The Medusa Encounter (17 page)

What she now read in Singh’s coded files confirmed the conviction that had been building in her since she’d left Mars. A great many human subjects had passed through Holly Singh’s ungentle hands. An astonishing proportion of them had died. They were the anonymous, the homeless poor, the orphaned . . . those who would never be missed.

Among them, one stood out.

 

Female subject, 18 years, height 154 centimeters, weight 43 kilograms, hair brown, eyes brown, race: white (English ancestry)/
diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia by transferring agency confirmed/
patient complains of constant and severe visual and aural hallucinations/
prescribed treatment, GAF neuro-amplification injection
/

 

complications of autonomic nervous system/
apnea/ elevated body temperature/
convulsions/
patient declared dead at 11:31 P. M
.
/
disposition of body according to conclave directive/
shipment to North America contact without incident/
records edited, successfully transmitted on . . .

On that day, that month, that year. And the dead girl, a nameless runaway washed up in an asylum in Kashmir, appropriated by Singh for her own purposes, could from her appearance have been Sparta’s twin. Her appearance was all they had needed from her—the appearance of her dead body. Singh’s treatment of the girl who was unlucky enough to look like Linda N. was swift and deliberate murder.

Eight years ago Sparta had been a patient in a sanatorium, a building of the same vintage as these and like them, high in the mountains—the Rocky Mountains of North America. She’d been trapped there, mired in her own past, immobilized by her inability to retain new information for more than a few minutes. Her short-term memory had been so effectively eradicated that she could not even remember her doctor’s face.

But the doctor she’d had such difficulty remembering had known how to restore her working memory; he’d done so at the cost of his own life, giving her precious seconds she’d used to escape—in the Snark that had brought her intended assassin.

Hardly a coincidence that, at the time, Doctor Holly Singh should be running a mountain sanatorium, halfway around the globe. Hardly a coincidence that Singh should have developed the neurochip techniques that the doctor had used to save Sparta—the same techniques, in part, that had made Sparta a freak.

One further next-to-impossible coincidence. When the
Queen Elizabeth IV
, with its crew complement of neurologically enhanced chimpanzees, had crashed over the Grand Canyon, and Captain Howard Falcon, Holly Singh’s old friend, had been put back together again, what they could save of his nervous system had depended on the same neurochip technology. Of course, they’d done more to Falcon, much more.

Sparta and Falcon and Steg, the crippled chimpanzee, were all cousins under the skull.

Sparta loaded the whole capacious secret file into her own memory and retracted her spines from the computer ports. She stood in the moonlit office, listening to the keening cries of exotic birds, the cough of a tiger, the chatter of sleepless monkeys in the menagerie.

There were powers at loose in the world that intended to render humans as evolutionarily passé as monkeys and chimpanzees—intended to render the distinction meaningless. Holly Singh was working for them, not for the Council of Worlds, not for the Board of Space Control, and certainly not for the welfare of her patients.

Sparta left Singh’s office and went down the hall. She removed the wire loop from the alarm circuit and closed the window, leaving the neat hole in the glass, then returned and left by the front door. Whether she confronted them now or in the morning hardly mattered. As an officer of the Board of Space Control, she would arrest Dr. Holly Singh. Singh and her servants were helpless to resist.

Humans and machines had been in growing symbiosis for centuries. Sparta was but a slightly precocious form of what was to come, the inevitable melding of human individual and human-generated mechanism. What was she then but what was once called a cyborg?

No
, the dead eighteen-year-old in her cried,
I am human
. A human being corrupted by this
artificial
dependence, these prostheses that made up for no natural or necessary deficiency but were forcibly grafted onto and into her by others with inhuman programs of their own.

Yet she had become dependent upon her prostheses, even while telling herself she used them only for the good, for the sake of humanity, for the sake of discovering what had become of her parents, supposedly murdered, and for the sake of finding those who might have murdered them, and for the sake of eliminating those evil beings who, in giving her these powers, had given her the power to fight back.

And she loved the power.

 

At this moment she was afraid of nothing.

She walked boldly down the moonlit path, a confident woman who believed that her extraordinary senses protected her from anything the night might hold, and never heard the creature who came out of the shadows behind her.

XV

He dropped out of the trees onto her back and for a horrible instant, as her nostrils flooded with the odor of the beast, she thought he would rip her head from her shoulders with his leathery black hands and black-haired muscular arms. Yellow fangs grazed her scalp.

Her strength was a tenth of his and, under ordinary circumstances, her quickness—even enhanced as it was—was a bare match for a chimpanzee’s. Desperately she jerked and bent, evading his fangs, breaking his grip on her throat, and rolled, slipping out of the grasp of his clinging, uncoordinated legs. Poor Steg’s damaged central nervous system had not prevented him from displaying patience and stealth, but his motor control was severely impaired.

Having failed to kill her immediately, he was at her mercy. He fled, and she sprinted after him. As the terrified chimpanzee ran and stumbled along the path, stretching his arms and vaulting on his knuckles, he hooted and shrieked in anguish, and his hoots and shrieks were immediately taken up by all the sleepless animals caged in Holly Singh’s private menagerie.

Something had metamorphosed in Sparta. Her mercy had been strained in these last weeks and days, and she had no more compassion for this miserable half-ape than Artemis for a stag. The grace and speed that would have made a dancer of her had she chosen to be a dancer now bore her in an arc of vengeance.

Ten meters down the path she sprang onto his back and brought him screaming to the ground. The loop of wire she had used to bypass the clinic’s alarm system went around his throat and cut off his panicstricken calls.

She used violent leverage. He died in seconds.

Death. The sucking vortex that beckoned her, which she had resisted with less energy, less conviction, as the months wore on. A trail of death, until this moment none of it of her volition but leading her on, as if she were gravitationally attracted to a moving nexus of destruction. On Earth. Venus. The moon. Mars.

And her parents—dead or not, they were gone. Laird, or Lequeu, or whatever the shadowy figure who dogged her path now called himself, had tried with all his power to murder them. That was enough, and although he was out of her reach, others were not. She anticipated Holly Singh’s return, for now she understood very well why Singh had snuck away.

Steg—who understood commands a bit more complex than Singh had pretended—had been ordered to murder Sparta in her bed. He was on his way to do it when she encountered him on the path. To have been killed by him would have seemed a tragic and most regrettable accident. Surely Dr. Singh would have wept copious tears, and the deranged Steg would, sadly, have been put to death. But Singh deserved to die more than Steg.

When Sparta raised herself from the corpse and stood erect there was a moonlight gleam in her eye more savage than any light she had seen in the chimpanzee’s. She, who thought she hated killing. She, who lived to prevent murder and to bring murderers to merciful justice. She stood with the blood of a crippled animal dripping from the wire in her hands and with the keening cries of other terrified animals filling the night. In their calls was something less than mourning but more than fear—the advertisement of death.

Sparta found, as she searched her soul and reminded herself of what she had supposed she believed in, that not only could she dredge up no objection to killing Holly Singh, she could even look forward to that event with a certain savor.

With this newfound taste for blood, however, there came a heightened sense of the refined pleasures of the hunt. She decided that, after all, she would defer immediate revenge on Dr. Singh in favor of bigger game.

A long run along the ridge in the thin, cold air brought her to Darjeeling town. The rising sun came up from the mountains toward China, not like thunder but like cold fire; her breath steamed in front of her, and she thought as she watched it that the searing ball of yellow flame was challenging her directly, in the most intimate terms, to cease from patient questioning and to act—that the rising sun had transfigured her. To her right, the roof of this world. To her left, the inhabited universe and its deity, speaking to her in spears of light.

A few purchases in the market and a visit to the latrine behind a sweet shop and she was ready to board the morning’s first train. Riding the chugging antique down through the tea terraces toward the plains, she was just another bedraggled tourist girl in search of enlightenment and
bangh
.

By the time the little train reached its terminus, Sparta’s thinking had evolved. It seemed to her that her role as Ellen Troy, inspector for the Board of Space Control, had finally and completely outlived its usefulness. For what she was about to do, what was a badge but an encumbrance? She walked across the train platform to the nearest infobooth. All by itself—as she had so often proved in her short history—it was a ticket to wealth and mobility and invisibility. A smile tugged at her perpetually open lips. She rarely smiled, and this one was not pleasant.

A day after leaving Darjeeling, she walked into the Varanasi shuttleport. Her eyes were liquid brown, her hair was as long and straight and black and sleek as Holly Singh’s own, and her sari would have graced a maharani. When she spoke to the cabin attendant on the hypersonic jitney to London, her accent was perfect BBC, enlivened by musical hints of India.

But when she left Heathrow for London by magneplane three hours later, her hair was once more redgold and curly and her eyes were sparkling green.

 

The next morning she woke up stiff and cold, to the sound of black rain beating against her apartment’s single small window. Winter had come to London.

The videoplate brightened to the image of a young man wrapping his rosebud lips around his words as if he were sucking a lozenge. “Ronald Weir of the BBC reporting. Here is the morning’s news. The Board of Space Control has just announced the seizure of the freighter
Doradus
. The vessel was discovered abandoned in a sparsely populated region of the main asteroid belt. The
Doradus
and its crew have been sought for several months in connection with the attempted robbery of the artifact known as the Martian plaque. A Space Board spokesperson notes that the
Doradus
was discovered to have been heavily armed with sophisticated weapons of a type restricted to use by authorized agencies of the Council of Worlds. The registered owners of the vessel have been approached with new inquiries.” The announcer shuffled his papers. “In Uzbekistan, South Central Asia Administrative Region, religious leaders have announced a cease-fire in the nine-year-old hostilities . . .”

Sparta put on one of Bridget Reilly’s plainest dresses and sweaters. After a quick breakfast of soy paste on bran, she wrapped her threadbare Burberry around her and made her way through the gray rain to her office in the city.

Without a good morning to anyone, she hung up her coat and umbrella and sat down at her terminal.

To date, no bureaucracy had been safe from her electronic inquiries. Like ivy on a stone wall, her mind had reached into the crevices of every bureaucratic facade, patiently prying loose a flake of information here and a flake there, until massive structures of obstinacy and deceit had crumbled.

The Board of Space Control operated the most sophisticated computer nets in the inhabited worlds; an entire bureau within the Board was devoted to perfecting computer security, and another whole bureau was dedicated to ruining the work of the first. There was a way, only one, to maintain perfect security in a computer: complete isolation, not allowing the machine to talk to any other—and for the Space Board’s purposes, that sort of security was useless.

Sparta—although she was not supposed to be—was thoroughly familiar with the intricacies of the Space Board’s primal and fractal encryption systems. When all else failed and she chose to take the time, the computer behind the bone of her forehead could break encrypted codewords by sheer number-crunching power. Thus, in the long run, she could peek into any file she wanted to see. Much more easily, she altered files and created new files as she needed them.

Information was an ocean, one she swam in freely.
XVI

“The Prime Directive states that in any contact between humans and unknown forms of life, the human explorers shall take whatever steps are necessary to avoid disturbing the unknown forms. There follow quite a few footnotes and clarifications, of course, but that’s the gist of it.”

“An excellent principle; one we lobbied for with great energy.” Dexter Plowman looked alarmingly like his sister, with gaunt face, bristling brows, and a tight cap of crimped, gray-black hair. “And successfully, of course.”

Blake and the two Plowmans were trudging briskly northeastward along a seemingly endless, garbagefouled beach. To their right, tired surf the color of tea slumped against the sand. To their left rose the twisted and blackened ruins of Atlantic City.

Arista had tracked her brother to this bleak shore, where he was making a personal inspection—and incidentally providing the mediahounds with photogram opportunities—in preparation for his next big suit against the government. The mediahounds having been reluctant to leave the parking lot and fill their shoes with sand, Blake had Dexter and Arista alone long enough to make his pitch.