by MadMaxAU
Not yet, Johnny. First I want to run a complete diagnostic on you.
ALL RIGHT, VIRGINIA. INITIATING “MR FIXIT” SUBPERSONA.
Saul had never seen this simulated personality before He laughed as a crystal clear image formed, of a man in grimy overalls, wiping his hands on a cloth. Behind the workman scurried assistants, dashing about carrying stethoscopes and voltmeters and giant wrenches over a great scaffolding. Within, a huge, cumbersome machine clanked and throbbed. Steam hissed and a low humming permeated everything.
A clipboard appeared out of nowhere. The master mechanic smiled as he put on a pair of bifocals and scanned the list.
WE’RE CHECKIN’ IT OUT, MISS. PRELIMINARY RESULTS LOOK PRETTY GOOD.
OVER ALL SYSTEMS STATUS HAS RETURNED TO NOMINAL. SELF CORRECTION ROUTINES NOW OPERATING ON “TELL ME THRICE” BASIS, RELAXED FROM QUINTUPLE CHECKING REQUIRED DURING THE EMERGENCY. SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE REPORTS THAT PROGRAMS ARE RUNNING AT NORMAL OR BETTER EFFICIENCY.
WE SEEM TO HAVE SERIOUS PROBLEMS IN ONLY ONE AREA, NOW.
Well? What is it? she inquired.
Mr. Fixit looked at her over the rims of his glasses.
I HAVE SOME POETRY FOR YOU VIRGINIA
Her head jerked in surprise. The same exact words . . .
Something was going on here.
“What is it, Ginnie?” Saul asked, feeling some of her concern over his own link.
“Nothing, probably . . . “ Virginia muttered. She concentrated on sending probes down several avenues at once to find out for herself what was behind this.
It felt so smooth! Was it just in comparison with JonVon’s former, wounded state? Or did it seem easier than ever to cruise these channels in the data streams? It was almost as if she could enter in true thought, instead of using simulations the computer provided to mimic the experience. Blocs of memory were represented by metaphors card catalogs, filing cabinets, mile long bookshelves and rows of wizened storytellers . . . .
There. She came upon a barrier. Something guarded behind a high abates and tightly locked gate. A blockage. A big accumulation of data, hidden away, inaccessible.
“I think he’s just a little constipated,” she said. Saul barked a sudden laugh, and cut it off just as quickly when he sensed her seriousness.
It’s big. What has JonVon got stuffed up in here?
She poked away at the jam with metaphorical levers that were actually carefully crafted mathematical subroutines.
Try a Kleinfeldt Transform . . . a rotation mapping . . . yes.
A resorting routine manifested itself as a key that kept changing shape until it slipped into the lock, and turned. Light streamed forth.
Well I’ll be a blue nosed mongoose!
“Five hundred terabytes of poetry!” She gasped aloud. “And half of it is flashed as triple A priority data!”
“Poetry? Priority data?” Saul asked. “I don’t get it.”
“Neither do I.” Then Virginia stopped. “Oh!”
Amazed, she turned toward Saul and opened her eyes. He looked back at her.
“JonVon knew he was sick! And so he isolated part of himself, in order to save important information for me. He used a sub cache I’d already double guarded . . . my poetry!”
She looked back up at the ceiling, staring. “Five hundred terabytes . . . the overflow spilled into everything JonVon did. No wonder Carl kept stumbling over apparently random poems while he was doing routine calculations.”
Saul’s voice was bemused. “But poetry!”
She nodded. “Let’s see what this urgent scribbling is all about.”
Present us with a sample selection of triple A priority poetry, please, she asked Mr. Fixit.
The dungareed figure shrugged.
THANKS, MISS. IT WAS GETTIN’ CROWDED IN HERE.
He vanished, and suddenly words flowed.
United States Patent Office
Tr series— 87239345 56241
Where is springtime,
Here on the borderlands of Sol?
Where…
Miniaturized Robotic Power Supply
Where stars, unwinking,
Rule a dark…
Issued May 8, 2089
Rule a dark domain—
To Virginia it was one of the weirdest versifications she had ever seen. It was as if the machine had interweaved poetry with some sort of document. She was beginning to be concerned that this was a sign of yet another, until now hidden, illness. But then she heard Saul laugh out loud and clap his hands.
“Of course!” he cried. “The urgent data has been shuffled in among the poems in order to protect it.”
“Yessss.” She nodded, seeing what he meant. “But . . . but what is the data? What was so important that it had to be hidden away in my special file for safety”
“Look at the date, dear. Only seven years ago. This stuff was sent from home! And at a glance there seem to be volumes, libraries of the stuff!”
She was confused. “Carl said nothing about this.”
“He didn’t know. Ould Harrad was in charge then, and Carl was still in the slots. Ould Harrad must’ve just ignored it. He was starting to get all mystical even then.”
“But Earth Control has been so stingy with help— “
“Who said anything about Earth Control?” Saul laughed again. “Here, I’ll bet I can sift through and find the cover letter.”
“The cover letter?”
But Saul was already at work. He sent commands so quickly, so deftly, that Virginia felt a strange contradiction, a touch of jealousy at someone else being so familiar with her domain, combined with pride that he had learned so well. Pages, sheaves, volumes, flickered past in an automatic sort that pulled the data from reams and reams of poetry.
A few flickering lines of verse caught her eye. Not half bad, she thought. JonVon improved, even when he was sick. If it were sent Earthside, some of it might get published . . . yet another fallen Turing test.
“Here! Here it is,” Saul announced. “It’s a letter in video form.”
There was a multicolored blur, and then a new image flickered before them. She knew t once that it was not another JonVon simulation. This was a real, recorded transmission.
A woman with close-cropped hair sat at a console, wearing a tight skinsuit. Her face had that high-cheeked puffiness that came from a long time spent living in low gravity. She was made up in an odd manner, lightninglike strokes of color streaking her forehead from her temples in a fashion that must have been current when the message was sent.
Behind the woman there was a broad window wall showing a scene of vast, reddish deserts, observed from high altitude. Puffy clouds of sand blew in storms across immense wastelands. Somehow, Virginia knew that this was not a weather wall depiction, but the real thing.
“Halley Colony,” the woman intoned. Her accent was one Virginia could not quite place, but the tension in her voice was unmistakable. “Halley, this is Phobos Base calling. We have listened to your story, heard the agony of your lost hopes, which are ours as well. We note the callous treatment you have received, and are ashamed.
“To a few of us, this crime has gone beyond forbearance. We take this risk, in transmitting to you these tokens of our good will, because not to do so would be to join the soullessness of a generation too smug and comfortable to care about past promises. Too lost in their pleasures to remember.”
The woman paused. Her anxiety was apparent in the whiteness of her knuckles as her hands held the edges of the console.
“If you love us, do not answer or bother to thank us in any way. Do not mention this to Earth Control. These gifts are evidence that a few, on Earth and in space, have not forgotten our kinfolk, those who voyage through the cold reaches and down the river of despair.
“May the Almighty guide you to your destinies, people of the Comet . . . people of deepest space.”
The image flickered and was gone. There followed a steady flow of indexes, texts, designs, patents, music. Saul
scanned the lists, excitedly, but for a few moments Virginia could only blink, again looking out through tears. She seemed still to hear the Phobos woman’s voice, echoing within her mind.
“JonVon was right,” Virginia whispered, though at the moment Saul was too involved, shouting over one title after another pouring forth from the broken logjam of the computer’s memory, to pay close attention.
“JonVon was right. This belonged under poetry. There was no other place for it.”
PART 5
WITH THE BRUSH
OF A FEATHER
You only live twice:
Once when you are born,
And once when you look death in the face.
—Bassho
Japanese poet,
1643-94
SAUL
Existence. Life. Awareness.
The words were often used as synonyms, but he knew that actually they were all three very different things. Three stages in Creation.
Did the proverbial tree falling in an empty forest make a sound?
Could that question even have been asked before all three stages had come about?
Existence supposedly began nearly twenty thousand million years ago—in a hot flux of quarks and leptons when time itself whirled, as if blindfolded, and stabbed out at something that it thereby named the Future. The universe could have taken a myriad of other forms by happenstance—by tiny variations in chance and dimension. Had even one of the basic physical constants been a fraction off, life would never have erupted out of clay catalyzed chemistry, billions of arbitrary intervals later.
But Life did erupt . . . self organizing, self replicating, and other-organizing. Life had a tendency, from the very beginning, to alter its surroundings, its environment.
But that was not the end of it. Then there came the third creation. There came awareness . . . .
The midget gibbons flew down the tunnel ahead of Saul, chirping at each other and swinging lithely from cables stapled to the moss covered ice. At an intersection they pivoted and regarded Saul, wide brown eyes blinking in question.
“Patience, children,” he told them. “Let Papa read the tunnel signs. We’re supposed to meet a Ginnie at Blue Stone Cave.”
The two small apes hung nearby while he swam over to the meeting of two corridors. A thick green fuzz covered the old shaft and tunnel codes, but below the obscured markings were deep incisions, exposing dark, glittering, icy conglomerate, painted with a substance poisonous to Halleyforms.
An arrow to the right, piercing a large S.
S for survivors.
“Yes, this is the way.” He adjusted his backpack. “Come on, Max. Come on, Sylvie.”
The two minigibbons landed on his shoulders. He pushed off following the phosphorescent glow of the lichenoids.
Two years, he thought. It’s been two years since, all at once, the universe seemed to let up on us. Since the litany of bad news turned around.
I wonder how mach longer this good spell will last.
Everyone seemed to credit his serums and Virginia’s miracle mechs for the turnaround in the colony’s fortunes. But Saul knew that part of the problem, before, had been pure and simple loneliness.
Things had not been the same since that afternoon in Virginia’s lab, when JonVon’s illness wrought memory blocks tumbled down, and they discovered that they had not been forgotten after all.
There had been no more messages from their secret benefactors. But that didn’t matter. Even more important than the techniques they had received had been the boost to morale, knowing that someone back home still cared.
Even the officials back on Earth seemed to have relented. The colony was buzzing about the “Care Package” that was nearing rendezvous with Halley—sent at high velocity by an Earth Control apparently guilt-racked over its past neglect.
No wonder Jeffers s teams are getting so much done, down at the south pole. Virginia estimates they’ll actually be ready to begin the Nudge this month.
If this peace among the clans lasts, that is . . .
The passage lightened ahead. Max and Sylvie launched themselves from his back and sped along a wall cable, rushing toward a chattering greeting.
“Who is it, Hokulele? Who’s coming?” a deep voice asked from beyond a stone arch. “Oh, quiet down, you silly monkey, can’t you see it’s only Max and Sylvie? Come on in, Dr. Lintz!”
Keoki Anuenue’s grin was broad and his grip strong as he hauled Saul into a wide chamber that looked half ice palace, half mad scientist’s laboratory. Cavelike crannies led off in all directions, bordered by glittering, faceted structures of hardened crystal. People could be seen moving in some of the rooms, working at various tasks. A few stopped and waved at Saul.
In the chamber’s center there protruded a great boulder of some bluish metal agglomerate, an odd formation that had given the group that lived here its name.
Everywhere was the soft verdance of lush plant life . Here a lawnlike expanse of cloverlike Trifolium halleyense, there a shock of mutated marigolds, growing out of night soil into spindly shapes that never would have been possible on the homeworld.
“Great to see you again, Doc,” Anuenue said. “My people are always glad when you visit.”
Saul had given up trying to get Keoki to call him Saul, like everyone else did. That the big Hawaiian was now older than he—his once jet black hair had turned silver and his eyes were deeply etched by smile lines—hardly seemed to matter to him.
“Hi, Keoki. You’re looking well.”
“How could I not? I was never really sick, like so many others, but those treatments of yours have me feeling I could climb a wave all the way to Molokai!”
His laugh was infectious. Saul reached up and petted the little capuchin monkey on his friend’s shoulder, who hid behind Anuenue’s head and glared suspiciously at the gibbons. “And how is Hokulele? Does she still have a big appetite?”
Keoki laughed. “There hasn’t been a purple sighted anywhere near Blue Rock Cave for weeks. She has to live off table scraps, these days, and she hates it!”
“Well.” Saul smiled. “I’m sure motherhood will keep her busy enough.”
“You can tell?” Anuenue held up the little monkey. “Ua huna au is mea . . . I wasn’t sure I should tell you, since you wanted us to be careful before letting any Earth species become independent of your cloning chambers. But Virgil Simms was visiting from Central, and he brought his male with him— “
Saul waved a hand. “No matter. The modified capuchins are a success, obviously. We ought to see if they breed true.”
The data from Earth had been the key. For although science was still a dull affair, back home, some progress could not be avoided. Saul would never have been able to develop the cloning machines himself, even using parts from a dozen scavenged sleep slots. But by implementing designs released from JonVon’s unclogged memories, he had been able to build astonishing devices.
Using samples taken from their still frozen “zoo” of test animals, he could now force grow a monkey or ape from blast cell to
fetus to adult in a month. A month.
It was, frankly, almost beyond his comprehension as a biologist. Saul was grateful that half of the process could be run by JonVon, without his having to understand it. He could turn most of his attention to modifying the original genes—an art at which his skill was not obsolete—giving them an artificial inheritance to thrive in the new ecosystem that was coming into being under Halley.
Anuenue was trading monkey faces with Max and Sylvie, making Hokulele insanely jealous.
“I still can’t really understand why you chose gibbons for your own watchdogs, Doc. Without a prehensile tail, they’re almost as clumsy as a man.”
“I have a weakness for apes,” Saul began. “They have their— “
“Saul!” two feminine voices called out, almost in unison. He looked overhead and saw a young woman in roughly sewn fibercloth over alls drop down from a shaft to alight on the blue rock.
A spindly machine fell after her and she caught it deftly, placing it gently on the floor. The whirring, spiderlike mech whizzed ahead of Lani to reach Saul first.
“Hi Saulie!” The machine spoke with Virginia’s voice, but in a slightly higher register, a simpler tone. It was easy to tell that Virginia herself wasn’t “present” —was not operating this particular mech herself—and Saul was just a little disappointed.
“Hello, little Ginnie,” he said to the very unmachinelike, colony made machine as it reached out an arm and stroked his leg. The device was another hybrid of Earth based and homegrown research—a mixture of new designs sent up by their secret benefactors, the mechanical brilliance of Jeffers and d’Amario, and Virginia’s hypermodern approach to personality based programming.
“I love you, Saul,” the childlike voice said softly. The little artificial persona was an edited replica of Virginia’s own. Sometimes, as now, it led to embarrassment. Keoki coughed, grinning behind his hand.
Saul felt particularly unnerved since, at the moment, Virginia was mad at him. Can’t even really blame her, he thought.
“Hello, Lani,” he said to the young woman who followed the robot. She enveloped him in a warm embrace.
“You are looking wonderful,” he said, holding her back at arm’s length.
She blushed, turning slightly away as if to hide the scars the zipper Pox had left on her once smooth cheek.
“You’re a magnificent liar, Saul. Almost as good as you are a doctor.”
But to him she did look wonderful. For he well recalled when Lani Nguyen had been slotted. At the time it had seemed as pointless as storing a corpse. Now the pallor of deepsleep had almost left her face, and the blue eyelids only made her half oriental features seem all the more sultry and mysterious.
Virginia should never have told me about Lani Nguyen’s secret cache of human sperm and ova. I’ve almost questioned her about it several times, since her unslotting . . . to find out where it’s hidden.