Yet that final addition proved to be the saver. In some way that Birdie could not explain, Steven Graves and E. C. Tally canceled each other out. Maybe it was because they never stopped arguing. The annoyance level of their arguments was enough to reduce most other irritations to background level, and it allowed Birdie to take his mind off the unpleasant reality of the journey.
That reality had started even before they lifted off from Opal. All three had gone to the edge of one of the Slings, to inspect the ship that Birdie had been offered for the journey. Tally had lagged behind the other two, showing an unnatural interest in a species of domestic waterfowl swimming just offshore.
"You're saying he's a bloody robot!" Birdie complained, when he was sure he could not be overheard. "Well, why didn't somebody tell me that when he first arrived? No wonder he comes across like such an idiot."
"He's not a robot." Julius Graves was eyeing the interplanetary transit vessel with disfavor. The ship was certainly big—ten times the size they needed—but the outer hull was scarred and rusted. On Miranda it would have seen the scrap heap a century earlier. "I really shouldn't have said anything at all, except that sometime it might be important for you to know. E. Crimson Tally is an embodied computer. His available data base should be huge, even though he lacks human experience and local knowledge."
"Same difference. Computer, robot. And data base about what? He doesn't seem to know anything useful."
"He's not a computer, or a robot. He has a human body."
Birdie shuddered. "That's awful. Whose was it before he got it?"
"Nobody's. It was grown for him from a library template." Graves had climbed up to stare through a hatch into the ship's vast and desolate interior. He sniffed. "Phew. What did you say this was used for last time?"
"Ore freighter." Birdie peered in. "At least, that's what they told me. Can't imagine what sort of ore looked like that. Or smelled like it." He pulled his head out fast. Even he was impressed by the filth inside. "But I still don't know what Tally's doing here."
"Blame me for that. If I had returned to Miranda as planned, E. C. Tally would have gone with me. He tells me that he was sent to Opal with three goals. First, to determine firsthand the significance of recent events here; second, to accompany me wherever I go; and third, to bring me back with him to Alliance headquarters." Graves rubbed his hand over the hatch cover and stared at the results with distaste. "Look, this won't do. The whole inside will have to be cleaned out completely before it's fit for use."
"No problem."
No problem, because Birdie knew that the chances of getting anyone to clean it out were zero; but there was no point in telling that to Graves. It occurred to Birdie that he would willingly settle for the last of those three stated mission objectives for E. C. Tally—all his own problems would go away if only Graves and Tally would just leave. And didn't it display the most monstrous and the most typical gall, for the Alliance Council to sit hundreds of light-years away and try to call the shots through a half-witted robot?
Tally's next act had not helped his popularity with Birdie. He had finished his puzzled inspection of the ducks, then wandered over to examine the inside and outside of the ship.
"May I speak?" he said at last.
Birdie swore. "Will you for God's sake stop saying that? Even when I say no, you speak anyway."
"My apologies, Commissioner Kelly. Since my request for some reason causes you discomfort, I will try to desist . . . even though politeness was a basic element of my prime indoctrination. However, I am sure you will be interested in what I have to say now. I have been engaged in computation and analysis. Based on this ship's history and current condition, I calculate a sixty-six percent chance of catastrophic failure on any extended journey, such as that planned to the planet Gargantua."
Julius Graves gave a loud grunt of disapproval. Birdie shuddered and felt inclined to echo it. Had he survived Summertide, then, only to be wiped out in space? Not if he could help it. But surely he didn't need to do anything. This was the moment where Graves would exercise his override authority as a council member and veto the whole journey, no matter what E. C. Tally wanted to do. It was unacceptably dangerous.
"I am sorry, Tally," Graves said—there, he was going to use his authority, just the way Birdie had hoped. "But we are forced to take exception to your statement. Steven calculates that there is a sixty-percent chance of catastrophic failure—no more!"
"I beg to differ." Tally looked down his well-designed nose at Graves. "I think that if you itemize the parameter inputs appropriate to the case, as follows, you will find these additional sources of danger . . ."
And away they went.
The Steven Graves vs. E. Crimson Tally stakes; that was the way Birdie was coming to think of it. As the Incomparable—Birdie was inclined to agree with that name for the rotting hulk—creaked and groaned its smelly and rust-covered way to the outer system, Steven Graves and E. C. Tally went on with their endless arguments.
Who was the winner? Birdie was not sure. The trip out to Gargantua was long and—thank God!—uneventful, and there were few people around to argue the point with. From sheer perversity Birdie went to an unlikely source—and consulted Julius Graves about the Steven-Tally dispute.
The councilor took the question perfectly seriously, wrinkling his bald, scarred forehead before he replied.
"I believe that I can be impartial. And I think it is a standoff. E. C. Tally has the advantage over Steven when it comes to anything involving computational speed—which is no surprise, given that his basic circuitry is many trillions of times as fast. The real surprise is that Steven can do as well as he does. So far as I can tell—Steven and I have discussed this several times—Tally employs direct formula computation whenever possible. Steven, on the other hand, makes extensive use of precomputed and memorized lookup tables and interpolation. Normally Tally will reach a conclusion faster on anything calling for straight computation—but not always.
"Steven's advantage comes in other areas. Like any human, he enjoys a degree of parallelism that no computer, embodied or not, has ever achieved. To take one simple example, Steven and you and I are capable of remarkable feats of pattern recognition. We can distinguish and name an object familiar to us in a fraction of second, no matter how far off or at what angle we see it. You know who I am at once when we meet, regardless of lighting conditions or distance. Given the slow speed of organic memory, that cannot require more than about one hundred full cycles of our brains, which means tremendous parallel processing. To do the same job of recognition, the inorganic brain of E. C. Tally needs hundreds of billions of serial calculation cycles. Naturally, he will eventually reach the same result. But in this case, Steven will often be faster."
"Two heads are better than one, you mean." Birdie was unsmiling. "Either one of them may win. Sounds like we ought to hear from both Steven and E. C. Tally before we make any decision."
"There is a certain logic to that idea. The other surprise is in information storage. Steven has far slower access, but he has better information packing density. He knows many more facts than E. C. Tally, but he takes longer to retrieve them." Graves thought for a few moments longer. "And, of course, the final weakness of E. C. Tally is unrelated to computation speed or to memory capacity. It is his inability to allow for the effects of emotion when considering human issues. He will always do his best to make the right decision—his makeup gives him no choice—but his judgment on both human and alien issues will always be impaired. And the farther he is away from the environment in which his principal experience was drawn, the more suspect his decision processes will be." Graves peered around, making sure that Tally was not lurking somewhere near. "It occurs to me that you and I had better keep a close eye on him. Especially you. He will seek to hide his motives from me, because he knows that I am part of the Council. You must inform me at once if his actions ever appear dangerously simplistic, or insensitive to the subtleties of organic intelligence."
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Birdie nodded. At the first opportunity he went for a quiet chat with E. C. Tally.
"Your observations have merit," Tally said carefully, after a few milliseconds' pause for substantial introspection. "The minds of Julius and Steven Graves possess certain attributes that may supplement mine. There is virtue in massively parallel processing, although on the whole it does not compensate for the painfully sluggish speed of an Organic's neural circuits." Tally looked carefully around him. "However, Julius and Steven Graves possess one weakness that could be fatal. In an emergency they—especially Julius—will tend to make judgments that are clouded by emotion. I was warned of this by the council. Perhaps you can assist me here. Graves will seek to hide the effects of his emotions from me, because he knows that I will be reporting to the Council. You must tell me at once if his actions ever appear dangerously emotional, or unduly colored by the hormonal influences of organic intelligence."
"Sure. You can count on me."
"Hmm. Indeed?" There was a moment's pause. "Aha! You employ the verb idiomatically, not literally." E. C. Tally nodded with heavy satisfaction. "Yes, indeed you do. Logic, and the slowness of your arithmetic circuits, require that must be the case. It is rewarding to know that the ways of organic intelligence are becoming apparent to me."
He wandered off through the interior, with its lingering aroma of rancid fat.
Birdie felt a moment's satisfaction, which was quickly replaced by a disturbing thought: Graves is as crazy as a Varnian, and E. C. Tally is no better. What's wrong with me, when both sets of weirdos take me into their confidence?
ENTRY 18: VARNIAN
Distribution: The Varnian cladeworld, Evarnor, orbits an F-type star near the center of the ellipsoidal gas cloud known in the Fourth Alliance as the Swan of Hercules. The cloud lies approximately 170 light-years from Sol, in a direction bisecting the angle between the galactic normal and the vector to the galactic center.
Varnians spread from their original home via sublight-speed ships to thirteen other planets prior to their discovery by human explorers. All fourteen of these Varnian worlds lie within or on the boundaries of the Swan of Hercules.
Subsequent to that first discovery (in E. 1983, by the members of the Dmitriev Ark), small groups of Varnians have been spread by human contact throughout the Fourth Alliance and the Cecropia Federation. Spiral-arm regulations prohibit the formation of any colony of Varnians in excess of four thousand members, except on Evarnor itself or on one of the original thirteen Varnian colony worlds. Despite Varnian petition, this edict is judged unlikely to change in the foreseeable future (see Culture, below).
The population of Varnians throughout the spiral arm is estimated at 220 million. Although in no danger of extinction, they represent one of the rarer intelligences of the region.
Physical Characteristics: The Varnians are versatile metamorphs, capable of extensive physical transformation. Since Evarnor is a low-temperature planet, close to the limit for oxygen breathers, the Varnians who live there adopt in repose a spherical configuration that maximizes heat conservation. They extrude variable-width pseudopods as required, but they rarely deviate far from the overall spheroid.
Varnians in warmer environments are less constrained in appearance. In the presence of members of another species they will often mimic their main features, from the basic elements of endoskeleton, limb structure, and epidermal appearance, to such refinements as eye color, hair follicles, and behavioral patterns. There are no known limits to such mimicry ("Don't judge a Varnian by the warmth of her smile").
History: The Varnian story appears as a constant battle with racial insanity. If any species points up the distinction between intelligence and rational behavior, this is it. Archeological records, obtained by human and Cecropian workers, show that Varnian civilization went through at least five sudden and total extinctions, with subsequent slow returns from barbarism. Each collapse occurred without warning, following a long stable period of peaceful development. The estimated cycle time has been as short as forty thousand years (Second Eclipse) and as long as seven hundred thousand (Fourth Eclipse).
The loss of all but scanty records of those five disasters makes reconstruction of past events difficult; however, the spread of Varnian civilization across fourteen planets of twelve suns during three different eras proves that an advanced technology was achieved in at least those cycles.
The continuous written history of the Varnians can be traced back for twenty-two thousand years, to the time of the beginning of the Sixth Emergence.
Culture: Today's Varnian civilization is tranquil, unambitious, and apparently stable. It has been so for thirty thousand years, with no sign of an impending sixth species-wide disaster. However, the Per'nathon-Magreeu symbiote (PM) Suggested in E. 2731 that this is no cause for complacency. It was PM's analysis of Varnian culture that finally led to the restriction on colony size to four thousand members anywhere beyond the original fourteen Varnian worlds.
PM, in a systematic analysis of Varnian languages, noted that although there are over 140 semantic groups, languages, and local dialects in use among Varnians, none of those possesses a word meaning cynicism, self-criticism, or skepticism. They also pointed out that the basic collapse of Varnian civilization took place only on Evarnor, with the failure of other colonies arising from their material dependence on the cladeworld. In addition, the several different collapses do not all appear to have arisen for the same reason. Finally, PM remarked that the autopsies of Varnian brains reveal no meme-inhibitor complex.
PM concluded that the Varnian collapses were a resonance phenomenon, the consequence of positive feedback among large Varnian groups. Lacking the necessary faculty of reasoned skepticism, the Varnians are uniquely vulnerable to negative memetic influences. Destructive memes, spreading unchecked through the whole population, feed on themselves, to the point where individual Varnians become incapable of rational thought. The memetic plagues are terminated only by a civilization's collapse, with the associated loss of rapid communication among large groups.
PM set the absolute lower limit of interacting Varnians for such a phenomenon at twenty thousand participants. The onset of instability will not normally be seen until the number of individuals involved is in the millions. The present maximum value of four thousand for general colony size is extremely conservative.
—From the Universal Species Catalog (Subclass: Sapients).
CHAPTER 7
Without the aid of the beacon they would never have found Louis Nenda's ship. Darya became convinced of that as the Summer Dreamboat crept closer to it. For the past hundred kilometers they had been flying through a cloud of debris—lumps of rock, water-ice, and ammonia-ice ranging from boulders the size of a house down to pea-sized hail. Even the smaller pieces could be dangerous. The clutter scattered radio signals, too, and determining the precise location of the Have-It-All became a trial-and-error process. No wonder the beacon had been so faint.
"I don't understand this at all," Hans Rebka complained. "Why are there so many fragments, all so close to their ship? We're having to avoid more and more of them." He was at the controls with Kallik at his side. Darya had retired to the bunks, and J'merlia had been left behind on Dreyfus-27, along with a complete record of everything seen so far and instructions to explore and maybe refurbish the old mine shafts and tunnels.
"It cannot be the result of chance." Kallik was still tracking and monitoring, using range and range-rate data to determine the trajectories. She whistled and clucked to herself as she added to the data base she had already formed. "If these fragments were in normal orbits about Gargantua, they would have dispersed, long ago, to form an extended toroidal ck-c-cloud with Gargantua at its center. Since they have not, and since physical laws have not been suspended here . . ." She leaned forward, her forward-facing black eyes intent on the display screen. "Ck-ck. I believe I have the explanation. Tell me if you s-s-see it also. Is not something there, another object, close to the location of
the Have-It-All?"
Darya stood up from the bunk and moved forward to examine the display. Amid the diffuse reflections she saw the hint of a brighter ring of light, at roughly the computed position of Nenda's ship.
"I see something. Hans, it's another planetoid, right in the middle of the mess. In fact it explains why there is a mess. The whole cloud of fragments is orbiting around it, while it orbits Gargantua."
"I ck-concur. It is the reason that they have not dispersed."
"But it makes things more mysterious, not less." Hans Rebka changed the contrast of the display, so that the bright circle stood out more clearly from the background. "Look at that thing. It's tiny—a couple of kilometers across, no more. We'd never have seen it with the ordinary sort of search methods."
"You mean it shouldn't have enough mass to hold anything in orbit around it."
"Right. But it does. And we're being accelerated toward it. I'm forced to make adjustments to our own motion."
The Summer Dreamboat was sliding through a denser froth of orbiting fragments as the body ahead of them became larger and sharper on the display.
"And look at that outline," Darya said softly. "If that's not a perfect sphere, it's close enough to have fooled me."
Kallik was busy superimposing the latest fix for the position of Nenda's ship on the largest display screen. It became clear that the other vessel sat on or very close to the round body. The Hymenopt studied the combined image in silence for a few moments. "The Have-It-All is not moving relative to the planetoid. There must be enough ss-ss-surface gravity to hold it firmly in one position."
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