Mute (21 page)

“Those specific ones, yes. But they should be typical of the pattern of futures awaiting you, so are valid in that sense, just as the pattern of my own futures is valid.”

“Now I think I appreciate your problem. The future visits really aren’t of much use to you. Still, you must have found at least one of your specific demises.”

“Correct.”

“Who did that one?”

“You did.”

Knot laughed. “When I had you turn yourself off for my own experiment. That doesn’t count!”

“Incorrect. This was on another track, in which I never contacted you. The enemy contacted you, through a randomized private missive that I was unable to trace to its source, and gave you information that enabled you to act.”

“Now, wait: Missives don’t come from nowhere! You could have analyzed the material, found out where it was made—”

“Pointless. Were you to receive a book on how to fashion a bomb, knowing that tens of thousands of similar copies had been printed and distributed, it would do you no good to locate the publisher. You could make no legal connection between the publisher and the person who used that text to make a bomb with which to perpetrate a crime.”

“I keep running up against that! All right, I’ll accept that you couldn’t trace the fundamental source in time. What did I actually do?”

“You came three years from now, used your psi power to elude my defenses, and turned me off. I obviated that by contacting you on this track.”

“But you didn’t need to go to all the trouble to bring me here and tell me about it! You could simply have had me assassinated.”

“I investigated the possibility that a successful agent for one side might make as successful an agent for the other aide. Your potential seemed excellent. Therefore I set about converting you.”

“I see. This time you have shown me the consequence of the action I might otherwise have taken in three years. But I suppose there were hundreds or thousands of similar attempts, using similar dupes, so that they came at you—will come at you—like a swarm of flies, too many for you to intercept?”

“Correct, in essence.”

“But now you’re on this track, and other forces are closing in. Have you isolated any other of your turn-offs?”

“Several. But as I explained, I was unable to trace the root causes.”

“CC, I must seem awfully slow to you. I hate to make you keep rehashing material, but some things I just can’t choke down easily. If one man, like me, comes and turns you off, maybe it is random, not a part of any organized conspiracy, so you just have to take your chances. But if there is anything organized, you should be able to handle it.”

“There are organizations dedicated to my elimination. But I am not permitted to strike at them merely on suspicion. I must demonstrate a tangible and legal connection between such an organization and the one who destroys me. In your case I had no such connection. I could not demonstrate your motive.”

“My motive would have been no secret! I felt the galaxy would be better off without you. Many people feel that way.”

“Correct. Yet you had to have some specific imperative to seek me out, and some information on how to turn me off, for access to my vulnerable points is not easy for the uninitiated. A general distrust of me, and a booklet of inflammatory oratory are not sufficient. What caused you to leave your secure enclave, and how did you obtain the more specific information needed for the task? Many other people were exposed to the same overt stimuli you were, yet only you reacted, in that instance. Many others tried to eliminate me, because of other stimuli, but only you succeeded. Some other factor is involved. Probably it was psi, for I am unable to detect most psi powers directly, such as telepathy. Yet I do have the most formidable collection of psi-mutants in the galaxy as my employees, and they should have been able to detect foreign psi. Circumstantial evidence suggests that no such contact was made with you.”

Knot considered. “So in that future, Finesse didn’t come for me, and Mit and Hermine didn’t give me the control code. So if I was contacted telepathically, someone else must have been behind it; I was just the pawn. Except that you don’t think telepathy was it.”

“Correct. That is the hidden force—in your case and the others’. Any person who feels as you did is a potential missile against me, and that force even now is hurling them at me. Several hundred people make the attempt each day, unsuccessfully.”

“Several hundred a day!” Knot exclaimed.

“Fortunately, I have formidable defenses, both mechanical and psi. Only this remote terminal is vulnerable; I need it to make private contacts with agents who would otherwise be watched by the enemy.”

Knot shook his head. “The more I go over this, the more trouble I have grasping it. It seems to me you could put some kind of a tracer on those who come, searching for the common theme.”

“The great majority of assassins are ignorant. They believe they can hide a laser pistol, take ship to CCC, and fire at some key terminal. There is no force behind them, and I would waste my effort searching for it. The few who have real destructive potential are lost amidst the crowd of those who do not—and many of those have no overt knowledge of their mission, and die before I can interrogate them. I cannot trace their motives far into the past; what changes in them is mental. Their lives are ordinary until they are abruptly motivated to act against me. Thus I am confined to the successes on the future tracks, for I can investigate them in the present, while taking no overt action to alert the people or their motivators. You are such a person; I believe the enemy will contact you, because in the future it has done so. If you are actually an agent of mine—”

“Suddenly a dim bulb lights at the end of the tunnel of my mind!” Knot exclaimed. “I become the trap, the bait for the enemy. Through me, you will at last gain what you need. Assuming you can convert me to your cause.”

“Even so, the trails are well concealed. The motive agency may be only a front for a more subtle agency, itself a front for another. I cannot trace such motivations far in the present. I lack the proper investigative capacity. I have virtually no power on most planets; only in space am I supreme. The enemy is highly alert for my operatives, and foils their attempts even as I foil the enemy operatives. But the power of the enemy is growing like a dark tide, and if I do not locate the nucleus soon—within the year—it will become strong enough to overthrow me regardless. Then there will be anarchy in the galaxy.”

There was a silence. Knot realized that CC had done a lot of investigating and a lot of thinking, and that the computer was up against a really capable and subtle enemy. There might even be a counter-computer operating, anticipating and voiding CC’s moves. Since CC had a galaxy to run, it could not devote its full effort to self-preservation, without letting go of the very thing it was protecting: galactic civilization. The enemy computer, however, could devote its entire capacity to the sole purpose of torpedoing CC.

“Are you ready for the next future?” Drem inquired.

“No,” Knot said. “I came here determined to present my case against CC and return to my enclave. Instead, CC has presented its case to me. It has shown me that I lack the ability to run the galaxy, or even to set meaningful policy. It has shown me that my mind is not suited to handling the complex concepts of strategy and intrigue. I am not leadership material.”

He took a deep breath, looking at Finesse. “I have been persuaded. CC knows best. I renounce the Emperorship, and agree to serve as an agent of CC in trying to trace down the source of the threat to it.”

“Oh, Knot!” Finesse cried, throwing her arms about him.

“That, too,” he agreed, enfolding her.

We told you,
Hermine thought smugly.
You wanted to join us all along. Ever since you saw up her leg.

“Well, at least I put up a fight,” Knot said, giving the weasel a mental stroke as he pinched Finesse’s bottom.

PART II:
Mutilation

CHAPTER 6:

Knot drove up to the enclave in a rented taxi, paid off the car, and watched its autopilot drive it back toward the spaceport. The guard at the gate challenged him, not recognizing him, and Knot explained that he was a transferee.

“Report to the placement office,” the guard said, bored. He was a man whose arms fractured into a dozen or so spaghetti-like extremities; he had been dubbed “Mister Medusa” and took pride in the designation. Technically he was a mod-mute rather than a min-mute, but the line between what constituted minimum mutancy and moderate mutancy was somewhat arbitrary. If a mod-mute or even a max-mute could make it in a min-mute enclave, and there were no complaints, the authorities let it go. Knot had known him for years, but of course the man had forgotten Knot.

He reported to the placement office. York’s triple-breasted bosom heaved gladly as he walked in; she, of course, remembered him. “Knot! I thought I’d never see you again, once that normal siren hooked you off to CC.”

“I told you I was only going to defend our enclave,” he said.

Her brow furrowed. “You must have told me when I wasn’t recording; I don’t have a note on it.”

“True. It involved the leadmuter and—you know.”

She knew. The enclave secrets had to be protected. “Did you salvage him?”

Knot had worked that out with CC. “Halfway. He stays here, but CC operatives will assume control of his output. They will try to convert him to iridium production, and give us a royalty amounting to half the value of the gold he used to produce.”

“Iridium is that valuable?”

“About five times the worth of gold, at contemporary prices. CC uses a lot of it in its wiring, I think.”

“So CC’s cut itself in for 50 percent of our share, despite making a 400 percent profit on the changeover,” she grumped.

“But now it’s legal. We can spend all we get, openly.”

Her eyes lighted. “Now
that’s
an improvement. We could only risk 10 percent, before.”

“Yes. I’m rather pleased with myself. We could have lost him entirely. Now we’ll have five times as much disposable income, indefinitely. Maybe I should quit my job here and become a professional negotiator.”

York came to him, spreading her arms. He took her in—but she detected the difference immediately. “Oh, no—that slinky normal got to you, didn’t she!”

“Yes,” he admitted sheepishly. “It was her job to guarantee the good faith of our enclave by—”

“By captivating you,” she finished.

“She was extremely good at it. Nothing against you, York—”

“I never had controlling interest in you,” she said with resignation. “I can’t compete with a beautiful normal. Matter of fact, if I had access to a handsome normal man—”

“Glad you understand.”

“You’ll never see her again anyway.”

“I’m going to make the effort, though.” It would have been easier to let York be satisfied, but his new mission required her informed cooperation. He had to be alert for any contact by the enemy, and had to inform Finesse when it came. If York thought he was to have no further contact with the CC girl, she might interfere with such a message. That could be disastrous. “Face it, York: the damage is done. CC has the leadmuter and Finesse has me. I’m going to go after her.”

“Knot, you’re a mutant! She works for CC. You were just an assignment, her route to the leadmuter. Certainly she’s pretty, and smart, and normal—that’s why you’re nothing to her.”

“I’m a sucker, without a doubt,” he agreed ruefully. Indeed, he was beginning to wonder. His memories did not seem to align perfectly with his logic. Could CC have been stringing him along, dumping him back here with a pseudo-mission to keep him quiet? “I’ll send her a hologram asking for a date.”

“She won’t even remember you!”

“Yes she will. She made holos of all her time with me. She uses the same system you do.”

“Just what sort of time did you spend with her?”

York was getting too jealous. He’d have to fudge it somewhat. “Well, I’d like to believe that I made love to her once or twice, and that—”

“Ha! With a normal? And her making holos of it all?”

“Uh, well—”

“In any event, that means CC knows all about your—”

“CC always did. I found that out. Fortunately, it’s not a talent CC can use, outright.” That had been something of a comedown. He had assumed CC would co-opt his services the moment it ascertained his psi-status and obtained his agreement to work for it, but in fact CC had not been very much interested. They had hammered out the leadmuter compromise and that had been that. In fact, he had never actually interviewed CC directly; Finesse had taken him instead to an available terminal on a closer planet, a chicken world. He was disgruntled.

“You were gone four days,” York exclaimed. “Allow two days for travel, to and from. You cooled your heels for two days to get the leadmuter compromise?”

“I did. But it was surely worth it.”

“CC’s more efficient than that! Even granted that it was giving you only a millionth of its attention, while it coordinated all the diskship schedules of the galaxy and poked its awareness into all sorts of private business elsewhere, it still shouldn’t have taken that long. There had to have been more. Could some of your memory have been blotted out?”

That was a telling thrust. Knot was used to doing it to others, amused at their problems remembering him. Was he now getting a taste of what it felt like? Certainly CC had the facilities to erase selected memories, or to suppress them for a time. Drug/hypno therapy—painless removal of key information.

“It could be,” he admitted reluctantly. “But to what point? Had CC wanted me as an active agent, CC could have taken me. Why interview me, then blot out the memory and turn me loose with a passive mission?”

“As a gesture of contempt,” she suggested. “Or to keep you out of its agent’s hair. If you’re pinned to one planet by a make-work mission, all she has to do is stay off that planet.”

Knot began to get angry. “Damn it, I didn’t like CC before, and I like CC less now. Why disrupt my life for four days, to show how unimportant I am?”