This Alien Shore (22 page)

Today he had managed, for perhaps five minutes, not to think about what was happening back home. It took effort. For a Guildmaster to abandon his domain for a year meant leaving his holding in the hands of those who coveted it the most, and for all that the Prima herself had promised to protect his interests, she wouldn't even be aware of the kinds of subtle maneuverings that went on there, not until it was too late to stop them. No outsider could possibly know. You had to be in the middle of things yourself to catch all the cues, you had to be meeting with people who were plotting to bring you down so that you could see them with your own eyes, searching for that one quickened breath or awkward glance which would hint at a rebellion in the making....

He felt helpless here, and frustrated, and at times even angry. There was no point in the last emotion and he knew it, but being human he suffered it nonetheless. The Prima had given him a choice. The Prima had told him he didn't have to go. The Prima had assured him that she could find someone else to carry the precious virus to Masada, so that he could be convinced to sign onto the project. It didn't have to be Hsing.

Only it did.

He knew that he had carried the whole fate of the Guild in his hands, and it was an awesome feeling. He knew that there were maybe ten people at most that the Prima would trust with such an assignment, and that he was the first she had asked. That was worth something, wasn't it? That was the kind of favor he could parlay into power at some later date, an implied obligation on her part that he would save until the day he needed it most. It had seemed, at the time, like that made all the risk worthwhile. But now, eight months later, he wasn't quite so sure. What if he came home to find that he had been ousted from power, and had to climb his way back up from the bottom again? Would he have to waste that precious favor just regaining what this mission had cost him?

It'll all be worth it if we beat this virus,
he told himself.

He wished he could fully accept that. There was a part of him deep inside, a selfish part, that warned him that a dead virus would be damned little consolation if he did indeed lose everything he had. Was that something to be ashamed of, or was it simply part of being human?

“Guildmaster?”

The sudden voice from behind startled him. He turned to find one of the ship's stewards waiting at a polite distance, eyes averted. The man's kaja warned him not to read too much meaning into the lack of eye contact, merely to accept it as an accompaniment of his Variation. He quieted his
nantana
nerves and waited.

“The captain would like to see you,” the man said, and then added, almost apologetically, “if you can spare the time. ”

It took little effort to interpret the man's tone and pick apart its hidden meanings. The captain's real words had been much more forceful, but the steward balked at delivering them precisely as ordered. The last words were strictly his own, meant to ameliorate the aggressive power of the implied command. Not an uncommon blend of messages, in such strained circumstances as these.

How very strange it was, moving into another man's territory, where the title of a Guildmaster meant so little. In any other setting a captain would have bent over backward to see that Hsing didn't take offense. In any other setting a Guildmaster's word was law. But when you locked up five hundred people on a single ship for six months, and gave one man the responsibility of keeping them from killing each other out of sheer boredom, the balance of power shifted accordingly. Hsing didn't like that fact, but he acknowledged it.

“Very well,” he said. Was it his imagination, or did he see the steward's shoulders slump in relief? “Take me to him.”

The captain was in one of the small briefing chambers at the front of the ship, flanking its bridge. Hsing knew it well. He had fought for more than a week at the beginning of the voyage to get Masada access to one of the well-equipped spaces, so that when his work required a more sophisticated display than the vid labs could handle, he could have it. Hsing had won that battle, but barely. No doubt resentment still lingered. No doubt that was half of what this meeting was about.

They'd give him the whole damned ship if they knew what Masada's work was about. Unfortunately,
he thought with a sigh,
we can't tell them that, can we?

The captain waited until the steward had shown him in and left them alone together. He was a sturdy man anchored solidly in the prime of his life, and the joint pleasure and responsibility of his office were written boldly in the lines of his face. Right now it was the lines of tension that showed the most, wrinkling his
simba
kaja. Not a good omen.

“Guildmaster Hsing.” He nodded toward a chair at the far end of the table, but Hsing shook his head. He wouldn't sit while the captain was standing, it would put him at too much of a spatial disadvantage. He saw the captain's eyes narrow briefly as the
simba
assessed his defiance, but what did the man expect? Hsing was the man's superior in every forum but this one, and he wasn't about to let the captain forget it.

A real
simba
would have snarled its annoyance at him now, and stiffened in predatory posture. This man did neither of those things, but Hsing wasn't fooled by that. The reaction might be hidden inside him, but it was there all the same.

“I've been having reports from my stewards of problems on the ship.”

Hsing waited politely.

“First it was the viddie library that was affected. Access slowed down by 10%, then 20%, now 40%. Then some of the vids became unobtainable ... apparently the directory's been dumping its less popular offerings to save space for processing. Now my nutritionist says that his programs are slowing down, which means that meals aren't there when people want them. Not a good thing, on a ship like this. I need people calm. I need them happy. Keeping them that way is my job. Not interfering is yours.”

For a moment he was tempted to simply say what he was feeling:
What the hell do you think I have to do with all that?
But you didn't confront a
simba
like that. An
iru
might try it, or some other kaja that lacked social sophistication, but not a
nantana.

Instead he did the social equivalent of baring his neck. “Of course, I would never interfere with this ship's functioning.”

It worked; several of the harsher lines creasing the man's brow relaxed ever so slightly. “Perhaps you wouldn't. But your companion has.”

“Dr. Masada?” He was genuinely surprised. “He brought his own equipment with him.”

“You asked me a few weeks ago if he could use some of the ship's processing capacity for his research. I said yes, provided he didn't interfere with any of the ship's programs.”

“I'm sure he didn't,” Hsing said quietly. Then, when he saw the captain's expression harden, he added quickly, “Why would he? What would he have to gain?”

Grim-faced, the captain handed him a hardcopy readout, printed on thin white plastic. Fifteen pages: an inventory of net usage since the first day of their voyage. Hsing tried to make sure that his expression revealed nothing as he studied it.

The records clearly showed that Masada had been using the ship's innernet for data processing, and using it freely enough that the system had begun a partial shutdown of peripheral services. Food wouldn't be cut off entirely, of course. Nor would the viddie program, or any of two hundred other systems that the passengers relied upon for survival or entertainment. But the borrowing of a byte or two here, a few million there, had its price. Nineteen of the ship's primary systems were already affected. Twenty-seven more were soon to follow, assuming the current pattern of usage continued. At that rate of consumption, it was estimated that the average ship's program would be running at half-efficiency within days. He could see why the captain was concerned.

When he indicated by looking up that he was finished perusing the document, the captain said to him, “He's your charge. You asked for permission for him to use our system. Very well, you deal with him now. I don't know what the hell he's doing—you say it's top secret stuff, all right then, I won't ask—but I want him out of our system, and I want him out now. We've got more than four months left to this trip, and I'm not going to spend it on a crippled ship.”

Aware that the very air was charged with social pheromones of dominance and conflict, he chose his words carefully. “Of course, Dr. Masada understands his responsibility to you and your ship. No doubt he was unaware of the effect his research was having on your system. I'm sure when I show this to him, he'll make the necessary adjustments.”

“Make sure of it,” the captain said gruffly, and he handed him the inventory.

With great effort Hsing managed to make his exit without any further confrontation. But inside he was seething. No one would treat him like that in his own node. No one. Had the captain forgotten that without the Guild there would be no outworlds to support his little ferry? Had he forgotten just what Hsing's title meant, the kind of power he wielded in his own right? What was a petty inship processor when compared with the kinds of priorities he juggled daily?

But you didn't fight with a man over things like that when the two of you were stuck on the same ship for months yet. It just wasn't worth it. Let him have his petty little kingdom; the stars would belong to Hsing, once he returned to the ainniq.

For now, all he had to do was deal with Masada.

Masada.

At times he wondered if what was going on inside the man's head resembled any process he would recognize, or whether common speech and cultural habits were disguising a conceptual gap so vast that they might well be from different species. But in that sense, all Guerans were aliens to one another, weren't they? The iru only seemed more alien than most to him because he was
nantana
, and all the signals of tone and movement which he relied upon for social intercourse were absent in such a man. Or distorted. Or exaggerated. You couldn't even try to read such a man beyond the surface, you just took his words at face value and tried not to look any deeper.

Ah, he thought dryly,
the joys of Gueran society.

He wended his way through the public parts of the ship, back to the small cabins which were tucked into its rear. It was a pretty empty place this time of the shift; most passengers preferred the roomier public chambers up front, with their viddie screens and gaming tables and the thousand and one diversions provided for their amusement. Here in the back, in these smaller spaces, it was harder to forget that you were locked inside a finite vessel for the better part of six E-months, and if you didn't get along with your neighbors, or needed some new horizon to explore, or simply wanted to be by yourself for a time ... tough luck.

He knocked on Masada's door. Three times in all, before the man responded. That was typical. The door finally opened to some unspoken command, and he saw exactly what he had expected to see.

The professor was sitting before the large vid screen he had brought with him, which was doubtless displaying some coded and incomprehensible interpretation of a computer program. The screen was angled so that Hsing couldn't see just what was on it, but that was all right; he had learned weeks ago that the types of visual patterning Masada used in his work were utterly meaningless to him. Which was just as well. He doubted the
iru
would take kindly to explaining the details of his work, even if Hsing were capable of understanding them.

“Come look at this,” the professor said.

Hsing was startled. Masada wanted him to look at his work? That was a first. Usually the iru treated Hsing's bouts of curiosity as mildly annoying interruptions, and though he gave such explanations as the moment required, he was always anxious to regain the solitude which was his accustomed environment. To be invited to look at the Master's work ... that was an honor indeed, Hsing thought dryly. Almost enough to make him forget that, look as he might, he probably wouldn't comprehend one line of it. Most of it looked like pure chaos to him.

But then he came to where the screen was fully visible, and saw what was on the surface. Not chaos. Not chaos at all. For a moment all other concerns were forgotten, even the one that had brought him to Masada's cabin in the first place.

“What is it?” he asked.

Masada pushed his chair back slowly; his eyes never left the screen. “That,” he said quietly, “is our virus.”

It flowed across the screen with fluid grace, a shape made familiar by every youngster's teaching program. The sheer familiarity of it took his breath away, and for a moment he couldn't even connect what he was looking at to what Masada said it was. A double helix? How was their virus connected to that? Was Masada trying to say that the damn thing had DNA, that it really was alive, in the sense of a biological infection? If so, then the world-famous holist had finally lost all touch with reality. Life was a metaphor for programming, not a description of its true state. Surely even Masada understood that.

“What is it?” he asked again. This time the question meant other things, deeper things. And it sheltered an even larger question:
Have we made a mistake after all? Have we hired an extremist so lost in his holistic fantasies that he can

no longer connect to reality?
The thought made Hsing feel sick inside. Had he put his guildmastership at risk for some fairy tale of a binary Pygmalion? God help this man if that were the case. God help the Prima if it were so, for asking him to come here. Saving the world was one thing. This ... this was just crazy.

But Masada's tone was not the tone of a madman, and it was clear from his voice that he neither knew nor cared what was going on inside Hsing's head. “It's a programming chart of the virus. This is just a section of it, of course—but I assure you, the whole thing looks like this. Perfectly organized, from the first bit of data to the last.” He looked at Hsing for a moment, and it seemed that he smiled slightly. “Life.”