Infinity's Shore u-5

by David Brin

  Envy wouldn’t be a problem if I established clear authority from the start, both as an officer and as senior-ranking male.

  Unfortunately, chain of command was a recent, human-imposed concept. Underneath, bull dolphins still felt ancient drives to jostle over status and breeding rights.

  In fact, Peepoe’s choice might reinforce Kaa’s position atop the little local hierarchy. Though I shouldn’t need help. Not if I were a real leader.

  “Jealous.” He pondered, thrusting harder with his flukes, till his beak pushed their shared shock wave, drawing her along in his wake. “Those two are highly sexed, so maybe they will be. But at least this way Zhaki and Mopol should stop bothering you with hopeless propositions.”

  The young males had made relentless crude suggestions toward Peepoe from the first day she arrived, even brushing lewdly against her until Kaa had to rebuke them. While it was true that dolphins had a far different scale of tolerance for such behavior than humans — and Peepoe was capable of taking care of herself — in this case the pair were so persistent that Kaa had to dish out tail whacks to make them back off.

  “Hopeless?” Peepoe asked in a teasing tone. “Now you’re making assumptions. How do you know I’m monogamous? Maybe a little harem would suit me fine.”

  Kaa spread his jaws and aimed a nip at her nearest pectoral fin … slow enough for her to slip aside, laughing, before his teeth snapped.

  “Good,” she commented. “Pacific Tursiops go in for that kinky stuff. But I prefer a nice and conservative Atlantean.

  You’re from Miami-Under, no? Born into an old-fashioned line marriage, I bet.”

  Kaa grunted. Even the sonar-based dialect of Anglic wasn’t easy while speeding at full throttle.

  “One of the Heinlein family variants,” he conceded. “The style works better for dolphins than humans. Why? You looking for a line to marry into?”

  “Mnn. I’d rather start a new one. Always hankered to be the founding matriarch of a nice little lineage — if the masters of uplift allow it.”

  That was the eternal Big If. No neo-dolphin could legally breed without permission from the Terragens Uplift Board. Despite the unusual freedoms humans had given their clients — voting rights and the trappings of citizenship — Earthclan was still bound by ancient Galactic law.

  Improve your clients, went the basic code of uplift.… Or lose them.

  “You gotta be kidding,” he answered. “If any of us Streaker fins ever do make it home somehow from this crazed voyage, we’ll never face another sapiency exam from the masters. We may be sterilized on the spot, for all the trouble we caused. Or else we’re heroes, and it’ll be sperm-and-seed donations for the rest of our lives, fostering almost the whole next neo-fin generation.

  “Either way, it won’t be cozy family life for any of us. Not ever.”

  He hadn’t expected it to come out that way, with an edge of ironic bitterness. But Peepoe must have seen he was telling the truth. She continued keeping pace alongside, but her silence told Kaa how much it stung.

  Great. Everything felt so fine … this wonderful water, the fish we snatched for breakfast, our lovemaking. Would it have hurt to let her stay in denial for a while, dreaming of happy endings? Holding on to the fantasy that we might yet go home, and lead normal lives?

  “Kaa!” Brookida’s cry made the tiny habitat reverberate. “I’m glad you’re back. Did your mission go well? Wait till you hear what I discovered by correlating passive seismic echo scans from here to Streaker’s sssite. I fed the raw data into one of Charles Dart’s old programs to get tomography images of the subcrustal zone!”

  All that, on a single breath. It was what humans would call a “mouthful.”

  “That’s great, Brookida. But to answer your question, our mission didn’t go as well as we hoped. In fact, we have orders to pack everything up and break camp. Gillian and Tsh’t plan to move the ship.”

  Brookida shook his mottled gray head. “Won’t that risk giving away Streaker’s position?”

  “The site’s already compromised. Dr. Baskin suspects the Jophur may be p-preoccupied, but that can’t last.”

  It had been Kaa’s mission to find out what the sooners knew about such things. Perhaps Uriel the Smith had some idea what the Jophur were up to. No one had blamed Kaa for the failure — not out loud. But he knew the ship’s council was disappointed.

  I warned them to send someone better trained at spying.

  He looked around. “Where are the others?”

  Brookida let out a warbled sigh.

  “Off joyriding on Peepoe’s sled. Or else vandalizing the fishing nets of local hoons and qheuens.”

  Damn! Kaa cursed. He had ordered Zhaki and Mopol to stay within a kilometer of the dome, and restrict themselves to monitoring spy eyes already in place at Wuphon Port. Above all, they were supposed to avoid direct contact with the sooners.

  “They got bored,” Brookida explained. “Now that Streaker has Alvin and other local experts aboard, our team is a bit redundant. It’s why I’ve been tracing the subduction-zone magma flows. My first chance since Kithrup to test out an idea I had, based on Charles Dart’s old research. You recall those strange beings who lived deep under Kithrup’s crust? The ones with the weird, unpronounceable species name?”

  Peepoe spoke up. “You mean the Karrank-k%?’

  She did a creditable job of expressing the double-aspirated slide tone at the end, sounding like a steam kettle about to explode.

  “Yes, quite. Well, I’d been wondering what kind of ecosystem could support them down there. And it got me thinking …”

  Brookida halted. Then all three dolphins whirled around as the wall segment behind them began emitting a low, scraping hum. The grating vibration hurt Kaa’s jaw.

  Soon, the entire habitat groaned to a rasping sonic frequency Kaa recognized.

  It’s a saser! Someone’s attacking the dome!

  “Harnesses!”

  At his shouted command, they all dived toward the rack where heavy-duty tool kits were hung, ready for use. Kaa streaked through the open end of his well-worn apparatus, and felt its many control surfaces slide smoothly into place. A control cable snaked toward the neural tap behind his left eye. Robotic arms whirred as he jerked the harness free of its rack. Peepoe’s unit popped loose just half an instant later.

  A rough rectangle crept across the opposite wall, above and below the waterline, glowing hot.

  “They’re cutting through!” Peepoe cried.

  “Breathers!” Kaa shouted. From the back of his harness, a hose swarmed over his blowhole, covering it with a moist kiss and tight seal. A blast of canned air tasted even more tinny than the recycled stuff within the dome. Kaa sent a neural command activating his torch cutter and saser, tools that could second as weapons in close combat.…

  But they didn’t respond!

  “Peepoe!” He shouted. “Check your—”

  “I’m helping Brookida!” she cut in. “His harness is stuck!”

  Kaa slashed the water with his flukes, squealing a cry of frustration. With no better options, he interposed his body between theirs and the far wall…

  … which abruptly collapsed in a wave of pummeling froth.

  Gillian

  I HAVE DISCOVERED SEVERAL THINGS OF INTEREST,” the Niss Machine told Gillian, after she wakened from a brief induced sleep. “The first has to do with that wonderfully ostentatious native machine, built and operated by the urrish tinkerer, Uriel.”

  Sitting in her darkened office, she watched a recorded holo image of wheels, pulleys, and disks, whirling in a flamboyant show of light and action. Not far from Gillian, the ancient cadaver, Herbie, seemed to regard the same scene. A trick of shadows made the enigmatic, mummified face seem amused.

  “Let me guess. Uriel created a computer.”

  The Niss reacted with surprise. Its spiral of meshed lines tightened to a knot.

  “You knew?”

  “I suspected. From the kids’ reports, Urie
l wouldn’t waste time on anything useless or abstract. She’d want to give her folk something special. The one thing her founding ancestors absolutely had to throw away.”

  “Possession of computers. Good point, Dr. Baskin. Uriel could aim no higher than to be like Prometheus. Bringing her people the fire of calculation.”

  “But without digital cognizance,” she pointed out. “An undetectable computer.”

  “Indeed. I found no reference to such a thing in our captured Galactic Library unit. So I turned to the precontact 2198 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. There I learned about analog computation with mechanical components, which actually had a brief ascendancy on Earth, using many of the same techniques we see in Uriel’s hall of spinning glass!”

  “I remember hearing about this. Maybe Tom mentioned it.”

  “Did he also mention that the same thing can be achieved using simple electronic circuits? Networks of resistors, capacitors, and diodes can simulate a variety of equations. By interconnecting such units, solutions can be worked out for limited problems.

  “It provokes one to consider the military potential of such a system. For instance, operating sneak-attack weapons without digital controls, using undetectable guidance systems.”

  The Niss holo performed a twist that Gillian interpreted as a shrug.

  “But then, if the notion were feasible, it would have found its way into the Library by now.”

  There it was again. Even Tymbrimi suffered from the same all-pervading supposition — that anything worth doing must have been done already, over the course of two billion years. The assumption nearly always proved true. Still, wolfling humans resented it.

  “So,” Gillian prompted. “Have you figured out what Uriel is trying to compute?”

  “Ah, yes.” The line motif spun contemplatively.

  “That is, perhaps.

  “Or rather … no, I have not.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  The Niss showed spiky irritation.

  “My difficulty is that all the algorithms used by Uriel are of Terran origin.”

  Gillian nodded.

  “Naturally. Her math books came from the so-called Great Printing, when human learning flooded this world, most of it in the form of precontact texts. A mirror image of what Galactic society did to Earth. On Jijo, we were the ones to unleash an overpowering wealth of knowledge, engulfing prior beliefs.”

  Hence also Gillian’s recent, weird experience — debating the literary merits of Jules Verne with a pair of distinctly unhuman youngsters named “Alvin” and “Huck,” whose personalities had little in common with the stodgy Galactic norm.

  The Niss agreed, bowing its tornado of laced lines.

  “You grasp my difficulty, Doctor. Despite Tymbrimi sympathy toward Earthlings, my makers were uplifted as Galactic citizens, with a shared tradition. While details of my programming are exceptional, I was designed according to proven principles, after eons of Galactic experience refining digital computers. These precepts clash with Terran superstitions—”

  Gillian coughed behind her hand. The Niss bowed.

  “Forgive. I meant to say, Terran lore.”

  “Can you give an example?”

  “I can. Consider the contrast between the word/concepts discrete and continuous.

  “According to Galactic science, anything and everything can be accomplished by using arithmetic. By counting and dividing, using integers and rational fractions. Sophisticated arithmetic algorithms enable us to understand the behavior of a star, for instance, by partitioning it into ever-smaller pieces, modeling those pieces in a simple fashion, then recombining the parts. That is the digital way.”

  “It must call for vast amounts of memory and raw computing power.”

  “True, but these are cheaply provided, enough for any task you might require.

  “Now look back at precontact human wolflings. Your race spent many centuries as semicivilized beings, mentally ready to ask sophisticated questions, but completely lacking access to transistors, quantum switches, or binary processing. Until your great savants, Turing and Von Neumann, finally expressed the power of digital computers, generations of mathematicians had to cope by using pencil and paper.

  “The result? A mix of the brilliant and the inane. Abstract differential analysis and cabalistic numerology. Algebra, astrology, and geometrical topology. Much of this amalgam was based on patently absurd concepts, such as continuity, or aptly named irrational numbering, or the astonishing notion that there are layered infinities of the divisibly small.”

  Gillian sighed an old frustration.

  “Earth’s best minds tried to explain our math, soon after contact. Again and again we showed it was self-consistent. That it worked.”

  “Yet it accomplished nothing that could not be outmatched in moments by calculating engines like myself. Galactic seers dismissed all the clever equations as trickery and shortcuts, or else the abstract ravings of savages.”

  She acceded with a nod.

  “This happened once before, you know. In Earth’s twentieth century, after the Second World War, the victors quickly split into opposing camps. Those experts you mentioned — Turing and von Whoever — they worked in the west, helping set off our own digital revolution.

  “Meanwhile, the east was ruled by a single dictator, I think his name was Steel.”

  “Accessing the Britannica … You mean ‘Stalin’? Yes, I see the connection. Until his death, Stalin obstructed Russo-Soviet science for ideological reasons. He banished work on genetics because it contradicted notions of communist perfectibility. Moreover, he quashed work on computers, calling them ‘decadent.’ Even after his passing, many in the east held that calculation was crude, inelegant … only good for quick approximations. For truth, one needed pure mathematics.”

  “So that’s why many practitioners in the Old Math still come from Russia.” Gillian chuckled. “It sounds like yet another inverted image of what happened to Earth, after contact.”

  The Niss pondered this for a moment.

  “What are you implying, Doctor? That Stalin was partly right? That you Terrans were right? That you were onto something the rest of the universe has missed?”

  “It seems unlikely, eh? And yet, isn’t that slim possibility the very reason why your makers assigned you to this ship?”

  Again, the meshed lines whirled.

  “Point well taken, Dr. Baskin.”

  Gillian stood up to start moving her body through a series of stretching exercises. The brief sleep period had helped. Still, there were a hundred problems to address.

  “Look,” she asked the Niss Machine. “Is there some point where all this is heading? Haven’t you a clue what problem Uriel is trying to solve?”

  She gestured toward the recorded image of pulleys, leather straps, and spinning disks.

  “In a word, Doctor? No.

  “Oh, I can tell that Uriel is modeling a set of simultaneous differential equations — to use old wolfling terminology. The range of numerical values being considered appears to be simple, even trivial. I could outcalculate her so-called computer with a mere one quadrillionth of my processing power.”

  “Then why don’t you?”

  “Because to me the problem first calls for unlocking the code of a lost language. I need an opening, a Rosetta stone, after which all should be instantly clear.

  “In short, I need help from an Earthling, to suggest what the expressions might be for.”

  Gillian shrugged.

  “Another tough break, then. We’ve plumb run out of mathematicians aboard this crate. Creideiki and Tom both used to play with the Old Math. I know Charles Dart dabbled, and Takkata-Jim.…”

  She sighed.

  “And Emerson D’Anite. He was the last one who could have helped you.”

  Gillian moved toward her reference console. “I suppose we can scan the personnel files to see if there’s anyone else—”

  “That may not be necessary,” the Ni
ss cut in. “It might be possible to access one of the experts you already mentioned.”

  Gillian blinked, unable to believe she heard right.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You assigned me another problem — to find out what the feral-sapient tytlal named ‘Mudfoot’ was staring at, after the council meeting. To achieve that, I enhanced the spy camera’s last scene, before the privacy wasps closed in.

  “Please watch carefully, Doctor.”

  The big display now showed the final clear picture sent by the lost probe. Gillian found it physically painful to watch the insect’s beating wings, and felt relief when the Niss zoomed toward a corner of the field, pushing the privacy wasp off-screen. What ballooned outward was a section of the ornate contraption of Uriel the Smith — a marvel of pure ingenuity and resourcefulness.

  I did take one course in the Old Math, before heading to medical school. I could try to help. The Niss can supply precontact texts. All it wants is insight. Some wolfling intuition…

  Her thoughts veered, distracted by the vivid enhancement. Looming around her now was a maze of improvised scaffolding, filled with shadows that were split, here and there, by glaring points of light.

  All this incredible activity must add up to something important.

  Gillian saw the apparent goal sought by the Niss — a set of shadows that had the soft curves of life-forms, precariously balanced in the crisscrossing trusswork. Some figures were small, with snakelike torsos and tiny legs, brandishing tools with slim, many-jointed hands.

  Miniature urs, she realized. The maintenance crew?

  A larger silhouette loomed over these. Gillian gasped when she saw it must be human! Then she recalled.

  Of course. Humans are among Uriel’s allies, and skilled technicians. They’re also good climbers, perfect to help keep things running.

  The Niss must now be straining its ability to enhance the grainy image. The rate of magnification slowed, and remaining shadows peeled grudgingly before the onslaught of computing power. But soon she knew the human was male, from the shape of neck and shoulders. He was pointing, perhaps indicating a task for the little urs to perform.