Forbidden Knowledge by Stephen R. Donaldson Page A

a ladder where you can’t see the top because it disappears into a cloud. I couldn’t see the end, exactly, but I could see every rung along the way. All I needed was a handlight, and I could have guessed my way past the rest of the rungs to the answer.
    “What I dreamed, you see,” he said half apologetically, “was that I was going to be the savior of humankind. We were all part of it, of course, our whole section—and we wouldn’t have been able to do that kind of work without Orn—but I was the one who could see the rungs. I was the one who knew how close we were to the end of the ladder.”
    Then his smile twisted ruefully, as if he were amused by his own regret. “That’s as far as I got.”
    “What happened?” asked Morn. A few short weeks ago, she’d been a young officer on her first mission, with ideals she’d adopted from her family, and enough experience of loss to know that such ideals were important. The idea of an achievement as vital, as tremendous , as a mutagen immunization—the idea of being able to do that many people that much good—still touched her, despite Angus and gap-sickness.
    Vector shrugged stiffly. “One day, when I went in to work, I found I couldn’t call my research up on the screen. We didn’t do that kind of research in a bio lab. It was too complex and time-consuming to be run physically. We did it all with computer models and simulations. And my research was just gone. The whole project was gone, everything the whole section was doing. No matter whose authorization we used, or what priority it had, our screens came up blank.
    “It was Orn who figured out what happened. He rigged his way into the system and found it was full of embedded codes none of us knew anything about. When those codes were activated, they closed down the project. Sealed it off. None of us could get the smallest fraction of our data back. The system wouldn’t even recognize our names.
    “Those codes were UMCP.” As he spoke, his voice resumed its undertone of vehemence, harsh and bleak. “Not UMC. This wasn’t just a situation where the United Mining Companies wanted to protect itself in case Intertech became too powerful. Orn knew that because the codes included source- and copy-routes. They came from a dedicated UMCP computer over in Administration, and they copied everything we did to the same place.”
    She listened as if she were transfixed. What he was saying made her skin crawl.
    “That computer was DA. It wasn’t supposed to have the capability to do anything except scan Intertech research, looking for developments the cops might find useful. But when Orn got into the system, he learned that computer had the power—and the authority —to blank the entire company.
    “You’re young,” he said to Morn abruptly. “You haven’t been out of the Academy, or away from Earth, very long. Have you ever heard one rumor about an immunization against RNA mutation? Has anyone ever given you a reason to believe we don’t need to spend the rest of our lives in terror of forbidden space? Have the cops—or the UMC—ever released our data?”
    Stunned, she shook her head.
    “We had the raw materials for a defense, we had all the rungs. And they took it, they suppressed it.” Vector’s eyes were so blue they seemed incandescent. “They don’t want us to know that the way we live now isn’t necessary—and it sure as hell isn’t inevitable. Forbidden space is their excuse for power, their justification. If we had an immunity drug, we wouldn’t need the United Mining Companies fucking Police.”
    He made an effort to control himself, but it didn’t work. “Think about it for a while,” he broke out. “At least a dozen billion human beings, all condemned to the terror and probably the fact of genetic imperialism, and for what? For nothing. Except to consolidate and extend the power of the cops. And the UMC. In the end the whole of human space is going to be one vast gulag, owned and