Blish,James - Midsummer Century
Page 9
memory and its computational functions were locked up inaccessibly in the now cold hardware. He had no source of information but that inexplicable trickle of remaining power which seemed to come from somewhere inside himself .
and the demands of maintaining the interference zone were mounting exponentially. The critical limit would be reached in under an hour—after which Martels and machine together would be effectively dead. The alternative was to drop the zone, which would make both Martels and machine the Qvant’s creatures; for in that split second of his resistance Martels had discovered that the cyclic process in the computer which he had usurped had been shaped to receive the Qvant, who would make a much better fit.
In desperation, he groped inward toward that problematical trickle of power. It was a terrifying pathway to follow, for the stronger the power-flow felt, the more his mind seemed to verge upon something like deep hypnosis. Yet the closer he came to it, the more alert he felt; it was as though he were paying more and more attention to fewer and fewer things, so that at the heart of the mystery he would paradoxically be totally intent upon nothing at all.
The curve of such a relationship formed automatically in his mind, its points defined by the outer corners of successive, changing rectangles. The diagonals through these points met at the origin; and their extremities formed 900 of a circle. The edge of that circle stood for the maximal state of awareness to the maximal number of things, but 1800 of it encompassed input from the outside world; the rest was reserved for interior input—meditation, sleep, and dream. REM dreams were on the outside of the wheel, dreamlessness at the center; as in the wide-awake world, the rim was the Zen state, and the origin was the void of mystical experience, zero attention to zero things.
But this was not the end. While he watched in wonder-
ment, the great wheel turned on its side and became a disc, bearing the same four diagrams, but whose parameters now were degrees of certainty versus emotional affect. The zero point here, too, was a mystical state, but it could be either total joy or total despair—either a Height or a Dark Night of the soul. The model, he saw now, was spherical; it was a model of the structure of the computer itself. It was a model of the sentient universe, at the heart of which lay the primary pulse of life—
—and a core of absolute passivity. Almost too late, he scattered himself and fled outward toward the skin of the sphere, the zone of interference. Infinity, rest, and certitude pleaded with him as he fled, but they could wait; they were realms of contemplation and dream; he had, for the moment, other business.
As he raced outward, the power fell toward the critical limit. Other far more practical questions also had to be answered, and fast. Since the transistorized devices of his own ancient time had needed no warm-up time, it seemed highly unlikely that the computer did, either. A quick interior scan of its sparse and simple circuitry showed this to be the case, and also located the command mechanism for the print-out.
Everything depended now on whether the Qvant had been able to keep his attack going continuously, or whether he was now waiting alertly for the shield to be dropped before resuming. Martels would just have to take that chance; the Qvant was far faster than he was, but the machine was faster than both. In either case he would have no chance to put his new-found knowledge of Inner Space to use— good old Yank shoot-’em-up tactics were what were needed here. They might, also, have the element of surprise on their side. If not, he had had it, and Bob’s your uncle.
Hovering tensely around the circuitry, he let the screen fall. The computer sprang to instant life, and Martels shot
an eight-character burst through the print-out line. He didn’t have time to determine whether the slave machine responded, let alone to what end; clawing and stabbing like a whirlwind of knives, the Autarch homed on the place within the master mechanism which had been prepared for him, and had been denied him for unknown centuries.
Then the blocking zone was back, and the computer was once more dark and lifeless except for the blind and deaf consciousness of Martels. The entropy timer wore the fractional seconds away. How long would it take the Antarcticans to respond—if they did, and if the Qvant had not been able to prevent them? What Martels had sent had been: STUN TLAM. That card—the Qvant’s abnormal sensitivity to physical pain—had been the only one he had had to play.
Whatever had happened out there, Martels had only the same amount of time available as before, or less—whatever it took the computer this time to lose power down to the critical limit. The brief surge of outside power had not been stored; Martels had used it up in driving the print-out.
And the time was up. He dropped the shield once more. Nothing but light sprang in upon him. Puzzled but alert, the three Antarcticans were standing over the sprawled body of the tribesman. They had gotten the message.
“Anesthetize him quickly, and keep him that way while we decide what else to do,” Martels said quickly, viva voce. “I was wrong; the Qvant is fully present in his brain, not in the case at Rawson at alL As long as he is conscious he will continue trying to reoccupy the computer, and I can’t keep him out without shutting the machine down completely. If you don’t want that, or want him back either, you’d better put him on ice.”
Lanest jerked his thumb toward the door in a gesture that had defied twenty-three thousand years. Robels and Anble picked Tlam up, their forearms under his, and dragged him
out. As the door closed behind them, Lanest sat down at the carrel. His expression was still very wary.
“I am not sure that you represent any improvement over the Qvant,” he said. “You seem to be both ignorant and clumsy.”
“I am both, admittedly, but I’m learning fast. What kind of improvement are you looking for? If you just want your computer back, I won’t allow it; you must choose between me and the Qvant. Why did you shut him out, anyhow? The machine was clearly made for him to use—I’ll probably never be able to run it one tenth so well.”
Lanest looked far from sure that he wanted to answer this, but finally seemed to come to the conclusion that he had little choice. “We did not in fact want to shut him out, and did so only with great reluctance. As you note, he and the computer are suited to each other, and the machine has not been at peak efficiency since. The original intention was that the two together should act as a repository of knowledge until such time as the men of Rebirth Four could make use of it again; and that the Museum should be placed far enough out in the jungles to allow the men access to it, and to the Qvant, when they were ready. The Qvant had been bred to be a leader, and the assumption was that when the time came, he would indeed lead.
“Instead, the access which the computer gave him to the juganetic Pathways became a trap luring him into increasing passivity. I seriously doubt that you are equipped to understand the process, but for most mortal men, there is a level of certainty which they hold to be ‘reality’ all their lives. A very few men are jolted out of this state by contact with something disturbing—a personal tragedy, discovery of telepathic ability, a visitation by an ancestor, or any of hundreds of other possible shocks to their metaphysics. The loss is irreversible, and the transition from one certainty level to
another is cloudily spoken of as ‘divine discontent,’ ‘immortal yearnings,’ and so on. Does this convey any meaning to you at all?”
“As a matter of fact,” Martels said, “I can even place it on a qualitative chart I’ve begun to evolve, around which the computer seems to be built.”
“Quite so—the computer is a Type of the universal sentient situation. Then I will be briefer about the remaining stages; there are eight in all—orientation, reality loss, concentration, meditation, contemplation, the void, re-emergence, re-stabilization. The Qvant became so immersed in this mental pilgrimage that he lost all interest in leadership, allowed the Birds to evolve and develop without any interference, and eventually began to impede many of our own practical, day-to-day uses of the computer.
> “There are two levels of the M state, the fourth stage. When the Qvant definitively entered the deeper of the two, we judged it wise to sever his connection with the computer entirely. From there, a descent into the V state was inevitable, and we had, and have, no way of predicting what his wishes would be when he emerged. He might well have been actively on the side of the Birds—such reversals are far from uncommon, and as you probably have learned, the Qvant would be a uniquely dangerous enemy.”
“The traitor Is more dangerous than a regiment of enemy soldiers,” Martels agreed. “What you tell me agree completely with my own observations. The Qvant must have been just about to enter the V state when my arrival jolted him backwards one step. Now he is mobilized against all of us.”
“And your’
“I don’t understand the question,” Martels said.
“On which side are you?”
“That should be self-evident. I came here for help; I won’t get It by taking the side of the Qvant, and certainly I
won’t get it from the Birds. You will have to trust me— and keep the Qvant, and the tribesman, unconscious until we decide what is to be clone about that problem. I have no immediate solution.”
“For what do you have a solution?” Lanest demanded in an iron voice. “For practical use of the computer, you will be even more in the way than the Qvant was when we cut him off from it. Unless you have some concrete plan for immediate action against the Birds, we will be better off without you.”
“You can’t get rid of me, Lanest. Unlike the Qvant, I’m not just connected to the computer by a line that you could cut. I’m in it.”
Lanest smiled, as humorlessly as a wolf. “Computer, know thyself,” he said.
Martels looked inward. The necessary knowledge sprang immediately and obediently to his attention, and he studied it with mounting dismay. Lanest did indeed have the whip hand. He had only to kill Tlam/Qvant and wait long enough for the Autarch’s ghost to dwindle into powerlessness; then, he could expunge Martels from the machine with a simple blast of raw power, as though performing the equivalent of a lobectomy. Martels could re-erect the interference zone against this, to be sure, but he could not maintain it forever; the best that could be hoped from that was a stalemate maintained by constant alertness. .
And sooner or later, probably far sooner than the Qvant had, Martels too would find himself drawn down the juganetic Pathways, one of which he had already traversed almost to disaster. Thereafter, the Antarcticans would be rid of both bothersome intelligences, and would have their mindless, obedient computer back.
That would do them no good in the long run, of course— but unless Martels could offer some strategy against the Birds,
he would not be around to say “I told you so.” He would be only one more of those fading nexi of fruitless regrets which he had encountered during the few seconds between Tlam’s body and the computer when he had been authentically dead.
“I see the problem,” he said. “Very well, Lanest—I’ll make you a deal.”
In the brain-case in the Museum at Rawson, years passed by . . . ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years passed by, until Martels began to believe that he had gotten lost.
There were occasional distractions. The humming, almost somnambulistic presence of the Qvant was no longer with him, to be sure; the Antarcticans had taken literally Martels’ order that the tribesman be put on ice, and Tlam and the Autarch alike were now in frozen suspended animation. The computer was back in full use, and its line to the brain-case re-established, so that Martels was able to participate at any time he liked in the machine’s ordinary problem-solving chores, and to talk to the succeeding generations of the men who tended it far to the South. It was interesting, too, to see that the Antarcticans did not age very much; Anble’s granddaughter now sat at the carrel, but Anble herself still looked in upon occasion, old but not entirely without vigor. Lanest was still alive as well, although feeble.
But the chore of organizing the tribesmen—the same one that Martels had proposed so long ago to a scornful Qvant
—was very slow. It took two decades simply to spread the word among the tribes that the brain-case was speaking again, and another to convince them (for Tlam’s misadventure and exile was now a legend, reinforced by his failure to leave
behind even a trace of a ghost) that it was safe to approach, and had gone back to being helpful. By then, too, Martels had almost forgotten the Qvant’s customary way of speaking in parables and mantras, which was still the only kind of advice the tribesmen knew how to understand.
It had turned out, too, that there were two other cities in the world which were still both occupied by the remnants of Rebirth III and had some energy resources that might be called upon. Both were small, and both in what had been South America—all the rest of the world was the property of the Birds—and integrating them into the network and the Plan did not provide more than a few years of attention. As the decades wore on, Martels was increasingly tempted inward along the Pathways, further seduced by the availability of the powerful Type or model of that Platonic original of all sentience which the computer represented. The computer was a chip off the living monobloc, and tended constantly toward reunion with it, dragging Martels after in its wake.
Then the blow fell. The Birds could not have timed their attack better. Like the Qvant before him, Martels was already drifting, in hypnotized fascination, into the late M state, helped by the diagrams in which the Type presented itself to him. By the time he was shocked back toward the A state which was as close as he would ever come, now, to his ancient conception of reality, the sky was blackly aswarm, the two subsidiary Rebirth III cities had fallen after only a brief struggle, and the ghosts of the tribesmen of Rebirth IV were dwindling wailing away toward the Origin in tormented and useless hordes. Crude bombs and torpedoes, planted by no one knew what malign swimming descendants of the comic pengums of Martels’ era, cut off all communication between Antarctica and its few outposts among the islands at the tip of the continent; others fell from the claws of squadrons of albatross-
like creatures who sailed the winds far better than any man had ever managed.
But in the long run, human planning proved better. The line from the computer to the brain-case remained uncut while Martels belatedly reorganized his forces. Powered aircraft retaliated; and from a laboratory buried, unsuspected, in the Land of Fire, back-bred and mindless ancestral versions of the birds of Martels’ age were loosed carrying a plague, as human Australians once had planted the virus of myxomatosis among swarming rabbits.
The Birds began to come down out of the sky like dead rain. Their last attack was savage beyond belief, but it was ultimately hopeless, for at this point the line between the computer and the brain-case was again closed down, leaving the intelligence of Martels now as free-floating and dirigible as the Qvant’s had ever been. Backed by two substrates and amplified by their total energy resources, he entered and confounded the mind of the reigning King of the Birds. The attack became a complete rout.
By the time the midsummer century was over, the Birds’ last chance was gone. Their organization was smashed, their nascent technologies in ruins, their very hope of using juganity against man now but a fading dream. The glaciers could now be depended upon to end them as any kind of threat.
Man was on the way back up. Rebirth V had begun.
Martels presented his bill. They called Lanest, old as he was, to try to cheat him out of it.
“There is no question but that we can send you back home, if you still wish it,” the ancient, quavering voice told the microphone on the carrel. “The matter has been much studied, with the computer, while you were cut off from it recently. But consider: We have confidence in you now, and believe you to be a far better intelligence for the inhabitance
of the computer than we can trust the Qvant to be. Should you leave us, furthermore, we would feel obliged either to revive the Qvant or to murder him, and neit
her course is palatable to us. We petition you to remain with us.”
Martels searched the computer’s memory, a process that took only a second, but which gave him a lot to think about; it remained true that computation can be almost instantaneous, but real human thought requires finite time.
“I see. The situation is that you can return me to the moment before I slipped and fell into my absurd telescope. And it would appear that I will carry all my knowledge back with me—and will not, after all, slip when the moment comes. Is this your understanding, Lanest?”
“In part,” Lanest said, almost in a whisper. “There is more.”
“I see that there is more. I wanted to see if you would honestly tell me so. I tell you that I would welcome this; I have had more than enough strife. But explain the rest of the situation, as you understand it.”
“It is . . . it is that your additional knowledge will last only a split second. We do not have the power to send you back, to save you your accident, and maintain in you all you have learned, all at the same time; there is a paradox in the world lines here which we cannot overturn. Once you have not fallen, the knowledge will vanish. And more: You will never come to our century, and all the gains you have made possible will be wiped out.”
“In my century,” Martels said grimly, “I would have called that blackmail. Emotional blackmail only, to be sure, but blackmail, nonetheless.”
“We do not intend it as such,” Lanest whispered. “We are wholly willing, in any case, to pay the price, whatever your decision. But we believe that no intervention out of time can make a permanent alteration in the world lines. Should you go . . . home . . . then the illusion of change