by Paul Chafe
Rrit-Conserver paused by the gates, breathing deeply, his limbs sore from a Hunter's Moon of walking, finished by the final climb. The arduous path was obstacle enough, but the real reason for the fortress's decayed defenses was that it had been protected from time immemorial by something much more powerful, tradition. The Conservers maintained the traditions in the Patriarchy, and one of the strongest was that only a Conserver could enter the bastion of their calling. Not even Patriarchs were permitted to violate its sanctity, and with good reason. Only by preserving impartiality could the Conservers be trusted to judge for the benefit of the race. Even the perception of bias would destroy that trust.
Fifth Custodian greeted him at the gate and showed him to his usual quarters, an austere room in what had once been the main keep. He stayed only long enough to drop his scant belongings and groom himself, then hurried to the central tower. A winding staircase led to a heavy stonewood door bound in iron, behind it a room full of the quiet whir of medical machinery, much of it attached to a wizened figure lying on an instrumented prrstet: Kzin-Conserver.
The old kzin looked up as Rrit-Conserver came in, his ears furling up in surprise. “My old friend, what are you doing here?”
Rrit-Conserver made the half-abasement. “I have come to see you, sire. I was worried.”
“You should be in the Citadel. These are critical times for the Patriarchy.”
“Scrral-Rrit has dishonored himself. I am free of my oath of fealty.”
“What did he do?”
“Does it matter?”
“No. Nor am I surprised.” Kzin-Conserver's ears relaxed. “You might have advised Kchula-Tzaatz instead.”
“Kchula-Tzaatz is as dishonored as Scrral-Rrit, he just hides too well for ztrarr. And he will not take my advice.”
“Hrrr. I had to force him to put you into their councils. I'd hoped you might provide some balance.” The old kzin reclined again, suddenly tired.
“Sire.” Rrit-Conserver stepped to the prrstet, put a paw on his mentor's shoulder. “How are you?”
“I am dying.” Kzin-Conserver struggled to raise his head again. “Which is a welcome thought, when I live like this.”
“There are treatments…” Rrit-Conserver waved a paw to the medical equipment surrounding them.
“To what end? That I may lie gasping on this prrstet and fantasize that I guide that Patriarchy? My life is over. I don't need it anymore.”
“You have lived your life well, sire.”
“Perhaps. I have abandoned the traditions to hold the Patriarchy together. I am ashamed of that, and also afraid I was still too inflexible.”
“You did what you had to for the species. Your decision was balanced.”
“In the end it will make little difference. The Patriarchy is dying too.”
“No, there is hope yet.”
“Hope?” Some of the old fire came back to Kzin-Conserver's voice. “The kz'eerkti are coming, mark my words. Scrral-Rrit is nothing, though we all pretend he is Patriarch to avoid the consequences if he were not. As for Kchula-Tzaatz, the Great Prides will call him leader while they storm to conquest, but when we face the full might of the monkeys they will abandon him. A Traveler's Moon later they'll be at each other's throats.” Kzin-Conserver coughed painfully. “We have been a proud race for a long time. I'm glad I won't live to see the end of that.”
“We are still a proud race, sire, and First-Son-of-Meerz-Rrit is alive.”
“He escaped!” Kzin-Conserver sat upright, reenergized. “I knew that sthondat Tzaatz was hiding something. Have you zatrarr?”
“No, I knew before that the Tzaatz had not killed him. Now I have the word of a kzintzag warrior who helped him escape. He fights the Tzaatz and leads others, and he got a message to me through a slave. His name is Far Hunter.”
“Far Hunter. A promising name.” Kzin-Conserver relaxed back onto the prrstet, breathing heavily after his exertion. “Perhaps there is hope yet.” He closed his eyes, speaking slowly. “You will be Kzin-Conserver after me. I have told Senior Custodian.”
“I am honored, sire.” It was an honor Rrit-Conserver would rather not have had to accept.
“It is a poor gift, in these times. Do your best with it.” Kzin-Conserver waved a paw. “Let me rest now. Come back tomorrow.” The old kzin's eyes slid closed.
“As you wish.” But Rrit-Conserver knew there would be no chance to come back tomorrow and so stayed in silence, his paw on his mentor's shoulder providing what comfort could be given until the end.
They think we don't have weapons? Today we'll show them what a mass driver can do.
— Captain Sael Pollonia at the defense of Luna City (First Man-Kzin War)
Oorwinnig had conducted her test run at the system's edge to hide her capabilities from enemy eyes. Alpha Centauri had lots of kzinti, a decent number of other aliens and more than its fair share of human pirates, freerunners and outlaws who would quite happily sell their species out, so long as the profit margins were high enough. Her tests completed, she plunged back toward the central star. Tskombe did not see Captain Voortman again, and spent the remainder of the voyage with Trina and Curvy. Alpha Cen A itself grew from a dim fourth magnitude star to a burning disk, still small enough to look at directly with the naked eye but putting out as much light as the full moon on Earth. They docked at Tiamat, the largest asteroid of the Serpent Swarm. Tiamat was a potato-shaped mixture of rock and nickel-iron, fifty kilometers by twenty, spun on its long access to generate artificial gravity in the time before humanity gained the grav polarizer. It housed five million humans in its vast warrens, a hundred thousand kzinti, half that many Kdatlyno and Jotok, and a handful of other aliens, all of them the detritus of generations of war. It was the Free Wunderland Navy's major military base, and the economic powerhouse that made the economy of the Centaurus system the showpiece of the UN colonization effort.
Khalsa had planned to land Valiant on wide-open Wunderland. Tiamat presented a problem; the sealed world was under even tighter surveillance than Earth. Tskombe was worried about clearing customs, not for himself but for Trina. The UN had a lot of unofficial clout on Tiamat, but they operated in Centaurus System purely as invited guests with no administrative or governmental power, a compromise arrangement arrived at after a long and frequently bloody struggle with the Isolationists and their political arm, the Free Wunderland Party. Even if the ARM on Earth had hyperwaved Tskombe's ident to the Goldskin cops, the Goldskins wouldn't tag it until the UN had cut their way through the jungle of red tape required to get an Earth warrant recognized in the system. Trina's total lack of an ident was a different matter, but as it turned out he needn't have worried about that either. Curvy spoke to the Goldskin running the customs checkpoint, and shortly thereafter an ARM showed up to usher them through the formalities. The UN's left hand didn't know what the right was doing, not yet anyway. They were given senior quarters in the UN section on the one-gee level. The accommodation people shut down the section's swimming pool for Curvy and arranged fresh fish from Tiamat's aquaculture farms. Another ARM, an attractive blonde woman, took Trina to shop for clothes. Tskombe took the opportunity to go for a swim himself, a rare luxury, and he paddled steadily back and forth while Curvy leapt and played amid the darting trout, getting the exercise that she'd been denied in transit and snapping down fresh fish. Eventually they both tired, and Tskombe climbed out of the water to towel himself off.
“I thought we'd be in trouble without Khalsa to grease the wheels.”
Curvy came over and nosed herself deftly into her hand-suit. “Khalsa worked on my authority. I have sufficient rank within the UN to command resources as required.”
“You do?”
“Yes, of course. I am the UN's senior matrix strategist. My talents are unique, and so they were anxious to secure my services. I am not part of the human hierarchy so they must convince me to work for them. My price, part of my price, has been freedom of movement within human space, facilitated by the UN. Raval
la will want us captured, but his organization is facing many challenges in consolidating power. We are a small detail, and now outside his sphere of direct influence. It will take the bureaucracy a long time to catch up with us here.”
Tskombe shook his head. I knew that, why didn't I make the connection? “If you have this much influence, why didn't you just request me through normal channels back on earth?”
“We were working to that end through General Tobin. However, it was a sensitive situation. If WarSec were caught intervening in political affairs it would generate bad matrix outcomes. In general, we therefore avoid it. Still, matrix analysis has indicated that the elevation of Secretary Ravalla to Secretary General will almost certainly lead to war, and perhaps to the revocation of democratic principles on Earth, and ultimately throughout human space. Ravalla's personality profile is dangerous, even for a politician.”
“Do you actually believe you can make predictions in that detail?”
“Predictions can be made to an arbitrarily high level of detail, with the probability of correctness falling as an exponential function of specificity.” Curvy whistled something that her translator did not translate. “You seek to understand the functional limits within which we can expect to be accurate. We successfully predicted the nature and outcome of the power play that lead to Ravalla's election, within the constraints of our error bars. Admittedly he moved at the earliest possible time. Unfortunately our freedom of action was too limited to allow us to stop it, given the limited amount of warning that our model gave. Launching you to Kzinhome was our best available strategy to prevent war. I have since updated the matrix. The probability lapsed chance of your success is one point four percent.”
Tskombe kicked himself to the side of the pool and levered himself out of the water. “That hardly seems worth the effort.”
“You do not understand, Colonel Tskombe. To have a one percent influence on the course of history is tremendous power. Most individuals have so little influence as to be irrelevant. You are in a privileged position.”
“Privileged with one point four percent.” Tskombe thought about that. “And what about the other ninety-eight point six percent?”
“There are a variety of potential outcomes. The most probable is your death on Kzinhome at seventy-six point one percent, followed by your death on approach to Kzinhome, at twelve point nine percent, followed by a variety of outcomes in which you survive but are unable to prevent the war.”
Tskombe smirked humorlessly. “At least I've got a better than one point eight chance of living.”
“No.” Curvy missed the humor. “In a scenario where you survive to see the war start your chances of surviving the conflict are in line with those of all sentients in human or kzinti space, which is to say close to zero. In addition, there are several sub-scenarios in which you are likely to prevent war but are unlikely to survive personally.”
Not encouraging. “And what is the chance I'll find Ayla on Kzinhome?”
“Unknown. She was removed from the strategic matrix when you returned from your mission. Probability assessment indicates she is almost certainly dead. If not, her circumstances are so extreme that her role is not quantifiable. Hence we cannot compute outcomes in which she plays a part.”
Tskombe fell quiet. Having it put in those stark terms made it clear just how daunting a task he was undertaking. Better, perhaps, to cut his losses while he could. Except, as Curvy had pointed out, if he didn't succeed he was likely to die in a war of mutual annihilation along with almost everyone else. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Curvy swam away to catch another trout. When she came back, she stuck her head out of the water and whistled again. “Colonel Tskombe, we must discuss Trina and her psi talent.”
“Okay.”
“You speculated that she was preternaturally lucky.”
“Only a theory, with virtually no support.”
“I have thought about this in some detail. It is a theory which fits my own experience playing chess with her. In speed chess an amateur has the opportunity to make lucky moves and so win against an expert, because the expert cannot play a deep game. In a standard game the most phenomenal luck will not suffice for victory.”
Tskombe nodded. “I've been thinking about that too. Luck has operating parameters.”
“Explain please.”
“I can kill myself slipping in the shower…” Curvy interrupted with an interrogative whistle. Her translator belatedly said “What?” She was unfamiliar with showers, of course, but Tskombe had already started elaborating. “A small fall is potentially fatal, although that's an unlikely outcome. A fall of five meters will probably injure you, I mean a human, unless you are trained to handle it. A fall of thirty meters usually kills, but not invariably. Some lucky individuals have survived falls of ten thousand meters through lucky landings, in deep snow usually. But no one has ever survived a fall from orbit. Reentry is too extreme a regime for luck to play a role.”
Curvy whistled, rising and falling “I count myself lucky that I do not belong to a species subject to falls.”
Tskombe laughed. I recognize that whistle… Curvy was making a joke. “We have a long way to fall from where we are now.”
Another whistle, this one on a falling note. “Your point is taken, Colonel Tskombe.”
“So is yours. So the question is, how far in advance can luck operate?”
“As far as is necessary, it would seem.”
“No, it can't be like that. Imagine you had luck, not just because someone has to be on the lucky end of the bell curve and that turns out to be you, but because you had a psi talent that could locally influence events. Did some prehistoric mammal return to the oceans because millions of years in the future you, Curvy, would be born, and being born into an aquatic species would protect you from falls? Impossible, because part of what allowed you to be born in the first place was the evolution of dolphins, including the speculative evolution of genes for a psi talent that makes you lucky. You could not have been born anything but a dolphin; if you weren't, you wouldn't be you. To say otherwise would be to imply that every event in your species history — in all of evolution, in all of the universe — had been scripted simply to bring about your existence.”
Curvy clicked. “Such megalomania is a common human conceit.”
“Perhaps, but only a conceit in that defying the tremendous odds against your birth doesn't make you special. If you consider the infinitesimal chance of that one particular sperm out of billions combining with one particular egg out of tens of thousands to form you, the odds against your parents even meeting, against their birth, against your grandparents being born and meeting to produce them, it's easy to convince yourself that you are special. If a trillion trillion universes ran a trillion trillion times we would not expect to see you born even once. What more evidence of your total uniqueness do you require?”
“You commit the gambler's fallacy. A coin flip may come up heads ten thousand times in a row. The odds that it will come up tails next time remain fifty percent. Of the incomprehensibly huge space of possible evolutionary tracks, some tiny fraction must be followed. We happen to be on the track that has developed, which is no more or less likely than any other track which may have been followed from any given start point, but because we happen to be on this one we are here to discuss our good fortune in existing in the first place, whereas the uncountable legions of potential individuals who remained unborn are perforce unable to discuss their own circumstances. We cannot discuss probabilities post-facto, because events have already transformed them into certainties.”
“Yes, but in a very real sense you inherit your parents' luck. Your father didn't drown while fishing at the age of twelve. Your mother wandered between a mother bear and her cubs at eighteen, but the bear didn't attack. All of this luck is required to even get you born.”
Again the rising and falling whistle. “While it is possible that my father could have drowned while fishin
g, I am certain my mother never came between a bear and her cubs.”
“You know what I mean, and it goes further. Some anonymous person you will never know fixed a hidden fault in a tube car which therefore didn't crash and kill them both on their honeymoon.” Tskombe held up a hand. “Yes, I know they never rode a tube car or had a honeymoon either. The point is, there is an immense, maybe infinite, universe of non-events which are as pivotal as the actual events which do occur.”
“Granted.”
“So luck has operating parameters. You can be lucky and catch a shuttle by seconds, or lucky and miss a shuttle that's going to crash, or lucky and catch the shuttle and survive the crash. So we can imagine some mechanism that tips the scales one way or another, which implies some form of feedback from future to past, some kind of macro scale collapse of the quantum wave function. But there is a limit. Some things, like attempting reentry in a space suit, luck simply cannot influence. If luck is going to operate on something like that it has to prevent you from being in that situation in the first place, but it cannot have an infinite time-horizon either. It can't reach back before you were born to ensure that you are born. Neither can it see indefinitely into the future to sculpt events now to suit you then.”
Curvy whistled. “Luck is by definition post-facto. To take your example, you don't know if it's lucky to catch the shuttle at the last minute until you land safely at your destination.”
“Not even then. Disaster might hit after you land.”
“Point taken. Also, the universe of might-have-beens contingent upon your missing the shuttle can, and probably does, include some that are extraordinary and tremendously beneficial. You can never know if any given actual outcome is in fact the most beneficial outcome, although you can speculate.”
