Transcendent dc-3

by Stephen Baxter

  At least the pain stopped.

  The day after that first integrated test was launched, Edith Barnette returned to her home in DC.

  She took with her good wishes from our confused little crew. It meant a lot that such a grand old lady had hauled ass all the way to Alaska to see it, for she had demonstrated concretely that there was support for our work out there, if only we could tap into it. We were a somewhat fragile alliance of partners, with both Shelley’s concerns and EI always having their eye on the need to make an eventual profit. Barnette’s endorsement would help keep their boards and shareholders happy — or anyhow nobody was talking about pulling out yet.

  In the days that followed, we dug into the work once more.

  What Barnette had witnessed was only the beginning of the integration trials, the first tentative burrowings of our moles into shallow sea-bottom sediments. It had mostly gone well. Around ten percent of the Higgs-field power packs had suffered glitches of one sort or another, but as Higgs was the one really novel technological element, you had to expect unpleasant surprises.

  Most of the smart moles had behaved much as expected, but the tentative network they had begun constructing hadn’t been of quite the quality we’d hoped for. Small-world networking: a useful, robust network should be designed around a number of key nodes with plenty of links between them, so you can get from one point to another with very few steps, and yet the whole thing is robust to failure. As we wanted our refrigerant network to be working from the moment we put it in the ground, we were seeking a kind of rolling optimum, with it being as good as it could be at every stage of its extension. In those first few hours of work, what we built was good, but not quite as good as that.

  Some of the moles seemed to have forgotten the wider goal, and had gone burrowing off according to their own agenda. We speculated that maybe the unusual environment of the moles led to a kind of mechanical solipsism, as if each mole was tempted to believe that it was alone, the center of a cramped, dark universe of cold and sediment. We were going to have to pull some of the moles back for therapy, we decided. This was twenty-first century engineering, where you wielded TLC rather than a spanner.

  The plan beyond that was for the moles’ drillings to extend out to about a kilometer from the central rig. Then an array of condenser stations would be established across the seafloor to complete the logical closure of our refrigeration loops. After that the first liquid nitrogen would be pumped through our lined tunnels, and we should begin to demonstrate actual cooling over a significant chunk of the seafloor, and deep beneath its surface. All this, Ruud Makaay hoped, would be achievable in a few more months.

  It was at that point, when we were able to demonstrate significant temperature reductions, and we were sure about the heat flows and efficiencies and other parameters of the whole process, that we would go public, we had decided.

  It would be a sales pitch, and would have to be carefully choreographed. We hoped to be able to use Edith Barnette as a lever to bring us some attention from the world’s decision makers. Gea’s projections of how well our refrigerant technology would work, and the difference it would make to the state of the planet, were going to be crucially authoritative. Then, so the best-case scenario went, with endorsement from the Stewardship, the U.S. federal government, and various other agencies of governance, we would begin the roll-out of the technology around both poles of the planet, tweaking the design and learning all the way. We might be at that point in as little as a year from now.

  And at this point, the business analysts suggested, serious money would start to roll into the coffers of EI and the other private agencies involved. Even I would be getting a consultancy fee, I was assured. Capitalism would save the world, but only so long as it showed a profit.

  That was the plan. To achieve it there was still a hell of a lot of work to do, for all of us. Even Tom and Sonia had carved out a role as a kind of watching brief on the project, which was turning out to be surprisingly useful. They couldn’t contribute much technically, but they had a good sense of the impact our project was going to have on the high-latitude communities on which its infrastructure was going to be “imposed,” in Tom’s word. They added a degree of cultural sensitivity which our little engineering community perhaps lacked.

  And while all this was going on we had to deal with the fallout from the Poole family circus-show.

  On the day itself, Ruud Makaay explained the Morag incident away to Edith Barnette as a personal issue for me and Tom. She clearly didn’t buy this, but her only comment was that it was a good thing there had been no press here to see it. After all the center of the incident was me, who everybody knew was the originator of the whole project in the first place; it couldn’t have been more high-profile.

  As for everybody else, Deadhorse was a pretty desolate and uninspiring place, and I was suddenly a valued source of scuttlebutt. Makaay was irritated at the way his people were distracted by “this stupid sideshow,” as he called it; it was “getting in the way” when there was already too much work to do. Shelley was more circumspect. She didn’t say much, and I knew she would support me in trying to resolve this knot of strangeness in my life. But I think she, too, wished it would all just go away.

  As for Tom, he avoided me for days.

  I took Shelley’s advice not to push him. He had a lot to absorb, after all: this was the first time he had been haunted, too. And besides, as Sonia confided in a discreet moment, his pride had hurt. Whatever the cause, a thousand people had seen him crushed and weeping on the frozen ground. So I tried to give him space.

  But I had to follow it up myself. I parceled up the records of that day and beamed them over by high-bandwidth link to Rosa, my wizened, black-clad aunt in Seville, to see what she made of them.

  A week after that strange day, Rosa called me back.

  Ruud Makaay, bowing to the inevitable, gave us one of his conference rooms to take Rosa’s call. Tom and Sonia were there — though I gathered that Sonia had had to twist Tom’s arm. I could understand his reluctance, but my son was no coward, and I knew he would face up to all this strangeness.

  However I asked Shelley Magwood to attend, too. I had often observed that we Pooles behaved better toward each other when outsiders were present. Or maybe I just felt I needed an ally. Gea, my strange artificial companion, was there, too.

  So we sat around a simple circular table, Gea’s little toy-robot avatar rolling back and forth on the tabletop.

  And Rosa materialized among us, a dark, brooding presence in her black priest’s garb. The VR facilities were functional rather than corporate-luxurious, and you could see a ghostly second surface where the projection of Rosa’s table was overlaid on ours.

  “So,” Rosa smiled at us. “Who’s first?”

  It was actually Gea who started us off. She had been analyzing the surveillance records of the day. She conjured up a snippet of the visitation, played out by manikins on the tabletop, ten-centimeter-high models of me, Morag, Tom, and Sonia. The resolution was good, far better than Rosa’s image of the Reef; the whole area around the marquee and the offshore rig had been drenched with sensors. And the data went beyond human senses. Gea was able to show us an X-ray image of Morag, for instance; we saw bones, a regular-looking skeleton, the ghostly images of internal organs — a brain, a heart.

  “Whatever this creature is,” Gea said dryly, “the body of ‘Morag Poole’ responds to our sensors, every one of them. It has mass, volume, an internal structure. It is in our universe. It is no hallucination, and no ghost, in the sense of the word as I understand it. It is really there. ”

  But who was this? Gea snipped out a little volume around Morag’s head and blew it up until it was life-size, a disembodied head with a serene, somewhat vacant expression. Gea overlaid this with an X-ray image of the skull within, and she compared it to images of Morag from her medical records and my own personal archive. Rapidly we were taken through a point-to-point matching of facial structures, of the de
eper bones. All this was completed in seconds. The implication was clear: any forensic scientist would have concluded that the face in our image was indeed Morag.

  “But,” Gea said, “there are anomalies.”

  The Morag creature was dense, massive, in fact about twice my weight. Gea had been able to measure that by studying seismic echoes of her footsteps. The sense I’d sometimes had that Morag was somehow more real than me and the rest of my world seemed to be borne out. But Gea’s sensors had detected only flesh and blood and bone, and it wasn’t clear what form her invisible mass took.

  For all her intense reality, the sensors had no clear record of where Morag had come from, or where she had gone to. It was as if the myriad artificial eyes just looked away, and she was gone.

  As Gea went through all this, Rosa watched Tom carefully. She seemed fascinated by his reaction, his emotional state. Tom was expressionless, but even that was eloquent, I thought.

  Rosa said at last, “Whatever we are to make of all this, one thing is clear. The visitations are now part of our consensual reality. Michael may indeed be crazy, but we can’t explain away his experiences that way anymore.”

  “Thanks,” I said warmly.

  “Well, personally I’m awed,” Sonia said. “Scared.”

  “Me, too,” Shelley said. “It’s a ghost story suddenly coming true.” But she didn’t sound scared, or particularly awed, and neither did Sonia; they sounded curious. I was impressed by the resilience of their minds, the minds of a soldier and an engineer. It wasn’t just their professions that gave them such strength, I suspected, but a deeper robustness of the human psyche.

  I said, “There’s no reason to be afraid. If strangeness spooked us we’d still be competing for gazelle bones with the hyenas out on the savannah. We’ll deal with this—”

  Tom turned on me. “That’s typical of your bullshit, Dad. What we’re trying to deal with here is my mother. Or rather, that thing that looks like my mother. And all you can come up with is some fucking pep talk about walking out of Africa.” His voice was controlled but brittle.

  Rosa said evenly, “We all need ways of coping with this, Tom. You must find your own path, as your father is finding his. This is a reality Michael has accepted for some time, I think. But now suddenly this isreal for you. You were even able to approach your mother—”

  “It wasn’t my mother,” he snapped.

  Rosa nodded. “Very well. You were able to approach the visitor closely, to inspect her, as I hadn’t been able to in Seville. What did you feel?”

  Tom wouldn’t reply. He shot me a resentful, pitying glance.

  As for me, I truly believed that this visitor was, on some level, Morag, it really was her. I had always believed that. So how was I supposed to feel? I had never known that, not since my first visitations as a child. My reaction was to figure it out, try to make sense of it. But maybe I was the weak one; maybe the true, strong reaction was actually Tom’s, his devastated weeping on the plain; maybe he felt the reality of this return, its strangeness in ways I was incapable of.

  Shelley’s hand crept over mine.

  Rosa had been concentrating her own studies on Morag’s speech. She played us a sample. Once again a disembodied head floated over our tabletop; once again I saw that beautiful face, those full lips. But Morag spoke strangely and quickly, a string of syllables too rapid to distinguish, her tongue flicking between her lips.

  Rosa froze the image. “There is no known human language detectable in this signal. And yet we can detect structure…”

  She told us, somewhat to my surprise, that there was a flourishing discipline in the study of nonhuman languages.

  It had originated in questions about animal communication. The songs of whales and whistles of dolphins were obvious case studies, but so were the hoots and screeches of chimps and monkeys, the stamping of elephants — even the dull chemical signaling of one plant to another. But how much information was contained in these messages? Even if you couldn’t translate the language, even if you didn’t know what the whales sang about, were there ways of determining if there was any information in there at all — and if so, how much, how dense? This was a discipline that in latter years had been useful in helping us figure out the sometimes cryptic utterances of our more enigmatic artificial intelligences — and, I thought, it might be useful someday if we ever encountered extraterrestrial intelligences.

  Rosa waved a hand, and the air filled with graphs. It was all to do with information theory, she said, the mathematics of sequences of symbols — binary digits, DNA bases, letters, phonemes. “The first thing is to see if there is any information in your signal. And to do that you construct a Zipf graph…” This was named after a Harvard linguist of the 1940s. You broke up your signal into its elements — bases, letters, words — and then made a bar graph of their frequency of use. She showed us examples based on the English alphabet, presenting us with a kind of staircase, with the usage of the most commonly used letters — e, t, s — to the left, and lesser usages represented by more bars descending to the right. “That downward slope is a giveaway that information-rich structure is present. Think about it. If you have meaningless noise, a random sequence of letters, each one is liable to come up as often as any other.”

  “So the graph would be flat,” Sonia said.

  “Yes. On the other hand if you had a signal with structure but no information content — say just a long sequence of e, e, e, like a pure tone — you’d have a vertical line. Signals containing meaningful information come somewhere between those two extremes. And you can tell something about the degree of information contained by the slope of the graph.”

  Sonia asked, “What about the dolphins?” She glanced apologetically at Tom. “I know it’s nothing to do with your mother. I’d just like to know.”

  Rosa smiled. “Actually the analysis is a little trickier in that case. With human languages, it’s easy to see the breakdown into natural units, letters, words, sentences: you can see what you must count. With nonhuman languages, like dolphin whistles, it’s harder to see the breaks between linguistic units. But you can use trial and error. Even dolphin whistles have gaps, so that’s a place to start, and then you can expand the way you decompose your signal, looking for other trial break markers, until you find the breakdown that gives you the strongest Zipf result.”

  Sonia asked, “And the answer?”

  Rosa waved a hand, like a magician. A new line on the graph appeared, below the first and parallel to it. “Dolphin whistles, and whale songs and a number of other animal signals, contain information — in fact they all show signs of optimal coding. Of course knowing there is information in there isn’t the same as having a translation. We know the dolphins are talking, but we still don’t know what they are talking about.”

  “We may never know,” said Sonia, her voice tight. “Now that the oceans are empty.”

  Gea rolled back and forth, friction sparks flying. You wouldn’t think a tin robot could look so judgmental.

  Rosa said brightly, “As far as Morag is concerned we aren’t done yet. There is a second stage of analysis which allows us to squeeze even more data out of these signals.”

  As I’d half-expected, she began to talk about entropy. The Zipf analysis showed us whether a signal contained information at all, Rosa said. The entropy analysis she presented now was going to show us how complex that information was. It makes sense that information theoreticians talk about entropy, if you think about it. Entropy comes from thermodynamics, the science of molecular motion, and is a measure of disorder — precise, quantified. So it is a kind of inverse measure of information.

  Rosa showed us a new series of graphs, which plotted “Shannon entropy value” against “entropy order.” It took me a while to figure this out. The zero-order-entropy number was easiest to understand; that was just a count of the number of elements in your system, the diversity of your repertoire — in written English, that could be the twenty-six letters of the alphab
et plus a few punctuation marks. First-order entropy measured how often each element came up in the language — how many times you used e versus t or s. Second-order and higher entropies were trickier. They were to do with correlations between the elements of your signal.

  Rosa said, “If I give you a letter, what’s your chance of predicting the next in the signal? Q is usually followed by u, for instance. That’s second-order entropy. Third-order means, if I give you two letters, what are your chances of predicting the third? And so on. The longer the chain of entropy values, the more structure there is in your signal.”

  The most primitive communications we knew of were chemical signaling between plants. Here you couldn’t go beyond first-order Shannon entropy: given a signal, you couldn’t guess what the next would be. Human languages showed eighth — or ninth-order entropy.

  We talked around the meaning of this. The Shannon entropy order has something to do with the complexity of the language. There is a limit to how far you can spin out a paragraph, or even an individual sentence, if you want to keep it comprehensible — though a more advanced mind could presumably unravel a lot more complexity.

  Sonia asked, “And the dolphins?”

  Sadly, the dolphins’ whistles showed no more than third or fourth-order Shannon entropy. They beat out most primates, but not by much.

  “I guess they were too busy having fun after all,” Sonia said wistfully.

  Tom had glowered all the way through this. Now he asked, “And the signal from the mother-thing? What does your analysis tell us about that?”

  “It passes the Zipf test,” Rosa said. “And as for entropy—”

  She laid a new line on her graphical display of plant, chimp, dolphin, human languages. Sloping shallowly, it tailed away into the distance of the graph’s right-hand side, far beyond the human.

  “The analysis is uncertain,” Rosa said. “As you can imagine we’ve never actually encountered a signal like this before. Human languages, remember, reach Shannon order eight or nine. This signal, Morag’s speech, appears to be at least order thirty. We have to accept, I think, that Morag’s speech does contain information, of a sort. But it is couched in a fantastically abstruse form. As if it contains layers of nested clauses, overlapping tense changes, double, triple, quadruple negatives, all crammed into each sentence—”