Polyon waved his hand over the palmpad and shut off the bickering voices of the gamesters. He brooded in silence for a while. Why had he ever bothered with such an inept bunch of conspirators? They were too stupid to pick up on his veiled hints. They thought he was interested in playing a game Blaize, now; Blaize was brighter than the others, and he'd taken no pan in the brief exchange. Polyon tapped out a series of commands that would give him a private comm link to Blaize's cabin. At least he could 274.

fcf hack into Nancia's system to that extent from the key.

board; though it was nothing to the power that would be his once he'd made his way to a reader slot with his minihedron.

While he thought out his approach to Blaize, he was startled by a crackle of sound. The idiot thought he'd achieved a private channel to the lounge! And what was he planning to do with it? Polyon scowled, then began to listen attentively. It seemed that Blaize was too bright to make a good tool.

But he might still be an excellent p.a.w.n, in a game whose moves he'd never see....

"Uncle Forister?" Blaize switched comm channels to the lounge. "I need to talk to you."

"Talk," Forister grunted. He was just putting the final touches to a truly beautiful strategy, designed to pit Micaya's and Nancia's Brainship pieces against one another while he moved unopposed to control all ver- tices of the holohex.

"Privately."

"Oh, all right." Forister got up and stretched. "Nan- cia, can you store the holohex until I get back? I wouldn't want to tire you by asking you to maintain the display while we're not actually playing."

Nancia chuckled. "You mean you don't want to leave the holohex set up where we can study the posi- tions and figure out what nasty trap you're getting ready to spring on us this time."

"Well..."

The holohex folded in upon itself and became a sheet, a line, a point of dazzling blue light that then winked out of existence. "All right. We're approaching the Sin- gularity point, anyway; I really shouldn't be playing games now. Need to check my math," Nancia said cheer- fully. "Be sure and get back in time to strap yourself in.

You softpersons get so disoriented in Singularity."275.

"And you sh.e.l.lpersons get so uppity about it,"

Forister retorted. "All right. You'll warn us in plenty of time, I a.s.sume?"

"And monitor you while you're in die cabin," Nancia said. "Don't look like that; it's for Blaize's protection as well as yours. If you're left alone with him, the prosecution might try to discredit your testimony, say you'd been bribed or suborned."

"They won't have much respect for his uncle's good word anyway," said Forister gloomily, going on down the pa.s.sageway to find out what Blaize had in mind.

Nancia triggered the release mechanism on the door just long enough for him to slide dirough.

"I think Polyon's planning something," Blaize said as soon as Forister entered the cabin. He sat at the cabin console, one hand quivering over the palmpad without actually starting a program., all red-headed intensity like a fox at a rabbit hole.

"What?*1 "I don't know. He wants to get out of his cabin. He keeps telling us that he can fix everything if only he could get out for a few minutes. Listen!" Blaize ran the heel of his hand over the palmpad and brought up a datacord- ing of the last few transmissions between the s.p.a.cED OUT gamesters. From the cabin console he couldn't ac- cess enough memory to store images as well as voices; the players' words crackled out through the speaker, disem- bodied and robbed of half their meaning. Forister listened to the recorded exchange and shook his head.

^Just sounds like a few more moves in that dumb game of yours to me, Blaize."

"It's a move in a game, all right," Blaize said grimly, "but he's not playing the same game as the rest of us.

d.a.m.n! I wish I'd been able to capture the images and the icon moves too. Then you'd see,"

"See what?"

"That what Polyon was saying made absolutely no 276.

fef Margaret, Ball sense in the context of the actual game moves." Blaize dropped his hands in his lap and looked up at Forister.

"Can Nancia keep Polyon under sleepgas until we reach Central?"

"She can," Forister replied, "but I've yet to see any reason why she should. This case is going to have all the High Families buzzing like uprooted stingherbs as it is; it'll only be worse if we give them some excuse to allege mistreatment of prisoners."

"But you heard him!"

"Didn't make any sense to me," Forister allowed, "but nothing about that silly game makes sense, in my humble opinion. Come on, Blaize. Can you seriously see me explaining to some High Court judge that I kept a prisoner stunned and unconscious for two solid weeks because something he said in the course of a children's game made me nervous?"

"I suppose not," Blaize agreed. "But - you'll be careful?"

"I am always careful," Forister told him.

"And - I don't think you should talk to him. The man's dangerous."

"1 know you four are scared of him," Forister agreed, "but I think that's because you've been away from Central too long. He's nothing but an arrogant brat who was given more power than was good for hun. Like some other people I could name. Now if you'll excuse me, it's nearly time to strap down for Singularity."

He nodded at the wall sensors and Nancia silently slid the door open for him.

Once he was in the pa.s.sageway again, she spoke in a low voice.

"Polyon de Gras-Waldheim requests the favor of a private interview."

"He does, does he! And I suppose you think I ought to take Blaize's warning seriously, and insist on having Micaya as a bodyguard before I talk to him?"277.

"I think you're reasonably able to look after your- self" Nancia said, "especially with me listening in. It's not as if you were piloting a dumbship. But there's not much time; I'll be entering the first decomposition se- quence in a few minutes.'1 "All the better," said Forister. "I won't have to spend too long with him. I'll talk with him until you sound the Singularity warning bell, if that's all right. Can't do much less. Visited Blaize - have to visit any of the others who request it."

When Forister entered, Polyon was lying on his bunk, arms folded behind his head. He turned at the soft sound of the sliding door, jumped to his feet and brought his heels together with a military precision that Forister found almost annoying.

"Sir!"

"I'm not," Forister said mildly, "your superior of- ficer. You needn't click your heels and salute. You wanted to tell me something?"

"I - yes - no - I think not," Polyon said. His blue eyes looked haunted; he pushed a wayward strand of golden hair back from his forehead. "I thought - but he was my friend; I can't do it. Even to shorten my own sentence - no, it's impossible. I'm sorry to have dis- turbed you for nothing, sir."

"I think," Forister said gendy, "you'd better tell me all about it, my boy." It was hard to reconcile the haunted creature before him with the monster who'd made Shemali prison into a living h.e.l.l. Perhaps Polyon had some explanation he wished to proffer, some story about others who'd conceived the vicious factory system?

It took him a good five minutes of gentling Polyon's overactive sense of honor, all the time listening anxiously for the Singularity warning bell, before he coaxed the boy into letting out a name.

"It's Blaize," Polyon said miserably at last. "Your nephew. I'm so sorry, sir. But - well, while we were 278.

AmneMcCaffrey & Margate Ball279.

playing s.p.a.cED OUT he was boasting to me of how he'd pulled the wool over your eyes, convinced you he was innocent of any wrongdoing - "

"Not quite," said Forister. He spoke very evenly to con- trol the twist of pain that squeezed his chest "He did sdl PTA shipments on the black market That's wrongdoing, in my book, and h.e.l.l be tried for it on Central"

Polyon nodded. His look of suffering had not abated.

"Yes, he said that was the story he'd given you. Then I thought-if you didn't know - perhaps I could trade the information for a reduction in my own sentence."

"What information?*" Forister asked sharply.

Polyon shook his head. "Never mind. It doesn't mat- ter. I've enough on my conscience already," he said, raising his head and staring at the wall with a look of n.o.ble resignation that Forister found intensely irritat- ing. "I won't compound my crimes by informing on a friend. It's all on this minihedron-well, never mind."

"What," asked Forister with the last vestiges of his patience, "what exactly is supposed to be on the mini- hedron?'' He stared at the faceted black shape Polyon held in his hand, dark and baleful like the eye of an alien G.o.d.

"The true records of how Blaize made his fortune,"

Polyon said. "It's all there - he thought he'd con- cealed his tracks, but there were enough Net links for me to find the records. I'm very good with computers, you know," he said with a boy's naive pride. "But when I begged him to tell you the truth, he laughed at me.

Said he had you convinced of his innocence and he saw no reason to change the situation. That was when I thought - but no," Polyon said, averting his face as he thrust out the minihedron towards Forister, "I don't want any favors."

Forister felt as queasy as though they had already entered Singularity. Was this why Blaize had tried so hard to keep him from talking to Polyon? He'd wanted to keep Polyon drugged and unconscious until they reached Central; he'd had that silly story about Polyon using the s.p.a.cED OUT game as a cover for some land of plot But what good would it do to keep Polyon from talking for two weeks, when his evidence - whatever it might be-would come out anyway at the trial?

*Just-you take this. Read it once. Then keep it safe - or wipe it if you want to," Polyon said,"/ don't care.

I just wanted to hand it over to - to somebody honorable." His voice broke slighdy on the last word, and Forister thought there was a gleam of moisture in the corners of his eyes. "G.o.d knows, I can scarcely claim that for myself. You take it. You'll know what to do with the information."

"What is it?"

Polyon shook his head again. "I don't - I can't tell you. Go and read it in privacy. Just drop it into any of the ship's reader slots and have a look at the informa- tion. Then I'll leave it up to you to decide what should be done. And I don't," he said, almost savagely, "I don't want to profit from it, do you understand? Say you got it from somebody else. Or don't say where you got it Or destroy it. Do what you want - it's off my con- science now, at any rate!"

He dropped back onto the bunk and buried his head in his arms. Overhead, the silvery chime of the first warning bell sounded. "Five minutes to Sin- gularity," Nancia announced. "All pa.s.sengers, please fie down or seat yourselves and secure free-fall straps.

Tablets for Singularity sickness are available in all cabins; if you think you may be adversely affected by the transition, please medicate yourself now. Five minutes to Singularity."

Polyon fumbled without looking up, caught his free-fall strap and buckled it around himself. "Sin- gularity," he said bitterly, "doesn't make me sick. But what's on that minihedron does."

280 Forister left the cabin with a sparkling black mini- hedron clutched in his hand, the facets cutting into his palms, his head awhirl with doubts.

"What a magnificent acting job!" Nancia com- mented with a low laugh.

"You think Polyon was lying?"

"I'm certain of it," she told him. "You know Polyon.

You know Blaize. Is it credible for an instant that Blake could have committed crimes that would turn Polyon's stomach?"

"I - don't know," Forister groaned. He dropped into the pilot's chair and stared unseeing at the console before him. Micaya Questar-Benn tactfully pretended to polish the gleaming buckle on her uniform belt.

"Up to now, I'd have said - but I'm biased, you know."

"Well, I'm not," Nancia said decisively. "I don't know what Polyon's going on about, but whatever it is, I don't believe a word of it"

Forister laughed weakly. "You're biased too, dear Nancia." He stared at the sparkling surface of the minihedron, the polished opaque facets that gave nothing away, and sighed deeply. "I suppose I had bet- ter find out what this is."

"Can't it wait until after Singularity?" Nancia said, but too late. Forister had already dropped the datahedron into the reader slot. Automatically, her mind already on the vortex of mathematical transfor- mations ahead, Nancia absorbed the contents of the minihedron into memory. Something strange there, not like ordinary words, more like a tickle at the back of her head or an improperly positioned synaptic connector - She rode the whirlwind down into Singularity, balanc- ing and coasting along constantly changing equations that defined the collapsing walls of the vortex.

Something was wrong; she sensed it even before she281.

lost her grasp on the mathematical transformations.

She had never experienced a transition like this one.

What was happening? Sounds as slimy as decaying weed whispered and snickered in her ears; colors beyond the edges of human perception rasped at her like fingernails being drawn over a blackboard. The balance of salts and fluids surrounding her shrunken human body swirled crazily, and a dozen alarm sys- tems went off at once: Overload! Overload! Overload!

She couldn't optimize the path; s.p.a.ces decomposed around her and shot off in an infinity of different recompositions, expanding in every path to lights and chaos that could tear her apart. The hyperchip- enhanced mathematics coprocessors returned gibberish. Her brain waves were strung out on the grid of a multi-dimensional matrix. Something was trying to invert the matrix. No computations matched previous results, and all directions held danger.

Nancia shut down all processing at once. The grat- ing colors and stinking noises receded. She hung in blackness, refusing her own sensory inputs, balanced on the point of Singularity where decomposing sub- s.p.a.ces intersected, with no way forward and no way back.283.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

Polyon was pacing the narrow s.p.a.ce of his cabin, too impatient to strap himself in for Singularity, waiting for some sign that Forister had taken the bait, when the air shimmered and thickened around him.

He opened his mouth to curse his luck. The ship had entered Singularity before that thick-headed brawn ambled to a reader slot The air distorted into gla.s.sy waves, then became al- most too thin to breathe. The cabin walls and furnishings receded to specks in the distance, then swam around him, huge menacing free-flowing shapes. Polyon's curses became a comical growl en- ding in a squeak.

d.a.m.n Singularity! There was no chance that Forister would drop the datahedron into a reader now, he'd be safely strapped into his pilot's chair like a good little brawn. By now, too, the ship's reader slots would probably be shut down for Singularity - and even if by some miracle he could persuade Nantia to accept the hedron, he still would not be able to enter the Net until the transformations were over and they had returned to normal s.p.a.ce. No, he would have to wait until after the subs.p.a.ce transformation to implement Final Phase - and this transformation would bring the brainship into Central subs.p.a.ce, close to all the aid that Central Worlds and their innumerable fleets could give.

He reminded himself that this made no difference whatsoever. The basic nature of the gamble remained the same. Either his plan had advanced far enough to succeed despite the way they were forcing his hand, or jt hadn't. If it had, then the fleets of Central would be obedient to him and not to their former masters. If it hadn't - well, then, annihilation would be a little quicker than if he'd moved from the remote s.p.a.ces around Nyota, that was all.

He had only to sit and wait. And waiting out a single transformation through Singularity should be noth- ing to him. He had already spent patient years waiting on Shemali, planting his seeds, watching them grow, seeding the universe, ever since he had the flash of brilliance which at once conceived the hyperchip design and saw how it could be twisted to his own ends.

But this waiting was harder than all those years in which he had at least been doing something to further those ends; and it seemed longer; and there was some- thing disturbing about this particular ship's decomposition. Singularity wasn't supposed to be this bad. Polyon breathed and gagged on a sickly swirl of colors and smells and textures, looked down at the wavering distortions of his own limbs and closed his eyes momentarily. That was a mistake; Singularity sickness heaved through his guts. What was the mat- ter? He'd been through plenty of decompositions during his Academy training, not to mention pa.s.sing through this very same Singularity point on die way out to Vega subs.p.a.ce. Had he so completely lost con- ditioning in the five years on Shemali, to be gagging and puking like any new recruit now?

No. Something else was wrong. This decomposition was lasting too long. And some of the visual distortions looked oddly familiar. Polyon fixed his eyes on one small sector of the cabin, where braces supporting an extruded shelf formed a simple dosed curve of permalloy and plas- Ofilm. As he watched, the triangle ofbrace, waU and shelf elongated to a needle-shape with one thin eye, stretched out into an open eye as big as the wall, squeezed into a 284.

fcf 285.

rotating pinpoint of light with absolute blackness at its center, and opened again into the original triangle.

Needle, eye, pinpoint, triangle; needle, eye, pinpoint, tri- angle. They were caught in a subs.p.a.ce loop, perpetually decomposing and reforming in a sequence which preserved topological properties but which made no progress towards the escape sequence leading to Central subs.p.a.ce.

A loop like that couldn't have happened, shouldn't have happened, unless the ship's processors had shut down. Or - a wild hope tantalized him - unless the ship's processors were too busy with some other prob- lem to navigate them out of Singularity.

A problem like a.s.similating a worm program which would turn over all control to a single user, effectively cutting the brain off from her own body and its processing.

Polyon swallowed his unspoken curses and plunged across the cabin. He had some trouble locating the palmpad and holding his hand steady over it, but even- tually he managed to match his shrinking and bending arm with the erratic loop of the ballooning palmpad. He slapped the surface twice. "Voice control mode!"

His own voice boomed oddly in his ears, the soundwaves distorted by the perpetual twisting of s.p.a.ce around him, but evidently there was something un- changing in the voice patterns which his worm program still recognized. "Voice control acknowledged," an un- dulant voice boomed and twittered from the speakers.

"Unlock this cabin door." The first time the words came out as an unrecognizable squeak; the next, something close to his normal speaking voice emerged and the computer acknowledged the command. But nothing happened. A moment later the quavering vocal signal of the program responded with a shrill squeak that gradually became a groaning boom.