Forbidden Knowledge by Stephen R. Donaldson Page B

operated by the UMC for its own benefit, with the cops for muscle.
    “I’m one of the lucky ones.” Now at last Vector’s anger began to recede; but his smile didn’t come back. “I got out. Intertech shut down our section and transferred all of us, but I kept in touch with Orn. Mostly because he has so few scruples, he tends to meet people with none at all. I quit Intertech and apprenticed engineering on one of the orbital smelters. Then Orn got me a job on a small, independent orehauler, along with a few other”—at last he permitted himself a mildly sarcastic grin—“disaffected souls. We took over the ship and went into business for ourselves. Eventually we met Nick. Orn understands illegals, and I understand brilliance, so we joined him. We’ve been here ever since.”
    There he stopped. Maybe he could see how profoundly he’d disturbed her. Or maybe he was just exhausted himself, worn out by too much mass and too little rest. He stood up as if he had to fight resistance in every joint, apparently intending to leave her alone with the implications of what he’d said.
    But he wasn’t done after all. Halfway out of the galley, he paused to ask, “Do you know why I move like this?”
    Morn shook her head dumbly.
    “Arthritis,” he told her. “Once I made the mistake of interfering with one of Orn’s less scrupulous pleasures. He beat me up. Rather severely. Quite a few of my joints were bruised or damaged. That’s where arthritis starts. It gets a toehold on old wounds or scar tissue. Then it spreads. Heavy g is—agony.
    “G is agony, agony g,” he said as if he were quoting, “that is all ye know in space, and all ye need to know.”
    As he left, he concluded, “I prefer it that way. As far as I’m concerned, the pirates are the good guys.”
    She stayed in the galley alone for a long time. She’d just survived a bout of gap-sickness: for the first time since Starmaster sighted Bright Beauty , she’d discovered a reason for hope. Nevertheless she felt none: she felt abandoned and desolate. She’d become a cop because she’d wanted to dedicate herself to the causes and ideals of the UMCP; perhaps, covertly, because she’d wanted to avenge her mother. But if Vector was right—if he was telling the truth—
    In that case, the UMCP had perpetrated an atrocity so colossal that it beggared her imagination; so profound that it altered the meaning of everything she’d ever valued or believed; so vile that it transformed the moral order of human space from civilization and ethics to butchery and rape, from Captain Davies Hyland to Angus Thermopyle.
    Now what was she supposed to hope for? That Vector was lying? If so, she would never be able to prove it. And she would never be able to eradicate what he’d told her from her brain: it would always be there, tainting her thoughts, corrupting her as surely as forbidden space. No matter how much personal integrity her father—or she herself—had possessed, he and she may have been nothing more than tools in malign hands.
    Alone in Captain’s Fancy ’s galley, with a mug of cold coffee in front of her and nowhere to go, Morn Hyland spent an hour or two grieving for her father—and for everything he represented in her life. She’d only killed his body; and only because of an illness she hadn’t known about. Vector Shaheed had damaged his image, his memory.
    That grief was necessary. Until it was done, she couldn’t summon enough anger to return to her cabin and the zone implant control.

CHAPTER        5
 
    W hen she tried to return to her cabin, however, she discovered that she had a problem she hadn’t anticipated. Her black box was still on, transmitting sleep to the centers of the brain. As soon as she reentered the control’s range, she began to grow drowsy.
    And her door lock was set to a five-second delay. Her zone implant had that much more time in which to overwhelm her.
    Fool! she swore at herself. Fool. Her lack of foresight was