by Greg Bear
“Fortunately, it was against the law by then to turn off activated thinkers without a court order, but nobody could even talk to it. Its grasp of human languages was inadequate; it couldn’t follow their logic. It was a mind in limbo, Mickey; brilliant but totally alien. So it sat in a room at Stanford University’s Thinker Development Center for five years before Roger Atkins—you know about Roger Atkins?”
“William,” I warned.
“Before Atkins found the common ground for any functional real logic, the Holy Grail of language and thought … His CAL interpreter. Comprehensible All Logics. Which lets us talk to the QL. He died a year later.” William sighed. “Swan song. So this,” he patted the interpreter, a flat gray box about fifteen centimeters square and nine high, “lets us talk to this.” He patted the QL.
“Why hasn’t anybody used a QL as a controller before?” I asked.
“Because even with the interpreter, the QL—this QL at any rate—is a monster to work with,” he said. He tapped the display button and a prismatic series of bars and interlacing graphs appeared over the thinker. “That’s why it was so cheap. It has no priorities, no real sense of needs or goals. It thinks, but it may not solve. Quantum logic can outline the center of a problem before it understands the principles and questions, and then, from our point of view, everything ends in confusion. More often that not, it comes up with a solution to a problem not yet stated. It does virtually everything but linear, time’s arrow ratiocination. Half of its efforts are meaningless to goal-oriented beings like ourselves, but I can’t prune those efforts, because somewhere in them lies the solution to my problems, even if I haven’t stated the problem or aren’t aware that I have a problem. A post-Boolean intelligence. It functions in time and space, yet ignores their restrictions. It’s completely in tune with the logic of the Planck-Wheeler continuum, and that’s where the solution to my problem lies.”
This was why we never let William present his case to the syndics. “So when’s your test?”
“Three weeks. Or sooner, if there aren’t any more interruptions.”
“Am I invited?”
“All doubters, front row seats,” he said. “Call me when Rho gets in. Tell her I’ve got the answers. Or an answer.”
My office lay along a north warren, in an insulated cylindrical chamber that had once been a liquid water tank. It was much larger than I needed, cavernous in fact, and my bed, desk, slate files and other furnishings occupied one small section of about five meters square near the door. I entered, set myself down in a wide aircushion seat, called up the Triple Exchange—monetary rates within the Greater Planets economic sphere of Earth, Moon, and Mars—and began my daily check on the Sandoval Trust. I could usually gauge the Ice Pit’s annual operating expenses by such augury.
Rho’s shuttle landed at Pad Four an hour later. I was engrossed in trust investment performances; she buzzed my line second. William was not answering his.
“Micko, congratulate me! I’ve got something wonderful,” she said.
“A new terrestrial virus we can’t set for,” I said.
“Mickey! This is serious.”
“William says to tell you he’s very very close.”
“All right. That’s good. Now listen.”
“Where are you?”
“In the personnel lift. Listen.”
“Yes.”
“How much extra cooling capacity does William have?”
“You don’t know?”
“Mickey …”
“About eight billion calories. Cold is no problem here. You know that.”
“I have a load of twenty cubic meters coming in. Average density like fatty water, I assume. What would that be, point nine? It’s packed in liquid nitrogen at sixty K. Keeping it colder would be much better, especially if we decide on long-term storage …”
“What is it? Smuggled nano to liberate lunar industry?”
“You wish. Nothing so dangerous. Forty stainless steel Dewar containers, quite old, vacuum insulated.”
“Anything William would be interested in?”
“I doubt it. Can he spare the extra capacity?”
“He’s never used it before, even when he was close, very close. But he’s in no mood for—”
“Meet me at home, then we’ll go to the Ice Pit and tell him.”
“You mean ask.”
“I mean tell,” Rho said.
The Pierce/Sandoval home was two alleys south of my office, not far from the farms, off a nice double-width heated mining bore with smooth white walls of foamed rock. I palmed their home doorplate a half hour later, allowing her time to freshen from the Copernicus trip, never a luxury run.
Rho came out of the bathnook in lunar cotton terry and turban, zaftig by lunar standards, shook out her long red hair, and waved a brochure at me as I entered.
“Have you ever heard of the StarTime Preservation Society?” she asked, handing me the ancient glossy folio.
“Paper,” I said, hefting the folio carefully. “Heavy paper.”
“They had boxes full of these on Earth,” she said. “Stacked up in a dusty office corner. Leftovers from their platinum time. Have you heard of it?”
“No,” I said, looking through the brochure. Men and women in cold suits; glass tanks filled with mysterious mist; bare rooms blue with cold. A painting of the future as seen from the early twenty-first century; the moon oddly enough, glass domes and open-air architecture. “Resurrection in a time of accomplishment, human maturity and wonder …”
“Corpsicles,” Rho explained when I cast her a blank look.
“Oh,” I said.
“Society capacity of three hundred and seventy; they took in fifty extra before close of term in 2064.”
“Four hundred and twenty bodies?” I asked.
“Heads only. Voluntarily harvested individuals. Each paid half a million terrestrial U.S. dollars. Four hundred and ten survivals, well within the guarantees.”
“You mean, they were revived?”
“No,” she said disdainfully. “Nobody’s ever brought back a corpsicle. You know that. Four hundred and ten theoretically revivable. We can’t bring them back, but Cailetet BM has complete facilities for brain scan and storage …”
“So I’ve heard—for live individuals.”
She waved that off. “And doesn’t Onnes BM have new solvers for the groups of human mental languages? You study their requests from the central banks, their portfolios. Don’t they?”
“I’ve heard something to that effect.”
“If they do, and if we can work a deal between the three BMs, just give me a couple of weeks, and I can read those heads. I can tell you what their memories are, what they were thinking. Without hurting a single frozen neuron. We can do it before anyone on Earth—or anywhere else.”
I looked at her with less than brotherly respect. “That’s a load of dust,” I said.
“Flip your own dust, James. I’m serious. The heads are coming. I’ve signed Sandoval to store them.”
“You signed a BM contract?”
“I’m allowed.”
“Who says? Christ, Rho, you haven’t talked with anybody—”
“It will be the biggest anthropological coup in lunar history. Four hundred and ten terrestrial heads …”
“Dead meat!” I said.
“Expertly stored in deep cold. Minor decay at most.”
“Nobody wants corpsicles, Rho—”
“I had to bid against four other anthropologists, three from Mars and one from the minor planets.”
“Bid?”
“I won,” she said.
“You don’t have that authority,” I said.
“Yes I do. Under family preservation charter. Look it up. ‘All family members and legal heirs and etc. etc. free hand to make reasonable expenditures to preserve Sandoval records and heritage; to preserve the reputations and fortunes of all established heirs.’”
She had lost me. “What?”
Her l
ook of triumph was carnivorous.
“Robert and Emilia Sandoval,” she said. “They died on Earth. Remember? They were members of StarTime.”
My jaw dropped. Robert and Emilia Sandoval, our great grand-parents, the first man and woman to make love on the moon; nine months later, they became the first parents on the moon, giving birth to our grandmother, Deirdre. In their late middle age, they returned to Earth, to Oregon in the old United States, leaving their child on the Moon.
“They joined the StarTime Preservation Society. Lots of famous people did,” she said.
“So … ?” I asked, waiting for my astonishment to peak.
“They’re in this batch. Guaranteed by the society.”
“Oh, Rhosalind,” I said. I felt an incredulous hollow sense of doom. “They’re coming back?”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Nobody knows but the society trustees and me, and now you.”
“Great-grandpa and grandma,” I said.
Rho smiled the kind of smile that had always made me want to hit her. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
William came from an unbound lunar family, the Pierces of Copernicus Research Center Three. A lunar family—then and even more so now—consisted not just of those born to a single mother and father, but tight associations of sponsored settlers, working their way across the lunar surface in new-dug warrens, adding children and living space as they burrowed. Individuals usually kept their own surnames, or added surnames, but claimed allegiance to the central family, even when all the members of the central family had died, as sometimes happened.
As with our own family, the Sandovals, the Pierces were among the original fifteen families established on the moon in 2019. The Pierces were an odd lot, unofficial histories tell us—aloof and unwilling to pull together with the newer settlers. The original families—called primes—spread out across the Moon, forming and breaking alliances, eventually coming together—under pressure from Earth—into the financial associations later called binding multiples. The Pierces did not bind with any of the nascent multiples, though they formed loose alliances with other families.
The unbound families did not flourish. The Pierces lost influence, despite being primes. Their final disgrace was cooperation with terrestrial governments during the Split, when Earth severed ties with the Moon to punish us for our presumptuous independence. Thereafter, for decades, the Pierces and their kind were social outcasts.
By contrast, the allied superfamilies handily survived the crisis.
The Pierces, and most unbound families like them, driven by destitution and resentment, contracted their services in 2094 to the Franco-Polish technological station at Copernicus. They became part of the Copernicus binding multiple of nine families and finally joined the mainstream economy of the post-Split Moon.
Still, the Pierces’ descendants faced real prejudice in lunar society. They became known as a wild, churlish lot, and kept to themselves in and around the Copernicus station.
These difficulties had obviously affected William as a child, and made him something of an enigma.
When my sister met William at a Copernicus mixer barn dance, courted him (he was too shy and vulnerable to court her in turn) and finally asked him to join the Sandoval BM as her husband, he had to face the close scrutiny of dozens of dubious family members. William lacked the almost instinctive urge to unity of a BM-bred child; in an age of rugged individuals, tightly fitted into even more rugged and demanding multiples, he was a loner, quick-tempered yet prone to sentimentality, loyal yet critical, brilliant but taking on challenges so difficult he seemed doomed to always fail.
Yet in those tense months of courtship and scrutiny, with Rho’s constant coaching, he put on a brilliant performance, adopting a humble and pleasant attitude. He was accepted into the Sandoval Binding Multiple.
Rho was something of a lunar princess. Biologically of the Sandoval line, great-grand-child of Robert and Emilia Sandoval, her future was the concern of far too many, and in response, she developed a closeted attitude of defiance. That she should reach out for the hand of a Pierce was both expected, considering her character and upbringing, and shocking.
But old prejudices had softened considerably. Despite the doubts of Rho’s very protective “aunts” and “uncles”, and the strains of initiation and marriage, and despite his occasional reversion to prickly form, William was quickly recognized as a valuable adjunct to our family. He was a brilliant designer and theoretician. For four years he contributed substantially to many of our scientific endeavors, yet adjunct he was, playing a subservient role that must have deeply galled him.
I was fifteen when Rho and William married, and nineteen when he finally broke through this more or less obsequious mask to ask for the Ice Pit. I had never quite understood their attraction for each other; lunar princess drawn to son of outcast family. But one thing was certain: whatever William did to strain Rho’s affections, she could return with interest.
I walked to the Ice Pit with Rho after an hour of helping her prepare her case.
She was absolutely correct; as Sandovals, we had a duty to preserve the reputation and heirs of the Sandoval BM, and even by an advocate’s logic that would include the founders of our core family.
That we were also taking in four hundred and eight outsiders was quite another matter … But as Rho pointed out, the Society could hardly sell individuals. Surely nobody would think it a bad idea, bringing such a wealth of potential information to the Moon. Tired old Earth didn’t want it; just more corpsicles on a world plagued by them. Anonymous heads, harvested in the mid-twenty-first century, declared dead, stateless, very nearly outside the law, without rights except under the protection of their money and their declining foundation.
The StarTime Preservation Society was actually not selling anything or anyone. They were transferring members, chattels and responsibilities to Sandoval BM pending dissolution of the original Society; in short, they were finally, after one hundred and ten years, going cold blue belly up. Bankruptcy was the old term; pernicious exhaustion of means and resources was the new. Well and good; they had guaranteed to their charter members only sixty-one years (inclusive) of tender loving care. After that, they might just as well be out in the warm.
“The societies set up in 2020 and 2030 are declaring exhaustion at the rate of two and three a year now,” Rhosalind said. “Only one has actually buried dead meat. Most have been bought out by information entrepreneurs and universities.”
“Somebody hopes to make a profit?” I asked.
“Don’t be noisy, James,” she said, by which she meant incapable of converting information to useful knowledge. “These aren’t just dead people; they’re huge libraries. Their memories are theoretically intact; at least as intact as death and disease allow them to be. There’s maybe a five percent degradation; we can use natural languages algorithms to check and reduce that to maybe three percent.”
“Very noisy,” I said.
“Nonsense. That’s usable recall. Your memories of your seventh birthday have degraded by fifty percent.”
I tried to remember my seventh birthday; nothing came to mind. “Why? What happened on my seventh birthday?
“Not important, Mickey,” Rho said.
“So who wants that sort of information? It’s out of date, it’s noisy, it’s going to be hard to prove provenance … Much less check it out for accuracy.”
She stopped, brow cloudy, clearly upset. “You’re resisting me on this, aren’t you?”
“Rho, I’m in charge of project finances. I have to ask dumb questions. What value are these heads to us, even if we can extract information? And—” I held up my hand, about to make a major point, “What if extraction of information is intrusive? We can’t dissect these heads—you’ve assumed the contracts.”
“I called Cailetet from Tampa, Florida, last week. They say the chance of recovery of neural patterns and states from frozen heads is about eighty percent, using non-intrusive methods. No nano in
jections. Lamb shift tweaking. They can pinpoint every molecule in every head from outside the containers.”
However outlandish Rho’s schemes, she always did a certain amount of longer-range planning. I leaned my head to one side and raised both hands, giving up. “All right,” I said. “It’s fascinating. The possibilities are—”
“Luminous,” Rho finished for me.
“But who will buy historical information?”
“These are some of the finest minds of the twentieth century,” Rho said. “We could sell shares in future accomplishments.”
“If they’re revivable.” We were coming up to the white line and the big porcelain hatch to the Ice Pit. “They’re currently not very active and not very creative.”
“Do you doubt we’ll be able to revive them … someday? Maybe in ten or twenty years?”
I shook my head. “They talked revival a century ago. High-quality surgical nano wasn’t enough to do the trick. You can make a complex machine shine like a gem, fix it up so that everything fits, but if you don’t know where to kick it to start it chugging … And we don’t. Long time passes, no eyelids crack to the new day.”
Rho palmed the hatch guard. William took his own sweet time answering. “I’m an optimist,” she said. “I always have been.”
“Rho, you’ve come when I’m busy,” William said over the com.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, William. I’m your wife and I’ve been gone for three months.” She wasn’t irritated; her tone was playfully piqued. The hatch opened, and again I caught the smell of cold in the outrush of warm.
“The heads are ancient,” I said, stepping over the threshold behind her. “They’ll need re-training, re-everything. They’re probably elderly, inflexible … But those are hardly major handicaps when you consider that right now, they’re dead.”