"Yes. And all kinds of other things too," Tanya answered. "It beats having to ship lots of materials all the way from here."
Luthis traced a finger along one of the exciter power cables, then turned to Vicki. "Now I think I'm beginning to see why they were in such a hurry to get that power system there that Landen designed."
"You mean the Agni?"
"Yes. The generating plant to power something like this is already there. Did they really anticipate it that far back?"
"But of course," Vicki said loyally. But in fact, she was only just appreciating it herself.
* * *
That evening, Vicki sat alone in her room in the quarters the outbound personnel had been assigned while waiting to be taken up to the Aztec. It felt depressingly like the unit she had vacated on Dione. Even with Lan and Sariena working most of the time in other parts of Kronia, their visits had meant more than she'd realized. And after the Varuna mission departed, the steadily lengthening signal delay eventually made meaningful interaction with them electronically impossible too. Robin had become progressively more withdrawn before finally joining the Security Arm, and now he had been shipped off with the reconnaissance survey sent to Jupiter—which perhaps would be best for him. Leo Cavan still stayed in touch and tried to be reassuring, telling her that it was only to be expected that young people would go through a troubled time when the world they had thought they would grow up to was snatched away from them, and in the long run he was confident that Robin would be fine. Vicki was just a mother, being a mother. . . . But the way she saw it too, he was just Cavan being Cavan.
And so she had immersed herself in her work with Emil Farzhin's group and his account of how Earth and Mars had influenced each other's histories in recent times. In conjunction with other work that had been going on, it was shedding new light on the puzzle of how living forms managed to alter so abruptly in conditions of stress and change. This was the area that Luthis specialized in and what he and Vicki were going back to Earth to investigate further.
The principal mechanism for introducing new genetic information into a species and spreading it rapidly through an initial breeding group, they now suspected, was not the sexual mixing of genes and subsequent agonizingly slow propagation of any benefits through a population. Even before Athena, this had been recognized as a major problem with the orthodox ideas on evolution, but nobody had been able to suggest anything better. Yet a far more effective process had been there all the time, capable of manifesting its effects immediately among adults already at a procreative age, and capable of appearing almost literally overnight: infection. But it had been misidentified through being noticed only when the mechanism produced harmful results instead.
The room's wall screen, which had been showing a dance troupe with the sound turned down—low-g choreography could be quite captivating—switched to a head and shoulders view of Claud Valcroix talking. The caption aztec mission below interrupted Vicki's brooding. "House. Sound up," she instructed in a slightly raised voice.
The Pragmatists were making a bid for greater influence in the Congress by arguing that since the Directorates embodied concentrations of expertise and knowledge in certain vital areas, then by the Kronians' own system of values they represented the interests of entrenched "wealth," thus violating the principles of democracy and fairness. Therefore the Pragmatists, who claimed to speak for typically unrepresented elements of the population, should be involved in their decision-making processes too. It was an obvious attempt to gain greater access to policymaking without having the votes needed for seats in the Assembly, which constituted the democratically elected arm of the Congressional system. Officers of the Directorates were appointed from within, much in the way that senators had been placed by their state legislatures under the original American system. It was an ingenious ploy, Cavan had conceded when he and Vicki spoke a day or two previously. But he couldn't see Congress buying it.
This time, however, Valcroix was criticizing the decision to send the lithoforming technology to Earth. " . . . as we saw in the demonstration given at Foundation this morning. But where are the shelters for the people who are here, at Kronia? I ask you all, does it make sense to be sending this capability for cutting and constructing huge works in rock all the way to Earth, where we have just two ships? They tell us, 'Yes, but Kronia may become uninhabitable. We have to be prepared.' I say they have everything backward. Our population, our homes, our industries, and our future—for as far as it's possible to see it at the present time—are here! Not on the ruins of a distant cosmic battlefield that for all we know contains no other human life and will not be able to for a long time to come . . ."
"House, off," Vicki told the domestic manager wearily. She sat back in her chair and stared up at the cream-painted metal ceiling, the lamp, the extractor-fan grille. Just the thought of getting away from all of it . . .
In her mind, she was soaring out and away, back to a sphere of clouds, earth, and water, close to the warmth and light of the Sun. Even if the clouds were thick and murky, the earth shuddering, and the water thrown into convulsions, it meant being able to breathe without helmets or containment; to see a wind-sculpted sky, and life, however crude, clawing its way up out of the soil. To live from day to day only for her work, leaving politics and jealousies far behind. She thought about Lan, Sariena, Charlie Hu, and Gallian—all of them out there already, and the others who would be going with her on the Aztec. . . .
Strange though the word seemed in the circumstances, yes, it would be good to go home.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Midway through the morning two days after the probe's first discovery of the survivors, the Scout lurched its way along the descending line of the ridge, which provided a relatively unobstructed route down from the plateau. With Agni online and behaving, Keene had been free of any pressing duty commitment at the time, and Gallian, up in the Varuna, had named him as his first choice for inclusion in the party that would make contact when Zeigler reported the situation and requested instructions.
Because of the difficulty Kronians had acclimatizing so early in the mission, the five others in the Scout were also all Terran-born. Ivor, an SA vehicle mechanic and electrical technician was driving. Sitting up front beside him was Jorff, also from the SA, a lieutenant standing in for Kelm. Keene was behind, next to a control panel for various instruments, communications systems, and outside cameras, with Naarmegen sitting opposite, his back to the cabin wall. The two females of the group were in the rear seat: Maria Sanchez, a medic, and Beth, Serengeti base's current nearest thing to a resident psychologist, since she had once majored in psychiatric disorders at the University of California, Irvine. There were no further pictures of the survivors coming in from the probe at the moment to occupy them. Its presence had apparently caused consternation at the settlement, and Gallian had ordered it to be pulled back. Just at the moment, it was hovering a short distance ahead of the Scout, reconnoitering the way. So Naarmegen and Keene were back on the subject of where the genetic codes that directed the formation and function of all living things had come from.
"I talked a lot with Sariena too on the voyage out," Naarmegen said above the growl of the Scout's diesel—it used an independent electric motor on each wheel but was dual-equipped, being able to run them from either a pure electrical storage system or a motor-generator. One of the plans for Serengeti was to set up a fractionation tower to process fuel, oils, and other products from the readily accessible hydrocarbons that Athena had deposited over wide areas. "I was skeptical when I first moved out there. But I think the Kronians have convinced me." It was interesting, Keene noted, that now back on Earth, Naarmegen was already referring to Kronians in the third person.
"That there has to be some kind of intelligence behind it all?" Beth said, leaning forward behind Keene.
Naarmegen glanced back at her. "Right. They've even devised objective ways of recognizing it." He looked at Keene again. "Did Sariena tell you about that?"
<
br /> "I haven't really talked to her that much," Keene confessed. "Too wrapped up in nuclear plasmas and induction physics for most of the time." But he was interested. "Of recognizing what? Do you mean the results of intelligence at work?"
Naarmegen nodded, hanging onto a handrail. "Exactly."
"Objective ways," Keene repeated.
"Yes."
"Okay, so how would I recognize it?"
Naarmegen made a gesture in the air that could have meant anything. "When you or I see something that's been organized the way it is for a purpose—like the parts of a machine, or the codes in one of those processors behind you—we don't have any difficulty distinguishing it from the results of pure, unguided, physical processes. So how do we do it? There's obviously something we latch onto. Is it possible to identify what it is, even define some rules for measuring it—and then apply them to the natural world and see how it scores?"
Which would certainly be the way to go about it, Keene could see—if it could be made to work. "Is that what the Kronians have done?"
"Yes."
"How?" Maria asked, beside Beth.
"Okay, let's take an example." Naarmegen thought for a moment. "Did you ever play that game they used to have, where you made words out of letter tiles and got double and treble scores on the good places? What was it called . . . ?"
"Scrabble?" Keene said.
"Yes, that was it. So suppose you found a jumble of tiles on the floor that said absolutely nothing at all. You'd have no reason to think they'd been arranged, right? If you had to guess, you'd say they got spilled and just fell that way."
"All right," Maria agreed.
"But now imagine you come across, let's say, a hundred tiles all lined up, and they spell out a sentence from a book that you know. You wouldn't hesitate to say that someone arranged it. It's kind of obvious." Naarmegen waved his free hand in the air. "But why is it obvious? What's different that you've picked out? Can you put your finger on it?"
There was a short pause. "It's too improbable," Beth offered finally. "More complex."
Naarmegen's mouth split into a toothy grin behind his beard, and he nodded as if he had been expecting that answer. "Complex, yes," he agreed. "But more complex? No. Every arrangement of a hundred tiles is as improbable as any other."
"True," Keene agreed.
"The second one—the sentence—contains more information," Beth tried.
"Does it? But you'd need just as much information to construct any of the other sequences too. In fact, if they were random, you'd probably need more. You'd have to specify every letter. There's no way to compress a random string."
Beth shook her head. "No, that wasn't what I meant. I meant it conveys information in a different sense . . . in a language. It carries meaning."
"Meaning to whom?"
"To me—anyone who speaks English."
"What if someone doesn't speak English? It wouldn't mean anything to them."
Beth thought about it. "It doesn't matter. The meaning is still there. It's still encoded in a specific way. Not knowing how to decode it is a separate issue."
Naarmegen nodded slowly, giving all the others time to digest that. "Yes, you've hit it," he said finally. "The key word is encode. It encodes—or specifies—meaning according to an independent system of rules whose purpose goes beyond simply specifying a sequence. The Kronians call that property 'specificity.' "
"But you could still get some of that in the first example—the random one," Maria pointed out. "English-language words, I mean. Small ones."
"You mean like 'it,' or 'so,' or 'and'?" Naarmegen said.
"Yes,"
"Why did you say they had to be small?"
"Well . . ." Maria shrugged. "They don't have to be, I suppose. But you wouldn't expect long ones."
"Too improbable?"
"Yes, I'd say so. Wouldn't you agree?"
Naarmagen made his gnomish grin again and looked back at her. "But we already said that any other string would be just as improbable anyway."
Maria waved a hand helplessly. "I know what I mean. I'm just not sure how to say it."
"You have to have both," Naarmegen supplied. "The small strings that happen to be English are specific, yes, but not complex enough to rule out chance. When you see a highly complex arrangement that's also highly specific in some form of language, that's when you conclude it was put together that way by an intelligence that understood the language and did it for a reason. So there's your answer."
Keene had been following with interest. It explained a lot of things about the Kronian world view. "And you say they've been able to define these properties rigorously? And quantify them?" he queried. "They've measured them in things like genetic codes and protein sequences?"
"Right," Naarmegen affirmed.
"And what did they find?"
"About as conclusive as you could get. They loaded all the numbers to be biased in the direction of caution—in other words, more likely to miss a signature of intelligence when it was really there and write it off as chance, than to misread a false indication of one where there wasn't any."
"Okay."
"When the complexity becomes too vast and the specificity too tight, you can eliminate chance as the cause. So where's the cutoff? Philosophers typically used to take an improbability of fifty orders of magnitude as a universal bound beyond which chance processes could be eliminated as the explanation. The Kronians applied a boundary—get this, Lan—of a hundred and fifty orders of magnitude! And they find organization that exceeds it." Naarmegen smiled expectantly. Keene whistled and looked away for a few seconds to digest the information.
In the front passenger seat, Jorff took an incoming call from Serengeti to check the calibration of the navigation grid laid down by satellites deployed from the Varuna. Beside him, Ivor, who had been listening, glanced back over his shoulder as he drove. "You don't need scientific criteria and numbers," he told the others. "It's all there in the Bible, and now it's happened again. The old world became corrupt and abandoned God, and set up its own gods. So God destroyed it, and now He's creating a new world."
Naarmegen glanced at Keene. Keene shrugged and shook his head to say that the ball was Naarmegen's. Naarmegen paused to choose his words before answering. "You could be right, Ivor. For now, we're just concerned with detecting the work of an intelligence. Whether it's the god of any religion or not, or what its reasons are is another matter. Science can't answer that."
"It's all in the Bible," Ivor said again.
Jorff's voice came from up front. "Check three-seven-five and two-oh-nine. We're coming down from the ridge entering a canyon to exit the plateau complex. It's rough going but passable." The Scout had independent swivel-axles for all of its six balloon-tired wheels, and could practically climb a mountain. The Kronians had a lot of experience in designing vehicles for rugged terrains.
"What's your updated ETA?" the operator at Serengeti asked from Jorff's panel.
"Oh . . . maybe a couple of hours, judging by what we're seeing from the probe. There's a scarp of steep, muddy gullies with what look like steam vents that we may decide to go around."
"Is Landen Keene there?" another voice asked. It sounded like Gallian's.
Jorff looked back from his seat. "Gallian is on the circuit, from up in the ship, Dr. Keene. He wants a word with you. You can take it on the panel back there."
Keene turned to activate the panel's screen; Gallian's features appeared on it moments later. They had talked before the Scout departed, when Keene had agreed to be the mission's impromptu diplomat. But with Gallian's ebullient way of going about everything, no plan ever stayed set for too long without addendums and afterthoughts.
"Ah, Lan! How is it to be home?" he inquired.
"I've had smoother rides in my time. This isn't exactly a Texas interstate. What's up?"
"We've been going over the pictures that came up. Those people appear extremely primitive, and they might still be traumatized or otherwise
disturbed. Don't take chances. Give all your personnel sidearms. The two SA troopers are authorized to carry rifles. Just as a precaution, eh?"
Only Kronians would have deliberated over the question. It had never crossed Keene's mind not to. "Okay," he replied simply.
"And Charlie's peeved because he can't be in on it too. He says you could have saved some of the interesting stuff." Charlie Hu was still up on the ship, analyzing planet-wide geological data and hadn't managed to make it down to the surface yet.
"Tell him I'm sure there'll be plenty more in store to keep him happy," Keene said.
"Well then . . . good luck. That's really all I wanted to say, I suppose."
"We'll just have to see how it goes. There isn't any set game plan."
"I'm sure you'll improvise appropriately. We'll just watch from the wings and leave you to it unless you call us in. We have every confidence in you and your team."
Typical Gallian. Keene smiled inwardly. "Thanks," he acknowledged.
Gallian cleared down.
"How are the seismic readings?" Jorff inquired in front, to the Serengeti operator. Steady earthquake and volcanic activity had been detected in the regions to the east, beyond the central range of shattered rocky desolation known as the "Spine," ever since the first probes from the Varuna landed. Some of the lava lakes there were still molten in the centers.
"Holding steady. No signs of anything unusual building up."
"Uh-huh."
* * *
It took the Scout several hours to negotiate a path southward and down through the hilly region, avoiding several difficult patches and following a course roughly parallel to the river. Twice, it was forced to back up and find another route: first, from the top of steep slopes of mud and precarious rock falls that were revealed as more treacherous close up than they had seemed from the probe preview; and again by impassable fissures venting sulfur gases. But finally it emerged onto a boulder-strewn slope above the settlement, with the probe stationed high up and circling at an unobtrusive distance, watching through telescopic lenses. The Scout stopped a few hundred yards above the rude collection of huts and shelters, where smoke was rising from a cooking fire. Figures came out and stared. Some went back inside. After a short delay, a small group came out and approached warily.
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