Singularity

by Bill DeSmedt

  Best not to think about that now—focus on the business at hand. “What’s so important that Grishin couldn’t wait to find it out?”

  “You tell me. What does poimka mean anyway?”

  Knox sighed. Playing Russian etymologist again. “It’s a noun derived from the verb poimat’.”

  “You mean ‘to understand’ ?—No, wait: that’s ponimat’, poimat’ means, uh, ‘to catch,’ right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Thanks. Thanks for that, and for all the interpreting, Jon. Good job.”

  “De nada. Not my usual line of work,”—no more so than the rest of this assignment—“but, what the hey, Archon is a full-service consulting agency.”

  “So, it would be the act of catching, or capturing, or something?” She was back to business.

  “ ‘Capture’ about sums it up. But capture what, and how? Let’s see . . .” He glanced over at the laptop screen, but it had gone dark at the end of the sequence. “The date was tomorrow?”

  “Yep, 10:47 P.M. Midway through Galina’s regular evening shift, given we’ll be on Azores time by then.”

  “Too much of a coincidence. That lab has to be involved somehow. Too bad there aren’t any surveillance signals to tap into, like in the chartroom.”

  “Yes, but I’m beginning to see why not, and it isn’t lax security like I’d thought.” Marianna was talking more to herself than him.

  “Whatever’s going on is so super-secret Grishin doesn’t trust anybody else to tend to it, has to go and do it himself. So it’s for sure he doesn’t want to go broadcasting images of it all over the boat. You could probably count the number of people who know what’s going on in down in that lab on the fingers of one hand.”

  “Forget who knows about it; the question is how do we find out about it. You didn’t by any chance leave one of your spyeyes behind last night?”

  “Couldn’t. Too much chance of it being spotted; you saw how bright it was in there. I did manage to bug their LAN, but that’s not going to be much use in real-time: we’d have to reverse-engineer their interprocess communication protocols first, if we even can.”

  “What’s our alternative?”

  “Simple: deploy a full-video recorder in the lab just before this capture business is set to start, then extract it afterwards.” She’d started thinking aloud again. “I’ll need darkness for both, so we’re talking nine, nine-thirty P.M. for the insertion, earliest.”

  “An hour before the balloon goes up? That’s cutting it kind of close, isn’t it? I don’t like the thought of you going down there even one more time, much less twice in an evening.”

  “Can’t be helped.”

  “Sure it can. Can’t we access your LAN-bug remotely?”

  “Of course. Hell, Pete could fire it up from his desk in Chantilly via satellite downlink.”

  “What’s stopping us, then? Don’t tell me the transmissions aren’t encoded?”

  Marianna emitted a ladylike snort. “Hello? Would it help if I told you the manufacturer’s initials were N.S.A.? It comes standard with the latest in spread-spectrum pseudo-encryption—transmits each successive bit on a different frequency across a range of several megahertz. The receiver’s got to be precisely synched or all you hear is noise.”

  “Where’s the problem, then?”

  “Like I said, it won’t give us near the amount of information that video would. We can’t sit here on our hands with God knows what-all going down and no way to surveil it. Agreed?”

  “Would it matter if I said no?”

  “Not really. So that’s it then: the spyeye goes in at, say, nine tomorrow evening, and comes back out at midnight. That’s going to mean two stake-outs on the bridge for you, or one really long one. How’s your Russian holding up?”

  “Plenty of chance to practice at the party tonight.”

  To celebrate the inception of Rusalka’s summer research program, Arkady Grishin had decreed a formal banquet be held. With the ship’s complement still halfway synched to US East Coast time, Grishin had indulged his own nocturnal predilections: cocktails and zakuski would be served at eleven, dinner would commence at the stroke of midnight, and the revelry was to continue till dawn. Knox, who had spent a summer in Spain as a young man and grown to love the late evening dinners in the open-air cafes of Madrid, was up for it. His kind of party.

  Marianna had packed her own evening gown, but Knox had just taken CROM’s potluck formalwear. He was still peering dubiously at the paisley cummerbund reflected in the full-length mirror when Marianna walked in through the connecting door.

  “You ready, Jon?”

  He turned to look at her, and kept on looking. She wore an ankle-length halter gown of black silk knit, its high neckline—only her shoulders were exposed—accentuating her long neck and upswept hair. The demureness of the cut stood in marked contrast to the way the fabric itself clung to her curves. A single wide gold cuff adorned her left wrist.

  “Like it? It’s a Donna Karan.”

  “Beautiful. But DKNY’s not what comes to mind when I think of government-issue evening wear.”

  “It isn’t—government-issue, that is. I’ve got a rainy-day trust fund I dip into when khaki threatens to take over my wardrobe altogether. Set to go?”

  She turned toward the door.

  “Did you remember to turn off the WaterPik?” Knox said, then stopped. He became aware his mouth was hanging open. “I can see why you didn’t want tan-lines,” he managed.

  There was no back to her dress! With the single exception of the halter strap around her neck, all there was to be seen from crown to coccyx was Marianna. From the rear, it looked as if she had just stepped from her bath and wrapped a black towel around her rump—just barely around her rump. The lamplight caressed her smooth-muscled, perfect skin.

  And she had him on a strict look-but-don’t-touch regimen. A torment to almost make him believe in reincarnation: Knox simply hadn’t done enough mean, rotten things in his current lifetime to merit such punishment.

  “Ready?” Knox was still looking at Marianna as he held one of the banquet hall’s outsized French doors open for her. “Time to see what kind of a shindig the world’s third richest Russian throws.”

  Then he turned to see what lay beyond, and fell silent.

  Rusalka’ s banquet hall was as wide as the vessel’s twenty-meter beam, and nearly double that span in length. To either side marble-colonnaded walls, their intercolumniations all of tempered glass, rose up and up, two full deck-heights, to skylights opening out on the evening heavens. From gimbaled fixtures in the munnions of those skylights there descended six starburst chandeliers of the same Austrian crystal as graced New York’s Metropolitan Opera, save that these had been fitted with gyrostabilizers for use aboard ship. The chandeliers’ subdued radiance blended with the glow of the skies above them: the stars of a summer night, with six galaxies hovering closer than the rest.

  The far wall, a hundred feet away across the hall, was a single concave expanse of luminescent onyx veneer bonded to backlit Nomex substrate, with a huge replica of the now-familiar GEI world-snake coiled at its center. Unlike its mosaic counterparts elsewhere on Rusalka, this Ourobouros was three-dimensional, and . . . moving. Its great scales flashed as it sank fangs into its own tail, closing the loop around a slowly spinning, cloud-mottled globe. An enormous hologram, beneath which Grishin held court from a raised dais, smiling benevolently out over the throngs of senior corporate staffers and researchers that constituted GEI’s latter-day service nobility.

  Veteran of the occasional power-lunch at the Four Seasons that he was, Knox was still frankly dazzled. “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree . . .” he recited to Marianna.

  “ ‘. . . Where Alph, the sacred river ran,’ ” she recited right back at him, ‘“through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea.’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge.” Marianna had nailed it all right, as she did most of his references. Where was he going to find ano
ther woman like this, now that he’d gone and lost this one?

  “Yeah, Xanadu . . .” He didn’t quite succeed in keeping a note of plaintiveness out of the rest of his reply. “Just rotten luck that old Sam got himself interrupted in the middle of that beautiful opium dream. Now it’s gone for good, no way to ever get it back again.” If she read his intended meaning, she chose not to acknowledge it.

  They moved out onto the parquet dance floor, where pseudo-glitterati swayed to the strains of Strauss waltzes and the rhythms of Motown shags—both equally foreign, hence equally cultured, to Russian sensibilities. Traversing the periphery of the crowded space, Marianna left a swirl of male admirers in her wake. Khrushchev’s old dictum about humanity’s face being more beautiful than its backside could have claimed few adherents among his countrymen here tonight.

  Knox and Marianna found silver placemarkers embossed with their names at settings of Rosenthal china, Bacarrat crystal, and Cartier silver, all incised with the serpentine GEI crest. Beyond the tableware, an expanse of Damasque tablecloth sported a row of golden candelabras, each rising out of a Steuben crystal bowl filled with fresh orchids helicoptered in from the Azores that morning.

  They also found Sasha, resplendent in a custom-tailored summer tux, chatting up the Grishin Enterprises CFO and her escort.

  Sasha held Marianna’s chair as—carefully, so as to reveal no more than Donna Karan had intended—she took her seat. He then sat down beside her and began spinning yarns of grad-school days in Soviet-era Moscow, including several starring Knox that were better left forgotten.

  With this tete-a-tete in full swing beside him, Knox was left to his own devices. He would have struck up a conversation with the dinner companion to his right, but that chair remained empty even as the clock chimed midnight.

  A breathless Galina arrived just before the first course. “Sorry to be so late, Dzhon. Only stopped to work an hour ago, and took time to dress.”

  Knox rose. “The results are well worth the wait,” he said, and truly they were: Galina was wearing a short royal-blue sequined dress with spaghetti straps, its fit complementing her legs and bosom simultaneously. “Still, I definitely need to talk to Sasha if he’s got you working this hard on vacation.”

  “Oh, no. Is not work really. Is—what you call it?—labor of love.” She seemed elated about something. Giddy, almost.

  “Sounds fascinating. I’d love to hear about it.”

  With the suddenness of a cloud passing over the face of the sun, Galina’s exhilaration morphed into a feminine version of Sasha’s sly “let’s not go there” look. Time to change the subject again.

  She beat him to it. “Men!” she said with a sadder smile. “Always talking of work. Never of important things, of family.”

  Knox shrugged. “There’s not much to tell. I got married about five-six years ago. Didn’t take.”

  “Why is this?”

  “Lots of things. Started out okay, turned into a disaster. In the end we just decided to pull the plug. You know, the Second Law of Data Processing: ‘When in doubt, reboot.’ ”

  Galina looked blank for a moment, then: “Ah, yes, reboot—restart computer. Is Second Law? Serious?” She frowned. “If so, then what is First Law of Data Processing?”

  “ ‘Never put your tongue on a power supply.’ ”

  That got the laugh he was hoping would ease them off this uncomfortable topic. But Galina was not so easily sidetracked. “Children?” she asked.

  “No, thank God! Divorce is complicated enough as it is without custody and visitation rights to contend with.”

  “Children not complication, Dzhon. Children—whole purpose of life. My advice: have little boy, little girl, before too late.” She glanced over his shoulder, to where Marianna was sitting immersed in conversation with Sasha, then looked him in the eye. “Not too late for you yet, I think.”

  She read something in his expression then. “Or, you two are having fight, perhaps?”

  Was it that obvious? “To tell you the truth, Galina, I’m not quite sure what it is we’re having. Nothing good, that’s for sure.” Where was the pattern in all the rained-out relationships of the past few years? And how had he managed to screw up yet another one before it even got started?

  “But what about you, Galya?” he said, as much to get off this subject as anything. “I don’t see any little ones tugging at your apron strings.”

  Her reaction seemed out of all proportion to his words. Her face crumpled and tears started forth from her eyes.

  “Not possible,” she said between sobs.

  He sat there feeling helpless, watching her silently weep. “Galina, what’s wrong?”

  “Ach, Dzhon.” She mastered herself with visible effort. “Had possibility to have such ‘little one’ as you say. Was already growing inside me. But was, was too neudobno—too inconvenient. Too busy with researches, too little money. And abortions free in state clinics.”

  Galina sobbed again. “How could I know? How could I guess this was only chance? Was coming infection, and then, and then—no more possibility, ever.”

  The dessert service had been cleared away, replaced by champagne and vodka, magnums of Louis Roedrer Cristal alternating with liter bottles of Stolichnaya XX. Galina was already on her third round of the latter, evidently intent on drowning old sorrows in liquefied good cheer.

  Moving with what seemed exaggerated caution, the waiters brought in the solyen’ye—little salty snacks that served as indispensable accompaniment to any serious Russian drinking party. Intricately-engraved silver trays were set before the guests, five to a table. On each tray, three small silvery model ships, freighted with Beluga caviar, sailed round and round on a bed of mist.

  Knox found the small portion-sizes a bit out of keeping—he would have expected Grishin to dole out roe by the tubful. He looked closer; the silver receptacles were miniatures of Rusalka, dainty as Faberge eggs, distorted laterally to increase their caviar-cargo capacity.

  Further down the table a gaggle of geophysicists had begun whispering excitedly to one another. Something to do with the fish-egg carriers. Knox peered, blinked, rubbed his eyes—the little Rusalka’s were floating on, were floating on . . .

  Were floating on nothing. He bent to bring his eyes level with the tabletop, looked again. There was half an inch of untroubled air between the keel of each mini-Rusalka and the mist rising off a bed of crusted ice. Knox straightened again to look into Galina’s slightly unfocused eyes. She giggled. The background whispering was rising to a general hubbub, spreading out to fill the room.

  “You knew!” Knox accused Galya. “You knew this was coming, and you didn’t tell me!”

  He couldn’t believe it. This was still years off, decades even. Wasn’t it? He reached across the table and gently nudged one of the Lilliputian Rusalka’s with an index finger. It felt cold, but no colder than the ice beneath it. It hobbled, then floated serenely away, unsupported.

  Incredible! Room-temperature superconductivity!

  “Is this it?” He raised his voice over the growing clamor. “What you’re working on, I mean?”

  “No, Dzhon. This what I working with!” She laughed overloud at his puzzlement, and finished with a hiccup.

  All around them people were beginning to clap their hands, to pound the tables, to clink silverware against crystal in unison. Then they were rising to their feet, stamping, whistling, shouting “Oo-rah,” calling for Arkady Grigoriyevich.

  With a show of reluctance, Grishin stood and accepted the plaudits of the assembled multitude. Champagne corks exploded with the precision of a fusillade’, and he raised his glass.

  “Dear friends and associates, it is my privilege to welcome you to the Rusalka Institute’s Summer Research Program. May this year’s efforts on behalf of science and all mankind be crowned with success.”

  Grishin set his glass down. He had given his toast in English, but now he switched back to Russian. To his left Knox could hear Sasha translating f
or Marianna as the GEI chairman spoke.

  “Some of you will have been wondering at the unusual solyeriye servers which adorn our tables this evening, courtesy of Grishin Enterprises’ Materials Sciences Division.” He paused to acknowledge scattered “Oo-rahs!” before going on. “For those among us who, like me,”—a small self-deprecatory smile—“have not the slightest inkling how this miracle has been accomplished, our resident materials magicians have been kind enough to prepare this brief explanation.”

  Grishin donned half-glasses and began reading from a small placard in his right hand. “Since the discovery of the Meissner Effect in 1933, it has been well known that magnetism cannot penetrate a superconductor. Picture the lines of magnetic force surrounding a bar magnet: they emerge from one pole and wrap around to enter the other in a series of concentric loops. Since this magnetic field cannot pass through a superconductor, the magnet itself is forced to rise high enough above the superconducting surface to allow room for its field lines. “The result is magnetic levitation—a magnet will float above a superconductor, or vice versa.

  “At the outset, the Meissner Effect could only be observed in liquid helium superconductors, at a temperature within ten degrees of absolute zero. Then advances in crystallography and ceramics in the late 1980s made possible materials that superconduct at liquid nitrogen temperatures: seventy-seven degrees above zero Kelvin. Still, magnetic levitation remained a phenomenon largely confined to the laboratory.

  “Now, GEI Research has fabricated alloys which superconduct at the temperature of frozen water—nearly two hundred degrees warmer—ushering in an era of superconductivity for the masses, superconductivity within reach of any household refrigerator! This breakthrough makes possible resistanceless electrical circuitry for power storage and transmission, maglev trains and other transportation, medical diagnostics of unprecedented accuracy, and, not incidentally—” Grishin set down his notes and grinned genially around the room “—the little superconducting Rusalka’s that levitate your caviar to you tonight.” He smiled at the renewed applause.