Hidden Variables

by Charles Sheffield

  Before I could pursue that thought the screen was alive. I read the instructions as they appeared there, and followed them as carefully as possible. After a few minutes I got the knack of it. We had tests rather like it when I first applied to go into space. To say that we were taking an intelligence test would be an oversimplification—many other aptitudes were tested, as well as knowledge and mechanical skills. That was the only consolation I had. McAndrew must be wiping the floor with me on all the parts that called for straight brain-power, but I knew that his coordination was terrible. He could unwrap a set of interlocking, multiply-connected figures mentally and tell you how they came apart, but ask him to do the same thing with real objects and he wouldn't be able to start.

  After three hours we were finished. Both screens suddenly went blank. We swung to face each other.

  "What's next?" I said. He shrugged and began to look at the terminal itself. The design hadn't been used in the System for fifty years. I took a quick float around the walls—we had entered the Ark near a pole, where the effective gravity caused by its rotation was negligible. Even on the Ark's equator I estimated that we wouldn't feel more than a tenth of a gee at the most.

  No signs of what I was looking for, but that didn't mean much. Microphones could be disguised in a hundred ways.

  "Mac, who do you think she is?"

  He looked up from the terminal. "Why, she's the woman assigned to . . ." He stopped. He had caught my point. When you are two light-years from Sol and you have your first visitors for seventy-five years, who leads the reception party? Not the man and woman who recycle the garbage. Kleeman ought to be somebody important on the Ark.

  "I can assist your speculation," said a voice from the wall. So much for our privacy. As I expected, we had been observed throughout—no honor system on this test. "I am Kal Massingham Kleeman, the daughter of Jules Massingham, and I am senior member of Home outside the Council of Intellects. Wait there for one more moment. I will join you with good news."

  She was beaming when she reappeared. Whatever they were going to do with us, it didn't seem likely they would be flinging us out into the void.

  "You are both prime stock, genetically and individually," she said. "I thought that would be the case when first I saw you."

  She looked down at a green card in her hand. "I notice that you both failed to answer one small part of the inquiry on your background. Captain Roker, your medical record indicates that you bore one child. But what is its sex, condition, and present status?"

  I heard McAndrew suck in his breath past his teeth, while I suppressed my own shock as best I could. It was clear that the standards of privacy in the System and on the Ark had diverged widely in the past seventy-seven years.

  "It is a female." I hope I kept my voice steady. "Healthy, and with no neuroses. She is in first level education on Luna."

  "The father?"

  "Unknown."

  I shouldn't have been pleased to see that now Kleeman was shocked, but I was. She looked as distressed as I felt. After a few seconds she grabbed control of her emotions, swallowed, and nodded.

  "We are not ignorant of the unplanned matings that your System permits. But hearing of such things and encountering them directly are not the same." She looked again at her green card. "McAndrew, you show no children. Is that true?"

  He had taken his lead from me and managed a calm and literal reply. "No recorded children."

  "Incredible." Kleeman was shaking her head. "That a man of your talents should be permitted to go so long without suitable mating . . ."

  She looked at him hungrily, the way that I have seen McAndrew eye an untapped set of experimental data from out in the Halo. I could imagine how he had performed on the intellectual sections of the test.

  "Come along," she said at last, still eyeing McAndrew in a curiously intense and possessive way. "I would like to show you some of Home, and arrange for you to have living quarters for your use."

  "Don't you want more details of why we are here?" burst out Mac. "We've come nearly two light-years to get to the Ark."

  "You have been receiving our messages of the advances that we have made?" Kleeman's manner had a vast self-confidence. "Then why should we be surprised when superior men and women from your system wish to come here? We are only surprised that it took you so long to develop a suitably efficient ship. Your vessel is new?"

  "Very new." I spoke before McAndrew could get a word in. Kleeman's assumption that we were on the Ark to stay had ominous overtones. We needed to know more about the way the place functioned before we told her that we were planning only a brief visit.

  "We have been developing the drive for our ship using results that parallel some of those found by your scientists," I went on. I gave Mac a look that kept him quiet for a little while longer. "When we have finished with the entry preliminaries, Professor McAndrew would very much like to meet your physicists."

  She smiled serenely at him. "Of course. McAndrew, you should be part of our Council of Intellects. I do not know how high your position was back in your system, but I feel sure you have nothing as exalted—and as respected—as our Council. Well,"—she placed the two green cards she was holding in the pocket of her yellow smock—"there will be plenty of time to discuss induction to the Council when you have settled in here. The entry formalities are complete. Let me show you Home. There has never been anything like it in the whole of human history."

  Over the next four hours we followed Kleeman obediently through the interior of the Ark. McAndrew was itching to locate his fellow-physicists, but he knew he was at the mercy of Kleeman's decisions. From our first meeting with others on the Ark, there was no doubt who was the boss there.

  How can I describe the interior of the Ark? Imagine a free-space beehive, full of hard-working bees that had retained an element of independence of action. Everyone on the Ark of Massingham seemed industrious, cooperative, and intelligent. But they were missing a dimension, the touch of orneriness and unpredictability that you would find on Luna or on Titan. Nobody was cursing, nobody was irrational. Kleeman guided us through a clean, slightly dull Utopia.

  The technology of the Ark was simpler to evaluate. Despite the immense pride with which Kleeman showed off every item of development, they were half a century behind us. The sprawling, overcrowded chaos of Earth was hard to live with, but it provided a constant pressure towards innovation. New inventions come fast when ten billion people are there to push you to new ideas. In those terms, life on the Ark was spacious and leisurely. The colony had constructed its network of interlocking tunnels to a point where it would take months to explore all the passages and corridors, but they were nowhere near exhausting their available space and resources.

  "How many people would the Ark hold?" I asked McAndrew as we trailed along behind Kleeman. It would have taken only a minute or two to work it out for myself, but you get lazy when you live for a while with a born calculator.

  "If they don't use the interior material to extend the surface of the Ark?" he said. "Give them the same room as we'd allow on Earth, six meters by six meters by two meters. They could hold nearly sixty million. Halve that, maybe, to allow for recycling and maintenance equipment."

  "But that is not our aim," said Kleeman. She had overheard my question. "We are stabilized at ten thousand. We are not like the fools back on Earth. Quality is our aim, not mindless numbers."

  She had that tone in her voice again, the one that had made me instinctively avoid the question of how long we would be staying on the Ark. Heredity is a potent influence. I couldn't speak about Jules Massingham, the founder of this Ark, but his daughter was a fanatic. I have seen others like her over the years. Nothing would be allowed to interfere with the prime objective: build the Ark's population on sound eugenic principles. Kleeman was polite to me—I was "prime stock"—but she had her eye mainly on McAndrew. He would be a wonderful addition to her available gene pool.

  Well, the lady had taste. I shared some of that att
itude myself. "Father unknown" was literally true and Mac and I had not chosen to elaborate. Our daughter had rights, too, and Jan's parentage would not be officially known unless she chose after puberty to take the chromosome matching tests.

  Over the next six days, McAndrew and I worked our way into the life pattern aboard the Ark. The place ran like a clock, everything according to a schedule and everything in the right position. I had a good deal of leisure time, which I used to explore the less-popular corridors, up near the Hub. McAndrew was still obsessed with his search for physicists.

  "No sense here," he growled to me, after a meal in the central dining area out on the Ark's equator. As I had guessed, effective gravity there was about a tenth of a gee. "I've spoken to a couple of dozen of their scientists. There's not one of them would last a week at the Institute. Muddled minds and bad experiments."

  He was angry. Usually McAndrew was polite to all scientists, even ones who couldn't understand what he was doing, still less add to it.

  "Have you seen them all? Maybe Kleeman is keeping some of them from us."

  "I've had that thought. She's talked to me every day about the Council of Intellects, and I've seen some of the things they've produced. But I've yet to meet one of them, in person." He shrugged, and rubbed at his sandy, receding hairline. "After we've slept I'm going to try another tack. There's a schoolroom over on the other side of the Ark, where I gather Kleeman keeps people who don't seem quite to fit into her ideas. Want to take a look there with me, tomorrow?"

  "Maybe. I'm wondering what Kleeman has in mind for me. I think I know her plans for you, she sees you as another of her senior brains." I saw the woman herself approaching us across the wide room, with its gently curving floor. "You'd like it, I suspect. It seems to be like the Institute, but members of the Council have a lot more prestige."

  I had immediate proof that I was right. Kleeman seemed to have made up her mind. "We need a commitment from you now, McAndrew," she said. "There is a coming vacancy on the Council. You are the best person to fill it."

  McAndrew looked flattered but uncomfortable. The trouble was, it really did interest him, I could tell that. The idea of a top-level brains trust had appeal.

  "All right," he said after a few moments. He looked at me, and I could tell what he was thinking. If we were going to be on our way back home soon, it would do no harm to help the Ark while he was here. They could use all the help available.

  Kleeman clapped her hands together softly; plump white hands that pointed out her high position—most people on the Ark had manual duties to keep the place running, with strict duty rosters.

  "Wonderful! I will plan for your induction tomorrow. Let me make the announcement tonight, and we can speed up the proceedings for the outgoing member."

  "You always have a fixed number of members?" asked McAndrew.

  She seemed slightly puzzled by his question. "Of course. Exactly twelve. The system was designed for that number."

  She nodded at me and hurried away across the dining area, a determined little woman who always got her way. Since we first arrived she had never ceased to tell McAndrew that he must become the father of many children; scores of children; hundreds of children. He looked more and more worried as she increased the number of his future progeny.

  The next morning I went on with my own exploration of the Ark, while McAndrew made a visit to the Ark's oddities, the people who didn't seem to fit Kleeman's expectations. We met to eat together, as usual, and I had a lot on my mind. I had come across an area in the center of the Ark where power supply lines and general purpose tube inputs increased enormously, but it did not seem to be a living area. Everything led to one central area, but one accessible only with a suitable code. I puzzled over it while I waited for McAndrew to appear.

  The whole Ark was bustling with excitement. Kleeman had made the announcement of McAndrew's coming incorporation to the Council of Intellects. People who had scarcely spoken to him before stopped us and shook his hand solemnly, wishing him well and thanking him for his devotion to the welfare of the Ark. While I drank an aperitif of glucose and dilute ascorbic acid, preparations for a big ceremony were going on around me. A new Council member was a big event.

  When I saw McAndrew threading his way towards me past a network of new scaffolding, I knew his morning had been more successful than mine. His thin face was flushed with excitement and pleasure. He slid into the seat opposite me.

  "You found your physicist?" I hardly needed to ask the question.

  He nodded. "Up on the other side, in a maximum gravity segment right across from here. He's—you have no idea—he's—" McAndrew was practically gibbering in his excitement.

  "Start from the beginning." I leaned across and took his hands in mine.

  "Yes. I went out on the other side of the Ark, where there's a sort of tower built out from the surface. We must have passed it on the way over from the Hoatzin but I didn't notice it then. Kleeman never took us there—never mentioned it to me."

  He reached out with one hand across the table, grabbed my drink and took a great gulp of it. "Och, Jeanie, I needed that. I've not stopped since I first opened my eyes. Where was I? I went on up to that tower, and there was nobody to stop me or to say a word. And I went on inside, farther out, to the very end of it. The last segment has a window all the way round, so when you're there you can see the stars and the nebulae wheeling round past your head." McAndrew was unusually stirred and his last sentence proved it. The stars were normally considered fit subjects only for theory and computation.

  "He was out in that last room," he went on. "After I'd given up hope of finding anybody in this whole place who could have derived those results we got back through Triton Station. Jeanie, he looks no more than a boy. So blond, and so young. I couldn't believe that he was the one who worked out that theory. But he is. We sat right down at the terminal there, and I started to run over the background for the way that I renormalize the vacuum self-energy. It's nothing like his way. He has a completely different approach, different invariants, different quantization conditions. I think his method is a good deal more easy to generalize. That's why he can get multiple vacuum colors out when we look for resonance conditions.

  "Jeanie, you should have seen his face when I told him that we probably had fifty people at the Institute who would be able to follow his proofs. He's been completely alone here. There's not another one who can even get close to following him, he says. When he sent back those equations, he didn't tell people how important he thought they might be. He says they worry more about controlling what comes in from the System, rather than what goes out from here. I'm awful glad we came. He's an accident, a sport that shows up only once in a couple of centuries—and he was born out here in the void! Did you know, he's taken all the old path integral methods, and he has a form of quantum theory that looks so simple, you'd never believe it if you didn't see it . . ."

  He was off again. I had to break in, or he would have talked without stopping, right through our meal. McAndrew doesn't babble often, but when he does he's hard to stop.

  "Mac, hold on. Something here doesn't make sense. What about the Council of Intellects?"

  "What about it?" He looked as though he had no possible interest in the Council of Intellects—even though the bustle that was going on all around us, with new structures being erected, was all to mark McAndrew's elevation to the Council.

  "Look, just yesterday we agreed that the work you're interested in here must have originated with the Council. You told me you hadn't met one person who knew anything worth discussing. Are you telling me now that this work on the vacuum energy doesn't come from the people on the Council?"

  "I'm sure it doesn't. I doubted that even before I met Wicklund, up there in the tower." McAndrew was looking at me impatiently, "Jeanie, if that's the impression I gave, it's not what I meant. A thing like this is almost always the work of a single person. It's not initiated by a group, even though a group may help to apply it to p
ractice. This work, the vacuum color work, that's all Wicklund—the Council knows nothing of it."

  "So what does the Council do? I hope you haven't forgotten that you're going to join it later today. I don't think Kleeman would take it well if you said you wanted to change your mind."

  He waved an impatient arm at me. "Now, Jeanie, you know I've no time for that. The Council of Intellects is some sort of guiding and advising group, and I'm willing to serve on it and do what I can for the Ark. But not now. I have to get back over to Wicklund and sort out some of the real details. Did I mention that I've explained all about the drive to him? He mops up new material like a sponge. If we can get him back to the Institute he'll catch up on fifty years of system science development in a few months. You know, I'd better go and talk to Kleeman about this council of hers. What's the use of calling it a Council of Intellects, when people like Wicklund are not on it? And I'll have to tell her we want to take him back with us. I've already mentioned it to him. He's interested, but he's a bit scared of the idea. This is home to him, the only place he knows. Here, is that Kleeman over there by the scaffolding? I'd better catch her now."

  He was up and out of his seat before I could stop him. He hurried over to her, took her to one side and began to speak to her urgently. He was gesturing and cracking his finger joints, in the way that he always did when he was wound up on something. As I moved to join them I could see Kleeman's expression changing from a friendly interest to a solid determination.

  "We can't change things now, McAndrew," she was saying. "The departing member has already been removed from the Council. It is imperative that the replacement be installed as soon as possible. That ceremony must take place tonight."

  "But I want to continue my meetings with—"

  "The ceremony will take place tonight. Don't you understand? The Council cannot function without all twelve members. I cannot discuss this further. There is nothing to discuss."

  She turned and walked away. Just as well, McAndrew was all set to tell her that he was not about to join her precious council, and he was planning to leave the Ark without fathering hundreds, scores, or even ones of children. And he was taking one of her colonists—her subjects—with him. I took his arm firmly and dragged him back to our table.