by Hal Clement
This time Faivonen did glance down at the object strapped to his left wrist. He knew that Beedee could not actually read minds. He—or she, or it; the man had vacillated about the correct pronoun for most of the twenty-four years since he first met Riita and her strange possession—could do a very good job of reading the expression of anyone it knew, however. During the twenty years of their marriage, and the year since he had found and inherited the black diamond, it had plenty of opportunity to get to know him.
“You’re in no position to insist on anything,” he pointed out, as usual when one of their conversations reached this point. Beedee made the usual counter.
“Very true, but you know I’m right. We can see well enough for research. Get the rest of your equipment on, and let’s start.”
“I’m hungry.”
“Well, you won’t eat anything but cheese until you get moving. You managed to kill one meal here at the shore an hour after we landed but nothing else has—”
“All right. Hiking is easier than arguing.” Faivonen attached knife, shovel, canteen, cheese incubator, shoulder pack, bow, and quiver to various parts of his person. Then he took a last look at the Fahamu silhouetted against the dull red patch on the horizon where Argo had set a few hours before, turned his back on the bay, and set off up the valley.
From the sea, this had looked like a product of glaciation. No one had been surprised, since it led toward the cold hemisphere. However, there had been no sign of any stream or river flowing into the bay, in spite of the heavy vegetation which could be seen from shipboard. The plant life itself was a little startling for the latitude—eighty-six degrees north of the equator—where Castor C gave very little assistance to Argo in heating the world. When a careful check failed to show even a cove where a seasonal stream might have emptied, it was agreed that information was needed. Elisha Kent Kane Faivonen drew the job of getting it.
A few facts had been ascertained before the ship had hoisted sail. There were animals which could serve as food, and plenty of the plants whose sap would serve as culture medium for the “cheese.” This was the mixture of gene-tailored bacteria which produced the half-dozen amino acids needed by human beings and lacking in Medean life forms—one of the very few products of advanced Earth technology which the colonists had retained. They had not wanted to be dependent on anything which had to be replaced from Earth, but had little choice in this matter. Terrestrial plants were still struggling to become adjusted to the satellite, and until real crops of these could be grown, people lived on native food and cheese.
Faivonen kept well to the left wall—his own left—of the valley as he travelled away from the bay. This would get the better light when the suns were a little higher, and they did have to see. Everything had to be examined; plants, animals, soil, rocks, wind, weather. The wind had been blowing on shore and up the valley for days before the Fahamu had reached the bay; a surface wind blowing toward the cold side of Medea was another peculiarity to be explained, though the explanation might be as trivial as the explanation of local weather so often was. Beedee had claimed a special interest, however, and was constantly asking the man to hold it as high as possible so that its delicate pressure senses could record air currents with a minimum of ground disturbance.
Faivonen didn’t object, usually. The black diamond weighed only about three quarters of a kilogram, a negligible fraction of the equipment he was carrying. Whether the thing should be called equipment or personnel was still an open question, of course; he knew it was of artificial origin, but could not bring himself to regard it as merely a computer. It said too many things which smacked of personality. Somewhere in the lattice of carbon atoms which formed the thing’s basic structure was a tendency—programmed, grown, or learned—to imitate human speech mannerisms and even voices. When he had found it with Riita’s body it had spoken to him with her voice . . .
They had reached an understanding on that, right away; Beedee had promised not to repeat the offense. Courtesy? Sympathy? Faivonen couldn’t know, but also couldn’t help thinking of the device or creature as a person, as his wife always had.
Of course, a person is alive, and living things don’t operate from such simple energy sources as the flow of heat from a man’s forearm to a near-freezing environment, or the potential difference between two metal bracelets with human sweat as an electrolyte. Living things, when their energy sources vanish and they stop operating, don’t start up again after indefinitely long periods of time.
Beedee had been “dead” for over two years between Riita’s death and Faivonen’s discovery of her body. He(?) had been “dead” for over two billion years between the time he(?) had sunk with a surface vessel on the Earthlike world of his(?) makers, and the time he(?) had been discovered by Riita’s grandmother on an airless planet, blistering under a red giant sun, in a pile of calcium oxide which had once been a deposit of marine limestone.
Only machines can be turned off and on, so Beedee must be it, not he or she. So Faivonen’s experience insisted—most of it.
“Elisha! There is a fairly large animal beyond the bush—thirty meters at two o’clock. You’re hungry; get ready!”
They were two kilometers from the bay, and the man was even hungrier than when they had started; his bow was bent and an arrow nocked before the diamond had finished speaking. Silently, avoiding the ankle-high puffballs whose bursting would give audible warning of his approach, Faivonen stalked toward the bush. He was still a dozen meters away when a calf-sized creature with six legs leaped into view on the far side, clearly bent on departure. He put his arrow high in the trunk, between the first and second pairs of legs. If it were like the animals he knew closer to the equator, it had no centralized heart; but a major aorta ran along its body just below the backbone. Severing the blood vessel or the major nerve cord should be equally effective. It was; the creature dropped on the next bound.
Faivonen performed a combined butchering and anatomical dissection, with Beedee recording the data. Then he collected fuel, lighted a fire with pyrite and steel, and cooked a meal. He didn’t enjoy eating it much; neither the Medean flesh nor the cheese was particularly tasty, but hunger was even less pleasant.
He cut a couple of kilograms of the meat into thin strips for his next few meals, extracted the few remaining lumps of ripe cheese from the incubator’s tank and put them in the storage chamber, refilled the tank with sap from the Cheddar plants he had already identified, and resumed his hike, after asking Beedee if his(?) own battery needed charging.
“Oh, no—I’m running on—oh, you’re being funny. Excuse me.”
It had happened before. The diamond’s calculating processes, or reasoning if that was really what it could be called, operated at electronic speed; it had known he was joking long before its first word had been uttered. Nevertheless, it had imitated a human double-take; it had been playing up to his humor. Whether it had felt anything corresponding to the strange relay-chatter with which the human nervous system responds to incongruity was something Faivonen couldn’t guess. Whether it felt at all was an equally open question.
By the time the Castor C twins were halfway around to their midday position a few degrees above the southern horizon, Faivonen was tired; even with frequent pauses to examine biological or geological data, they were more than thirty kilometers from the sea. He rested and ate again, and then settled into his sleeping bag. He knew that his own biological clock would never reset itself to Medea’s seventy-five hour rotation, but sleep was as necessary as food; he slipped the blinders over his eyes and relaxed. Beedee would guard; it was unlikely that anything could approach without registering on its supersensitive pressure sense. Guarding might be necessary; Medean predators could get no more adequate nourishment from human tissue than the other way around, but none of them seemed to know it.
This time the man was lucky, not waking up until Beedee’s voice began hammering “Eight hours, loafer,” into his ear. He sat up, slipped the pads from his eyes, an
d looked around. The suns were almost in the south, now, just above the spot where Argo had long ago disappeared. Two balloons floated a hundred meters overhead; Beedee might not have heard them, since they always seemed to ride with the wind, but it didn’t matter. No one knew much about the organisms—Faivonen wasn’t even sure whether they were actually inedible, or merely had too little tissue to be worth hunting—but they were certainly harmless. At the moment they didn’t seem to be moving at all, which was interesting.
“Sullivan thought the wind was getting a little weaker each cycle,” Faivonen remarked. “It looks as though he was right.”
“He was,” agreed the diamond. “There was a pretty good chance of it when he was speaking, but there were too many unknown variables for real computation. You know, I am beginning to suspect that some of the variables lie in the shape of this valley. We’ll have to get a long way inland to make sure.”
“Too far inland and Argo won’t be rising at all. I want no part of Coldside,” Faivonen pointed out. “You wouldn’t like it either. There may be a lot to learn, but with your power off you wouldn’t be learning it.”
“You could rig me a battery. I can think of ways you could set it up to operate even at dry-ice temperatures.”
“It gets colder than that—and you don’t like being turned off any better than I’d like dying, even if you can switch on again.”
“I know. I hate to miss arriving information. Still, I believe right now that I’d like to take the chance; and I’ve heard you, and Sullivan, and many other people say that danger gives spice to existence.”
“I think we said life, not existence. And I know we said danger, not suicide. Forget it, Beedee; you stay with me, and I stop a long way short of dry ice even if this valley goes that far. You figure out what you can from the rocks and the weather and the life; that should be enough.”
“There is never enough. I can calculate, but then I have to see whether I was right. You should allow for that; your wife always did.”
Faivonen’s silence was pointed. A human being would have been embarrassed at the faux pas, but Beedee didn’t make such mistakes. He must have had—it must have had a reason, and it must have been a good one.
The man knew that he probably wouldn’t be able to guess it. The score of black diamonds which had been brought back by the Tammuz expedition had made no secret of their composition, though the knowledge had done human engineers no good—the techniques needed to make one of the things were far beyond current human ability.
They were just what they were called—diamonds, structures of carbon with replacement atoms and crystal defects built deliberately into their lattices in ways which resembled mankind’s operations on silicon chips for the last century or two—resembled them in much the same way that the circuit chips resembled a flint knife. About twelve hundred unit cells of the diamond lattice composed a single basic structural unit of the devices; a much less reliable estimate, usually guessed at about five thousand, of these units had about the recording and decision-making capacity of a single human brain cell.
The things themselves—Beedee was typical, though no two were identical—looked as though someone had made a cylinder of black glass a little over six centimeters in radius and not quite ten in length, fitted the ends with hemispheres of the same material, and split them lengthwise to make two units. With that volume—a little over two hundred milliliters—they had theoretical capacity for the equivalent of not quite 200,000,000 four-billion-cell human brains. Some people were afraid of them, and there had been loud demands—to destroy them or get them off Earth—by some of that planet’s more paranoid inhabitants. It had not been entirely the high regard for private property rights characteristic of the culture of that time which had allowed Beedee to come to Castor.
Faivonen himself was no more afraid of the thing than his wife had been, but he took for granted that it could think many times faster and with far more precise consideration of myriads of variables than any human being could. It had been one of Beedee’s fellow machines, or beings, who (which?) had proved that chess was as trivial a game as tick-tack-toe.
Some people had not forgiven them for that.
Faivonen didn’t go back over all that, consciously. He merely wondered why Beedee had mentioned Riita when it knew the man would be pained, assumed he would not be able to guess the answer, and turned to the day’s work. He cooked and consumed another meal, loaded up his equipment, and not until they were under way did he speak to his computer-recorder again. Even then he changed the subject to one of more immediate importance.
“There’s still no river in this valley—”
“There could hardly be one at all, if none reached the sea,” Beedee pointed out.
“There have also been no pools or puddles, though there is plenty of vegetation. I’m halfway through this two-liter canteen. Have you any practical suggestions?”
“There was snow visible at the top of the cliffs from the sea. The temperature here is distinctly above freezing. Some water should flow over the edge, if only occasionally. Let’s examine the base of the cliff more closely; the geological information will be useful in any case.”
Faivonen refrained from comment, and started toward the nearer side of the valley. They had already learned that the valley had been cut in sedimentary rock—a fine sandstone—whose present elevation above sea level implied much about the tectonic forces available on Medea. There was rubble, inevitably, at the foot of the cliffs. Near the bay, this had been deposited so as to give a U-shaped contour to the valley, leading the explorers to assume former glaciation; closer examination had revealed only very fine material which appeared to have been wind-borne. This far from the bay the roundness persisted and was even exaggerated; the cliff, on this side at least, seemed slightly undercut.
Away from the walls, the soil was a fine-grained loess. Closer in, it contained rocks whose size increased with decreasing distance from the cliff. Exposed portions of the rocks were well rounded by some form of erosion.
The soil itself was very dry, in spite of the abundant vegetation. The man had dug up several of the smaller plants, and found that their root systems did not go particularly deep; Beedee had agreed with his conclusion that there must be a fairly frequent supply of surface or near-surface water, since the plants themselves showed nothing unusual in the way of liquid storage capacity.
The diamond, as usual, was right; the soil was detectably moister near the cliff, and part way up the slope they found occasional shallow puddles where the rocks had made dams to hold them. With a good deal of relief, Faivonen took the first long drink he had allowed himself since landing, and refilled his canteen.
He was in a better humor now, willing to go on farther toward the cold. His garment was another bit of Earth technology which had been kept for special uses, a coverall of thin polymer whose thermal conductivity was extremely low, though it was quite transparent to near infra-red radiation—he could appreciate the heat of a fire or of the Castor C twins without having to take off anything to let the light in. With a headpiece like an ancient skiing mask, he would be able to face air temperatures well below the freezing point of water, even with fairly high winds. Dry ice temperatures would be something else, but it should take many days of foot travel to bring him anywhere near that sort of environment.
He chatted good-naturedly with Beedee as they resumed their way up the valley, slanting back toward its level floor where walking was easier. The discussion was almost entirely about the facts they were observing—the diamond was seldom willing to play human to the extent of indulging in gossip or idle chatter—but it included much speculation. What had elevated this entire region of sedimentary rock practically as a unit for more than five hundred meters? Beedee had made several dip measurements where the exposure permitted, and nowhere found more than two degrees. What had cut this canyon, if not a river or glacier? and if it had been a river or glacier, why was there no trace of it now? Valleys without centra
l streams are most unusual except the ones in deserts—and even those usually have empty stream beds where water once flowed.
The two balloons had drifted down the valley—the wind had finally reversed, instead of merely slowing down. Could this be a tidal phenomenon, as Sullivan had guessed as they were approaching the region in the Fahamu? Beedee agreed that it could be, but declined to risk a prediction.
“If this is really a tidal current in the atmosphere, and is being funnelled into this valley from both ends, the width of the valley itself, the height of the walls, and the size of the feed areas are all relevant. At the sea end the supply reservoir is effectively infinite, but we have no observations about the other factors. Guessing that the canyon keeps its present width and height for its whole length is pointless as long as I don’t know the length or the other variables. I can treat it mathematically as an organ pipe of rather unusual cross section with a forced input of one Medean day’s period, but—”
“Forget it.” Faivonen was a perfectly good mathematician as human beings went, but knew the futility of trying to follow Beedee’s brute-digital-force “estimates.”
“You keep your ideas inside, and we’ll check their accuracy as we get farther up the organ pipe. Isn’t that a new plant?”
“Not really. It’s quite common on some of the islands near the equator. It is the first time I have seen it so far north. Of course latitude means much less than longitude here as far as climate is concerned.” The last sentence came after a slight pause, as though it were an afterthought.
“Yes, I keep forgetting. It was very tactful of you to talk as though you forget too, but I don’t really need that kind of coddling. I know what your brain is like.”
“Does it offend you? I have noticed that most human beings seem more at ease when I use such conversational artifacts.”
“Well—no, not really. Just don’t ever let it waste time if we’re in trouble.”
“Of course not.”