“How come you do your own hatchetwork? If I were you, I’d be about eight layers of subordinates away, playing golf in some public place.”
He shook his head. “Your grasp of tactics is thirty years out of date. Multilayer insulation was indeed useful in conspiracy or fraud for centuries: before a fallible lazy human investigator could work his way to the top of the chain he was likely to give up or be reassigned or retire or die. But then they started buying computers, and interconnecting them. Now every layer of intermediaries is merely another weak point, another thread the enemy may stumble across, and pull on to unravel the entire knot in a twinkling. I have many such chains of influence, whose sole purpose is to be found and keep investigators happy and harmlessly employed. Really important work I assign to the only person I know will not betray me. What else puzzles you?”
“Your ultimate aim. Do you plan to keep on blowing up Stardancers until they get annoyed and go away?”
“I plan to annihilate them, root and branch.”
“But that’s silly.” Hunt down and kill more than forty thousand individuals in free space, who had low albedo, no waste heat, and nothing bigger than fillings in their teeth to show up on radar? Fat chance. With those huge variable light-sails attached to insignificant mass, they were more maneuverable than any vessel in space could ever be. What he proposed was not merely impossibly expensive, but impossible. “How could you hope to succeed?”
“By raising up an army against them,” he said blandly. “And for that I need a technological edge, an unbeatable one. I need the Symbiote, tamed.”
In my present state, I was incapable of shock. I was only mildly confused. I tightened my grip on the edges of my chair, so that I would not float away. “ ‘Tamed’?”
“You did not know. Good.” He sat back and lit up a joint. No, a cigarette. My ex-husband had been a diehard smoker too. “By coincidence, it was a resident of Carmel, Sheldon Silverman, who first proposed the concept of a Symbiotic army—less than ten minutes after the existence and nature of the Symbiote was first revealed. It’s in the Titan Transmission. But Charles Armstead pointed out the flaw in the idea. An immortal, telepathic soldier will mutiny the moment he joins the Starmind. He cannot be coerced anymore. I have tried placing spies in the Starmind; all ceased working at the instant of their Symbiosis. Fortunately I had anticipated this; none of them carried knowledge especially dangerous to me.
“But just suppose one could genetically modify the Symbiote, to produce a strain which does not convey telepathy, and has a limited life-span without regular reinfection.”
He had not phrased it as a question, so I could not answer. I did as I was told, just supposed. The drug kept me physically calm, relaxed and at ease—but inside my head a tiny part of me was screaming, beating at the walls of my skull.
The toughest part of having an army is keeping it fed and supplied and in motion. If you had a Symbiotic army, all you’d have to do was issue them lasers and turn them loose. So long as they needed regular fresh doses of false Symbiote to keep breathing vacuum, they would follow orders.
“It would be useful,” he went on, “to further modify the altered Symbiote so that it could survive terrestrial conditions. But I am told that is fundamentally impossible. No matter: who controls space controls the planet, in the final analysis. And the only military force in space that cannot be defended against is naked human beings who never hunger and thirst, an infantry who cannot be seen until it is too late. Do you see a flaw in the plan?”
“How can you genetically modify Symbiote? You can’t get a sample, without giving yourself away.”
Again his mouth grew tiny parentheses. “I have done so. That is precisely why your friends died.”
The Symbiote Mass! Its mass and vector to several decimal places had been public information. Place an explosive of known force near it, trigger it by radio at a predetermined instant, apply a little chaos theory, and when the mass blows to smithereens…you’ll know the projected new vector of the largest smithereens. There’s no way anyone else can track shards of organic matter in open space—but you can happen to have a ship in the right place to intercept some.
I lacked the capacity to be horrified. I appraised the idea dispassionately, like the emotionless Vulcan Jerald in Star Trek: the Third Generation on 3V. The scheme was brilliant, without flaw that I could see. Not only did he have sample Symbiote for his geneticists to experiment on, no one even suspected that. His biggest problem would be making sure no human accidentally touched any of the Symbiote while working with it—but that’s why they make remote-operated waldos; it was nowhere near as complex a problem as coping with dangerous nanoreplicators.
I’d been asked if I saw any flaws in the plan. “Stardancers would still have tactical advantage in combat. Instant, perfect communications.”
He shrugged. “Telepathy is not that much more effective than good radio, at close quarters. I will match my generalship against any component of the Starmind. And they are utterly unarmed.”
“There are a lot of them.”
“Do you have any idea how many men I can put in space in a hurry, if I do not mind heavy losses in transit? At most, the Stardancer population is one ten thousandth of that of the People’s Republic. The outcome is foreordained.” He blew a puff of smoke toward the ceiling. “Well, what do you think?”
“I think you are the biggest monster I ever heard of.”
He nodded. “Thank you,” he said.
A phone chimed beside him. He answered at once. “Yes?”
Maybe the drug enhanced my hearing. I could make out Robert’s voice. “Is she all right?”
Chen Hsi-Feng frowned slightly. “Did I not promise?”
“Let me speak to her.”
“No.”
“Then I’m coming in. I have to see her once more, before you take her mind.”
His frown deepened…then disappeared. “Of course. Come.”
He put down the phone, and took an object from an inner pocket. My own Gyrojet, it looked like, or one like it. “There is time for one last question,” he said distractedly.
I nodded. “You’re not going to let me live, are you? You lied to him.”
“Yes. I dare not simply wipe your memory. Organic memory differs from electronic in that any erasure can be undone, with enough time and effort. A pity: it will cost me a son.”
So I was going to die. And so was Robert, or Po Chang, or whoever he was today. Interesting. Regrettable. At least I would be forever safe from the things with the leather wings. Or perhaps not; perhaps they came from the land beyond life. No matter. An old traditional blues song went through my head.
“Sit there and be silent,” he commanded me. He swiveled his chair away, faced the door with his back to me. The door opened and Robert came in. Not Chen Po Chang—my Robert Chen. The door closed behind him, and locked. He registered that at the same instant he saw the gun. His face did not change, but his shoulders hunched the least little bit, then relaxed again. “I have been stupid,” he said.
His father nodded. “When you called her a romantic in the restaurant, I nearly laughed aloud. Do you remember what I told you on your thirteenth birthday?”
“…‘Love is to be avoided, for it causes you to believe not what is so, but what you must believe.’ You were right. You must kill her…and so you must kill me. Pray proceed.”