by Ian Stewart
Yes, the women were shrewd.
Yet, another part of him denied it, for the secrets that were known to the men of the Village had to be known only to the men. Without that, his life was meaningless.
"All or not, it is our duty," he said, closing the discussion. Binshaba sighed, in secret, inside. Once Simeon's mind was made up, there was no changing it.
Not by frontal assault, anyway.
She clambered to her feet. "It is time to milk the goats," she said.
Simeon watched her go. Once more he wondered just what the women of the Village really knew . . . But that was fruitless speculation, and a question best not asked.
What was more important was what the men of the Village had been entrusted with. That was where the real power lay And the Outsider child was entrusted to him.
It was enough.
"The irony is. Sir Charles, that the Paris lab could have discovered squark signaling eighteen months ago. But the Macnamara Institute group's funding got cut off before they were able to publish."
"How could that happen?"
"Apparently some bureaucrat in the State Department interfered with normal procurement procedures and nobbled the appraisal subcommittee. Since then, the group has had to spend most of its time chasing alternative sources of money, and their research was held up."
Sir Charles found this incredible. The whole point was that anything remotely related to the aliens and carried out by competent people had to be encouraged, just in case, there was no budget limit. "Wally—how could something so important get its funding cut?"
Halberstam shrugged. "Beats me."
Moses was running through the Village, clambering quickly onto the roof of a hut, trying hard not to laugh as the other children hunted for him.
They knew where he was—but he was only eight, they didn't want to find him too easily And so they passed to and fro beneath his precarious perch, pretending not to see or hear him as he clutched the reeds and tried not to giggle too loudly.
For a few moments, he was happy.
Although the wheelers on Europa had taken the precautionary step of dispatching a repauter to monitor extrajovian activity on Sixmoon, they had not expected the Elders to take an interest. It had simply been a routine feature of the triennial audit. Then the Subcommittee on Poisonbluvian Trespass was suddenly instituted, and took its first—and to date its only—decision, which was to instruct the repauter to stay where it was and to continue its monitoring duties. Naturally, the symbiaut took this instruction literally, and deluged the wheelers of the Conclave with real-time commentary from inside Europa Base. However, the subcommittee had not debated what to do with the information that the symbiautic observer would provide. Currently it was deeply divided over just that question, and as a stopgap the reports were being filed in memaut databanks until the issues had been fully clarified.
Unaware of the wheelers passive role, Sir Charles had assumed it must be an ambassador from the aliens, eager to open negotiations with the newcomers from Earth. When the wheeler had made its dramatic entrance at Europa Base, Sir Charles had been certain that he would soon be in communication with the machine's alien masters . . . wherever they might be. Now—two years and an incredible amount of wasted effort later—he was less sure. Communication there was, of a sort. Exchange of signals, huge quantities of information—^yes. Exchange of meaning —no. Both parties were talking, but they weren't talking interactively. Even alien syntax seemed beyond the powers of his analysts, even though he'd given them the very best signal-processing software. Alien semantics was a distant dream. In fact, the only significant thing they had discovered about the alien signals was that they were statistically indistinguishable from random noise. Perfect black body radiation.
Some bright spark back on Earth had even worked out why Now they tell me. At the turn of the twentieth century a mathematician named Cris Moore at the Santa Fe Institute had written a paper with the title Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable from Noise. It was a parody of Clarke's Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from mage. And in a way, it said the same thing. An advanced civilization would have learned to encode its signals in the most efficient manner possible: they would be incompressible. Another mathematician of that era, Gregory Chaitin, had already realized that any incompressible signal is random. The idea was easy: if there is a discernible pattern in the signal, you can compress the amount of information involved by describing the pattern, and if not the signal has no pattern—so it looks random. Moore had parlayed Chaitin's result into a statistical distribution of frequencies for incompressible electromagnetic signals, and nature had arrived at the same distribution in a context where signaling was irrelevant— the radiation spectrum of a perfect black body.
The alien signals were supersymmetrically chromodynamic rather than electromagnetic, but the same reasoning applied. Turning squark wavepackets into radio preserved the frequency distribution.
The wheeler signals weren't random, of course. They were merely encrypted. But anyone who has tried to watch an encrypted W channel knows how random such signals seem to be, unless you know the secret key to decrypt them. The aliens were talking in code, and the Jovian Task Force lacked the key. This had been anticipated—though not the resemblance to random noise—and Skylark had several of the best cryptanalysts there were. Hundreds of others were beavering away back on Earth. Sir Charles had a horrible feeling that they were all getting exactly nowhere.
At that moment four of his people were staring at a transmission from . . . somewhere . . . relayed to the wheeler by squark wavepackets, processed into electromagnetic signals by their own "tame" wheeler, and displayed on a flatfilm screen in a dozen plausible formats.
All dozen windows showed uniform shades of gray.
In an attempt to make contact in the reverse direction, a W camera perched precariously in one comer of the room relayed its contents to the wheeler, and by using another wheeler they could be pretty sure that their broadcast was being transmitted. Certainly something (if only noise) was. Throughout, the wheeler rested on all six wheels in the middle of the floor, apparently oblivious to everything around it. It had long ago retracted its dimetrodon vanes and turned off its disturbing inner light. A flimsy barrier had been erected to keep people from tripping over it. Occasionally it rolled back and forth for a short distance, as if to "stretch its wheels."
After seventeen thousand hours of continuous recording and transmission, some meaningful interaction ought to have begun. At the very least, they surely should have been able to establish the aliens' system for counting, which would open up the periodic table, hence elements, hence materials, hence biomolecular structure ... the usual method for bootstrapping from simple concepts to complex ones.
Not so.
They had programmed their computer to generate bursts of short blips in mathematical patterns—integers in ascending order, odd numbers, squares, cubes, powers of two, primes, even Fibonacci numbers. They had turned these patterns into sound, light, radio, and squarks. They had shone lasers at the wheeler, played music to it, show it movies, sung and danced for it. The wheeler, which presumably must have been picking up at least some of these messages, displayed not the slightest interest and continued to squat on the floor.
Was it asleep? What was it there for? Didn't the Jovians have mathematics? How, then, could they possibly build machines with wheels? And why, why, why weren't the aliens attempting to send some kind of simple pattern that their viewers could latch on to, like any intelligent creature would?
The only bright spot was that the wheelers hadn't just switched off and gone home. The aliens seemed perfectly happy to continue sending signals in both directions. But there was no indication that the results made any more sense to them than they did to the humans.
Kambo had caught a young gazelle. Its mother had been ambushed by a leopardess—from the claw marks it must be the one they called B'wulu, who had a litter of cub
s to feed—and the corpse had been hijacked by a pack of hyenas. Kambo had found the delicate creature lying in the hot sunshine, while vultures circled overhead. It was astonishing that the hyenas hadn't found it and killed it, but they had temporarily been lured away by the prospect of a cheap meal at a lion kill.
He had looped a crude rope of twisted grasses around the kid's neck and tied it to a wooden stake outside his father's hut.
He had given the kid water, and smiled when it drank its fill. Now he was trying to get it to feed, without success.
Moses wandered by and stopped to pass the time of day He had grown considerably since he first arrived in the Village. Now he was twelve years old, tall for his age, quick and agile. In his three years as a Chinese street child he had mastered the art of fighting dirty, and a year of gongfu had refined those skills. He knew how to cause minor or serious injury, how to maim for life, and how—when necessary—to kill. He hid all of these refinements from the other children, afraid that if they became known he would be forced to demonstrate them. Nonetheless, he remembered everything that Silent Snowflake had taught him, and he practiced in hideyholes among the rocks where no one could see him.
He made no such attempt to conceal his ability to fight like the street children. He had a temper that was easily aroused, and a vicious streak that made him into a formidable opponent. Only the biggest of the children ever dared fight him now; the rest bore too many scars, mental and physical, from failed attempts to battle with him.
He was respected, and not just for his teeth and fists.
Kambo was upset. "She just won't eat the food, Moses! She drinks like a fish, but look at her rib cage, showing through her flanks ... I think she will die soon."
Moses picked up the food bowl, swirled it around. It was a mixture of grain and milk.
He placed it in front of the young gazelle. The animal nosed at the food, raised its head slightly, and backed away. It stood, poised, leaning slightly forward, and seemed to sniff the air.
"It's too thick," said Moses. "Use more milk. But boil the milk first to take away as much of the smell of goat as you can. If you can find a gazelle hide, place the bowl on that. Oh, and chop a few handfuls of grass and sprinkle that into the bowl."
Then he got up and walked away
Kambo watched Moses depart. Then he picked up some grass, wandered into the family hut, found an old piece of gazelle skin, boiled up some fresh milk, and did as Moses had instructed.
After the milk had cooled, he placed the bowl in front of the kid, on top of the fragment of hide.
The kid approached warily, sniffed several times at the mixture . . . and began to feed.
Kambo wasn't even surprised. Everybody knew that Moses had an uncanny affinity for animals. He seemed to know what was going on inside their heads.
He could even pick up a black mamba, whose bite was death, and the snake seemed to like it. Of course, he never played that particular game in front of the adults. But the entire Village had seen him calm a cow whose leg had been savaged by a lioness . . . The cow still died, but more peacefully than they usually did.
Moses had a way with animals. He seemed to understand them. He could whistle to a bird and it would settle on his hand.
Even the spiders seemed to respond to him. Instead of scuttling into their holes when he approached, they would crawl into his cupped hand. They seemed to be watching his eyes.
A thousand miles away from the Village, Charity awoke from sleep and wondered why. Usually she slept like a log. Then she heard the noise again.
Someone was wandering around the bungalow.
She glanced at the clock, a strip of flatscreen stuck to the chest of drawers beside her bed. She'd bought the chest in the local flea market, assured it was an antique, but at such a low price that she knew it had to be a fake. That was fine—she'd just wanted one of those old wooden box-things with the slide-out trays . . . She shook her head to clear it. Damn fake antiques. The time was 4:22 a.m.
Burglar? Surely not, there was nothing here worth stealing, and anyway, the last burglary in the whole county had been more than two years ago. Hired killers? Oddly enough, that was far more likely. Now that Pru—
There was a sound of a toe being stubbed, a muffled oath, and Charity recognized the voice. She sat up, grabbed a robe, and headed for the kitchen.
"Pru? Why the devil are you up so earl— Oh." Several packed bags were piled up by the door. Outside, a taxi was waiting, its electric motor humming so silently that Charity would never have heard it approaching.
Or departing.
"Pru, you're not—"
"Sorry but I bloody well am, little sister!" Prudence had been steeling herself for this for days. Her patience had worn clean away, she had to get out to Callisto again. So much time had passed since Moses had been killed that she was getting weary of perpetually holding her sister's hand. Prudence knew that her nephew was dead—why couldn't Charity face reality? She'd hoped that by taking her leave in the early hours of the morning, she would avoid the inevitable confrontation. Fat chance. Her embarrassment showed.
"You know what I think about—"
"Yes, Chatty dear, I most certainly do, you've told me often enough. It just so happens that we have a fundamental disagreement about it. A very simple disagreement—I'm right, and you're wrong."
"Jupiter."
"Yes."
"With those weird vidivision people, no doubt. I wondered why you'd been spending so much time in discussions with them on the Xnet—"
Prudence exploded. "Who I interact with on the X is no business of yours!"
"Even if you do it in my house, on my node, with my electricity?" Their disputes always went this route, from childhood. Time to back off. . . "I never said it was my business. I just couldn't help noticing, and wondering ..."
"Little sister, you were a snoop when you were two and you're still a snoop today Look, I'm sorry about everything that's happened, it's tragic and awful and I feel deeply for you, and I loved Moses, too, even if it didn't show as much as it should've—but I've got to live my own life again, okay?"
Charity gave a mirthless chuckle. Prudence never could stay in one place for very long. How she coped stuck in a metal box for years on end was one of the wonders of the world . . . "You're going back into space."
"Why not?" Prudence was unusually prickly She knew very well why not. It wasn't space as such, it was what she was going into space for . . . Charity just stood there, silent, accusing.
"Damn it, Chatty, you don't need to look at me like that! It's not as if I'm betraying the human race! We can't all devote one hundred percent of our time to the War Against the Comet! We all have to eat, so farmers have to farm, and we still have to earn the money to buy their food ... Or has the Ecotopian Central Bank abolished money now?"
"Don't be foolish. Prudence." Even to Charity it sounded prissy. She'd never won an argument with Prudence. She was usually right, but that didn't imply a win.
"Look, it's not my fault that there's a bloody comet coming!" Prudence took a deep breath and ran her fingers through her polychromatic hair in an agony of indecision. "It's thanks to me that we may have a chance to divert it! Look, if the comet does hit, it will be a good idea to have as many of us as possible off-planet. You've seen the plans to revive the lunar colonies. Why don't you—"
"Stop changing the subject. Science needs those wheelers. You never should have—"
"They've got plenty, all of them my property. I found them! Now they've commandeered the lot." They both knew this was a lie: the authorities had commandeered exactly eight wheelers, of which Reliant Robin had a wheel missing and Trabant was completely seized up. Even, so, the compensation they'd offered her was pathetic, and their reason—"contribution to the comet effort"—even more so. Prudence had refused point-blank to say where the other wheelers had been hidden. She felt a foolish urge to justify her position, even now, even to her sister. "They have no idea what to do with the ones they've go
t?"
"That's not the point—"
"Yes, it is! Look, if it makes you any happier, if the boffins really get an idea what to do with the bloody things, I can always tell them where I've stashed the other hundred and twenty-nine of them. Even from Jupiter, it'd only take a few hours for the message to—"
They'd been over this before. "Maybe the scientists will find something important if they get to look at them all."
"Maybe. But definitely I'll end up a pauper." That was an exaggeration. What she really meant was that she'd fail to become a multimillionaire. They both knew that.
"What if the comet hits, Pru? What good will money be then?"
"If it hits, all bets are off. Tough. I'll have other problems then, anyway. But if it misses— when it misses—I can turn over the rest of the wheelers to Angle Carver, and I'll be heavily in profit. Especially if I can pick up all the others that must be out there." Prudence had also refused to say exactly where on Callisto she had dug up the wheelers. The Skylark expedition had been instructed to look for them, but so far they'd found nothing. Callisto was large—its surface had the same area as Africa and the Americas combined. Remote sensing wasn't sensitive enough, and what was couldn't possibly cover such a huge area. For that reason, Sir Charles's team had never made a really serious attempt to find where the wheelers were buried.
"So basically you're saying that you can make a mint if Dunsmoore succeeds, and if he doesn't, kaboom, too bad. That's cynical."
"Realistic. Charity, I'm not as nice a person as you. I'm a selfish bitch, okay? I have to be—in my business I'd be bankrupt in a day if I wasn't. And no, I can't change my line of work, it's in my blood. You're happy with a dead-end job in the back of beyond. I want a bit of excitement in my life."