The Mind Pool

The study door slid open and Godiva appeared. She was naked except for a pair of gauzy briefs. “Luther!”

He ignored her and ran back across the room, a scarlet Nemesis that left bloody, puddled footprints behind him in the carpet. The first group who had attacked him were on the floor by the communications unit, trying to point their weapons up at Luther while a quarter-inch flood of water surged and tugged at their legs. He stomped every one of them, wincing as the angular figures cut into his soft flesh.

A final scatter of shots came from his right. He headed that way, smashing and devastating with bare hands and feet anything that moved.

And suddenly it was over.

By the time that help arrived the sprinkler system was off and the study a junkyard of flattened simulacra. Godiva took Luther through to the bedroom and began to apply antiseptics and surrogate skin. He lay faceup on the bed, his face, chest, and belly an eroded mass of raw wounds co

Godiva had finished Luther’s left side and was telling him to turn more to the right. He was ignoring her, and talking furiously on a handset.

“Useless!” he growled to Mondrian. “They don’t know one damned thing. Adestis Headquarters won’t have regular staff there until tomorrow, and maintenance can t even tell me if simulacra are missing, never mind what sort. Ouch!” He winced as Godiva began to patch skin onto the ball of his right thumb.

“Does it matter how many?” Mondrian picked up one of the flattened simulacra from the heap at the bedside and inspected it. “I didn’t know they made them this big. What are they used for?”

“To hunt the biggest game. Scorpions and crustaceans, mostly. They can operate under water, but luckily for me they were never designed to handle a rainstorm.”

“But the real question isn’t the minisims. It’s who was handling them. Did you ask?”

“Adestis Headquarters can’t tell me that, either.” Brachis touched his finger tenderly to the biggest wound on his face, a one-centimeter crater in the middle of his left cheek. “But I know the answer without being told. It’s that bastard’s Artefacts again, it has to be.”

Mondrian was studying Brachis’s pitted and furrowed skin. “Someday, Luther, you must tell me just what you did to earn such undying enmity from Fujitsu that his heirs would try to give you more craters than the surface of Callisto.”

“Never mind what I did. The worst thing I did was, I underestimated him. For that, I deserve everything I’ve been getting.”

“You told me that you had everything locked up tight here in the apartment, so nobody and nothing could get in. What went wrong, Luther?”

“The oldest mistake in the world. It proves the point that I tell every trainee for Survey basic training: It’s the things you don’t expect that get you. I set up this apartment so that nothing could get in through the door without me knowing. Nothing can burrow through the walls or floors or ceilings. I put in a sniffer system to sound an alarm if anything poisonous or radioactive was blown in as gas or dust through the air supply ducts. What I didn’t expect was that something smart and dangerous could actually walk in along the ducts. The openings are only a couple of centimeters across.”

“Big enough.” Mondrian glanced from the simulacrum he was holding to the other man’s battered body. “I’m amazed to see how much firepower one of these things can carry. Surely you don’t need to hit that hard, even for scorpions.”

“They were carrying the absolute top of the weapons line. It took two minisims to handle some of the guns.

That’s the sort of equipment that Adestis normally gives only to a group that they judge to be inexperienced and scared shitless. One shell from the big guns would do for a scorpion. It damned near did for me.”

“Last time we met you told me you thought you had located and destroyed every artefact that the Margrave left. Obviously, you were wrong.” Mondrian nodded his head to the heavy apartment door and its protective locks. “But if you thought you’d got them all, why did you bother with such an elaborate security system?”

“My guardian angel insisted.” Brachis pointed an index finger, its nail half blown away, at the near-nude Godiva. “You’re right, I thought I’d killed the lot. Now I have to start over.’

During the first few frantic minutes, Godiva had been totally absorbed in her work on Luther. She was still wearing only her thin panties and had not thought to put on more clothing. Her only worry was to patch new skin, carefully and completely, onto every one of his wounds. She had not seemed to notice the arrival of Esro Mondrian. But now, directly introduced into the conversation, she seemed to become aware of her own near-nude condition. She applied a final patch to Luther’s shoulder, stooped to kiss him quickly on the lips, and headed for the bathroom. “Ten minutes,” she said. “To put on a robe and dry my hair. Please don’t let him get into more trouble while I’m gone, Esro.”

Her departure created a gap in the conversation of the two men. Brachis, tough as he was, felt drained and distant. With Mondrian silent, he began to think again of the Artefacts. How many more were there? How could he hide from them, how could he destroy them?

His mind drifted back to the silent surface of Hyperion. As soon as he had arranged for delivery of the volatiles, the seven items had been delivered to him as promised from storage. The crew who brought them returned at once to the Deep Vault. They did not look back. They had no interest in knowing — or perhaps they suspected only too well — what Brachis intended to do with his purchase.

The logical thing was to flashfire the seven containers at once and leave the airless surface of Saturn’s moon with minimal delay. Only some dreadful driving streak of curiosity forced Brachis to open them, and thaw the contents.

The first four varied in appearance, but they were recognizably in the image of the Margrave. Brachis fired them at once. Two more were younger, clean-shaven, and fatter. It took the DNA match to prove that they too derived directly from Fujitsu. When the eight million degree flame passed over them, they too were gone in an eyeblink flash of purple light.

It was the seventh and final box, where identification in the Deep Vault had been the poorest, that would linger forever in Luther’s memory. The casket held a young girl in her early teens. Naked, clear-ski

The container gave her complete identification, along with her DNA sequence. It differed from the Fujitsu line in every significant detail. She was the oldest daughter of a deposed royal, from a bend sinister line that was now long extinct. Whoever had committed her to the Deep Vault of Hyperion had purchased, for whatever reason, a perpetual endowment of the highest quality. For four hundred and forty years she had Iain in frozen silence, dreaming of whatever phantom shadows might flee through a brain held at the temperature of liquid helium. Left now on the surface, she would die — or, worse yet, waken and die — on the barren, airless wilderness of Hyperion.

Brachis had made no contingent plans for his purchases from the Deep Vault. Even if he were desperate to do so, it was impossible to save her. He groaned, cursed, and stared around him at the black-shadowed plain. It taunted him, with its emptiness and uselessness. At last he shuddered in his suit, breathed deep, and raised the fusion torch. Subnuclear fire reached out to caress the pale young body. As it consumed her bare breast, Brachis fancied that she sighed, opened dark-blue eyes, and stared up at his face …