Mute (7 page)

“A genuine archaic hundred-cent note?”

“Or equivalent in service. Women have been known to do a lot for a dollar.”

Don’t try to fence with that predator; she’ll eat you up,
Hermine warned.

“Hermine thinks I’m a rat and you’re a weasel.”

Finesse stretched, elbows bent, breasts flattening under the cloth of shirt and jumper. “Some rats are attractive enough.”

“And some weasels.” But he had a challenge to rise to: the proof or disproof of precognition. “What’s to stop me from just walking out of here, now, a rat that slips the trap?”

She gestured at the effects continuing beyond the mouth of the cave. “That.”

The electrical display was at its height. Every tree radiated streams of light, illuminating the landscape so brightly it was difficult to watch. Knot was not sure what such a flow of current would do to his body and brain, and did not care to experiment. On the other hand, he knew it was not safe at this time to approach the leadmuter. To that extent the precognition was correct. He would have to remain here.

But he did not have to be seduced into anything! Finesse was lovely, and she was a normal, and his memory of his last engagement with her—and the timely and graphic reminder of it she had provided via the holograph—fired his imagination and desire. But he had willpower, and he would not sell his conscience for sex.

Yes you will,
Hermine thought.
Her net is closing over you already. She obtained a distance precog about the storm, and timed this visit to coincide. You never had a chance.

Shall we make a wager?

No. I never take easy prey. You cannot win. Mit knows.

Mit can’t know. A storm he can predict; it has no self-will. I am a man. My fate is not predetermined.

It is in this respect.

“Whatever are you two thinking about that distracts you from the immediate prospect?” Finesse murmured, self-assured and twinkling.

“Free will or not free will.”

She smiled, and again he felt the impact. Oh, she knew how to use her assets! “As William Ernest Henley put it in ‘Invictus’: ‘It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishment the scroll; I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my Soul!’”

Knot considered her curiously. “Which side are you on?”

“I’m on your side, Knot. And on CC’s. I know what’s best for you. That’s why I must work to reconcile the two of you; you belong together.”

“I have no use for CC! I refuse to join it. My free will will not permit it.”

“So you prefer to argue with Mit? This is futile.”

“I defend my right to pursue my own destiny!”

“Your unconquerable Soul,” Finesse agreed. “I like it.”

“You really believe in this stuff, don’t you! You think everything will come out exactly as the crab predicts.”

“I
know
it will. But that doesn’t mean you are in any way under duress.”

“This is a contradiction!”

“Not at all. It simply means that your free will will bring you to CC.”

“I could knock you out and toss you into the electricity. Neither your faded memory nor your fouled-up recording would ever betray the truth. You cannot force me to join!”

Finesse put her hands on his shoulders. In the flickering electric light her face was animated despite its stillness, the shadows leaping across nose, lips and brows. She was eerily beautiful. “Knock me out. Throw me away.”

Of course he could not. “Pointless. Your memory and recording will be washed out anyway, by my psi and the storm. But CC has the prior recording. I can’t hide any longer. But I still don’t have to join.”

Finesse smirked knowingly. Knot threw his arms about her, bore her back against the rock, and kissed her savagely. She offered no resistance.

He drew back. “No! This is how you’re doing it! Seducing me.

You showed me how good it could be, with your sophisticated subtle expertise, getting me hooked; then you carefully reminded me with the holo, making sure that hook was tight; now you’re putting your price on it. You figure I’m already addicted. You think I’ll throw away my conscience for your favors.”

“I wouldn’t respect you if you did.”

“So it’s all right with you if we just lie here a while, wait out the storm, then go back to the main enclave?”

“It’s all right with me if you try to do that. But I would be deceiving you if I said I thought you’d succeed. You will join CC before we leave here, or at least make a sufficient commitment.”

“I submit I will not—and that you will not remember any of this, and this time will have no recording to remind you. You will have either to turn me in for hiding the leadmuter, or let me go entirely. I have beaten you, this time.”

Fool, Hermine thought, as Finesse smiled complacently.

Knot plowed on heedlessly, “You’re all locked into your brainwashed belief in the machine, in nonsensical psi. Well, you may have nabbed the leadmuter, but not me.”

“You’re repeating yourself,” Finesse said. “Next, you’re supposed to plead the welfare of your enclave.”

“Though why you want to take the leadmuter away from his only joy, to the detriment of our fine enclave—” Knot broke off, realizing that he was proceeding exactly as she predicted. The precognitive crab was probably keying her in. The very thing he was trying to disprove, mocking him!

“That I can answer in a manner you can understand,” Finesse said, adjusting herself on the rock for greater comfort. Knot realized that he was still halfway embracing her, and drew back farther. “You are evidently using this mutant to produce gold, a metal of unquestionable value for sculpture and coinage and the plating of assorted objects and the illumination of fancy manuscripts. Has it occurred to you that he might as readily produce platinum, which is more valuable than gold, or iridium, which is several tines as valuable as platinum? With proper management, the value of his metallic output might be multiplied tenfold, with no inconvenience to him. He might even like iridium better.”

“Well—”

“CC is aware of that prospect. That’s CC’s job—to coordinate mutant talents, to the best advantage of humanity. You are largely wasting the gold you have here, in the interest of secrecy. Suppose we tuned the leadmuter to something really precious, like crystallized carbon—diamond—and granted your enclave a percentage of the proceeds? You could have more profit from that than from all your present gold, and the leadmuter would be happy, and it would all be legal. The leadmuter would not even have to move from this cave. CC expediters would be provided to attend to all his needs. He could be much better off than he is now.”

Knot looked at her cynically. “CC is offering that?”

“Not necessarily. I’m merely making the point that CC takes good care of mutants, especially the ones with special psionic powers. If you really care about the welfare of the leadmuter—”

She was becoming uncomfortably persuasive. He
did
care about the leadmuter, and knew that what she offered was probably the best possible situation for the old mutant—and for the enclave. To keep all that they had now, plus the intangible benefit of legitimacy... “What assurance do I have that CC would honor such a commitment?”

“Practicality. On bucolic worlds like Nelson, the best bovine milkers are the ones who are the most pampered. The most productive hens—”

“And this is the hen with the gold eggs,” he agreed. “All right, I bow to expedience. If CC will make a formal royalty commitment, and eschew recriminations, penalties—”

“I have no doubt it will—if you acquaint it with the facts I will have forgotten.”

“Making me an agent of CC! Is
that
what Mit means?”

“A hint of it. You will have to do what you feel is best for the interests you serve. In this case, the leadmuter and the mutant enclave. You aren’t going to hurt a number of mutants just to spite CC.”

“Why do I have the sinking feeling that all is foreordained?” he grumbled rhetorically.

“Because it is.”

He had walked right into that one. “
My
service isn’t! The leadmuter is one thing, but—”

“An analogy, if you will,” Finesse said, adjusting her skirt to show a trifle more leg. His eye was of course drawn to it. The flickering light made the shadow between her thighs jump forward and back, as though beckoning. He wished he could run his hand into that shadow, and knew that he could—which was why he could not. The moment the fish did more than nibble at the lure...

“You think of the leadmuter in terms of precious metals or stones,” Finesse continued as if blithely unaware of the lure of leg and shadow. “But he may be wasted in that capacity. Did you ever think what transmutation of substance entails?”

“It is an exercise in futility to speculate how a mutant performs,” Knot said. “The processes of the brain are in many respects too complex for the brain itself to comprehend. Somehow it taps into a source of power no machine can even detect, and uses it to do things no machine can do as readily. If laboratories could duplicate any portion of true psi, they would have done so long ago.”

“I was not referring to the mutant, but to the effect.” She twitched a muscle in her thigh, and Knot finally had to look away, lest his battle be lost right here. “Do you know how nature produces lead?”

Knot focused on that as though grasping a lifeline. “Never thought about it. Isn’t it one of the elements, the basic forms of matter from which all others are made? Created in a supernova by heat and compression and whatnot? As with copper, silver and gold? I do know it is one of the four most used metals of the industrial age, or used to be.”

“Start with the radioactive element thorium 232,” she said briskly. “It has a half-life—you know what half-life is?”

“What I have here.”

She did not smile. “It is the time it takes for a substance stance to lose half its radioactivity.”

“Why not double it and take the whole life?”

“Because it is not a linear progression. It’s a percentage loss. It takes just as long to halve the remaining radiation as it did the first time, and as long to halve it again. A theoretically endless progression. So for convenience—”

“I get it. What does this have to do with lead? I understood lead was not radioactive.”

“Thorium 232 has a half-life of close to fourteen billion years. As it—”

“Fourteen billion years!” he exclaimed. “That’s longer than they used to think the universe existed! Who was standing there with a stopwatch, timing it?”

“Rates of decay are calculable. Now stop playing the ignoramus and let me get on with—”

“The seduction?”

“In my fashion. If the physical appeal is not immediately effective, the intellectual one may be. Unless you have some other approach to recommend?”

“No, I’m sort of interested. I’ve never been intellectually seduced before.”

“As the thorium breaks down, it transmutes naturally into radium 228, with a half-life of a scant seven years. Then into actinium 228—actually the radioactive elements have different names, but I’m simplifying for convenience—”

“How nice. Simplify some more.”

“With a half life of about six hours.”

“That’s simplifying almost too rapidly. From fourteen billion years to six hours?”

“Then into thorium 228 for two years, and radium 224 for three and a half days, and radon 220 for one minute—”

“That’s certainly speeding up! From six hours to one minute. But—”

“And polonium 216 for sixteen one-hundredths of a second—”

“Haven’t we gone about as far—or fast—as we can go?” His eyes had drifted to her thighs again, refuge from the sudden complexity of her listing.

“And lead 212—”

“At last I see the relevance!” he cried with relief.

“Which has a half-life of ten and a half hours.”

“Now wait a minute—or maybe ten and a half hours! I thought lead was the end of the line!”

“Some lead is radioactive. After that it becomes astatine for three ten-thousandths of a second, and bismuth for an hour, and polonium 212 for three ten-millionths of a second. I’m speaking in round figures, of course.”

“Of course,” Knot agreed weakly, eyes locked to her legs. He had declined her physical round figure, so she was battering him with mathematical round figures. He should have known when he was well off.

You’re learning,
Hermine’s thought came.

“Then into thallium 208 for three minutes,” Finesse continued as if unaware of the havoc she was wreaking in his mind. “And finally lead 208, which is stable. That’s the thorium series; there’s also the actinium series, which carries through its series of permutations to lead 209. It’s a bit more complicated—”

“I’ll take your word!”

“And the neptunium series, which goes to bismuth 209. And the uranium series, to lead 206. So my point is—”

“That lead in its various forms is the end product of a fantastic exercise of nature. And the leadmuter does it in a single step, in a matter of hours, thereby transcending time as well as matter.”

“But he is not merely accelerating the processes of nature. He is bypassing them, creating lead from substances that are in none of these chains that are not radioactive. In turn he is rendering stable lead into other substances—something that never occurs in nature. Lead is only a stage for him, not the end product. The significance of this ability—”

“I comprehend. This is more of a talent than we thought. We’re just backwater planet mutes. But—”

“Suppose he learned how to transmute radioactive wastes into inert lead? That would solve a problem that has bedeviled man since the onset of the atomic age. That service could be worth more than any precious metals he might make.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Knot admitted, cowed. He had indeed been simplistic in his handling of the leadmuter, relying on the age-old dream of transmuting lead into gold, not realizing that far broader horizons offered.

“CC thought of it, though. That’s CC’s job. To ascertain the maximum value of any mutant’s talent it surveys. It may develop an entirely different use for your leadmuter—one you and I are not even capable of thinking of. None of us have the right to conceal such information from the Coordination Computer.”