The Gap into Madness: Chaos and Order (19 page)

“I just
care what you do.”

“Thank
you.” In despair Angus mocked Vector’s more tolerable gratitude.

Morn
studied him with the same cold and bloody determination her father must have
felt when
Starmaster
went after
Bright Beauty
; when he fixed his
targ on
Bright Beauty
and ordered Angus’ destruction. Her tone and her
loathing seemed as steady as steel.

“Are
you really going to send a report when we reach human space?”

Angus
glowered, not at her, but at the contents of his datacore. “Yes.”

“What
are you going to say?”

He didn’t
know the answer — or he wasn’t allowed to reveal it. “What do you want me to
say?” he countered.

“Tell
them about Davies,” she answered promptly. Perhaps there was no hesitation left
in her. She may have had no remaining scruples except the ones on which her
definition of herself rested. “Tell them why the Amnion want him. Tell them the
Amnion may have gotten a sample of the drug from my blood.

“And be
sure to tell them the Amnion are experimenting with gap components to reach
near-C acceleration.”

“Yes,
sir, Captain Hyland, sir,” Angus sneered. What else could he do? She surpassed
him in every dimension. And he was helpless to turn off his anger and grief. “Anything
else?”

She
shook her head.

“What?”
he pursued sarcastically. “No mention of zone implants? No mention of Captain
Sheepfucker’s adventures in creative treachery?”

Morn
held his gaze. She might have been daring him to outface her. “You can do that
if you want. But I hope you won’t.”

“In
that case —” He leaned toward her threateningly. His prewritten instructions
permitted that: they didn’t care how badly he scared her. “Get out of my seat.”

He
couldn’t break her, however; not this way; maybe never again. She complied by
rising from the command station and stepping out of his way; but she didn’t
drop her eyes — or the focused demand of her hate.

He
could play that game. The terror bred in his bones was as good as hate. And his
programming gave him an oblique support: it steadied him reflexively when he
was afraid. But he found he didn’t want to fight her on those terms. He’d lost
his appetite for seeing her lose. So he used the motions of sitting in his
g-seat and looking at the information on the command readouts as excuses to
turn away from her; let her go.

Warden
Dios had said,
It’s got to stop.
Angus couldn’t imagine what the UMCP
director meant, but he had his own answer.

This.
This
has got to stop.

Morn
regarded him in silence for a moment or two. When she spoke, her tone had
changed. It was softer, more open; it ached quietly. Like her bruised eyes, it
reminded him that her abhorrence was based on pain.

“How do
you feel about having a son?” she asked. “About having Davies for a son?”

Angus’
heart clenched in a grimace which didn’t show on his face, a spasm which didn’t
touch his body. In more ways than he could bear to examine, Davies was him —
another abused child.
Afterward she used to comfort him as if it were him
she loved, and not the sight of his red and swollen anguish or the strangled
sound of his cries.
The crib and the torture were different: the cost was
the same. If Davies made something more out of it than his father had, that was
due to Morn — to her presence in her son’s mind; to the fact that she surpassed
his father.

Angus
couldn’t bring himself to look up at her. His answer was like a cry from the
core of his being.

“How do
you
feel,” he retorted, “about having gap-sickness — about needing a
zone implant so you won’t go ape-shit and try to kill everyone when we hit hard
g?”

She
sighed to herself. “That bad?” The words might have expressed recognition or
rejection: he couldn’t tell the difference. And yet he seemed to hear a smile
in her voice as she added, “Then I guess we’re both in pretty poor shape.”

With
his peripheral vision, he saw her turn away. But he didn’t watch as she put her
hands on the rails of the companionway and left the bridge. It was already too
late.

How
do you feel about having a son?

She
shouldn’t have asked him that; shouldn’t have opened that door. He could feel
the slats of the crib closing around him, sealing him to his terror. He’d spent
his whole life running away from this, headlong across space and time. Every
act of violence, every atrocity, every instance of destruction, had been a form
of flight: an attempt to hold his own fear at bay by inflicting it on other
people; an effort to stave off his past by consuming others in the present. And
now Morn had translated it across the gap of years and crimes to reach him.

As soon
as it caught up with him, he was finished.

Stop!
he cried out voicelessly.
It’s got to stop!

But
Warden Dios’ unexplained convictions and ambiguous intentions were irrelevant
here. For all its exigencies and compulsions, Angus’ computer was no help to
him. His zone implants replied to the physiological symptoms of panic by
calming him. Thus unwittingly they contributed to the erosion of the defences
he needed most.

Caught
inside
Trumpet’s
hulls and his own skull,
he lay in the crib

with
his scrawny wrists and ankles tied to the slats

while
his mother filled him with pain —

She’d
been a lost woman, as lost as Angus himself. Like her son, she’d thought that
she had no choice about the things that were done to her, or the things she
did.

She’d
been born by accident to a couple of guttergang kids in one of Earth’s dying
urban centres. They had no love for her, of course; and like kids they made her
know that from the day she was born. But they found that she had a couple of
uses. She was a lever with their own parents, a means to extort support or
credit — or a place to hide. And she was another kind of lever with the
crumbling social infrastructures which still struggled — as misguided and
stubborn as most other bureaucracies — to provide some kind of welfare for the
destitute. She wasn’t a child: she was just a tool. Her parents, and later the
entire guttergang, treated her like a tool. They picked her up when they needed
her, and tossed her aside when they didn’t.

This
remained true until she was old enough to have other, more recreational uses.
Then she was picked up more often, tossed aside less. But this was not an
improvement. She grew up illiterate; functionally retarded; dirty and diseased.
By the time she was twelve, she was of no use to herself.

And
then the guttergang to which her parents belonged was slaughtered in a struggle
with a rival power.

‘ Like
other women in other corrupt wars, she became plunder.

As
plunder she was introduced to an experience which society had once called a “gang
bang” and now referred to as “freefall.” After all, a gang bang might be
considered a one-sided orgy. Over time “orgy” became “oh-gee” and then “zero g”:
hence “freefall.” At the hands of the guttergang which had supplanted her own,
she tasted freefall any number of times.

This
might have killed her; perhaps should have killed her. But it didn’t. The gang
kept her alive because of her connection to the welfare infrastructure. And the
welfare infrastructure kept her alive because it was still trying to do its
job. After a certain amount of freefall, she naturally became pregnant, which
increased the scale of support she received. As an act of conscience initiated
by men and women long since dead, for reasons long since forgotten, welfare
provided her with a small room to live in, a bit of food, some baby furniture. But
the bureaucracy supplied no hope: all its other benefits were taken by the
guttergang.

Somewhere
in the process she went privately and irretrievably mad.

Little
Angus was all that belonged to her.

He was
also her only outlet.

Alone
with him in her room, waiting for freefall and death, she began experimenting
with the cycle of abuse and solace which he identified as
the crib.

In a
strange way, her impulse to comfort him after she tortured him was sincere. His
small body seemed to have an almost limitless capacity for pain; his wild
squalls and his red-faced agony gave her an acute frisson of pleasure, at once
guilty and addictive. And the way she cuddled him in her arms and cooed over
him and eased his hurts
as if it were him she loved
felt like the care
she herself needed from the bottom of her heart and had never received.

The
effect on him was quite different, however.

Its
consequences were everywhere, no matter how he fled. His dread of EVA, like his
abhorrence of confinement, came from that source. Yet the more he tried to
escape, the more he carried with him the things from which he ran. Ever since
he’d escaped her and the guttergang, he’d striven with a kind of bleak and
absolute stubbornness — as unselfconscious and self-destructive as the damned —
to replicate on someone else his mother’s look of degraded desperation. As long
as he fought to turn the tables on her, he remained her victim.

Now at
last the logic of his life seemed to have reached its blind conclusion, its
ineluctable cul-de-sac. His victimisation was complete. Just when prewritten
requirements and machine compulsion eased their grip on him, he found that Morn
had the power to put him back
in the crib
. His efforts to change roles
with her had failed: she surpassed him. And there was nothing he could do about
it. He couldn’t even keep his promises to her. The men who’d programmed him
would never let him keep them.

Access-code
Isaac! he cried into the void of his datalink. Priority-code Gabriel! Tell me
it’s going to stop! Tell me what I’m going to do. Let me at least warn her. Don’t
make me be the one who betrays her!

The
silence which answered him felt like his mother’s abject, ravenous laughter.

Alone
on the bridge, Angus Thermopyle bowed his sore head over his board and waited
for Warden Dios or Hashi Lebwohl to destroy him.

 _

 _

Naturally they didn’t do
it by killing him; or by letting him die. Their malice was too profound — and
too oblique — for that. They went about their purposes in other ways.

His
datacore kept his future to itself: it allowed him access to new information
only when it pertained to his immediate present. For that reason he couldn’t
see the several ways in which his masters prepared his ruin until each one took
effect.

However,
none of them had become apparent by the time
Trumpet
reached her window
on human space. His zone implants had interrupted his despair with a few hours
of sleep, a trip to the galley for food; after that he’d coded his report to
UMCPHQ. In addition to describing the outcome of his mission — and of Milos
Taverner’s treachery — he’d included the information Morn desired. And he’d
left out the things she didn’t want mentioned. His message was ready to be
transmitted as soon as
Trumpet
passed within range of a listening post.

As the
gap scout rounded the occlusion of the red giant and approached her window,
Mikka Vasaczk chimed him to say that she was on her way to the bridge. He
responded with an intraship broadcast forbidding anyone else from joining him.
In particular he didn’t want Nick loose on the ship. Or Morn: he ordered Davies
to stay with her so that he could take care of her if
Trumpet
encountered circumstances which required hard manoeuvres on the other side of
the gap. If he hadn’t needed Mikka, he would have told her to stay away, too.
Whatever Lebwohl or Dios were about to make him do, he didn’t want witnesses.

She
arrived with two g-flasks of coffee. She handed one to him, then seated herself
at the second’s station and belted herself down. Some of the knots in her
expression had loosened. She didn’t smile, but she no longer looked like a
woman for whom smiling was impossible. Apparently she was glad of a chance to
be useful.

After
studying her board for a moment or two, she asked, “What do you want me to
handle?”

“Targ,”
Angus answered brusquely. He’d already eased a certain number of his coded
restrictions on her board. “We’re linked on scan, data, and astrogation. As
long as we don’t run into trouble, I want you to calculate headings and
distances for the Valdor system — put a course up on the main screen. Update it
as often as you can. I’m counting on you to keep us away from Station itself,
or the shipping lanes. We’re looking for a bootleg lab, not a dogfight with
some paranoid orehauler.”

Mikka
nodded. Slowly at first, then with more confidence, she began to run commands.
In moments a macro-plot began to form on the screen, displaying a purely
hypothetical direct line between the red giant and Massif-5. Distances
accumulated as the plot completed itself; but the line was only hypothetical
because it took no account of gravity wells, intervening bodies, or
Trumpet’s
gap capabilities.