The collected short fict.., p.68
The Collected Short Fiction, page 68
In her own idiosyncratic way, Rho was crazy about him; but then, she was just as driven as William. It was a miracle their vectors added.
We matched step. “Rho’s back from Earth. She’s flying in from Port Yin,” I said.
“Got her message,” William said, bouncing to touch the rock roof three metres overhead. His glove brought down a few lazy drifts of foamed rock. “Got to get the arbeiters to spray that.” He used a distracted tone that betrayed no real intent to follow through. “I’ve finally straightened out the QL, Micko. The interpreter’s making sense. My problems are solved.”
“You always say that before some new effect cuts you down.” We had come to the large, circular, white ceramic door that marked the entrance to the Ice Pit and stopped at the white line that William had crudely painted there, three years ago. The line could be crossed only on his invitation.
The hatch opened. Warm air poured into the corridor; the Ice Pit was always warmer than ambient, being filled with so much equipment. Still, the warm air smelled cold; a contradiction I had never been able to resolve.
“I’ve licked the final source of external radiation,” William said. “Some terrestrial metal doped with twentieth-century fallout.” He zipped his hand away. “Replaced it with lunar steel. And the QL is really tied in. I’m getting straight answers out of it-as straight as quantum logic can give. Leave me my illusions.”
“Sorry,” I said. He shrugged magnanimously. “I’d like to see it in action.”
He stopped, screwed up his face in irritation, then slumped a bit. “I’m sorry, Mickey. I’ve been a real wart. You fought for it, you got it for me, you deserve to see it. Come on.”
I followed William over the line and across the forty-metre-long, two-metre-wide wire and girder bridge into the Ice Pit.
William walked ahead of me, between the force-disorder pumps. I stopped to look at the ovoid bronze toruses mounted on each side of the bridge. They reminded me of abstract sculptures, and they were amongst the most sensitive and difficult of William’s tools, always active, even when not connected to William’s samples.
Passing between the pumps, I felt a twitch in my interior, as if my body were a large ear listening to something it could barely discern: an elusive, sucking silence. William looked back at me and grinned sympathetically. “Spooky feeling, hm?”
“I hate it,” I said.
“So do I, but it’s sweet music, Micko. Sweet music indeed.”
Beyond the pumps and connected to the bridge by a short, narrow walkway, hung the Cavity, enclosed in a steel Faraday cage. Here, within a metre-wide sphere of perfect orbit-fused quartz, the quartz covered with a mirror coating of niobium, were eight thumb-sized ceramic cells, each containing approximately a thousand atoms of copper. Each cell was surrounded by its own superconducting electromagnet. These were the mesoscopic samples, large enough to experience the macroscopic qualities of temperature, small enough to lie within the microscopic realm of quantum forces. They were never allowed to reach a temperature greater than one-millionth Kelvin.
The laboratory lay at the end of the bridge, a hundred square metres of enclosed work space made of thin shaped steel framing covered by black plastic wall. Suspended by vibration-damping cords and springs and field levitation from the high dome of the Ice Pit, three of the four cylindrical refrigerators surrounded the laboratory like the pillars of a tropical temple, overgrown by a jungle of pipes and cables. Waste heat was conveyed through the rubble net at the top of the void and through the foamed rock roof beyond by flexible tubes; the buried radiators on the surface then shed that heat into space.
The fourth and final and largest refrigerator lay directly above the Cavity, sealed to the upper surface of the quartz sphere. From a distance the refrigerator and the Cavity might have resembled a squat, old-fashioned mercury thermometer, with the Cavity serving as bulb.
The T-shaped laboratory had four rooms, two in the neck of the T, one extending on each side to make the wings. William led me through the laboratory door—actually a flexible curtain—into the first room, which was filled with a small metal table and chair, a disassembled nano-works arbeiter, and cabinets of cubes and discs. In the second room, the QL thinker occupied a central platform about half a metre on a side. On the wall to the left of the table were a manual control board—seldom used now—and two windows overlooking the Cavity. The second room was quiet, cool, a bit like a cloister cell.
Almost from the beginning of the project, William had maintained to the syndics—through Rho and myself; we never let him appear in person—that his equipment could not be perfectly tuned by even the most skilled human operators, or by the most complicated of computer controllers. All of his failures, he said in his blackest moods, were due to this problem; the failure of macroscopic controllers to be in sync with the quantum qualities of the samples.
What he—what the project—needed was a Quantum Logic thinker. Yet these were being manufactured only on Earth, and they were not being exported. Because so few were manufactured, the black market of the Triple had none to offer, and the costs of purchasing, avoiding Earth authorities and shipping to the Moon were vast. Rho and I could not convince the syndics to make such a purchase. William had seemed to blame me personally.
Our break came with news of an older-model QL thinker being offered for sale by an Asian industrial consortium. William had determined that this so-called obsolete thinker would suit our needs—it was suspiciously cheap, however, and almost certainly out of date. That didn’t bother William.
The syndics had approved this request, to everybody’s surprise, I think. It might have been Thomas’s final gift and test for William—any more expensive requisitions without at least the prospect of a success and the Ice Pit would be closed.
Rho had gone to Earth to strike a deal with the Asian consortium. The thinker had been packaged, shipped, and had arrived six weeks before. I had not heard from her between the time of the purchase and her message from Port Yin that she had returned to the Moon. She had spent four weeks extra on Earth, and I was more than a little curious to find out what she had been doing there.
William leaned over the platform and patted the QL proudly. “It’s running almost everything now,” he said. “If we succeed, the QL will take a large share of the credit.”
The QL itself covered perhaps a third of the platform’s surface. Beneath the platform lay the QL’s separate power supplies; by Triple common law, all thinkers were equipped with supplies capable of lasting a full year without outside replenishment.
“Who’ll get the Nobel, you or the QL?” I asked. I bent to the QL’s level to peer at its white cylindrical container. William shook his head.
“Nobody off Earth has ever gotten a Nobel, anyway,” he said. “Surely I get some credit for telling the QL about the problem.” I felt the most affection for my brother-in-law when he reacted positively to my acidulous humour.
“What about this?” I asked, touching the interpreter lightly with a finger. Connected to the QL by fist-thick optical cables, covering another half of the platform, the interpreter was a thinker in itself. It addressed the QL’s abstruse contemplations and rendered them, as closely as possible, in language humans could understand.
“A marvel all by itself.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“You didn’t study the files,” William chided.
“I was too busy fighting with the syndics to study,” I said. “Besides, you know theory’s never been my greatest strength.”
William knelt behind the opposite side of the table, his expression contemplative, reverent. “Did you read about Huang-Yi Hsu?”
“Tell me,” I said patiently.
He sighed. “You paid for it out of ignorance, Mickey. I could have misled you grievously.”
“I trust you, William.”
He accepted that with generous dubiety. “Huang-Yi Hsu invented post-Boolean three-state logic before 2010. Nobody paid much attention to it until 2030. He was dead by then; had committed suicide rather than submit to Beijing’s Rule of Seven. Brilliant man, but I think a true anomaly in human thought. Then a. few physicists in the University of Washington’s Cramer Lab Group discovered they could put Hsu’s work to use solving problems in quantum logic. Post-Boolean and quantum logic were made for each other. By 2060, the first QL thinker had been built, but nobody thought it was successful.
“Fortunately, it was against the law by then to turn off activated thinkers without a court order, but nobody could talk to it. Its grasp of human languages was inadequate; it couldn’t follow their logic. It was a mind in limbo, Mickey; brilliant but totally alien. So it sat in a room at Stanford University’s Thinker Development Center for five years before Roger Atkins—you know about Roger Atkins?”
“William,” I warned.
“Before Atkins found the common ground for any-functional real logic, the Holy Grail of language and thought . . . his CAL interpreter. Comprehensible All Logics. Which lets us talk to the QL. He died a year later.” William sighed. “Swan song. So this,” he patted the interpreter, a flat grey box about fifteen centimetres square and nine high, “lets us talk to this.” He patted the QL.
“Why hasn’t anybody used a QL as a controller before?” I asked.
“Because even with the interpreter, the QL—this QL at any rate—is a monster to work with,” he said. He tapped the display button and a prismatic series of bars and interlacing graphs appeared over the thinker. “That’s why it was so cheap. It has no priorities, no real sense of needs or goals. It thinks, but it may not solve. Quantum logic can outline the centre of a problem before it understands the principles and questions, and then, from our point of view, everything ends in confusion. More often than not, it comes up with a solution to a problem not yet stated. It does virtually everything but linear, time’s-arrow ratiocination. Half of its efforts are meaningless to goal-oriented beings like ourselves, but I can’t prune those efforts, because somewhere in them lies the solution to my problems, even if I haven’t stated the problem or am not aware that I have a problem. A post-Boolean intelligence. It functions in time and space, yet ignores their restrictions. It’s completely in tune with the logic of the Planck-Wheeler continuum, and that’s where the solution to my problem lies.”
“So when’s your test?”
“Three weeks. Or sooner, if there aren’t any more interruptions.”
“Am I invited?”
“All doubters, front row seats,” he said. “Call me when Rho gets in. Tell her I’ve got it.”
My office lay along a north warren, in an insulated cylindrical chamber that had once been a liquid water tank. It was much larger than I needed, cavernous in fact, and my bed, desk, slate files and other furnishings occupied one small section of about five metres square near the door. I entered, set myself down in a wide air-cushion seat, called up the Triple Exchange—monetary rates within the Greater Planets economic sphere of Earth, Moon and Mars—and began my daily check on the Sandoval Trust. I could usually gauge the Ice Pit’s annual operating expenses by such auguries.
Rho’s shuttle landed at Pad Four an hour later. I was engrossed in trust investment performances; she buzzed my line second. William was not answering his.
“Micko, congratulate me! I’ve got something wonderful,” she said.
“A new terrestrial virus we can’t set for,” I said. “Mickey. This is serious.”
“William says to tell you he’s very very close.”
“All right. That’s good. Now listen.”
“Where are you?”
“In the personal lift. Listen.”
“Yes.”
“How much extra cooling capacity does William have?”
“You don’t know?”
“Mickey . . .”
“About eight billion calories. Cold is no problem here. You know that.”
“I have a load of twenty cubic metres coming in. Average density like fatty water, I assume. What would that be, point nine? It’s packed in liquid nitrogen at sixty K. Keeping it colder would be much better, especially if we decide on long-term storage . . .”
“What is it? Smuggled nano prochines to liberate lunar industry?”
“You wish. Nothing quite so dangerous. Forty stainless-steel Dewar containers, quite old, vacuum insulated.”
“Anything William would be interested in?”
“I doubt it. Can he spare the extra capacity now?”
“He’s never used it before, even when he was close, very close. But he’s in no mood for—”
“Meet me at home, then we’ll go to the Ice Pit and tell him.”
“You mean ask.”
“I mean tell,” Rho said.
The Pierce-Sandoval home was two alleys south of my office, not far from the farms, off a nice doublewidth heated mining bore with smooth white walls of foamed rock. I palmed their home doorplate a half-hour later, allowing her time to freshen from the Copernicus trip, never a luxury run.
Rho came out of the bathnook in lunar cotton terry and turban, zaftig by lunar standards, shook out her long red hair, and waved a brochure at me as I entered. “Have you ever heard of the StarTime Preservation Society?” she asked, handing me the ancient glossy folio.
“Paper,” I said, hefting the folio carefully. “Heavy paper.”
“They had boxes full of these on Earth,” she said. “Stacked up in a dusty office corner. Leftovers from their platinum time. Have you heard of it?”
“No,” I said, looking through the brochure. Men and women in cold suits; glass tanks filled with mysterious mist; bare rooms blue with cold. A painting of the future as seen from the early twenty-first century; the Moon, oddly enough, glass domes and open-air architecture. “Resurrection in a time of accomplishment, human maturity and wonder . . .”
“Corpsicles,” Rho explained when I cast her a blank look.
“Oh,” I said.
“Society capacity of three hundred and seventy; they took in fifty extra before close of term in 2064.”
“Four hundred and twenty bodies?” I asked. “Heads only. Voluntarily harvested individuals. Each paid half a million terrestrial US dollars. Four hundred and ten survivals, well within the guarantees.”
“You mean, they were revived?”
“No,” she said disdainfully. “Nobody’s ever brought back a corpsicle. You know that. Four hundred and ten theoretically revivable. We can’t bring them back, but Cailetet BM has complete facilities for brain scan and storage . . .”
“So I’ve heard—for live individuals.”
She waved that off. “And doesn’t Onnes BM have new solvers for the groups of human mental languages? You study their requests from the central banks, their portfolios. Don’t they?”
“I’ve heard something to that effect.”
“If they do, and if we can work a deal between the three BMs, just give me a couple of weeks, and I can read those heads. I can tell you what their memories are, what they were thinking. Without hurting a single frozen neuron. We can do it before anyone on Earth—or anywhere else.”
I looked at her with less than brotherly respect. “Dust,” I said.
“Flip your own dust, Mickey. I’m serious. The heads are coming. I’ve signed Sandoval to store them.”
“You signed a BM contract?”
“I’m allowed.”
“Who says? Christ, Rho, you haven’t talked with anybody—”
“It will be the biggest anthropological coup in lunar history. Four hundred and ten terrestrial heads . . .”
“Dead meat!” I said.
“Expertly stored in deep cold. Minor decay at most.”
“Nobody wants corpsicles, Rho—”
“I had to bid against four other anthropologists, three from Mars and one from the minor planets.”
“Bid?”
“I won,” she said.
“You don’t have that authority,” I said.
“Yes I do. Under family preservation charter. Look it up. ‘All family members and legal heirs and—etc., etc.—free hand to make reasonable expenditures to preserve Sandoval records and heritage; to preserve the reputations and fortunes of all established heirs.’ ”
She had lost me. “What?”
Her look of triumph was carnivorous.
“Robert and Emilia Sandoval,” she said. “They died on Earth. Remember? They were members of StarTime.”
My jaw dropped. Robert and Emilia Sandoval, our great-grandparents, the first man and woman to make love on the Moon; nine months later, they became the first parents on the Moon, giving birth to our grandmother, Deirdre. In their late middle age, they had returned to Earth, to Oregon in the old United States, leaving their child on the Moon.
“They joined the StarTime Preservation Society. Lots of famous people did,” she said.
“So . . .?” I asked, waiting for my astonishment to peak.
“They’re in this batch. Guaranteed by the society.”
“Oh, Rhosalind,” I said, as if she had just told me someone had died. I felt an incredulous hollow sense of doom. “They’re coming back?”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Nobody knows but the society trustees and me, and now you.”
“Great-Grandpa and Great-Grandma,” I said.
Rho smiled the kind of smile that had always made me want to hit her. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
William came from an unbound lunar family, the Pierces of Copernicus Research Centre Three. A lunar family—even then—was not just those born of a single mother and father, but a tight association of sponsored settlers working their way across the lunar surface in new-dug warrens, adding children and living space as they burrowed. Individuals usually kept their own surnames, or added surnames, but claimed allegiance to the central family, even when all the members of the central family had died, as sometimes happened.
As with our own family, the Sandovals, the Pierces were among the original fifteen families established on the Moon in 2019. The Pierces were an odd lot, unofficial histories tell us—aloof and unwilling to pull together with the newer settlers. The original families—called primes—spread out across the Moon, forming and breaking alliances, eventually coming together, under pressure from Earth, into the financial associations later called binding multiples. The Pierces did not bind with any of the nascent multiples, though they formed loose alliances with other families.
