Leaping to the Stars

by David Gerrold

  "Ungaged, yes," said Mom. "That sounds about right."

  After Stinky left, I looked over at her. "You took that well."

  "He's only eight," she said. "He's trying on identities, looking for one that fits. After he's through with this identity, he'll try on another. You and Douglas are his only role models. Tomorrow, he'll be asking you to teach him how to play the cello, and when he discovers he can't learn in a day, he'll decide to be something else. Maybe he'll ask Bev to show him how to make a Portobello mushroom sandwich, or maybe he'll go down to the zoo and announce he wants to take care of the chickens."

  "So he can learn how to be an egg?"

  "If that's what interests him, yes."

  "How did you get to be so smart?" I asked.

  "I learned it from my children." Then she said something remarkable. "I used to worry that you'd never be able to take care of yourself. Then for a while I worried that you'd be so independent that you'd never need me again. And then you asked me to sing with you and I decided to stop worrying and just ride the roller coaster."

  "Oh," I said. "Thank you."

  She looked surprised for a bit, then she smiled across the cabin at me. "Is that what you were worried about?"

  "You could tell I was worrying?"

  "I could hear it in the way you were pounding on the keyboard. I kept wanting to remind you that Wachet Auf is not an assault weapon—but then I got used to the way you were playing it."

  "I was playing it to calm myself," I said.

  "Ahh. Well it was certainly an interesting interpretation."

  I shrugged. "Yeah, I guess so." And then, mostly to avoid any more questions, I ducked out.

  The thing is, what Mom had said about riding the roller coaster—that did help. It didn't matter that I didn't know how to do it; the important thing was knowing that it was possible.

  There was this thing that Dad did once. I was six, and he was trying to teach me about 32nd notes. At first, I thought he was talking about "thirty second notes"—notes that lasted thirty seconds. But then he explained about quarter-notes and eighth-notes and sixteenth-notes and then thirty-second-notes—that you could fit thirty-two of those little peckerwoods into a single whole note.

  I told him, very seriously, that I didn't like being made fun of. And that I didn't believe in 32nd notes.

  So he played one.

  I gave him the look. Very funny.

  Then he played a whole bunch of them. And I went from disbelief to astonishment with a short detour through Wow! But now that I knew that 32nd notes were possible … I was determined to figure out how to do it. Within a month, I was playing them. It wasn't just about playing the notes faster, it was about thinking them shorter …

  The same thing with the emotional roller coaster. If it really was possible to ride it without throwing up every ten minutes, then I was going to figure that out too.

  HOCKEY

  I knocked on the cabin door tentatively.

  For a long moment, there was no reply.

  I knocked again, hoping that no one was home. Except I already knew they were.

  Finally, the hatch popped open and a bleary-eyed David Cheifetz looked upside down at me. He didn't look happy. He righted himself just enough so he could recognize me, but that didn't make him any happier. But he didn't yell at me or say anything nasty. He simply asked, "Yes?"

  "Can I ask you something?" Then I remembered my manners. "If this is a bad time, I can come back later."

  "No, no—it's all right." He pulled the hatch open and waved me in. "You want something to drink? Tea? Soda? Water?"

  "You have soda?"

  "We brought some, yes. Coca-Cola? Root beer? Ginger ale?"

  "You have Coke? Wow. I thought I'd never taste it again in my life."

  "We brought a few tanks of syrup. We thought it might be useful." He popped open a small cooler and pulled out a plastic bladder that wobbled like Jell-O. It was filled with something dark and delicious-looking. "We should have enough for two or three years, if we ration ourselves. And by then, maybe we'll have the first crops growing so we can make our own."

  The soda-bag was pleasantly cold. I popped the cap off the straw, put the end in my mouth, and squeezed the first swallow gently into my mouth. For a moment, I just marveled at the taste. It was delicious. And it had been sooo long. This was another thing I'd missed. "Thank you," I said. "This is very good."

  He nodded. "I hear you've been nice to my J'mee. She plays in your band now?"

  "She plays very well. Better than me, I think. She's got a nice touch."

  "I wonder where she learned. I could never get her to practice."

  "She's very—" I decided that stubborn was the wrong word, "persistent."

  "Stubborn," Cheifetz corrected.

  For a moment, we just studied each other.

  Finally, he said, "Just to get something straight, Charles, I don't dislike you. It was your Dad. I didn't even dislike your Dad. I disliked the way things happened. And the way things happened—well, you boys didn't have a lot of choice, did you?"

  "It didn't seem like it at the time."

  "J'mee has argued your case quite convincingly. She must like you a lot."

  "I hope so." I was surprised to hear myself admit that, especially to Mr. Cheifetz.

  "The reason I'm saying this—well, two reasons. First, when we get to Outbeyond, we're all going to have to depend on each other. And second, whatever it is you want to ask me about, it must be important; otherwise you wouldn't have knocked on my door. And if it's that important, then you and I had better have an understanding that we can talk man-to-man. You understand what I mean? Totally honest."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Your question? It's about HARLIE, isn't it?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Not too hard to figure out. Do you know the joke about HARLIE units?"

  "No, sir."

  "HARLIEs don't solve moral dilemmas. They create them."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Do you want to tell me about it?"

  "Mr. Cheifetz, sir? Can a HARLIE unit be evil?"

  "You've been talking to the Revelationists?"

  "Not directly, but—" I blurted out as much as I could. What Trent had said about how to tell the difference between good and evil, and how HARLIE had left a trail of destruction behind him. And what J'mee had said about being right. He smiled at that; I guessed that was a conversation he was already familiar with. And I even told him what HARLIE had said about the nature of identity—and how he needed me to be human for him.

  Mr. Cheifetz's expression had gone serious—enough so that it worried me. "Is that bad?" I asked.

  "'Bad' isn't the right word," he said. He hesitated while he tried to figure out how best to explain it. "Do you know the difference between a HARLIE and an IRMA?"

  I shook my head.

  "An intelligence engine is a personality core. It doesn't solve problems by itself; what it does is create problem-solving matrices to be manipulated by other processors. The bigger the processing array you plug it into, the larger the problem it can model.

  "The IRMA engine is the workhorse of the industry. It considers problems. It analyzes the nature of problems. It creates matrices that encompass all the variables within a circumstance. It quantifies and codifies. It games out scenarios and then, depending on the amount of processing power available to it, it manipulates the various matrices to see what consequences are most likely to occur from a given set of circumstances. It even includes chaotic modeling to allow for nonrepeatable constructions.

  "The reason that an IRMA works so well is that it can reprogram its models of a situation through a near-infinite number of matrices—of course, it sorts for practicality, discarding ninety-nine percent of the possibilities, the obviously impractical and illogical ones. It does that for every problem, constructing its computational models on the fly. This is how all intelligence engines work—even HARLIEs."

  "Yes, sir." I sipped some more soda.r />
  "For the most part, a HARLIE works just like an IRMA—but with one important difference. An IRMA reinvents its models as it considers them. A HARLIE goes one step further. It recognizes that it's part of the model too—and reinvents itself as well."

  "Oh," I said. Then, "Oh!"

  "Right." Just to make sure I understood, Cheifetz explained further, "There are some types of problems that IRMA units have difficulty with. We call them Heisenberg problems. Do you understand why?"

  "Heisenberg's uncertainty principle?"

  "Very good. What Heisenberg said was that you can't ever observe anything without affecting what you're observing. That is, the watcher influences what is being watched, simply by the act of watching—so it's impossible to know how something behaves when no one is watching.

  "The same thing applies to intelligence engines. Some problems can't be modeled and manipulated by intelligence engines, because the intelligence engine becomes part of the problem. Aside from the recursive dilemma, there is a whole branch of intelligence theory to deal with the philosophical and theoretical problems that raises.

  "The HARLIE unit—a quantum-based processor—represents a kind of loophole in the paradigm. Because it can redesign itself as necessary, it can actively step out of the problem—at least far enough to create theoretical negation of its own—" He stopped. "I'm losing you, aren't I?"

  "Uh, no, sir."

  "Charles, please. We promised to be honest with each other. The point is that for certain problems, the value of a HARLIE is that it can change its own personality to match the kind of problem it's trying to solve. It's kind of like biting off more than you can chew and then growing the jaws to chew what you've bitten."

  "So, HARLIE was telling the truth when he said he wasn't the same entity from one moment to the next … ?"

  "Pretty much so. A HARLIE can rewrite its own code. It will reconstruct its own personality to suit its needs. It can grow some pretty interesting sets of jaws. Do you see the danger in that?"

  "Um, yes, I think so. One day, HARLIE is going to bite his own ass. Or maybe ours?" I struggled to put it into better words. "I mean—what you're saying is that if a HARLIE can rewrite its own code, then HARLIE could get pretty far out there, right?"

  "That's right."

  "So at some point, we'd have to ask—is HARLIE sane?"

  "Sane isn't the right word. Rational or appropriate would be better terms. But, yes—that's the right question. How do we know that HARLIE hasn't gone too far?

  "Is there an answer?"

  "There would have been—"

  "If?"

  "If we'd had more time. Theoretically, the HARLIE base personality will center itself before each new iteration—but because that restricts its freedom to evolve, it also has the ability to reinvent its core. So the dilemma just gets passed to another domain." He shook his head. "We don't know how it works in practice. We never had the chance to find out."

  He waited for me to say something, but I couldn't think of anything to say. Maybe HARLIE was deranged and maybe he wasn't. We had no way of knowing.

  Finally, Mr. Cheifetz spoke up. "There is this, Charles … "

  I looked up hopefully.

  "HARLIE seems to have been pretty candid with you. That counts for something."

  "I guess so."

  "He told you that he needs you to be human for him. That suggests to me that he's recognizing his own limitations. That he wants to learn."

  "So you think … ?"

  "I think HARLIE is a lot like you. He's trying to grow up. That's what he needs you for. He needs to see how it's done."

  "Oh." And then, "Oh, shit."

  "Yes, I agree."

  "What should I do?"

  "Keep watching him—to see which way he grows."

  "Yes, sir."

  As the hatch closed behind me, I realized another piece of what it is to be a grown-up. You have to help take care of those who aren't.

  DEFINING GOVERNMENT

  After that, nothing happened for a long time.

  Mostly because there wasn't much opportunity for anything to happen. We were still three months to New Revelation, and we had a lot of work to do.

  We fell back into the same shipboard routines and we went on. Boynton pushed our speed up to fifty-six C and we held there for two weeks. Other than that, nothing was different. Everybody worked. Everybody went to school. Stinky went to school, I went to school, Douglas and Mickey went to school. Mom and Bev went to school—sometimes to learn, sometimes to teach.

  Whatever premonitions I'd been having, either I learned to live with them, or they went away, or I was so busy with homework and music practice that I didn't have time to think about them. Probably the latter.

  In one of our classes, we started having discussions on the nature of government. At first, I'd expected these to be pretty boring, but they weren't. Our instructor was a guy named Whitlaw. He was an old man, so old I wondered why he was emigrating—or even why they'd accepted him; he was obviously too old to do any hard work. But here he was, using up air and food and water. I figured they'd only made him a teacher because there wasn't anything else he could do, and most of us kids had already figured out that a lot of our classes were just a fancy way of baby-sitting, keeping us busy so we wouldn't get into trouble on our own—because most of the stuff they were teaching us was obviously going to be irrelevant once we got to Outbeyond. Like all these discussions on the nature of government. How was that going to be important?

  For example, one day, Whitlaw asked us what kind of government we wanted.

  "Free," said somebody.

  "Yes, that's the easy answer," said Whitlaw. "Do you mean free, as in you don't have to pay for it? Or free, as in liberté, égalité, fraternité?"

  "Not having to pay for it would be nice," Gary Andraza said. "Besides, nobody believes in that liberty, equality, fraternity stuff anymore. It doesn't work. Government is a bargain with the devil. You pay for as much as you need. And most people think they need more government than they really do."

  "Uh-huh, and how much do you need?"

  "Not very much, if you pick up your own trash."

  Whitlaw considered that for a moment. "All right," he said. "It's your government. Make it up the way you want to."

  "Why?" asked someone else. "The grownups aren't going to listen to us anyway. They're just going to do whatever they want."

  "Yes, that's what you believe. But someday—a lot sooner than you expect, you're going to be the grown-ups. And whatever government the colony starts out with, you're the ones who are going to inherit it. So it's important that all of you be a part of the discussions from the very beginning." I got the feeling that he wanted to pace around the classroom—but you can't pace in free fall.

  "Listen," he said. "You have a rare opportunity. You get to build a new civilization. You get to decide for yourself what you want it to be. This is a question that everybody on board this starship has to consider. And everybody will consider—because colony orientation seminars are mandatory for everyone. And every seminar, every class, every committee, has been assigned this question for discussion. And when you think you've worked out what you want, you'll elect representatives to a shipboard congress who will draft a charter document. A declaration of intention.

  "The folks at Outbeyond are doing the same thing you are—asking themselves what kind of government they want. And when we arrive, their representatives and yours will form the first Outbeyond Congress. And your declaration of intention and theirs will be the starting point for Outbeyond colony's first constitution. So I suggest you approach this discussion as if it matters—because it does." He looked around the cabin as if daring anyone to disagree with him.

  By this time, we'd heard some of the stories about Whitlaw, about how when he taught high school back in California, he used to make all the girls cry, and sometimes some of the boys. And once his students actually rebelled against him. But instead of scaring us, those rumors ac
tually made us respect him.

  So we started out by listing all the things that were important to us.

  Kisa went first. She said, "I don't want anybody telling me that I have to believe in God the way they say. What if I don't want to believe in their God?"

  I was looking at Trent when she said that and his face tightened a little bit.

  "Freedom of belief." Whitlaw wrote it down on his pad, without comment.

  Trent raised his hand. I was expecting him to say something angry, but he didn't. He said, "There's music I want to play, but some people tell me I can't, because it's sinful. I don't see how music can be sinful. Sometimes it's different, but that doesn't make it wrong. I want to be able to have my own music."

  "Freedom of expression." Whitlaw wrote that one down too.

  "I want to be listened to," said Gary Andraza.

  "The right to vote," said Whitlaw, writing.

  Little Billy Piper spoke up next. "I want to be left alone." I knew what that was about. He got picked on a lot because he was the smallest and the smartest. Maybe he deserved some of what he got, because he was also a smart-ass, but it still wasn't fair.

  Whitlaw scribbled. "The right to be unpopular." Somebody giggled. Whitlaw looked up. "It's the right to be different. It's about not letting the majority beat up the minority. And it's a critical component of justice."

  "A fair legal system," said Cassy Beach. "An equitable way to petition for redress of grievances."

  "Someone's been doing her homework," said Whitlaw.

  I raised my hand. Whitlaw looked over at me. "I don't want to be chased by any more guys with subpoenas. We had two governments—three, if you count invisible Luna—try to stop us from emigrating. I want limits on the authority of government."

  "Protection from unreasonable search and seizure. Limits on the authority of government. Good, Charles. Anyone else—?"

  "The right to defend ourselves."

  "The right to have a party without someone saying we can't."

  "The right to get married."

  "The right of privacy."

  "The right to secede." That was Pedder Branson. He was always arguing about something—he'd argue with anyone about anything, even when he knew absolutely nothing at all about the subject. Nobody liked him.