Three minutes thirty seconds gone. He went to the doorway and cut a huge rectangle of ice from the wall. It was thin— insubstantial almost—but strong. It weighed nothing in itself but he could pile all the heavy machinery up on top of it.
It would have to do.
There was just short of two minutes left to get out.
Time for his last trick. He ran for his life. Back the way he'd come. Without pause he pulled the last of his bombs from his belt and threw it, pressing the stud at his belt as he did so.
The outer wall exploded, then buckled inward.
Karr, his life processes suspended, was thrown out through the rent in the starship's outer skin; a dark, larval pip spat out violently.
The pip drifted out from the giant sphere, a thin trail of dust and iced air in its trail. Seconds later the outer skin rippled and then collapsed, lit from within. It shriveled, like a ball of paper in a fire, then, with a suddenness that surprised the distant, watching eyes, lit up like a tiny sun, long arms of vivid fire burning a crown of thorns in the blackness of space.
It had been done. War had been declared.
EPILOGUE
SUMMER 2202-2203
Mosiacs
What is it whose closing causes the dark and whose opening causes the light? Where does the Bright God hide before the Horn proclaims the dawning of the day?
—t'ien wen (Heavenly Questions)
by Ch'u Yuan, from the Ch'u TYu • (Songs of the South), second century BC.
A Bridge over Nothingness
SO THEY BEGAN, burying the dark; capping the well of memory with a stone too vast, too heavy, to move. The machine watched them at their work, seeing many things their frailer, time-bound eyes were prone to miss—subtle changes of state it had come to recognize as significant. At times the full intensity of its awareness was poured into the problem of the boy, Kim. For a full second, maybe two, it thought of nothing else. Several lifetimes of normal human consciousness passed this way. And afterward it would make a motion in its complex circuitry-—unseen, unregistered on any- monitoring screen—approximate to a nod of understanding.
While the two theoreticians began the job of mapping out a new mosaic—a new ideal configuration for the boy's mental state, his personality—the Builder returned to the cell and to the boy. His eyes, the small, unconscious movements of his body, revealed his unease, his awkwardness, finally his uncertainty. As he administered the first of the drug treatments to the boy he could not hide the concern, the doubt he felt.
It watched, uncommenting, as'the drugs began to have their desired effect upon the boy. It saw how they systematically blocked off all pathways that led into the boy's past, noting the formulae of the drugs they used, deriving a kind of mathematical pleasure from the subtle evolving variations as they fine-tuned their chemical control of the process of erasure. There was an art to what they did. The machine saw this and, in its own manner, appreciated it.
It was a process of reduction different in kind from what they had attempted earlier. This time they did not seek to cower him but to strip him of every last vestige of that which made him a personality, a being. In long sessions on the operating table, the two theoreticians probed the boy's mind, sliding microthin wires into the boy's shaven skull, then administering fine dosages of chemicals and organic compounds, until, at last, they had achieved their end.
In developing awareness the machine had developed memory. Not memory as another machine might have defined it—that, to the conscious entity that tended these isolated decks, was merely "storage," the bulk of things known. No, memory was something else. Its function was unpredictable. It threw up odd items of data—emphasized certain images, certain words and phrases, over others. And it was inextricably bound up with the sensation of self-awareness. Indeed, it was self-awareness, for the one could not exist without the eccentric behavior of the other. Yet it was also much more than the thing these humans considered memory—for the full power of the machine's ability to reason and the frighteningly encyclopedic range of its knowledge informed these eccentric upwellings of words and images.
One image that it held important occurred shortly after they had completed their work and capped the well of memory in Kim. It was when the boy woke in his cell after the last of the operations. At first he lay there, his eyes open, a glistening wetness at the corner of his part-open mouth. Then, as though instinct were taking hold—some vestige of the body's remembered language of actions shaping the attempt—he tried to sit up.
It was to the next few moments that the machine returned, time and again, sifting the stored images through the most intense process of scrutiny.
The boy had lifted his head. One of his arms bent and moved, as if to support and lift his weight, but the other had been beneath him as he lay and the muscles were "asleep." He fell forward and lay there, chin, cheek, and eye pressed close against the floor. Like that he stayed, his visible eye registering only a flicker of confusion before the pupil settled and the lid half closed. For a long time afterward there was only blankness in that eye. A nothingness. Like the eye of a corpse, unconnected to the seeing world.
Later, when, in the midst of treatment, the boy would suddenly stop and look about him, that same look would return, followed by a moment of sheer, blind panic that would take minutes to fully subside. And though, in the months that followed, the boy grew in confidence, it was like building a bridge over nothingness. From time to time the boy would step up to the edge and look over. Then would come that look, and the machine would remember the first time it had seen it. It was the look of a machine. Of a thing without life.
They began their rehabilitation with simple exercises, training the body in new ways, new mannerisms, avoiding if they could the old patterns of behavior. Even so, there were times when far older responses showed through. Then the boy's motor activities would be locked into a cycle of meaningless repetition—like a malfunctioning robot—until an injection of drugs brought him out of it.
For the mind they devised a set of simple but subtle games to make it learn again. At first it was resistant to these, and there were days when the team were clearly in despair, thinking they had failed. But then, almost abruptly, in midsession, this changed. The boy began to respond again. That night the three men got drunk together in the observation room. '
Progress was swift once the breakthrough was made. In three months the boy had a complete command of language again. He was numerate to a sophisticated degree, coping with complex logic problems easily. His spatial awareness was perfect: he had a strong sense of patterns and connections. It seemed then, all tests done, that the treatment had worked and the mode of his mind—that quick, intuitive talent unique to the boy—had emerged unscathed from the process of walling in his personality. With regard to his personality, however, he demonstrated many of the classic symptoms of incurable amnesia. In his new incarnation he was a rather colorless figure, uncertain in his relationship with the Builder, colder, distanced from things— somehow less human than he'd been. There was a machinelike,
functional aspect to his being. Yet even in this respect there were signs of change—of a softening of the hard outlines of the personality they had grafted onto him.
Nine months into the program it seemed that the gamble had paid off handsomely. When the team met that night in the observation room they agreed it was time to report back on their progress. A message was sent uplevels. Two days later they had their reply. Berdichev was coming. He wanted to see the boy with his own eyes.