Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  “Where are you from?” the carpenter resumed, hopefully.

  “Back east,” she replied. “And I wish I was back there now. Tell me there’s a bus out of here in ten minutes and you’ll make my day.”

  The bearded guy behind the carpenter laughed at that, but the carpenter didn’t. “There’s no buses through here,” he said.

  “No surprise.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, but I’m driving down to Boulder tonight. You could get a bus from there.”

  “Don’t get me wrong.” she said. “I said you’d make my day.”

  “Sure, lady.”

  He seemed humble enough, but he was male and naturally he was playing the odds. That was fine with her, as long as she got within reach of civilization.

  The carpenter ended up having his van drive them both all the way to the Denver shuttleport, almost a hundred miles away. He gave her no trouble during the seventy-minute ride. He seemed grateful for what little conversation she was willing to give him, and parted from her cheerfully with a firm handshake.

  Sparta went into the terminal and threw herself joyfully into the nearest contoured, chrome-and-black-plastic chair in the busy lobby. To her, the noise and the winking neon ads and glaring videoplate billboards, the diffuse green light that bounced off every reflective surface, were soothing. She pulled her quilted coat tight around her, hugging herself, letting fatigue and relief wash over her—she was back, back among crowds of people, with access to transportation and communication and financial services, the whole vast neural network of electronics that knit the country, the world, the colonies of space together. She could get what she wanted without making herself memorable. And for a few minutes she could sit right here in the open and rest, not bothering to hide, confident that nothing about her nondescript appearance would attract the slightest attention.

  Her eyes opened to find an airport cop looking down at her suspiciously, his finger poised at his right ear, about to key his commlink. “You been out for half an hour, lady. You need sleep, use the hive in Five.” He tapped his ear. “Or you want me to call work-shelter?”

  “Goodness, officer. I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t realize.” She looked past him, startled, in the direction of the flight announcement screen. “Oh, don’t tell me I’m going to miss this one too!” She stood up and dashed for the nearest people-mover headed for the launch pads.

  She didn’t look back until she was surrounded by other passengers. There was a certain air of glumness about the belt riders, huddled in their festive plastic-and-foil vacation clothes, probably because for most of them the vacation was over; they were headed back to the reservation. She made a discreet show of searching her pockets in distress before stepping off the rolling walkway at the first interchange and heading back toward the waiting area.

  She walked straight into the women’s room and peered into the mirror. She got a shock. Nondescript wasn’t the word for her; she was bedraggled. Her drab brown hair hung in greasy snakes; there were dark circles under her eyes; her boots and pants and the skirts of her coat were splashed with dried red mud to the knee.

  No wonder the cop had suspected her of being non-R. He was right, of course—only one agency held her registration—but right for the wrong reasons, and she’d have to do something about those reasons quickly.

  She washed her face, splashing it repeatedly with icy water until she was wide awake. Then she left to find the nearest information booth.

  She slipped into the booth and peered at the blank flatscreen. Here, on this little flat plate and mounded keyboard, was light-speed access to anyone on Earth or in space who wished to be accessible (access to persons who didn’t want to be accessible took a bit longer). Here was access to vast libraries of data (access to protected data took a bit longer). Here were the means of making or securing loans, paying debts, investing, wagering, buying every imaginable kind of legal goods or services, or just giving money away (other kinds of goods, services, and transactions took a bit longer). All that was required of the client was a valid I.D. sliver and sufficient credit in a registered account.

  Sparta no longer had the sliver she had stolen, having deliberately dropped it in the snow outside the door of the mountain tavern, for she had no intention of leaving a trail of illicit transactions behind her. But in the intimate privacy of an information booth—the sort of privacy only a place surrounded by crowds could provide—her lack of a sliver was not an immediate concern.

  Like the long struggle between people who design armor and people who design armor-piercing projectiles, the long struggle between people who design software and people who want to penetrate it was an endless evolutionary spiral. In these days of the late 21st century, fiddling with open-access programs wasn’t easy, even for those with inside knowledge.

  Yet it was another of the things Sparta was sure she had been trained for—to what purpose, she could not remember. With fingerprobes thrust deep into the sliverport she was able to bypass the keyboard and taste the flavor of the system directly…

  Alas, there are no glittering informationscapes, no pretty crystal structures of data, no glowing nodes of inference and signification. There are no pictures in the electricity—nor in the light—except as encoded, and such pictures as there are must be filtered through crude external analogue devices, steerable beams, glowing phosphors, excited diodes, writhing liquid magnetized suspensions, the raster. But although there are no pictures in the electricity, there are relationships. There are patterns, harmonics, conformations.

  Datastreams are numbers, huge numbers of huge numbers, huger numbers of lesser numbers, a virtual infinity of bits. To attempt to visualize even part of the stream is beyond the capacity of any general-purpose system ever evolved. Smell and taste are different. Feel is different. The sense of harmony is different. All are acutely sensitive to pattern, and because there are higher-process analogues of these patterns, it is possible for some people to savor numbers. Calculating prodigies—geniuses, and more frequently idiots savants—occur naturally in every age; to create one purposely requires a prodigious grasp of the peculiar neurology of the numerically gifted. So far the task had been accomplished just once.

  Sparta didn’t even know it. Sparta, like natural calculators, had a particular fascination and facility with prime numbers; unlike natural calculators, her right brain housed artificial neural structures that vastly expanded the range and size of the primes she could manipulate, structures of which she was yet unaware, even as she used them. It was not wholly by coincidence that data encryption systems often depend on keys that are large primes.

  Sitting quietly in the Denver information booth, watching the flatscreen, Sparta appeared to be studying the dance of the alphanumerics; the blurring symbols on the screen had no significance, however, for she was questing far beyond the interface, following the sharp tang of a familiar key through the communication networks like a salmon following the trace of its home brook through the labyrinth of ocean—except that Sparta was immobile, and the informational ocean surged through her mind. Sitting still, she swam ever closer to home.

  The budgets of the most secret agencies of government are not labeled in public print but are broken up and scattered through the budgets of many other agencies, disguised as insignificant line items, with the funds frequently channeled through transactions with cooperative contractors and commercial bankers. Occasionally the ploy backfires—as when a legate whose colleagues have kept him in the dark inquires loudly and publicly why the defense forces, for example, have paid millions for “helicopter replacement parts” and have only a handful of cheap nuts and bolts to show for it—but generally only a few people know or care what the money is really for, or where it really goes.

  The money is electronic, of course, spreadsheet numbers of constantly changing magnitude, transactions tagged in electronic code. Sparta was tracking the routes of one code in particular. Sliding into the memory of the First Tradesmen’s Bank of Manhattan through a
coded trap door, Sparta’s awareness uncovered the golden thread she had been seeking.

  The people who had created her had not imagined the playful uses to which she would put her talents.

  Here in the information booth it was a simple matter to transfer a modest and reasonable amount, a few hundreds of thousands, from an insignificant line item in her target’s budget (“office maintenance and custodial”) to a real contractor, to that contractor’s real subcontractor, to a well-known phony consultant firm, and now into a cutout loop through the black side of another agency—who would not miss what they had held for only a microsecond flip-flop, but would stop any inquiries cold—and finally through a random cascade of addresses to another, much smaller New York institution, the Great Hook Savings and Loan, which appealed to her for the naiveté of its pseudo-prime key and whose Manhattan branch thus acquired a new customer without even knowing it—a young woman whose name was…

  She needed a name, fast, not her real name, not Linda, not L. N., but Ellen, and now a last name, Ellen, Ellen … before the flatscreen dumped her she keyed in the first word that popped into her mind. Her name was Ellen Troy.

  Sparta needed the information booth only a few seconds longer, to reserve a seat for Ellen Troy on the next hypersonic ramjet flight from Denver to JFK. The voucher and gate pass slid soundlessly from the printer slot. She withdrew her newly programmed fingernail PIN spines from the sliverport.

  Her flight was not until morning. She would walk to the hive in Terminal Building Five, take a cubicle for the rest of the night, wash up, clean her clothes, get some rest. It would have been nice to shop for new clothes, but with the economy as it was, robots doing all the technical stuff and people competing for the rest, the shops in heavily used public places were overcrowded with sales people on duty around the clock. She couldn’t buy from machines just yet; she would have to wait until she had managed to secure an ID sliver of her own before she could buy anything, right out in public.

  She was confident that the Great Hook Savings and Loan would be more than happy to replace the sliver Ellen Troy had “lost.” Their records would show that Miss Troy had been a loyal customer for the past three years.

  4

  The plan seemed a good one at first. She wanted to find her parents, or find out what had become of them. Meanwhile she had to survive. She needed an occupation that would help her do both, and before long she found one.

  The old United Nations buildings on Manhattan’s East River now housed the U.N.’s successor, the Council of Worlds. Beside Earth, the worlds in question were the orbiting space stations and colonized moons and planets of the inner solar system, dominated by shifting coalitions of Earthly nations. The historic U.N. treaties against territorial claims in space were still honored in letter, if not in spirit; like Earth’s open oceans, space knew no borders, but its resources went to those who could exploit them.

  Among the Council of Worlds’ largest bureaucracies was, therefore, the Board of Space Control, formulating and enforcing safety regulations, shipping rates and schedules, customs and passport restrictions, and inter-planetary treaties and law. The Space Board had huge data banks, sophisticated forensic laboratories, its own gleaming-white fast ships emblazoned with a diagonal blue band and gold star, and an elite corps of trained and motivated inspectors.

  The Space Board also employed thousands of non-elite—technicians and clerks and administrators—scattered among offices on every space station and inhabited body of the solar system but particularly concentrated at Earth Central, near the Council of Worlds headquarters in Manhattan.

  Central as it was on the interplanetary scale, the Board’s administrative functions were widely dispersed throughout the city. Twenty-one-year-old “Ellen Troy” had no difficulty getting a job with the Space Board, for her credentials were excellent—electronic transcripts from her Queens high school and the Flushing Meadow College of Business, from which she had graduated at age twenty, showed that she had excellent word-and data-processing skills. References from the employer she had worked for the year after her graduation, the now unfortunately defunct Manhattan Air Rights Development Corporation, showed that she had been a model employee. Ellen breezed through the Space Board’s qualifying exam and found herself placed exactly where she wanted to be, with access to the largest interlinked computer network in the solar system, protected in her anonymity by a new name and a new appearance (Sparta’s hair was no longer brown, her face was no longer gaunt in its beauty, her teeth were no longer hidden by perpetually closed thin lips; instead her full lips were always slightly parted), and further camouflaged by an enormous bureaucracy in which she figured only as another cipher.

  Sparta’s plan was at once bold and cautious, simple and intricate. She would learn what she could from the Board’s vast stores of information. Later, whatever effort it took, she would earn the badge of a Space Board inspector; having achieved that, she would have gained the freedom to act…

  In this plan there were only a few minor hitches. She knew now that sometime during her eighteenth year, the first of the three years she could not recall, she had been altered significantly, beyond what was obvious—altered, that is, beyond her enhanced senses of taste, smell, hearing and sight, beyond even the PIN spines under her fingers, the polymer inserts which were already coming into fashion among the more avant-garde rich. (She did what she could to conceal hers, for Ellen Troy was a daughter of the working class.)

  These alterations had left their marks inside her body, some of which showed up on routine medical scans. She devised a cover story, not too difficult a task … but she further had to learn to control certain extraordinary abilities, some of them obvious, some unexpected, and some that manifested themselves at inconvenient moments. For the most part she no longer tasted what she did not want to taste, heard what she did not want to hear, saw what she did not want to see—at least while she was conscious—but now and then strange sensations overcame her, and she felt urgencies she could not fully bring to awareness.

  Meanwhile, life and work went on; a year passed, then two. On a hot and humid August morning Sparta bent close over the papers on her desk, hardcopies of documents and articles she had pored over many times before, none of them secret, all easily available to the public, documenting the innocent beginnings of the SPARTA project. One of them began:

  A PROPOSAL submitted to the United States Office of Education for a demonstration project in the development of multiple intelligences.

  Introduction

  It has frequently been suggested that the brain of the average human being has unrealized potential for growth and learning—potential which is unrealized, that is, in all but a tiny, haphazard minority of individuals we recognize as “geniuses.” From time to time educational programs have been suggested which would have as their goal the maximization of this unused intellectual capacity in the developing child. At no time before the present, however, have actual methods of stimulating intellectual growth been precisely identifiable, much less subject to conscious control and application. Claims to the contrary have proven at worst false, at best difficult to verify.

  Moreover, the mistaken view persists that intelligence is a single, quantifiable trait, a heritable or even a genetic trait—a view perpetuated by the continued widespread use of long-discredited Intelligence Quotient (IQ) tests by schools and other institutions. This continued use can only be understood as an attempt by administrators to find a convenient (and most probably a self-fulfilling) predictor upon which to base the allocation of resources perceived as scarce. The continued use of the IQ has had a chilling effect on the testing of alternate theories.

  The authors of this proposal intend to demonstrate that there are no unidimensional geniuses, that each individual human being possesses many intelligences, and that several, perhaps all, of these intelligences may be nurtured and encouraged to grow by simple, mindful intervention on the part of appropriately trained teachers and educational technicia
ns…

  Shaved of its academic fuzz, this document—a draft, rejected by the government to which it had been submitted, and dating from some years before Sparta herself had been born—was a fair statement of what Sparta’s parents had set out to do.

  They were cognitive scientists, Hungarian immigrants with a special interest in human development. In their view an IQ number, lacking inherent meaning, was a label that blessed some, damned many, and gave easy comfort to racists. Most pernicious was the peculiar notion that some mysterious something, reified as IQ, was not only heritable but fixed, that not even the most beneficial intervention in the growth of the child could increase the quantity of this magical mental substance, at least not more than a few insignificant percentage points.

  Sparta’s parents intended to prove the opposite. But despite their revolutionary rhetoric, the public and the granting agencies perceived something old-fashioned about their up-by-your-bootstraps ideas, and it was several years before support materialized, in the form of a modest grant from an anonymous donor. Their first subject, as their convictions demanded, was their own young daughter. Her name was still Linda, then.

  Not long after, New York State and then the Ford Foundation chipped in grants of their own. The SPARTA project got its acronymous name, plus a small staff and several new students. After it had been officially underway for two years, the Science section of the New York Times carried a notice:

  Bullish on Fox, Bearish on Hedgehog

  Psychologists at the New School for Social Research hope to resolve an argument that goes back at least as far as the 8th century B.C., when the Greek poet Archilochus made the enigmatic statement, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” In recent times the poet’s remark has symbolized the debate between those who think intelligences are many—linguistic, bodily, mathematical, social, and so forth—and those who believe intelligence comes as a lump sum, symbolized by an IQ score, which is resistant to change and can probably be blamed on one’s genes.