"Attention on deck!"
The officers around the table rose to their feet in response to the chief of staff's quiet announcement as Vice Admiral Castellan entered the room.
"As you were, ladies and gentlemen," Basil said, with an authoritativeness he still had to consciously put into his voice at age thirty-seven. The fact that he had only just gotten his third sunburst, and was the youngest person in the Fleet to have it, didn't help. Such rapid advancement had been unheard of in the old days. So many things had been unheard of in the old days. . . .
He dismissed the thought and sat down at the head of the shiny-topped oval table, and everyone else followed suit. The ensuing moment of chair aligning gave him and his new staff a chance to study each other. They saw a man who looked even younger than he was. Flag rank had brought with it access to the anagathics that the Castellans—academics of no enormous distinction—had never been able to afford. His response had proven to be about average: his aging would be slowed by a factor of roughly two and a half, as long as he continued to receive the treatments on an annual basis.
"I'm sorry we haven't had a chance to get to know each other better," he began. "But, as you're all aware, this task force is being put together in some haste. Only recently has Grand Admiral Medina been in a position to undertake the offensive we're going to be a part of—the offensive that will put an end to the rebellion." He studied the staffers' reactions. Some were oddly ambivalent. Most of these people, like him, were young for their ranks by the standards of the old peacetime Fleet. The youngest had come of age with the New Human rebellion, and probably found the idea that it could ever end slightly unreal. As unreal as he would once have found the notion that it would still be going on after fourteen years.
"Please turn your attention to the packets Captain Silva has already distributed. These documents contain the basic operational concept that Grand Admiral Medina submitted to His Imperial Majesty for approval." He eyed them narrowly, but no one cracked a smile. There was a snapping of security seals and a soft clicking as datachips were inserted into the tabletop terminals. "Captain Silva, please summarize."
"Thank you, Admiral." The chief of staff, an obvious native of a low-gravity planet of a hot sun, reminded him of Torval Bogdan simply by being so precisely his opposite. She was taller than the average man but elvish slender, and her skin was ebon black although her features reflected a mixture of races. Her willowy look concealed a wiriness acquired over a professional life spent mostly on heavier planets and aboard ships that maintained the Fleet's standard one Prometheus gee. She touched a control, and a holographic star diagram appeared over the table. It covered the three sectors that had broken away fourteen years ago, mostly still in rebel hands, and the nearer regions of the Empire, including Sigma Draconis. "Up" and "down" were defined by the traditional ecliptic plane of Old Earth.
"You will note," she said, "that the Mu Arae Sector's isolated position makes it, from the rebel standpoint, a potential base for us to create a new front. This, of course, explains their early efforts to gain control of it through internal subversion." They had all seen the scars left by the fighting in the rebellion's early days, when control of this small, out-of-the-way sector had fluctuated. "Grand Admiral Medina's plan is for us and a task force from Sigma Draconis to advance toward the rebels' core systems simultaneously. The Sigma Draconis force will allow itself to be driven back rather easily, leading the rebels to believe that we represent the main thrust. But in fact there will be a second, stronger wave from Sigma Draconis under Grand Admiral Medina's personal command, timed to enter rebel space just after they have realigned their forces to confront us.
"Obviously, this plan will require us to face the main rebel fleet for a short time—hopefully a very short time, before they realize their mistake and try to fall back to protect their capital system. The objective is to catch that main fleet between ourselves and Grand Admiral Medina and crush it, thus effectively ending the rebellion as a military force and making the individual rebel planets accessible to us. Of course, the rebels have had a long time to fortify those planets—"
Yes, a very long time, Basil thought bleakly. Longer than anyone would have dreamed, fourteen years ago. He stopped listening as Silva proceeded with the order of battle, which he already knew—indeed, he'd helped formulate it. Instead, he thought back over those fourteen years.
As Medina had foretold, they'd been in no position to exploit the initial victory at DM -27 14659, with rebellions erupting all over the Empire. Regional admirals had been given extraordinary authority to deal with those rebellions, superseding an Imperial administrative structure that had been reeling toward dissolution anyway. As time had passed, those admirals had tended more and more to behave as quasi-independent warlords. And they had seethed with resentment of the corruption and incompetence among the inner court circle which had hampered every effort to reconquer the three seceded sectors. Fortunately, in the aftermath of DM -27 14659 the "People's Democratic Union" had been like a wounded dog, growling at the hamstrung giant but unable to spring for its throat.
Then, in 3899, old Emperor Armin IV had died—and the synthetics who had surrounded and dominated him overplayed their hand. Tradition permitted the Emperor to choose his successor from among his own blood relatives, and Armin's choice had fallen on Josef, the younger of his two sons. But the synthetics had installed Andrei, the elder, whom they deemed more controllable. The governmental apparatus, long accustomed to being excluded from the Emperor's person by his household administration, had been paralyzed by indecision . . . all but Prime Minister Morava. She had summoned available Fleet forces to Sol, hoping to overawe the synthetics with the threat of a military coup and thereby avoid its actuality. Unfortunately, the forces first able to respond to her call had been those of Admiral Kleuger, who by virtue of his unrivaled ability at murder and slaughter had gained control of the Sigma Draconis system. Unfortunate, too, that Morava herself had been assassinated by the synthetics shortly after those forces had arrived. Kleuger had sent his Marines down onto the Old Earth city where the court had currently been in residence. (What had it been called? New York? New Delhi? Something like that. One of the capitals of one of the old civilizations whose remains overlaid Old Earth like geological strata.) They had exterminated all the synthetics they could catch. Then they'd exterminated all supporters of Andrei the False. Then they'd exterminated everyone whose support for Josef's claim to the throne had been insufficiently vociferous. Then they'd exterminated everyone whose face they hadn't liked. Somewhere along the way, they'd managed to take Andrei alive; and Kleuger, in one of his more rational moments, had accepted his abdication. (His subsequent death, the Empire was solemnly assured, had been a natural one.)
Then, threatened by a coalition of rival freebooting admirals, Kleuger had taken the newly crowned Emperor Josef to Sigma Draconis "for security reasons." For the next two years, he had claimed universal authority in the name of his puppet Emperor. Finally, by 3902, his behavior had reached such a psychopathic level of violence that his own officers had thought it prudent to assassinate him. The Imperial court had existed in limbo until 3906, when Yoshi Medina had seized Sol and declared himself protector of the Empire. He ceremoniously brought Josef back from Sigma Draconis and reinstalled him on Old Earth amid such of his ancestors' accumulated glories as Kleuger hadn't plundered. Then, armed with the prestige which the Emperor could still confer on his military commander-in-chief, Medina had brought most of the renegade admirals to heel. Only Kang still remained evasively recalcitrant in the Serpens/Bootes region—a group of frontier sectors with imperfectly assimilated populations. Medina deemed him ignorable for the present, preferring to put a final end to the New Humans before dealing with Kang and those other admirals of whose subservience he still wasn't altogether certain.
Basil grew aware that Silva was concluding her presentation. "Thank you, Captain," he said, hauling his mind back to the present. "As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, the task force still exists largely on paper. Major elements have yet to arrive—notably Rear Admiral Rady's battle group and Major General Bogdan's planetary assault forces. In order to meet the target date, we will have to begin preliminary staff work immediately, while they are still en route. Captain Silva has full authority in this matter until I return from my inspection tour." The nearby red-dwarf system of DM -48 11837 was the staging area for the first of the new Implacable-class battleships which had been assigned to this task force—Medina was still skeptical of the Mu Arae system's security, and he wanted the Implacables to come as a surprise to the rebels when the offensive commenced.
There was a brief flurry of questions, and then Basil was off, ascending a lift tube to an even higher level of this urban tower and emerging onto a flange where his personal aircar waited. It was night, and as the aircar lifted off he got a spectacular view of Bronson's Landing, the metropolis of Hespera, with its dazzling array of towers. Nanoconstructors could make repairs very quickly, and the cityscape showed no signs of the ravages of civil war. Basil wondered if the same was true of the society that dwelled inside these gleaming buildings.
He dismissed the thought, to make room for his more usual anxieties—notably, the length of time it was going to take Sonja and Torval to get here with their respective commands. He had asked for them and gotten them, for Medina had learned over the years that the three of them formed a whole that was more than the sum of its parts. As Basil had risen as Medina's protégé, the other two had risen with him.
The aircar approached the spaceport, its vast field an oasis of darkness in the light-blazing cityscape. Mu Arae had never had a Fleet base before the rebellion, just a small headquarters at this civilian facility. Now the entire spaceport was under military administration, and Basil's Courier-class speedster lay alongside a secondary terminal which had always handled such small vessels. As the aircar settled down beside the terminal and Basil stepped out, a quartet of guards emerged from the darkness and fell into a diamond-shaped formation around him. They were Fleet Security, and Basil smiled at the thought of what Torval would have said. But this sort of duty was, by tradition, Security's job. No need to step on people's toes unnecessarily.
They proceeded toward the Courier. It was streamlined for rapid atmosphere transit, which gave it a look of fleetness which could have been completely spurious as far as the interstellar long haul was concerned but wasn't. It was near the lower limit of size for a viable interstellar craft, built for speed and little else. Its sleek sides reflected the meager light—this was a poorly illuminated area—and Basil couldn't make out the features of the uniformed woman who emerged from the hatch. It must, he decided, be his aide, who would share the Spartan accommodations with him and the crew of two. But wait, wasn't this woman a little tall for Lieutenant Commander Markova? And who was that coming out after her . . . ?
The woman walked briskly forward and, without breaking stride, brought up a hand weapon. There was the harsh humming of a sonic stunner, and the guard in front of Basil collapsed. By sheer chance, the guard fell backwards, into him, and he lost his balance. He saw the other guards go down—their impact armor was designed to stop solid projectiles, and offered no protection against sonics. Only the point man's body had shielded Basil. Looking up from under the immobile form, he saw the two figures come closer, stunners lowered—they evidently thought him unconscious. A third, silhouetted against the Courier's hatch, called out, "Take him—quick!"
The woman approached. Basil pulled his legs sharply up and, using them and his arms, propelled the guard's limp form into a collision with her. As she stumbled, he sprang to his feet and charged her companion, seizing him by both wrists before he could bring his stunner into play. As they grappled, Basil took a deep, gasping breath and yelled with the maximum volume he could manage. "Guards! Anybody! Help!"
He wrestled the man to the ground and spared a quick glance at the woman, who had regained her feet. She was pointing her stunner but seemed hesitant to try a shot, which would almost certainly stun both of the struggling figures. Then he heard the sound of running feet on the tarmac from the direction of the small-craft terminal. Ah, they heard me, or saw what was going on. About goddamned time . . .
There was a brain-rattling impact behind his right ear, and the universe exploded into whirling galaxies of stars before going out.
He awakened into an infinity of pain and nausea, far beyond what a simple hit on the head, even if combined with sonics, could account for. He couldn't even escape from his nightmare of inability to move, for he was lying on his back strapped tightly to a narrow bunk in what he recognized as a Courier's cabin. And he could hear and feel the very faint thrumming that was unavoidable aboard even the best-built spacecraft under drive.
Movement at his bedside penetrated his fog of agony. He turned his head slightly and saw a woman—the one from the spacefield?—stand up and pocket the injector from which she'd presumably dosed him with whatever had brought him around. She moved aside, revealing a man in nondescript civilian clothing with a paralysis pistol holstered at his side, sitting cross-legged in a chair—a thin man with a long narrow face and a long narrow nose down which he gazed impersonally at Basil with pale-gray eyes. There was a guard standing beside the compartment's door, but Basil spared him only an instant's glance. The seated man was the one who counted.
The pain in his head gradually made room for the reality of his situation. With it came the slate-gray knowledge of what his duty was. Without further thought, he probed with his tongue for a certain tooth . . . only to find a gap, and awake a shooting pain that momentarily rose whitecap-like above his sea of misery.
The thin-faced man's mouth twitched upward in a half-second's amusement. "Don't bother, Admiral Castellan. We're aware of your suicide devices. We haven't removed the explosive implant, since we lack the equipment to do a proper job and we didn't want to risk damaging your brain. We have, however, extracted the artificial tooth with which it is activated."
Basil hadn't even noticed the pain of the rough-and-ready dental work, for individual pains were hard to differentiate. And he didn't really notice even now, not in the face of the despair that eclipsed even his physical agony. He opened his mouth with some effort, for his lips seemed to be glued together, and when he tried to speak he realized how dry his mouth was. "Water!"
The thin-faced man gestured, and the woman stepped forward and offered Basil the drinking tube of a plastic bottle. The rarest and most fabled vintages were reduced to insipidity by comparison with the room-temperature water . . . which, with another gesture from the man in the chair, was withdrawn.
"Not too much at once. We've kept you unconscious for some time. An awkward process, but this craft lacks cryogenic suspension facilities."
"How long?" Basil croaked.
Again the thin lips moved in a tic of momentary amusement that had no humor in it. "Cautious habit prevents me from answering that question, Admiral. It might enable you to estimate the distance from Mu Arae to the destination at which we are about to arrive."
"I'm hardly in a position to make use of the information."
"True. But security procedures are best observed at all times. We need only look to your side for illustrations of the consequences of failure to do so."
Either Basil's headache was ebbing or he was getting used to it, for speech seemed to be coming with less agony. "I suppose you're referring to your knowledge of my movements. And the fact that you were able to infiltrate the Bronson's Landing spaceport and take control of this vessel."
"And also take control of the small craft terminal," the thin-faced man nodded. "Which allowed us to escape from the system before anyone was aware of what was happening."
Basil wasn't too surprised. They'd known there was still a functioning New Human underground on Hespera. Evidently they hadn't taken it seriously enough. "So your local people held that terminal long enough for you to make your escape. I imagine they're all dead by now," he added with calculated malice.
"Indubitably." There was no sign that Basil had succeeded in shaking his captor's composure. "By the way, I am Felix 3581-2794. We have, you see, done away—"
"With surnames," Basil finished for him. "Part of your overall policy of destroying the family."
"Of course. It must be eradicated along with all other institutions which interpose themselves between the State and the individual. Only then, with the individual's insignificance revealed plainly enough for even the stupidest to see, will the majority of humans be sufficiently controllable to be led into the next stage of social evolution, in which individuality is transcended. But I digress." Felix stood up and stretched. "We are arriving at our destination. Which is, of course, the reason you've been awakened."
Of course, Basil's mind echoed dully. It's necessary that I be conscious. In some periphery of his mind that was not immobilized by knowledge of what was to come, he became aware of that subliminal change in background sensations that told an experienced spacer that the ship had come out of drive.
Felix gestured, and his two subordinates proceeded efficiently to release Basil's straps. Then they grasped him by the arms and hauled him up into a standing position that his long-unused muscles couldn't have sustained unaided. A thousand tiny needles seemed to prick his legs and feet as blood circulated back into them, and a wave of nausea and dizziness washed over him. Before he had time to be sick they marched him through the door and along the Courier's short central passageway to the bridge.
It was a small bridge, with the pilot-captain's and helmsman's chairs and their attached control panels and neurohelmets extending out into the concavity formed by a bowl-shaped viewscreen. That screen showed only the star-strewn blackness of interstellar space.
Felix observed Basil's puzzlement and gave his brief half-smile of humorless amusement. "Tactical," he ordered the pilot-captain, and at once the viewscreen ceased to reproduce what unaided eyes would have seen through a transparent hull. Instead, an array of multicolored symbols appeared, bewildering to anyone who wasn't trained to read it. But Basil was so trained. And his despair deepened as he gazed at the serried ranks of ships that had no nearby light source to reflect in the visual display.
These weren't the converted freighters that had made up the bulk of rebel strength in earlier years. They were warships of every class. Swift, lightly armed frigates. The cruisers and battlecruisers that were the backbone of every fleet. And battleships comparable to the Empire's new Implacables. This new-construction armada must represent a fanatical production drive by all the worlds in all the sectors of the breakaway "People's Democratic Union."
Basil grew aware that Felix was looking at him. This time the faint smile held an unmistakable element of malice—the first real emotion Basil had seen his captor display.
"Where are we?" he asked, not expecting an answer but needing to fill the silence.
"We're orbiting a rogue planet at the maximum radius at which it can hold objects in a stable orbit—it's quite invisible to the naked eye at this distance. As for the location of that rogue planet, I'll only say that the force you see before you will be in a position to launch itself at the Imperial core systems as soon as those have been denuded of ships by your Fleet's offensive."
Basil knew his jaw had gone slack, and couldn't help it. Felix's expression was now unmistakably one of gloating. "Oh, yes. We know, in general terms, about the offensive planned by the butcher Medina—your mentor. We've known for some time. You really have no idea, do you, how deep the rot goes in the Imperial system? It goes far beyond security leaks on Hespera. Some of the synthetics in the Imperial court itself have been in our pay!"
Basil wasn't really surprised. The synthetics' corruption was well known to everyone except the Emperors, whose trust in them had repeatedly proven to be misplaced. It was an abiding Imperial blind spot. Living in a court pervaded by intrigue, the Emperors needed to believe that someone around them was free of ambition. So they made intimates of synthetics, believing that ambition was simply out of the question for beings who had nothing but Imperial protection standing between themselves and the universal loathing and contempt with which they were regarded. So went the theory. But in fact the synthetics were quite capable of avarice . . . and of a sheer malice born of desire to hurt and punish the society of natural humans that had brought them into existence.
"I don't imagine," Basil heard himself saying, "that they've been much help to you lately." Kleuger's berserk pogrom of the court synthetics had been followed by Medina's careful, systematic one.
"True enough," Felix admitted. "We've experienced a certain drying-up of our sources of information, and therefore know about the offensive only in broad outlines. Which is why we were prepared to go to great lengths—including the sacrifice of our surviving organization on Hespera—to capture you, Admiral."
Basil met his gaze in silence, for there was no reply to make. After a moment, Felix glanced back at the viewscreen. "I believe we're now in eye-range of our destination." The pilot-captain took the hint and switched the viewscreen back to visual display. At first Basil could make nothing out except a small shark-shaped segment of blackness, occluding the stars. Then a ship began to take form and grow, feebly reflecting the stars and the Courier's spotlights.
"A frigate specially equipped for intelligence-gathering purposes," Felix explained. "Naturally it carries mind-probe equipment."
"Naturally," Basil echoed in what he hoped was a conver-sational tone. He made himself relax, hoping that the two who held his arms would loosen their grips correspondingly. Felix probably wasn't a fast-draw artist, and at any rate he wouldn't use his paralysis pistol here, where an accidental hit could play hob with electronic systems.
"Let no one assert," Felix philosophized, "that technological advancement has not fundamentally altered the human condition. For one thing, it has eliminated much of the need for torture—at least as an aid to interrogation, in which capacity it was never particularly reliable anyway. Indeed, to a limited extent it has eliminated the very process of interrogation, in the old sense."
And, Basil thought sickly, watching the frigate swell in the viewscreen as they approached rendezvous, along with torture has disappeared the possibility of resistance to torture. Determination, courage, honor, loyalty . . . all counted for nothing. Even extreme gestures like biting out one's own tongue, once effective against the old "truth" drugs—which at any event had only been able to access what the subject believed to be the truth—could no longer suffice to withhold information. Nor could suicide, for even the freshly dead mind could be made to yield its secrets.
But that mind had to be housed in an intact brain. . . .
Basil made his muscles relax even further as the frigate continued to wax in the viewscreen and its docking bay yawned before them like the mouth of hell. His captors, with no resistance to overcome, grasped his arms a little less tightly.
As suddenly as he could manage in his weakened, just-awakened state, he performed a textbook breakaway maneuver—first forcing his arms upward in a movement that those holding him instinctively pushed against, then downward. Then he thrust his momentarily free arms straight outward to each side, shoving the startled rebels off balance. Felix yelled something, but Basil hardly heard, for with everything he could summon up from his stiffened limbs he was springing forward toward the open space between the two control chairs, through which he would leap headfirst into the viewscreen.
It might have worked, had his body been functioning at its normal pitch, and had the pilot-captain and helmsman been mind-linked with the ship and thus oblivious to their bodies' immediate surroundings. But the former had his neurohelmet raised, and responded instantly to Felix's shout, throwing himself sideways out of the chair against Basil's sluggishly pumping legs. The two of them went down in a tangle from which Basil was hauled by his two guards. They yanked his arms painfully upward behind his back into a position from which he couldn't even attempt to extricate them save at the cost of dislocation.
Felix stepped slowly forward into Basil's field of vision. Abruptly and with no appearance of passion, he slapped his prisoner across the face twice. Basil tasted the saltiness of blood from a cut lip, and consciousness wavered. Behind Felix's head he could see the viewscreen. The frigate's docking bay was swallowing them.
"Typical," Felix observed. "Theatrical heroics are only to be expected from a servant of a system rooted in archaism. I remind you that while use of the probe requires that you be conscious, it does not require that you be willing . . . or comfortable. Any further recalcitrance will be punished with nerve lash." There was a faint jar as the Courier settled onto the docking bay's deck. "And now, let us proceed."
Basil went without resistance. He didn't really think Felix would use nerve-lash, which while technically non-lethal (although it carried harsher penalties for unlawful use than most deadly weapons) sometimes resulted in its victim's death as the nervous system seized up in response to unendurable agony. But he had no desire to take the chance. There was a brief colloquy in the docking bay between Felix and an officer in the nondescript gray uniform of the People's Democratic Union. Then they proceeded through labyrinthine corridors where people stepped aside deferentially at Felix's approach despite his civilian dress. They came to a hatchway where a sentry admitted them to a small compartment.
The room held the same clutter of cabinets and overloaded shelves as such rooms anywhere. But its centerpiece was an ironically comfortable-looking reclining couch. Overhead, ready to be lowered down over the head of the couch's occupant, was something that looked not too unlike the standard neurohelmet used in ordinary forms of direct human-machine interfacing, but which Basil recognized for what it was. Off to one side was a desktop-sized device including a viewscreen he couldn't see, connected to the chair by cables. Behind the desk, under a still-raised helmet identical to the other, a gray-uniformed woman sat. Her head had the same stubblelike haircut that all New Humans affected (black in her case; Felix's mingled the colors of sand and dust), but Basil could tell that she was a woman. And, for no particularly good reason, that made it even worse. His mind ran frantically back over things he had seen, heard, felt, smelled and tasted in the last three months.
"And now," Felix said, "just to assure that there will be no further nonsense. . . ." He drew his paralysis gun and fired at a range at which he couldn't miss.
The pair holding Basil's arms kept him upright as he abruptly became incapable of any voluntary muscular action. They put him on the couch, manipulating his limbs with the impersonality one might bring to the hanging of a carcass from a meathook. Then they lowered the slightly peculiar-looking helmet over his head. His consciousness of all this was horribly unimpaired, and he found that he could, with great effort, turn his eyes in their sockets. Thus he saw the woman from behind the desk approach from his right and, without granting him even the most passing of glances, roll up his sleeve. First she inserted an IV tube—probably to continue feeding him nourishment, for this might take a while. Then she pressed an injector to his upper arm. Then she was gone from his range of vision, and Basil heard a faint hum which, he knew, meant that her own helmet was lowering into place.
Felix stepped in front of him. "As you are doubtless aware, the process is physically painless. And your innermost mental privacy is quite secure, for the probe reads not actual thoughts but sensory impressions—all of them, for the last three months or so, regardless of your ability to consciously recollect them. Of course, most of these will simply be skimmed over by our operator, a highly skilled—and professionally detached—technician." The thin face was as immobile as ever, but Basil detected a slight gleam in the pale-gray eyes, and he decided his initial impression of emotionlessness had been mistaken. Felix enjoyed his work. "We are, after all, only interested in what you have seen and heard that pertains to the planned offensive," the dead-leaves-dry voice went on. "And, to repeat, your actual memories will be inviolate—for now. Afterwards, when we've taken you to a core system of the People's Democratic Union where full-scale hospital facilities are available, it will be time to consider downloading your consciousness."
Basil, whose immobilized larynx could not form a scream, just looked at him. The thin mouth formed one of its momentary half-smiles. Then Felix moved aside, and it began.
Basil lay on the hard, narrow bunk in the room without windows or doors, looking up at the featureless ceiling. His soul looked up from the bottom of a black well of hopelessness.
With the usual absence of warning, a doorway appeared in one of the smooth walls as the nanoplastic reconfigured itself. Felix, now in uniform and carrying a briefcase, stepped into the room, followed by two powerfully built guards with paralysis guns. Behind them, the wall became unbroken again.
"You are well, I trust. Evidently the rations agree with you, as I understand you've been eating voraciously."
Basil's stomach had shrunk during the period when he was being intravenously nourished, so he hadn't experienced any hunger pangs until after his first normal feeding. Then he'd ravenously attacked food that he normally would have found about as appetizing as dampened chalk. Now he wordlessly swung himself up into a sitting position on the bunk's edge.
Felix evidently hadn't expected a reply, for he continued without a break. "You will be interested to know that your probing was a complete success. As expected, most of the material was of no value to us—all the everyday tediousness and sordidness. But some of the auditory input exceeded our most sanguine expectations—"
Like Medina's voice, and my own, and those of his staffers, as we hammered out the operation, Basil thought bleakly.
"—as, to an even greater extent, did some of the visual images, which as you know can be recorded by ordinary means as they appear on the probe's screen."
The operations people were so proud of their detailed, multicolored hologram of the entire plan, Basil's bleak thoughts flowed sluggishly on. Nothing would do but that I view it from every angle and voice appreciation of every aspect.
"I have the datachip containing the visual recording here," Felix continued, patting his briefcase. "And now, the time has come for us to depart for Unity."
Curiosity overcame Basil's disinclination to speak. "'Unity'?"
"A planet of the People's Democratic Union. It used to have another name, of course—now abolished like all holdovers of the past. Our transportation should have a comforting familiarity for you, for we're taking your personal Courier. Its swiftness is such that the journey should not be a tedious one."
"Will I be kept unconscious again, lest I occupy my time calculating distances?"
"I don't believe that will be necessary, Admiral. You will, however, be closely guarded to prevent any attempts at self-destruction."
"Why bother, now? You have what you want, don't you?" But then a recollection broke the surface of Basil's consciousness. "Unless you really meant what you said about . . ."
Felix nodded. "The downloading. Yes. You'll find I never say anything without meaning it, Admiral."
"I'm flattered, considering the expense."
The ability to record the memories that made up a human awareness dated back to the thirty-fifth century, when it had been heralded as offering a kind of immortality through imprinting copies of one's consciousness onto the blank brains of one force-grown clone after another. But that hope had run aground on the hard facts of organic chemistry; the process took too long for a living brain to accept the input. Computer software, though, was another matter. A very complex computer, purpose-built at staggering cost to accept the very specialized data-storage media involved, could run a recorded personality as a self-aware program.
"It is expensive," Felix acknowledged. "But with your knowledge of Imperial operations, we fully expect it to justify its cost."
"What makes you think a copy of my mind will have any more inclination to cooperate with you than I do myself?"
Felix's tiny smile lasted longer than usual. "Oh, I think you'd be surprised, Admiral. The downloaded consciousness can be given whatever stimuli we desire. And there is no physical body to go into shock, so the traditional limitations of torture do not obtain . . ."
"Weren't you the one who was lecturing me about the obsolescence of torture?"
"For certain information-gathering purposes—not for purposes of enforcing obedience. However," Felix continued after a barely perceptible pause, "I have high hopes that such regrettable expedients will not be necessary. You see, we have been experimenting with subtle modifications of the recorded personality, at the basic motivational level. Such as, for example, instilling a devotion to the principles of New Humanity without adversely impacting the memories and abilities. The preliminary results are quite promising. And, of course, the research is expedited by the availability of additional copies of the original copy, in any number desired. We need not hesitate to test a recorded personality to destruction. So I have every hope that it will be possible to avoid the cruder forms of coercion."
"Thank you," Basil said drily.
Felix spoke like one reciting doctrine. "Gratitude, Admiral, is a disease of dogs—as a very great man once said, very long ago."
"Lenin," Basil muttered automatically.
Felix raised one eyebrow. "Ah, yes: I remember now. You are a history enthusiast. I was one myself, in my former life." Basil recognized the New Human jargon. "And I have been allowed to continue to refine my knowledge of it, in accordance with the policy that permits persons of demonstrated reliability to pursue forbidden areas of study which may have practical applications. It is one of the reasons I look forward to working with you, Admiral . . . or, rather, with a download of you, when a satisfactory one has been produced. After which, of course, you yourself will become disposable."
Felix gestured to the guards. They hauled Basil to his feet and fastened neural shackles to his wrists. He made no attempt to struggle against the physically flimsy restraints, which would deliver a nerve-lash effect in response to any such attempt. Then Felix turned on his heel toward the wall, whose sensors detected his genetic pattern. The doorway appeared again, they passed through, and the wall resumed its confining seamlessness.