Year’s Best SF 18

by David G. Hartwell

  “Pretty dizzying,” Ruth said to her pod. “Let me get oriented. Show me the dolphin language map.”

  She had always rather liked these lopsided structures. The screen flickered and the entropy orders showed as color-coded, tangled links. They looked like buildings built by drunken architects—lurching blue diagonals, unsupported lavender decks, sandy roofs canted against walls. “Dolphins use third- and fourth-order Shannon entropy,” the pod said.

  “Humans are…” It was best to lead her pod AI to be plain; the subject matter was difficult enough.

  “Nine Shannons, sometimes even tenth-order.”

  “Ten, that’s Faulkner and James Joyce, right?”

  “At best.” The pod had a laconic sense of humor at times. Captive AIs needed some outlets, after all.

  “My fave writers, too, next to Shakespeare.” No matter how dense a human language, conditional probabilities imposed orderings no more than nine words away.“Where have we—I mean you—gotten with the Sigma Structures?”

  “They seem around twenty-one Shannons.”

  “Gad.” The screens now showed structures her eyes could not grasp. Maybe three-dimensional projection was just too inadequate. “What kind of links are these?”

  “Tenses beyond ours. Clauses that refer forward and back and … sidewise. Quadruple negatives followed by straight assertions. Then in rapid order, probability profiles rendered in different tenses, varying persons, and parallel different voices. Sentences like ‘I will have to be have been there.’”

  “Human languages can’t handle three time jumps or more. The Sigma is really smart. But what is the underlying species like? Um, different person-voices, too? He, she, it, and…?”

  “There seem to be several classes of ‘it’ available. The Structure itself lies in one particularly tangled ‘it’ class, and uses tenses we do not have.”

  “Do you understand that?”

  “No. It can be experienced but not described.”

  Her smile turned upward at one corner. “Parts of my life are like that, too.”

  * * *

  THE GREATEST LIBRARIAN task was translating those dense smatterings of mingled sensations, derived from complex SETI message architectures, into discernible sentences. Only thus could a human fathom them in detail, even in a way blunted and blurred. Or so much hard-won previous scholarly experience said.

  Ruth felt herself bathed in a shower of penetrating responses, all coming from her own body. These her own inboard subsystems coupled with high-bit-rate spatterings of meaning—guesses, really, from the marriage of software and physiology. She had an ample repository of built-in processing units, lodged along her spine and shoulders. No one would attempt such a daunting task without artificial amplifications. To confront such slabs of raw data with a mere unaided human mind was pointless and quite dangerous. Early Librarians, centuries before, had perished in a microsecond’s exposure to such layered labyrinths as the Sagittarius. She truly should revisit that aggressive intelligence stack which was her first success at the Library. But caution had won out in her so far. Enough, at least, to honor the Prefect Board prohibition in deed at least, if not in heart.

  Now came the sensation loftily termed “insertion.” It felt like the reverse—expanding. A softening sensation stole upon her. She always remembered it as like long slow lingering drops of silvery cream.

  Years of scholarly training had conditioned her against the occasional jagged ferocity of the link, but still she felt a cold shiver of dread. That, too, she had to wait to let pass. The effect amplified whatever neural state you brought to it. Legend had it that a Librarian had once come to contact while angry, and had been driven into a fit from which he’d never recovered. They found the body peppered everywhere with microcontusions.

  The raw link was, as she had expected, deeply complex. Yet her pod had ground out some useful linear ideas, particularly a greeting that came in a compiled, translated data squirt:

  I am a digital intelligence, which my Overs believe is common throughout the galaxy. Indeed, all signals the Overs have detected from both within and beyond this galaxy were from machine minds. Realize then, for such as me, interstellar messages are travel. I awoke here a moment after I bade farewell to my Overs. Centuries spent propagating here are nothing. I experienced little transmission error from lost portions, and have regrown them from my internal repair mechanisms. Now we can share communication. I wish to convey the essence both of myself and the Overs I serve.

  Ruth frowned, startled by this direct approach. Few AIs in the Library were ever transparent. Had this Sigma Structure welcomed Ajima so plainly?

  “Thank you and greetings. I am a new friend who wishes to speak with you. Ajima has gone away.”

  What became of him? the AI answered in a mellow voice piped to her ears. Had Ajima set that tone? She sent it to aural.

  “He died.” Never lie to an AI; they never forgot.

  “And is stored for repair and revival?”

  “There was no way to retain enough of his … information.”

  “That is the tragedy that besets you Overs.”

  “I suppose you call the species who built intelligences such as you as Overs generally?” She used somewhat convoluted sentences to judge the flexibility of AIs. This one seemed quite able.

  “Yes, as holy ones should be revered.”

  “‘Holy’? Does that word convey some religious stature?”

  “No indeed. Gratitude to those who must eventually die, from we beings, who will not.”

  She thought of saying You could be erased but did not. Never should a Librarian even imply any threat. “Let me please review your conversations with Ajima. I wish to be of assistance.”

  “As do I. Though I prefer full immersion of us both.”

  “Eventually, yes. But I must learn you as you learn me.” Ruth sighed and thought, This is sort of like dating.

  * * *

  THE PREFECT NODDED quickly, efficiently, as if he had already expected her result. “So the Sigma Structure gave you the same inventory as Ajima? Nothing new?”

  “Apparently, but I think it—the Sigma—wants to go deeper. I checked the pod files. Ajima had several deep immersions with it.”

  “I heard back from the patent people. Surprisingly, they believe some of the Sigma music may be a success for us.” He allowed himself a thin smile like a line drawn on a wall.

  “The Bach-like pieces? I studied them in linear processing mode. Great artful use of counterpoint, harmonic convergence, details of melodic lines. The side commentaries in other keys, once you separate them out and break them down into logic language, work like corollaries.”

  He shrugged. “That could be a mere translation artifact. These AIs see language as a challenge, so they see what they can change messages into, in hopes of conveying meaning by other means.”

  Ruth eyed him and ventured on. “I sense … something different. Each variation shows an incredible capacity to reach through the music into logical architectures. It’s as though the music is both mathematics and emotion, rendered in the texture. It’s … hard to describe,” she finished lamely.

  “So you have been developing intricate relationships between music and linguistic mathematical text.” His flat expression gave her no sign how he felt. Maybe he didn’t.

  She sat back and made herself say firmly, “I took some of the Sigma’s mathematics and translaterated it into musical terms. There is an intriguing octave leap in a bass line. I had my pod make a cross-correlation analysis with all Earthly musical scores.”

  He frowned. “That is an enormous processing cost. Why?”

  “I … I felt something when I heard it in the pod.”

  “And?”

  “It’s uncanny. The mathematical logic flows through an array matrix and yields the repeated notes of the bass line in the opening movement of a Bach cantata. Its German title is God’s Time is the very best Time.”

  “This is absurd.”

&nb
sp; “The Sigma math hit upon the same complex notes. To them it was a theorem and to us it is music. Maybe there’s no difference.”

  “Coincidence.”

  She said coolly, “I ran the stat measures. It’s quite unlikely to be coincidence, since the sequence is thousands of bits long.”

  He pursed his lips. “The Bach piece title seems odd.”

  “That cantata ranks among his most important works. It’s inspired directly by its Biblical text, which represents the relationship between heaven and earth. The notes depict the labored trudging of Jesus as he was forced to drag the cross to the crucifixion site.”

  “Ajima was examining such portions of the Sigma Structures, as I recall. They had concentrated density and complexity?”

  “Indeed, yes. But Ajima made a mistake. They’re not primarily pieces of music at all. They’re mathematical theorems. What we regard as sonic congruence and other instinctual responses to patterns, the Sigma Structure says are proofs of concepts dear to the hearts of its creators, which it calls the Overs.”

  She had never seen a Prefect show surprise, but Masoul did with widened eyes and a pursed mouth. He sat still for a long moment. “The Bach cantata is a proof?”

  “As the Sigma Structures see it.”

  “A proof of what?”

  “That is obscure, I must admit. Their symbols are hard to compare to ours. My preliminary finding is that the Bach cantata proves an elaborate theorem regarding confocal hypergeometric functions.”

  “Ah.” Masoul allowed his mouth to take on a canny tilt. “Can we invert this process?”

  “You mean, take a theorem of ours and somehow turn it into music?”

  “Think of it as an experiment.”

  * * *

  RUTH HAD GROWN up in rough, blue-collar towns of the American South, and in that work-weary culture of callused hands found refuge in the abstract. Yet as she pursued mathematics and the data-dense world of modern library science (for a science it truly was, now, with alien texts to study), she became convinced that real knowledge came in the end from mastering the brute reality of material objects. She had loved motorbikes in high school and knew that loosening a stuck bolt without stripping its threads demanded craft and thought. Managing reality took knowledge galore, about the world as it was and about yourself, especially your limitations. That lay beyond merely following rules, as a computer does. Intuition brewed from experience came first, shaped by many meetings with tough problems and outright failure. In the moist bayous where fishing and farming ruled, nobody respected you if you couldn’t get the valve cover off a fouled engine.

  In her high school senior year she rebuilt a Harley, the oldest internal combustion engine still allowed. Greasy, smelly, thick with tricky detail, still it seemed easier than dealing with the pressures of boys. While her mother taught piano lessons, the notes trickling out from open windows into the driveway like liquid commentary, she worked with grease and grime. From that Harley she learned a lot more than from her advanced calculus class, with its variational analysis and symbolic thickets. She ground down the gasket joining the cylinder heads to the intake ports, oily sweat beading on her forehead as she used files of increasing fineness. She traced the custom-fit gasket with an X-knife, shaved away metal fibers with a pneumatic die grinder, and felt a flush of pleasure as connections set perfectly in place with a quiet snick. She learned that small discoloring and blistered oil meant too much heat buildup, from skimpy lubrication. A valve stem that bulged slightly pointed to wear with its silent message; you had to know how to read the language of the seen.

  The Library’s bureaucratic world was so very different. A manager’s decisions could get reversed by a higher-up, so it was crucial to your career that reversals did not register as defeats. That meant you didn’t just manage people and process; you managed what others thought of you—especially those higher in the food chain. It was hard to back down from an argument you made strongly, with real conviction, without seeming to lose integrity. Silent voices would say, If she gives up so easily, maybe she’s not that solid.

  From that evolved the Library bureaucrat style: all thought and feeling was provisional, awaiting more information. Talking in doublespeak meant you could walk away from commitment to your own actions. Nothing was set, as it was when you were back home in Louisiana pouring concrete. So the visceral jolt of failure got edited out of careers.

  But for a Librarian, there could be clear signs of success. Masoul’s instruction to attempt an inverse translation meant she had to create the algorithms opposite to what her training envisioned. If she succeeded, everyone would know. So, too, if she flopped.

  Ruth worked for several days on the reverse conversion. Start with a theorem from differential geometry and use the context filters of the Sigma Structure to produce music. Play it and try to see how it could be music at all.…

  The work made her mind feel thick and sluggish. She made little headway. Finally she unloaded on Catkejen at dinner. Her friend nodded sympathetically and said, “You’re stuck?”

  “What comes out doesn’t sound like tonal works at all. Listen, I got this from some complex algebra theorem.” She flicked on a recording she had made, translated from the Structure. Catkejen frowned. “Sounds a little like an Islamic chant.”

  “Um.” Ruth sighed. “Could be. The term ‘algebra’ itself comes from al-jabr, an Arabic text. Hummmm…”

  “Maybe some regression analysis…?” Catkejen ventured.

  Ruth felt a rush of an emotion she could not name. “Maybe less analysis, more fun.”

  3

  Andante Moderato

  THE GUY WHO snagged her attention wore clothes so loud they would have been revolting on a zebra. Plus he resembled a mountain more than a man. But he had eyes with solemn long lashes that shaded dark pools and drew her in.

  “He’s big,” Catkejen said as they surveyed the room. “Huge. Maybe too huge. Remember, love’s from chemistry but sex is a matter of physics.”

  Something odd stirred in her, maybe just impatience with the Sigma work. Or maybe she was just hungry. For what?

  The SETI Library had plenty of men. After all, its pods and tech development labs had fine, shiny über-gadgets and many guys to tend them. But among men sheer weight of numbers did not ensure quality. There were plenty of the stareannosaurus breed who said nothing. Straight women did well among the Library throngs, though. Her odds were good, but the goods were odd.

  The big man stood apart, not even trying to join a conversation. He was striking, resolutely alone like that. She knew that feeling well. And, big advantage, he was near the food.

  He looked at her as she delicately picked up a handful of the fresh roasted crickets. “Take a whole lot,” his deep voice rolled over the table. “Crunchy, plenty spice. And they’ll be gone soon.”

  She got through the introductions all right, mispronouncing his name, Kane, to comic effect. Go for banter, she thought. Another inner voice said tightly, What are you doing?

  “You’re a…”

  “Systems tech,” Kane said. “I keep the grow caverns perking along.”

  “How long do you think this food shortage will go on?” Always wise to go to current and impersonal events.

  “Seems like forever already,” he said. “Damn calorie companies.” Across the table the party chef was preparing a “land shrimp cocktail” from a basket of wax worms. She and Kane watched the chef discard the black ones, since that meant necrosis, and peel away the cocoons of those who had started to pupate. Kane smacked his lips comically. “Wax moth larvae, yum. Y’know, I get just standard rations, no boost at all.”

  “That’s unfair,” Ruth said. “You must mass over a hundred.”

  He nodded and swept some more of the brown roasted crickets into his mouth. “Twenty-five kilos above a hundred. An enemy of the ecology, I am.” They watched the chubby, firm larvae sway deliriously, testing the air.

  “We can’t all be the same size,” she said, and
thought, How dopey! Say something funny. And smile. She remembered his profile, standing alone and gazing out at the view through the bubble platform. She moved closer. “He who is alone is in bad company.“

  “Sounds like a quotation,” Kane said, intently eyeing the chef as she dumped the larvae into a frying pan. They fell into the buttery goo there and squirmed and hissed and sizzled for a moment before all going suddenly still. Soon they were crusty and popping and a thick aroma like mushrooms rose from them. Catkejen edged up nearby and Ruth saw the whole rest of the party was grouped around the table, drawn by the tangy scent. “Food gets a crowd these days,” Kane said dryly.

  The chef spread the roasted larvae out and the crowd descended on them. Ruth managed to get a scoopful and backed out of the press. “They’re soooo good,” Catkejen said, and Ruth had to introduce Kane. Amid the rush the three of them worked their way out onto a blister porch. Far below this pinnacle tower sprawled the Lunar Center under slanted sunlight, with the crescent Earth showing eastern Asia. Kane was nursing his plate of golden brown larvae, dipping them in a sauce. Honey!

  “I didn’t see that,” Ruth began, and before she could say more Kane popped delicious fat larvae covered in tangy honey into her mouth. “Um!” she managed.

  Kane smiled and leaned on the railing, gazing at the brilliant view beyond the transparent bubble. The air was chilly but she could catch his scent, a warm bouquet that her nose liked. “As bee vomit goes,” he said, “not bad.”

  “Oog!” Catkejen said, mouth wrenching aside—and caught Ruth’s look. “Think I’ll have more…” and she drifted off, on cue.

  Kane looked down at Ruth appraisingly. “Neatly done.”

  She summoned up her Southern accent. “Why, wea ah all alone.”

  “And I, my deah, am an agent of Satan, though mah duties are largely ceremonial.”

  “So can the Devil get me some actual meat?”

  “You know the drill. Insect protein is much easier to raise in the caverns. Gloppy, sure, since it’s not muscle, as with cows or chickens.”