Resurgence

by Charles Sheffield

  The fog did not show on the range-rate sensor, but Hans did not need any help to compare speeds. Unless Lara could move faster there was no way that she could reach the Savior before the fog lapped around her feet and calves. Ben was in a different situation. He could turn around and make the ship before the layer of mist reached him—if only he had the sense to act immediately.

  He didn't turn. Worse than that, Hans realized that Ben was still moving toward Lara. The man was crazy. What was he hoping to do, grab hold of the blue fog and wrestle it away from her?

  Ben's hopes and intentions did not matter. He was fifty paces from Lara when the mist reached her and rippled around her lower legs.

  She at once stopped running. Hans heard a gasp, a startled scream, and then nothing.

  "Lara!" He, Darya, and Ben were shouting in unison.

  She did not answer. She stood for a few seconds, motionless. And then Lara was screaming again, and she was shrinking. She did not move, she did not topple, she did not sway. She simply sank into the blue surface layer, slowly and steadily. To Ben, limited to the quality of image provided by his suit, it must seem as though Lara drifted down to and through the surface of Iceworld.

  Hans, employing the superior sensors of the Savior, knew better. As the different sections of Lara's body came to within a few centimeters of the glowing layer of blue, they fractured and fragmented and turned to powder. As that happened, the sensors showed her body dropping in temperature. She was ice—she was as cold as liquid air—she was liquid helium, just a few kelvins above absolute zero. Finally, the instruments could not provide values.

  Lara's disintegration formed a hypnotic sight, but the warning of a different danger forced Hans into action. The layer of blue mist had paused when it reached Lara. Now it was moving again, sweeping toward the Savior. Long before it got there it would meet Ben, who stood as silent and motionless as if the tide of blue had already drained him of life and heat.

  "Ben! Into the ship."

  Ten quick steps would do it, then they could head up and away to safety. Ben was moving now, but he was like a zombie. Long before he reached the Savior, the fog would roll up to and over him. Already it was no more than thirty meters away, and what had at first been a gentle ripple forward now seemed like an irresistible advance.

  Certain death for Ben and escape for Hans and Darya? Or possible death by impact for Ben and an uncertain fate for Hans and Darya? There was no time to work out the odds, but Hans refused to lose another crew member.

  "Sit tight."

  That was for Darya, inexplicably trying to stand up from the seat next to him. Hans hit the controls and boosted the Savior—not away to the safety of orbit, but straight forward. The ship accelerated at four gees and scooped Ben Blesh into the maw of the airlock's open outer door. The clang as his body hit the back of the lock sounded through the whole ship.

  What Hans would have liked now was an instant switch from forward motion to upward motion, but the ship's inertia and the laws of dynamics did not permit that. Although he could alter the direction of thrust in a fraction of a second, until that change took effect the Savior continued to move forward. Forward, toward the edge of the grid point. Forward, toward the deadly blue mist that had crumbled Lara to dust and swallowed her body, and forward toward the pulsing spheres of blue light beyond.

  Hans was pinned back in his seat by four gees of acceleration. It took all his strength to keep his hands in place on the controls. The Savior was turning and rising. The ship would clear the layer of blue fog. But they were not rising fast enough. The aft end, where the main drive was located, would pass through the spheres of blue at the edge of the grid patch.

  Hans waited for an impact. He felt nothing, but he heard a change in the sound of the drive. A moment later the crushing force on his body lessened. The Savior was losing power. He called for Emergency Mode thrust, which ought to override any other command. Instead of punishing acceleration, the drive turned off completely. Hans felt himself in free fall, dropping with the ship toward the featureless surface.

  He braced for an impact that might kill or maim. It never came. Falling in the light gravity of Iceworld, the Savior hit the ground, bounced, then hit again and skidded along the surface.

  Hans glanced at the control read-outs. The hull had not been breached. All life-support systems showed normal readings. In principle the inside of the Savior was still the safest place on the planet.

  Hans did not believe that for a moment. Something had touched the lower part of the ship, and seconds later they had lost the drive. Every other part of the ship might be equally vulnerable. He glanced across at Darya to make sure that her suit was fully closed.

  "Come on."

  "Where?" But she was already standing up.

  "Outside. We lost power, and I don't know why. Until we know what happened I think we'll be safer on the surface."

  How safe was that? Hans did not know, but already he was cycling the inner door of the airlock. It did not matter that all the air would be lost from the interior of the ship. When they came back in—if they came back in—air could be replaced.

  The inner door was open. Hans had never closed the outer one, and he pushed Darya toward it.

  "Go ahead."

  "Ben—"

  "I'll help him." I lost one crew member, but I'm damned if I'll lose another. "You go outside, make sure the outer door is clear."

  Hans was exposing Darya to an unknown risk, and she surely knew it. The surface could be even more dangerous than the Savior's interior. She went without another word.

  Hans moved to where Ben's suited figure lay sprawled by the wall of the airlock. After the first impact as the Savior scooped up his body, Ben had then felt another four-gee force as the ship tried to rise toward orbit. Unlike Darya and Hans, he had not been cushioned in a well-designed seat.

  The suit tell-tales showed that its integrity had been maintained. That was good, but had Ben survived the multiple shocks? Hans leaned over and shone the head beam of his own suit into the faceplate. Ben's eyes were open, and the pupils contracted as the light struck them.

  Alive.

  Hans had no time to ask for anything more. He scooped up the suited body and headed for the outer door of the airlock. It was a three-meter drop from there to the surface, but—thank Heaven for low-gravity planets—he jumped and landed without difficulty.

  Darya was waiting. She at once pulled him away from the ship. He did not resist. The flat plain of the grid patch, which had before been dark as the grave, was illuminated now by a faint blue.

  Twenty paces from the Savior, Darya paused. Hans, still carrying Ben's body, turned. At first sight the ship was just as it should be, standing at an odd angle on the smooth surface. But a line of blue flame licked at the outside of the hull, right down at ground level. The flame was not moving. The Savior was. While Hans and Darya watched, the whole hull sank downward slowly and steadily as though being absorbed into the surface of Iceworld.

  Ignoring Darya's cry of warning, Hans took a couple of paces back toward the ship. Once you were close enough you could see what was really happening. Just above the pale blue line of flame, the hull of the Savior was fracturing, cracking, turning to powder, and vanishing.

  Logic said that they ought to turn and run, but to where? Hans could see that the whole grid area had become edged with blue light. He and Darya could move no more than a hundred meters or so in any direction without passing across that blue barrier. He turned to stare again at the Savior, and noticed a change. The lower half of the ship was gone, and the dust that it had become was slowly spreading outward. Already the outer edge smudged the surface five meters away from the vanishing hull.

  Hans stared upward. Somewhere in the sky, hundreds of millions of kilometers away, the Pride of Orion would be monitoring their status. They should receive everything up to Hans's order to Darya to head for the airlock. Since then there had been no time for spoken messages, but the beacon would automatica
lly send out its signal for as long as it existed.

  That existence would be for only a few more minutes. The chance of anything from the Pride of Orion arriving in time to help Darya, Ben, and Hans was a flat zero.

  Hans brought his attention back to their surroundings. Another meter of the Savior had vanished, and the dust that the ship had been was oozing closer. It might be harmless, but that was not a risk they could afford to take. The boundary of the grid area was still alight with an ominous blue.

  Hans took a deep breath. "Darya?"

  He knew what they had to do. He just wanted to hear her voice.

  "I'm here, Hans."

  "We can't stay where we are. I screwed up, and I'm sorry. I thought the surface would be safe. I was as wrong as I could be."

  "We all were."

  "The ship is done for. We can't go up. There's only one thing left."

  "Hans, I know that. I know very well what we have to do." She produced a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob. "This is my fault, not yours. I'm the one who wanted to come here, and I'm the one who said I wanted to see the interior of Iceworld. If I'm lucky, I'll get my wish."

  It was an odd definition of luck, but Hans understood. The powdery layer had advanced to within a few meters of their feet. He said, "No point in waiting. Let's hope we were right about the destabilizing field. I'm going to turn mine on now."

  "Me, too. Hans, I hope I'll meet you on the other side—wherever that is."

  "You have to. Remember, you promised me there would be a better time? You can't renege on that."

  Hans raised his gaze to the upper edge of his suit's faceplate. He glanced in turn at each element of the control sites that would cause his suit to generate a cancellation field. The suit's sensors, tracking his eye movements, turned the field on.

  He had time for one more moment of worry. Would the field's active radius be enough to include Ben, whose body Hans was still holding? If not, what would happen to both of them?

  And then there was no time for either worries or actions. The weak gravity of the planet seemed to vanish. Hans was in freefall, still holding his burden, dropping down through the deadly surface of Iceworld and on toward the unknown interior.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The perfect embodied computer.

  E. Crimson Tally had been reluctant to talk at any length to Julian Graves and the others about the changes and improvements made since his first embodiment. That would sound too much like boasting.

  For example, having attosecond circuitry seemed on the face of it like a good thing, something you would want all of the time. Years ago, within days of his initial embodiment and activation, he had learned otherwise. Yes, he could think trillions of times as fast as any organic intelligence, and with an accuracy and repeatability beyond their imagining; but as one consequence of that speed he had been obliged to spend almost all his time waiting, as he was now waiting. How would Darya Lang like it, if she asked E.C. a question and then had to hang around ten years before she had an answer?

  He had learned to get by, sitting quietly and calculating the first ten billion prime numbers or seeking repeating digit strings in pi while he waited for the first word of response, but you could only stand so much of that. Among the improvements in his second embodiment was one that he had specifically requested: he wanted a stand-by mode. And he didn't mean simply the one he'd had before, which dropped his internal clock rate by a factor of a thousand or a million. No, he wanted a genuine stand-by mode, in which he could "sleep" the way that others slept, brought back to consciousness only when his senses were jogged by some external event—such as someone finally getting around to answering his question.

  Now he had that ability to sleep, and it was better than anyone else's. Like them, he could wake when provided by an outside stimulus. But he could also set his internal timer to a precise interval and become active when a second, a week, a month, or a century had passed.

  E.C. Tally's own logic circuits made him amend that thought. He could not be certain that sleep for a long interval would work, since he himself had only tested periods up to one day. On the other hand, the required changes had been put in place by Sue Harbeson Ando and Lee Boro, back on Miranda, and those two ladies were perfectionists. True, they had never managed to fix his smile so it didn't make other humans shudder, but that was nerves and muscle connections, not computer functions. He had complete confidence in Ando and Boro. They had certainly tightened and adjusted him in other desirable ways.

  Deliberately, E.C. allowed his thoughts to wander to time travel and to the paradoxes that the idea introduced. Suppose that a man went back in time, and killed his own grandfather? Would he then cease to exist? Maybe he would, and maybe he wouldn't. Tally felt quite comfortable, whereas considerations of time travel in his earlier unimproved form had sent him into a loop from which only a cold start could rescue him.

  And quantum theory, with all its now-you-see-it now-you-don't peekaboo elements? He was just as comfortable with that. His brain could now handle everything from Lukasiewicz's three-valued logic, to Reichenbach's infinite-valued logic with its continuous range of truth-values.

  Tally permitted himself the luxury of one final test. He turned his mind to Russell's statement of the granddaddy of all true/false problems: "A barber in a certain village shaves all those, and only those, who do not shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself?"

  Well, if he doesn't shave himself, then since he shaves everyone who doesn't shave himself, he shaves himself. On the other hand, if he shaves himself . . .

  E.C. pursued the endless logical trail, on through the theory of types, meta-set theory, and fuzzy logic. It ate up idle time in a pleasant manner. Only the greater pleasure of a call from Julian Graves could exceed it.

  "Tally, I know you are eager to leave, but I have kept you here because I have a task for you."

  At last. After a full day of idleness. Tally switched his circuits from background to turbo mode. "I am ready."

  "This will involve colossal amounts of computation. It will possibly exceed your resources."

  "We shall see."

  Tally was merely being polite. Of course, it had come nowhere close to straining his capabilities. The amount of calculation was gigantic, but he had it completed, checked, and re-checked in a few hours. Now, surely, he would be allowed to leave.

  But no. Once again he was obliged to sit in stand-by mode, this time for an even longer period. At last the second call came.

  "The results that you provided are most satisfactory. Are you still prepared for departure?"

  "I am completely ready. My ship is also ready." In fact, I have been ready for days, while you have brooded over the doings of Professor Lang and Captain Rebka and the results that I gave you. Tally kept the last sentence to himself—another of the many improvements installed in his new embodiment.

  "Then you may proceed with your mission. Good luck, and do not forget to keep me informed as to whatever you may discover."

  Do not forget. As though an embodied computer ever would or could forget. "I will keep you informed."

  Tally took the final steps to free his own ship, the Tally-ho, from its magnetic bonds to the Pride of Orion. As he did so, it occurred to him that his current embodiment was perfect, in that it could not be improved.

  In a sense he was correct. It could not be improved, because no one had ever managed to define good judgment, still less create a working algorithm to provide it.

  * * *

  Tally had not wasted time while Julian Graves kept him tied to the Pride of Orion's apron strings. For three full days he had studied the stellar system to which their last Bose transition had brought them, working with unmatched speed and focus, endless patience, and the powers offered by his new ability to handle multi-valued logic systems.

  The members of the expedition party from the Orion Arm were all in full agreement: they had not chosen this destination. It had been fed to them as Bose network coord
inates, derived from the log of the Chism Polypheme's ship. When they arrived at an obviously dead system, everyone said, Oh, that's so typical of a Polypheme. It lied, they always lie. But suppose that the Polypheme had lied, and at the same time told the truth? Then in that case the stellar system to which they had come was both the wrong place to find the Marglotta home world, and at the same time the right place.

  E.C. could live with that notion. When the Tally-ho pulled away from its docking he knew exactly where he wanted to go. Of course, he would eventually head for the edge of the dark zone, just as he had said he would, and hope in that way to arrive at the world of the Marglotta. Before taking his leave, however, there were points of interest right here in this system.

  One of them was Iceworld, but Professor Lang had already staked her claim to that. Tally had read every report beamed back from the Savior, and he questioned Lang's assessment that no matter what had been done to it recently, the big, hollow world had begun as a Builder artifact. Unlike everyone else on the Pride of Orion, he did not reject Darya Lang's idea of a second super-race (perhaps a race of computers?). But didn't it then make sense that they, rather than the Builders, had created Iceworld?

  If so, the rest of the system was wide open as a possible hiding place for real Builder artifacts. Tally, after analysis that would have taken any human a million years of calculation, had a candidate.

  His conversation with Julian Graves on the subject had been less than satisfactory.

  * * *

  "This body." E.C. Tally indicated on a whole-system display a medium-sized planetoid moving in an orbit far out from the dark star that formed the center of the gravitating set of worlds.

  "What about it?" Julian Graves glared at the insignificant object, his great bald brow furrowed with impatience or suspicion. Sometimes Tally wondered if Graves approved of embodied computers. "I've never seen a more average lump of rock."

  "Councilor, it doesn't rotate."

  "I can see that. But it's very common for planets and moons not to rotate. They become tidally locked to some other body."