“To what?” asked Eron unenthusiastically while Murek pulled, from beneath the seat, an elegant leather case that the boy hadn’t noticed, unpacking it. One of the objects from the case looked suspiciously like a helmet. “You’re not going to try to read my mind!”
“No, no, this stuff just picks up on your emotions. It’s not a psychic probe; your fam wouldn’t allow that. It is a far more primitive device.”
At the mention of psychic probe Eron’s heart began to pound, and he had visions of a grinning Kapor—after nailing him about Nemia—pressing a button that opened up a trapdoor in the aerocar’s floor to eject his mind-stripped body into the clouds. He made a vow of celibacy. With minor gestures of noncooperation he tried to discourage this evil farman from attaching the apparatus to his hands and head. He began to practice thinking about nothing. But he felt Nemia’s sexy fingers stroking his chin.
Murek paused, reluctant to fight even the most passive of resistance. “You’ve got to do it, kid, or no upgrade.”
“You’re going to kill me!”
“This stuff works at the microvolt level, no danger. It only senses local brain temperature changes, skin resistance, and hormone levels.” The clamps went on Eron’s fingers and the helmet went on his head. He was defenseless! “Hmm,” said the Kapor-monster, reading the hand-size output screen, “you’re in a pretty agitated state.”
“Just give me a moment to blank my mind.” This time Eron’s chin was well defended from Nemia’s fingers by an elite troop of his personal thought police, linked arm in arm at a safe five-centimeter buffer from his face. Then... in the midst of his concentration... with the gentlest touch... he felt Nemia’s hand do an end run and slip up the inside of his left leg. Space! Not that! Hastily he grabbed her wrist and lowered her down into the clutches of his steadfast ally, Lord Gravity, where he let her go tumbling into whatever was now below them. Because he loved her he gave her a pretend parachute. But eight tiny Nemias, naked, began to dance on the dashboard in synchrony.
“What is that?” asked his relentless persecutor as he noticed blips on his screen.
“Nothing. Just a flashback to something that has nothing to do with the operation.”
“I see. You’re worried? Something you haven’t told me?”
“Maybe I was thinking about my father,” he evaded.
“Your father? I’ve never been clear on that relationship. Is there something about him you haven’t told me?” There was a pause. “Ah, yes!”
“Why do you say that?”
“I got a big blip.”
“So you are trying to read my mind!”
“No, no. I want you in a calm state for your upgrade.” Eron said nothing. Neither did the monster from outer far-space. He just seemed to sit there, eyeing Eron, probably waiting to pounce, ready with the trapdoor switch in the aerocar’s passenger-side floor. “Some things we aren’t supposed to talk about,” Eron commented lamely.
“Ah, Ganderian taboos. What might those be? I never did get all the details straight. Very convoluted.”
“I don’t have to tell a Big Nose like you,” said Eron sulkily. “I’m not supposed to tell a Big Nose like you. Big Noses are always poking into things that shouldn’t interest them.” “Is this something you could tell your father?”
“I tried. He always slither-snaked out of it. He was good at changing the subject. Maybe he was right.”
“What subject was he good at changing?”
Eron shrugged. The questioning was getting too hot. He found his mind beginning to shut down in resistance. It was increasingly difficult to think. That was a mercy under the circumstances!
“Okay. I’m reading resistance. We’re going to have to break through that before you get your upgrade. Just recall that I’m not your father and that you’ve always been able to talk to me. My machine is going to start reading syllables to you and combining them into words as it analyzes your emotional reactions to syllable-space. The procedure doesn’t require a response. You just have to listen.”
Eron felt in a mood of total rebellion. He wasn’t going to speak. He was just going to order his fam to relax him and that would be that. While he resisted, the machine began to speak syllables to him, pausing between each syllable as if it were thinking. He wondered at the machine’s intelligence. After a while it started to combine syllables into words, sometimes repeating itself. Eron felt like a target. Every so often he would be hit by a word that struck with chemical impact. The hits grew more frequent. The words, at first general, began to get more specific. Dangerously specific. He could tell that with each hit the machine was learning something. Its targeting was beginning to upset him. Murek just sat there, staring, not reacting. Then the machine locked onto what it had been seeking, and each word was a hit. “Secret.” Pause. “Affair.” Pause. “Sex.” Pause. “Nemia.” Pause.
The eyes of the Kapor-monster lifted from his machine to stare at his victim, lizardlike. Eron felt trapped. He was caught. He had to escape! A defensive explanation formed in his mind, but when he tried to speak it, his mouth opened while nothing came out. It was weird. The same thing had happened when he was with Nemia.
“Okay,” the monster said with unexpected gentleness. “We have something to work with. We’ve run into your definition of ‘secret.’ Secrets don’t let you talk. A command installation. Let’s sidestep for a moment. Tell me something that isn *t a secret.”
“Agander’s sky is blue,” he said inanely, relieved that he could actually make meaningful sounds.
“Tell me something else that isn’t a secret.”
“You are pissed at me and are about to push the button on the trapdoor under me.” That sounded foolish. “I know there isn’t a trapdoor under me.”
“Eron, I come from a very different place than you do. I’m not pissed at you. I’m your friend, and in a few watches more or less we’ll be off to Faraway and you’ll be signed up for the program at Asinia Pedagogic. Nemia will be coming with us. She likes you. For the moment, I don’t want your secrets. I want your definition of ‘secret.’ Try this one on. How does your mind tell the difference between something that is a secret and something that is not a secret?”
“Stop asking me tough questions!” Eron laughed but he felt like crying. He was damned if he would show tears.
Murek glanced at his screen. “It’s not a secret that you want to cry right now.”
Eron bawled for a short inamin, feeling astonishment at the outburst, and then calmly recited a definition right out of his fam dictionary. “A secret is something known only to a specific person or group and deliberately kept from the knowledge of others.”
“Not good enough,” said the relentless tutor. “How do you know what to deliberately keep from the knowledge of others and what you can tell them? That’s your rule-base. Can’t keep a secret without it.”
Eron thought for many jiffs, coming up on an inamin. “It has something to do with defense. A secret is to prevent information from being used to hurt yourself or someone under your protection. But that gets complicated. You have to know what hurts people.” He looked at his alien farman tutor. “Some things that don’t hurt you hurt other people.”
“That’s possible.”
For a while his tutor had him play an alternation game that clicked like a metronome back and forth across Eron’s fam. First he was asked to search across his memory for something that wasn't a secret and find a way to spin it into a story. That cycle complete, the devil at the truth-machine’s metronome sent him careening back across his life to locate a dark secret that he must withhold in spite of any temptation to reveal it—and Murek enforced the compulsion by requiring him to contemplate the “dark secret”—silently.