And who decided when an egg would be fertilized and a new child added to Home’s population?
Mel told me, but I should have guessed for myself. The same agent who did everything else on Home. Fertilization decisions, along with air content and surface rain and the food supply and each child’s individual education program, were the job of the controller. Mel told me that her own presence out on the surface of Paddy’s Fortune had been an education elective, something that few other girls wanted. She enjoyed the privacy and the wild feeling of the jungle.
Wild, when the location of every crevice—maybe the size of every plant, and the timing of every drop of rain—was decided by the controller?
My growing bewilderment finally ended. “Here we are,” Mel said. “This is the controller’s main room.” She sounded uneasy as she led me to a circular chamber about a quarter of the size of every other one. There was a tall vertical cylinder in the middle, surrounded by a narrow round table and half a dozen angular chairs. Other than that the place was empty.
I turned to Mel, but before I could speak I heard a pleasant female voice. “Sit down,” it said to me, “in the white chair. Make yourself comfortable. As for you, Mel Fury, you will be punished later. You have been warned, many times, about unauthorized trips to the outside. Yet you continue to make them.”
So there was the reason for Mel’s discomfort. And so much for her “education elective.” She had been running wild when she found me, just the way I suspected. The difference that I had sensed between her and the other girls was apparently a real one.
But at the moment I had bigger worries. I sat down in the white middle chair, and at once thin wires as fine as spider silk crept out from its arms to swathe themselves around my body. They tickled my arms and neck, and touched my ears and scalp. “Relax,” the voice said again, “you will not be harmed. This is for inspection only.”
I didn’t relax, but I did kind of collapse and sag down in my seat. Of course I should have realized, long before, that the controller had to be a machine. No human could do the thousand and one jobs that the controller performed. We had control computers on Erin, even if they were not this capable.
Well, why didn’t I realize it? Because so much was different here, it was easy to make the mistake of assuming that nothing learned on Erin was likely to apply.
Anyway, the Home controlling computer really was different. It was kind of creepy, to sit and chat with a machine just as though it was a human being. For one thing, you didn’t know where to look. I stared at the vertical cylinder, for lack of anything better, but I had no reason to believe the controller’s computer “brain,” if it had a brain, sat in there. More likely, the controller was spread all over the interior. For another thing, no computer on Erin was a hundredth as advanced as this. If it hadn’t been for Mel, sitting there and talking to that machine as though it was the most natural thing in the world, I don’t know if I could have handled it. But anything she could do, I decided I could match.
So I talked with the controller. I didn’t think it was God, though, the way that Mel and the other girls seemed to. She had bossed me around since we met, any chance she got, but now even feisty Mel sat meek as a mouse. No wonder. I learned that the controller set their whole lives for them—or tried to: everything but the time they would die, and maybe that, too, eventually, although they had no experience of it, because no one had been developed in the wombs and born inside Home until twenty years ago, when the controller had initiated a female birth program.
“Why no boys?” I asked, when it told me that everyone was a girl. It seemed like an obvious question, but Mel stared at me in amazement. To her, I guess it seemed natural that people should be female.
“My analysis of Home and its resources suggested that male children might actually be physically preferred here,” the controller said softly. “Examination of you confirms this. However, for psychological reasons the female choice was made, at least until such time as external contact had been reestablished; which has now occurred.”
That statement about male children being physically preferred turned out to be important, but I missed its significance at the time because I thought that the “external contact” the controller was talking about was Danny Shaker and his crew. I was struck dumb with horror, until I realized the controller was actually referring to me. But recalling yesterday, which today’s weird events had made like some awful dream, started me worrying again about Doctor Eileen and the rest of our party. I had to warn them that Danny Shaker and his men were killers, and now the presence of two dead bodies on Paddy’s Fortune provided evidence that could not be talked away.
I decided it would take days to explain everything to the controller—I had been explaining for Mel since we met, and I still hadn’t finished. So this time I didn’t even want to try.
Instead I said, “I need to return to the outside, as soon as possible, and leave this world.”
It was a reasonable request, and I saw no reason why the controller would object. After all, I wasn’t one of its precious charges, raised from some frozen fertilized egg.
But instead of answering at once, which it had done in every other case, the controller remained silent. To my relief, the web of wires that had enmeshed my body retreated back into the arms of the chair. I was free to wriggle nervously in my seat—and I did.
“Tell me why you came here,” the controller said at last.
So much for my idea of a quick and easy escape to the surface. I had to start all over again, with the whole messy explanation that I had given Mel.
This time it went a lot faster, though, because unlike Mel the controller didn’t interrupt me with a stupid question every two seconds. It knew all about the Forty Worlds, in far more detail than I did. It also apparently contained detailed data on every worldlet in the Maze. I decided it was a lot smarter than Mel and the other girls—particularly when I got to the Godspeed Drive and our journey to search for it.
The controller took that idea in its stride. “This world was established as a biological reserve against future need, which has now arrived, never as a reservoir of space hardware. There is no Godspeed Drive on Home.”
That news was going to devastate Doctor Eileen—if ever I had the chance to tell her. And if I had been Mel Fury, I would not have been pleased by my role as part of a sort of as-required supply house for humans. But the controller was continuing: “There may be no Godspeed Drive anywhere in the Maveen system. If there is, that information is not available here.”
And then, just when I was ready to sink into the gloom of a wasted months-long journey, it added: “There is, however, a logical place to look. There are several related references in data storage that possess space hardware associations.”
I could hardly breathe. “References—to places? In the Forty Worlds system?”
“It is not clear that all are places. They are names: the Net, the Needle, the Eye… The Net lies within the Forty Worlds system, and even within the Maze itself. It carries a designation as a ‘hardware reservoir.’ ”
“Do you know how to get there?”
“Coordinates are available for the Net. However, the information is not easily conveyed orally. You must use a navigation aid. This one is appropriate.”
A little machine no bigger than my hand came scuttling out of nowhere and extruded long, spindly legs that brought it up to the level of the table. Just when I was thinking that this was the most peculiar-looking navigation aid I could imagine, it reached out a thin arm and placed in front of me a flat black oblong and a little silver box.