Loralynn Kennakris 4: Apollyon's Gambit

by Owen R. O'Neill

  Satisfied, the major once again yielded to the attentions of those four busy hands. “And what’s it take to jump to the top of that list?”

  Vasquez opened her eyes slowly. “I can’t say, ma’am. That hasn’t happened—yet.”

  Five: The High Southern Reaches

  Day 191

  Isabelle Downs, Llanberis District

  South Continent, Iona, Cygnus Mariner

  Six GAT days later found Dr. Leidecker waiting on a vast spreading plaza, decorated with numerous fountains and dwarf species of native trees, all flowering in a riot of color (so typical of things Ionian), under a noonday sun so brilliant that it made even the black jackets of the professional people scurrying to and fro on lunch-time errands look cheerful. If the plaza was vast, the building in front of which he waited, the Marcella-Zavala-Marquez Medical Center, was vaster still. Erupting from the plaza’s north side for a full two hundred one stories, it was the concrete symbol of Iona’s pride in its medical technology, and the crown jewel of Isabelle Downs, the capital of Llanberis, South Continent’s richest district, and the de facto (if not de jure) capital of the continent itself.

  Visitors often supposed that the capital’s name harbored some satiric intent, for unlike the cites of the northern hemisphere, Isabelle Downs was located on the planet’s surface. In its design and construction, the city, sited on a tall headland overlooking the ocean, was a literal monument to the wonders seismic isolation technology could accomplish; wonders so expensive nothing like it had been attempted since. Placing one of the League’s tallest buildings at the center was interpreted by some as a singular gesture of defiance, much in keeping with the Ionians complicated relationship with their rambunctious planet.

  Leidecker had been here often enough before that the towering edifice no longer filled him with awe, and moreover he was hot. He’d dressed for this visit in the full regalia of his profession, and the good black broadcloth of his long coat felt inches thick, while his pink shining face above the high stiff white collar seemed to threaten an incipient apoplexy.

  But much of the shine was happiness: happiness at being allowed to venture in the Ionian wilds; at being fully recovered from the excessive dinner of two night before; at Corporal Vasquez gifting him with a flat of cocoa, compliments of the LSS Osiris’s wardroom, and most of all with seeing his particular friend, Dr. Isabeau VelSilinjes, whose clinic occupied six of the Medical Center’s upper floors and who should be emerging from the grand entrance any second.

  “Amos! How delighted I am to see you!” cried Dr. VelSilinjes, appearing as if on cue and catching Dr. Leidecker in an enveloping hug.

  “Likewise, Isabeau. Most assuredly.” Leidecker disengaged himself gently from his friend’s capacious bosom with a chuckle, for Dr. VelSilinjes was tall and statuesque with lively eyes in an open, rather florid face, and curly dark red hair that always seemed to be waving under the influence of some private storm. “You look well. You seem happy.”

  Quite happy, indeed: her face flushed with uncomplicated pleasure, a look quite at odds with her status as one of humanity’s leading neurologists. Although imposing in her professional role, there was nothing of the dour clinician or narrow, cloistered researcher in Isabeau VelSilinjes, and the two physicians stood there with clasped hands, considering one another with great contentment.

  “Tell me how you do, Amos. It’s been months since we last spoke, with this ridiculous state of affairs. I have not laid eyes upon you since when? The last Picardian conference? And why are you dressed like that in this heat? You look to be courting a cerebrovascular accident.”

  “Has it truly been as long as that?”—ignoring the last two comments.

  “Of course it has”—squeezing his hands fondly. “What a creature you are, Amos.”

  “You keep the years better than I, I find.”

  “I hear you have not returned to private practice. Your position must be agreeable?”

  “It has its rewards.”

  That was a cautious answer, and he did not allude to the vexations. In truth, he’d been far from happy with his patient these past few weeks, and his last examination had revealed things that deepened his concern. He would have dearly liked to discuss Loews’ condition with Isabeau, even more than he hoped she might be able to look at Kris’s obstinate nervous system. The extraordinarily complex interactions between immunocyte implants and their hosts were less well understood than the industry liked to admit. That was perhaps understandable given the extreme rarity of most violent reaction: a cytokine storm that was almost invariably fatal. But there were other, less drastic side effects, more difficult to assess than the autoimmune disorders that immunocyte implants had largely eradicated, but essentially similar, which occurred when a host’s immune system—or their entire internal ecology, as it were—and the implant evolved along divergent paths. The maintenance and tuning procedures were supposed to correct this, and in almost all cases they did, but sometimes the implant appeared to “outsmart” the tuning procedures (it was a hive-mind, after all), with unpredictable consequences.

  Leidecker was afraid this was happening with Loews, but the standard response—replacing the implant entirely—was not an option at the moment, and Loews suffered from a number of debilitating conditions, so the implant itself could not be deactivated. More worrisome, this was Loews’ third implant and in each successive case, the divergent behavior had arisen more quickly. Leidecker was at a loss to explain the cause, or this abrupt onset. Ionian medical technology was held to be the best there was; Isabeau had strong connections with the leading experts in the field and he longed to consult them. But if politics was a major concern in the case of an obscure flight officer, with a League Envoy of the highest rank, his desire might border on treason—both for him and Isabeau.

  Dr. VelSilinjes, sensing the constraint and that they had ventured onto this thinnest of thin ice, hastened to change the subject. “I’m sure it must. Let’s get you inside. Undo your collar—I don’t like your color at all. The entrance is around this way.”

  Undoing his collar, he followed her around a massive buttress into the deeper shade of a narrow walkway let into the building’s flank.

  “Tell me,” asked Dr. VelSilinjes over her shoulder as they proceeded farther into cooler depths. “How is dear Riley?”

  Leidecker paused before answering with a pensive smile. “As for dear Riley . . . She found it expedient to—seek in other ranges.”

  Stopping, Isabeau’s face fell. “Oh, Amos. I’m most heartily sorry. That must’ve been very painful for you.”

  “All in the course of things, you know”—the pensive smile tightening a hair. “Not the outcome we looked for, but it seems neither of us were sufficiently domesticated. We remain in contact—see each other when time and circumstance permit. All in all, not unsatisfactory.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. Now I shall not feel so mortified for having brought it up. But come.” She laid a long, elegant hand lightly on his shoulder. “Let me make amends, in any case. How much time do you have? You have companions, I believe. Have you any engagements this PM?”

  “Two charming persons accompany me, yes—I hope you might meet them. But no engagements this afternoon.” These charming persons—if Kris and Vasquez could be so described—were at their accommodations which (while quite pleasant) had been selected to make it easy for IPS to keep a constant watch on them. Vasquez had suggested it would be prudent for them to stay behind to soothe the IPS men while Leidecker made his visit. “Tomorrow, we leave on our excursion. IPS has a assigned us an amiable young man as guide and escort. In truth, they’ve been more friendly and obliging than I had any reason to expect. But today, my dear doctor, I am entirely at your service.”

  “Then you must come up.” The dear doctor badged them through a concealed entrance and across a bare atrium to her private lift. Nodding to the trio of stern IPS men standing by—nothing friendly or obliging there—she shepherded him onto a waiting riser.


  “This excursion sounds delightful,” she remarked as they began to ascend. “I saw from your message that you seek an elusive quarry. I’ve often longed to see a Veriform Gloriosa in the wild, myself.”

  “Quite so. It was your kind suggestion as to where the beast might be better found that taught me to hope.” Leidecker had noted the tight security and her pointed lack of acknowledgement of it beyond that somewhat tense nod. Isabeau had never been a great friend to officialdom—hardly a friend at all, to be perfectly candid—and he wondered at this encroachment of government onto her domain. But it would not do to mention it. “I even have some hopes of a Herculean Probostellus.”

  She smiled indulgently. “Now that is ambitious.”

  “Is it? Are they so very rare now?”

  “Sightings have diminished these past years,” Isabeau allowed. “But we know so little about them—nothing of their mating habits, how they rear their young. We don’t even know if they lay eggs or give live birth.”

  “I’d thought that question was settled—that they certainly laid eggs.”

  “Oh no, Amos. That is rank speculation. Argument by analogy. The . . . shall I say, practical difficulties implied by direct impregnation of the females have convinced many that they must lay eggs, which the males then fertilize. But in truth, no one knows. And, as you’re aware, it’s quite impossible to breed them in captivity.”

  “True. True,” Leidecker muttered distantly, turning the matter over in his mind.

  “It’s a wonder, isn’t it, Amos? To know so little in this day and age? Ah, here we are.” The riser halted and she tapped a code on the panel to open the doors. “It’s over here, Amos.” Isabeau lead him into a darkened room, the luminates set to spectrally mimic starlight. He stopped to let his eyes adjust. “Apologies for the lighting.” She increased it a notch. “We’re experimenting with what works best.”

  “Is that it?” Leidecker asked, making out the dim shape on top of a kind of pedestal at the center of the room. It was a stone tetrahedron of a color indistinguishable in this light, but probably a dull gray-green, with a greasy sort of sheen to it; roughly polished, about thirty centimeters high, with steps two centimeters or so deep carved into one side. A small hole had been bored near the apex, and pale liquid was flowing from it, cascading down the stepped side into the wide, shallow basin in which the object sat. To Leidecker, the arrangement strongly resembled the antique tradition that was still anachronistically called “modern art”, especially with the fountain and the fan of fine gold wires radiating from the base of the tetrahedron.

  “Yes it is,” Isabeau answered, speaking in a hushed tone.

  Removing his heavy coat and placing it over the back of a convenient chair, Leidecker walked over to it, stepping quietly in the room in which the only sound was that of the gently splashing fluid, all thoughts of modern art now banished. He viewed the block from all sides, squatting down to examine it closely, then rose, rubbing his palms together and grinning like a happy child. “So this is the lithomorph. Have you named it yet? Lithomorphus VelSilinjeii, perhaps?”

  “Oh, do be serious, Amos.” But Isabeau looked far from serious herself. Indeed, she was laughing, almost giggling. “Many people were involved in this discovery, not just me. Besides, we hope for something more descriptive.”

  “Descriptive?”

  “Yes,” Isabeau said, with that mischievous smile usually associated with the very young. “Come and see.” She led him over to a desk with some of her hardcopy notes and a new system in it; one of the latest semi-quant hybrids. Five displays surrounded it, each showing a scrolling haze of multicolored dots. Staring at the displays, Leidecker concluded that the activity on the screens was not random; some kind of complex repeating pattern or patterns underlay it, but otherwise it meant nothing to him. He gathered it was connected with the lithomorph.

  “Do I take it that this machine is monitoring the pulses exchanged within the specimen?”

  Isabeau nodded, but with an odd little negative writhe. “It is recording—recording, Amos—the content of the exchanges. In digital form.” She looked so happy she must surely burst.

  “Content, my dear doctor? Am I to understand . . . that is, ones and zeros, perhaps assembled in such a fashion as to have some independent meaning?”

  “Exactly, Amos!” The doctor actually bounced. “Exactly! Oh, I must tell you about it—I’ve never been so thrilled!”

  Certainly that was true, Leidecker reflected, at least not in this century. “Please do,” he invited.

  Isabeau pulled two chairs over so they could sit in front of the screens. “You know how we made those field recordings early last year—the ones that we analyzed so carefully to show the statistics were neither random nor related simply to environmental conditions?”

  “Quite so,” Leidecker affirmed. “The basis for your most excellent paper. Dr. SanSoire went so far as to say that they reflected some degree of individual will, not just simple stimulus response.”

  “He did, dear Dr. SanSoire,” Isabeau beamed. Dr. SanSoire was the Chair of Biological Simulation at Ranjit Singh University on Terra. He had been one of the first and most enthusiastic supporters of her work. “Little did he imagine!” She laughed. “Forgive me, Amos! Oh, do forgive me.”

  “Yes, certainly. Of course. But do go on, Isabeau.” Leidecker was inching towards the edge of his seat. He had never considered Dr. VelSilinjes a particularly alluring woman other than intellectually, but with this mood upon her . . .

  “Well,” Isabeau began, “about a year ago, Dr. SanSoire showed our data to a colleague of his—not a biologist, but a mathematician—just imagine, a mathematician! Anyway, this woman—I forget her name . . . Ramanujan? No that isn’t it, but something like that—”

  “Ms. Not-Ramanujan,” Leidecker suggested helpfully.

  “Yes. This woman looked over the data and said she was sure that not only was it not random and possibly directed, but that it was correlated—that is, the various parts were mathematically related, as if the whole represented some sort of equation. Can you think what that means, Amos!”

  “Yes, undoubtedly, my dear . . . but do continue.”

  “Well, she took copies of the data and worked on it—worked all the rest of the year, Dr. SanSoire said—and she finally solved it. They sent me the results only two months ago, a few weeks after we installed this specimen. They were prime numbers, Amos! Large—very large—prime numbers, and along with them were the prime factors of their products! Don’t you see, Amos, the lithomorphs were doing modulo arithmetic with large primes!”

  Her face was so radiant, her eyes so large and glowing, Leidecker was rather taken aback. “The discovery of the age, my dear, surely. But . . . but what does it signify?”

  “Oh Amos! You are such a character, truly. Have you ever heard of the Shamir Conjecture?”

  “I’m ashamed to say I have not, Isabeau. But it sounds . . . mathematical.”

  “Oh it is,” she agreed, grinning. “Very much so. SanSoire told me about it. Otherwise, I’d have had to look it up. It describes one of the classical hard-to-solve problems of mathematics: finding the prime factors of a very large integer. There are several other similar problems, such as computing discrete logarithms in a finite field generated by a large prime number, and something to do with elliptic curves. They were once used as the basis for encryption methods, the Shamir Conjecture surely was—I don’t think it is any longer. But, Amos, what I didn’t know was that the Shamir Conjecture formed the basis for Mendelson’s Hypothesis!”

  “Indeed?” Leidecker said, blinking hard. Mendelson’s Hypothesis, formulated over two centuries ago, had been the millennial breakthrough in genetics—almost. Thomas Mendelson had claimed to find a way to reconstruct the entire genome of any species based on a very small sample of its genetic code—one part in a million or less. The more complex the genome, the better the method worked, Mendelson said. He’d hoped to use it to reconstruct extinct speci
es from tiny samples of fossil DNA, but unfortunately the calculations involved were so onerous no one had ever managed to prove the hypothesis, much less make practical use of it. Initial tests using genetic fragments from certain bacteria had shown promise and Mendelson himself claimed to have solved the case for a flatworm. But those results were never made public and Mendelson committed suicide shortly thereafter, disconsolate at having made a great discovery that he could neither demonstrate nor use. His hypothesis became a mere cautionary tale in the annals of xenobiology.

  Isabeau continued to beam at him, waiting for the enlightenment to dawn, and when it did not her face fell a bit. “Don’t you see, Amos,” she finally cried, “the lithomorph was solving the Shamir problem! And that’s not all! It works out all kinds of difficult number theory problems. We don’t know how many.”

  “Yes, I see,” Leidecker said defensively. “But over what period, Isabeau? I remember when we tried to reproduce some of Mendelson’s early results—it took months, even on modern machines. How long had this . . . creature . . . been working on the problem when you recorded it?

  “Oh!” Isabeau perked up. “Just moments, actually.”

  “Moments?” Leidecker inquired. “Surely you speak in hyperbole.”

  “Not at all,” she replied brightly. “We performed a test. We asked it—”

  “Asked it? Do not tell me you can communicate with this rock! For all love, Isabeau!”

  “Why certainly we can, Amos. What good would it be if we couldn’t?”

  “But you must tell me how, Isabeau! How did you manage—”

  “Later, Amos, later,” Isabeau said, laughing. “It’s really quite simple, once Dr. SanSoire’s student—Ms. Not-Ramanujan—discovered how interpret their internodal signals, but what I wanted to tell you was we asked it to find the prime factors of a googolplex plus one. On this machine here,” she patted her new system, “that calculation would take over a year.”

  “And how long did your lithomorph require?”