Christopher’s questions pointed back toward the Project, and he could only think of one person there who might be both able and willing to answer them.
As soon as he cleared the Bonneville flight control zone, Christopher gunned the Avanti and pointed it skyward.
“Lila?”
“Yes, Christopher?”
“Would you see if you can get through to Daniel Keith at AT-Houston?”
“Secure or direct?”
Christopher considered. “You still know some of your routing tricks?”
“Yes, Christopher.”
“Secure.”
“Calls into Allied Transcon should be assumed to be monitored. A voice-only connection should be untraceable for three minutes.”
“Do your best. Put it through.”
It took but a second for the green bar on the dash to glow. “Keith,” said a voice.
“Daniel, this is Chris.”
An ominously long silence followed. “I don’t think I can talk to you, Chris.”
“I’ll call you later, then. At home.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I think you know.”
Christopher had been half prepared for this. “Daniel, you have to know that whatever they’re saying about me is a lie.”
“Then why did you resign?”
“Who says I did?”
“Chris, Loi called me last night, worried about you. She asked me if I knew where you were.”
“Why didn’t she call me?”
“She did. You’re off-net. The call just came back to the house,” Keith said.
Christopher looked at his bare wrist dumbly. “I lost my band.” Lange or the sentries must have taken it from him, but he had no memory of that.
“Doesn’t matter. The point is, I asked a few people a few questions, as a favor. My curiosity wasn’t exactly rewarded.”
“Damn it, Daniel, corpsec murdered my father.”
Another long silence. “I can’t discuss that,” Keith said finally.
It was such a surprising answer that Christopher’s mental wheels stalled as he tried to embrace it. “I need to see you.”
“I’m sorry,” Keith said curtly. “I can’t help. Call Loi, will you? She deserves better.”
Calling Loi was a duty which had tugged at him more than once since Dryke and his people had left the ridge. Something had always intervened—most often the sobering finality of being severed from his life in Houston, paired with the stark futility of trying to reclaim any part of it. Thinking about Kenning House only evoked feelings of helplessness and rootlessness. He wanted to go home too much to be able to admit to Loi—even to himself—that he could not.
Instead, he called Skylink Customer Service and changed his residence pointer to the Avanti, which had a comsole almost as powerful as the one in Houston. The next distraction was replacing his personal phone—now that he had noted its absence, he felt naked without it.
Lila steered him to an executive supplies retailer in one of Portland’s older mail-malls, who offered him a Brazilian-made four-channel wrist phone at Pacific Land Management’s customary generous discount. Outside in the car, he completed the process, initializing the phone with his account number and checking that his directory was intact. When the confirming message came back on the bounce, his last excuse was gone.
“Lila—Skylink is owned by Tetsu Communications?”
“That’s correct.”
“Which is a corporate sibling to Takara Construction, Allied’s primary contractor for Memphis.”
“Yes. Both are subsidiaries of Kiku Heavy Industries, Ltd., a Tokyo-based private stock corporation.”
“How hard is it for Skylink to listen in on the traffic that they’re carrying?”
“It is quite easy, Christopher. Mr. McCutcheon used it only as a last resort, and always with encryption,” Lila said. “If you need to send a message, I can handle it more safely.”
“That’s all right,” Christopher said. “I just wondered.” He touched his phone, and the command bar glowed. “Message to Loi Lindholm. Hold to end, then send,” he said, then paused. “Begin.”
“Hello, Loi. This is Chris.” His heart was racing, even though he did not have to fear her response. “Daniel said that you were worried,” he said, speaking slowly. “I’m sorry. I— these last few days have been the hardest days of my life. Allied’s thrown me out. They think I’m a security risk. And my father—” The tightness threatened to return, and Christopher found other, safer words. “I’m staying at my father’s for a while. I need to figure out what to do.
“I miss you. I wish to God I could come home.” He swallowed hard. “End of message.”
The delivery acknowledgment came back on the bounce.
“Well, Lila—do you know anywhere I can buy a life transplant, cheap?”
“I’m sorry, Christopher. I do not.”
He sighed and squeezed the throttle. The Avanti edged forward. “Then I guess I’ll just come on back to the house.”
For no good reason he could divine, only twice during the drive did he think about crashing the car at full throttle into an approaching ridge.
Curled up on the couch in front of the high-D TV, propped up by pillows and a flask of Puerto Rican rum, Christopher let the sounds and images wash over him.
The TV came up with a pop station out of Los Angeles preselected. But he made no effort to search through the channels, for he was no more interested in one offering than another. He was escaping, and he knew it—and it hardly mattered where he escaped to, so long as he got away.
So a chat show on lesbian incest, with a bioethicist, a Catholic Reform priest, and the national director of Family Love dueling at close quarters, was as good a diversion—no better, no worse— as the seven thousandth rerun of a medical comedy. He remained a passive observer of both, asking no questions and voicing no opinions during the former, declining his part as a heavily bandaged patient in the latter.
He was feeling a bit more participatory during a half-hour pitch for the Because You’re a Woman diet, drawing gargoyle faces on the men and undrawing the clothing of the women. Even the insanity of Denali Devil’s Downhill amused him, at least until a grinning Irish skier missed a gate at the seventeen-thousand-foot level and fell off the mountain at what the announcer straight-facedly called a “high terminal velocity.”
Emboldened by liquor and pity, Christopher risked a glimpse at Current Events, morbidly curious about what they were saying now about him, about Malena Graham, about Jeremiah. He was almost disappointed to find that Current Events wasn’t saying anything at all—not so many as five of the nine hundred stories in the Current Events stack had anything to do with the Diaspora.
Displacing them was a juicy drama—the collapse, just after midnight, of a centuries-old room and pillar salt mine a thousand feet under the trendy Melvindale section of Detroit. Sixteen square blocks had subsided ten meters in a jolt, dropping short-stack condos into their own basements and folding a crowded spin club flat.
One hundred sixty-three were known dead, and at least six hundred were missing, including the Detroit city manager, a noted poet, and three members of the Detroit Pistons basketball team. What’s more, officials feared that the collapse had burst thousands of containers of colloidized hazardous waste stored in the mine in the 1990s. The Archbishop of Detroit, with wages-of-sin solemnity, called it God’s warning to Sodom.
Death in the night, earthquakelike devastation, holiday-season tragedy, toxic poisons, missing celebrities, government neglect, holy vengeance—it was a news executive’s wet dream. Christopher watched the coverage with a rum-flavored bemusement, finding black humor in the absurdities of the event, the stupidities of the reporters.
Christopher’s mood had turned increasingly savage, cynical. It was already unpleasant sharing his mind with such thoughts, and promised to grow uglier still. He needed an escape from his escape. When it finally came, it was from a mo
st unexpected source.
“Christopher, are you awake?” Lila asked. On the TV, dancers writhed to a backbeat.
“Sorry to say.”
“Daniel Keith is calling.”
He looked dumbly at his band. “My phone didn’t ring.”
“It’s a station call to the house, Christopher. Shall I put it up for you?”
Christopher uncrossed his legs and pulled himself closer to vertical. “Sure.”
Keith’s face came up in a box on the TV. “Hello, Chris.”
“Hello yourself.” He shook his head, mostly to clear it. “Surprise, surprise. After this morning—”
“Yeah. I didn’t want to be that short. But I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t even tell you that I couldn’t. Not till I could get out of the complex.”
“You home now?”
“No. Look, Chris, the hair on my neck is standing up just being on the line with you. There’s been a lot of talk around here the last day or two, very strange stuff, none of it official. I didn’t know how much of it to believe. I guess you told me. Your father was Jeremiah?”
“So I’m supposed to believe. I swear I didn’t know.”
Keith nodded. “I might be the only one in the center who’d believe that,” he said slowly.
“I need some answers, Daniel.”
“You want some wisdom? Don’t ask the questions.”
“My father left notes that have me confused. I have to know if what he believed was true.”
“Why?” It was a cautionary, challenging question. Why do you have to know? Are you sure you want to know?
“So I can let go of it. So it’ll let go of me. Will you meet me somewhere?”
Keith frowned and looked away momentarily. “Are you coming back to Houston?”
“I can’t,” Christopher said. “Meet me in Portland. No, better, San Francisco.”
“I’ve got no reason to come west. And I need a reason. A good reason. There’s a limit to how much of a friend I can be to you now. I’m sorry. That’s just the fact.”
“I know. Where, then?”
Keith was silent for a time. “I think I’m going to go up to Chicago and visit my parents when we finally get cleared to leave. Nobody around here’s gotten their winter holiday yet.”
“When?”
“Not tomorrow. Probably not till Friday.”
“I’ll be there Friday. Call me.”
“I don’t know,” Keith said, shaking his head.
“Please, Daniel. An hour. Half an hour.”
“Why do you think I can help?” He almost sounded angry.
“I went out to watch the salmon at Bonneville Dam this morning.”
“Oh? Were they helping each other?”
“I need to know why it’s happening. I need to know why we’re doing what we’re doing.”
Keith looked cross, distracted.
“Will you talk to me?”
“I don’t know,” Keith said. His tone hardened the words to a no.
Christopher chose to ignore the subtext. “Friday in Chicago. I’ll call you.”
“No,” said Keith, shaking his head. “Don’t. Maybe I’ll call you. I have to think about it. Let’s leave it at that.”
There was nothing to be gained by pushing him. “All right. We’ll leave it at that.”
“Thank you.” Eyes lowered, Keith looked as though he were unhappy with himself. “I don’t know why I called you this time.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“Sure. Chris—”
“Still here.”
Keith did not look up. “If you’ve got nothing better to do, you might ask DIANNA about von Neumann machines.”
He signed off before Christopher could reply.
CHAPTER 28
—GCC—
“Sweet promises were made.”
After months of working on and with the Memphis hyper, it was hard to go back to DIANNA. The sluggish query engine, the restricted cross-citations, the lack of original source texts were all painfully obvious to Christopher. But he was reluctant to use his father’s specialty accounts, and besides, Keith had pointed him specifically in that direction.
The name of Johann von Neumann was one with which Christopher had at least a passing acquaintance. In fact, it was hard to pass through any sort of technical education and not brush up against the Hungarian savant at one or more points.
In quantum theory, there was Neumann algebra with its critical analytical tools—rings of operators and continuous geometry. In economics, political science, and military strategy, von Neumann’s game theory and minimax theorem still held center stage. In theoretical mathematics, there was the von Neumann who solved Hilbert’s fifth problem and offered a persuasive proof of the ergodic hypothesis.
In computer science, von Neumann was there at the stone knives and bearskins beginning, introducing stored programs and advancing logical design in the ENIAC era. In meteorology, he anticipated the greenhouse effect in his studies of planetary heat balance. And in the history of technology, there was “Johnny” of the Manhattan Project, designing implosion lenses and solving hydrodynamic problems for Fat Man, the first plutonium bomb.
But the lead which Keith had given Christopher pointed in a different direction, to a comparatively unheralded collection of papers published a decade after von Neumann’s death. Theory of Self-reproducing Automata was a speculation on a daunting engineering challenge—the design and construction of a “universal constructor.”
Von Neumann envisioned the universal constructor as an advanced cybernetic device capable of making any sort of artifact, including a copy of itself, from the specifications programmed within it and the raw materials found without. The pattern of cross-citations showed his influence on his contemporaries.
But the citations which interested Christopher were not from von Neumann’s century, but from Christopher’s own. Fifty years ago, as the elements which would lead to the construction of Tigris were starting to reach critical mass, a weak countermovement arose.
The amorphous opposition had no coordinating focus, no political center, no activist arm. All it had was a unifying argument—presented philosophically by some advocates, pragmatically by others. The first starships should be von Neumann machines, they argued. A crewed starship was too expensive, too complex, too premature, too risky. Send machines first— ship-sized robot probes which would pave the way for starships to follow, or even take their place entirely.
Some called for a few complex “prospector” probes, which could collect and relay information which could shape later decisions. Others wanted many expendable “pathfinder” probes, which could gauge the dangers of such a journey. The most ambitious proposed “caretaker” probes, which could oversee the terraforming of one planet while dispatching their clones to do the same for other worlds.
The proposals varied, but the message was the same: Let machines be our eyes, our hands. Let them go in our stead.
Christopher saw that there had never been any real chance that the machines-first movement would carry the day. Human ambitions must be satisfied in human time frames, and none of those on the point were willing to step aside in favor of a machine or an heir. But, just as clearly, contained within this largely forgotten debate was the intellectual genesis of the Homeworld movement. It was their Federalist, their Das Kapital. The seeds of revolution.
There was a time Christopher would have welcomed the discovery. But now it was the answer to the wrong question. I need to know why we’re doing what we’re doing. Daniel must have misunderstood or been deliberately obtuse. It was not the answer he needed. In fact, it didn’t seem to be about the same thing at all.
At dusk Friday, they met on the Burnham Park levee, near the children’s playground at Thirty-third Street. Between the restless waves of Lake Michigan, the howling Chicago wind, and the screamers climbing out of Meigs Island just to the north, they had all the privacy they could ask for.
“Are you here to talk me
out of something, or are you ready to help me?” Christopher asked as they started off at a slow walk along the top of the concrete barrier, known locally as the Great Wall. With global warming, Lake Michigan had risen almost a meter in the last century, swallowing the city’s beaches and forcing construction of dikes all along the waterfront.
“Did you take my suggestion?”
“It wasn’t enough.”
Keith sighed, pushing his hands deeper into his coat pockets. “What do you want to know?”
“What are you really selecting for?” It came out in a half-shout as a commuter screamer passed overhead with a roar.
Shaking his head, Keith said, “We’re not doing the selecting. Not really.”
“Who is?”
They covered another thirty meters before Keith spoke. “There are a hundred thousand genes in a mammalian cell,” he said. “A hundred thousand genes, and enough unexpressed DNA between them for a hundred thousand more. Full of fragments, copies, oncogenes, nonsense sequences that code for no known proteins, programs for traits which haven’t been needed in ten million years. It’s where tails on babies and hind legs on whales come from. A chemical library that rivals the hyper. Not a bad analogy. The hyper is everything we know. The DNA is everything we are.”
“Not everything.”
“Everything. Why is one man addicted to alcohol and another never tempted by it? Look in his cells. It’s all there. All our weaknesses. All our predispositions. Biology is destiny, Christopher. Clinical depression? Homosexuality? Look in the cells. Genius? Madness? They’re there, too. An athlete’s muscles, a musician’s ears, the poet’s heart—just different little bits of clockwork chemistry. Love? A neurochemical cycle—runs about six and a half years. Ever hear of the seven-year itch?”
“I can’t argue physiology with you,” Christopher said. “But we’re learning from the first day we’re alive. That’s part of what we are, too.”
“Sure. But mostly we’re learning how to get what we want. You asked why we do what we do. I would have thought that was obvious. The meaning of life is to make new life. Nothing more. We just never understood the scale on which the drama was being played.”
The Quiet Pools Page 34