Mute Read online

  Beneath that was a more fundamental suspicion: a general distrust of and aversion to the Coordination Computer itself. Did CC really have to have these psis checking out passengers, or was it gathering data for the aggrandizement of its own power? A machine ruled the galaxy; everybody knew that, though all officials denied it. But if it was awkward to challenge the insight of an individual psi-mute, how much more awkward was it to challenge the phenomenal organizational computer itself? So the undercurrent of hostility showed only obliquely. As Knot suspected was the case here.

  “Very well,” the Captain said, with an enigmatic smile.

  Now comes the good part, Hermine thought. With all your complex thoughts, you have missed the obvious. Mit’s laughing.

  A middle-aged woman entered the passenger compartment. She wore a transparent face mask to protect her from possible contamination by passenger ailments, and translucent skintight gloves. “I am the telepath,” she announced.

  “A female peep!” the man behind Knot exclaimed. “It’s indecent!”

  The woman glanced at him. She was matronly, with smile lines around mouth and eyes. “I’m sure it would be, in your case,” she said to the man “Fortunately I read only with permission.” She addressed the woman in green. “May I read you?”

  Somewhat deflated, the young woman consented. “Of course.”

  The telepath stood before her, concentrating. “Please think of this trip,” she murmured. “Your expectations for the voyage, your concerns, fears—”

  The woman screwed up her face, thinking. Knot was tempted to make a remark about the obvious effort and what it signified of her intelligence, but Finesse nudged him warningly before he got started. And no comments about garbage burning, Finesse says, Hermine thought. Knot had indeed been generating such a thought, too; the weasel must have read it, reported it to Finesse, and relayed the reply.

  “It isn’t working,” the telepath said. “Like many people you do not focus your thoughts clearly unless you vocalize. Try talking to yourself, subvocalizing, so I can follow.”

  Rat twaddle! Hermine thought. A good telepath can pick up images. This one is only a partial tele; she can perceive only what is directly broadcast, and she can’t send at all.

  “Subvocalize?” the woman asked.

  “Speaking in your mind.”

  “I can’t do that! You think I’m queer?”

  Knot had trouble following that. How could subvocalizing relate to oddity?

  “The alternative,” the telepath said patiently, “is to speak aloud, while I verify the accuracy of your presentation. You would not be able to distort the facts. I really think there should be a more private place to do this.”

  The woman looked at the entrance to the crew’s quarters. “Nuhuh! I stay right here.”

  She’s as difficult as I am! Knot thought to Hermine, intrigued.

  “As you wish,” the telepath agreed with resignation.

  And will suffer similarly, the weasel warned.

  “So you want me to say what I’m thinking aloud?” the woman asked. “Here goes. My name is Stenna, and this is my fourth disktrip, and I’m not worried at all about it, and I have absolutely no intention of blowing up this ship or derailing it or pulling out the bilge-plug or whatever, so your precog or clair or whoever has a gear loose, or maybe he just wanted to get me in that crew-room alone.”

  The telepath looked perplexed. She glanced at the holo-Captain. “She’s telling the truth, as she sees it. She has a limited intellect.”

  Hoo! Hermine thought. They are fed up with that woman.

  “She may not know the truth,” the Captain said. “Keep working. If we get much farther behind schedule, we’ll have to scrub this flight. “

  “Why are you making this trip?” the telepath asked.

  “I told you,” Stenna said, sounding irritated. “To rejoin my husband. He works for Nebula Chemical Company, researching new strains of organic catalysts, and he’ll be there another six months or more. So I want to be with him. Why would I mess up the ship that’s taking me there, even if I knew how?”

  “A good question,” Knot murmured. “I think the precog goofed.”

  “Your self-interest leads you to question the validity of precognition,” Finesse replied.

  And the precog is right, Hermine put in.

  “Do you have any personal problems?” the telepath asked. “History of aberration?”

  “Of course I don’t!” Stenna said indignantly. “You think I’m a mutant freak or something?”

  “Who are you calling a freak?” Knot demanded.

  Stenna looked at him, her nervousness making her more carelessly assertive. “You, you freak! You shouldn’t be allowed on board with normal people. You should be shipped in the cargo hold. You’re probably the one causing the trouble, only your mute-loving girlfriend is cozy with the captain so they have to fix the blame on someone else.”

  “Madame, please do not address a mutant in that manner,” the captain said. “They are citizens of the galaxy too. Common courtesy requires—”

  “You’re talking just as if they’re people,” Stenna said with bravado. “They should all be locked in the enclaves where they belong, every last freak—and the freak-lovers with them!”

  The Captain looked pained, and the telepath was hardly pleased, but they maintained their facade of politeness. Knot was under no such restraint. He ripped free of Finesse’s cautioning hold and strode to confront Stenna. His light mood had now swung back to ponderosity, and he wanted to shove his burden of negation onto someone else.

  “You uncompromising bigot!” he exclaimed. “Without mutants, you would not be able to join your normal-loving husband at all. Galactic travel would be impossible. Did you ever think of that?”

  Stenna was too far gone to be cowed. Her normal eyes, which were green like Finesse’s fairly flashed. “I don’t mean psi-powered people; they’re a necessary evil. But you physical freaks—you’re the failures that happened instead of psi-mutes. You should be thankful you even exist. If it were up to me, you wouldn’t exist. Why don’t you stay in your place? Look at you, with your lopsided body. You should be ashamed to show yourself in public.”

  “I’d be ashamed to show a mind like yours in public,” Knot retorted. There was an element of awkwardness here, because she did have those green eyes and large bosom and was physically attractive. He would rather have fought with an ugly normal. But her bigotry, to his mind, was like a nest of maggots, eating out the substance of what could have been a lovely woman. “You’ve already inconvenienced this whole ship because of it.”

  “You think so? Prove that I’m going to do any damage whatever to this voyage!”

  Knot studied her, bringing his square pegs/round holes alignment expertise into play. Suddenly it clicked. All he needed was the proper formulation of the problem. “You’re pregnant,” he said.

  “What business of yours is that?”

  That might have been a set-up for a smart remark, but now he was more interested in establishing his devastating point. “Don’t you know how the mutations occur?”

  “Of course I know! I haven’t been in space for a year, until now, and once conception has taken place it doesn’t matter.”

  “It doesn’t matter anyway, for the mother,” Knot said. “Where was your husband the month before you conceived?”

  “Right on Planet Vermiform with me!” she said.

  “The whole month?”

  “Thirty full days. I wouldn’t let him touch me until I’d checked the last one off on the calendar. So there’s absolutely no chance of—”

  “Two things,” Knot said. “First, aren’t you aware that the clearance date is approximate, not absolute? The good Captain has explained that this particular ship has improved shielding—but many other ships do not. Prospects of mutation decrease geometrically with the passage of time, so that you are ninety percent safe after a month—if you operate correctly. Only fifty percent safe if you play it i
ncorrectly.”

  Suddenly she was uncertain. “Incorrectly?”

  “The problem is that the mutated sperm cells stored in the male body do not clear automatically. One day after a space flight ends, they number 50 percent to 99 percent of the total. As the body continuously generates new ones, the ratio changes. But as long as there are any mutant cells remaining, even one percent, you cannot be sure. Since, as you put it, you did not let your husband touch you—well, did he touch any other women in the period?”

  “Of course not! I wouldn’t marry a philanderer!”

  “Then the presumption is that he did not manage to dispose of all of those tainted cells. It would have taken them longer than a month to clear.”

  “No!” she exclaimed, horrified, “It can’t be!”

  “It can be. My own father was onplanet a month before—”

  “You’re stretching the case,” the Captain interjected. “Most ships carry the improved shielding now, so that the mutations lack viability. After a month, very few survive, so even if they are not expelled from the body they can’t cause mutation.”

  “Can you guarantee that her husband’s ship did have that improved shielding?” Knot asked evenly.

  The Captain was silent.

  Knot returned his attention to the woman. “As I was saying, my parents used the same system. I was conceived 35 days after my father’s excursion in space, according to the records.”

  “And I was conceived twenty days after,” Finesse called, galled by this line of attack.

  Stenna grabbed desperately at the proffered straw. “And she’s obviously normal! Freak chances happen, but the overwhelming probability—”

  “Which brings up my second point,” Knot said, getting set to close his trap. “How long is your day on Planet Vermiform?” He happened to have a notion, because he had once placed a mutant from that planet.

  “A day is a day, dolt! What—”

  “Not in terms of the human system. The galactic standard is the Earth day, but local standards conform to the cycles of their own planets. Some days are longer than Earth’s; others are not.”

  “No!” she cried again, stricken. “Vermiform has short days—”

  “Which translates into less time per day. So your probability of bearing a mutant baby has just escalated again, because you did not really wait a full thirty Earth-days. So that means—”

  “Never!” she screamed, lunging at him. The lady telepath put her hands to her head.

  Knot moved aside, and Stenna missed him. She grabbed at her own hair, suddenly drawing out a long, wicked hatpin. She turned on the Captain, who stood closest, stabbing him. Of course the pin passed right through the holograph without resistance.

  There was another reason for the segregation of crew from passengers. Stenna collapsed, sobbing.

  The man who had been behind Knot muttered: “You are a freak! But she asked for it. A pox on both.”

  “What’s the matter with the telepath?” Finesse asked, going to the woman.

  “It’s all right, all right,” the telepath said, still holding her head. Her face mask had become dislodged; she had become contaminated by interaction with the passengers. “An emotional overload—I was tuned to her mind when she exploded—oh, it hurts! I won’t be able to function telepathically for days!”

  “You are relieved from duty,” the Captain said, concerned. “Debark to the orbiting port and report to their med officer.”

  Finesse nodded as the telepath left. “Which explains what was scheduled to happen in space. Stenna was going to realize that her worst nightmare was coming true—that she carried a freak fetus—and her reaction would wipe out the power of the telepath who was going to guide the ship to port. We would have been lost in space.”

  “But the woman has not conceived a mutant!” the Captain protested. “Our clairvoyants check routinely for such things, to make sure no blame for mutancy is fixed unfairly.”

  “Perhaps you should have reassured her at the outset,” Finesse said gently. “This small misunderstanding has delayed your flight, tormented one passenger, and knocked your telepath out of commission. It could have been much worse.”

  “Affirmative,” the Captain agreed, shaken.

  Finesse returned to Stenna “Your baby is normal,” she said. “The clair checked it. The odds may have been against you, as they were against my own parents, but it is all right. Do you hear me?”

  Stenna looked up at her. “N–normal?”

  “Normal,” Finesse repeated firmly. “It happens all the time. Some mutes are conceived after the ‘safe’ period, like Knot here.” She shot Knot a dark look. “But some are sired by spacefaring men well within the critical month, like me. As you can see, I’m completely normal, and so is your own baby.”

  “Normal...” Stenna repeated, hope returning. “The clair says it?”

  “Yes. Now you can rejoin your husband, secure in that knowledge.” Finesse stood and looked across at Knot again. “And you, you freak—”

  Volcanoes! Novas! Planetbuster bombs! Hermine thought.

  All I did was solve the riddle, Knot thought innocently.

  It was the way you did it. You brutalized a normal.

  I comeuppenced a bigot.

  “Now don’t you start in, miss,” the man behind Knot said. “Can’t blame the man for not liking being called a freak. I called him that myself, but I shouldn’t have. I didn’t like it much when people made ignorant remarks about my daughter.”

  “The precog has now cleared this ship for travel,” the Captain said. “A substitute telepath is boarding. Please take your seat.”

  They took their seats, subdued. Stenna was silent, not looking at Knot—and Finesse was the same. He was back in the mutant enclave. Normals, he complained to Hermine. They’re all alike.

  Yes, the weasel agreed, enjoying the by-play.

  They don’t object to mutants, so long as the freaks keep their places.

  True.

  And if a mutant ever has the temerity to talk back—

  Volcanoes! Novas! Explosions!

  Right, freak!

  Finesse looked straight ahead, refusing to acknowledge any of this, though Knot was sure Hermine was gleefully filling her in. Weasels did seem to have a predatory sort of humor.

  The ship got under way at last. A stasis field encompassed them, and acceleration commenced at 100G increasing as they cleared the immediate environs of Planet Nelson.

  The holo-Captain appeared. “This is a recording, this time, folks. I’m locked in stasis the same as you are, at the moment. The entire ship is in stasis; we wouldn’t want anything to fall off, ha-ha! We are now clearing the local stellar system, advancing our acceleration smoothly to approximate one million gravities. Without the stasis field we would all be in sad shape. Stasis, as much as any other thing, is responsible for the development and maintenance of the galactic empire of man. You can put that in your next term paper on the history of life.

  “It will take us about ten minutes to reach lightspeed. Don’t worry, you can survive it; diskship stasis fields are carefully tailored to protect the life processes despite almost total immobility. After we achieve C—that’s lightspeed—we shall use the tachyon drive to assume short-hop travel velocity. Sit tight; the stasis field will release when we go to tach-one.” He smiled, as though making a small joke, but Knot did not fathom the humor and was sure most other passengers missed it also.

  Implied pun on mach one, the speed of sound through Earth-type atmosphere, Hermine thought. Finesse told me.

  Oh. That must have been a common term back when the velocity of sound through air seemed to be the absolute limit. No wonder he had missed the reference. Still, it showed how one became acclimatized to the contemporary state of the art.

  Still, Knot was not yet used to trans-galactic velocity. He had thought the acceleration of the planetary shuttle was fierce. This diskship’s drive was of another magnitude. He wished he could look out the portals, but o
f course there were none, and if there had been, the stasis would have prevented him from looking, and had he surmounted that problem there still would have been nothing out there he could visually assimilate. Trans-lightspeed was a different universe.

  “You may wonder at the strength of our propulsion,” the holo-Captain said. Knot could see him fuzzily, since his eyes were aimed that way but could not focus. The stasis field did not seem to interfere with sound. He knew that the holo-recording was intended to distract and entertain the passengers, who might otherwise panic in the extended stasis and do themselves emotional harm. As it happened, he had just been wondering about the propulsion; he was a typical first-time passenger.

  “We use a psionic drive,” the recording continued. “The technical aspects are complex, so I’ll use an analogy. The normal chemical propulsion is reactive; it is like firing a rocket with the exhaust being shoved back as the rocket shoves forward. This psionic drive is like climbing a ladder; no mass is expended. We are climbing very rapidly, of course, and the ladder we are using is the framework of space itself, in the region of our galaxy. It is the same ladder light uses—but we shall soon be leaving light behind. This drive is made possible by the efforts of psionic mutants, who create the fuel, relate to the framework, and orient telepathically on our destination. Yes, it is quite fair to say that this trip would be impossible without mutants.”

  And what did bigoted Stenna with the nonmute baby think of that? Knot asked himself smugly. She hated mutants, but was dependent on them. Was she closing her mind to the Captain’s canned message? No—she accepted mental mutation as a necessary evil; it was physical mutation that bothered her. Yet of course the two types occurred in equal numbers. So normals like her simply ignored or shut out the physicals, while accepting the largesse of the mentals. No doubt it had ever been thus.

  The stasis released. “We are now in tach,” the Captain announced. “The normal interactions of mass no longer apply to this ship with respect to the galaxy. We shall maintain token artificial gravity of one-quarter norm until we depart the galactic disk. As far as conventional space time is concerned, we no longer exist; but as far as we’re concerned, the galaxy no longer exists. So we shall simply proceed as if we are the only people in the universe, and hope we all get along together. You may leave your seats and mingle freely.”