Starfire a-2

by Charles Sheffield

  “Very well.” Lauren Stansfield leaned toward Maddy, providing a close-up of the retrousse nose and the small, prim mouth. For the first time, that mouth took on the shadow of a smile. It was not reflected in the cold, wide eyes. “Ms. Wheatstone, you must excuse me if I am as blunt as if you were not present.”

  Lauren turned to John Hyslop, making it clear that so far as she was concerned Maddy was not part of the meeting. “As you know, John, our procedure calls for an inventory of materials every three months. We are six weeks away from the end of the quarter, but since I am taking over from you in certain areas I decided to make an inventory at once. It seems that there are major discrepancies between recorded and actual quantities. I see signs of substantial theft of materials derived from the Aten asteroid stores—”

  “Hold on.” John held up his hand. “Lauren, I wish you had let me know that you were going to do this.”

  It was not at all a reprimand, but it seemed to Maddy that Lauren Stansfield took it as such. Her back stiffened and she said, “I thought it best to proceed without telling anyone. After all, if there has been theft, as appears to be the case, I did not wish to give the thieves an opportunity to cover up their actions.”

  “Sure. But it’s not theft, Lauren. It’s only sloppiness — my sloppiness.” John pulled out the little notebook that Maddy had seen him using on the shuttle. “When we were making fixes on the shield last week, the crew needed a bunch of chrome bars and smart sensors and carbon filament microlattices. It was a rush job, so I told them to pull straight out of inventory and I would take care of the record keeping. I did, too.” He waved the notebook. “In here. But I never got round to transferring it into the data bases.”

  Lauren Stansfield’s face was inscrutable. Even Maddy, who specialized in such things, could not read it. Was that a look of relief, that the problem had gone away? Was it annoyance, at having her theory of theft disposed of so quickly? Or was it disdain, for the primitive way that John Hyslop recorded information?

  Listen and learn. Maddy had too little experience with women engineers.

  Lauren was taking a small entry terminal from her own jacket. “I see. Then I suggest that we update the inventory at once. If you will read me the industry codes, and then the quantities …”

  Maddy sat back as the conversation descended into a boring exchange of meaningless numbers. She listened with half an ear and watched much more closely. She wanted to understand, not so much what these engineers talked about as what moved and motivated them.

  Her first take on John Hyslop, as a calculating and unemotional man, had been wrong. You only had to hear him talk about Giorgio Hamman to realize that his enthusiasm for the man went beyond admiration to adoration.

  Lauren Stansfield was a tougher challenge. The woman presented herself as the very model of Ms. Cool, but occasionally, as when John had interrupted her assertion of theft, you sensed a spark of fire inside the ice.

  Since Lauren was taking over John Hyslop’s duties, she must be highly competent. That came across in her demeanor. Otherwise, she was an invisible woman. Maddy had the feeling that if she turned her back on Lauren, the woman would fade from view within seconds.

  No one is calm, no one is logical. Inside, everybody is a volcano. That was Gordy Rolfe’s guiding principle, the one he had used to build the Argos Group.

  It worked fine down on Earth — brawling, selfish, tormented Earth. But what about here, in the quiet sanctuary of Sky City, with its abundance of calm and logical engineers? Maybe Gordy’s principle didn’t work at all.

  Maddy turned away from John and Lauren, still deep in their number swapping, and looked out along the great length of the communal hall.

  Everything was peaceful. Calm, logic, order, rational behavior made manifest. But someone on Sky City, perhaps one of the very people she was now watching, was an insane murderer.

  Underneath, even here, burned the volcano.

  interlude 2

  interlude: Sniffer, Model B.

  Two years in the million-year evolution of human intelligence is nothing, less than an eyeblink. Two years in the twenty-first-century development of machine intelligence is a significant interval.

  In outward appearance and even in internal hardware, Sniffer-A and Sniffer-B were almost identical, but the second model possessed a far higher degree of program flexibility. In human terms it was still no more than a low-grade moron with unique specialized talents, a silicon-based idiot savant, but it was enormously smarter than Sniffer-A. Model B could correlate predicted and observed values, decide if the difference between the two was significant, and then — a major improvement — vary the performance of its onboard sensors and analytical tools.

  The Sniffer tasted the speeding front of the particle flux and decided, as Sniffer-A had done two years earlier, that the difference from expectations went far beyond statistical tolerance. That result was sent on its light-speed journey back to Earth, while at the same time a new sampling protocol was introduced. The arrival times of the anomalously heavy particle nuclei were measurable to within an attosecond. Even moving at an appreciable fraction of light speed, nucleic separation distances of less than an atomic diameter could be determined.

  The Sniffer was well equipped to analyze time series data. It was clear that the arrival times of groups of nuclei of different species were tightly correlated. Those groups were also very large, usually containing trillions of separate nuclei. The time pattern was seldom repeated, but the number of a particular type of nucleus contained within a single cluster was usually the same.

  Sniffer-B pondered the problem at a thousand billion cycles a second as it flew on through the incident flux. It held in its general data base enough information to realize that the external world was not composed of one-dimensional entities. The data series that it was observing was a projection onto a single dimension — time — of three-dimensional structures. The Sniffer also had information on organic chemistry, enough to infer how a complex structure, such as a molecule, would appear if projected onto any given axis in space. Varying the axis of projection would give patterns characteristic of the molecule, patterns that looked different from each other but in which the number of a particular kind of atom would always be the same.

  The Sniffer struggled with the problem of reconstructing the spatial configuration of the clusters that its sensors were observing. It made the working assumption that the structure was always the same, but might be arriving at the sensors at any angle.

  Sniffer-B tried, and tried, and failed. It knew that it needed a method for the inference of spatial structures applicable to the clusters of nuclei, but the closest relevant technique — the theory of molecular crystallography — had seemed to the Sniffer’s makers far beyond the set of applications likely to be useful in the interstellar environment.

  The Sniffer did not know how to stop trying. It continued with its ceaseless ferment of computation long after the main flux of particles had passed. Only when all systems were powered down for the long interstellar cruise did the analysis process suspend.

  It would start up again one more time, when arrival at Alpha Centauri triggered a last flurry of futile activity. The Sniffer would never know that the puzzle racking its circuits had been solved, within days of its receipt on Earth, by the slow and inefficient organic computers of its makers.

  13

  Nick Lopez was waiting for Celine when Suborbital One touched down at the New Rio port. As they taxied in she saw him waiting on the tarmac. His broad, simple face and warm, welcoming smile made her think, not for the first time, I’m the President, but he’s the politician.

  How could you dislike somebody so cheerful and so positive? How could you resist that sunny smile? When you were with him, you couldn’t. Only when you went away and read the thirty-year catalog of suspicions and rumors and unsuccessful charges against him did the doubts come back.

  “Good flight, Madam President?” He engulfed her hand in his warm brown
paw as she reached the bottom of the glide stair, and grinned down at her from his thirty-centimeter height advantage.

  Celine shrugged. The plane had squeaked in under the nose of a July storm racing in from the northwest, and during the final approach a bout of turbulence had been too much for the stabilizers. “You know what they say — if you can walk away from a landing, it was a good flight. Actually, I’ve known better. But we had to do our final approach from the south because of the weather. And I wondered, are those new beaches that I saw?”

  “Under construction.” Nick fell into step beside her. “New beaches, but with the old names. Copacabana, Ipanema, Leblon, Gavea. Don’t you just love them, the dreams from the past? Though of course, I don’t plan to visit the new beaches; they’re for the younger generation.”

  Celine was not so sure. Nick’s file was a thick one. Long before the supernova, U.S. Senator Nick Lopez had been a frequent visitor to the Rio de Janeiro beaches. He had not been above bringing his young male pickups back to Washington and showing them off around the halls of Congress. Now he wore his trademark hairstyle, a shaped high pompadour, deliberately gray, but he was in excellent physical shape. It would be no surprise if he still followed his old habits. It was Nick, after all, who had decided that the main headquarters for the World Protection Federation would be in New Rio.

  Still, no one could argue with his logic. New Rio had space available, and lots of it. The old line “And I alone lived on to tell the tale” applied literally to Joachim Salazar, an inhabitant of the old city of Rio de Janeiro. After the supernova, rain had fallen continuously and torrentially in the Serra dos Orgaos, the mountains to the west of Rio; rain from March 2 to September 5, one hundred and eighty-eight days and nights. At the end of that time the city was gone. The great bridge across the harbor had been riven from its supports and lay on the bed of Guanabara Bay. The airport on Ilha do Governador had disappeared, along with the island itself. The famous beaches south of Rio, Copacabana and Ipanema and the others, had vanished.

  So had Rio’s seven million residents. The post-supernova surveys found no trace of them. Only Joachim Salazar survived. Huddled inside an inverted mobile home, he had washed out to sea on a vast slurry of mud and water surging into the Atlantic between Sugarloaf Mountain and the Parrot’s Beak promontory. He had floated in the open ocean for thirty-nine days and been picked up, dehydrated and demented, six hundred miles out to sea. Salazar’s memories, such as they were, provided the only record of the last days of Rio.

  Guanabara Bay, the splendid natural harbor north of Rio, remained in altered form after the floodwaters receded. Where better, then, to make a fresh start and build the wonderful New Rio, a fitting headquarters for the World Protection Federation?

  That had been Nick Lopez’s argument. Celine had not been deeply into politics at the time, but she could not remember any opposition to Nick’s idea. Only recently had she come to realize that Lopez was, for all practical purposes, the final authority on everything that happened in New Rio.

  “What’s the population now?” It seemed to Celine that there were fewer people around than she remembered on her last trip.

  “About one hundred thousand.” They had reached the limo, and Nick opened the door for her. “The road northwest is finished, and the interior is once more accessible. Lots of space to fill.”

  That was an understatement. Celine had seen the satellite maps, old and new. Brasilia was gone; Manaos was gone. Eight million square kilometers of Brazil’s heartland lay empty.

  “The inland region is a big draw for young people,” Nick went on. “I don’t mind that at all. New Rio is close to the right size.”

  The right size? Celine thought. He means the controllable size. I bet no one realized at the beginning that this was going to become Nick Lopez’s private domain.

  Sometimes, struggling to serve a hundred and fifty million people in fifty-three states scattered over ten million square kilometers, Celine wondered if Nick Lopez didn’t have the better idea. Find a place small enough, and manage it completely. The United States — even with its population halved by Alpha C and with an infrastructure far less than fifty percent of what it had once been — often felt unmanageable. It was an act of faith that said progress was possible, that the country could be united to rise to and surpass its past; that there would one day be another Mars expedition, a strong program in basic science, a confident populace, and faith in the future.

  As the limousine rolled along the splendid avenue that led to central New Rio and the WPF headquarters, Nick Lopez noticed Celine’s subdued manner. He pointed to the chauffeur beyond the sliding glass panel and said, “We tried an AVC system for a few years. But a human can do things that Automatic Vehicle Control will never do. Did you ever ask an AVC to bring you a beer and a sandwich?”

  Celine came back to the present and inspected the silent chauffeur. “No, but it could be done. Why not add a rolfe to the car? That would be smart enough.” Nick nodded, but Celine doubted if beer was the issue. A rolfe kept a complete log of when and where it went. So did the AVC. Unlike a human driver, they could not be paid to “forget” a midnight trip or a destination.

  “Is he listening?” she asked.

  Lopez shook his head. “He doesn’t speak English. And in any case, you don’t need to worry. He’s my man. We can talk. Just how bad is the problem?”

  Ten years ago Celine would have been shocked by the question. Now she wondered if it was possible to keep anything secret, ever, in Washington. She stared north, to where a dense black thundercloud hovered over the bay. Already it was raining there. “How much do you know, Nick?”

  “Rumors only. Word that shit will hit the fan sooner than we thought.”

  “That’s all?”

  “All I know. Of course, I can make guesses. When you ask for a meeting and become annoyed when my staff can’t find me, it’s a marker. When you tell me you’ll fly down to New Rio for that meeting, that’s another marker.”

  “You said you were willing to come to Washington.”

  “I did and I was. But I also said that I couldn’t make the trip for three days. When you ignore that and fly here, it means you have something that can’t wait so long. That’s when I begin to worry.”

  “Join the club.”

  They had reached the WPF building, a tall pyramid of white limestone and glass standing out against the dark sky. Celine wondered how they would get inside without getting soaked. Rain lashed the avenue in front of them, and the building was at least fifty meters from the road. To the north, jagged spears of lightning flashed down in concert, a multilegged angular monster stalking across the bay. The storm would intensify before it blew away to the east.

  Well, this year it seemed to be always raining. And there were worse places than a limousine for a private conversation. It could be bugged, but the only person likely to listen to the record was Nick Lopez himself. A bigger worry was whether the other plane, leaving Norfolk at almost the same time as Celine had left Washington, would be able to fly in and land. She ought to have checked that before she left Suborbital One.

  Nick was waiting patiently. As he had implied, this was her move. “I didn’t know you when you were a Senator,” she began.

  “Not quite true.” His voice and relaxed manner took away any suggestion of criticism or correction. “I was a Senator when you captured the Eye of God and brought her to Washington. I also stood in line and shook your hand as one of the survivors of the first Mars expedition.”

  First and only expedition, Celine thought. Earth has other priorities at the moment. But you have to keep the faith. We’ll survive the particle storm, and someday we’ll go back to Mars.

  She said, “Happy days. You know, when I was on the Mars expedition, we used to tell each other that it was really important to build a permanent base there, so that if something happened to Earth, the human species wouldn’t become extinct. It never occurred to any of us that something might be so widespread t
hat it could wipe out life on both planets.”

  “Me neither. While you were on the Mars expedition, I didn’t give a second’s thought to issues like that. If all politics is local, then I was all politics.”

  “I didn’t work with you when you were in the Senate. I’ve talked to people who know you, though, and I’ve checked your reputation.”

  “Ah. Now it’s coming. The old scuttlebutt.” Lopez reached forward to pull out the service module in front of the seat, and waved his hand at the array of choices. “Something for you?”

  Celine declined with a shake of her head. “Nick, I’m not talking about what you do with your private time. If you screw, who you screw, when you screw, that’s none of my business.”

  “Madam President, you disappoint me.”

  Was he deliberately trying to distract? Even after years in politics, Celine still had doubts about her own ability to read a situation. She said, “I’m talking about your professional reputation.”

  Nick nodded. He said nothing more, but sat watching her with an intent expression. He had taken a bottle of Calvados and poured an ounce or two into a snifter. Now instead of drinking the apple brandy he held the balloon glass under his nose. The thunderclouds were directly overhead; there was a darkness like nightfall, and continuous thunder rolled around the limousine. Reflected lightning flickered pale on Nick’s face.

  “What I heard wasn’t all good,” Celine said. “You made enemies when you were in the Senate. I found people who said you couldn’t be trusted with anything, large or small. I met people who said you always looked out for yourself, first and last. I found someone who would have stuck a knife in you if they could have got away with it.”

  “If you’d looked harder, you’d have found more than one.” Still Lopez only sniffed at the brandy. “And yet you flew here?”