Wheelers

by Ian Stewart

  It had been especially confusing at the Way of the Wholesomes first lunar base, a hastily erected conglomeration of plastic domes and metal tubes near the Moon's south pole. The phases of the Moon make sense from any observation point. . . other than the Moon itself. Even to a neo-Zen monk, the Moon observing the Moon was a shade too self-referential. It was much more in the spirit of Zen to leave the question unresolved, and from its earliest inception the lunar base had found ways to live with the ambiguity. From the Cuckoos Nest, on the other hand, the phase of the Moon was a perfectly well defined concept, and could easily be observed on any local node by logging into the telescope that was situated two miles outside the lamasery's perimeter . . . And when they did, they found that the phase of the Moon as seen from the Cuckoo's Nest seldom agreed with its phase as seen from the Earth.

  So Nagarjuna sat on his rock in his pale blue spacesuit, next to his temporarily discarded gas-jet harness, and pondered. He knew that today was definitely not an uposatha day in monastery-based coordinates, because he had observed the Moon on a local-node holoscreen in the Cuckoo's Nest the previous day, and from long experience he could tell that it was nowhere near one day short of a perfect bright circle. But what if the day's status was determined from Earth? Unfortunately, he couldn't remember what the rule was. He could easily radio over and ask the local node to tell him, along with whether it happened to be an uposatha day in Earth-based coordinates, but the nature of his dilemma was that possibly this was forbidden.

  To be precise, it was definitely not forbidden if the answer was no, but it might be forbidden if the answer was yes.

  The nub of the dilemma was that on uposatha days, monks and laity alike must observe the five precepts—to refrain from murder, theft, falsehoods, drugs, and sexual perversions. The monks, male and female, had to observe several more: no sex of any kind, no eating after midday, no watching entertainments, no jewelry or body paint, and absolutely no sleeping in a comfortable bed. Of course, it being a low-gravity environment, any bed was comfortable, so the final precept was normally interpreted as no sleeping in a bed, period. But just to lie stretched out on the floor would still be fairly comfortable ... no matter.

  By the curious accounting of tradition, this made eight precepts in all.

  Seven of those—well, eight less one, which was seven as long as you didn't start asking what eight less eight was—caused him no heart-searching, provided he quashed the urge to kill whichever fool was still insisting on basing religious rituals on an ill-defined lunar calendar. However, accessing the Xnet was traditionally interpreted as entertainment, even when one's intentions were scholarly or a matter of duty. And if he was to do his duty, he would shortly be required to link up with the neo-Zen Buddhist's deep-space telescope array on the Moon, thereby accessing an entertainment medium.

  Of course, he could do the whole job electronically and look at the results later, but according to the rules this would be the same as looking now. Otherwise the monks would all record entertainments that were forbidden on uposatha days in order to watch them later, which the Green Parakeets, senior monks, deemed to be inconsistent with the spirit of self-denial that was, after all, the very essence of uposatha.

  Nor could he consult his superiors for advice, since to do so would again require accessing the local node.

  To compound the problem, the contrary advice from The Dharma Among the Birds meant that he wasn't sure whether he ought to carry out his duties, thereby earning the condemnation of the King Vulture, or shirk them, meriting the wrath of the Great Crane. Either might raise the ire of the Cuckoo himself—the High Lama of the entire orbital lamasery.

  Nagarjuna swore, which as far as he knew was acceptable on any kind of day, holy or not . . . provided none of the Parakeets heard you. He'd made sure the microphone was temporarily switched off.

  Basically, the best he could manage was to make some decision, and live with the consequences. The Birds would just have to decide for him. With clumsy gestures his gloved hands opened the leg pocket of his suit and extracted a copy of the sacred text, printed like a scroll on a long strip of vacuum-proof paper. He shut his eyes, twiddled the wing nut attached to a rotating device that rolled the paper sideways, continued for a random period of time, and then opened his eyes again.

  The idea was to obey whichever line first met his gaze. Honey stored by bees for themselves alone can serve no other. It was the Cuckoo's summing-up speech, the one that always brought tears to his eyes. He instructed his suit to suck up the moisture before it clouded his visor.

  Now all he had to do was figure out what the oracular phrase meant.

  It took half an hour, but then it came to him in a rush. There was no inconsistency after all. The three quotations were not about actions, but about motives. Laziness and sloth hinder the performance of good meant that you should not intend to be indolent. The folly of ceaseless busyness was not that it was wrong to be busy, but it was wrong to create unnecessary work deliberately. The warning about storing honey was what gave it all away: it meant that you should not set out to serve your own sole ends.

  All of which meant two things. First, that he should indeed carry out his assigned duties, and second, that if by misfortune it turned out to be an uposatha day after all, then he could trot the whole story out to explain his decision to the White Grouse— the senior lama to whom he was assigned.

  Taking a deep breath, he activated the suit's node and asked to be logged on to LADSOCS.

  "Sunblock: grade ten, one carton. Sundew electrolytic sports soda—um, twenty crates." Cashew Tintoretto was checking a huge pile of equipment and provisions against an interminable list displayed on her wristnode. She was beaded with sweat, streaked with dust, and looked distinctly harassed. "Sunglasses, anti-UV: twelve pairs—Jonas, do you think four each is enough? We'll probably drop them over the side or sit on them or—"

  "Cashew, stop fussing." Jonas opened up a camera case and began sorting through its innards. "Four pairs each is more than enough—but don't forget the crew. Bailey, are you ready for the press conference yet? We've only got ten minutes."

  "No rush," said Bailey. "The longer you keep 'em waiting, the more excited they get; the more excited they get, the more publicity they give you."

  Cashew pouted and returned to her list. "Tables: five hundred. What? Surely we only need—"

  "Let me look at that." Jonas peered at the tiny screen. "No, Cash, that's not 'table' as in 'dining'—it's 'table' as in 'look up where the Moons of Jupiter will be.' And it's five hundred pages, not items. It's a hard-copy backup for the wristnode programs."

  "Hey, there isn't a table in the dining sense at all. We've forgotten the damned—"

  "Cashew," said Bailey gently, "ask for a search under 'boat.' Subreference 'galley'"

  "Huh?"

  "Just do it."

  "Okay. Mmm. Oh, right. There's a table built in."

  Bailey nodded. "Along with seats, sails, an engine for calm weather, and a hull to keep the sea—"

  "All right, no need to be sarcastic. Tacks: five pounds. What the devil do we—oh, never mind. Tack, hard: six packs. Tack, soft—Jonas, what the devil are hard and soft tack? Never mind, I'll look it up. Oh. Aren't we taking this ancient nautical business a bit seriously here?"

  "Authenticity," said Bailey. "Authenticity is everything on this trip. Cashew."

  "Weevils, ten million. Scurvy, one case per crew member." She flipped her wristnode to standby and sat down on the crumbled wall of the old prison, long derelict. "Well, this volcanic derelict is certainly authentic. It's an authentic hellhole."

  Bailey shrugged, stood, looked once more at the barren tufa that formed the tiny island. "Goree village is okay Kind of picturesque, in a decayed sort of way. And Fort Nassau is definitely vidivisual. Pity Fort St. Michel collapsed."

  Jonas slapped some fresh memory into one of the cameras. It was a handheld Suzuki-73, and the cameraman fussed over it like an emperor penguin tending its egg.

/>   "I don't know why you bother with that lump of old junk," said Bailey.

  "Junk? This is pre-Pause technology! Worth a fortune! They don't make them like this anymore."

  "I thought the Pause happened because the technology then didn't work," said Cashew.

  "Yes and no," said Jonas. "It worked fine. Just got too smart."

  "Oh, right." In the twenty-third century everyone knew the dangers of smart technology. The main one was that it wasn't, smart, that is. Any manager knew that the main problem wasn't machines, but people. People are smart, they have ideas of their own. Unfortunately, they aren't always the ideas that the managers would like them to have. So making machines more like people was dumb.

  This had become obvious in 2072.

  The Pause had been building for a long time. As standards of living rose, the anti-technology movement rose with them— a simple lifestyle always looks more attractive when you've got time on your hands and little work to do. Meanwhile, every item of machinery from can openers to buildings was becoming more and more proactive, anticipating its users needs. This was wonderful except on the innumerable irritating occasions when the smart machinery goofed. Anything might have triggered the backlash, but in this case it was the destruction of the fledgling Mars Colony The smart computer that discovered a fire inside the colony's main dome tried to turn on the sprinklers—but it was overruled by the smart computer in charge of health, which had just discovered legionella bacteria in the water supply. Warmth, the medical computer reasoned, was just what those bacteria needed to multiply, so the water had to be kept away from the fire. Since medical priorities overruled all others, the colonists never stood a chance.

  The needless disaster triggered a Luddite revolution on Earth. All over the globe, smart machinery was smashed, piled high in the streets and set on fire, or shoved off cliffs . . .

  "Jonas, if the camera comes from an age when everything was too smart, why do you use it?"

  "Remember what the Pause led to? Dumb smart machines are better than no machines. To be honest, I like its proactive features. It sets the light level very intelligently and the fuzzy logic anti-shake system is a dream. Mind you," he added sheepishly, "I did have to dumb down the autofocus. The stupid thing always made the foreground sharp. Bloody useless when you're trying to shoot a distant herd of elephants with an artistically out-of-focus thornbush in the foreground."

  Cashew was running through a list of questions that the press were likely to ask. "Do you know this place was a major port for the Atlantic slave trade back in the eighteenth century?"

  "No," said Bailey. "Hmm, hope we can keep that under wraps, might put some viewers off. Maybe we ought to revise our point of depar—no, we've got to start from here."

  Cashew waved vaguely toward the mainland. "Why? Dakar has a better harbor, an infinitely more exciting nightlife, ten times the territory, and air-conditioning."

  "Authenticity," Bailey reiterated. He headed for the conference room. Cashew checked in a pocket mirror to make sure her dishevelment looked sufficiently vidivisual, rubbed a bit more dust on her face until she was satisfied with the effect, and followed. Jonas brought up the rear, carrying his precious Suzuki-73.

  The neo-Zen monks of the Way of the Wholesome had originally developed an installation on the Moon as a stepping-stone to the asteroid belt, a celestial way station that freed them from Earths stifling gravity well. An inevitable consequence of that strategy was to develop an industrial infrastructure on the Moon, and the key resource was water. There were only two places on the Moon where you could find water: the north and south poles. There, huge deposits of ice survived in endless shadow, forever hidden from the hot rays of the Sun by steep crater walls. Everywhere else the Moon was drier than the most extreme desert. Nearly all of the water in the Moon's rocks had turned to superheated steam in the first few minutes of the worldlet's existence, three and a half billion years earlier, when it had been splashed from the Earth's mantle by an impact with a body the size of Mars. Sunlight had decomposed the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen; then the hydrogen, being the lightest gas of all, had escaped the Moon's low gravity. By now most of the other gases had gone, too. Only at the Moon's poles had water survived; presumably some of the vaporized water molecules had pooled there as the worldlet cooled, and then had frozen. Everywhere else, the heat of the Sun would have prevented any vapor from becoming liquid.

  The Buddhists, great believers in the belt-and-braces approach, had built bases at both of the Moon's poles. And there, as expected, they had found an abundance of water, enabling them to construct thousands of crude spacecraft using metal smelted from lunar ores by solar-powered machines. There were vague rumors that these early neo-Zen Moon bases had found too much water—that is, far more than could be explained by the standard theories—but there was nothing on record to confirm or deny this.

  As the orbital mines—and their attendant monasteries—in the asteroid belt became productive, the Buddhists expanded their lunar operations to match. Even with a moderately high-powered telescope, none of this activity was visible from the Earth, and when the ultra-green anti-technology movement now known as the Pause cast its long, deceitful shadow over humanity, the people of Earth lost any interest in the Moon. The Belters pulled in their horns and waited patiently for the groundhogs to regain their sanity. The Pause halved Earth's population, then halved it again—mostly the nasty way.

  As the ultra-green policies came spectacularly to pieces, the survivors split into two political camps. China went one way, the rest of the world renamed itself the Community of Ecologically Responsible Nations, Ecotopia for short, and went the other. Ecotopia rebuilt selected technologies in order to manage its environment effectively; as a result, post-Pause Ecotopian technology was a weird mixture of hi-tech and low-tech. Computers did what they were told and not much more, but they did it with blistering speed. Machine designers did all they could to keep people in the loop, either in control or with the semblance of control: human psychology was considered a major design factor. A suitably qualified human could always overrule a machine. Earth's technologies turned inward, with an emphasis on everyday life: basic science languished, and anything outside the thin layer of the planet that was inhabited by people was left to its own devices. So by the time the neo-Zen presence was once more acknowledged, the Buddhists had laid claim to the entire lunar surface and all attendant mineral rights. Earth, belatedly realizing that it was heavily dependent on the flow of minerals from the Belt, had no choice but to accept that claim.

  As the Buddhists' operations grew ever larger, they began to realize that the greatest danger to their thriving business would be a cosmic collision. An inbound asteroid or comet could hit a monastery, the Moon—or, worse, the Earth, their spiritual home (and, it hardly need be said, their main customer base). Even a near miss could cause unwanted perturbations, throw orbital mining gear out of position, and generally create havoc. Precisely what remedy the monks had in mind if such a body were ever sighted was far from clear, but the general plan seemed to be to send out a massive fleet of rockhounds who would mine it into dust. Or, perhaps, push it into a safer orbit, but that wouldn't be as profitable.

  Of course it was also in the Earth's interests to have advance warning of any dangerous incoming bodies, so the monks set up LADSOCS—the Lunar Automatic Deep Space Optical Comparison System. This employed sophisticated optical interferometers to combine the observations of several hundred telescopes, using the electronic wizardry of charge-coupled devices to collect incoming photons. The system watched for changes in the position of distant bodies, possibly indicative of an inbound comet from the Oort cloud and beyond, or a wayward asteroid.

  Nagarjuna had been assigned a duty by White Grouse—more a character-building exercise than anything else, since the same job could easily have been automated. But the Way of the Wholesome had also learned from the Pause—and what led up to it—and it encouraged its devotees to undertake as many burd
ens as possible themselves. So each local monastery has assigned several junior monks to a rotation, and their job was to keep an eye on LADSOCS and try to get visual identification of any inbound lump of cosmic junk.

  The system had been running for half a century and so far the worst that had ever been seen was a small comet that missed a medium-sized mining complex by two million miles. So when Nagarjuna hesitantly logged on to LADSOCS's main computer and downloaded its latest scans, it took him several seconds to register that one sighting actually required attention. From the look of it, LADSOCS had spotted a new comet. That was hardly unprecedented—it usually found about three a year. But this one was heading for the inner Solar System.

  Or was it?

  The Solar System is fortunate in having its own celestial vacuum cleaner, a planet so massive that its tremendous gravitational field sucks in many incoming comets, keeping them away from the more fragile planets inside its protective circle. This is the gas giant Jupiter, and it is likely that without it, life would never have gained a foothold on the Earth. Even Jupiter is fallible, of course: sometimes it has an appointment in the wrong part of its orbit, and the inbound impactor escapes its clutches. Sixty-five million years ago, one such intruder had exterminated the dinosaurs.

  Nagarjuna instructed the computer to make the best prediction of the comet's orbit, based on all available data.

  There was room for error—the comet was still a long way off and accurate observations were difficult at that distance— but in ten to fifteen years' time the intruder might well be swept up by Jupiter. Or possibly miss, swing past, and make one or more further attempts at self-immolation in the gas giant's thick atmosphere. Even though the impact would be equivalent to that of millions of hydrogen bombs, there were some ancient records of cometary impacts on Jupiter—a complete impact sequence of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 from the twentieth century, and a series of sketches of what might be the remains of an impact, drawn over an eighteen-day period by Cassini in 1690. This showed that the planet would gobble up the comet with little more reaction than a few huge ripples scarring its upper atmosphere for a week or two. The gas Goliath would be more than a match for the slung pebble.