Finity

by John Barnes

  The primary problem with all of this was that I saw absolutely no way in which any of this could be relevant to what ConTech did. The secondary problem that occurred to me then was that I also had no idea what ConTech did, except that I had a strong feeling that whatever it was, it wasn’t anything for which abduction was relevant.

  Iphwin scanned the solutions for a moment, asked a couple of technical questions, then said, “Well, there you have it. These are all what we’d want you to have come up with. It looks to me like your abductive methods work, and that’s why I need you.”

  “Excuse me, er, Iphwin, but that’s just what I don’t understand. Exactly why is it you need me?”

  “Why, to solve a large number of abductive problems for ConTech in general and for me in particular, of course.”

  “I guess I was really asking what kind of abductive problems you needed to have solved.”

  “And I think I did a very neat job of evading the question.” Now he was standing at the window, looking south across the sea, toward Surabaya just over the horizon. “I’ve been extraordinarily impressed with your work, and more importantly, so have my engineers and research teams. Once you’re hired and have been on board for a while, perhaps we’ll all have a better picture of what you’ve been hired for. If you think about it, a company that needs problems in abduction solved is a company that isn’t coming up with the ideas that it needs.

  “I can’t really tell you what it is that we need to have thought of. If I could tell you, we’d already know. In a little while—a few minutes, an hour, a day, a year—I’ll tell you some things that clarify what you will be working on. Till then, well, I won’t, and you’ll have to make up your own mind whether it is because I wouldn’t or couldn’t—or just didn’t.” Now he flopped into a couch and scratched his leg fiercely. “I’m afraid I’ll never be really comfortable in my body. I think it’s so remarkable of you to be comfortable in your mind.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say about that, but before the silence got awkward, the small elevator door opened, and the same security man came in. “We have an identification on that note, sir. The handwriting matches Billie Beard.”

  “Damn,” Iphwin said, making a face. “We should have known. It sounds like she’s operating in New Zealand now.”

  “One way or another, even if she isn’t there physically.”

  “May I ask—” I began.

  Iphwin nodded. “You may, and we can give you a partial answer. As you probably know, I’m a subject of the British Reich. Nominally my hometown is Edinburgh. And I’m an American expat. I know that very nearly all other American expats find that combination strange, since so many of them won’t even think of living in the Reichs, but that’s the way it goes—I have my reasons. My biggest single operation is right here in the Big Sapphire, here in the Dutch East Indies, and the Dutch Reich is consequently the biggest thorn in my side. I do my best to be the biggest thorn in theirs. They spy on me, I spy on them. They send their Gestapo into my offices and shops all the time, and I sue them constantly. Sort of an ugly tension of power, because frankly they couldn’t run my operations without me but they could easily take them away—which would bankrupt both me and Surabaya District, for which I am the tax base.

  “Now, some of the Dutchmen are pretty reasonable about all that, and they understand that it’s just business and politics in their usual forms, and they play the game to win but they don’t make it personal. Billie Beard, on the other hand, is a white-sheet American from way back, like her parents and her parents’ parents, and she hates expats in general and me in particular, and unfortunately she has found the perfect job for her miserable self—she works for the Dutch Gestapo and her beat is hassling ConTech. The only good thing to say for this is that if you let us use this as evidence, we can probably get an injunction to keep her out of New Zealand, and since our plan is to base you out of our Auckland offices, that should mean this is about the last you’ll hear of her. How the hell she found out you were in line to be employed at ConTech, I can’t begin to guess. You didn’t tell anyone, did you?”

  “My boss and my girlfriend. Neither of them would blab it around much. Maybe she just picked it up by sheer luck, overheard it or something.” I was catching some of the feel of Iphwin’s urgency; he seemed genuinely afraid, angry, and hassled by the whole business. I suppose that was the moment when I realized that my sympathies were all with Iphwin—I hated white-sheeters, always have, always will. If they really think Hitler’s conquest, and Goebbels’s proconsulate, were the best things that ever happened to America, why don’t they move back? Anyway, if Billie Beard was a fair sampling of what Iphwin’s opponents were—an American expat working for the Gestapo, for the love of god—then I was positively delighted to be on his side. “I am sorry if it leaked from my side, but at least now that I know where that note came from, I’m not going to worry about it much anymore. Maybe she just found out by sheer luck.”

  “When it comes to psychotic Nazi bitches like Billie, I don’t believe in luck,” Iphwin said. “And we should worry about that note, a little bit, anyway. If you’ve come to her attention I don’t know how far she may go.” He turned to his security man, who had been standing there quietly during our whole conversation. “Mort, how fast can we get a shadow on Lyle, here? He’s going back to Surabaya in a couple of hours, and then—back to Auckland?”

  I shook my head. “Uh, my girlfriend and I were going to celebrate, or whatever reaction was appropriate, this weekend in Saigon. I was going to jump there to meet her.”

  “That’s great, Dr. Peripart,” Mort said. “If Beard is after you, that’ll help shake her for a while. I don’t have an op I can put on it right now, Mr. Iphwin, but, Dr. Peripart, I can have a team of bodyguards meet you in Saigon, and if you’re not going back to Auckland till Sunday, then I should have no problem getting you covered from then on. I think we ought to be okay, but let me give you a crisis code to hit in case anything happens between now and your takeoff.” He gave me a little plastic chip; if I stuck it into the data import slot in any phone, it would call his office and get help dispatched to that location.

  “Probably I’m being paranoid,” Iphwin said, “but you can learn a lot from paranoids. Such as how to behave when you’ve got way too many enemies, and you’re very important to them and there can easily be more of them around, ready to strike anytime. I feel I really have to ask you—do you still want to sign on?”

  “More than ever,” I said.

  I was amazed at how much I meant it. Maybe it was that I liked Iphwin’s choice of enemies, or maybe the chance to work on such an interesting class of problems. Perhaps it was only my fear of always wondering what might have happened.

  “Good, then,” Iphwin said. He turned to Mort and said, “Get security following Lyle just as soon as you can, and keep it on him until you’re dead certain he’s no longer threatened.”

  “Yes, sir.” Mort turned and left through the small elevator again.

  “Now,” Iphwin said, “as you must have guessed, my sources and research were good enough so that I knew already that you would produce the satisfactory results we wanted. The whole purpose of this meeting was mostly to determine that we could stand each other’s company, because at first you’ll be seeing me almost daily, and my habit of flitting around the room drives some people crazy, whereas my habit of flitting around a subject drives almost all people crazy. The bottom line is, you’re hired, Lyle, and you may start on Tuesday so that you can enjoy your weekend as planned without worrying about having to be back early. After a few weeks here, Monday morning through Saturday noon, we won’t need so much constant contact, and we’ll set you up in our Auckland offices. Meanwhile, I own nine hotels in Surabaya, so I imagine we can find a decent room for you. I suppose you could bargain for salary and benefits, but it will go faster if you just accept our offer.” He handed me a piece of paper. “We made sure it was a far better package than Whitman College gave you.”


  I looked down, saw a preposterous number, looked again to confirm it was a starting salary. “That will work fine,” I said. Vac had just begun, and Utterword had told me that since my two astronomy classes weren’t particularly popular and he could always get someone else to teach freshman physics, I wouldn’t need to give the customary notice if I got the job.

  Iphwin had apparently jumped across the room while I had been thinking. “I do have just a few more questions for you if you don’t mind, but they have no relevance to whether or not you get the job. You might think of them as the first questions of your job.”

  “Fire away,” I said, grinning now, as it sank in that I had just accepted a job for two and a half times my present salary and a better benefits package. I would finally have enough to be able to go shopping for a larger house, something with room for kids and two clutter-equipped adults, and therefore be in a position to propose to Helen. I could propose to her within a few hours ... even this evening—

  “Well, first of all, are you planning to marry Helen Perdita?”

  I started. “I was just thinking that. Yes, I had already decided that if I were offered the position, I would certainly think about proposing to Helen. I would think about it strongly, and probably decide to go ahead. May I ask why you want to know?”

  “Dr. Perdita is also on our list of prospective employees,” Iphwin explained. “Second question: when was the last time that you talked by phone with anyone living in the American Reich?”

  He might just as well have spoken to me in Chinese; I understood every word, I could have diagrammed the sentence, and I didn’t have the foggiest idea of what it might mean. I also felt a horrible, overpowering fear of asking for the question to be repeated, as if the question itself were so frightening that I could not risk hearing it again.

  I sat staring, not sure what to do, until Iphwin said, “I don’t want an answer to that question.”

  Instantly, I felt better and peculiarly relieved. “I don’t understand why or how I drew a blank like that.”

  Iphwin shrugged; he appeared to care as little as if I had sneezed, or noticed that my shoe was untied. “It happens. Next question, then: what picture have you most recently seen of events in the former United States?”

  “Oh, that’s easy, the surrender anniversary events, in 2046. Lots of footage of people in the old uniforms standing around on battlefields, shots of ruins, people saluting the swastika and stripes, the big ceremony at the Surrender Arch in St. Louis, that kind of thing. Funny to realize how long ago that was, though— sixteen years. I can’t think of a thing since then.”

  “Good. How many pictures do you remember seeing during the 2050s?”

  “Not many, if any.”

  “Good. And anything very recently?”

  “Nothing.”

  “All right, then. Name a few important Americans in your field who are still living.”

  Once again I had the terrifying feeling that he had ceased to speak my language, or more likely that I had ceased to understand it; I could understand every word, parse the sentence with ease, and yet it meant nothing to me, less than any cat meowing or wind rustling in a tree. I couldn’t ask him to repeat or clarify, I couldn’t focus on what he had said, and I couldn’t even begin to comprehend what answer I might be able to give.

  After a very long time, Iphwin said, “I release you from that question, as well. You don’t have to answer it.”

  I slumped back into the chair, breathing hard. I was drenched in sweat. “Why does that happen?” I asked.

  “That’s the problem you start working on next Tuesday,” Iphwin said. “And your possible proposal to Helen Peripart is not part of the issue, but perhaps you should start working on that also. Meanwhile, don’t worry and enjoy your weekend.”

  “I can’t even really remember what the questions were.”

  “When you start studying on Tuesday, we’ll make sure you have a recording system in the room so that you have a way to get back to them. Now let me ask you just one technical question, Lyle. But I want you to try to explain it to me in English, rather than in math, and I know that means you’ll be waving your hands but do the best you can. What does your comprehensibility theorem—the one you published last year—imply for our communication with extraterrestrials?”

  I sat and stared at him for a long time, not having any problem understanding the question, but startled by how much of an answer was leaping into my mind. “I had never thought that it might have anything to do with that problem,” I said. “You aren’t telling me—you can’t possibly mean that ConTech truly is having problems communicating with a group of extraterrestrials? They haven’t already been found?”

  “Alas, no.” Iphwin chuckled. “And I have to say, I’ve never seen one of my technical experts look more surprised. Although”—the corners of his mouth curled in pure mischief—”if they had been found, and somehow or other ConTech was the organization that had made the contact, the exact thing that we would be doing is to recruit you secretly under some pretext or other, and to get you working on some associated problems, until we could surround you with enough security so that we could safely let you in on it. Because, as you might guess, my technical staff is convinced that the comprehensibility theorem has a lot to do with this problem. All the same, it is really just a hypothetical problem. Now what can you come up with?”

  “Well.” I scratched my head. “Am I to assume that you understand the comprehensibility theorem?”

  “Include your layman’s-terms explanation in your answer, and stop stalling, Lyle. I really do think you probably have an answer and you’re just reluctant to risk giving it to me.” He was still smiling but it was slightly less friendly than it had been, as if he were not sure whether I was stalling him deliberately or merely inadvertently wasting his time.

  I had no idea why I had so suddenly and completely become resistant to answering, but I had. With a shrug, since the impulse made no sense, I plunged into my answer, and said, “Well, yeah, as soon as you point out that it’s a possible application, all of a sudden I see the whole problem of talking to extraterrestrials in terms of the comprehensibility theorem. Isn’t that odd? But it’s simple: if you use the statistics of structural relations—the business about the topologies of priority—Lemma Four Dot Two— then our ability to communicate with them would depend on the similarity of what they were saying to things that we had said to each other in the past, the similarity of form between their language structures and ours, and the similarity of the differences and distinctions that the grammars of the two languages constructed. If their way of talking was a matrix presented by smells, we might not be able to talk to them at all, or only be able to discuss simple statements about the physical universe. If, on the other hand, they make the noun-verb distinction in a linear stream of signs, and spend substantial amounts of their time talking about sex, violence, and prestige, well, then, we’d be home free, because that’s morphologically so much like our own speech.

  “The theorem itself deals with what happens when a person who is working with an abstract system of ideas happens to arrive at a solution which is meaningful in the real world but has never been thought of before, and whether that person will be able to see it as anything other than a purely abstract result. It has all sorts of things to do with why and how the quantum physicists achieved what they did and failed in other things, or with the old problem of continental drift, so that in effect when a message is purely an abstraction from an existing system that we think corresponds to the truth, then our comprehension of its significance depends mainly on its similarity to other statements from the same system. Like the example I gave, the way you could analyze Great Expectations so that the lengths of paragraphs might be set up to be expressions of the Pythagorean theorem, and furthermore since the problem of understanding—so common in that novel—can be expressed as orthogonality, there’s a neat harmonization. But readers could read it for generations without getting any such me
ssage, and Dickens surely didn’t put it in there for that. The ability to find it doesn’t mean it was put there, nor does it even mean that finding it has to do with comprehending.

  “Originally I came up with the theorem to try to get a handle on the possibility that every so often people think of things that are true, but which they don’t understand. It happens in the high end of physics, in music, sometimes in literature. The theoretical guys have been alert to that possibility ever since the Copenhagen Interpretation and all that stuff 140 years ago; the observational and experimental group tends not to think it applies to them, but very often it matters even more in their case because so many of the great ideas come from the great failed experiments. They thought they had one little ad hoc explanation or one little anomaly, and all of a sudden the tiny little idea opens doors and doors and doors as it proliferates through the whole space of ideas.