On the Symb-Socket Circuit

by Kenneth Bulmer

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

Matthew Wade had been a coord, one of the mysterious chosen ones, who through the powers unknown to the rest of mankind, ruled over the known galaxy. But Wade fled the overwhelming responsibility of his exalted caste and went into hiding on the symb-socket circuit. The symb-socketeers were the migrant workers of the galaxy. Traveling from planet to planet, they worked for play and played for a living. Matthew Wade adopted the freewheeling, ever-changing life hoping to evade the bailiffs of Altimus, the home planet of the cords, knowing that they would never rest until they had tracked down the renegade. And then Wade took service on the plant of Ashramdrego, and was faced with the most important decision of his life - would he let an entire planet be destroyed rather than reveal his true identity?

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 172

Sample

THREE OR FOUR TIMES in the last six days his alice had squirted him up the funny muscle and Matthew Wade had welcomed the light relief at this point of his self-imposed exile.

This computer, now … Men needed computers so much that playing jokes on them had become on addict’s vice.

He had to remember that if his impersonation of an ordinary human being could continue with any degree of success he must consistently maintain a mature responsibility to the antics around him. The sober knowledge battled freakishly with obsessive desires to abandon all responsibility. This administration computer of Star House, now, from which he expected merely to extract routine personnel information, acted on him like a highly volatile drug.

“Hey, Wade, are you nearly through?” Eva Vetri called across the computer room. Her slim brown fingers fondled the fur of her alice and a shaggy sheaf of papers and tapes ruffled around her as she gestured violently. “I’ve a mess of details to get out about the harvest—”

Wade ignored her. He pressed his hands flat on the warm plastic-metal of the computer fascia. How supremely giggle worthy it would be to punch into the computer a nursery rhyme. Say one of those trapezoidal language fabrications from Giorgione’s Planet, or a simple mnemonic that would echo and reverberate within the electronic pathways of this insensate machine’s mechanical mind. Great fun!

Or—and how sneakily diabolical that would be—just for a moment turn on those circuits in his own brain he had switched off when he’d left Altimus and reach into the computer and pump the hysteresis cycles of “The little Preet had a treet whose freetless greetings calokreeted it,” directly into the scientific marvels of the computer’s innards.

Gosh, wow, boy oh boy!

“Wade. Are you all right?”

“Perfectly, thank you, Miss Vetri.” He spoke with a difficulty he concealed with habitual professionalism. An ordinary human being would react with predicted patterns in given situations, he knew that well enough. It was just that, right now, he wanted to turn on and have a giggle ball.

“You look—you’re sure you’re got the hang of that GBM?” Her small brown face showed concern, a wrinkling between the eyebrows, a softer pouting of the full lips. The annoyed fluttering of the papers stilled although her hand continued its sensuous stroking along the fur of her alice. “That’s the most complex computer this side of Sjellenbrod, and it costs—”

“It costs more than our combined salaries per minute,” he said more firmly, with a patched smile. “I’ll be all through in just a moment.”

What had he been about? If he switched on those extra circuits in his brain the coords of Altimus would know, would know … the rink fear of Altimus stank in his mind.

Forcing himself, but without hesitation, he rapped out the routine inquiry and then stood up, indicated the vacant chair.

“It’s all yours, Miss Vetri.”

She sat down and twitched her alice into a more comfortable position over her shoulders, poising her hands above the input. As a human being she presented certain ticklish problems for Matthew Wade.

“There’s been a lot of—well, you know, funny sort of sickness about. If you’re feeling peculiar—”

“I’m quite all right, thank you, Miss Vetri. I appreciate your concern.”

“—have Doc Hedges check you out.”

“Thank you;”

“Kolok Trujillo’s due in this afternoon. He’s a big man in the galaxy. I hear he always brings about a hundred hangers-on wherever he goes. There’ll be a ball tonight.”

“Yes.”

He picked up his printout, that chattered through its slot like Moloch spitting out bones, and walked off.

“Hey, Wade!”

He turned. Eva Vetri looked up with a brown sparrow motion of her sleek head. “Didn’t you have any files?”

“Ah, no.”

She frowned. Her own information papers billowed on the rest, bulging beneath the clip.

“Don’t tell me you keep your data and your code in your head?”

“It was only a tiny routine matter,” he said and continued walking, thankful for his alice, which at that moment hiccuped and gave him breakaway cover.

“Thanks, Sinbad,” he symbed, and the response formed a pattern of amused pleasure in his mind. On arrival on Ashramdrego, when he had been fitted with his life support system, he’d been disappointed and obscurely alarmed at the lack of telepathic quality on the part of the organism on which his existence depended. On Catspaw he’d achieved a friendly relationship with Boris in half a day. But here even in six days he’d come to see a counter benefit. He’d never developed as close a relationship with Lon Chaney, his camouflage cloak, as had many other people with theirs and, aware of his need for isolation and aloofness, had felt no loss. Lon Chaney hung now supinely down his back. That very ego-succoring apartness he must cultivate benefited by the puzzling muffling of symb contact with the alices here on Ashramdrego.

He left the computer section of Star House—like most of the structures here simply fashioned from local materials—and headed for the corner block housing personnel, across from a flier park with the CT Building partially hidden beyond. The sun Ashram shone down beneficently. From space the sun blazed red and golden, but here on the surface of Drego, the third planet, the poisonous atmosphere turned those fiery colors to burning blues and verdigris greens. Long sinuous wafts of toxic gases lay like afternoon cloud shadows over the nearby hills and the muted brilliance of topaz and sapphire and amethyst drowned the planetary surface in a ghostly dry land image of undersea.

He breathed in deeply, letting his lungs creak and savoring the out-of-doors feeling. Sinbad burped amicably.

On a planet like this he could well understand why some people opted out of the symb-socket circuit and became permanents, like the personnel of Kriseman, who lived here all the year around.

Just what had possessed him—the word was in no way too strong—back there before the computer he had no idea, apart from a frightening feeling of irresponsibility, of juvenile lightheadedness, of an adolescent atavistic fecklessness, he could analyze no further. He had been taught that most humans, ordinary humans, were still children at heart and he supposed, not without a tremor of distaste, that his recent intimate contact with them had begun to work insidiously on him.

Between the complex of office buildings and housing enclaves of the Kriseman Corporation Headquarters flowering Dregoan shrubs grew in painted profusion and flower beds bloomed in autumnal splendor. Semisentient gardeners tended the plots. People strolled along the flagged paths. As though mindful of his duty, Matthew Wade avoided them without conscious effort. A few yards ahead he saw the tall and portly form of Silas Sternmire, the planetary director, the big man himself, and he made to avoid him, too.

A heavy, prestigious man, whose features reflected the self-opinionated, self-gratifying, self-importance of one responsible for a whole planet’s well-being and overly conscious of that scarcely demanding chore, was how Sternmire had been summed up by Wade at their first interview. Completely without humor, with two deep parallel indentations at the corners of his mouth, he could have reacted to the names T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden as though confronted by Open cesspools.

The planetary director espied Wade. A bright, chuckling expression fleeted across those doughy features. The unyielding man bent like a camel going down on its knees.

“Walsh, isn’t it?” Then in a quick, bubbling voice: “Hey, Walshy, I bet I c’n beat ya at marbles. C’mon.”

The portly figure knelt, trousers straining. Stern-mire’s thick fingers flicked. Glass spun flickeringly in the sunlight.

Unbelieving and yet forced to believe by what he saw, Wade realized the big man did want to play marbles. The speech patterns and values bewildered Wade.

Still unsure of normalcy in this unfamiliar world, still strange even after Tiberious and Catspaw and Takkarnia, still uncertain just how adults were expected to behave, he knelt beside Sternmire.

“Where’s yer alleys, Walshy? Say—I’ll lend ya some of mine. Here, I c’n lick you easy!”

Sternmire’s life support system rippled furrily along his shoulders and back. Ignoring his alice, Sternmire, whose flushed and happy face reflected all the joys of boyhood, spun and flashed his marbles in the dust of the walk.

The feel of the marbles between Wade’s fingers unleashed a gush of memories.

The past-destroying violence of those memories washed up a maelstrom of bric-a-brac: hot happy afternoons playing with the other kids on the back lot; wondering about Dagda; diving and swimming mother naked in the water-scooped pool below the spillway; scrumping for golden apples where every breaking branch signaled a helter-skelter rout; reading under the bedclothes late into the night; a score of boyish memories flickered through his operating brain like goldfish past an aquarium light.

Then, like the last bright frame of a film rustling through the projector, those old happy memories vanished to be replaced by the abrupt vision of his parents’ faces, serious, worried and unsure about his future, looking at him already as ordinary people looked at coords. He did not have to recall his life after that, when the calm-faced man in the blue cloak and silver girdle had taken him to Altimus, for that life was so intimately a part of himself, so essentially what he was now, what he was trying to deny, that only by this apparently stupid fight and return to the galaxy could he hope to regain the boy he once had been.

“C’mon, Walshy, it’s your go.”

“All right, Mr. Sternmire—”

“Hey! You tryin’ to be funny or sump’n? My old man’s not around. I’m Gus. You oughtta know that, stupe!”

“Yeah, sure, Gus,” Wade said, trying to catch the boyish intonations. “I’ll match you, and I’ll lick you, sure.”

“Nah! Not me. I’m the best. Just lookit that!”

Sternmire’s thick fingers flicked with remnants of vanished skill. Glass sparkled against the dust.

“Not bad,” said Wade. Carefully, betrayingly more at ease with relationships on this juvenile level, he flicked his own marble. Glass spat and glittered.

“Hoo, boy!” chortled the director, his thick face creased and sweating, the ruff of hair bedraggled like a drunken cockatoo’s. “Not bad. But I’ll beat-ya!”

The planetary director pushed at his alice, his thick fingers groping around the symb-socket at the base of his neck where the life support system’s blood circulation was joined to his own. He didn’t notice what he was doing. All his concentration was bent on flicking his glass alley, on beating Wade.

Sternmire’s alice didn’t like those sausagy fingers probing at him. He rippled chestnut fur tinted green by the hollow light, unwrapped a beady black eye. The director completely engrossed in his game of marbles scratched the skin around his symb-socket, fumbled in toward that spot where the two circulatory systems twined. His alice burped.

“You should be more careful, Mr. Stern—uh, Gus.”

“Wazzat, Walshy? Nittering itch… C’mon! It’s all on your pitch!”

The glass alley smooth in his fingers, Wade cast a worried glance at Sternmire’s fingers scratch, scratch, scratching at the alice’s arterial probe.

“C’mon, Walshy! You chicken!”

If this was truly how ordinary humans behaved …

“Go easy!” Wade had to say, snapping the words out through his own feelings of frustration. On Catspaw there had been nothing like this. To have to live among continuing adolescents—and because of his own choice! “Careful of your alice.”

“Wazzat?”

A Mephistophelian brand of fury caught at Wade in the frustrations his agonized decision to reject his calling as a coord had brought. In renouncing his special birthright he had renounced his own justification for exercising those rights; he had outlawed himself.

“Leave your alice alone, Gus, for Astir’s sake!”

“Alice? What you talking about? Alice’s gone riding on her fancy new pony. You know that, Walshy. C’mon, let’s get with it!”

Thick fingers poking, probing … Marbles splashing sparks of brilliant color in the Ashram sunshine … The gently zephyr breeze of poison gas Dregoan atmosphere. …

Sternmire’s alice hiccuped. He wriggled and then extended three of his slender, jointed legs, their toe-claws varnished a brilliant carmine. The movement on the director’s neck and shoulders upset him. He gave a vigorous, youthful push, carelessly shrugging.

“Goddamned itch! Are you. . .