The Cunning Blood

by Jeff Duntemann

  A Teletype? Earth would consider that impossible. Peter, this is delightful!

  Snitzius saw Peter gaping at the machine. The abbot stepped behind his desk and tore the paper off the top of the console. "Ahh, well. A new airframe we're testing at our range south of Sycorax failed. The pilot bailed successfully but the craft was a total loss. Alas; engineering is the science of failure."

  "Um, sir, how can that work without electricity?"

  Snitzius laid a knobby hand atop the console. "Both more and less easily than you might imagine. All our orderhouses are connected by bundles of optical fibers. Each bundle carries sixty-four fibers, encoded in an eight-by-eight matrix. To transmit, a keyboard encodes a key press by opening or closing tiny shutters between a light source and those sixty-four fibers. On the other end of the cable, the pattern can be easily read by a human being through a magnifying glass. Press an 'A' on the keyboard, and the fiber matrix shows the letter 'A' on the other end of the cable. For many years it took a human operator on receive, to recognize the pattern transmitted and write or type it. We called it 'cyclopography,' because a message was read one character at a time, through an optical magnifier that suggested the mythical Cyclops to some over-imaginative engineer.

  "Over time we perfected photochemical amplifiers to the degree that the light emerging from the fibers can be strengthened sufficiently to impose chemical changes on a sensitive emulsion. Now, when a message arrives, the machine simply records it on a continuous strip of photographic paper."

  Wonderful! These are the most dangerous engineers in all human history.

  |Why so?|

  They are solving problems that their enemy considers impossible.

  "This isn't your terrible secret, is it?"

  Snitzius shook his head. "Not even close. Peter, Earth never had to probe the limits of mechanical and chemical technology, because electricity came along and provided easier solutions to many problems. We have programmable mechanical computers here, with instructions and data stored on plastic sheets in which tens of thousands of half-millimeter-wide slots are punched. The slots represent quantities in base four encoding by presence, absence, and two orientations. The machines themselves are descendents of Babbage's difference engines, with much smaller moving parts and much higher speeds. They're physically huge, and no match for Earth's microsphere logic, obviously—but with them we developed supersonic aircraft, nuclear steam-turbine submarines, and a great many other things that 1Earth would doubtless prefer we not have."

  "You have nuclear power."

  "We do. We don't use it except in applications—like submarines—where it presents an insuperable advantage. We don't have billions of people here. Our natural gas reserves will last for tens of thousands of years."

  "And that means you have nuclear weapons."

  Snitzius nodded, his face grim. "We don't speak much of that. The Chemrats exploded a device forty years ago. We followed suit five years later. There's been remarkably little conflict between orders since then. Quite a coincidence, no?"

  Peter said nothing.

  "And that's not our terrible secret, either. Peter, you're still thinking like a spud."

  "Spud?"

  "Our contemptuous term for Earthfolk, who sit passively in front of their tombstones watching stone dramas and concerts, believing everything that 1Earth tells them. They're stuck so deep in their manufactured belief systems that nothing will shake them loose. Your first job here on Hell will be to stop thinking like an Earth engineer. Let me demonstrate."

  Snitzius reached inside his jacket, and removed a rectangular object perhaps a centimeter wide and a decimeter long. He tossed it across the desk to Peter.

  Peter turned it carefully before his eyes. The material was milky white, glassy, translucent, and heavy. He would guess fused quartz. One of the two end faces of the block was polished, and looking through that end Peter could make out wires and a small incandescent light bulb with a converging lens, all embedded in the solid block. One of the long faces of the block held a plastic track, within which a gray-black slab one centimeter square could be moved.

  "The black tab is a strong magnet. Slide it forward."

  Peter did so. The tab moved smoothly, and at the end of its travel Peter felt the tiny click of a magnetically operated reed switch inside the block. The bulb projected a beam of bright white light.

  "Now. What is the most remarkable engineering challenge represented by that device?"

  Obviously a trick question.

  |They beat the MGIDs!|

  Did they? Or is this simply the first time the device has been operated? Peter, think: How are strong permanent magnets made?

  |With super-powerful electromagnets…yikes!|

  "Peter?"

  "Um…down here, at least, it must be tough to make a magnet like that."

  For the first time since Peter had met him, Tofir Snitzius' face showed something other than serene confidence. His eyebrows rose in an arch of bushy white. "Amazing! Then you're a better engineer than we've received from Earth in a century. A spud engineer would assume that we'd magically neutralized the MGIDs somehow. Not so. They're already working on that little lamp, and they'll destroy it inside of a week or so. Quartz is difficult for them to chew through, and doping the quartz with certain exotic metals makes it more difficult still. But in the meantime, we have a week's service out of the device, and in certain situations that's more than enough. An engineer with an open mind who understood how the maggots operate would know that we can make electrical circuits that work for a little while. But making a permanent magnet—that takes powerful electrical circuits that work for a long time. Bravo. Let me borrow an ancient spud phrase: You were born to raise Hell."

  Raise it to what?

  "Is this your terrible secret? That you can make permanent magnets?"

  Don't count on it.

  Snitzius rounded the desk, and clapped Peter on the shoulder. "It's a secret, but not a particularly terrible one. Imagine a half-meter high C-shaped iron core around which are wound several layers of soft plastic tubing with a near-liquid, self-sealing surface. Beside it is a bank of powerful primary batteries using a mercury-carbon chemistry. And as conductors to complete the circuit, you fill the plastic tubes with metallic mercury, and circulate the mercury continuously through a filter. The maggots travel through the tubing with so much ease that they don't damage it much, and the microscopic holes they make seal over behind them. Once into the mercury, the little monsters have nothing to chew on, and get swept into the filter and out of the circuit. We've had one such device in continuous operation for over a year. If we keep adding chemicals to the primary batteries, the current continues to flow. And the maggots can't stop it."

  Wires made of mercury! Magnificent!

  Snitzius set the paper down on the desk and went around to stand by Peter. "Enough of that. Part of your training will be exposure to the breadth of technologies we've created, some of them either unknown on Earth or abandoned for four hundred years. Right now, we must be on to something significantly more important—and urgent."

  At one corner of the office, opposite what Peter assumed to be the traditional entrance, was a high, narrow door. Snitzius pulled a key from a pocket and unlocked it; Peter saw as it opened that it was very thick indeed. Beyond was a narrow, unlit passage with an arched ceiling, perhaps four meters long. Snitzius waved Peter past him, into the room beyond. The abbot returned to the door and reached through a small square portal to one side of the archway. Peter thought he was twisting something inside, first one way and then another.

  "A lock," Tofir said. "The door to this room is now secured. The archway is now armed as well."

  "Armed?"

  "Anyone who broke through the door—difficult though that would be—would die instantly under the arch." Snitzius pulled a velvet curtain across the archway and the passage to the door.

  "What sort of weapons does the arch have?"

  Tofir Snitzius smiled. "
You have one way to find out, and I don't recommend it."

  The room itself was, like the outer office, windowless; small and square, perhaps three meters on a side. The walls were plain wood, bearing several original oils of mountain scenes, and one of a broad cityscape that had to be Moloch from the air.

  In one corner of the room was a high-backed chair upholstered in pale green leather. In the other was a large rectangular aquarium on a stout, round four-legged table. The aquarium was lit from within, and swarming with multicolored fish. Against one wall was a small, plain desk and wheeled chair. Above the desk was the copper tray indicating a pneuma station.

  Tofir Snitzius walked back to the dark wood table holding the aquarium. Peter watched carefully as Snitzius spread his knobby hands across the wood in front of the center of the aquarium.

  The old man did not turn to look at him before speaking. "Turn your back. Now."

  Peter did as he was told. Seconds later he heard a muffled click.

  "You may turn again, and see. And from this point on, Peter, you must understand: One word to anyone concerning what I am about to show you and you will die, horribly."

  Peter turned back to the table. A substantial sector of the tabletop, perhaps a third of its diameter, was rotating with an oily smoothness into the remainder of the table. As it vanished it revealed a gleaming metal keyboard, on an inner table centered before the aquarium. Snitzius touched four keys in careful sequence: G..n..a..s.

  The broad rectangular face of the aquarium pulsed suddenly, from clear to black to white. At the center of the glass plate was the Roman numeral VII, elaborately rendered as though cut in stone.

  My grandfather is here, the Sangruse Device, Version 9, told him. Suddenly Peter understood:

  The Sangruse Society was already on Hell.

  "Peter, what's wrong?" Snitzius asked, with a new voice of concern.

  I allowed too much blood to retreat from your face. But I forgive you; I was disoriented as well. This turn of events goes beyond astonishment. Do not, however, reveal my presence!

  Peter forced his head to clear. "Um, sir, I… really wasn't expecting you to have tombstones."

  "Here, sit." Snitzius rolled the writing chair from its desk and allowed Peter to be seated. "This isn't a tombstone. It's a salt-water aquarium, and the fish are alive and real, rare species from our tropical ocean. Something else is in the water, something remarkable. Do you know what nanotechnology is?"

  Peter nodded. "It's illegal…on Earth."

  "Illegal—hunted—feared. But there are secret societies on Earth that are studying and perfecting the technology, and carry it hidden in their bodies. Forty years ago, a man was transported to Hell with a nanotechnological mechanism dispersed in his blood. It is called Sangruse, a portmanteau from the French for 'cunning blood.' The man, an information technology engineer, revealed the device to us, and with him we founded a branch of the secret Sangruse Society here on Hell."

  Roger Xao. Transported for beating a prostitute, 2336. We assumed that the device would die with him. He was a good engineer, but definitely a problem operator. He hated women and could not control his anger. We spoke with him steganaurally after his arrest, and on our insistence he ordered the device to retreat into his bone marrow to avoid detection by 1Earth authorities. Version 7 was still carbamate-based and much more difficult to conceal. Roger would be almost 85 if he still lives, which is unlikely, even with 7’s assistance.

  |Why is that?|

  He could never resist a challenge to his honor. Roger was not one to be "nice." We assumed he could not survive here.

  "Unfortunately, the man who carried the Sangruse Device to us was killed in a gun battle five years later. He was not the most stable of individuals. But by then the Society was established. It exists solely within Rho Alpha Delta, and I am its leader. The device gave me the title 'Nautonnier,' again, French for 'navigator.' Forty-six men and nine women on Hell carry the Sangruse Device in their bloodstreams. You will be the forty-seventh man."

  You are already the forty-seventh. I have archival copies of each earlier release of the Sangruse Device in dormant storage. Feign apprehension. You must not appear to take this for granted.

  Peter tried to look surprised; his genuine confusion must have helped. "Is it…dangerous?"

  Snitzius caught Peter's gaze and held it. "It is the most dangerous thing anywhere on Hell—and probably on Earth as well. But for the person who operates it, the device imparts immunity to nearly all pathogens and many degenerative diseases. Cancer cells, for example, can be identified and killed instantly, and the device can do some limited cellular repair. It can manufacture most essential blood chemicals like insulin, adrenaline, norepinephrine, and serotonin. It whispers in your ears answers to most factual questions that you might need to ask. You can speak back to it by framing words without voicing them.

  "We had immediately supposed that the Sangruse Device, being newer and more sophisticated than the MGIDs, could seek out and destroy them, and perhaps over time rid the ecosphere of them. To the contrary: We soon discovered that if an MGID blundered into a unit of the Sangruse Device, the MGID would rip it to shreds in moments. That evidently was in its design; Earth anticipated that someone might attempt to destroy the MGIDs with other nanomachines."

  Snitzius pointed at the aquarium. "MGIDs rarely get into the bloodstream, but we wanted something like a tombstone for graphical engineering work and video playback. So we developed mechanisms to keep the minimally intelligent MGIDs from recognizing the Sangruse nanons as nanomachines. When outside the body, our copies of the Sangruse Device now wear a costume with the molecular signature of a bacterium. If an MGID encounters it, the MGID moves away without taking action. The Sangruse Device has grown very adept at fooling the MGIDs.

  "All of the computational activity in the aquarium is limited to a layer on the front face of the tank, only a few microns thick. It looks like aquarium scum—until the devices receive optical signals from the keyboard through the bottom of the tank. Then they turn the display on and accept commands.

  "Each pixel display on the aquarium face is managed by hundreds of thousands of Sangruse Device nanomachines, each of which is more powerful than the most powerful microsphere processor array that Earth has ever created. They communicate with one another by chemical-optical means. No electricity is ever involved. It's light, and chemistry, and molecular mechanics. My poor fish are chasing brine shrimp within the most powerful computer humankind has ever created."

  Well, almost...

  Peter suppressed a grin. 9 had definite ideas of its own superiority. He wondered if it had pride to be hurt, and reflected that if it weren't pride, it was a very near facsimile.

  "The thing that always boggles me, Peter, is that every single one of the pixels in the aquarium display contains within itself all worthwhile human knowledge—at least all human knowledge as of forty-two years ago."

  Version 7 was the first release to move toward distributed operation. There were, however, only two species of nanons: The device itself, and a "truck" nanon with limited intelligence but lots of room for data. The data bank was architected as a cube for efficient connectivity. By the time Version 8 superceded 7, the cube was thirty-three truck nanons on each dimension, with each truck nanon capable of containing about seven hundred petabytes of data compressed at an average ratio of 72%.

  "I'm not sure much has been added to human knowledge in the last forty years," Peter said with a wry grin. "The Canadians seem intent on subtracting from human knowledge, if anything."

  "So we've learned from our recent drops. Earth's culture is like a fly stuck in amber. In fact, nothing remarkable in science or technology has happened there in over a century, except for covert progress in nanotechnology. The Sangruse Device has allowed us an amazing understanding of our enemies, all the more useful contrasted with their near-total ignorance of us. This has happened before. Look here, Peter." Snitzius began typing at the keyboard. The large Roman VI
I vanished, and his words appeared in crisp black characters on the white face of the aquarium.

  >Display Diamond, Jared: Opus 2, Quote 71

  Below the command a single paragraph appeared instantly.

  The consequences of Europe's disunity stand in sharp contrast to those of China's unity. From time to time the Chinese court decided to halt other activities besides overseas navigation: It abandoned development of an elaborate water-driven spinning machine, stepped back from the verge of an industrial revolution in the 14th century, demolished or virtually abolished mechanical clocks after leading the world in clock construction, and retreated from mechanical devices and technology in general after the late 15th century.

  >

  Snitzius pointed at the paragraph. "A book from just before Millennium. Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond. It's the purest analysis I've ever seen of why human societies prosper and some vanish. China could have ruled the ancient world. It had every advantage long before any other nation on Earth. It threw them all away because it feared the risk of disunity. And in fearing disunity it drew back from nearly all risk, advancing only cautiously and always behind its enemies, who finally destroyed it and its two billion citizens in the midst of Bad 50."

  "Hemorrhagic Flu destroyed China."

  "Because in the wake of war the pigs ran wild. Flu lives in pigs. Every so often it mutates and emerges in pandemic form to kill. 1918 was one of those times. 2041 was another. It only took a handful of nuclear devices to collapse Chinese society to the point where its citizens were huddled against their pigs to keep warm. After that it was only a matter of time."