Chan stared at the image and smiled. He certainly knew who it was. But that was the only response. The days wore on, all the same, and at last Tatty gave up hope. She should stop trying, stop torturing. Chan would never learn.
She brooded on her own situation. No visit from Esro Mondrian. No calls, not even a message. He had talked her into leaving Earth, duped her into doing what he wanted, as he could always do — and then forgotten about her until the next time she might come in useful.
She took the initiative, placing calls to him and to Kubo Flammarion. She could never get through to either of them. But one day, after many attempts, she managed to pass the shielding layers of guard and assistants and found herself talking to Mondrian’s private office on Ceres.
“I’m sorry.” One of Mondrian’s personal guards took the call. “Captain Flammarion is in a meeting, and Commander Mondrian himself is not here.”
“Then where the devil is he?” To get so far, and have her hopes dashed again …
There was a pause, while the woman consulted a display. “According to the itinerary, Commander Mondrian is on Earth. He will be there for two days.”
“He is where!”
Tatty disconnected the communicator in a cold, clean rage. To drag her all the way to Horus to do his dirty work. To use her, and neglect her, while she passed through the agonies of Paradox withdrawal. And then to go back to Earth himself, without even telling her.
Tatty felt bitterness consuming her body, burning in her stomach. She went through to the other room, where Chan was connected to the Stimulator. The session was almost over. He was sweating prodigiously, banging his head from side to side in the neck brace and headset. Tatty went to stand next to him.
“Chan. Can you hear me?”
His eyes opened a slit. They were bloodshot and slightly bulging. There was inflammation and some excess pressure inside the skull case, but he was listening. She put her arms around him.
“He’s using us, Chan. Both of us.”
Tears rolled down her cheeks. Chan’s eyes widened, and he reached out a wondering finger to touch the drops of moisture.
“Tatty crying.”
“Oh, Chan, I’d have done anything for him, anything in the world. I thought he was wonderful. I even let myself be marooned out here, because I thought I’d be helping him. But it’s no use. He doesn’t care about us — about anything, except himself. He’s a devil, Chan, crazy and heartless. He’ll destroy you, too, if you let him, the way he’s destroying me. Don’t let him do it.”
“Him?” He was staring at her in stony incomprehension. Tatty fumbled in the overall pocket above her left breast. She took out a thin wallet, removed from it a small holograph, and held the image for Chan to see.
“Him. Look at it, Chan. This is the man who brought us away from home. This is the one who took Leah away from you. See him? This is the person who makes you go into the Stimulator. If you learn your lessons you can get away from here. You can go and find him.”
The bloodshot eyes stared in silence, until at last Chan took a deep, shuddering breath. He reached out to take the hologram, with its smiling face of Esro Mondrian.
Was it imagination, or wishful thinking?
Tatty could not be sure, but she thought that a faint spark of understanding had glowed for a moment behind those innocent, tormented eyes.
The Margrave of Fujitsu paused and lifted his ugly head from the stereo-microscope. “And what, if I might ask, did you expect to see?”
Luther Brachis shrugged. “That’s a hard question. But a lot more than this.” His sweeping gesture took in the whole room, from the grimy skylight window that looked out onto Earth’s surface, to the huge display system that covered a whole wall. “I mean, apart from those special microscopes almost everything here looks like part of a standard computer facility. If you hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t know this is a Needler lab at all.”
“I see.” The Margrave bent again over the microscope and” made a minute adjustment to the setting. He laughed, without looking up. “Of course. You expected to see Needlers, didn’t you — men in white coats, sticking pins into cells. I’m sorry, but you are seven hundred years too late.”
He at last straightened, turned, and lifted a great pile of listings from the desk at his side. “In the earliest days, yes. A strange set of methods was used at one time to stimulate parthenogenetic egg development. Ultraviolet radiation, acid and alkaline solutions, neat, cold, needle puncture, radioactivity — almost everything was tried, and a surprising number of them worked — after a fashion.
“But all those methods produce only exact copies of a parent organism, rather than interesting variations. And even when mutations arise as a side effect of stimulation, they are quite random. As a way of producing an art form it would be quite hopeless, like dropping a block of marble off a cliff, and hoping to find a masterpiece of sculpture when you got to the bottom. Today, everything is planned.” He held out the pile of listings. “With these.”
Brachis took the top few sheets and inspected them. “These don’t mean a thing to me, Margrave.”
“Not Margrave. I am to be called simply Fujitsu. Mine was an Imperial line when most of your under-level braggarts were wearing animal skins and eating their food raw.
“Sorry, Fujitsu. But I don’t see much here. Just page after page of random letters.”
“Ah, yes. Random.” The Margrave stabbed at the top page with a bony index finger. This is random in very much the same way as we are random, you and I, since what you are holding is the complete DNA sequence of a living organism, in its precise and correct order. This output simply indicates the nucleotide bases in each of the chromosomes, letter-coded of course for convenience: A for adenine, C for cytosine, G for guanine, and T for thymine. The whole listing is built up — as we are — from those four letters. Taken together, they constitute the exact blueprint for production of an animal.” He shook his head and stared at Luther Brachis. “I am sorry. You are no innocent and no fool, though you sometimes choose to pretend to be. I will be more specific. This is the blueprint for production of a special animal — a human being.”
“I thought DNA had a coiled spiral structure. There’s no spiral here. And I don’t want to produce a human being.”
“A coiled spiral is topologically equivalent to a straight line, and a straight-line presentation of data is far easier to comprehend and analyze. As for the fact that this is presently a human encoding, do not worry about it. This is only my starting point, the theme from which we will construct sublime variations. Any one of the nucleotides can be changed to any other. We have full chemical control of the whole sequence. The chains can be split, lengthened, shortened, inverted, and modified in any way that I wish.” He tapped the stack, with its endless and apparently random jumble of letters. “You asked me earlier, what is my job? What is it that I actually do. After all, since I am merely evaluating the effects of inserting different DNA fractional chains into this coding, what can I do that is not done better and faster by a computer? “I have been asked that question many times, and still I can answer only by analogy. Do you play chess?”
“Some. It’s required for Level Six education.” Brachis saw no reason to mention that he had once been close to Grand Master level. It was hard to see how that slight misdirection could have future value, but the habit was ingrained.
“Then you probably know that, despite many centuries of work, the best chess-playing programs still fail to beat the best human players. Now, how can that be? The computers can store a million times as many games in memory. They can evaluate all possible moves, far ahead, to see which one is the best. They are tireless, and they never make the foolish errors of fatigue.