Nemia escorted Hiranimus down to her study where she displayed for him diagrams and Crowe maps of Eron’s fam, none of which meant anything to him, but he nodded sagely while she pointed and zoomed in on critical features as she jabbered.
Eventually he had to put his hand on her wrist to slow her down. “Keep it simple. If I’m going to help you I have to understand what you need me to do.”
She broke off. “I keep forgetting that you’re only a mathematician.” She looked down at her toes, still bare, and curled them. “Okay. We skip the electroquantum physiology. You’ll just have to take my word and do what I say. Accept my assurances that the physiological consequences will be exactly the ones we want.” She met his gaze. “This is the point I want to make: Your emotions don’t count; his mind has to be in exactly the right state of emotional turmoil just before he undergoes the operation. Fail and, postoperation, his fam’s security will kick in and erase what we’ve done and, worse, warn him that we’ve been tampering.”
He gave her the old Imperial salute of a Stars&Ship Assistant Gunner. “Mine is to do and not reason why; I’m good at that.” He’d been trained as an operative and not as a thinker. It made him sad. In time he’d surprise them all.
She took his arm. She didn’t have to say anything sympathetic, but she did anyway, “You’re good at what you do do. I wouldn’t know how to be you. Your mind fascinates me. I’m tempted to throw off my traces and run away with you and Eron to Faraway. Maybe I would if you’d offer me some bait.”
He smiled. He liked this woman. “It wouldn’t work,” he growled. “Too many complications. Maybe we can toil pleasurably together again anon. Right now we have to work out the details of the job we’re going to do on Eron.”
“I’ll miss you,” she said sadly.
“It can’t be helped. I’m doomed to be on the move.” “There is a last something I can do for you while we’re here in my makeshift lab. I shouldn’t—but I will. You hate that Murek Kapor persona, don’t you?”
“He’s not me; he’s a wimp. I’m glad he’s gone.”
“He’s not gone. He’s just deactivated. The Oversee can re-activate Murek Kapor again anytime they need him. From a distance, too. I was the one who installed him; I know. Let me erase him for you.”
“Without authorization?”
“Why not? Who will ever suspect? It’s easy. Your specialized fam was built from the ground up to be meddled with. Your parents had plans for you. Tailored persona on demand, that’s you. Subaltern, that’s you. All I need to destroy Murek are the special Oversee access codes—and I have those since I already used them once.”
He stood indecisively. She said nothing. He said nothing. It was tempting. He had already vowed that he’d never allow the Oversee to install another persona in that special organ of his fam that was designed to host possessor agents. But it was true; all the information that defined Murek Kapor was still intact and could be reactivated. It didn’t stop there. Once activated, Murek was just the kind of passive fop who, if asked, would offer up Scogil’s fam for repossession by a new agent. There was no way Scogil could destroy the Murek-parasite by himself—it would take more than a lifetime in tandem with major computing resources to break the
code. But Nemia had the code. This might be the last few watches he’d ever see her.
Ah, the risks a man took to be free! Nobody was more loyal to the purpose of the Oversee than Hiranimus Scogil. They had told him that the persona machine in his fam was only a means for rapid disguise—but it was also the means for enslavement. At the Oversee’s whim, he was as much a slave as any controlled sycophant of Cloun-the-Stubbom. He’d been that once on Agander. Never again!
“Can you kill him now?”
“Promise you won’t rat on me?” she stalled.
“I’ll be in your debt.”
“In that case...” She reached back and gently removed his fam.
He watched her fit his warmly fluid pad into her diabolical machines. This was a more dangerous game than taking a shower with her. He couldn’t watch. He had a paranoid need to run and lock up the cottage, uninhibited by logic. Famless, he wasn’t really oriented, though all agents of the Oversee had been trained to operate famless in an emergency. Each room seemed familiar but wasn’t organized in a rational manner. He had to reason out his location. The long gadget at the base of each window he perceived as a lock that he should know how to activate but didn’t. He had to deduce the function by trying various settings. Success delighted him. He wandered through the rooms repeating the action that seemed to lock each window. He missed his fam’s mental house map. Surely he should have been able to set up a windows check list to reassure himself that he had locked them all! He stood there counting the windows his mind remembered, astonished that he didn’t even know what the total should be.
‘The house panel is in the kitchen, oaf,” she said. It was a sweet voice. He let it reverberate in his head so that he could understand each word. The house panel Of course. It would control the door lock, too.
But that created a problem. He reasoned carefully. If the house was locked from the inside via the panel, how would he get out? He gave up. It was simpler manually. He found a mask, figured out the airlock door mechanism, and stepped outside—to a vivid emotional rush, the memory of being adolescent. Half-grown boys did silly things like run around houses without their fams, pretending to be animals. So did agents in training. The tension of muscle. Sights. Smells.
How green the fragrant garden. Weird layout. Wild slopes. Stone fences. Damn! A pesky robobulb was following him on its spider legs. He wondered if he could outrun the bulb. Could those bots even see in what for them would be the brilliant dazzle of day? He ran. The bulb kept up with him, not even bothering to stay on the path. He ran faster. But Ha! Could the bot climb?
“Yahoo!” shouted Hiranimus as he monkeyed up a tree. No, the bulb couldn’t follow! He swung from a branch, flailing his legs gaily while bellowing down at the robocreature. “Yahoo!” Here in the sky he was already free! From everything! Even the Oversee couldn’t send Murek scrambling up a tree. “Nanny, nanny, boo-boo!” he singsonged down to his enemies with the age-old child’s taunt. Then he snuggled into a crotch of the tree to enjoy the spectacular scenery. For a long time he just stared. It was fascinating how the shadows crept across the landscape like a timorous army trying not to be noticed. The colors changed and deepened. Had he ever seen such blue mountains!
When Nemia finally arrived at the trunk of the tree, he refused to notice her and she had to climb up to meet him. He let her position his head—her leg awkwardly hooked in a branch—while she reattached his soft leathery external brains.