by John Barnes
FREEZE
“City. No one calls it Saigon anymore.”
I tried to say “His Most Catholic Majesty the King of Cochin-China does,” but apparently just the thought caused a freeze, or maybe my thought and Helen’s together did.
We played around all night, and we established a few rules. If we said it slowly enough, no freeze happened. If the people who weren’t talking carefully copied the words down and read them aloud, slowly, no freeze happened. If we practiced that for a while, till everyone could say the words, then we stopped freezing on the word itself, but often froze if we tried to use it in a sentence.
It gave us something to talk about, and we went really late that night, especially since none of us had anything really pressing in the next few hours. We developed slightly more theories than we had people—Helen and the Colonel each had two. Mine was that the censor was some kind of crude AI that did some kind of very limited brain monitoring and that as we practiced the word, we got to where we could say it without meaning it—but if we used it in a sentence, the meaning came back and set off the censor. Helen thought that somehow everyone’s brain had been programmed with a virus that acted to censor other people’s words at the auditory center so that as we practiced we gradually stopped censoring each other; her alternative theory was that the censor had some way of determining, after a few freezes, that the conversation was harmless, and then wouldn’t freeze it again until it changed.
All of us elaborated our theories and sniped at each other’s; we did dozens of other small experiments without really adding any more facts to our store of knowledge. It finally got too late for Colonel Sykes, who said the sun was coming up in Mexico, so he departed; Kelly had to go a while later, as she had a first reading on a new play, and finally Terri stretched and yawned— an impressive gesture in Yvonne’s body because that jacket had not been constructed for a woman who moved freely—and left also. “Ever think of having sex with Bogart?” I asked Helen.
“Said the man who would really like to have sex with Ingrid Bergman,” she said, smiling. “I’m pretty tired. Hold the thought for another night?”
“Sure.”
By the time we got up on Sunday, it was past noon. Iphwin’s people had supplied us with the English-language version of the Batavia paper, plus the LA Times in Exile from Auckland. We sat around, read, ate, and talked. Late in the afternoon we went out on one of the Big Sapphire’s many observation decks and watched the big waves roll by, messengers from some storm a thousand miles away. For the whole of Sunday, nothing unusual happened. That was beginning to seem strange.
* * * *
O
n Monday morning we made and ate a quick breakfast in the room’s kitchenette, then got dressed, stepped out the door into the corridors of the Big Sapphire, and headed for the office that we had been assigned. Iphwin was waiting for us there, to my surprise; I couldn’t help wondering how a man who ran so much of the planet’s economy had time to meet with us so often and at such length, without even any interruptions.
“Well,” Iphwin said. “Glad to have you here at last. I’ve decided to take charge of this matter personally, at least for a while. Now, Helen, let’s start with a reconciliation problem. Let me suppose the existence of two documents of equally good provenance, containing statements absolutely contrary to each other. Suppose, say, that one of them specifies that General Grant died at the battle of Cold Harbor, and the other that he was killed while holding Little Round Top at Gettysburg.”
“But he wasn’t,” I said. “He lived to be the president of the United States, for two terms I think, after Johnson?”
“After Johnson?” Helen said, gaping at me. “Where I grew up, Lyndon Johnson was the president of the Republic of Texas, the last one before they voted to go communist, and shot him. And after I came to Enzy, I learned he was the first Secretary of the Treasury for the government in exile. Either way, U.S. Grant couldn’t have been president after him—”
“Andrew Johnson,” I said. “The Vice President who succeeded Abe Lincoln after his assassination in 1865.”
She shook her head slowly. “Hannibal Hamlin succeeded Lincoln,” she said. “In 1863. After the impeachment.”
None of this perturbed Iphwin one bit that I could see; he listened with great interest but didn’t seem to feel any need to intervene.
After a long pause, just to break the silence, I finally asked, “Can I ask what provenance is?”
“Provenance is what you have when you have established that a document actually originated where and when it was supposed to have,” Helen said. “As Iphwin has set up this problem, the documents have equally good provenance, which means the case is equally strong that either one really does date from the American Civil War.”
“Oh,” I said. “I was hoping that I was just misunderstanding one idea somewhere, but it doesn’t seem likely, now.”
The pause dragged on, broken only by Iphwin’s moving between three chairs. When he finally found one he liked, at least for the moment, Iphwin sat tugging at his lower lip and said, “All right, now, imagining you have those two documents, of equally good provenance, what is your next move?”
“Well,” Helen said, “speaking as a historian I guess it’s pretty obvious. I need to find some way to challenge the accuracy or the provenance of at least one of them, preferably both.”
“What would you do, Lyle?”
“I’m not a historian.”
“Answer as the developer of abductive statistics.”
“Hmmm. But if you can do the things Helen just outlined, that would be the thing to do.”
“Assume for the moment that it proves impossible; you cannot show that either document is from anything other than that period, and both appear to be absolutely authentic. Furthermore, in your case, anyway, you have a large body of evidence that tells you that neither of the documents can possibly be right.”
“In abductive math, we don’t. We leave them unreconciled until something turns up to settle the question.”
“All right,” Iphwin said, with seemingly infinite patience, though I felt like a complete idiot who had wandered into a Socratic dialogue while looking for the bathroom. “Suppose now it is absolutely dreadfully important to reconcile the two documents and the known facts.”
“Well, then, at that point I try to identify how many things the documents do agree on. For example, they agree that there really was a General Grant in the Civil War.”
“Why do you want to know that?” Iphwin demanded. For one moment he had an expression of keen interest, before he resumed his usual bland composure.
“Because what I’m finding out are the implicit constraints on the solution. It can’t be one that denies the shared material.”
“All right, go on.”
“Then at the next higher level, you get more abstract points of agreement, like that the Civil War had battles and that General Grant died in one of them. And then you try to figure out whether the two messages are different enough. That is, do they require reconciliation? How much does your world change if they can or can’t be reconciled? For example, we are more likely to have hypotheses in which General Grant died once; till then we know he’s dead and that it’s probably associated with battle during the war.
“Thus the abductive process would say that we suspend conclusions and not apply induction or deduction yet—and would then work on the conditions that allow us to form hypotheses, because if all your hypotheses were just random noise, you’d never find anything that worked in the real world.
“There has to be an abductive process, a process of generating hypotheses more likely to be right than not—and so what you’re doing is taking the shared elements in the evidence and identifying a family of hypotheses—all the possible hypotheses in which Grant served in the Civil War, all of those hypotheses in which he was killed in battle, and so forth—down to where you have to suspend judgment and get more evidence. Abduction isn’t a process of findin
g answers—ordinary induction and deduction do that—but of allocating scarce time to questions. And of course from that standpoint, only having two pieces of evidence, the question is trivial; it gets more complex when some of the hypotheses are about which pieces of evidence are relevant, and how.”
Iphwin nodded. “Now let’s try something bigger. This time you have two documents from the American Civil War, and each contains a list of ten battles. There are only two battles that overlap between the two lists.”
“Well,” Helen said, “the usual thing a historian would do is figure that the two lists were made for different purposes by different people, and what’s important for one may not be important for the other.”
“Suppose each list purports to be a list of the ten battles with the highest death tolls.”
“The two sides may have called them by different names, or they may disagree about what a battle is,” she said. “Like the way that the first three days of the Battle of Wheeling is often called the Battle of Deer Run, and the last four days are counted separately as the Battle of Steubenville.” She seemed to be gaining morale every moment as her specialty was called on; her green eyes were keen with interest and she sat up with her old athletic energy.
“Well,” I said, “an abductive statistician would say that we have a family of hypotheses that the two documents actually contain the same information, or part of the same information, in forms which are somehow mutually translatable; that is, with enough information, the maker of one list could always explain his differences with the maker of the other list. And therefore the genuine unknown is the relation between the two documents. If we add more documents to the pile, they might determine the relationship.”
“And could the relationship be anything as simple as one being true and one being false?” Helen asked. “Lyle, I’m alarmed at what you do for a living.”
“It could very easily be the case. For example, say you go looking for your glasses.”
“Usually when I do that they’re on my forehead.”
“Just so. You have a family of hypotheses: forehead, on the nightstand, folded into the bedclothes, used as a bookmark, and so forth. You draw a hypothesis from that family—which you make as small a family as you can before drawing—and test it. Say it turns out false. Then you add the assumption that any hypothesis which has tested false is still false, and on that grounds you keep testing new ones till you find one that is true—which establishes a relation with all the other hypotheses.”
“But I don’t care about all the places my glasses aren’t, once I find them.”
“Nevertheless you’ve established it.”
“Good enough,” Iphwin said. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“I wish I knew where,” I admitted. “I really don’t understand why you can’t just tell us what’s going on.”
Iphwin nodded. “I hold a family of hypotheses to the effect that telling you, at this time, might imperil discoveries I will need later. It may not, for all I know. But I prefer not to run the risk. And if it does cost us the further discoveries, the consequences may be grave for everyone, and therefore I won’t tell you until I am sure I am not going to screw something up. But I do want you to know that this isn’t my choice.”
Helen sat down and cocked her head to one side, looking at Iphwin as if he had just tried to put one over on her. “All right, then, is there any way you can tell us who or what your adversary is?”
“I wish I could. I have a whole series of guesses based on various experiences and encounters with the forces that oppose me. Many of these experiences point to contradictory conclusions. Others complement each other, of course.”
“I guess what you’re trying to tell me is that the weirdness in the world”—I thought I understood what he was saying but couldn’t believe he was saying it—”everything from the fuel consumption of my jump boat while it was tied up, to the severe discrepancies in our memories, to the behavior of Billie Beard and the way she kept appearing and disappearing—all these things are being caused? I mean, not just like ordinary events, but something is causing them to be contradictory?”
“Or the indeterminacy may be a form of attack on my business,” Iphwin said. “Make the world unpredictable enough and capitalism becomes impossible, and it so happens I am a capitalist. I have a very large array of holdings. A couple of years ago I became aware that many things were happening that looked like coincidences but seemed to be happening too often; then on top of that, the explanations that seemed to suggest themselves rapidly became mutually contradictory. Some very good mathematicians—you would know their names, Lyle, but no, I may not tell them to you—working under a covert contract from me, concluded that the odds of all these things happening were very low, but of course that means little; the odds of any one configuration of the world are low, but the world always ends up in some configuration or other. They also compiled a list of other things that might happen, incidents that might fit a pattern established by the previous incidents, and to my deep surprise those predictions began to come true. In the words of a fellow American, a few generations back, ‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.’
“Furthermore, as soon as I began to take any steps to identify the enemy and to harden myself as a target, the attacks stepped up and became more elaborate and complex. Now, my researches identified you all as possible assistants in this project. I cannot tell you who is attacking me because I don’t really know. In fact, a secret known to only a few people in my company is that I don’t know anything from before when I was about twenty—as far as I can determine, I have complete amnesia for my childhood and adolescent years, and I seem to have arrived from nowhere— there are no records of me before that time, and yet one day there I was in Edinburgh, able to read, write, calculate, and so forth, with my identity papers in one front pocket—I also knew how to use and present them—and an enormous wad of cash in the other. It is entirely possible that all this originates from some enemy that I don’t know about because they have lain low for fifteen or twenty years.”
“Since you’re an expat who does business in the Reichs,” Helen pointed out, “one obvious possibility is that the American Resistance may have targeted you.”
“You can dismiss that possibility. I am not at all concerned that what remains of the American Resistance might be after me, because I am a primary financier for the American Resistance, I am in contact with it, and I coordinate my activities with it. You are high enough placed in the company so that you might as well know this right off; every so often ConTech is doing something inexplicable because we’re supporting the illegal American organizations around the world.”
“Is that something you should be telling brand-new employees?” I asked.
“You have no idea how long we’ve been watching you, or how much we know about you. You wouldn’t have been hired if I couldn’t be perfectly sure it was safe to tell you this. Anyway, my point is this: as you investigate this problem for me, don’t let yourself get too suspicious about the activities of American Resistance cells and fronts all around my company. They aren’t the ones causing the trouble. I don’t want you to waste time investigating them, and I really don’t want you to blow any of their various covers.”
“You can depend on us,” Helen said, firmly, and I found I was nodding my head vigorously, liking ConTech and Iphwin a great deal more than I had before.
“You’ll pardon my pointing out that I know that, and I should know it—I’ve spent enough to make sure I knew it,” Iphwin said. “Now, the way that I became interested in you was that some of our espionage and intelligence teams developed a very real possibility that we could at least get a rough list of who the adversary was after—that is, we didn’t know who the bad guys were except at the local, low-ranking flunky level, but we did know who they seemed to be out to get. And as it happened, Billie Beard showed up pretty often wherever they were planning to make trouble—and she was a
ll over Auckland last month, but especially hanging around Whitman College. The two of you had already been identified as potential recruits for ConTech, with interesting specialties, and since that was just the category of people she seemed to have an ugly tendency to kill, if she got to them first, we moved as quickly as we discreetly could to get you under our umbrella. The other thing, which interests me very much this morning, is that before being sent after you, she was pulled off a job in Mexico City, where she had been shadowing Jesús Picardin.”
“Who’s that?” I asked. “The name sounds familiar.”
“It should. Picardin is the boss for Esmé Sanderson, who used to be second in command for Colonel Roger Sykes of the Third Free American Regiment. The one that you know in your talk group as ‘the Colonel.’ When Terri Teal got word of your arrest, she called Sykes, who called Sanderson, who talked to Picardin—and he’s the one that dug out the huge file on Beard and dispatched it to Saigon. If anyone did, he’s the one who got you out of jail.”