Live Without a Net

by Lou Anders

  Darger was off in the suburbs of town seeing that a certain superannuated circus bear was being treated well when Surplus, who had just finishing saying good-bye to a dear and intimate friend, was accosted in the streets by the odious von Chemiker himself.

  “Herr Hund!” the stocky man cried. “Commen sie hier, bitte.”

  “Oui, monsieur? Qu’est-ce que vous desirez?” Surplus pointedly employed the more genteel language. But of course the man did not notice.

  “I want to show you something!” Von Chemiker took his arm and led him briskly down the street. “The new Trans-European Heliograph went into operation yesterday.”

  “What in the world is a Trans-European Heliograph?” Surplus asked, his curiosity piqued in spite of himself.

  “Behold!” The merchant indicated a tall tower bristling with blindingly bright mirrors. “The future of communications!”

  Surplus winced. “How does it work?”

  “Enormous mirrors are employed to flash messages to a tower on the horizon. There, a signal officer with a telescope reads off the flashes, and they are directed to the next tower, and so, station by station, anywhere in Europe.”

  “Anywhere?”

  “Well … The line has only just now gotten so far west as Basel, but I assure you that the rest of the continent is merely a matter of time. In fact, I have already flashed directions to my agent in London to make preparations to take possession of Buckingham.”

  “Indeed?” Surplus was careful to hide his alarm.

  “Indeed! The message went late yesterday afternoon, flashing westward faster than the sunset—imagine the romance of it!—all the way to London. The Trans-European Heliograph office there sent runners directly to my agent’s home. And I already have a reply! A messenger tells me that it is queued up in London and is scheduled to arrive here at noon.” The sun was high in the sky. “I am on my way to meet it. Would you care to come with me and witness this miracle of modern technology?”

  “With all my heart.” Surplus and Darger had counted on having close to a month’s time before a reliable courier could make the journey all that great distance to England, and another could return by that same circuitous route. This development quite neatly put a spike in their plans. But if there was any one place where this contretemps could be counterspiked, it was at the heliograph tower. Perhaps the signalmen could be bribed. Perhaps, Surplus thought grimly, von Chemiker was prone to falling from high places.

  It was at that moment that a shadow passed over the sun.

  Surplus glanced upward. “Oh, dear.”

  An hour later, Darger returned to the hotel, drenched and irritable. “Have you ever seen such damnable weather?” he groused. “They say this filthy rain will not let up for days!” Then, seeing Surplus’s smile, he said, “What?”

  “Our bags are packed, our bill has been paid, and a carriage awaits us in the back, dear friend. I will explain all en route. Only, please, I ask you for a single favor.”

  “Anything!”

  “Do not slander, I pray you—” Surplus handed his comrade an umbrella. “—the beautiful, beautiful weather.”

  Chris Roberson is the author of Voices of Thunder, Cybermancy Incorporated, Set the Seas on Fire, and Any Time At All, all from Monkeybrain Inc. His stories and reviews have appeared in Fantastic Metropolis, Revolution SF, and Steve Jackson Games’ Comic Book Life.

  O ONE

  Chris Roberson

  Tsui stood in the golden morning light of the Ornamental Garden, looking over the still waters of the abacus fishponds and thinking about infinity. Beyond the walls, the Forbidden City already hummed with the activity of innumerable servants, eunuchs, and ministers bustling along in the Emperor’s service, but in the garden itself was only silence and serenity.

  Apart from the Imperial House of Calculation, which Tsui had served as Chief Computator since the death of his predecessor and father years before, the Ornamental Garden was the only place he lingered. The constant susurration of beads shuttling and clacking over oiled rods was the only music he could abide, and as dear to him as the beating of his own heart, but there were times still when the rhythms of that symphony began to wear on him. On these rare occasions the silence of the fishponds and the sculpted grounds surrounding them was the only solace he had found.

  His father, when he had been Chief Computator and Tsui not yet an apprentice, had explained that time and resources were the principal enemies of calculation. One man, with one abacus and an unlimited amount of time, could solve every mathematical operation imaginable, just as an unlimited number of men working with an infinite number of abaci could solve every operation imaginable in an instant; but no man had an infinity in which to work, and no Emperor could marshal to his service an infinite number of men. It was the task of the Chief Computator to strike the appropriate balance. The men of the Imperial House of Calculation worked in their hundreds, delicately manipulating the beads of their abaci to provide the answers the Emperor required. That every click of bead on bead was followed by a moment of silence, however brief, served only to remind Tsui of the limits this balance demanded. In that brief instant the enemies of calculation were the victors.

  As a child Tsui had dreamt of an endless plain, filled with men as far as the eye could see. Every man in his dream was hunched over a small wooden frame, his fingers dancing over cherry-wood beads, and together they simultaneously solved every possible operation, a man for each calculation. In his dream, though, Tsui had not heard the same clatter and click he’d found so often at his father’s side; with an endless number of permutations, every potential silence was filled with the noise of another bead striking bead somewhere else. The resulting sound was steady and even, a constant hum, no instant distinguishable from any other.

  Only in pure silence had Tsui ever found another sensation quite like that, and the only silence he had found pure enough was that of the Ornamental Garden. Without speaking or moving, he could stand with eyes closed at the water’s edge and imagine himself on that infinite plain, the answer to every problem close at hand.

  The sound of feet scuffing on flagstone broke Tsui from his reverie, and he looked up to see Royal Inspector Bai walking leisurely through the garden’s gate. Like Tsui, the Royal Inspector seemed to find comfort within the walls of silence, and the two men frequently exchanged a word of pleasantry on their chance encounters.

  “A good morning, Chief Computator?” Bai asked. He approached the fishponds, a package of waxed paper in his hands. He stopped opposite Tsui at the water’s edge of the southernmost of the two ponds and, unwrapping his package with deft maneuvers, revealed a slab of cold pork between two slices of bread. A concept imported from the cold and distant England on the far side of the world, it was a dish that had never appealed to Tsui, more traditional in his tastes than the adventurous Inspector.

  “As good as I might deserve, Inspector,” Tsui answered, inclining his head a fraction. As he was responsible for the work of hundreds, Tsui technically ranked above the Inspector in the hierarchy of palace life, but considering the extensive influence and latitude granted the latter by imperial decree, the Chief Computator always displayed respect shading into submissiveness as a matter of course.

  Bai nodded in reply and, tearing pieces of bread from either slice, dropped them onto the water before him. The abacus fish in the southern pond, of a precise but slow strain, moved in a languid dance to nibble the crumbs floating on the water’s surface. The brilliant gold hue of their scales, iridescent in the shifting light prismed through the water’s surface, sparkled from below like prized gems. The fish, the result of a failed experiment years before to remove man from the process of calculation, had been bred from ornamentals chosen for their instinct of swimming in schools of close formation. In tests of the system, though, with a single agent flashing a series of lights at the water’s edge representing a string of digits and the appropriate operation, it was found that while accurate to a high degree, the slowness of
their movements made them no more effective than any apprentice of the House of Calculation. The biological and chemical agents used in breeding them from true, however, had left the scales of the languid abacus fish and their descendants much more striking than those of the base stock, and so a place was found for the failed experiment in the gardens.

  “Your pardon, O Chief Computator,” Bai remarked, shaking the last dusty crumbs from the pork and moving to the northern pond. “But it seems to me, at such times, that the movements of these poor doomed creatures still suggests the motions of your beads over rods, even in their feeding the fish arranging themselves in columns and rows of varying number.”

  Tearing off strips of pork, the Inspector tossed them onto the water, which frothed and bubbled the instant the meat hit the surface. Silt, kicked up by the force of the sudden circulation, colored the water a dusty gray.

  “I can only agree, of course,” Tsui answered, drawing alongside the Inspector and looking down on the erratic dance beneath the surface of the pond. This strain of abacus fish was, in contrast to its languid neighbor, much swifter but likewise far less consistent. They had been mutated from a breed of carnivorous fish from the Western Hemisphere’s southern continent, the instinct of hunger incarnate. The operations they performed, cued by motions in the air above and enticed by offerings of raw flesh, were done faster than any but the most accomplished human operator could match, but with an unacceptably high degree of error. Like their languid cousins before them, these fierce creatures were highly prized for their appearance, strangely viridescent scales offset by razor teeth and jagged fins, and so they were relocated from the Imperial Ministry of Experimentation into the garden when Tsui was only a child. “They mimic the process of calculation as a mynah bird does that of human speech. Ignorant and without any comprehension. Man does not, as yet, have any replacement.”

  “Hmm,” the Inspector hummed, tossing the last of the pork into the water. “But what does the abacus bead know of its use? Is it not the computator alone who must understand the greater meaning?”

  “Perhaps, O Inspector, this may be how the Emperor himself, the-equal-of-heaven and may-he-reign-ten-thousand-years, rules over the lives and destinies of men. Each of us need not know how we work into the grander scheme, so long as the Emperor’s hand guides us.” It was not a precise representation of Tsui’s thoughts on the matter, but a more politic answer than that which immediately suggested itself, and one better fit for the ears of the Emperor’s justice.

  The Inspector hummed again and wiped his fingers clean on the hems of his sleeves. Looking past Tsui’s shoulder at the garden’s entrance, Bai raised his eyebrows a fraction and nodded.

  “You may be right, Chief Computator,” the Inspector answered, grinning slightly. “I believe either of two beads, you or I, will in short order be guided from here. Can you guess which?”

  Tsui turned his chin over his shoulder and saw the approach of the Imperial page.

  “Neither can I,” the Inspector said before Tsui could answer. When the page presented the parchment summons to the Chief Computator with an abbreviated bow, Bai smiled and nodded again, and turned his attention back to the abacus fish. The last of the pork was gone, but white foam still frothed over the silty gray waters.

  Within the hall they waited, ministers and courtiers, eunuchs and servants, the Empress Dowager behind her screens, her ladies with faces made painted masks, and the Emperor himself upon the Golden Dragon Throne. All watched the still form of the infernal machine, squatting oily and threatening like a venomous toad on the lacquered wooden floor, its foreign devil master standing nervously to one side.

  Tsui was met in the antechamber by the Lord Chamberlain. With a look of stern reproach for the Chief Computator’s late arrival, the Chamberlain led Tsui into the hall, where they both knelt and kowtowed to the Emperor, touching foreheads to cold floor twice before waiting to be received.

  “The Emperor does not like to be kept waiting,” said the Emperor, lazily running his fingers along the surface of the scarlet-and-gold object in his hands. “Begin.”

  As the Emperor leaned forward, elbows resting on the carved arms of the ancient Manchurian throne, Tsui could see that the object in his hand was a representation in miniature of the proposed Imperial Spacecraft. A much larger version, at 50 percent scale, hung from the rafters of the hall overhead. It presented an imposing image of lacquered red cherry-wood and finely wrought gold, delicately sweeping fins and the imperial seal worked into the bulkheads above the forward viewing ports. That the Emperor did not like to be kept waiting was no secret. Since he’d first ascended to the Dragon Throne a decade before, he’d wanted nothing more than to travel to the heavens and had dedicated the resources of the world’s most powerful nation to that end. His ancestors had conquered three quarters of the world centuries before, his grandfather and then his father had gone on to bring the remaining rogue states under the red banner of China, and now the Emperor of the Earth would conquer the stars.

  In the years of the Emperor’s reign, four out of every five mathematical operations sent to the Imperial House of Calculation had been generated by the Ministry of Celestial Excursion, the bureau established to develop and perfect the art of flying into the heavens. Tsui had never given it a great deal of thought. When reviewing the produced solutions, approving the quality of each before affixing his chop and the ideogram which represented both Completion and Satisfaction, he had never paused to wonder why the scientists, sages, and alchemists might need these answers. The work of the Chief Computator was the calculation, and the use to which the results were put, the concern of someone else.

  Now, called for the first time to appear before his Emperor, it occurred to Tsui that he might, at last, be that someone else.

  The Lord Chamberlain, at Tsui’s side, motioned for the foreign devil to step forward. A tall, thin white man, he had a pile of pale brown hair on his head and wispy mustaches that crept around the corners of his mouth toward his chin. A pair of round-framed glasses pinched the bridge of his nose, and his black wool suit was worn at the edges, the knees worn thin and shiny.

  “Ten thousand pardons, Your Majesty,” the Lord Chamberlain began, bowing from the waist, “but may I introduce to you the Proctor Napier, scientific attaché to the Imperial Capital from the subjugated land of Britain, conquered in centuries past by your glorious ancestors.”

  The Emperor inclined his head slightly, indicating that the foreign devil could continue.

  “Many thanks for this indulgence, O Emperor,” Proctor Napier began. “I come seeking your patronage.”

  The Emperor twitched the fingers of one hand, a precise motion.

  “I was sent to these shores by your servant government in my home island,” Napier continued, “to assist in Imperial research. My specialty is logic, and the ordering of information, and over the course of the past years I have become increasingly involved with the questions of computation. The grand designs of Your Majesty’s long range plans, whether to explore the moon and far planets, or to chart the course of the stars across the heavens, demand that complex calculations be performed at every step, and each of these calculations require men, materials, and time. It is my hope that each of these three prerequisites might be eliminated to a degree, so as to speed the progress toward your goals.”

  Tsui, not certain before this moment why he had been called before the Emperor, now harbored a suspicion, and stifled the desire to shout down the foreign devil. At the Chamberlain’s side, he listened on, his hands curled into tense fists in his long sleeves.

  “With Your Majesty’s kind indulgence,” Napier said, “I would take a moment to explain the fundaments of my invention.” With a timid hand, he gestured toward the oily contraption on the floor behind him. “The basic principle of its operation is a number system of only two values. I call this system binary. Though an innovation of Europe, this system has its basis in the ancient wisdom of China, and as such it seems appropriat
e that Your Divine Majesty is the one to whom it is presented.

  “The trigrams of the I Ching are based on the structure of yin and yang, the complementary forces of nature. These trigrams, the building blocks of the I Ching, are composed either of broken or of unbroken lines. Starting from this pair of values, any number of combinations can be generated. Gottfried Leibniz, a German sage, adapted this basic structure some two hundred years ago into a full number system, capable of encoding any value using only two symbols. He chose the Arabic numerals 1 and 0, but the ideograms for yin and yang can be substituted and the system still functions the same. The decoding is key. Using the Arabic notation, the number one is represented as 1, the number two as 10, the number three as 11, the number four as 100, and so on.”

  The Emperor sighed pointedly and glanced to the spacecraft model in his lap, signifying that he was growing weary of the presentation.

  “Oh, dear,” Napier whispered under his breath, and then hastened to add, “Which brings me to my invention.” He turned and stepped to the side of the construct of oily metal and wood on the floor. It was about the height of a man’s knee, almost as wide, a roughly cubical shape of copper and iron, plain and unadorned. The top face was surmounted by a brass frame, into which was set a series of wooden blocks, each face of which was carved with a number or symbol. On the cube face presented toward the Emperor was centered an array of articulated brass buttons, three rows of fifteen, the brassy sheen dulled by smudges of oil and grime.

  “I call it the Analytical Engine. Powered by a simple motor, the engine comprises a series of switches, each of which can be set either to an ‘on’ or ‘off’ state by the manipulation of gears and cogs. By assigning a binary value to each of the two states, we are then able to represent with the engine any numerical value conceivable, so long as there are a sufficient number of switches available. With the inclusion of five operational variables, and the ability to display results immediately”—he indicated the series of blocks crowning the device—“a fully functional Analytical Engine would theoretically be capable of solving quickly any equation put to it. Anyone with a rudimentary ability to read and input values can produce results more quickly and efficiently than a team of trained abacists. This is only a prototype model, of course, capable of working only up to a limited number of digits, but with the proper funding I’m confident we could construct an engine free of this limitation.”