The Medusa Encounter Read online

  “Falcon is not one of us any longer,” Singh replied.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Since the crash of the Queen he’s chosen not to live in India. And he no longer seeks company outside the immediate circle of his colleagues on the Kon-Tiki project. It’s because of what they had to do to save him, I suppose.”

  XIV

  Sparta awoke in a high-ceilinged room, gleaming white from centuries of accumulated enamel. Its tall windows were hung with lace and fitted with panes of imperfect glass whose pinhole bubbles refocused the sun into golden liquid galaxies. She didn’t know where she was. . . .

  She was eighteen years old, a prisoner in a sanatorium, half drunk on the random return of her memory, on the assault of her exaggerated senses. Her heart was pounding and her throat ached with the need to scream, for she could hear the beating wings of the approaching Snark, bringing the assassin.

  Sparta rolled out of the bed and slid across the polished wooden floor on her belly, tucking herself naked against the wall below the window sill. She listened. . . .

  Far down in the deep valleys the night birds called and a million tiny frogs sang to the moon. The light of the full moon was flooding the room through the lace curtains.

  It wasn’t morning and she wasn’t in the sanatorium in Colorado, she was in Holly Singh’s house in India, and the air was cold enough that she could see her breath in the moonlight. The sound she heard wasn’t a Snark, it was Singh’s little two-seat Dragonfly, its tiny fusion-electric engine so silent that all she could hear was the whiffle of the blades—and it wasn’t approaching, it was taking off.

  Sparta raised her head to the corner of the window and peered out over the sloping lawn. Her right eye fixed on the Dragonfly, already half a kilometer away, as it climbed against a backdrop of moon-shadowed peaks, and she zeroed in until the image of the cockpit filled her field of vision. The angle was bad; she was looking from behind, and could see only the pilot’s left shoulder and arm, but the infrared image processed by Sparta’s visual cortex was bright as day. The pilot was a woman—Singh, or someone who closely resembled her.

  Something in Sparta was not reassured. Was it really Singh in the helicopter? And where was she going in the middle of the night?

  Sparta expelled her breath in a short sigh, an angry spasm almost like a snarl, and abruptly she sprang to her feet. For a moment she was exposed to anyone who might be watching her window, but she was defiant. She crossed to the closet where she’d hung her few clothes and slipped on a closefitting black polycanvas jump suit, then pulled soft black hightops onto her small feet. She returned to the window, this time silently, invisibly.

  She disarmed the telltale she’d set on the glass. In the night air the wooden sash had contracted; it came up easily, scraping softly against the frame.

  She slipped outside and closed the window behind her. She scampered across the gently sloping roof. At the corner of the veranda she tested the strength of the gutter, then hooked her hands into it, rolled forward and hung from the roof, her feet a meter from the ground. She dropped silently into a bed of decorative Irish moss.

  The moonlight through the trees created a blue and black mosaic, but to Sparta’s infrared-sensitive eye the ground itself glowed in shades of dull red, the grass and bushes and bare earth giving back the sun’s heat in varying degree. She walked quickly along the paths that led to the sanatorium.

  She paused once, at the sight of a ghostly white shape moving in the dark cedar branches, but it was only an egret that had sought safety for the night aboveground.

  She came to the sanatorium. Four low brick buildings with wide metal roofs formed a compound; in the center of the courtyard stood a gnarled old chestnut. Two of the buildings, facing each other, were dormitories, their individual rooms opening onto verandas. A third building housed the laundry, kitchen, and dining hall.

  She listened to the deep, drugged breathing of men and women in the dormitories, but passed them by. The fourth structure, the clinic, was her objective.

  Except for dim yellow lights illuminating the verandas, none of the buildings showed lights. Sparta circled the clinic slowly, keeping to the shadows. Her close-focused eye traveled along the roofline, around each window and door frame, seeking monitoring cameras and telltales.

  It seemed that the building’s security was simple, almost primitive. No cameras watched the compound. The windows and doors were wired with conducting strips. She picked a window half hidden by a rhododendron bush and pushed back its shutters. From the thigh pocket of her jumpsuit she removed a slender steel tool; with precisely measured strength she incised a circle in the glass near the latch, tapped it, and let the glass disk fall outward into her hand. She reached through the hole and was about to affix a slack loop of wire to the alarm’s conducting strip when she sensed, through her PIN spines, that no current was running in the alarm.

  She thought about that for a millisecond, then set the loop anyway, tacking down both ends with aluminized putty. Current could start flowing without warning. Then she twisted the latch. Unlike the bedroom window, it took muscle to lift this sash; crumbs of dirt and old paint fell onto her face and into her hair.

  She lifted herself easily onto the sill, tucked her legs, and curled sideways through the narrow opening. Her feet touched the floorboards and she stood up. She was in a small room equipped with a hospital bed and a variety of out-of-date diagnostic equipment. Not what one would expect of an expensive private sanatorium. Leaving the window ajar, she started to explore.

  The clinic’s offices and examination rooms were arranged on two sides of a long central hall. Moonlight fell through the slatted shutters and doors, most of which stood open, onto a threadbare strip of carpet.

  Sparta’s heat-seeking eye darted here and there in each of the rooms as she walked along, but she wasted little time, for she expected to find the clinic’s records in the administrator’s office. With micro-super technology, a century’s worth could be stored on a rupee-sized wafer.

  At the center of the building, near the front door, she came to a door that was closed. An engraved brass plaque screwed to the flimsy louvered door’s crossbrace said “Dr. Singh.”

  She sniffed the simple magnetic lock. From the pattern of Singh’s touch she deduced its sequence. A second later she stepped into Singh’s office.

  She experienced a peculiar shiver of pride. This had been so easy she’d hardly had a chance to stretch herself. She liked the way she could fool photogram monitors by a dancer’s simple tricks of movement; she liked the way she could see in the dark and fool movement sensors by the timing of her steps. She liked the way she could smell who’d been in a room last, and when. She liked the way she could virtually walk through walls.

  And she liked the way she could read a computer system by letting the PIN spines under her fingernails slide into its I/O ports, bleeding it of information—as she did now, to the tiny water-cooled computer box she found on Singh’s office wall.

  For a moment she was in trance, her senses overwhelmed by the aromatic tang of large primes flowing through her calculating organ, her soul’s eye. For her, mathematical manipulation verged on the erotic. The code key she was pursuing had the taste and smell of tangerines . . . thefeel of a light-fingered backscratch . . . the sound of a bamboo flute. Deftly she swam past the databank’s safeguards, and seconds later found what she was looking for.

  She laughed aloud, not at what she’d found—hardly funny—but with pleasure at her mastery. They’d given her powers she’d never asked for or consented to, powers greater than they knew.

  At first it had been frightening to realize that she could listen and hear what other people couldn’t, that she could taste and smell flavors and aromas that other people couldn’t, and not just perceive them but analyze them in precise chemical detail. It had been frightening—though convenient—to discover that she could open electronic locks and communicate directly with even the most complex computer syste
ms. Equally convenient were her boundless memory and her ability to calculate, at some deep level, far faster than her consciousness could follow.

  Not long ago she had even had the ability to sense the aether, to cast her very will via microwave beam—action at a distance. More than mere convenience, that sensation was one of pure power.

  But that had been ripped out of her on Mars. The life-mimicking organic polymers that had once capacitated her belly with burning electric power had been ruptured by a would-be assassin’s pulse bomb. Unknowing surgeons had finished the job.

  She had not been raised to depend on these prostheses. Her parents had taught her to trust in herself, taught her to believe that simply being human was not only enough, but—if she could be fully human—more than would ever be needed. To be human was to be potentially triumphant.

  What she now read in Singh’s coded files confirmed the conviction that had been building in her since she’d left Mars. A great many human subjects had passed through Holly Singh’s ungentle hands. An astonishing proportion of them had died. They were the anonymous, the homeless poor, the orphaned . . . those who would never be missed.

  Among them, one stood out.

  Female subject, 18 years, height 154 centimeters, weight 43 kilograms, hair brown, eyes brown, race: white (English ancestry)/

  diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia by transferring agency confirmed/

  patient complains of constant and severe visual and aural hallucinations/

  prescribed treatment, GAF neuro-amplification injection/

  complications of autonomic nervous system/

  apnea/

  elevated body temperature/

  convulsions/

  patient declared dead at 11:31 P. M./

  disposition of body according to conclave directive/

  shipment to North America contact without incident/

  records edited, successfully transmitted on . . .

  On that day, that month, that year. And the dead girl, a nameless runaway washed up in an asylum in Kashmir, appropriated by Singh for her own purposes, could from her appearance have been Sparta’s twin. Her appearance was all they had needed from her—the appearance of her dead body. Singh’s treatment of the girl who was unlucky enough to look like Linda N. was swift and deliberate murder.

  Eight years ago Sparta had been a patient in a sanatorium, a building of the same vintage as these and like them, high in the mountains—the Rocky Mountains of North America. She’d been trapped there, mired in her own past, immobilized by her inability to retain new information for more than a few minutes. Her short-term memory had been so effectively eradicated that she could not even remember her doctor’s face.

  But the doctor she’d had such difficulty remembering had known how to restore her working memory; he’d done so at the cost of his own life, giving her precious seconds she’d used to escape—in the Snark that had brought her intended assassin.

  Hardly a coincidence that, at the time, Doctor Holly Singh should be running a mountain sanatorium, halfway around the globe. Hardly a coincidence that Singh should have developed the neurochip techniques that the doctor had used to save Sparta—the same techniques, in part, that had made Sparta a freak.

  One further next-to-impossible coincidence. When the Queen Elizabeth IV, with its crew complement of neurologically enhanced chimpanzees, had crashed over the Grand Canyon, and Captain Howard Falcon, Holly Singh’s old friend, had been put back together again, what they could save of his nervous system had depended on the same neurochip technology. Of course, they’d done more to Falcon, much more.

  Sparta and Falcon and Steg, the crippled chimpanzee, were all cousins under the skull.

  Sparta loaded the whole capacious secret file into her own memory and retracted her spines from the computer ports. She stood in the moonlit office, listening to the keening cries of exotic birds, the cough of a tiger, the chatter of sleepless monkeys in the menagerie.

  There were powers at loose in the world that intended to render humans as evolutionarily passé as monkeys and chimpanzees—intended to render the distinction meaningless. Holly Singh was working for them, not for the Council of Worlds, not for the Board of Space Control, and certainly not for the welfare of her patients.

  Sparta left Singh’s office and went down the hall. She removed the wire loop from the alarm circuit and closed the window, leaving the neat hole in the glass, then returned and left by the front door. Whether she confronted them now or in the morning hardly mattered. As an officer of the Board of Space Control, she would arrest Dr. Holly Singh. Singh and her servants were helpless to resist.

  Humans and machines had been in growing symbiosis for centuries. Sparta was but a slightly precocious form of what was to come, the inevitable melding of human individual and human-generated mechanism. What was she then but what was once called a cyborg?

  No, the dead eighteen-year-old in her cried, I am human. A human being corrupted by this artificial dependence, these prostheses that made up for no natural or necessary deficiency but were forcibly grafted onto and into her by others with inhuman programs of their own.

  Yet she had become dependent upon her prostheses, even while telling herself she used them only for the good, for the sake of humanity, for the sake of discovering what had become of her parents, supposedly murdered, and for the sake of finding those who might have murdered them, and for the sake of eliminating those evil beings who, in giving her these powers, had given her the power to fight back.

  And she loved the power.

  At this moment she was afraid of nothing.

  She walked boldly down the moonlit path, a confident woman who believed that her extraordinary senses protected her from anything the night might hold, and never heard the creature who came out of the shadows behind her.

  XV

  He dropped out of the trees onto her back and for a horrible instant, as her nostrils flooded with the odor of the beast, she thought he would rip her head from her shoulders with his leathery black hands and black-haired muscular arms. Yellow fangs grazed her scalp.

  Her strength was a tenth of his and, under ordinary circumstances, her quickness—even enhanced as it was—was a bare match for a chimpanzee’s. Desperately she jerked and bent, evading his fangs, breaking his grip on her throat, and rolled, slipping out of the grasp of his clinging, uncoordinated legs. Poor Steg’s damaged central nervous system had not prevented him from displaying patience and stealth, but his motor control was severely impaired.

  Having failed to kill her immediately, he was at her mercy. He fled, and she sprinted after him. As the terrified chimpanzee ran and stumbled along the path, stretching his arms and vaulting on his knuckles, he hooted and shrieked in anguish, and his hoots and shrieks were immediately taken up by all the sleepless animals caged in Holly Singh’s private menagerie.

  Something had metamorphosed in Sparta. Her mercy had been strained in these last weeks and days, and she had no more compassion for this miserable half-ape than Artemis for a stag. The grace and speed that would have made a dancer of her had she chosen to be a dancer now bore her in an arc of vengeance.

  Ten meters down the path she sprang onto his back and brought him screaming to the ground. The loop of wire she had used to bypass the clinic’s alarm system went around his throat and cut off his panic-stricken calls.

  She used violent leverage. He died in seconds.

  Death. The sucking vortex that beckoned her, which she had resisted with less energy, less conviction, as the months wore on. A trail of death, until this moment none of it of her volition but leading her on, as if she were gravitationally attracted to a moving nexus of destruction. On Earth. Venus. The moon. Mars.

  And her parents—dead or not, they were gone. Laird, or Lequeu, or whatever the shadowy figure who dogged her path now called himself, had tried with all his power to murder them. That was enough, and although he was out of her reach, others were not. She anticipated Holly Singh’s return, for now she unde
rstood very well why Singh had snuck away.

  Steg—who understood commands a bit more complex than Singh had pretended—had been ordered to murder Sparta in her bed. He was on his way to do it when she encountered him on the path. To have been killed by him would have seemed a tragic and most regrettable accident. Surely Dr. Singh would have wept copious tears, and the deranged Steg would, sadly, have been put to death. But Singh deserved to die more than Steg.

  When Sparta raised herself from the corpse and stood erect there was a moonlight gleam in her eye more savage than any light she had seen in the chimpanzee’s. She, who thought she hated killing. She, who lived to prevent murder and to bring murderers to merciful justice. She stood with the blood of a crippled animal dripping from the wire in her hands and with the keening cries of other terrified animals filling the night. In their calls was something less than mourning but more than fear—the advertisement of death.

  Sparta found, as she searched her soul and reminded herself of what she had supposed she believed in, that not only could she dredge up no objection to killing Holly Singh, she could even look forward to that event with a certain savor.

  With this newfound taste for blood, however, there came a heightened sense of the refined pleasures of the hunt. She decided that, after all, she would defer immediate revenge on Dr. Singh in favor of bigger game.

  A long run along the ridge in the thin, cold air brought her to Darjeeling town. The rising sun came up from the mountains toward China, not like thunder but like cold fire; her breath steamed in front of her, and she thought as she watched it that the searing ball of yellow flame was challenging her directly, in the most intimate terms, to cease from patient questioning and to act—that the rising sun had transfigured her. To her right, the roof of this world. To her left, the inhabited universe and its deity, speaking to her in spears of light.

  A few purchases in the market and a visit to the latrine behind a sweet shop and she was ready to board the morning’s first train. Riding the chugging antique down through the tea terraces toward the plains, she was just another bedraggled tourist girl in search of enlightenment and bangh.