Carol thought that Bruno's eyes were the worst part. They stared, bulged, rolled up to show the whites and impossibly wide pupils. She wanted to stroke Bruno's face, but knew it was too early in the process to touch him. Not that he would even feel it. Sweat beaded out of his pores as he twitched, leaping from his skin in fine droplets, floating around the navigation deck in freefall.
When they had first had sex, Carol swore to herself that she was not in love with this sad little man with the bumpy, scarred cranium. The voyage was long, and it was doubtful that any of them would live through even its early stages. Years spent aboard an experimental spacecraft, followed by a suicide mission. Everyone on board Sun-Tzu, asleep or awake, knew the score displayed on that particular chip.
Carol had told herself that what she was starting to feel for Bruno was only the relief of tension, or at best its afterglow. She was an independent woman, after all. A pilot of a Shrike singleship against the Second Wave the ratcats had sent against Sol, Later, Carol had commanded several squadrons during the Third Wave, and had the shipsuit patches to prove it. Defending Sol had become her life. Carol did not have time for romantic entanglements, particularly with a chipheaded dwarf of a Flatlander like Bruno Takagama.
Yet she had fallen in love with him, with his moods and quirky sense of humor. Bruno Takagama was both child and man, and somehow neither. The plastic and electronics within his half-healed skull gave him a perspective and manner of thinking different from anyone Carol had ever known in the Belt.
She had found that very attractive.
Bruno was the family Carol had never really had, and she knew that he felt the same about her. The dour Neo-Amish Belters who had raised Carol after her parents' ore-carrier had blown out into high vacuum had a grudging praise for people like Bruno: His heart was as big as his soul.
It stung Carol deeply to see the man she loved become slowly inhuman, tied to the cold metal and silicon of a passionless machine. Yet, when she thought about it, it was ironic: Project Cherubim was not so very different for her, was it? Was Early's plan not to turn Carol, and the coldsleep crew, into something just as inhuman with the virus in the cryovial? Her lips thinned.
The main computer hummed an attention tone, and Carol dragged her thoughts back to the present. "Carol? I am ready to begin work.”
Bruno's voice was higher, oddly cadenced. The correct inflections were still there, peppering words and syllables, yet the nuances were almost too studied. It was as if he was trying to sound human.
She looked over at Bruno. The restraints had soundlessly retracted back into his crash couch. His eyes, still slightly wide, turned toward her, pupils black and enormous. She held back a familiar look of distaste and pain at that gaze.
The eyes were only part of it, Carol thought. His face was almost completely slack, like a poorly fitted mask. During Linkage, Bruno had other cool concerns than operating his facial musculature.
He sat calmly in the crash couch, the thick interface cable connecting his mind to the Sun-Tzu's computers slowly waving in the microgravity like a marine creature. She felt the usual conflicting emotions: love for Bruno, and discomfort at this alien Linked self.
Her hand reached over to touch his face, hovered, withdrew. "I assume the Linkage is complete?" Her tone was cool and professional, and each calm syllable cost her dearly.
"Yes," Bruno replied. "I can see again,”
While Bruno was Linked, he could see across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, using Sun-Tzu's complex and powerful sensory array. She knew that Bruno's sensorium was completely different from the minor chipping-in that any Belter pilot used from time to time for convenience. This was no mere telemetric readout of drive parameters or navigation control via the optic nerve.
Bruno in the fully Linked state perceived everything, all at once. The torrent of data fed directly into his brain and mind.
He called it the All. She had no more chance of understanding her lover's computer-augmented perceptions than an earthworm could understand a rainbow.
She turned away, pretending to study the holoscreen status reports. Even for someone as tough as Carol knew herself to be, as familiar as this scenario had become, the situation was almost unbearably painful.
Carol knew that Bruno's mental state was getting worse. And the process would continue inexorably. More and more, flashes of the cybernetic Bruno peered out from behind his eyes, even in his un-Linked state.
It was an inevitable process. The Linked Bruno was not human. The computer left more of itself behind with every full Linkage Bruno experienced. Each time he emerged from the autodoc after severing himself from the computer, there was less and less remaining of the Bruno she loved. His personality was slowly leaching away into a sea of silicon.
And yet he wanted Linkage, craved it.
Carol made a face. Perhaps she was being unfair. She wondered how she would feel and act, after conversion by the virus in the cryovial, with the odd name. Tree-of-Life. She knew that her feelings about full Linkage were a little irrational because, at least for now, Bruno could un-Link.
There would be no such return to humanity for Carol, once the Sun-Tzu reached Wunderlander space. Not once she awakened the crew in coldsleep, opened the cryovial in the sealed compartment of Dolittle, and initiated Project Cherubim.
She squared her shoulders. The trick, Carol knew from long experience, was to dissociate her command self from her personal self. She looked at Bruno and said coolly, "So, Tacky, do you still think that your ghost blip is actually a kzin ship?”
Bruno continued to stare directly at her, hardly moving, his pupils expanded to turn his normally grayish eyes into pools of blackness. It made Carol very nervous.
"Well?" she persisted, ignoring the creeping sensation crawling up and down her spine.
"Interesting," Bruno said, with a ghastly imitation of an un-Linked smile. "You keep your feelings from your voice. Or nearly so. But I can read your tones and stress patterns perfectly. Your facial gestures are quite clear when compared with contour bitmaps of earlier visual records. Biotelemetry is also accessed; your skin conductance and pupillary action concur with my conclusion." The alien smile faded. "I make you nervous.”
Carol kept her own face stiff, in counterpoint to his own slack features. "Yes," she said evenly, barely keeping the sarcasm from her tone. "It certainly takes an incredible intellect in full Linkage to conclude that fact.”
She watched Bruno for a moment, who said nothing.
"Humor, I would assume," he finally said flatly.
Carol tried again. "You certainly do make me nervous. You make everyone nervous when you're Linked. All Linkers do. This can't be the first time you've noticed.”
His face became completely immobile – mimicking her? "Quite correct; I apologize. But do recall that I am still partly the Bruno you know, and that portion of my Whole cares very much what you think and feel.”
Carol blinked at his odd terms and changing syntax. Still, she found his strange words reassuring: even while Linked, part of the Bruno-machine chimera remained the Bruno she loved.
"Thank you," she replied calmly, trying to focus. "But now it is time to get to work. Could you please look at the holoscreen, access the relevant data, and tell me what our putatively feline friends are doing, now that we have shut down the drive?”
Bruno chuckled slightly, too studied and deliberate. "You seem to forget – or refuse to accept – the properties of Linkage," he told her without rebuke. "In multitasking mode I do not require my optic nerves to read or interpret data.”
This was true, Carol knew. Data was pouring back and forth furiously through the interface cable, directly between Bruno's chipped-in hybrid brain and the main computers of the Sun-Tzu. It was still a little disconcerting to Carol to realize that a full Linker had his or her attention in many places, simultaneously.