“Food,” said Althea. “Drink. A word with Domitian.” Ivan was stone-faced, and even to her own ears her offer seemed petty, poor. She said, “I have nothing else to offer,” and heard her own desperation.
“And why would I want food, or drink, or a useless conversation with Domitian?” Ivan asked. “Think bigger, Althea.”
“I have nothing else to offer.”
The way Ivan looked at her was almost, Althea hardly dared to think, pitying.
“No,” she said in response to that look, to what it said without saying. “No.”
“Not even for your ship?” Ivan asked with a peculiar mocking emphasis on “your ship.”
“I can’t do it,” she said, and braced herself and said it outright. “I can’t set you free. I’m risking enough just being here, just talking to you. The System could throw me in prison, maybe even execute me, just for talking to you like this!”
“And that,” said Ivan, cruelly ironic, deliberate, “would be terrible.”
“Don’t do that to me,” Althea said, caught between anger and pleading. “Ivan, I need your help.”
For an instant, a desperate hopeful instant, she thought she saw pity in his face again, pity for her.
“Fine,” he said. “But here are my terms. They can’t be negotiated. They can’t be changed.”
Althea took a shuddering breath. “I can’t set you free, Ivan.”
“I want two things from you before I tell you a damn thing,” Ivan said. “First I want you to tell me something, and then I want you to do something for me. I want you to tell me the mission of the Ananke. And then I want you to lengthen the chains on my arms.”
She couldn’t do it. That was her first thought; it was so overwhelming that for a moment she could not speak for fear that nothing would come out of her mouth other than “I can’t, I can’t.” Then she swallowed and asked, “Why?”
“The first,” said Ivan, “is so that I can actually diagnose your problem for you. I can’t tell you what’s wrong with the ship if I don’t know how it’s supposed to work, Althea.”
That much was probably true. Althea’s mouth was dry when she said, “And what about the second?”
In answer, Ivan lifted his arms for the first time since she had walked into the room. They were arrested a few short inches away from the chair’s armrests by the chains, which had been hooked shut several links above the full length of the chain. It had to be uncomfortable. It had to be humiliating.
“Ida and Domitian have been shortening them,” he said, and she shifted her attention reluctantly from the chains to see that he had been watching her the entire time. “It’s not very comfortable.”
Lengthening the chains would lengthen his reach. Fully extended, he probably could reach above the top of the table or perhaps up to Althea’s waist if she stood right beside him. He would be less contained, less well trapped.
“You’re not going to…do anything, are you?” she said. “If I lengthen the…” She trailed off with a gesture.
“It’s just for my comfort,” Ivan said, and she wanted to believe him.
“Domitian and Ida will know—”
“—when they unchain me,” Ivan finished. “No, they won’t, not if I keep my arms down. When they bring me back, they’ll shorten the chains again, but they won’t know they were ever lengthened.”
It would be a brief comfort, but Althea could nearly justify it in her head.
What she could not justify was the betrayal of her ship and of Domitian.
“I can’t tell you about the Ananke,” she said. “It was the highest of my oaths when I took this position, that the mission of this ship be kept a secret.”
“No,” Ivan said, “the highest of your oaths is to obey the System, and you’re not doing that very well, are you?”
Althea set her jaw.
“Look,” Ivan said, seeming to relent. “There is no working surveillance in this room. Ida can’t get me to tell her what she wants to know; there’s no way I’ll tell her about this. I understand loyalty, Althea, and I understand keeping secrets, but I can only help you if you tell me this.”
This was all too much, and Althea was so exhausted. She ran her shaking hands over her face and could not even think how to decide.
“And anyway,” said Ivan, “I’ll be dead in a few days.”
Althea lowered her hands and stared at him, at the shadows under his eyes and the pallor of his skin, and could not decide if she was afraid of him or for him, only that she was overwhelmingly afraid.
“I can’t,” she said, and she whispered it, but it seemed very loud even at a whisper and in that vast white room.
“Then I won’t help you.”
“You have to understand,” Althea began, driven by some incomprehensible impulse to explain herself to him, to explain Domitian, and the Ananke, and the System, and her own fear.
“I understand,” Ivan said, but there was neither absolution nor forgiveness in his voice.
Althea tried again. “You know if something happens because I can’t fix the ship, you’ll die, too.”
Ivan leaned forward. There was an intensity to him, Althea decided, and that was what made him so frightening.
“Like I said,” he told her. “I’ll be dead in a few days.”
There was nothing she could possibly have said to that, so she let her fear drive her from the room. The door swung shut with a heavy clang behind her and nearly covered up the sound of her name being called from a nearby intercom.
“Althea,” said Domitian’s voice in a tone inching steadily from annoyed to angry. “Althea, come in.”
She could have just as well fixed the Ananke on the spot as not replied instantly to that tone. Hoping only that she did not sound too shaken, she opened the connection and said, “I read.”
“Control room. Now.”
She went.
It was a testament to how rattled she was that she did not realize immediately that she had walked into an ambush.
Domitian was sitting in the main chair, which had been swung around to face the door. Gagnon leaned with affected casualness against the wall and swung the door shut once she entered, and she found herself in the center of the tiny room, the object of both men’s attention.
“What is it?” she asked, although she already could guess.
Domitian had his hands folded in front of his face, bent elbows braced on the arms of his chair. He took his time before speaking, and that frightened Althea, that long, thoughtful silence.
“Althea,” he said. “We need to know when the ship will be fixed.”
“Soon,” Althea said, her fingers trembling against her sides; she stuck them in her pockets. They knocked against the tools she carried, the bits of wire, the slender silver box cutter, sharp and flat.
“When?” said Domitian. “An exact time frame, Althea.”
For a moment she contemplated a lie. In the next moment the very idea shamed her; she turned her head aside without answering.
“Do you even know what’s wrong with it?” Gagnon asked from behind her, and when Althea dared to glance Domitian’s way again, he did not look surprised at her lack of an answer.
“I have some ideas,” said Althea, but her only idea was a wolf in a white room.
“But you don’t know,” Gagnon pressed.
“Not exactly, no.”
She had the distinct impression that the two men were holding a conversation with each other over her head.
“If the computer can’t be fixed,” Domitian said at last, “then it must be deactivated.”
Her head snapped up.
“What?” She had misheard, she must have—even though she knew she hadn’t.
“The dead man’s switch is at the base of the ship,” Domitian said. “The ship can be operated by the crew without the computer.”
“Not completely,” said Althea. “Not perfectly, not entirely…”
“But it can be operated well enough to fly, to sus
tain life, and to perform the basic experiments of our mission,” said Domitian.
It was true, but Althea would not admit it.
“Stopping this insanity is worth the price of a few lost experiments,” Domitian said. “All the System needs to know is if the process this ship is designed to test is physically possible. That is the core purpose of this ship, and we can achieve that without the computer. Everything else the computer was designed to test can be tested in later experiments, but there will be no second ship with a black hole core if this ship fails. With the amount of resources the System has sunk into this mission, we must succeed or there will be consequences for all three of us. And there is still the matter of whether Ivanov can be removed from the premises while the computer is operational. Miss Stays is not happy, and do you realize what her unhappiness—”
“I know,” Althea snapped.
“So then tell me,” said Domitian, as sharp as she had been, “can you or can you not fix this ship?”
Again Althea could not answer.
“Give me an hour,” she blurted out when it seemed Domitian was about to break the silence. “Give me one more hour, and then, if I can’t fix it by then, you can…you can do whatever you’re going to do.”
“An hour,” Domitian said, and Althea ignored Gagnon’s visible exasperation. “One hour and no more.”
She left before he could take it back.
—
The ship’s cameras watched Althea Bastet step out into the hall and close the door to the control room behind her. For an instant she stood still, her hair curling chaotically out around her face, barely bound anymore by the band that once had held it back. She began to walk, and the ship watched her as she walked in the direction opposite to the white room.
Althea knew that if the dead man’s switch was flipped, it would destroy the computer, euthanize it, wipe it from existence and leave only the computer’s shell, the computer’s corpse, drifting through space. The ship would be left under manual control of the crew, who would operate it like ancient earth scientists testing galvanism, who set a corpse to jumping or shrieking with the touch of electricity to the right limb or piece of the brain.
Althea Bastet went to the weapons cabinet and opened it. She took a key from a hook that once had held the cuffs that now held Leontios Ivanov, and she dropped it into her pocket.
Down the hall she walked, down the winding hall, toward the white room.
If the dead man’s switch was flipped, there would be no computer to repair, nothing but dead synapses and the fading echoes of an aborted life.
At the door to the white room, Althea stopped and took a long, slow breath. Her hands were trembling when she reached into her pocket and came up with a handful of wire, the long flat blade of the box cutter, and, shining bright and small, the silver key to Ivan’s cuffs.
She dropped the rest back into her pocket absently, hardly paying attention to whether the items made it into her pocket or fell onto the floor, and pressed the key into the palm of her hand.
The Ananke watched her open the door and walk into the white room.
—
Althea was still no more conscious of when she had made the decision to go to Ivan than she had been the first time she had visited him. The decision, it seemed, had been made subconsciously, and she was left only to carry it out.
Without speaking a word to Ivan, she crossed the expanse between the door and the table in the center of the room. It seemed longer than it had before, the silence in the room overwhelming, the lights and the white walls and ceiling and floor all too bright for her eyes.
Ivan was watching her without speaking as she came up beside him. When she finally reached out to move, she knew that she had left the mark of the key in white and red on her palm.
She reached down first to his right wrist, which was closer to her. His skin was very pale against hers when she lifted his wrist so that she could reach the keyhole in the lock.
He watched her. She could feel him watching her, and she did not look at him.
She leaned over him to reach for his other arm. She knew that she should not—it left her vulnerable if Ivan reached up and grabbed her—but she could not quite bring herself to care or to believe that he would hurt her.
Something snagged her open hip pocket, probably the chair’s armrest, so she shifted and freed it, then lengthened the chain on Ivan’s left hand.
Then she pulled back, dropped the key in her pocket, faced Ivan, and said, “The mission of the Ananke is to discover how to reverse entropy.”
Ivan frowned, somewhere between incredulous and confused.
“If entropy can be reversed,” Althea said, “the System can create more efficient engines. We can create better terraforming devices. Without entropy, liquids don’t have to mix, water can be kept uncontaminated, heat doesn’t need to disperse; we can finally warm the outer moons up enough to have a proper biosphere. There will be no energy crisis. Every ship can have a relativistic drive, not just the lightweight ones. The System will be able to control the outer moons better. One day we’ll be able to colonize planets outside of the solar system.” Some of the wonder of the idea that had struck her when she first had heard it years ago came back to her now and in some small measure calmed her fear and despair. “Perpetual motion would be possible, Ivan,” she said. “Every physical process reversible. Time goes in the direction of increasing entropy; if we had control over whether entropy increased, it would be like having control over time. We would have the power of eternity.”
Ivan’s mouth was hanging slightly ajar; his eyes had gone very wide, and Althea could see the full circles of blue, reflecting on their surfaces the bright white walls, the bright white ceiling, and herself with the light coming through her hair like a halo.
“That’s why this ship is so well protected,” Althea said. “That’s why it’s kept such a secret. Imagine anyone but the System having that kind of power.”
“That’s not possible,” Ivan said. “The laws of thermodynamics are the laws of reality. They can’t be broken.”
“Gagnon has some theories. I don’t understand them completely, but I don’t need to. They have something to do with the black hole, I think, which is why the Ananke has a black hole instead of just a dense sphere for gravitation—but the computer, that I understand. The Ananke…she…” It was hard to put foreign inhuman languages, math and code, into simple, short spoken words. “The computer identifies the entropy,” Althea said, hands outspread, fingers curled, as if she would capture the correct way to communicate in her hands like a firefly, “and it turns it back into work.”
“What you’re saying, then,” Ivan said, leaning forward but with his hands still pressed flat to the rests of his chair, not taking advantage of the lengthened chains, “is that the computer is designed to take chaos as an input and produce order from it.”
“No,” Althea said immediately, and then on revision, “No, not really.”
“The greater the entropy, the greater the number of states a system can have,” Ivan said, leaning forward, alight, and seeming a different person for this sudden energy. There was color in his cheeks and his eyes were bright, but it looked more like the flush of fever than the glow of health.
“Yes,” Althea said slowly.
“So you start with a system of low entropy—low chaos, high order, only a few states,” Ivan said. “Maybe only one. And then you add a little bit of chaos—a little bit of entropy—and suddenly the system is broken up into many different states.”
“Chaos isn’t a thing,” said Althea, frustrated. Ivan was still alight with that familiar look of a scholar faced with the solution to a problem, but she had no idea where he was heading. “You can’t ‘add’ entropy to a thing.”
Ivan waved his left hand dismissively. The lengthened chain clattered. He said, “But you can increase the number of states the computer can have.”
It was Althea’s turn to be briefly struck dumb by the implicat
ions.
“Mattie’s ‘little bit of chaos,’ ” she said. “I thought you meant an error. I thought you meant he put some sort of…replicating random virus into the system.”
Ivan shook his head.
“The Ananke’s computer can exist in a few predetermined states, right?” he said. “Normal functioning, high alert, basic functioning only, that sort of thing.”
“He added states,” Althea said slowly, testing the sense of it.
“He added states,” Ivan confirmed. “Strange ones. Like ones where some of the cameras don’t save their footage but the computer functions normally. It was just supposed to confuse the crew, nothing more. And then he changed the computer so that it would cycle through them at random.”
It was possible, just—but there was no way Mattie would have had the time to do it. “He was only at the computer for a few minutes,” Althea said.
Ivan grinned, and the wolf was there again in that smile. “You didn’t even find his lock picks,” he said. “Do you think that was all he had hidden on him?”
“A computer drive.” Of course. But even so, the drives would be able to contain only generic programs; Mattie would have had to alter them for the Ananke, which was like no other ship in existence. He could have managed it—just—but the complexity of some of the behavior Althea had witnessed…“I still don’t see how—”
“We’ve done this a lot of times,” Ivan interrupted. “I promise you he could’ve done it in the time he had.”
It still didn’t make sense to Althea, not completely, but it had to be true. There was no other possibility.
“So the computer just fluctuates between these states at random?” Althea asked, turning her mind back to the problem at hand and feeling for the first time in a week as if she might have some way to fix this.
“Mattie adds a set of states,” Ivan confirmed, “sometimes a very large set, and then the computer fluctuates through them like a person having mood swings. That’s how we coded the Annwn, actually. We got the idea—”
He stopped.
It was so abrupt and unnerving that Althea said, a little too loudly, “What?” and it echoed through the white room.
“That’s how we programmed the Annwn,” Ivan said, slowly but building up steam, and Althea knew that expression from its having been on her own face, from seeing it on the faces of colleagues before—Ivan coming to conclusions, connecting the facts faster than he could speak.
Lightless Page 24
