Dark as Day

by Charles Sheffield

  When Alex said nothing, Kate went on, “You know, your mother just offered you what most people who work here would die for.”

  “You tapped in to a private conversation!”

  “I might have. Most of it I knew already. Anyway, you were talking in working hours, so I could claim the right. But don’t let’s get sidetracked. Me, I need to earn a living. I have to work, and I have to put up with bureaucratic bullshit. I even generate some myself, though I try to keep it down. But you don’t. You could walk out tomorrow. You’d have the freedom to work on what you want, when you want, where you want. There’d be nobody like me to pester you for reports.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Probably not. But I really want to. I’m a relatively recent arrival, but you’ve been here for over three years. Why do you stay?”

  “You have the reason sitting right there on your wall.” He pointed to the hand-embroidered sign. “I agree with Niels Bohr, prediction is difficult. What will happen in the next ten years, or the next fifty? We don’t know. I just happen to think that it’s the most important question in the solar system.”

  “I’m with you. And maybe the hardest.”

  Kate said nothing more, but sat waiting patiently until Alex at last took a huge gulp from the tumbler, swallowed hard, and burst out, “The models in use when I came here were useless. They couldn’t even predict the past. They’d been run over and over for the years leading up to the Great War, and they never saw it coming until the Armageddon Defense Line was gone and Oberth City was destroyed, and by then it was too late.”

  “What about your models?”

  “You saw today’s run. You said the right word: garbage.”

  “But isn’t that a problem of inputs, and of computer limitations? You designed the models to run with more than ten billion Faxes. That should be enough to include a simulation of every individual in the System, even if you let the prediction run for a whole century. You’ve always been forced to aggregate to a million or less. What do you think of the models themselves?”

  “They’re pretty good.”

  “I think I ought to call that Lie Number Two. I’m not able to judge what you’re doing, but before I took this job I talked to people whose judgment I respect. I also love modest men, but tell me true. Don’t you have an entirely new theoretical basis for predictive modeling?”

  “I believe I do.” Alex could feel the knot inside him starting to dissolve. Was it something in the drink, or something in Kate Lonaker? “At least, no one seems to have run across it before.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard. Look, you must know by now that I’m not much of a techie. I’ve looked at your papers, and didn’t get diddly-squat out of them. Can you describe what your models do in words of one syllable, so I’ll understand?”

  “I don’t think so. Not unless you have a few hours to spare.”

  “I don’t. But your models did predict the Great War?”

  “Sort of. When I ran from 2030 on, they reached a singularity in 2067. That was the correct year, but of course you can’t compute past a singularity of the time line. So there was no way of knowing the war’s outcome.”

  “You predicted a cataclysm. That’s good enough for me. Let’s go on. I asked you to tell me true, now it’s my turn to do the same. My worry list has three items at the top of it. First, I’m worried that you’ll take your mother’s offer, leave, and set up your own research shop.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Why not—and don’t tell me it’s because your mother makes you nervous.”

  “She does, but that’s got nothing to do with it.” Alex paused. “You said you love modest men. This is going to sound anything but.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like immodest men. I’ve certainly met enough of them. Go on.”

  “All right. My models may be producing garbage, but every other long-range predictive model that I’ve ever seen, here or elsewhere, is garbage. My models have the potential to get it right. You say you don’t understand what I do, but in a way you don’t have to. Because if you approve my results, they go up the line, and with any luck they’ll keep on going up to the point where the results lead to action.”

  “I hope so. Otherwise there’s no point in either of us working here.”

  “Now suppose that I go off and do what my mother suggests. I’d have plenty of research funds—Ligon Industries is huge, and it’s all in the family. Vast available assets.”

  “Richer than God, if you believe the media.”

  “So I run my models, and suppose they produce surprising results. I come here, and say, look what I’ve discovered. What happens next?”

  “We’d have to verify them before we could act.” Kate nodded. “Go on. I think I see where you’re leading.”

  “You’d verify them. Of course. And verify with what? The other models you have floating around here, that I know are crap? No agreement, we can pretty much guarantee that. And it would be NIH for me—Not Invented Here. I could come in showing that the Sun would go supernova, and I wouldn’t be heard. I’m working on the most important question in the solar system, but what’s the point if I’m not taken seriously? And for that, I must be an insider. Does that take care of your first worry? I’m not going to leave, unless somebody higher up comes along and throws me out.”

  “Which conveniently leads me to my second worry. You told me that you can’t easily describe your models in a way that I can understand.”

  “It would take hours.”

  “I believe you. But I can’t accept that answer. Because I have faith in you and your models, and I assume that soon—maybe starting tomorrow—they will start producing meaningful predictions, results that we really believe. So I take them up the line to Mischa Glaub. And the first thing I’m asked to do is explain what’s going on in a way that he can understand—and he has a lot less time to spend on this than I do. Then he has to brief his boss, Tomas De Mises. And he has to explain to anyone on the Council who shows interest.”

  “You make it sound impossible.”

  “If you talk about ‘iterated multiple convolution kernels,’ which is a snappy phrase I remember from your last paper, it is impossible. I want you do to something for me, and put it as high on your priority list as anything in your models. I want you to find a way to explain the models in a way that someone with no special training will understand.”

  “How can I do that?”

  “Your problem. Use analogies, use pictures, use metaphors, I don’t mind if you have to try poetry and dancing. But we really need this—or all your work will be ignored, just as surely as if it came from outside the organization.”

  Alex stared at her. He was feeling like a fool. She was right, and so obviously right that he should have thought of it for himself. “I’ll do my best. But how will I know when I have what you want?”

  “We use the Napoleonic principle.” At Alex’s raised eyebrows, she went on, “You’ll brief Macanelly, from Pedersen’s group. Do you know him?”

  “No. But I’ve heard about him.”

  “Heard what about him?”

  “That nobody likes to work with him. That he’s conceited, and also that he’s close to being a moron.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard, too. He’ll be perfect. Napoleon used to have a special officer, a very dim one, who read all outgoing dispatches. Unless a dispatch was clear even to that man, it didn’t go out. Loring Macanelly will be our dispatch reader. When we have an explanation of what you’re doing that he can understand and repeat back to me, we’ll be happy. Won’t we? You don’t look happy.”

  “Kate, I want to work on theory, and I want to develop analytic models. I consider what we are doing supremely important. But I hate this other sort of stuff, simplifying work to the point where it’s more misleading than informative, and then feeding it to half-wits.”

  “You know what they say: God must be specially fond of half-wits, because he made so many of them. Will
you do it?”

  “I told you, I’ll do my best.”

  “When you get something halfway ready, I’ll be your first half-wit.” Kate leaned back in her seat. “All right. That takes care of worries one and two. I’m not sure I have any right to ask you about worry three.”

  “But you’re going to.” Alex had been vaguely upset when Kate Lonaker was appointed as his boss. She was two years younger than he, and before the end of their first brief meeting he knew she had little technical talent. Now, bit by bit, he was realizing what she had instead. More nerve than he would ever possess, and an inexplicable charm that took the edge off whatever she said.

  And one other talent. How could a person do that, make you feel that they liked you and found you fascinating, without saying a single word? She was sitting there now, smiling at Alex as though he was the most interesting person in the System. And Kate could do it with anybody.

  “If you’re going to ask me, then ask.”

  “I will.” Kate glanced at her watch. “But I’m getting hungry. Can we talk and eat at the same time?”

  “That’s fine with me.” Was she stalling? “What’s the third worry?”

  “I was watching your face when your mother said that you mustn’t forget about the other thing, and she would make arrangements whenever you were ready.” Kate’s gaze, blue-eyed and sympathetic, was again fixed on Alex’s face. “As I said, it’s really none of my business, but I don’t believe that people I’m fond of should ever have to look like you looked. What is the other thing that you said you’d consider?”

  2

  THE TROJAN L-4 POINT, YEAR 2097,

  SEINE-DAY MINUS ONE

  Alex Ligon and Kate Lonaker held their meeting in one of the “low-rent” levels of the Ganymede interior, where most government offices are located.

  Draw a line that joins Alex and Kate to the Sun. It’s a straight line, a long line, and a line of variable length, because Kate and Alex rotate with Ganymede, and Ganymede revolves around Jupiter, and Jupiter itself circles the Sun. But to one significant figure none of that matters. The distance is seven hundred and seventy million kilometers, give or take thirty million. Using that Sun-Jupiter line as base, draw two equilateral triangles in the same plane as Jupiter’s orbit. The apex of one of those triangles, trailing Jupiter in its orbit, is known as the Jovian L-4 point. The apex leading Jupiter is the Jovian L-5 point.

  Both these locations are gravitationally stable. An object placed at one will remain there, co-orbiting with Jupiter. Nature long ago discovered this, and the group known as the Trojan asteroids reside there. The mathematician Lagrange proved the existence of such stable points in the eighteenth century. Humans only found a way to get there a good deal later.

  Milly Wu arrived at the Jovian L-4 station most recently of all. She had flown out in an economy 0.2 Earth-gee ship, on a flight of two weeks duration; long enough to worry to excess about the adequacy of her talents, but not long enough to learn all she felt she needed to know about the Argus Project. Now, only six days after arrival, Milly was sitting in her first staff meeting and wondering how long it would take her stomach to adjust to a micro-gravity environment.

  The good news was that she was not expected to do anything. “Just sit in the back and keep quiet,” her supervisor, Hannah Krauss, had said. “Answer a direct question if the Ogre addresses one to you, of course. But I don’t think that’s likely. JB is going to talk more than listen.”

  The Ogre. Hannah was about twenty-four, just a couple of years older than Milly. She was alert and attractive, with a wild mop of dark curly hair, a slim figure, and a mobile face that could take on a huge variety of expressions. When she said, “the Ogre,” her whole countenance somehow adopted a look of menace and malevolence. Milly had heard bad things about Jack Beston, even back on Ganymede. But could he really be as ogre-ish as he was painted?

  Milly looked, and decided that maybe he could. JB, Jack Beston, was standing in front of the group now. He was tall, red-headed, and skinny as a stim-stick. Not bad looking, if you liked skinny guys, as Milly did. But his expression cancelled any possible attraction. He was glowering at everyone and everything before a word was spoken. It made Milly wonder why she had struggled through all the horrendous aptitude tests in cryptanalysis and pattern analysis needed to bring her here. Was she all that keen to be part of the Argus Project?

  She decided that she was. If anyone made contact with aliens, Milly wanted to be in the front row. But for the moment she was quite happy to follow Hannah Krauss’s advice and sit at the back. She scanned the windowless room. Minimal furnishings. Twenty-one people, fourteen women, seven men; three empty seats in her row. Sit tight, keep quiet, and try to be invisible. She placed the rectangle of the scribe plate flat on her knees, where she could make unobtrusive condensed Post-logic notes on whatever she felt needed recording.

  “You’ve heard the crap the media are putting out.” Jack Beston made no introductory remarks. “The Seine is going to link everything to everything and solve every problem in the solar system. I turn that around. When the Seine is up and running—and that’s less than a day from now—nobody will be safe. Nobody will have secrets. People will use the Seine to wander all over the System and stick their nose in where it’s got no right to be. We can’t have that. I want to review where we stand on battening down on Argus information. Druse?”

  A small man with a wizened face and a shaved scalp stood up. “The incoming signals all come in from open space, and we can’t do anything about that. Anyone with the right receiving equipment will get exactly what we get. But so far as we know, no one else in the System has our sensitivity, or our modulated neutrino beam detector. Except—” Druse hesitated.

  “Except the Bastard.” Beston scowled. “He’s got Odin working different targets and a different set of neutrino energies, but his equipment’s as good as ours. No point in worrying about the security of incoming signals. What about the rest of it?”

  “We propose to use the Seine’s computer power only for raw data reduction and for first frequency scan. We don’t give much away there, even if someone taps our whole feed. That’s all that the Seine will do for us. Our private crypto programs and results will be completely caged, so no electromagnetic signals of any kind can get out. If we find a SETI signal—”

  “When we find the SETI signal.”

  “Right. When we find an unambiguous SETI signal, everything switches from search to analysis. We have to make a choice there. If we use the Seine for decrypt, we lose secrecy. If we don’t use the Seine and stay caged, we limit our computer power.”

  “That’s not your department. I’ll make that decision when the time comes. Just make sure I have a copy of the cage specs.” Beston turned to a woman just a couple of seats along from Milly. “Zetter. Any progress?”

  The woman had a thin vulpine face with a sharp nose. She must have slipped in late, and very quietly, because Milly had surveyed everyone in the room when she first arrived.

  Zetter—first name? last name?—did not stand up. She leaned forward, so that Milly was presented with only a quarter profile, and shook her head in a slow, reptilian manner. “Not as of four hours ago. I received a report from—”

  “No names. You know the rules.”

  “I wasn’t about to.” The woman sniffed. “I received a report from our source at L-5 four hours ago. Odin is tightening security on all fronts.”

  “Of course. The Bastard is as worried about leaks as we are. Any peepholes?”

  “Too soon to say. Maybe one weak point—human, not equipment.”

  “Better. You can’t buy a machine. How much?”

  “I don’t know yet. Pricey. You get what you pay for.”

  “Or less. Get onto it again. Tell our source we don’t want general information. If it’s not decrypt methods—” Jack Beston stopped in mid-sentence. His green eyes, apparently staring at nothing, had suddenly focused their glare on Milly. “You in the back. What the hell d
o you think you’re doing?”

  It was a direct question, the kind that supervisor Hannah Krauss had told her to answer. But it wasn’t one that Milly understood. She sat frozen.

  “Who are you?” Beston barked. “What’s your name?”

  “Milton Wu.”

  “Milton?” Beston moved to peer at her body. “What sort of a fucking name is that? You’re no man.”

  “No.” Milly, as always since the age of thirteen, was conscious of her too-large breasts. “Milton is my real name, a family name. But everyone calls me Milly.”

  “She’s new. Only been here six days.” Hannah Krauss was trying to divert Jack Beston’s anger. It didn’t work.

  “I don’t give a flying fuck if she’s been here just six minutes. And I’m not talking to you, Krauss.” He pointed straight at Milly’s crotch. “What’s that?”

  He meant the scribe plate sitting on her lap. He had to mean the scribe plate. They had already established that she was a woman. Milly felt herself blushing. “I thought I ought to make notes. I have a lot to learn.”

  “You can say that again. Tell me this, Milly Wu. Are we safe inside a cage, so no E/M signals get out?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t think so.”

  “I’ll tell you. We are not. You’ve been writing on that thing?”

  “Yes, sir. Just notes. Squiggles. In condensed Post notation.”

  “Which are converted to words for storage. Converted electromagnetically.” Jack Beston turned to the woman on Milly’s right. “Zetter? Are you on?”

  “Yes.” She opened her jacket, peered at something inside, and the thin nose twitched. “So is she. I’m picking up and recording. Not interpreting, but that’s an easy piece of processing. Unless we’re shielded, the reception range for that strength of signal will be at least five kilometers.”

  “Which might as well be infinity. Look around you, Milly Wu. Do you see anybody else making electronic notes?”

  Milly looked. Neutral stares, except for Hannah’s rueful rubber-lipped quirk. Sorry. I ought to have warned you.