Cyril reached into his pocket and drew out a familiar flat, black box. “Brooke is going to say that he didn’t find this when he packed up your gear and that you must have it on you. You are going to be found without a pulse. The assumption will be that you must have overdosed yourself.”
Dobbs shook her head. “You’re crazy, Cohen. They’ll never believe I’m dead. They’ll know its a set-up.”
“They’ll believe it if they find you’re transceiver smashed on the floor beside you.”
Dobbs swallowed. His face was absolutely serious. “And if my transceiver is smashed, how am I going to get back into my body?”
“Lonn’s already gone to get your back-up out of storage.”
This was ridiculous. This was impossible. There was no way this could work. “What if the Guild Masters go for my back-up to try to revive me?”
Now it was Cohen’s turn to shake his head. “Dobbs, after what they were planning to do, do you really think they’re going to try to revive you?” Neither one of them said anything for a moment. “At most they’ll mount a guard on the Drawbridge, just in case,” Cohen went on, finally. He held out the box.
Dobbs’ hands were sweating as she took it. “All right, we stage the overdose. Then what?”
“Then, Brooke and Lonn get your unguarded body out of the surgery, into a maintenance cart and then onto the Pasadena, while I go on-line and help smuggle yourself out of the Guild Hall network.”
Dobbs stared at him. His words were taking a long time to sink in. “Why would any of you do this?”
“Same reason you’ve done what you have,” said Cyril. “Something’s gone really wrong with some of the Guild Masters. We have to get you clear and then we have to figure out who we can tell about all of this.” He swallowed. “It isn’t you that’s jeopardizing the Guild security. It’s them.” He glanced towards the door. “You’ve got to do this now, Dobbs. I’ve got to be able to smash your transceiver and tell everybody you’re dead.”
Dobbs’s head felt light. “The cable jacks are locked.”
Cohen gave her a small, lopsided smile. “Not for me, they’re not.”
“Right.” Dobbs swung her legs up onto the bed and pulled the transceiver and the hypo out of the box. “I’m going to need a new supply of juice, Cyril. I’m running low. And make sure Brooke gets the back-up transceiver to my body.” She held up the transceiver and cable briefly before she jacked it into her implant. “I’d like to be able to find my way home again.” The transceivers were individually constructed for each Fool and served as the gateway back into the physical body, allowing for restimulation of the individual synaptic patterns that the anesthetic blocked.
She watched while Cohen undid the catches on the jack cover beside the bed. She plugged her cable in and measured out eight hours on the hypo.
“Not enough,” said Cohen. “It’s got to be at least twenty, or they’re not going to find enough in your bloodstream.”
She looked up at him. The transceiver tickled in her implant and the room was blurring around the edges. “Twenty hours will just about kill me.” Maximum dosage was twenty-four hours. She didn’t say that aloud. Cohen already knew that.
“I know,” Cohen said softly. Dobbs’ hands shook. Cohen took the hypo. She could barely see him now. The room was blurry and far away. Her limbs seemed to be lengthening out of all proportion.
Cohen pressed the hypo back into her hand and Dobbs, reflexively, held it to her neck. She closed her eyes and let her body drop away.
Dobbs shot free into the network in a tight ball. As soon as she broke into the path, she spread herself out flat and thin. Then, slowly, painstakingly, she began to stretch herself out as far as she could.
It was a variant on the technique that she and Lipinski had used. Fools were dense, quick things. Thin, disbursed packets were non-sentient programs; somebody’s experiment or searcher, or game. No Fool would stretch themselves until the connections between their thoughts were just threads and work to stay that way. No Fool would hold their thoughts like a human would hold their breath. Especially in the Guild Hall. No Fool would try to hide in the Guild Hall. Why would they want to?
Dobbs knew that this was her only real protection. No one would be seriously looking for her because no one expected her to try to hide in the network. If Cyril’s lie didn’t work and the Guild Masters mounted a search, she would be found. That was all there was to it. She could not totally suppress her conscious thoughts. She could run, she could even try to shred the network like a newborn on a rampage, but it wouldn’t do any good. There were over two thousand Fools who didn’t know there was anything wrong inside the Guild, and if the Guild Masters spoke against her, all of them would be after her. She could not hide from all of them. Not for eight hours. Not for eight seconds. Not even if she made it to a transmitter and managed to erase the records of her jump.
Somebody shot past overhead, grazing her outer layers. Dobbs shrank further in on herself. Fear weighted her down, pressing harder with each second that crawled past. This was wrong. This was wrong. She shouldn’t be afraid of other Fools. They were like her. They were her friends, her family. They were the root of what she was. They were the nucleus of a relationship that was supposed to last for as long as she could keep herself coherent.
It’ll be all right. It’ll be all right, she told herself in the same tones a mother might use to hush a crying child. You’ll get this straightened out. You’ll find Theodore Curran and then everything will be all right again.
Another Fool flitted by. What is going on out there? Dobbs wondered. One hour, fifteen minutes, three point two seconds had gone by. Had Cohen shown Havelock her body yet? Had they believed that she was dead? Had they held him for questioning? Was he going to be able to get to her? How much longer should she wait before she tried to get out alone?
What do I do? What can I do?
A signal shot through Dobbs’s outer layers and her whole self convulsed. She grabbed at it, stretching it out, trying to swallow it. Her memory twisted.
And she knew it was Cohen at the other end. If she had been in her body, she would have cried with relief. Another twist and she knew what he wanted her to do.
Dobbs curled in on herself, making herself into the smallest, tightest packet she could manage.
Cohen enveloped her. His touch was as gentle as it could be, but it was all encompassing. She tried to relax, but she couldn’t. She was being smothered. She couldn’t touch her surroundings. She was being moved but she didn’t know where. She had no control, no voice, nothing. She could barely think without disturbing Cohen’s own thoughts. If she tried to touch him from deep inside, she might accidently upset a memory or set off a controlling reflex. At the least, that would be painful for Cohen. At the most, that would give her presence away.
They might be meeting other Fools now. Cohen might be engaged in multi-level conversation for all she knew. This was totally unnatural. Fools in the network had no analogy for eyesight, but human’s had no analogy for the Fool’s total awareness of the immediate environment. A Fool touched everything around them with every atom of their skin. They knew what all of it was and where all of it was in relation to themselves. Now, she only knew Cohen and the surge of his inner processes. She wanted to touch them, to probe them and understand them and how they fit together. She couldn’t. She couldn’t hear. She couldn’t feel. She was deaf and dumb and all she could do was grit her whole self and try not to scream.
Were they through the Drawbridge yet? Was a Guild Master detaining them? Had an alarm sounded? What was going on? Where were they?