by David Brin
Lani smiled and started up the mech. He hung on in front as they moved down a long stretch of tunnel, watching the close, green-tinged walls warily.
Up at A Level the chamber scheduled to be the launcher factory gaped like an antediluvian tomb. The aft end of the sail tug Delsemme lay in the center, amid a scattering of unopened crates and machinery. Colored threads festooned the sides of the cargo vessel, giving it a faintly fuzzy outline. The cavern looked as if it had been abandoned for years. It was hard to imagine it humming with bright lights and activity—as it would have to if they were ever to get home again.
Carl’s friend, Jeffers… he’s been too busy to come up and look at this. I wonder if it would be a kindness not to tell him.
“Let’s give the place a zap on disruptor frequencies three, five, and ten,” he told Lani. “Then we’ll hurry through that inventory Betty wanted us to do up here.”
—Right, Saul.—Lani’s mech moved out under her delicate control. Soon a tiny series of clicks was accompanied by rising clouds from all over the chamber as the Hallivirens algoid blew apart under microwave disruption.
Saul pondered. If only treating the diseases were as simple. He took out a light pen and began scanning boxes, letting his Portable computer take inventory of the contents of the chamber.
—Saul,—Lani whispered. He turned from a scraping he had been taking, and saw that she was at the other end of the chamber pointing down one of the side passages. When he arrived where she was standing, his first reaction was one of quick combat adrenaline. For there was a telltale squirming ripple that told of purples, grazing on the gunk-lined fibersheath.
Then he saw something else. A hundred meters or so down, near one of the fungus-dimmed glow bulbs, an indistinct figure floated.
“Another deader?”
She shook her head.
—No. I… I think it’s Ingersoll!—
Saul cursed the scratchy, intermittent blurriness caused by the antihistamines. He peered down the tunnel. The dim figure was moving.
Ingersoll. Everyone simply assumed he was dead, by now. At first he thought the missing madman wore a green spacesuit tinted to match the growth-lined hallway. But then…
“What on Earth?” Stunned, he realized that the figure was not wearing clothing.
—That’s dried gunk he’s covered himself with! What’s he picking of the walls, Saul? What’s he doing?—
Fortunately, their suit helmets contained the sound of their voices. Saul tried to float closer quietly, using an awkward puff of his gas jet. “I think…”
The man must have heard something in the thin air. He whirled, and Saul saw that only his face was not coated by a thick layer of green, living growth. He cried out, eyes clouded with madness. Saul could make out only a few words.
“… Perfect!… Sweet, sweet, sweet an’ warm!… You’ll know, know, no, no, no!…”
It was hard to pay close attention when one saw what hung dripping from the man’s mouth… a purple bleeding mass.
Then in a sudden spin and kick, Ingersoll was gone. Lani and Saul could only stare after him, momentarily too stunned even to think of giving chase.
Finally, Lani broke the silence.
—Yuk,—she sent. Even through her suit he could see her shudder.
Saul nodded.
“Well, that’s one fate I’ll be spared. If it were me, I’d probably be allergic to the stuff.”
He touched Lani’s arm and winked at her. Finally she smiled.
Then Saul sneezed.
‘These damn antihistamines are wearing off again. Come on, Lani. Let’s mark this passage and go home.
With a backward glance down the purple-lined hallway, they turned and headed back, alone with their separate thoughts.
An hour later, they had looped around toward Central again and were approaching the worst area—the Border—where the warmth and air and moisture of human habitation most excited the comet forms. Lani was tuning the disruptor back to settings deadly to the purples, in case they had to fight their way through. Saul, though, felt his spirits rise. Beyond No Man’s Land, he knew, there was warmth, and food, and one special person waiting just for him.
His thoughts were a mix of shapes. The frankly sexual image of one of Virginia’s nipples, warm from his hand and stiffly erect. Her soft breath in his ear and the electronically enhanced tendril-touch of her emotions, channeled directly to his own…
And yet his mind kept drifting back to the little cells, multiplying in profusion, growing in mottled, many-hued hordes, forming cooperative macro organisms where no one with any common sense would have expected them to exist, let alone thrive.
There was a common chord to the images. A symphony of self-replicating chemistry… a young woman’s sexual flush, her deep currents of love, the surging tide of Comet Life, rising to meet waves of heat from a spring that came but once every seventy-six years…
Only indirectly, without malice, did the native forms wreak havoc on the visitors—killing them, and bringing retaliation in turn. Saul might have felt guilty over inventing weapons for such a war. But guilt would miss the point. Nothing we do here will set the Comet Life back. We are like the summer. And we, too, shall pass.
The speaker above Saul’s right ear crackled.
—Lintz, this is Osborn. You awake up there?—
Saul nodded. “Yes, Carl. What’s up?”
—There’s been some developments, Saul. Can you come to Shaft Four, K Level? I… We may need your help.—
“Oh? What’s happened?”
There was a pause.
—I want to talk to you privately, if possible.—
“Why’s that?” Saul frowned. “Is it something you can’t mention on a coded channel?”
There was another pause.
—No, not exactly. But… Well, I think I know where the missing slot tug is. I’m pretty sure I know what’s happened to the Newburn.—
Now it was Saul’s turn to stop, blink.
“We’re on our way in. Lintz, over and out.”
VIRGINIA
“JonVon,” she said pensively, “I can feel what you’re doing.”
HIGHLY UNLIKELY.
“No, really. There’s a tingling, a tickling.”
THE NUCLEAR MAGNETIC RESONANCE SCANNING PROCESS MOVES NOTHING. IT DOES NOT EVEN TOUCH YOUR SKIN.
“I can feel it.”
THERE ARE VERY FEW SENSORY RECEPTORS INSIDE THE SKULL.
“Well, something’s moving. Like fingers dancing on my scalp, only… deeper.” The sensation was unsettling, like tendrils lacing through her head. She stirred uneasily on the webbing. Only a thin buzzing came from the banks of equipment that ringed her.
THE MAGNETIC FIELD, PERHAPS.
“Can people feel magnetic fields?”
STRONG ONES, YES. I AM APPLYING 7.6 KILOGAUSS TO THE ZONE OF STUDY. UNIFORMITY ERROR IS LESS THAN ONE HUNDREDTH OF ONE PERCENT.
Just like the pedantic program—and she should know, she wrote it—to throw in an irrelevant detail.
Or maybe it wasn’t irrelevant. The tumbling of infinitesimal spinning electrons inside her skull demanded fine tuning of an order unusual even in research. She quelled the temptation to slide her eyes sideways to see the poles of the big superconducting magnet. Even that much movement would set up unwanted trembling in her head.
I AM ACCESSING THE LATEST DATA BASE ON HUMAN NMR. I WILL INVESTIGATE POSSIBLE UNANTICIPATED EFFECTS.
“Do. It itches inside my head.”
SEARCHING AND INTEGRATING NOW.
“Did Saul mention any effects?”
HE SUPPLIED SAFETY MCROS WHEN HE BROUGHT THIS NMR UNIT DOWN FROM MED CENTER, BUT STATED THAT USE WAS HARMLESS WHEN INSIDE THE INDICATED OPERATING RANGE.
“Ummm. Maybe I should’ve done this sedated.”
NONSENSE. I WOULD NOT WISH TO UNDERTAKE THIS TASK ALONE.
Just like me, she thought. Anxiety loves company.
THAT IS QUITE TRUE.
There was
virtually no difference now between JonVon’s grasp of her surface thoughts and her speech, since JonVon read both directly through the neural tap. Still, it felt different to her. Her mind processed the words in subtly different ways. The pre-speech processing center in her brain gave its own pacing to the phrases, feeding the words “forward’ in the unconscious cadence that made her own speaking style. When she thought without the subtle intention to speak, there often were no words at all. A quick. almost holographic perception of the idea shot through her. She wondered if JonVon could tell the difference.
OF COURSE.
“Of course,” she said/thought ruefully.
I DO NOT DETECT THIS TINGLING YOU MENTION. THOUGH OF COURSE I CAN PERCEIVE AN ECHO OF IT IN YOUR GENERAL STANDING WAVE PATTERNS, NOW THAT I KNOW WHAT TO LOOK FOR.
JonVon’s words came to her in two steps—the flash of their general sense, followed an instant later by an arranged sentence. That was her speech center operating in reverse, taking a series of swift, fleeting inputs from JonVon and forming them into prim, linear sentences.
“What a work of art we are,” she said.
SHAKESPEARE?
“Taken vaguely from him, yes.”
UNTIMELY RIPPED.
She constantly forgot how quickly JonVon could search out and scan a vast literature. “I’ll have to keep up your poetry lessons. You show a certain aptitude.”
YOU HAVE MADE ME… There was a true hesitation in the transmission, Virginia noted with surprise. It was not part of the simulation, but real uncertainty … PERCEIVE THE AMBIGUOUS SENSE OF SUCH LINES THE VIRTUE OF INDEFINITENESS.
She guessed that the program was reluctant to use feel and chose perceive only after a long comparison search and an inner struggle. Machines did not share a human’s casual confusion of senses and thoughts, since their input paths were vastly different. JonVon, though, could fool laymen into thinking he was a real person by using the terms in the normal, slippery human way. People commonly said I feel for I think; machines usually kept ironclad walls between the two meanings.
Which was one of the reasons she was doing all this, as well. Throw a rock at a woman and she could quickly digest the information incoming on sense channels, process it into intuitive vectors, speeds, and angles—then race forward, project, make approximate solutions-all to see where she should dodge.
Silicon-based machines could do that, but quite differently. They much preferred—meaning, humans were far better at programming them to—taking it as a problem in introductory physics, setting out the initial conditions all neat and clean, then integrating the equations of motion forward to see the exact result. Fine. Only by then you’re dead.
THAT IS A DRAWBACK.
“Another spurt of humor! You’re doing that more often now.”
YOU DID NOT LAUGH.
“That was irony you used, not yuk-yuk.”
OH. I ONLY DIMLY SEE THE DIFFERENCE.
She suspected JonVon used dimly see as a speaking convention. He did not have real power of language metaphor yet. “Well, all humor is based on two elements—ridicule and incongruity. Irony has…” She frowned.
YES?
“There are some things…”
MAN WAS NOT MEANT TO KNOW?
“Nope, wrong cliché. There are some subjects beyond explanation.”
A RIDDLE WRAPPED IN AN ENIGMA?
“Boy, you’re fast-accessing today. Can you do that and monitor this experiment at the same time?”
MOST ASSUREDLY.
Virginia could not remember inserting that smug lilt into this particular simulation. Was it mimicking Saul? JonVon had been in link contact with her lover a lot, lately. And she should never forget that JonVon, as a bio-organic construct, was midway between humans and silicon computers in his information processing. That led to unexpected capabilities.
“Can you stop the tickling?”
JonVon’s input broke into two channels, which she felt as a sluggish red stream of rusty words, with blue darting commentary slipping in and around them.
WHILE WE “SPOKE” —NOT THE RIGHT WORD, I
I TESTED THE EFFECT KNOW, BUT THERE IS NO
AND FOUND IT IS DUE OTHER
TO CONCENTRATIONS OF
MAGNETIC DIPOLES AVERAGE NUMBER 10°
FLIPPING TOGETHER
WHERE YOU HAVE BUILT
UP EMOTION-LADEN PROBABLY FROM ADOLESCENCE
TRIGGER COMPLEXES.
I AM AFRAID I CANNOT
ELIMINATE THEM BECAUSE THEIR PRIMARY EXTERNAL
THEY ARE CLOSELY TRIGGER SEEMS TO BE SEXUAL
TIED INTO YOUR LEARNED
MOTOR RESPONSES THE IMAGE YOU ARE CALLING
UP AT THIS MOMENT IS THE
CONTRACTION OF UPPER
THIGH MUSCLES AS YOU
SPREAD YOUR LEGS FOR—
“Stop! I don’t want my sex life played back by you.”
YOU ASKED.
“I did?”
SORRY.
Her head was clamped in close-packed foam, which proved to be good foresight—she would’ve flinched with embarrassment, otherwise.
“How much do you…” Well, of course. The times with Saul.
YOU ARE DISPLAYING RHYTHMS OF EMBARRASSMENT. SORRY.
“Oh, it’s not your fault.”
I CAN ABORT THE EXPERIMENT.
“No! I need this for the mechs.”
I AM RECEIVING VALUABLE SUBROUTINES NOW.
She supposed this last sentence was supposed to be reassuring. The program had an uncanny way of responding to her apprehensions. Still… “Just out of curiosity, what has my motor skill at handling tools—that is what we’re trawling for in my middle lobes, isn’t it? —what has that got to do with spreading my thighs?”
YOU HAVE ASSOCIATED THESE ACTIONS IN YOUR SELFPROGRAMMING.
“Self-programming?”
LIFE-LEARNED.
“Oh. Experience, you mean.”
THE BEST TEACHER, AN OLD SAYING GOES.
“Maybe. Some things I’d rather get safely out of a book.”
YES.
He’s being diplomatic. After all, he doesn’t have the option of directexperience. “Can you scan the nearby memory tie-in?”
YES.
Was there a hint of reluctance? “Can you assign a date when those complexes were laid down?”
A YEAR, NO. TIME ASSOCIATIONS ARE VAGUE, HOWEVER, YOU ARE LYING ON SOMETHING GRITTY AND COLD. THERE IS A SOUND. WATER WAVES, I ESTIMATE. OVER YOU THERE IS A FACE AND A POUNDING IN YOUR LOWER ABDOMEN.
Yes. That warm spring Hawaiian evening, fragrant with promise. A movie and a shake and off to the beach for some friendly necking. Only the warm kisses and gently probing, caressing hands hadn’t stopped there. Something powerful had seized her in a way she had never imagined—no matter how many thousands of times she had already thought of it, tried to visualize it—and then they were actually, unbelievably, doing it. And rather than a fiery yet lofting sensation, a cosmic rapture, a mystical union, as her dreams had envisioned, it was raw, crude, uncomfortable, painful, and finally depressing.
SHORT PANTS
ROMANCE
“A simple rhyme isn’t poetry,” she said primly.
TRUE.
“And anyway, what do you know about it?” Even as the words formed she thought, Well, actually, Jon Von knows exactly what you do. Or will, when he’s finished mapping your lobes, dipped into your hindbrain, plumbed the reptilian core of you. It was a sobering thought.
JonVon chose to not reply. Tact? Or was she indulging the usual programmer’s bias, reading human traits into machine responses?
The delicate cool tickling continued. She relaxed, letting her mind glide away from the red swirl of emotions the recollection had called up.
She knew that memories lodged close to sites where physical associations were stored, so that the body led the mind in storing data. A crisp dry smell could call up a distant dusty afternoon or childhood. But this made her wonder about the radical experim
ent she was attempting here.
The mechs needed supervision. Special processing programs controlled subtle waldo arms, but they weren’t smart. JonVon was fairly “smart” but he couldn’t help a mech turn a screwdriver or balance a suction sponge. As a stochastic machine, he was built to deal in uncertainties. He did not interface well with the mechs’ reductionist, solve-the-equation worldview. And JonVon lacked the intricate motor skills that evolution and exercise had given humans.
So she had decided to try one of her outlandish, low-probability dreams: Let JonVon read her skills. Her reflexes were also stochastic and holographic. He might understand them better.
The technology was available, if you knew where to look. The brain stored memories in the orientation of electrons, deep down in the cells and synapses. In principle, one could read the directions that these electrons pointed. The entire swarm of spins stored information—the intricate turns and tugs necessary to swivel a wrist, poke a finger. Virginia already had good programs that translated the human moves into mech moves. If JonVon could store her motor skills, he could take over much of the mech-managing. That would be a big help. Carl and other spacers had nagged her endlessly to spend more time with the mechs, and she was getting frazzled.
This was a way out. Maybe.
She would have to develop this technology eventually, anyway. Even with Saul’s microwave eraser, things were still dicey. Oakes and Lopez still gave mech-directing top priority.
If they kept losing people, over the seventy-year haul the mechs would have to be much more independent than the expedition had planned. And she had to be slotted eventually, so she had to at least start on a better programming system right away.
READING NEARING COMPLETION.
She sent an expression of relieved excitement: burnt-gold lightning strokes zapping across a velvet sky.
I RECORDED THE TRIGGER SITE. I COULD SUMMON UP FOR VOLUNTARY RECALL THE INCIDENT FROM YOUR CHILDHOOD. FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT.
“I wasn’t a child, you bucket of bolts.”
THE ASSOCIATIONS—
“And I don’t think it was `entertaining’ either. That big hulk of a boy—“She had a sudden jolting memory of a rasping, panting male voice muttering Eli a hohonu keia lua. His hard, machinelike ramming had hammered the words into her memory: I dig this hole deep. She shuddered.