

L
ogically
, the first thing to do was to count the jaws
of the trap. She already had her mental list of obvious pitfalls; now she
turned it into a written catalogue, which grew with dismaying speed as she
surveyed her surroundings.

They
were taking no chances, for instance, with injury or sickness. She had never
seen the threshold of an automatic
medicare
cabinet
set so low. If she so much as slept the clock around, she would
waken
to find a snuffling servo making metabolic checks
beside the bed, and behind it, alert for the trigger-signal, the prosthetics
responsible for the fiction of "live human occupancy" and hence
continued ownership of the planet.

Just
a second, though.
She
narrowed her eyes as something half-shadowed at the base of the
medicare
master unit caught her attention. Even someone
seriously enough injured to require hundred percent life-support of the
quality available here was entitled to compulsory repatriation—Abdul
Gamaliel
Higgins versus the
Systemwide
Communications Company, 2018: "An individual legally alive in respect of
the Celestial Bodies Occupancy Act is legally alive in respect of any other
contract or obligation
whatsover
."
That had been an interesting case—the only one on the galactic
statute book where the proxies who had fought the case had been held unable to
benefit from the success of it.

In short: you
cant
have it both ways.

But
the
Zygra
Company seemed determined to do so. There
was something at the very back of this
medicare
unit
which she didn't think belonged. Cautiously she fetched
a
circuit-tracer and began to work out what it was. Before touching anything,
of course, she spoke to the impersonal recorders monitoring her every movement.

"I
suspect a malfunction in
part of the automatic equipment and propose to verify the suspicion
. '
Inspection for the purpose of verification or repair of
non-manually operated equipment does not constitute sabotage'—the Lyon
et
Marseilles Freight Company versus
Adolphe
ben
Hossein
, 1992!"

When
she finally did discover the purpose of the mysterious addition to the
cabinet, she was shaking with fury. It was nothing more than a self-fatiguing
resonator plate, attached as one of the seals on the piping from the plasma
store, far below in the station's bowels, to the life-supporting prosthetics
here. To what signal it was sensitive she couldn't be sure, but she suspected
it would resonate to the frequencies generated as
Zygra
One
boomed down to land on the station's steel deck. Broken, it would admit
air to the pipe, and—that would be the end of the supervisor, and of the
company's worry about the cost of repatriation. "In the event of an
employee's decease, funerary arrangements shall be undertaken in accordance
with custom at his place of origin; next of kin may exercise right of
repatriation but the company shall be at liberty to stow the remains in an
unpressurized hold." That was a very recent decision: Relict of Arthur
Wong versus Universal Exploitation, 2176.

Of
course, the fractured plate would have been replaced with a sound one
automatically before the starship's crew emerged to find the
body
....

For
a little while after that she was cast into despair again. There was something
fiendishly subtle about a trap so simple yet so nearly infallible—how could she
ever hope to match the deviousness of the minds who had conceived it?

Yet
as she proceeded with her survey her spirits lightened anew. The
Zygra
Company's planners had themselves been victims of
circumstance. Developing new planets at high pressure—in her earlier image,
homesteading half a continent with scrap equipment—led to a particular attitude
of mind. The ideal aimed at was "turn her on and let her run," and
the more successful the
outworlders
had grown at
achieving high reliability, the less they had worried about modifications and improvements.

They had started, right back
in
the early days of colonization, from a given basis of technical
knowledge. They had been too busy applying what they'd already known to undertake
much original research; their genius-level breakthroughs had been on the
practical, not the theoretical, level. Inspired corner-cutting was no
substitute for
Earthside
-style exhaustive testing.
Earth had the manpower to waste on minor changes for the sake of closer
tolerances, a one percent improvement in energy
consumption,
or even for change's own sake. Fashion was a powerful force at home, but its
return was still
a
novelty among the
outworlders
.

Consequently, when
Kynance
came to look over the machinery running
Zygra
, she
was struck by an aura of obsolescence. It was by far the largest integrated
automatic system in the known galaxy, but for precisely that reason the
Zygra
Company had chosen to incorporate in it tried and
true devices, not ones which lacked adequate field-tests.

The
impact was so unexpected she had difficulty fixing it
in
her mind as real, rather than wishful thinking. She made what
comparisons she could in an attempt to convince herself. Suppose, for instance,
two centuries previous, it had been necessary to build a transport system
across hostile territory-say an African desert. By then, there were hovercraft,
monorails, flying mules and so forth to choose from; nuclear power reactors,
linear induction motors, fuel-cells, and a number of other possible power
sources had been known.

But
the decision would almost certainly have been for conventional diesel
locomotives hauling conventional trains on steel rails of a type already
familiar for a hundred and fifty years or more. In other words, the automatics
controlling
Zygra
were to faster-than-light starships
as a railroad to
a
nuclear power-station.

Which
left her in approximately the position of someone trying to stop a diesel
locomotive with sheer ingenuity:
a
tough
problem, but not beyond a solution.

Self-preservation
came first, though. Actual interference would have to wait.

Even the simplest of her
necessary tasks—rigging remote extensions for the central alarm—was tricky, not
because she couldn't take precautions against infringing the contract, but
because so many things that sprang to mind for the purpose, simply weren't
available.

She
could say to the recording machines, "In my opinion
j
the alarms are inadequate to comply with the conditions of my
employment—von Hagen and
Machetti
versus Ice V Con- |
struction
Company of Titan, 2119:
'Ceteris paribus
the ex-
1
perience
of employees in the field carries more
weight
than ]
predictions by even the most up-to-date
computers not at the ] site of operations.' "

But
she couldn't make a qua-space signal relay out of
Zy-gran
wood and old plastic food-boxes.

Somehow she managed to jury-rig her alarm
switches. Heartened, she tackled the self-fatiguing plate on the
medicare
cabinet, exchanging it for a proper seal
impervious to anything but a carbide-tooth saw. During that job, she established
that the station's central computers were indeed well primed with legal
information. The moment she touched the plasma pipe, a warning about her
contract dinned into her ears. She waited till it was over, then quoted Lyon
et
Marseilles versus
Hossein
again, and tried a second approach. This time the computer didn't raise any
objections.

Wonderful!
How about a less directly applicable precedent? She thought hard for ten
minutes and settled on
Yukinawa
, dos
Passos
and
Szerelmy
versus
Ge
Nuclear Fusion Monopoly, 2087: "Modifications to
automatic machinery which improve its function without detriment to the
purposes of the proprietor do not constitute grounds for voiding a contract of
employment."

At this point she had a feeling she detected
a somewhat unhappy grinding sound in the machinery below the deck on which she
stood. A grim smile flitted over her face. The computer's experience obviously
didn't include supervisors of
her
stamp.

Later,
for the sake of company, it might be fun to rig some vocal-communication
circuits with the central computer—no substitute for another human being, but
better than nothing.

Although
the harvest was over, the area surrounding the main station was still swarming
with undersized pelts. It was also, and not by coincidence, at
present
the largest area of open water on the planet. The
solar tide which had drawn the pelts to their rendezvous with the starship had
submerged several hundred square miles which ordinarily counted as land by
Zygran
standards: slimy mudflats and patches of silt
temporarily anchored by unconsumed
bondroots
.

But
as the
waterlevel
subsided, so the pelts, and their
herding monitors, and the coating-station and all the rest of the
automatically-controlled substations, would disperse over half the planet's
surface.

If
she wanted to get acquainted at first hand with the whole of her
responsibility, now was the time to do so. She could investigate the unexplored
portions of the main station at leisure, but everything else would shortly be
hull-down over the horizon.

She checked out one of the reserve monitors.
It wasn't intended for transporting passengers, and her weight put the deck
half an inch below water, but it wouldn't sink, and if she fell off she could
always swim back to the main station. Clinging with fingers and toes to the
slippery plastic casing of the handling units, she steered it awkwardly to the
coating-station.

The place stank like a glue factory. That was
a factor she hadn't reckoned with, though it was only to be expected considering
that the whole business of this vessel nearly as big as the main station was to
concentrate, distill and apply a sort of gummy organic jelly to full-grown
pelts. There was probably no time to go back and get a respirator; underfoot
she could sense the vibrations of the drive warming, and very soon now the
vessel would take off in search of specially rich clumps of the weed with which
it started its annual cycle of processing.

Breathing as shallowly as possibly, she
toured the whole of it, and everywhere found evidence for her conclusion about
the technical status of the devices here. She had never studied organic
chemistry properly, but before the boy who had mocked her for not being able to
fix her
skycar
there had been another who had been
insufferably proud of his ability in the garden, and she had crammed enough
horticulture into her head to wipe the grin off his face. This enabled her to
say without fear of argument
(Argument with whom?
muttered an annoying small voice at the back of her mind) that any
competent
Earthside
organochemist
could have increased the efficiency of the coating-station by fifty percent
inside of a week.

She
crossed next to one of the substations which rode herd on the monitors in the
same way that the latter did on the pelts: tracking them, reporting to the main
station their location and the environment they encountered and performing
routine repairs and maintenance. She was barely in time; some instinct was
exciting the pelts, and a gorgeous polychrome stream of them was heading
westwards, compelling the automatics to start scattering. But she was aboard it
long enough to make doubly sure of her conclusions.

"That
cuts the company down to size!" she told the air as she swam back to the
main station—her monitor had answered a call from its parent and was well out
of reach, but she didn't mind the short swim because it gave her the chance to
speak aloud without being recorded. "I must stop thinking of it as a bunch
of infinitely clever villains, and regard it as a belligerent dinosaur: big,
but stupid!"

She
clambered up the side of the main station and stood looking out over the steel
deck with pools of water dripping from her clothes. Now at least she knew what
she had to do. All it would take to save her from infringing her contract was a
mixture of caution and dirty-minded suspiciousness. And once that was settled,
she could let herself relax occasionally. The climate was damp, but at least
it was warm-when the sun broke through, it would be quite pleasant to
he
out here on the deck and acquire an all-over
tan
....

She turned slowly through a
complete circle, a hint of awe coloring her thoughts as she at last took in
what it meant to be in charge of a whole planet almost the size of Earth.

—And
froze, staring at something impossible, incredible, intolerable. In letters of
fire a clause from her contract blazed across her field of vision: a clause she
had thought there was no risk of breaking, but which in this instant she
realized was the one she could not force herself, here, now, to comply with.

Not
if she wanted to keep company with herself for the rest of her life.

Even
a wave is a signal, she realized bitterly. At least she could keep her hands by
her sides. But all that could do was postpone the reckoning. She was already
doomed.