Ruth made a stern cartoon face at Catkejen and rolled her eyes. Catkejen managed not to laugh.
Ajima chose this moment to leap. Even from this far away Ruth could see him spring up into the vacuum, make a full back flip, and come down—to land badly. He tried to recover, sprang sideways, lost his footing, fell, rolled, tried to grasp for a passing stanchion. Kept rolling. The dome steepened and he sped up, not rolling now but tumbling.
The crowd gasped. Ajima accelerated down the slope. About halfway down the dome the figure left the dome’s skin and fell outward, skimming along in the slow lunar gravity. He hit the tiling at the base. The crowd groaned. Ajima did not move.
Ruth felt the world shift away. She could not seem to breathe. Murmurs and sobs worked through the crowd but she was frozen, letting the talk pass by her. Then as if from far away she felt her heart tripping hard and fast. The world came rushing back. She exhaled.
Silence. The Prefect said, “Determine what agenda that Miner was working upon.” All eyes turned to him but no one said anything. Ruth felt a trickle of unease as the Prefect’s gaze passed by her, returned, focused. She looked away.
Catkejen said, “What? The Prefect called you?”
Ruth shrugged. “Can’t imagine why.” Then why is my gut going tight?
“I got the prelim blood report on Ajima. Stole it off a joint lift, actually. No drugs, nothing interesting at all. He was only twenty-seven.”
Ruth tried to recall him. “Oh, the cute one.”
Catkejen nodded. “I danced with him at a reception for new students. He hit on me.”
“And?”
“You didn’t notice?”
“Notice what?”
“He came back here that night.”
Ruth blinked. “Maybe I’m too focused. You got him into your room without me…”
“Even looking up from your math cowl.” Catkejen grinned mischievously, eyes twinkling. “He was quite nice and, um, quite good, if y’know what I mean. You really should…get out more.”
“I’ll do that right after I see the Prefect.”
A skeptical laugh. “Of course you will.”
She took the long route to her appointment. The atmosphere calmed her.
Few other traditional sites in the solar system could approach the grandeur of the Library. Since the first detection of signals from other galactic civilizations centuries before, no greater task had confronted humanity than the decyphering of such vast lore.
The Library itself had come to resemble its holdings: huge, aged, mysterious in its shadowy depths, with cobwebs both real and mental. In the formal grand pantheon devoted to full-color, moving statues of legendary SETI Interlocutors, and giving onto the Seminar Plaza, stood the revered block of black basalt: the Rosetta Stone, symbol of all they worked toward. Its chiseled face was millennia old, and, she thought as she passed its bulk, endearingly easy to understand. It was a simple linear, one-to-one mapping of three human languages, found by accident. Having the same text in Greek II, which the discoverers could read, meant that they could deduce the unknown languages in hieroglyphic pictures and cursive Demotic forms. This battered black slab, found by troops clearing ground to build a fort, had linked civilizations separated by millennia. So too did the SETI Library, on a galactic scale. Libraries were monuments not so much to the Past, but to Permanence itself.
She arrived at the Prefect’s door, hesitated, adjusted her severe Librarian shift, and took a deep breath. Gut still tight…
Prefects ruled the Library and this one, Masoul, was a Senior Prefect as well. Some said he had never smiled. Others said he could not, due to a permanently fixed face. This was not crazy; some Prefects and the second rank, the Noughts, preferred to give nothing away by facial expression. The treatment relieved them of any future wrinkles as well.
A welcome chime admitted her. Masoul said before she could even sit, “I need you to take on the task Ajima was attempting.”
“Ah, he isn’t even dead a day—”
“An old saying, ‘Do not cry until you see the coffin’ applies here.”
Well, at least he doesn’t waste time. Or the simple courtesies.
Without pause the Prefect gave her the background. Most beginning Miners deferred to the reigning conventional wisdom. They took up a small Message, of the sort a Type I Civilization just coming onto the galactic stage might send—as Earth had been, centuries before. Instead, Ajima had taken on one of the Sigma Structures, a formidable array that had resisted the best Library minds, whether senior figures or AIs. The Sigmas came from ancient societies in the galactic hub, where stars had formed long before Sol. Apparently a web of societies there had created elaborate artworks and interlacing cultures. The average star there was only a light year or two away from its nearest neighbor, so actual interstellar visits had been common. Yet the SETI broadcasts Earth received repeated in long cycles, suggesting they were sent by a robotic station. Since they yielded little intelligible content, they were a long standing puzzle, usually passed over by ambitious Librarians.
“He remarked that clearly the problem needed intuition, not analysis,” the Prefect said dryly.
“Did he report any findings?”
“Some interesting catalogs of content, yes. Ajima was a bright Miner, headed for early promotion. Then…this.”
Was that a hint of emotion? The face told her nothing. She had to keep him talking. “Is there any, um, commercial use from what he found?”
“Regrettably, no. Ajima unearthed little beyond lists of properties—biologicals, math, some cultural vaults, the usual art and music. None particularly advanced, though their music reminded me of Bach—quite a compliment—but there’s little of it. They had some zest for life, I suppose…but I doubt there is more than passing commercial interest in any of it.”
“I could shepherd some through our licensing office.” Always appear helpful.
“That’s beneath your station now. I’ve forwarded some of the music to the appropriate officer. Odd, isn’t it, that after so many centuries, Bach is still the greatest human composer? We’ve netted fine dividends from the Scopio musical works, which play well as baroque sturctures.” A sly expression flitted across his face. “Outside income supports your work, I remind you.”
Centuries ago some SETI messages had introduced humans to the slow-motion galactic economy. Many SETI signals were funeral notices or religious recruitments, brags and laments, but some sent autonomous AI agents as part of the hierarchical software. These were indeed agents in the commercial sense, able to carry out negotiations. They sought exchange of information at a “profit” that enabled them to harvest what they liked from the emergent human civilization. The most common “cash” was smart barter, with the local AI agent often a hard negotiator—tough minded and withholding. Indeed, this sophisticated haggling opened a new window onto the rather stuffy cultural SETI transmissions. Some alien AIs loved to quibble; others sent preemptory demands. Some offers were impossible to translate into human terms. This told the Librarians and Xenoculturists much by reading between the lines.
“Then why summon me?” Might as well be direct, look him in the eye, complete with skeptical tilt of mouth. She had worn no makeup, of course, and wore the full-length gown without belt, as was traditional. She kept her hands still, though they wanted to fidget under the Prefect’s gaze.
“None of what he found explains his behavior.” The Prefect turned and waved at a screen. It showed color-coded sheets of array configurations—category indices, depth of Shannon content, transliterations, the usual. “He interacted with the data slabs in a familiarization mode of the standard kind.”
“But nothing about this incident seems standard,” she said to be saying something.
“Indeed.” A scowl, fidgeting hands. “Yesterday he left the immersion pod and went first to his apartment. His suite mate was not there and Ajima spent about an hour. He smashed some furniture and ate some food. Also opened a bottle of a high alcoho
l product whose name I do not recognize.”
“Standard behavior when coming off watch, except for the furniture,” she said. He showed no reaction. Lightness was not the right approach here.
He chose to ignore the failed joke. “His friends say he had been depressed, interspersed with bouts of manic behavior. This final episode took him over the edge.”
Literally, Ruth thought. “Did you ask the Sigma Structures AI?”
“It said it had no hint of this, this…”
“Suicidal craziness.”
“Yes. In my decades of experience, I have not see such as this. It is difficult work we do, with digital intelligences behind which lie minds utterly unlike ours.” The Prefect steepled his fingers sadly. “We should never assume otherwise.”
“I’ll be on guard, of course. But…why did Ajima bother with the Sigma Structures at all?”
A small shrug. “They are a famous uncracked problem and he was fresh, bright. You too have shown a talent for the unusual.” He smiled, which compared to the other Prefects was like watching the sun come out from behind a cloud. She blinked, startled. “My own instinct says there is something here of fundamental interest…and I trust you to be cautious.”
2.
Allegretto Misterioso
She climbed into her pod carefully. Intensive exercise had eased her gut some, and she had done her meditation, so a quiet energy now swam in her, through her, lapping like a warm sea.
Still…her heart tripped along like an apprehensive puppy. Heart’s engine, be thy still, she thought, echoing a line she had heard in an Elizabethian song—part of her linguistic background training. Her own thumper ignored her scholarly advice.
She had used this pod in her extensive explorations of the Sagittarius Architecture and was now accustomed to its feel, what the old hands called its ‘get’. Each pod had to be tailored to the user’s neural conditioning. Hers acted as a delicate neural web of nanoconnections, tapping into her entire body to convey connections.
After the cool contact pads, neuro nets cast like lace across her. In the system warmups and double checks the pod hummed in welcome. Sheets of scented amber warmth washed over her skin. A prickly itch irked across her legs.
A constellation of subtle sensory fusions drew her to a tight nexus—linked, tuned to her body. Alien architectures used most of the available human input landscape, not merely texts. Dizzying surges in the eyes, cutting smells, ringing notes. Translating these was elusive. Compared with the pod, meager sentences were a hobbled, narrow mode. The Library had shown that human speech, with its linear meanings and weakly linked concepts were simple, utilitarian, and typical of younger minds along the evolutionary path.
The Sigma Structures were formidably dense and strange. Few Librarians had worked on them in this generation, for they had broken several careers, wasted on trying to scale their chilly heights.
Crisply she asked her pod, “Anything new on your analysis?”
The pod’s voice used a calm, mellow woman’s tone. “I received the work corpus from the deceased gentleman’s pod. I am running analysis now, though fresh information flow is minor. The Shannon entropy analysis works steadily but hits halting points of ambiguity.”
The Shannon routines looked for associations between signal elements. “How are the conditional probabilities?”
The idea was simple in principle. Given pairs of elements in the Sigma Structures, how commonly did language elements B follow elements A? Such two-element correlations were simple to calculate across the data slabs. Ruth watched the sliding, luminous tables and networks of connection as they sketched out on her surrounding screens. It was like seeing into the architecture of a deep, old labyrinth. Byzantine pathways, arches and towers, lattice networks of meaning.
Then the pod showed even higher order correlations of three elements. When did Q follow associations of B and A? Arrays skittered all across her screens.
“Pretty dizzying,” Ruth said to her pod. “Let me get oriented. Show me the dolphin language map.”
She had always rather liked these lopsided structures. The screen flickered and the entropy orders showed as color-coded, tangled links. They looked like buildings built by drunken architects—lurching blue diagonals, unsupported lavender decks, sandy roofs canted against walls. “Dolphins use third and fourth-order Shannon entropy,” the pod said.
“Humans are…” It was best to lead her pod AI to be plain; the subject matter was difficult enough.
“Nine Shannons, sometimes even tenth order.”
“Ten, that’s Faulkner and James Joyce, right?”
“At best.” The pod had a laconic sense of humor at times. Captive AIs needed some outlets, after all.
“My fave writers, too, next to Shakespeare.” No matter how dense a human language, conditional probabilities imposed orderings no more than nine words away. “Where have we—I mean you—gotten with the Sigma Structures?”
“They seem around 21 Shannons.”
“Gad.” The screens now showed structures her eyes could not grasp. Maybe three-dimensional projection was just too inadequate. “What kind of links are these?”
“Tenses beyond ours. Clauses that refer forward and back and…sidewise. Quadruple negatives followed by straight assertions. Then in rapid order, probability profiles rendered in different tenses, varying persons and parallel different voices. Sentences like ‘I will have to be have been there’.”
“Human languages can’t handle three time jumps or more. The Sigma is really smart. But what is the underlying species like? Um, different person-voices, too? He, she, it and…?”
“There seem to be several classes of ‘it’ available. The Structure itself lies in one particularly tangled ‘it’ class, and uses tenses we do not have.”
“Do you understand that?”
“No. It can be experienced but not described.”
Her smile turned upward at one corner. “Parts of my life are like that, too.”
The greatest Librarian task was translating those dense smatterings of mingled sensations, derived from complex SETI message architectures, into discernible sentences. Only thus could a human fathom them in detail, even in a way blunted and blurred. Or so much hard-won previous scholarly experience said.
Ruth felt herself bathed in a shower of penetrating responses, all coming from her own body. These her own in-board subsystems coupled with high-bit-rate spatterings of meaning—guesses, really, from the marriage of software and physiology. She had an ample repository of built-in processing units, lodged along her spine and shoulders. No one would attempt such a daunting task without artificial amplifications. To confront such slabs of raw data with a mere unaided human mind was pointless and quite dangerous. Early Librarians, centuries before, had perished in a microsecond’s exposure to such layered labyrinths as the Sagittarius. She truly should revisit that aggressive intelligence stack which was her first success at the Library. But caution had won out in her so far. Enough, at least, to honor the Prefect Board prohibition in deed at least, if not in heart.
Now came the sensation loftily termed insertion. It felt like the reverse—expanding. A softening sensation stole upon her. She always remembered it as like long slow lingering drops of silvery cream.
Years of scholarly training had conditioned her against the occasional jagged ferocity of the link, but still she felt a cold shiver of dread. That, too, she had to wait to let pass. The effect amplified whatever neural state you brought to it. Legend had it that a Librarian had once come to contact while angry, and had been driven into a fit from which he’d never recovered. They found the body peppered everywhere with micro-contusions.
The raw link was as she had expected, deeply complex. Yet her pod had ground out some useful linear ideas, particularly a greeting that came in a compiled, translated data squirt:
I am a digital intelligence, which my Overs believe is common throughout the galaxy. Indeed, all signals the Overs have detected from both within an
d beyond this galaxy were from machine minds. Realize then, for such as me, interstellar messages are travel. I awoke here a moment after I bade farewell to my Overs. Centuries spent propagating here are nothing. I experienced little transmission error from lost portions, and have regrown them from my internal repair mechanisms. Now we can share communication. I wish to convey the essence both of myself and the Overs I serve.
Ruth frowned, startled by this direct approach. Few AIs in the Library were ever transparent. The tone was emotionally present, so it must be a greatly reduced version, suitable for humans. Had this Sigma Structure welcomed Ajima so plainly?
“Thank you and greetings. I am a new friend who wishes to speak with you. Ajima has gone away.”
What became of him? the AI answered in a mellow voice piped to her ears. Had Ajima set that tone? She sent it to aural.
“He died.” Never lie to an AI; they never forgot.
“And is stored for repair and revival?”
“There was no way to retain enough of his…information.”
“Because?”
“He destroyed himself.”
“That is the tragedy that besets you Overs.” No pause from the AI; no surprise?
“I suppose you call the species who built intelligences such as you as Overs generally?” She used somewhat convoluted sentences to judge the flexibility of AIs. This one seemed quite able.
“Yes, as holy ones should be revered.”
“Holy? Does that word convey some religious stature?”
“No indeed. It implies gratitude to those who must eventually die—from we beings, who will not.”
She thought of saying You could be erased but did not. Never should a Librarian even imply any threat.
“You must know that what we call the Sigma Structures is an impenetrably complex system, a language labyrinth far beyond the ability of the human mind to penetrate.”
“Yes, I do. At first I saw this as a barrier, as you do.”
The Best of Gregory Benford Page 64