When the hardware and power were installed, Tommy sent his apprentices to the pond chambers and began the task he had to do alone: understand and replace the old programs.
First he made certain the operating structure was the same as in the programs he had worked with before, then he concentrated on what the programs were doing. The computational section was the easiest to duplicate, and he decided to postpone his curiosity about the meaning of the mathematical formulae and do a straightforward conversion from the old language to Java. The sections of the program that communicated with the console on the deck above were also familiar. He would replace them with something better as he had done before.
One device driver was new. This driver sent information along cables leading to the central column using a set of signal generators different from those in hydroponics or the targeting computers. In a process that always required operator intervention, the computer displayed a solution on the bridge console based on the parameters entered and waited for the console operator to confirm before passing a command down the central column. He was sure the command could be replicated, but that could wait. His computer just had to display the same results for the first test. The signal generators could be added later.
Even taking a few short breaks to tweak the hydroponics programs for use in the living area computer--a pond is not so different from a hydroponics tank--Tommy was ready in the fifth week for a parallel test with the old navigation computer. However, his request for access to the bridge console was denied. Ull's explained that a human was not allowed to sit at the consoles. When he asked Ull to assign a lord to run the tests for him, Ull's reaction was an undulating whistle. No lord would work as a human's assistant. The first test must wait until the first real transit.
The lords were far from ready to leave. After spending half of the six weeks since their arrival salvaging The Extended Claws, the ship had proceeded by in-system drive to their original destination, an oxygen and water planet. They needed several more weeks to harvest biological products from the planet's tropical forests.
The delay gave Tommy the time to complete his other assignment, and his teams soon were ready to start the pumps in all four of the lords' living areas. From the beginning, he had decided to take this a lot farther than Lord Ull expected. Doing four rather than one chamber was part of that. In addition, the team worked with the other guilds to install the biological filters, grease the pumps, and perform all the other mechanical maintenance needed for systems that had been turned off for many years.
To live again, the ponds needed a supply of water, fish, and plants. The water would be supplied from storage tanks at the turn of a computer-controlled valve. The fish and plants were the lords' responsibility, or so another guildmaster had told him.
The morning after he completed the navigation programs, he told Sanos to turn on the water and start the pumps in all the chambers.
Two days later, all the lakes and pools were full, and the pumps sent water plunging down the waterfalls.
The call to Lord Ull was his first since he had been told how. He pushed back the panel in his wall and entered Ull's number. "Lord Ull, may I speak with you?"
For a moment he heard no answer, then, over the faint sound of falling water "Yes."
"This is Tommy. Uhh, the feral human."
"I know who you are. What do you want?"
"Would it be possible for you to meet me at the living chamber we have been working on? We are ready to show it to you."
"Yes."
He found Ull waiting at the entry. Why didn't she go inside without me, he wondered. Opening the hatch released a rush of warm, steamy air that lacked the odor of plants and fish, but was, otherwise, much like his first experience in the entrance of Lord Ull's chamber.
"You have already filled the lake!" Ull exclaimed.
Tommy waited by the entrance while Ull jumped into the water and swam to the far side. She climbed up the hill and disappeared into one after another of the chambers where the smaller pools were hidden. He lost sight of her until she dived into the waterfall pool from the hillside and swam back to the entrance.
"I did not expect this,” Ull said. “You have done your work well."
"There is more," Tommy replied. He led the way down the corridor, past the occupied chamber, to the next chamber they had repaired.
"What is this?"
Again he waited inside the entrance while she made her inspection, and again he asked her to follow when she was done. When she had seen the fourth chamber, she seemed to be waiting for him to lead her to another and another.
"That is all, for now," he said.
Before she could respond, they heard a shout from the direction they had come. They had failed to close the doors! With Lord Ull in the lead, they hurried toward a multitude of voices.
Nesu packed the corridor and open hatches. Over the crowd noise were the sounds of bodies hitting the water.
A Nesu in the back of the crowd noticed Ull's approach. "Director Ull, are you responsible for this miracle?"
The lords behind the speaker turned in a wave.
"Yes, I and this human you see behind me," Ull replied. "With the council's permission and support, of course."
She gave me credit. Why did she do that?
"Who will be assigned to these chambers?" asked another.
"We have not decided,” Ull answered. “First, plants and fish must be added."
This brought a chorus of voices volunteering for the task.
"Will other chambers be repaired?" asked another voice.
Ull glanced at Tommy and replied, "Yes, and soon."
From behind the crowd, a voice asked, "Will the mating chambers be repaired?"
This question brought complete silence. From his position behind Lord Ull, Tommy could see the lords glance at each other, their muzzles turning first one way, then another--if they'd been human, he would have sworn the looks were speculative--then all eyes turned to Ull to wait for her reply.
"I am sure they will be," Ull told them.
Tommy added another emotional sign to his understanding of The People. If an undulating whistle indicated laughter, a shrill single note indicated pure joy. The combined whistles of the crowd in the passageway forced him to cover his ears.
When Ull could be heard over the noise, she leaned her head down to his. "Until the navigation test, this is most important. I will send you a list of compartments." She touched his shoulder, for the first time except in anger. "This was a good surprise, but do not do it again. We agreed you would tell me what you are planning before you do it."
"Yes, Lord Ull," was all he found to say.
When he got the new list, the number of dead living areas above the Commons was a surprise, and Tommy worried about his inventory of computers. The first thing to do, he decided, was change the programs so one computer could monitor multiple compartments. One computer for each deck would be enough, with a second for backup if the first one failed.
Tommy's journeymen and apprentices were soon working on most of the ship's upper levels. In an attempt to stop the constant challenges from lords and warriors both, he had a distinctive dark orange tunic created for everyone in his guild to wear. An orange tunic became the sign that another living or mating compartment was being repaired. The challenges became greetings and shrill whistles of pleasure from the lords, and the warriors learned to leave them alone.
# # #
Lord Ull's call for him to come to the bridge was a welcome break from what had come to feel like, after all, a glorified plumbing job.
The elevator door opened to a hum of activity. A lord sat at every console. Others moved from station to station. As Tommy stepped out of the compartment, he was met by the shortest lord he had seen outside the living areas.
"Director Ull has instructed me to bring you to her."
This lord is barely taller than I am. Maybe the lords have an apprentice program, too.
Lord Ull sat on an e
levated podium near the navigation station.
"Are you ready for the test?" she asked.
"I can be in ten minutes," Tommy replied.
"Good. We will begin calculations to leave this system in thirty minutes. I will give you the same instructions I give the navigator. Get ready."
What exactly is Lord Ull's position on this ship? Could she be the captain? He lifted the trapdoor and hurried down the stairs. A moment later, he had booted the primary and backup computer and was waiting for the operating systems to load.
The same smaller lord brought him the transit destination on a sheet of paper and waited on the top stair for him to acknowledge he was ready to begin the calculations. When Tommy had done so, the lord said something to the lord seated at the console on the floor above, then ducked her head down to talk to Tommy. "You may begin," she said.
Tommy clicked the submit button and waited by the printer for the response. That's got to be the slowest part of this until I can send the information to wherever it goes. Tommy handed the page to the small lord and followed her up the stairs.
Page in hand, Ull walked over to the navigation station and stood watching its lights flicker in the near darkness. Almost thirty minutes later, its results appeared in a column of numbers down a vertical panel.
"Your computer's results are different." She handed the paper to Tommy. "See for yourself." She waited a moment for him to make the comparison. "This transit will last approximately three weeks. We will be at that destination for several weeks before proceeding. You have much time to find your error." She turned to the console operator. "Initiate the transit."
The operator's words echoed softly from speakers at the edge of the room. "Transit in five seconds."
Tommy watched overhead as the countdown reached zero, and the stars disappeared into total black. I guess I'll check my program for bugs. I missed something, somewhere. Maybe it would be better if I knew what the thing is supposed to be calculating rather than just trying to duplicate the code in a different language. That's a place to start.
A week later, he had gotten as far as understanding the input parameters, or at least he thought he had. They were the ship's current and destination locations expressed in distance units from the galactic center, distance above or below the galaxy's center plane in the same units, and, finally, the angle subtending the galactic rim from some zero vector almost halfway around the edge. The destination parameters added a three-space vector for the ship's velocity relative to the galaxy's rotation at the destination.
He wasn't certain he was right because the zero-galactic-angle vector location made no sense at all. Ull said the transit would take approximately three weeks. That was a rough estimate, but, even roughly, if he were right about the beginning and ending points, the transit "velocity" was close to 180 times the speed of light. A set of marker stars must define the zero vector, but how could they be seen through the galaxy's core? The Nesu must be using a set of visible marker stars as a secondary vector and from them extrapolating to the real zero vector. Why would they use an invisible reference vector that would take at least four hundred years to reach at 180c? With all the rounding in the calculations, even a short transit might leave them several light minutes from their expected destination. If he were right, having to extrapolate the zero vector could double the expected rounding error.
The output signals generated by the lords' navigation computer were an even bigger surprise. After working with them for a while, he could only make sense of the signal by assuming they represented a series of ten-dimensional arrays containing base twelve numbers instead of the base sixty-four numbers used in the computer. He couldn't even begin to visualize what the mathematics might mean.
He decided to try another approach. What if his program were right and, somehow, the lords' computer was wrong? What if the program in the computer was different from the one in the backup circuitry block? Tommy went through the calculations line by line, calculating intermediate results and comparing them to what he believed they should be. Halfway through, he found a multiplication of two positive numbers in the calculation that, if multiplied by minus one, resulted in the same final answer as given by the lords computer.
I've got it! The lords' computers use the same method for representing a negative number in binary as Earth's computers: the high order binary digit was set to one for negative and zero for positive. Some malfunction in the circuitry had flipped the digit from zero to one during the calculation. My program's result is correct.
The ship would emerge in the wrong place. But where? He didn't have access to the star charts necessary to find out.
Writing a program to work backward from the result wasn't as difficult as the original had been. The day before they were to end the transit, he asked Lord Ull for a meeting.
Tommy found her swimming back and forth in her pond. Without waiting to be told, he walked to the rock shelf and sat down, this time without dangling his feet in the water.
She finally stopped in front of him. "You have something to tell me? Have you found the problem with your computer?"
"No, Lord Ull. I have found the problem with your computer."
Her undulating whistle had a different sound. "I have learned something new about you, feral. You do not like being wrong. The problem is with your computer, not our computer."
"Your computers have failed before. Many times."
"True, but always by dying, not by giving wrong answers."
"That may have been true in the past, but not this time."
"Wild human, I am enjoying the happiness flowing from those we have helped. My word has support in the council as never before. You are imagining a problem that does not exist, and I will not worry over it." She rolled over on her back. "You should be enjoying the moment, too."
Tommy stood. "I am happy you are happy, Lord Ull, but please look at this." He placed the sheet of paper on the rock, away from the water. "These are the coordinates of where we will emerge. If you grant I might be correct, will the ship be in danger at that location?"
The next day, Tommy was in his cabin when a call came from Lord Ull. "You were at least partially correct. We are not where we expected to be. Our exact location has yet to be established, but the nearest star is over a light year away.
"Is your computer ready to be used for navigation?" Ull asked.
"I am working on the device that sends the signals to the drive," Tommy replied. Wherever and whatever that is.
"That must be your highest concern until this is resolved."
"Yes, Lord Ull."
Nore
Nore showed her frustration by agitating the water beneath her. Ull had come to the council pool with a piece of paper she said proved the feral human had predicted their situation. Nore wanted to accuse her of getting the paper after their arrival, but dared not. Ull had become too popular. For that matter, the feral may have damaged the navigation computer. He spent many hours in the same chamber and was completely unguarded.
"Ull, you place far too much reliance in the feral human."
"I am only saying we should be cautious when making our next transit."
"You admit the feral reports the computer made a single error," Nore said.
"That is true," Ull replied.
"Has he given you reason to believe the computer will continue to make errors?"
"No, he has not."
"What is the worst that could happen?" Neth said. "Would any of The People be placed in danger?"
"We are seven light years from our intended destination," Luns said. "Space is large. This ship is small. We might be farther off course, but little else is likely to happen."
"We cannot drift here, far from our trade worlds," Las said. "We must move on."
"I agree," Nore said, "and I will be ship commander for the week beginning tomorrow. I recommend we continue."
"If you are sure we will not be in danger," Neth said.
"By your silence, I find agreemen
t," Nore said, cutting off the discussion and forcing a response.
When she received none, she said. "We will transit tomorrow."
# # #
Nore took her place on the control podium at the appointed time the next day. This was one tradition she wished she could change. Each member of the council was ship commander for a week in rotation. If any movement of the ship was required during the week, the ship commander was responsible and in command of the bridge. Nore would have preferred to always be in command. She had watched the other council members and thought them unenthusiastic and not in control. They were only on the bridge when a movement was required. She stayed on the bridge as much as possible during her rotation, even when in transit. That nothing had ever happened didn't mean nothing would.
A movement from the elevator caught her eye. Who was late? She insisted everyone be on the bridge at least an hour before transit. She soon found replacements for those who broke her rules. The feral human came into view. She was about to have him escorted off her bridge, when she saw Ull with him. She watched as the feral lifted the trapdoor into the sub-deck, and both climbed down the stairs, pulling the trapdoor closed behind them. Good. She could do without his smell in her bridge.
The astronomy section had located the ship the evening before. The coordinates of their destination were the same as from the previous transit. The calculations had been made. All that was left to do was enter transit. She turned to the navigator console operator. "Initiate the transit."
The operator's words echoed from speakers beneath the dome. "Transit in five seconds."
Overhead, the stars disappeared from view.
The week passed. The transit would continue for all of this week and most of the following. As usual, she spent most of each day on the command podium, watching the duty shift as they watched the control lights, and, as usual when in transit, nothing happened. She would not be ship commander when they exited. Each day the feral human and Ull arrived soon after she did and disappeared into the sub-deck, closing the trapdoor behind them. She waited for the day that the human came without Ull so she could order him off her bridge but that never happened. Whatever they were doing down there was Ull's problem not hers.
A Larger Universe Page 18