by Hanuš Seiner
“Whom has she got there?”
“Her father.”
The soldier sighed. “Sometimes I add a box of cigarettes to their rations. Secretly, so that no one else would know. It’s against the rules but I always thought it might cheer them up. Only yesterday it occurred to me that I don’t know if they’re allowed to smoke there at all.”
I took a peanut shell between my fingertips and tossed it to the center of the throat. We both watched it fall and zigzag under the nudges of the varying field. Like a Brownian particle in a drop of water.
Friday, August 31, 2192
My fingers spasmed last night. Yet I wrote only a few lines yesterday! My hand must be unused to the pencil. I’ll try to pause longer when writing.
Before the spasms woke me up, I was dreaming, like almost every night, of the time before the revolution. (I think there are so few stimuli here that my subconscious doesn’t use even the simplest of images. My dreams stem from my memories.) I was standing on a shining white promenade in one of Ganymede’s subterranean cities. Crowds of happy people passed me and the air was thick with the smell of some exotic flowers. There were the flags of the Republic and ribbons with Vaían symbols everywhere. All of a sudden, a tall, ceremoniously clad Elder appeared before me. He walked straight to me. The half-moons of his eyes shone like emeralds. We stopped. He took my hands in his and said one word: “Gratitude.”
The more I think about the dream, the less I understand it. What gratitude? Humans couldn’t have acted more ungratefully toward the Vaían. We all remember the selflessness and generosity with which the Vaían offered—but did not coerce us into—participation in an interstellar community. We remember how they warned us that accepting the virus was an irrevocable decision. We remember how they so casually started building the engines for our ships. And what have they gotten from us in return? I secretly hope the dream continues tonight.
One more thing from today is worth writing down. I’ve noticed a new inmate during lunch. Either they transferred him here today, or I’ve been too self-contained lately to notice him. By his shy gaze and slumped shoulders, I’d guess he ended up here for reasons similar to mine. He has heavy, sleepy eyes, and constantly covers his mouth, as if ashamed of his missing teeth. He reminds me of myself five years ago. Dare I hope now that I could have someone to talk to, or even become friends with?
3.
“The yellow cone of light flickered through the dark as I quietly approached Janita’s bed, a flashlight gripped tightly in my hand. I knew the Europans slept heavily in the thick Earth air, strong Earth gravity, and hard Earth beds. I probably couldn’t wake her up even if I tried. Despite that, I knelt by her bed cautiously and even more cautiously pulled aside a strand of hair falling over her forehead. The incubant started quivering in the light. I extended my fingers to it and held their tips just a few millimeters away from Janita’s head. The biomagnetic fields of our bodies merged and the code’s symbols started passing to my skin. They ran through my fingers and tickled my palm. But when I withdrew, they obediently returned to the Europan skin where they felt at home. I resisted the temptation to play with the virus, to try to catch its segments in the trap of curled fingers. I let it slide into my palm again and calm down, get used to the structures of my hand and reveal its own. The Vaían symbols never ceased to move slightly in the flashlight beam, but the basic flow of the algorithm was clearly recognizable.
“When people need to write a procedure with ten functions,” a coder once said to me, “they write ten short codes and build walls of conditionals and choices in front of them. The Vaían can do the same with one short code and ten keys to compile it.” The program has all ten functions at once, just as a ship has all five names. The trick is using the right cipher key. The Vaían virus was just a program, only instead of instructions for a computer processor, it contained instructions for a nervous system of a living being.
As I shifted my fingertips near Janita’s bare forehead, the virus rolled across my palm slowly. With it, conflicting memories swept through my mind. What have I been searching for, anyway? Janita may have held a four- or five-letter cipher key inside her body, and needed to enter the engines’ fields to go through a new compilation. That would make some sense. Does she want to become a part of the crew? But why? My eyes searched for the encapsulated shell of an unused compilation key: symbols divided from the rest by an impermeable line whose dissolution could be ordered only by Vaían technology. Its breach would mean that the virus would gain control over Janita’s life and death. If the encapsulated symbols were just four, Janita would understand the engines’ language and wouldn’t be able to live without them after the compilation. If they were five, she would start obeying their orders. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if I found the tetra- or pentagrammaton. I just felt curious, understandably, about whether Janita planned to return to the surface from the Destroyer. At last, the dark, gleaming shell slid onto my forefinger and into my palm.
I moved the flashlight to it to discern the details of the key.
The world trembled with me.
Saturday, September 1, 2192
The new prisoner was eluding me whole morning. I glimpsed him in the library but before I got to him through the maze of bookshelves, his chair was empty. In the lunch queue, he was standing far ahead of me but I didn’t see him later in the canteen. Perhaps he always sits in another dark corner, searching for a place no one will kick him out of, where no one will spit in his soup and he’ll be able to eat without enduring the others’ suspicious glances. Finally, I used my small savings of cigarettes and medicine to exchange them for a few minutes’ time with one of the local informers. He promised me to get as much from the guards as possible.
Later: I was right! The man’s name is Arvin and his soul really is unburdened by any mugging, murder, or fraud. He’s a scientist, a cryptologist. He studied Vaían ciphers right on Europa during the contact. After the revolution, he started working for the Earth government. But a few years later he allegedly started secretly aiding the Europan resistance. He was supposed to trade results of the government research to the fundamentalists. But some say it has been a show trial, because Arvin uncovered something that didn’t fit the government’s perspective on Vaían. In any case, I must speak to him! I’m trying to comb my memory for everything I know of Vaían ciphers. It’s not much, sadly. I can draw the cipher matrix and decipher the original text if I know the key , but those are the basics anyone willing to fully communicate with the Vaían Elders had to learn.
I also hazily recall how to find tautograms: texts that remain unchanged during the application of all known keys—tri-, tetra-, and pentagrammatons—because they decipher back into themselves. Using those, it was possible to communicate with the Elders without a previously given key. Mathematicians called them “eigenvectors of ciphers,” but I never fully understood what they’d meant by that. I was pleased to discover that I still remember the longest known tautogram. It is an oath of sorts, a vow composed by the captains of the seven remaining ships when it had been decided to bury those ships alive and let Earth devour their energy by the thirsty straws of the cones. The tautogram reads: “We live in stillness and darkness, deep under our conquerors’ boots. But in ourselves, we bear the legacy of those who came to raise us up, and thus our enslavement has meaning. Even though our gift became a burden, we still can pass its power unto humanity, as Vaían asked us and as we promised Vaían.” The words make me shiver.
* * *
Maybe Janita woke from her deep slumber at that moment and looked at me with her Europan eyes. Maybe she spoke to me. I don’t know. I wouldn’t have noticed. I sat heavily, extinguished the flashlight, and stared into the darkness. The shell contained six letters. A hexagrammaton.
I’d heard legends of it. I’d heard crazy men babble prophecies of it. I’d read about it in files marked Top Secret when I still worked for the expert committee. Six letters that could change the course of the war. The longest pos
sible compilation key that could transform the crew and engines into one being and enable travel across the galaxy. The crew would abandon their humanity, become like the Vaían Youngers, whose thoughts circulated through the ship’s command systems. And after approximately sixteen years the energy of the engines would deplete and their power decrease. Only then the ship being would dissolve and the crew members would be reborn as individual beings and full members of the interstellar community: as Vaían Elders.
But that never happened. As the virus had been spreading through Europa and new ships had been built in the Ganymedan ports, suspicion took hold of a part of the Republic. Was the transformation of people into the Youngers a path into an interstellar community, or was it a rejection of humanity and acceptance of Vaían’s rule? How big a part of their nature did the volunteers throw away and how much would be returned to them when they’re released from their long service?
Citizens of the Republic languished. There were water and energy shortages, quarrels, problems nobody cared about because all resources were being devoted to the Vaían program. This was the substrate the revolution had grown on. With the support of the Vaían Elders, advocates of the space program would perhaps have suppressed the uprising without great trouble. But Earth and Mars joined the conflict with their large armies and firepower capable of turning both moons into clouds of dust in Jupiter’s rings. The inner planets followed the doctrine: “If we don’t have the viral technology, no one should,” disguising it as care for the integrity of humanity. They considered themselves the cradle of this humanity. The Republic ships with Vaían engines weren’t built for combat. Nor were the original Vaían ships. Moreover, the Vaían Elders didn’t feel the need to interfere. They suspended the process of gradual compilation of the virus inside the ships, supposed to prepare the crews for the eventual acceptance of the hexagrammaton, and left our solar system—perhaps forever. The crews were frozen halfway between humans and Vaían Youngers. They couldn’t live apart from the engines but were unable to reach for the stars with them.
My thoughts swirled and flickered not unlike the symbols of the virus that had flown through my palm moments ago. The government cryptologists claimed that human knowledge of Vaían ciphers wasn’t sufficient to find the hexagrammaton. The Vaían alphabet consisted of one hundred and thirteen symbols, enabling two and a half billion six-letter combinations. But only millions of them translated some sequences of the virus into executable programs. Without knowing the engines’ functions, there was no criterion upon which to choose from the combinations. Yet what if someone on Europa had managed it? What if Janita truly carried a key for a new era of human civilization inside the compilation shell? Could this be the most important thing of my life? The ship had been buried under millions of tons of clay and rock and no force, Vaían or not, could move it. The throat had been such a perfect electromagnetic trap that the expanded hexagrammaton could never escape to Earth’s surface.
I rose and stumbled into the next room. My bed accepted me with a creaky sigh. Now I knew what my client carried to The Destroyer of Seven Villages. However, until I knew why, however, I still remained the same swayable, bribable civil servant. Questions kept circling in my mind, passing each other in still-new conjunctions like Jupiter’s moons. I only fell asleep long after midnight.
Sunday, September 2, 2192
I managed to talk to Arvin briefly. When I introduced myself and shook his hand, he stared at me with puzzlement for a moment. I’m not surprised; if he truly studied ciphers on Europa, he was bound to know my name, maybe even my face. But after five years in prison, one changes a lot. So far he approaches me with suspicion. I understand it. He’s probably afraid the government set me on him. I will try to convince him that’s not the case, but it won’t be easy. However, he can’t control himself completely: when I mentioned cryptology, his eyes lit up and he drew a breath as if to start talking. But then he covered his mouth again and mumbled some apology. We parted with a Vaían goodbye, as naturally as if we spoke it all the time. Perhaps I haven’t used up all my luck yet.
Later: I discovered a live snail in my cell after dinner. It has a gleaming obsidian shell and measures no more than two centimeters. I must have brought it with me on my boots or clothes from the canteen or bathroom. I let it climb my hand and thought about what I’d do with it. Never before has another living being kept me company in this cell. But I cannot keep it; there is nothing for it to eat here (though I only have a foggy notion of what snails eat). I’ll try to carry it to the yard tomorrow and set it free in the grass. For now, I can keep studying it and feel amazed by its perfection.
4.
“I was there,” I told Janita as we descended about a third of the throat. We were carefully climbing the rope ladders down from one tier to another. The coils around us buzzed disconsolately. The service lights flickered without any apparent pattern. Instead of air, a mixture of burnt dust, ozone, and bluish sparks tried to force its way down our lungs. Sometimes we could glimpse the resilient throat fauna and flora: fungi growing in spirals around the coils, spiders building absurdly formed webs in the small anomalies of the field, moths with asymmetric wings deformed by their lifelong fight with the vortices of the toroids. Ant paths following the line fields. Chiral stalactites of dust particles growing on the coils, disintegrating whenever the relays inside the walls changed the current’s flow with a deafening click.
“Where?” Janita asked, and sat beside me on the small platform protruding into the throat’s abyss.
“The decision of the ships’ fate. I’d been an assistant to one of the expert committee’s members.”
“I know. You recommended that he vote against their destruction. The proposal for building the cones came through by one vote—also thanks to you.”
A blue-white discharge suddenly crackled above our heads. Janita looked up, startled. A thin veil of burnt dust and ash from the lichens and small flies fell upon her face.
“It wasn’t an easy decision back then,” I said, almost apologetically.
“It certainly wasn’t,” she remarked. “It’s never easy to save almost four hundred lives, is it?”
I didn’t tell her that the committee spent lots of time pondering the question of whether the infected crews still constituted human lives.
Janita drank her depolarization solution thirstily. Small beads of sweat ran down her forehead, swirling as they followed locally meandering field lines. The human body is one big electrolyte tank. Little change is needed for it to become a charged monocell in the throat’s field.
“How do you feel?”
She looked at the almost empty flask. “Okay.”
“The truth.”
“I feel dizzy. I hear buzzing in my ears. And it’s very hot in here. But I can put up with that.”
I touched Janita’s forehead. She didn’t protest or pull away, just looked at me suspiciously. Her cold sweat ran down my palm and, amidst its beads, the viral symbols sometimes flowed too.
“It should be all right,” I said. “Let’s go another hundred meters and make an acclimation stop.”
She nodded.
Strong electromagnetic fields can be like high altitudes. Some can grow used to them quickly, some cannot. The body needs time to adapt its electrochemical processes.
We passed a toroid of absorption coolers with their heat exchangers glistening with frost. Spirals of water vapor rose from there into the dry air. The mist condensed on the coils around the toroid. Tassels of small water droplets, each black with the burnt dust, hung from them. The insect-like buzz of the coils and the deep tones of the exchangers, resembling the growling of a distant storm, mingled in our ears.
Just above the halfway point into the throat, there was a service platform where I usually spent the first acclimation stop with my clients. Janita grew very slow during the last meters, so I descended first to prepare the bends. An irritated hiss of self-inflating mattresses added to the throat’s sounds.
J
anita finally staggered to me and sat on the ribbed floor heavily. The whites of her Europan eyes were full of broken veins. Her light brown irises almost couldn’t be discerned in the red-and-white maze. She let me touch her forehead again. From my expression, she understood something was not right.
I pulled another flask out of my bag. “Drink it, all of it.”
The flask was supposed to last for the journey back but the entire plan was tumbling down like a house of cards. I watched Janita drink thirstily. Sweat dripped from the wet strands of her hair.
“Have you ever worn chrome watches? Or steel jewelry?”
She stopped drinking and looked at me in surprise. “No. I mean, for a little while, but I had to return them.”
I nodded. “They went black on you.”
“How do you know?”
Less than one percent of people have overly acidic skin. The depolarization solution works well enough inside their bodies, but it changes into nanocrystals of metallic salts in their epidermis.
“That hot feeling … that’s not from being overheated. It’s the electroosmotic pressure being misinterpreted by your thermoregulation system. Your skin is becoming a capacitor. It’s called the Faraday disease.”
She gulped. “What does it mean?”
“We’ll see,” I lied. “You’ll drink a lot and we’ll rest here for eight hours.”
Without objections, she let me help her out of the coverall, which was heavy with sweat. Her breathing was quick and shallow. With her blanket pulled to her chin, her exhausted eyes stared up into the distorted throat.