Mute by Piers Anthony
They found a deserted car in running condition. Its owner, Mit assured them, was dead; this was not really stealing. “It’s not really honest, either,” Klisty muttered, but did not make more of an issue of it.
They drove carefully to the spaceport, arriving shortly before the shuttle’s departure time. The connection was with a disk ship, but not one destined for CCC or Chicken Itza; the lobos were not watching it closely.
They trooped to the embarkation gate. The electric power remained off; the CC readout machine had been replaced by human clerks. Knot held out his arm to which Finesse had carefully taped over with a new code pattern: that of the Fosfor family. It would not have fooled the computer scan a moment, since it did not match the bone imprint—but these were inexperienced, harried clerks in a hurry. They hardly even looked at the pattern; they had him call out the number from memory while they checked it against the fare-tally.
The process was similar for Finesse—now Mrs. Fosfor—and their two children and container of animal pets. The line was already being swelled by other late arrivals. “Three miniature kittypups,” the final clerk said, peering into the homemade box.
“Actually, they’re tame rats,” Knot said, to abate the man’s surprise. “The kids wanted kittypups, but they were too expensive, so we just called them that.” He winked.
Tame rats! Hermine thought, affronted.
He can see you’re not a kittypup, Knot responded. The lobos will be alert for a weasel. So try to merge with Roto and Rondl for now.
I’d love to merge them! she thought, with a mental picture of a weasel consuming a rat carcass. But she huddled dutifully between the two rats so that her different nature was not particularly evident, and projected a mental impression of rat-ness to the clerk to enhance the illusion.
They passed inspection, as Mit had thought they would, without being sure. The baby Harlan still bothered the hermit crab because of the way he interfered with even the simplest acts of precognition. But even Mit now believed it was necessary to have this cover. He was in Knot’s pocket, making a halfhearted attempt to sulk.
Knot saw a man who might be a lobo, but he couldn’t be sure. Odd how all the lobos he had met, except Viveka at the solar power station, had been males; where were all the lobo females? There might be fewer of them, since women tended to be more docile, more law-abiding, but still there should be more than one. Piebald had claimed to have a wife, yet she had never manifested at the villa.
But this was irrelevant at the moment. Knot placed his trust in his psi, sure no lobo would remember his face or form directly, and marched boldly on by. The man glanced, but did not challenge him.
Then Finesse. She had made up her face and hair to deviate from her norm, so that she really looked like a different woman. She did not have the forgetting protection. But Hermine was helping her, projecting a general impression of greater age. She got by too. Finally Klisty—who had been made up as a boy, to match the Fosfor son. She passed readily, carrying Harlan. At last they were aboard the shuttle. Knot began to relax as the ship sealed, and would have breathed a sigh of relief when the stasis came—had the stasis itself not made that impossible. They were on their way.
Still, he checked. Hermine, are there any lobos aboard?
No. All normals except us.
Very good. Of course they still had to get through the pre-travel distance precog verification while the ship remained parked in orbit.
Oh, no! How could they get Harlan through that? Hermine, I just thought of a snag. Harlan will foul up the voyage precog. We won’t be able to go until Harlan is removed from the ship. We can’t take him along.
I will ask Mit. She paused. Oopsy, that’s no good! He can’t precog it either.
It will also expose us to the lobos, Knot continued. They will investigate the return.
I will ask Finesse.
The stasis released. Finesse looked at him, startled. “I never thought of that! We’re in trouble!” She glanced at the baby, now peacefully sleeping in Klisty’s arms.
“I think we’ll just have to break up our party at the orbiting station,” Knot said regretfully. “You can take Hermine and Mit on to report to CC, and I’ll stay here to take care of the rest.”
“No! I’m not separating from you again,” she said firmly. “I’ve worked too hard remembering you, to forget you now. CC might erase what memory your absence didn’t. I don’t want to lose another man that way!”
“But we can’t leave Klisty alone. She’s only a child.”
Finesse glanced obliquely at him. “You like her, don’t you.”
“Yes.” He smiled. “Now don’t get jealous. I like her, but I love you. It’s just that I feel responsible.”
“So do I. We’ll all go together, or stay together.”
“You realize that probably means we’ll never leave Planet Macho?”
“Oh, we might hire a private ship for a short hop to a neighboring system, bypassing the precog check.”
“If the lobos don’t get us first,” he said. Still, it was not a bad notion. Many small individual-passenger and two-passenger ships existed; travel in them was risky, but feasible for people in their situation. “There’s also the matter of our mission.”
“I’ll send a message to CC, asking that another agent be sent. We can give our report to that agent, who can take it to CC. It’s workable, if slow.”
And safer for them all, in the event CC was finished with them. Yes—rejection for this present voyage would not be a complete disaster. “And we can settle down peacefully amid the Planet Macho mutiny and breed normal children,” Knot said.
“You will simply have to compromise with the hive, and put a stop to the war. The rest will not be too onerous.”
“Which reminds me: How could you have been born mutant, and your folks never know it?”
“Obviously they did not want to believe it, and since it was subtle it may not have manifested until Piebald—” She stopped, disliking the memory, momentarily touching her nose.
Knot, of course, knew her talent had been operative before. “When I interviewed CC and started to get balky, I began to experience a phobia. You must have been responsible.”
She concentrated. “I did seem to live a charmed life. No one ever caused much trouble for me. As a child I thought a dog was going to attack me, but something frightened it away. Still, there were many other times I was bothered or frightened, and nothing like that happened.”
“So you had the psi all along, but suppressed knowledge of it, and used it only in unguarded moments, unconsciously. So there was never any obvious connection to you.”
“I suppose I just wanted to be normal,” she agreed, a trifle wistfully. “When I started working for CC—honestly, I thought it was my expertise as an interviewer that qualified me for that job, plus the fact that CC had taken care of me so long—remember, I really did not have much of a human family life—and when I associated with so many psi mutants, I began to wish I had power like that too. But I knew I didn’t. If any of the clairvoyants caught on, CC must have erased that knowledge from them, keeping the secret.”
“CC is good at keeping secrets,” Knot agreed ruefully.
“But now that I have experienced psi myself, I never want to lose it. The very notion of lobotomy—” She grasped Knot’s hand tightly. “Knot, suddenly I’m afraid to go back to Macho society. The lobos—their experiments—like the historical Nazi ones—I have so much more to lose than I knew before! Let’s make a try for the disk-flight!”
Knot didn’t have the heart to remind her how hopeless that was, or that the effort could only raise a commotion that would pinpoint them for the lobos; she was well aware of this. What use to dwell on the negative aspects of the situation, when they could do nothing to ameliorate them?
How did the roaches feel about it? If the human party was headed for trouble, so were they. Knot glanced down into his pocket where they hid. All three were visible and peaceful. They weren’t worri
Is it? he asked Hermine. Can Mit answer that?
Mit says yes he can answer. No, the roaches are not affected. They are not really precognitive; they just know when danger becomes more likely.
Isn’t trouble becoming more likely now?
The roaches don’t think so. Of course, their range is limited.
Limited range—that could explain it. Still, the moment of crisis was not far removed. “You were tuned in?” Knot asked Finesse. “Which do you think is correct—our logic or the roaches’ unworry?”
“Redbug, Greenbug and Yelbug, of course. What is logic compared to psi?”
“No comparison,” he agreed faintly.
Nevertheless, they awaited the docking and verification with trepidation that they tried not to communicate to Klisty or the other travelers. Knot remembered his first trip in space, seemingly so long ago, when he had been precipitously failing into love with Finesse. Much had changed, but not his feeling. He took her small fine hand again and squeezed it reassuringly. WISH US LUCK
SO WISHED, she squeezed back.
The docking and checking routine proceeded without a hitch. The orbiting ship was not affected by the turmoil on the surface of the planet; the mutiny was a matter of local curiosity, rather than life and death. No challenge was made. Soon they were seated in the disk ship, underway.
Knot hardly dared believe it. He squeezed Finesse’s hand in communication again. WHAT HAPPENED?
NOTHING HAPPENED, she responded, as mystified as he. MAYBE THIS IS AN ILLUSION, A SWEET DREAM. LET’S NOT WAKE SOON.
They went into stasis. No doubt about it: the ship was traveling. It was not going directly to CC, but they would transfer later to one that was. Once they were certain they were free of the menace of the lobos, they could change their itinerary openly. The important thing was that they were safely in space, despite Harlan’s presence.
What could account for it? It behooved him to find out. He was not the kind to accept an illusion unquestioningly. Hermine, does Mit know why we had no precog trouble?
No. Mit says ship’s precog could not have operated.
Could Harlan’s power be intermittent? Maybe it does not operate when he sleeps, or is distracted.
No, it is constant, like yours. His future cannot be anticipated whether he sleeps or wakes.
They would not have permitted ship to launch without a positive report. Yet obviously they had. What could account for this? No ship launched without a report by an accredited CC precog. Credentials were rigorously verified. The ship’s telepath would detect any substitution of personnel, or any prevarication by the precog. It was a tight system, virtually foolproof, as it had to be. So the reading couldn’t have been faked—yet it couldn’t have been accurate, either.
Klisty wants to know whether precogs are always right, Hermine thought.
Tell her I’m not sure, Knot replied. He didn’t want to alarm the girls. If a precog sees an accident coming, he makes the ship wait, so that there will be no accident. So in that sense he is wrong, because the accident never happens. Yet he is also right, because if he hadn’t seen it and given warning, it would have happened.
Suddenly Knot, listening to his own thoughts, had it. The voyage precog had seen no accident, therefore had approved the voyage routinely. He had not been verifying the ship’s safe arrival, but had taken the shortcut of checking for a problem. Since Harlan’s psi interfered with precognition, the precog had drawn a blank—and assumed it was all right.
Tell Finesse and Klisty, Knot thought grimly, that we owe our own security to the insecurity of the ship. Like the game of finding the pea under the cup; one way to win is to find the pea. Another way is to call out which cups do not have the pea. If the gamemaster is cheating, and has no pea under any cup, the second system is effective for the player. In this case, if the pea is disaster, the precog looked at the voyage, found no disaster, so assumed all was well. But the reason he did not find it—
Was because Harlan blanked it out, Klisty’s relayed thought concluded.
Which means we’re traveling blind, Finesse added. We don’t know this ship will arrive safely.
It’s a fair gamble, Knot thought. Better than returning to Planet Macho. If we get bounced from the next ship by a more alert precog, we’re still out of range of the lobos.
Unless the lobos on other planets have been given the word, Finesse thought.
But the pilot will be most upset if the ship cracks up and we all die in one big gooey squish, Klisty thought. Then she started laughing mentally, a bit hysterically, knowing that her image was ludicrous but that there was indeed some risk of ship malfunction.
Soon they were all laughing, though frozen in stasis. Hermine relayed the cacophony as well as she could.
But as it happened, there was no disaster. Few ships these days had serious trouble; the odds had been well in this ship’s favor. They docked in orbit about Planet Gumbo where, after a few hours delay, they transferred to a ship going to CCC, refueling at Chicken Itza.
Knot, as usual, had to reintroduce himself to people, and remind his companions of his recent interactions with them. “Oh, now I remember!” Klisty exclaimed. “You’re fun to keep meeting for the first time!”
When at length they orbited Chicken Itza they took the shuttle down openly; no one cared where they were going. Knot remembered the warehouse where the fighting cocks were parked. He would not go wandering and releasing any chickens this time.
No one challenged them as they made their way to the hay room where CC’s terminal was hidden. But Hermine and Mit were tense, the latter unable to precog but quite worried about what he might have seen had he been able to. The colored roaches became nervous, too.
Knot caught Finesse’s eye and gestured to his pocket; she nodded, understanding. The roaches had anticipated no threat in the disk ship, and had been correct; they had been aware of no problem in the shuttle’s descent, and had been right again. Now they felt trouble. They became more agitated as the party approached the terminal.
“Use your psi,” Knot murmured to Finesse. “Scare away all people and creatures from our vicinity. Just to be sure.”
She nodded agreement. Still the roaches reacted, beginning to fade out of sight. Knot paused. He did not want to use telepathy here; CC might have a monitor on such communication, and it would not be expedient to advertise that they no longer quite trusted CC. He put his hand on Finesse’s arm: WE HAD BETTER GIVE HERMINE AND MIT TO KLISTY, AND MEET CC ALONE.
Addressing Klisty, he pointed down the hall where he remembered the fighting cocks being caged. He knew Hermine would warn her against releasing any of those, should she be so foolish as to try it.
Then he lifted Harlan from Klisty’s arms. With luck, Mit’s psi would be able to protect the child, if she got far enough away from the precog-nullifying baby. But now Finesse objected, silently. She didn’t want Harlan going into CC’s presence. Belatedly Knot remembered that aspect; of course he couldn’t do that. Reluctantly he passed the baby back. At least Mit’s clairvoyance would still function, and that was worth considerable.
Suddenly the five bees buzzed across from Knot to Klisty too. It seemed they did not want to be on hand for the CC interview after all. The rats became restless, and the roaches had disappeared entirely. This was a microcosmic animal mutiny!
All perceivable creatures transferred to the girl. “I feel like a sinking ship,” Knot muttered. Spaceships didn’t sink, but the ancient waterborne ones did.
Then Knot and Finesse braced themselves and walked on to meet CC. They might be rendering themselves expendable, but they felt duty-bound to make their report to the machine.
The terminal was there amidst the hay, exactly as before. No one not in the know would suspect its nature without the aid of clairvoyance. Finesse fooled with wisps of straw projecting from the hay-bale
“Yes,” Knot replied. “We know who is attacking you. Prompt action should eliminate this particular menace and make it possible for you to survive and maintain the human empire. However, there is another complication.”
“What is this?” the machine asked.
“There is mutiny among the animals of Planet Macho—and perhaps elsewhere. The planet is being ravaged. The animals desire parity with man, and wish you to assist them in obtaining it. There are also specialized requests.”
“This is of no special concern,” CC replied. “We have means to subdue the hive intellect.”
“You already know of the hive?” Knot asked, surprised. He remembered how the hive had offered him a complete chart of CCC; had the two forces already encountered each other? “Some other agent reported?”
“My master reported.”
Knot felt a chill. Had someone else managed to use the override code? That could mean serious trouble! He began to tap his foot—but could not recollect the complex pattern Mit had picked up before.
“Desist,” CC said. “I am not to be overridden again; I am already on override.”
Bad news! “Who is your master?”
The holograph dissolved, then reformed—into the image of the lobo Piebald.
“No!” Knot cried, and Finesse made a little scream.
Now Piebald spoke for himself. “As you know, the odds were against your success. As it happened, you actually facilitated our victory over the machine. We now govern the Coordination Computer.”
Numbed by the extent of this disaster, Knot could only ask “How?”
“You obtained the secret override code.”
“But I never gave it to you!” Knot protested. “I don’t even remember it myself!”
“Naturally not. CC erased it from your memory, and from the memories of weasel and crab. But Finesse overheard it as you tapped it out. It was in her subconscious memory, available to our drug interrogation at the Macho station because she was not aware of its significance. All we had to do was reach a key CC terminal.”