“I know very well.” Wyeth’s hands were clenched and white. “Use your head! Your gang was swapping detailed bioscientific chitchat with a team of Comprise that is ostensibly here as engineers and physicists. How did they know the jargon? How did they happen to know enough of the biosciences to understand what you were talking about?”
“Well, Earth is, after all, a planet. They have the largest set of interlocking ecologies in the Inner System, so they must use…”
Embarrassed, Rebel shifted her gaze out the window wall. She saw tiny motes of light shifting through the orchid; people were astir out there. Doubtless the tanks were emptying out as people moved into the plant. But looking away couldn’t keep her from overhearing the argument.
“That’s nonsense! They know because they’re spies, that’s why. Before they left Earth they were systematically crammed with the basics of every corner of science, in the hope they’d stumble across something useful. Ms.
Moorfields, look at them! They are not human, they’re not friendly, and they’re not altruistic. They’ll take whatever technology you’ve got and then use it against your own race. You’re selling humanity down the tubes—and for what?”
Unexpectedly, a Comprise said, “She wants the technology to build a transit ring.”
Constance started. “I didn’t tell them that!”
“The Comprise is very quick on the uptake,” Wyeth said sardonically. He asked the Comprise, “Why did she want that information?”
“The desire for private gain is a common failing of individual intelligence.”
“That’s not it at all!” Constance cried. “It would open up the stars. Can’t you see?” She appealed directly to Wyeth.
“It could be used to accelerate comets beyond the Oort Cloud, toward the nearer stars. The closest could be reached within the span of one long lifetime—they gave me the figures! Imagine thousands of dyson worlds drifting from star to star. Expanding into the universe. Imagine an age of exploration and discovery.” Her voice was fervent, almost devout, and Rebel found herself responding to it as she might to a farbranch revivalist prophet. “Imagine mankind finally freed from the cradle of the sun and wandering the starry galaxies in search of… I don’t know.
Truth, maybe? Destiny! All the final answers!”
Before Wyeth could reply, the Comprise said, “Do not trouble yourself, Boss Wyeth. She has nothing we desire.”
“That’s not true. You told me…” But the Comprise had wandered off. Almost pleading, she said, “They told me they were interested in the mind arts. We know a great deal about them.”
“You yourself?” Wyeth asked. “One of your people?”
“Well, no. It’s all new technology. The breakthroughs are being made, but the skills aren’t widespread yet.”
“And yet you’re all biologists. Isn’t it a coincidence then that a Comprise of engineers are up on the mind arts, while your own people know zilch? I’d say you’ve just proven that your friends here are indeed spies.” Wyeth casually touched a bracelet on his wrist and crooked an eyebrow at Rebel. She touched the bracelet he had given her.
The world was transformed. Electricity glowed white from wires hidden in the walls. Heat shimmered green.
Cobalt particles sleeted through the room, cosmic radiation to which matter was as insubstantial as a dream.
A red haze of radiocommunication surrounded the now-green figures of the Comprise, and laser-crisp directional beams reached from individual to individual, shifting as thoughts were divided and routed for processing. Rebel blinked, and it all disappeared for an instant. She looked down at the bracelet and saw the blazing circuits of a holographic projector. One of Wyeth’s spy devices.
“Mr. Wyeth, you are being disgusting.” Constance turned away.
“Don’t be like that,” Wyeth said in his whimsical voice.
“Here, have an apple. Nice and crunchy.” He placed something in her hand.
“An apple?” Constance looked down at the shyapple and dropped it, horrified. “Where did that come from?”
“I was hoping you could tell me. This is an example of your mind art biotechnology, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but…” She tightened her lips. “Hook me into your intercom system.” One of the Comprise stepped forward and, stooping, reached for the fallen shyapple. Wyeth stepped on the woman’s hand, hard, and she jerked it back.
“We were curious,” the Comprise said mildly. Several new lines of interaction connected with her.
“So what?” Wyeth gestured to the samurai. “Keep the Comprise on their side of the stream. And open up a channel for Ms. Moorfields.”
A moment later, Freeboy’s image appeared, and Constance shook the shyapple at him. “Freeboy, you’re the only one who’s been working with directed viruses. Is this your doing?”
“Aw, hell,” Freeboy said. “It’s just pocket money.”
“You never mentioned this skill to me.”
“It’s not a skill. It’s only cookbook stuff. I got the recipe from a wizard in Green City, when I was in Tirnannog.”
Constance’s face was cold and white. The boy spread his hands, his shoulders hunching slightly. “Hey, it’s only a Billy Bejesus—eight hours’ looniness, and it deprograms itself. It’s not like I was hurting anybody. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Like hell you didn’t, young man.”
While the young treehanger was being dressed down, Rebel saw an odd thing: The Comprise, who had been moving about seemingly randomly, had all simultaneously arrived at the water’s edge. The samurai guarding them shifted uneasily. They stared across the water, orange faces blank, eyes unblinking. The electromagnetic interactions increased, lines blinking on and off like laser strobes. For a long moment, no one moved.
Then the Comprise jumped, individual componentsrunning furiously to one side or the other, forming clusters and gaps. Twenty charged across the wooden bridge. The samurai braced themselves to receive the charge.
In that instant’s confusion, a small orange figure darted across the stream. The guards’ eyes had been drawn one way and another, and he leaped through a blind spot. All in a flash, he was at Constance’s side, reached up, and snatched the shyapple from her hands. Before anyone could react, he was back among the Comprise. “That was a child!” Rebel said.
“Catch him!” Wyeth commanded, and three samurai leaped the stream. As they converged on the child, he crammed the fruit in his mouth and swallowed. One snatched him up and carried him back, the others defending. But the Comprise offered no resistance. They turned away, again as aimless as so many cattle. Still, red interaction lines connected the boy directly to half the Comprise in the room.
“Too late,” Wyeth said when the samurai placed the boy before him. “He’s already swallowed it.”
“But this is a child,” Rebel repeated.
“This is the body of a child. Comprise engineering teams always include a few children for tasks where a bigger body would just be in the way.”
“But that’s awful.”
“I agree.” Wyeth smiled at Constance. “How about you?
Still feel that there’s no crime in five billion human minds with only one single identity among them?”
“We must be careful not to anthropomorphize,”
Constance said weakly. She looked pale.
“Very well put.” Wyeth turned to the child Comprise.
“Why did you do it?”
“We were curious,” the boy said. “We wished to know whether this new technology might prove useful to us. Inthat sense—in that we are always eager for new information, new ideas, new directions of thought—we are indeed the spies you accuse us of being. But only in that one sense of being true to our nature.”
“You see?” Constance said.
“More importantly, it distresses us to be separated from the true Comprise.” Rebel couldn’t see the child’s face now for the blaze of red interaction lines touching the skin over his buried rectenna, but his voice was bland. “There are only five hundred Comprise in this structure—and we are used to the mental stimulation of billions. Restricted as we are, any new challenges are taken up eagerly.” A pause.
“You might say that we were bored.”
Wyeth turned to Freeboy’s image. “How long does your drug take to hit?”