The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Grey Knights allow you to reshape the entire maze, at will. They don’t confine you to some shrunken emotional repertoire; they empower you completely. They let you control exactly who you are.”

  I had to struggle to put aside the overwhelming sense of revulsion I felt. Largo had decided to fuck himself in the head; that was his problem. A few users of Mother would do the same—but one more batch of poisonous shit to compete with all the garbage from the basement labs wasn’t exactly a national tragedy.

  Largo said affably, “I spent 30 years as someone I despised. I was too weak to change—but I never quite lost sight of what I wanted to become. I used to wonder if it would have been less contemptible, less hypocritical, to resign myself to the fact of my weakness, the fact of my corruption. But I never did.”

  “And you think you’ve erased your old personality, as easily as you erased your computer files? What are you now, then? A saint? An angel?”

  “No. But I’m exactly what I want to be. With Grey Knights, you can’t really be anything else.”

  I felt giddy for a moment, light-headed with rage; I steadied myself against the bars of my cage.

  I said, “So you’ve scrambled your brain, and you feel better. And you’re going to live in this fake jungle for the rest of your life, collaborating with drug pushers, kidding yourself that you’ve achieved redemption?”

  “The rest of my life? Perhaps. But I’ll be watching the world. And hoping.”

  I almost choked. “Hoping for what? You think your habit will ever spread beyond a few brain-damaged junkies? You think Grey Knights are going to sweep across the planet and transform it beyond recognition? Or were you lying—is the virus really infectious, after all?”

  “No. But it gives people what they want. They’ll seek it out, once they understand that.”

  I gazed at him, pityingly. “What people want is food, sex and power. That will never change. Remember the passage you marked in Heart of Darkness? What do you think that meant? Deep down, we’re just animals with a few simple drives. Everything else is less than chaff in a breeze.”

  Largo frowned, as if trying to recall the quote, then nodded slowly. He said, “Do you know how many different ways an ordinary human brain can be wired? Not an arbitrary neural network of the same size—but an actual, working Homo sapiens brain, shaped by real embryology and real experience? There are about ten-to-the-power-of-ten-million possibilities. A huge number: a lot of room for variation in personality and talents, a lot of space to encode the traces of different lives.

  “But do you know what Grey Knights do to that number? They multiply it by the same again. They grant the part of us that was fixed, that was tied to ‘human nature,’ the chance to be as different from person to person as a lifetime’s worth of memories.

  “Of course Conrad was right. Every word of that passage was true—when it was written. But now it doesn’t go far enough. Because now, all of human nature is less than chaff in a breeze. ‘The horror,’ the heart of darkness, is less than chaff in a breeze. All the ‘eternal verities’—all the sad and beautiful insights of all the great writers from Sophocles to Shakespeare—are less than chaff in a breeze.”

  * * *

  I lay awake on my bunk, listening to the cicadas and frogs, wondering what Largo would do with me. If he didn’t see himself as capable of murder, he wouldn’t kill me—if only to reinforce his delusions of self-mastery. Perhaps he’d just dump me outside the research station—where I could explain to Madelaine Smith how the Colombian air force pilot had come down with an El Nido virus in midair, and I’d valiantly tried to take control.

  I thought back over the incident, trying to get my story straight. The pilot’s body would never be recovered; the forensic details didn’t have to add up.

  I closed my eyes and saw myself breaking his neck. The same twinge of remorse passed over me. I brushed it aside irritably. So I’d killed him—and the girl, a few days earlier—and a dozen others before that. The Company had very nearly disposed of me. Because it was expedient—and because it was possible. That was the way of the world: power would always be used, nation would subjugate nation, the weak would always be slaughtered. Everything else was pious self-delusion. A hundred kilometres away, Colombia’s warring factions were proving the truth of that, one more time.

  But if Largo had infected me with his own special brand of Mother? And if everything he’d told me about it was true?

  Grey Knights only moved if you willed them to move. All I had to do in order to remain unscathed was to choose that fate. To wish only to be exactly who I was: a killer who’d always understood that he was facing the deepest of truths. Embracing savagery and corruption because, in the end, there was no other way.

  I kept seeing them before me: the pilot, the girl.

  I had to feel nothing—and wish to feel nothing—and keep on making that choice, again and again.

  Or everything I was would disintegrate like a house of sand, and blow away.

  One of the guards belched in the darkness, then spat.

  The night stretched out ahead of me, like a river which had lost its way.

  GEORGIA ON MY MIND

  Charles Sheffield

  One of the best contemporary “hard science” writers, British-born Charles Sheffield is a theoretical physicist who has worked on the American space program, and is currently chief scientist of the Earth Satellite Corporation. Sheffield is also the only person who has ever served as president of both the American Astronautical Society and the Science Fiction Writers of America. His books include the best-selling nonfiction title Earthwatch, the novels Sight of Proteus, The Web Between the Worlds, Hidden Variables, My Brother’s Keeper, Between the Strokes of Night, The Nimrod Hunt, Trader’s World, Proteus Unbound, Summertide, Divergence, Transcendence, Cold as Ice, and Brother to Dragons (which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award), and the collections Erasmus Magister and The McAndrew Chronicles. His most recent books are a new novel, The Mind Pool, and two collections, Dancing with Myself and One Man’s Universe. He is currently at work on a couple of novels. His stories have appeared in our Seventh and Eighth Annual Collections. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

  Here he takes us along on a scientific treasure hunt with a pair of researchers who are trying to unravel a fascinating century-old scientific mystery, and who find much more than they bargained for.…

  * * *

  I first tangled with digital computers late in 1958. That may sound like the dark ages, but we considered ourselves infinitely more advanced than our predecessors of a decade earlier, when programming was done mostly by sticking plugs into plug-boards and a card-sequenced programmable calculator was held to be the height of sophistication.

  Even so, 1958 was still early enough that the argument between analog and digital computers had not yet been settled, decisively, in favor of the digital. And the first computer that I programmed was, by anyone’s standards, a brute.

  It was called DEUCE, which stood for Digital Electronic Universal Computing Engine, and it was, reasonably enough to card players, the next thing after the ACE (for Automatic Computing Engine), developed by the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington. Unlike ACE, DEUCE was a commercial machine; and some idea of its possible shortcomings is provided by one of the designers’ comments about ACE itself: “If we had known that it was going to be developed commercially, we would have finished it.”

  DEUCE was big enough to walk inside. The engineers would do that, tapping at suspect vacuum tubes with a screwdriver when the whole beast was proving balky. Which was often. Machine errors were as common a cause of trouble as programming errors; and programming errors were dreadfully frequent, because we were working at a level so close to basic machine logic that it is hard to imagine it today.

  I was about to say that the computer had no compilers or assemblers, but that is not strictly true. There was a floating-point compiler known as ALPHA-CODE, but it ran a thousand times slower than a machine code
program and no one with any self-respect ever used it. We programmed in absolute, to make the best possible use of the machine’s 402 words of high-speed (mercury delay line) memory, and its 8,192 words of back-up (rotating drum) memory. Anything needing more than that had to use punched cards as intermediate storage, with the programmer standing by to shovel them from the output hopper back into the input hopper.

  When I add that binary-to-decimal conversion routines were usually avoided because they wasted space, that all instructions were defined in binary, that programmers therefore had to be very familiar with the binary representation of numbers, that we did our own card punching with hand (not electric) punches, and that the machine itself, for some reason that still remains obscure to me, worked with binary numbers whose most significant digit was on the right, rather than on the left—so that 13, for example, became 1011, rather than the usual 1101—well, by this time the general flavor of DEUCE programming ought to be coming through.

  Now, I mention these things not because they are interesting (to the few) or because they are dull (to the many) but to make the point that anyone programming DEUCE in those far-off days was an individual not to be taken lightly. We at least thought so, though I suspect that to high management we were all harebrained children who did incomprehensible things, many of them in the middle of the night (when de-bug time was more easily to be had).

  A few years later more computers became available, the diaspora inevitably took place, and we all went off to other interesting places. Some found their way to university professorships, some into commerce, and many to foreign parts. But we did tend to keep in touch, because those early days had generated a special feeling.

  One of the most interesting characters was Bill Rigley. He was a tall, dashing, wavy-haired fellow who wore English tweeds and spoke with the open “a” sound that to most Americans indicates a Boston origin. But Bill was a New Zealander, who had seen at firsthand things, like the Great Barrier Reef, that the rest of us had barely heard of. He didn’t talk much about his home and family, but he must have pined for them, because after a few years in Europe and America he went back to take a faculty position in the Department of Mathematics (and later the computer science department, when one was finally created) at the University of Auckland.

  Auckland is on the north island, a bit less remote than the bleaker south island, but a long way from the East Coast of the United States, where I had put down my own roots. Even so, Bill and I kept in close contact, because our scientific interests were very similar. We saw each other every few years in Stanford, or London, or wherever else our paths intersected, and we knew each other at the deep level where few people touch. It was Bill who helped me to mourn when my wife, Eileen, died, and I in turn knew (but never talked about) the dark secret that had scarred Bill’s own life. No matter how long we had been separated our conversations, when we met, picked up as though they had never left off.

  Bill’s interests were encyclopedic, and he had a special fondness for scientific history. So it was no surprise that when he went back to New Zealand he would wander around there, examining its contribution to world science. What was a surprise to me was a letter from him a few months ago, stating that in a farmhouse near Dunedin, towards the south end of the south island, he had come across some bits and pieces of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine.

  Even back in the late 1950s, we had known all about Babbage. There was at the time only one decent book about digital computers, Bowden’s Faster Than Thought, but its first chapter talked all about that eccentric but formidable Englishman, with his hatred of street musicians and his low opinion of the Royal Society (existing only to hold dinners, he said, at which they gave each other medals). Despite these odd views, Babbage was still our patron saint. For starting in 1834 and continuing for the rest of his life, he tried—unsuccessfully—to build the world’s first programmable digital computer. He understood the principles perfectly well, but he was thwarted because he had to work with mechanical parts. Can you imagine a computer built of cogs and toothed cylinders and gears and springs and levers?

  Babbage could. And he might have triumphed even over the inadequacy of the available technology, but for one fatal problem: he kept thinking of improvements. As soon as a design was half assembled, he would want to tear it apart and start using the bits to build something better. At the time of Babbage’s death in 1871, his wonderful Analytical Engine was still a dream. The bits and pieces were carted off to London’s Kensington Science Museum, where they remain today.

  Given our early exposure to Babbage, my reaction to Bill Rigley’s letter was pure skepticism. It was understandable that Bill would want to find evidence of parts of the Analytical Engine somewhere on his home stamping-ground; but his claim to have done so was surely self-delusion.

  I wrote back, suggesting this in as tactful a way as I could; and received in prompt reply not recantation, but the most extraordinary package of documents I had even seen in my life (I should say, to that point; there were stranger to come).

  The first was a letter from Bill, explaining in his usual blunt way that the machinery he had found had survived on the south island of New Zealand because “we don’t chuck good stuff away, the way you lot do.” He also pointed out, through dozens of examples, that in the nineteenth century there was much more contact between Britain and its antipodes than I had ever dreamed. A visit to Australia and New Zealand was common among educated persons, a kind of expanded version of the European Grand Tour. Charles Darwin was of course a visitor, on the Beagle, but so also were scores of less well-known scientists, world travelers, and gentlemen of the leisured class. Two of Charles Babbage’s own sons were there in the 1850s.

  The second item in the package was a batch of photographs of the machinery that Bill had found. It looked to me like what it was, a bunch of toothed cylinders and gears and wheels. They certainly resembled parts of the Analytical Engine, or the earlier Difference Machine, although I could not see how they might fit together.

  Neither the letter nor the photographs was persuasive. Rather the opposite. I started to write in my mind the letter that said as much, but I hesitated for one reason: many historians of science know a lot more history than science, and few are trained computer specialists. But Bill was the other way round, the computer expert who happened to be fascinated by scientific history. It would be awfully hard to fool him—unless he chose to fool himself.

  So I had another difficult letter to write. But I was spared the trouble, for what I could not dismiss or misunderstand was the third item in the package. It was a copy of a programming manual, hand-written, for the Babbage Analytical Engine. It was dated July 7, 1854. Bill said that he had the original in his possession. He also told me that I was the only person who knew of his discovery, and he asked me to keep it to myself.

  And here, to explain my astonishment, I have to dip again into computer history. Not merely to the late 1950s, where we started, but all the way to 1840. In that year an Italian mathematician, Luigi Federico Menabrea, heard Babbage talk in Turin about the new machine that he was building. After more explanations by letter from Babbage, Menabrea wrote a paper on the Analytical Engine, in French, which was published in 1842. And late that year Ada Lovelace (Lord Byron’s daughter; Lady Augusta Ada Byron Lovelace, to give her complete name) translated Menabrea’s memoir, and added her own lengthy notes. Those notes formed the world’s first software manual; Ada Lovelace described how to program the Analytical Engine, including the tricky techniques of recursion, looping, and branching.

  So, twelve years before 1854, a programming manual for the Analytical Engine existed; and one could argue that what Bill had found in New Zealand was no more than a copy of the one written in 1842 by Ada Lovelace.

  But there were problems. The document that Bill sent me went far beyond the 1842 notes. It tackled the difficult topics of indirect addressing, relocatable programs and subroutines, and it offered a new language for programming the Analyt
ical Engine—what amounted to a primitive assembler.

  Ada Lovelace just might have entertained such advanced ideas, and written such a manual. It is possible that she had the talent, although all signs of her own mathematical notebooks have been lost. But she died in 1852, and there was no evidence in any of her surviving works that she ever blazed the astonishing trail defined in the document that I received from Bill. Furthermore, the manual bore on its first page the author’s initials, L.D. Ada Lovelace for her published work had used her own initials, A.A.L.

  I read the manual, over and over, particularly the final section. It contained a sample program, for the computation of the volume of an irregular solid by numerical integration—and it included a page of output, the printed results of the program.

  At that point I recognized only three possibilities. First, that someone in the past few years had carefully planted a deliberate forgery down near Dunedin, and led Bill Rigley to “discover” it. Second, that Bill himself was involved in attempting an elaborate hoax, for reasons I could not fathom.

  I had problems with both these explanations. Bill was perhaps the most cautious, thorough, and conservative researcher that I had ever met. He was painstaking to a fault, and he did not fool easily. He was also the last man in the world to think that devising a hoax could be in any way amusing.

  Which left the third possibility. Someone in New Zealand had built a version of the Analytical Engine, made it work, and taken it well beyond the place where Charles Babbage had left off.

  I call that the third possibility, but it seemed at the time much more like the third impossibility. No wonder that Bill had asked for secrecy. He didn’t want to become the laughingstock of the computer historians.