Souls in the Great Machine

by Sean McMullen

  CODING As Darien's message was traveling east, another message began its beam flash journey southwest at the market town of Canowindra in the Central Confederation Initially it was just a table of figures, a record of network traffic at the Canowindra terminal tower. A clerk used a code book to encrypt the figures, then handed the slate to the transmission supervisor, who took it to the beam flash gallery at the tower's summit. Here he checked the encryption, broke it into ten packets of data, calculated a checksum for each packet, then gave the slate to the relay.

  The relay looked through a large telescope pointing east to the Wirdnya repeater tower, sixty miles away. He pressed a key, two long flashes, two short. A concave mirror on the roof focused sunlight through a series of lenses to the shutters attached to the key. The flashing beam of light traveled over the town's markets, the fortified wails, a scatter of vegetable gardens, then rolling hills covered in dusky, olive-green eucalypt forests to the 540-foot Wirdnya tower.

  Wirrinya's receptor noted the POLL signal from Canowindra and told the eastward relay to flash the READY code. Canowindra's relay noted the faint, sharp flashing in the blue haze on the horizon, and only now began to key the encrypted table of figures into flashes of light. Hundreds of miles to the south Lemorel Milderellen sat in the cloisters of Rochester University with John Glasken. Her face was pale, and she was anxiously holding his strong, broad hands.

  If Lemorel had lived two thousand years earlier she would have been a doctoral student in computer science, but in the year of Greatwinter's Waning 1699 her thesis was in observational philosophy. Its subject was the shape and movement of the bands of alluring nothingness known as Sweeps of the Call. The movements were those timed and reported by the network of beam flash towers.

  "The beam flash traffic table is due to be sent about now," she said in a soft, apologetic voice. "ff the figures deviate from the mean, then I must see the Dragon Lady herself."

  "So why are you afraid?" Glasken said without concern. "The Highliber's lackey and her cleaner see her every day." "But not for the reasons that may bring me to petition her. I'm just a scholar doing research, yet my research is taking me into international politics. I hate it! I wish that I had your drive and confidence, Johnny. It's you who should be seeing her."

  "Lem, you need to go through trials like I have or you'll never develop confidence. Come, let me start you on your way." It seemed to Lemorel that he always said the wise and right thing, and she felt stronger just being with him. They stood up, and he began to walk her through the cloisters. Glasken cut an impressive figure, tall, strong, and dressed in the height of fashion with blue tunic, possum-fur codpiece, and black academic cloak. He was a desirable accessory for any girl, and she could hardly believe her luck to have him.

  I'll miss your graduation revel," she said sadly. "I'm sorry. I must begin waiting at ten o'clock, and Highliber Zarvora may keep me waiting until evening. Where will you go?"

  "Alas, Lem, my friends are taking me to some secret place. I can say nothing for I know nothing." "I'm glad to have at least attended your graduation ceremony. So you have been John Glasken, Bachelor of Chemistric, for an hour. How does it feel?"

  "Not nearly as good as it does to be with you." They kissed long and gently; then she strode off through the University gardens, past lattices entangled with flowering honeysuckle and jasmine, a small figure in the new black uniform of Libris. A blue band on her upper sleeve showed her acting promotion confirmed.

  From the Wirfinya repeater the message was sent fifty-two miles southeast to the Tallimba repeater. Below the signal's path the rolling hills flattened into plains, and the trees of the eucalypt forests became more sparse as the country turned into dry, scrubby grassland. Another fifty-three-mile stretch took the twinkling flashes across increasingly settled and irrigated land to the great beam flash center at Griffith.

  The network of communication towers was vital to the prosperity of the Central Confederation. Its thirty-five nations were scattered over an immense, parched area of the continent, so that anything which reduced the need to travel was a blessing. Why move cattle, gold, dried fruit, or rice between distant centers when debit and credit could be juggled on beams of light? Further, driving herds of cattle was made very difficult by the Call. Its enigmatic beckoning swept across the land at semiregular intervals, luring both herded and herders away. Better to move goods and livestock only when it was unavoidable.

  The beam flash towers also helped predict the Call. When a relay stopped sending a regular polling flash, the neighboring tower's receptor knew that a Call was approaching. A bell was tolled, and all within earshot would fasten their Call shackles.

  Eight major beam flash lines converged at the gallery of the Griffith tower. There was a duty supervisor for each line, and the Canowindra line's supervisor studied the encrypted message on the receptor's slate as he copied it down.

  "The checksums match the message packets for a change," he remarked with mock surprise.

  "Be fair, they get most of 'em right," the receptor replied. "The error rate on the Canowindra line is still four times the average for Confederation towers. There should be an investigation. Backsides should be kicked."

  "So? Will it happen?"

  "Wait for my annual report. There'll be a big shakeout." He noted the message in his logbook, then passed the slate to the Rochester line's relay. From Griffith the signal went almost due south, over the yellow tiled roofs of the prosperous city, over flat pasture and tethered flocks tended by tethered shepherds to the river that marked the border with a Southmoor emirate. It crossed grassy plains dotted with the tents, sheep, donkeys, and camels of Southmoor nomads until reaching a tiny, isolated Rochestrian enclave.

  The Darlington repeater was fifty-one miles from Griffith, on a plot of land about a mile square. The Southmoors were an Islamic sect that proscribed-among other things--the use of beam flash equipment. A beam flash signal could cross the Sweep of a Call without being affected, and because the Call was suspected to come from God, that was possibly blasphemy. The Emir of Cowra nonetheless leased a little plot of his territory to Rochester for a beam flash repeater tower at Darlington, preferring the Mayor's gold to a clear conscience.

  At Darlington the receptor wrote down the message on his slate--but decoded it in his head as he worked. Smiling, he noted the correct checksums, then unrolled a table of his own and checked the figures. He shook his head. Definitely not for the eyes of Rochester, he decided. His modifications did not take long, and soon the altered message was being flashed over another fifty-six miles of dry, flat Southmoor grasslands to the border tower at Deniliquin.

  In the time that it took for the signal to be flashed from Wirrinya to Deniliquin, Lemorel walked the uneven cobblestone streets of Rochester from the University to Libris. Deniliquin was on the border of the Mayorate of Rochester, and a last hop of fifty-eight miles took the signal over a great plain of eucalyptus forest to Rochester City's beam flash tower.

  In the Rochester tower's gallery a transceiver keyed pulses of reflected sunlight down a system of mirrors in the core of the tower itself and into the beam flash clearing room. Here a clerk copied the encrypted message onto slates, noted the routing instructions, and passed the slates to a Dragon Red Librarian. This Dragon Red typed the message with a soft pattering of coach wood keys on felt buffers, and beyond the keyboard, the Calculor decoded and stored the table of figures that had begun its journey of nearly 330 miles less than an hour before.

  A few minutes more passed; then an array of mechanical hens began pecking holes in several feet of paper tape being drawn beneath their beaks. Lemorel stood beside them, reading the figures in the rows of patterned holes. As she suspected, the data was impossible. She would have to confront the Highliber.

  "The beam flash traffic data has been tampered with," Lemorel insisted, timid but brave, saying to herself that this is what John Glasken would have done. She offered a sheaf of papers to Highliber Zarvora. "I need to travel
to Griffith to check their beam flash traffic registers. I could also check the Darlington tower on the same trip."

  "I'll not sanction a trip to Darlington," the Highliber replied. "Our position there is precarious already. As for Griffith, what you propose is almost as bad. We have spent years convincing their Guild of Relays that the Rochester network can be run by Dragon Librarians alone. If you go across there now and imply that they do not know how to run a beam flash network, they are likely to respond by closing the Griffith-Rochester link."

  It had been a long shot. The Highliber would not risk religious riots or diplomatic incidents by allowing a student researcher to blunder about in sensitive areas.

  The interview was being held in the study where Zarvora had her personal terminal to the Calculor. Dozens of little metal faces seemed to smirk at Lemorel from the shelves as she sat pleading her case.

  "Highliber, someone out there is modifying beam flash-traffic data, data that I need for my thesis on the Call. How can I convince you?" "You do not need to convince me, Frelle Lemorel, I agree," she said, smiling for the first time that Lemorel had ever seen. "When your written petition reached me I did some research of my own using the Calculor. I found anomalies too." "With the Calculor?"

  "Yes. I confirmed in a morning what took you months to--just a moment." A rabbit had raised a red flag while the fox beside it struck a bell. The Highliber began to tap at her keyboard. Lemorel had never been given unlimited access to the mighty calculating machine itself. So much power! Lemorel thought hungrily. If she had the Highliber's access she could solve her network data mysteries without leaving Rochester.

  Abruptly the Calculor dumped several lines of decoded message onto the binary wheels mounted above the keyboard. Lemorel missed part of the message, but not the important part:

  / MARALINGA RAIL SIDE SEIZED DURING--REPEAT DURING-CALL. RAIL SIDE

  RETAKEN. REQUEST INSTRUCTIONS. / The Highliber gasped, then hit the RESET lever for the display wheels. "I have a journey to make, I must leave now," she said as she tapped the TERMINATE switch and turned to Lemorel. "Write out the rest of your submission on the beam flash problem, then let yourself out. I shall tell the guards to give you as long as you want."

  Then she was gone in a swirl of black cloth, slamming the door behind her and shouting down the corridor for her lackey. Lemorel could not get the short message on the display wheels out of her mind. A rail side outpost seized during a Call, impossible.." yet if not impossible, fantastic. People who were able to move about freely during a Call could conquer the world. No wonder the Highliber had rushed off to investigate for herself.

  Lemorel stood up and took a step toward the desk before stopping in midstride. The mechanical bear above the TERMINATE switch was still holding his flag up: the Highliber had not pressed the switch hard enough and her connection to the Calculor was still active.

  Lemorel felt her mouth salivating. Here was a pot of cold ale being held before a thirsty drunkard, here was a thief confronted with an unattended pile of gold royals. By using the Calculor the Highliber had duplicated Lemorel's months of work in hours. It was not fair. She walked slowly across to the keyboard and ran her fingers along the inlaid and inscribed keys.

  Tampering with the Calculor carried the death penalty, nobody knew that better that Lemorel. A spasm of fear and elation wriggled through her body as she stood staring at the little mechanical bear holding a flag marked ACTIVE aloft. The Highliber would not be back for days, at least.

  It was like the time she had been seduced by Brunthorp: an overwhelming temptation with dire consequences if anyone else found out, yet one little step 112 $EAN McMULLEN led to another until the deed was done. The Highliber's connection was still active and the Highliber's priority on the Calculor was absolute. Lemorel sat down on the console chair, shivering with the thrill of twisting the dragon's tail. It was her duty to deactivate the Highliber's connection, but... She typed--with one finger at first.

  / COMPOSITION REGISTER /

  The console display wheels rattled into a request for a destination.

  / DENILIQUIN/ TEXT REQUEST CHECKSUM ERROR LOG FOR PAST

  WEEK / Her finger hovered over the COMMAND key; then she depressed it with a soft clack. The Calculor began assembling her command into encrypted code, then routed it up to the beam flash tower. Moments later the receptor at the Deniliquin tower was reaching for his code book.

  This is already enough to get me shot, Lemorel thought grimly, yet what more could they do than shoot her? She studied a map of the beam flash network until the reply from Deniliquin arrived with a rattle of wheels on the binary register. She checked the figures against her notes. Identical.

  By now her nerve was beginning to fray. She was risking her life to conduct tests that she could do more slowly through official channels. What was the point? If my Johnny was to risk his life, he would do it for a sensible reason, she told herself. She fought down a rush of panic as she typed in a plain text request to the node at Griffith. Again she was presented with statistics that she already had. One more test and she would give up. She repeated her previous request to Griffith, but this time used an obscure code and requested that the reply be similarly encoded. The Calculor decoded the reply, but this time the figures pecked out on paper tape were different.

  Lemorel stared at the checksum error rates, then checked them against her projections. They matched: the anomaly had vanished. She looked back at the map. Only the Darlington repeater stood between Griffith and the secure parts of the network. Somebody there was altering the statistics. What else was he altering He. They were all male at the Darlington tower: the Southmoor treaty saw to that. Even as she scratched her head the tape machine rattled into life again. It was an amendment to what she had just received, informing her that there had been an error in transmission, and offering the old, anomalous figures by way of correction.

  "Nice try," she whispered between clenched teeth, then gasped. They had no code book at Darlington, it was only a repeater! The encoded message had to have been broken then recoded in four or five minutes. No human could have done that, only the Calculor... no, only a calculor could do that. Another calculor, and in a place where inspections could be done only twice a year!

  She had been working for barely an hour, yet what a discovery. One hundred fourteen miles to the north there was another calculor, and it was being used to filter messages being passed to Rochester. Why? She looked over the figures for the seven lines going into Griffith and saw the anomaly at once. There was a massive checksum error rate on the eastern line.

  The operator at Darlington was aware of her now, and she would not get another message past him. Not in the same way, at least. Lemorel composed a request with every third letter missing, had the Calculor encrypt it into decoy text, then sent an amendment after it with a higher priority. The request was for a dump out of the message log at the Canowindra terminus. She also requested that it be headed as dried fish subsidies.

  This time the wait was much longer. She could not disconnect because she did not know the Highliber's password. Half an hour became an hour. Lemorel read through the Highliber's manuals on operating the Calculor. At ninety minutes she helped herself to shortbread and cold coffee from the study's little pantry, then put the Calculor through some exercises in data encryption. By two hours Lemorel was becoming restive, and she checked the log of the afternoon's traffic. Everything looked normal.

  The operator of the Darlington calculor would be using it to break the code of Lemorel's amendment message without realizing that it was just a useless bundle of corrections. The public clock built into the beam flash tower clanged four-thirty. The evening beam flash traffic would be reaching a peak as users tried to beat the sunset. She composed another split message, this time to Griffith, and launched it into the afternoon datastream. The message would be matched with its amendment at Griffith--and be revealed as an amendment to send to Canowindra. With the deluge of traffic, her opponent at Darlington
might not bother to check everything in great detail.

  The reply appeared after forty minutes. The figures meant nothing in their raw form, but a few keystrokes had the Calculor comparing them with its own records. It made interesting reading: every message that had been concerned with troop movements and the transport of strategic supplies for the past five weeks had been returned to Canowindra for verification. Not only that, but there had been instructions that all amendments should be sent in decoy code. Naturally enough, the re sends had not been reported to Rochester.

  Lemorel scanned her notes as she munched a piece of shortbread. All reports of military movements had been amended. She examined the Highliber's list of Calculor commands, then worked her way through the options marked MILITARY. Several programs estimated troop movements by correlating other factors, such as stores requisitions, travel restrictions, and missing market figures from specific places. She ran three such programs, but no warnings or alerts were flagged.

  The conclusion was clear. Southmoor troop movements were being disguised by someone at Darlington. Why? Perhaps the Emir of Cowra was moving an army south for a surprise attack on Alliance border forts. Perhaps Southmoor armies were already massed along the border, poised to overwhelm the Alliance forces while the Highliber was away. Had the Highliber been tricked into leaving?

  Lemorel could only warn of impending war by revealing how she had learned of the threat--and that would get her shot. Still, the issues seemed more serious than a single life's value, she thought as she drank cold coffee straight from the Highliber's demi jar War. Her lover would be taken away to fight. What would Johnny do if he was in my position? she wondered. She recalled his advice to her: never let a problem beat you, even if you have to work at it all night. Well, what was good enough for him was good enough for her.

  Records were being changed at Darlington. Darlington was also requesting double-encoded repeats of records from Canowindra. This did not follow. Why request correct information if you were changing it? Lemorel studied the map again. The eastern line was short and simple: the node at Griffith went through the Tallimba and Wirrinya repeater towers to the terminus tower at Canowindra. Canowindra's tower was known to contain a monitoring corps in the pay of the Mayor, a corps that returned data on Southmoor military movements. The operator of the Darlington calculor was taking care to get correct data past those two repeaters. Why?