Infinity One (23 page)

In their turn, the Kappans appeared confused at first by man’s binary patterns which specified pictures. When they did get the idea, they returned drawings full of physical-science information, such as the layout of their planetary system and the detailed structure of its members. Biology was for centuries confined to the molecular level; they had trouble grasping that men could be interested in natural history or the very looks of another thinking race; and at the date of the last collapse of human civilization they had not yet, apparently, deduced that they were being asked for an account of their own past, their culture, art, religion, any matter transcending the material universe.

Either word spread that Sol had joined the network, or independent attempts at contact finally began to be received. At any rate, there were exchanges with other stars. They being still further off Chan Kappa Ceti, still less progress had been made. But the difficulties looked curiously similar—as if the human mentality differed radically from some galactic norm.

“Quite likely true,” Luizo had once remarked to Roban.

“Machine civilization—which one must have for interstellar communication—presupposes order, rationality, a logic which must be the same throughout the cosmos. We are infants. Give us a few thousand years of peace and sanity, and we will doubtless be thinking like the Others.”

“I’m not sure I’d want that, sir,” the novice, as he was then, had answered. “Not caring about. . . oh, outings in the woods, good food, beer, girls, games, books, music ... only science and efficiency; it doesn’t seem right.”

Luizo had shrugged. “You will be dead well before it’s happened, son.” Gravely: “It won’t be like that anyhow. A static society, with everything automated that we would call work, sounds like living death to you. But you have been conditioned by war, poverty, toil, misery, the whole cruel, pointless rise-and-fall we know as history. Once that has ended, we will be free to live for the things that really matter.”

“If that’s right, sir, then why aren’t the Others telling us about those things?”

“Probably because they feel the mutual symbolism is inadequate thus far. Be patient; that is what the Order deals in, patience.”

And in the course of lifetimes, information exchange did evolve toward precision and completeness. With Kappa Ceti alone was the code approaching a true language; but given it for a guide, the development with other contacts ought to be faster. Furthermore, the sheer amount of accumulated material was becoming sufficiently great to permit considerable analysis; for example, several binary-chart “sketches" could be combined to form one fairly clear picture.

But meanwhile tension mounted between Great Asia and the Empire of the Americas; Midafrica was torn by civil strife; a militant new religion was preached on Mars and found converts on Earth; again demagogues assured starveling masses that their wretchedness was due to somebody else’s greed; the scope and weaponry of border wars increased; ever more carriers of nuclear explosive crouched underground, prowled sea and sky and space. This would not be the first dark age the Order had seen, nor the first time that its Directors considered unpropitious for the release of possibly transmitted technical data.

Accordingly, the newest development in interstellar linguistics were not published. Secular authorities who monitored the messages from Outside were as puzzled as the Communicators claimed to be. And when the upheaval came, Earth was not burned sterile.

For three hundred years, a succession of a few trusted masters of the Order kept secret that a key existed to those last dispatches to arrive before the catastrophe, and those which had come in while no one was there to read the recordings of them.

Roban was told, after Luizo selected him to come. Now he leaned forward and whispered in the Primary’s ear, “Should you mention you know what the renegade brothers didn’t? This room may be bugged.’’

“No doubt it is,” Luizo answered aloud. “You forget, though, the Domination government
has
been advised that I possess information that was never made public. They don’t know what it is, of course; if they did, you and I would not be here.”

Beneath his facade, he likewise stiffened. “I cannot just project the taped messages on a screen and read them like a book, you understand. We are not that far along. No, it remains a question of interpretation, of finding sets of possible meanings that look mutually consistent. You will have work, Roban, never fear. Dog work such as frequency analyses on particular symbol clusters. Let me illustrate.”

He took pencil and paper and scribbled. Roban waited. He wondered why Luizo should repeat what he had spent the past year studying. The room felt very silent.

The Primary handed him the sheet. His heart jumped.

I dared not tell you this before. You are no actor, and your manner might have given hints
to the Baikalan secret agents who surely checked on you after I selected you. But there are no such specialists on the Moon, and in any event you can be expected to show excitement under present circumstances.

I may indeed find something in those tapes that should not be revealed. What we have on Earth is harmless, but we cannot predict what is here. Yet lam required to turn in a full translation, with an account of the system 1 used, and this will be carefully scrutinized by Dominist experts.

With the help of certain colleagues, I have prepared and memorized a false system. It is close enough to the real one that most interpretations will be plausible and even correct. However, to give you an example: toward the end, the Kappans stopped sending numbers in binary and saved time by switching to a duodecimal base, hi the false system, the new base is said to be ten. That would make it impossible to build any machine that might be described for us. It is unlikely the deception will be suspected, when the most honest and competent readings always contain so many ambiguities. The Order can “explain” the difficulty as doubtless due to a misunderstanding, promise to send a request for clarification, and thus delay matters for at least 64 years, during which many things can happen.

Therefore, do not express surprise if you see me proceed in a way that your own knowledge of the data makes you think must be erroneous. And, while I trust no crisis will arise, be prepared to act in an emergency with the strength and courage for which I chose you.

Luizo’s gaze gripped Roban’s. “Do you see what I mean?” he asked.

The techno nodded. His neck was stiff, his palms wet. “Y-yes, sir. Absolutely.”

“Good.” Luizo laid the paper in an ashtray, touched a lighter to it, and watched it burn. “We will commence right after breakfast,” he said. The flame went out. He stirred the blackened remnants, breaking them up, mingling them with the ash from Duna’s cigar. “You really must go make yourself presentable, Brother. Never forget, we represent the Order.”

The sun rose slowly to blazing Lunar noon. A week later, night was falling on Farside.

Roban was scarcely conscious of time. Luizo worked him too hard. As translation progressed, he must continually reprogram the computers. (They, and the associated scanners, projectors, cross-comparison playbacks, memory banks, every piece of paraphernalia, were the reason for working on the Moon. In former days, the information could simply have been transmitted to Earth, where a parallel team used the facilities of Alpine Station. But the dark-age Mechanoclasts had dynamited it.) And he was put to uncreative but necessary tasks like tracking down previous appearances of a given configuration or drawing up probability matrices. He grew red-eyed and insomniac.

He didn’t resent it. The Primary was laboring more heavily . . . and growing more taut and taciturn for every watch that went by. Clearly the translation, as it developed, was revealing something of major import. But Luizo uttered no hint of what it might be, and kept his notes in a private cipher.

Neither man saw much of the Baikalans. A few soldiers were posted with them. Besides keeping guard, they kept house. The Primary, who spoke their language, could have gotten their help, for whatever that was worth, if he asked. But the longest sentence he gave them was a conveyance of Roban’s desire for a bit of variety in the

Asian food. The cook tried to oblige, with no great success.

Duna was gone. His assignment was only concerned in part with star talk. Mainly he was on the project of expanding his country’s military bases on Nearside. In one of his rare conversational moods, Luizo remarked what a prostitution of engineering that was. Roban nodded, though his own wish was that those could have been Norrestlander installations.

The colonel returned about sunset and inquired what had been accomplished. Luizo snapped, “Messages, long ones loaded with information, came in at intervals for two centuries before the Kappans gave up. Each included a further evolution of the code itself. Did you think I would have them read in two weeks?”

“You got any idea w’en you finish?” Duna asked mildly. “Our stores are limited, you know.”

“Perhaps another fortnight. Mind you, I won’t have a proper text then. I will simply have done everything 1 can with the apparatus here, so that I may as well take the material back to Earth for continued study. If you are in a hurry, Colonel, I suggest you stop delaying me yourself.”

Duna guffawed and left the laboratory.

Several hours afterward, he found Roban alone. Luizo had finally needed a little sleep. The assistant did too, but his nerves were overly stretched—
What
is
turning the old man so
. . .
grim? intense? exalted
—and he wandered into the observation lounge hoping the view would relax him.

The sun disc had gone behind a supply bunker. A plume of zodiacal light rose pearly over that black outline. Occasional ridges on the crater floor still caught the glow, and the spaceship was a burning spear, but otherwise shadows had engulfed the land. It was, naturally, a simulacrum on a hemispherical screen that Roban saw; a dome would soon have been etched useless by micro-meteorites. But the realism was absolute. You rarely got a presentation that fine on Earth these days, and nowhere an omnisensory program.

I wonder what life was getting to be like
. .
. would have become like, if the collapse hadn’t happened,
he thought.
No need to go anyplace, when any experience you might want is brought to you, nor to do anything when you need only issue an order to a machine that might be at the antipodes.

He felt the weariness that slumped his shoulders and wished briefly for that lost ease. Then looked at his big fisherman’s hands and wondered what he could use them for in such a world.

Hobbies, I suppose. My brain would do my real work. ... Or would it? Self-prograjmnmg computers could direct the machines better. In fact, at last the system would get so complicated that you wouldn’t dare let flesh and blood meddle with it.

Arts, philosophies, the spiritual explorations Luizo talks about?

Well, maybe for him, but I’m afraid Fd be no good at them, especially if every piece of information 1 had was provided for me by the system. That’s the trouble with organized perfection. No surprises.

His gaze went to the stars where they stood in darkness.
Is that why their people communicate? For newness? But why haven't they—
The sense of their isolation, and his own, stabbed him with cold.

Anticlimax, a whiff of cigar smoke called his attention back. Duna had entered the lounge. The Baikalan smiled. “Salutation, techno,” he said.

“Brother, if you please,” Roban corrected him annoyedly. “My title is Brother of the Order. ‘Techno’ is a job designation.”

“Excuse. I am a roughneck steppe dweller. We tend to t’ink of a person in terms of w’at he does.” Duna’s stumpy bowlegs carried him less gracefully across the floor than Roban had become able to move in this gravity. “You admire de scene?”

“Yes.”
When are you going?"

Duna took stance beside him. “Dat is not common for my folk. We live too close to nature, most of us, even today, for seeing it as a subject for poetry or tourism. I doubt you did, eider, w’en you was a sailor boy. Dese days you live more comfortable, more intellectual, and it gets different. Maybe my grandchildren, dey have a Horace or a Virgil”

“A what?” The question escaped Roban’s determination to snub the other.

“Roman poets of de late Republic and early Principate.” Duna cocked his glance upward at the bigger man. “You don’t follow?”

“No. I, uh, I believe I’ve heard mention of an empire a long time ago, but—”
He won't lord it over my education too!
“—my business is with more important things.”

“Ah, dere you make your mistake, my friend. Not’ing is more important. W’ere does de future come from if not de past? W’at is de present more dan deir intersection point? A wise man said in Old America, dose who will not learn history are condemned to repeat it.”

Duna laid a hand on Roban’s arm. “Here, let us settle and talk,” he urged. The cigar wagged between his lips.

“I have to sleep.”

“Maybe you do your Order and your home country some good if you hear w’at I got to tell you.”

Maybe. Can’t hurt, I suppose.
Roban lowered himself into a chair. The ancient unholstery crackled. Duna sat down to confront him. “Well?”

“Oh, relax. W’y can we not treat each odder like gentlemen, w’edder or not we agree?”

Roban felt himself blush, and resented it, but managed to nod and lean back.

“I imagine,” Duna said, “you wonder w’y a military man like me, a clansman who lives by de Yasa of his ancestors and worships very honest at deir graves each year w’en he goes home for de Grand Hunt—w’h he should know anyt’ing about w’at happened t’ousands of years gone?”

He blew his customary smoke ring. “I tell you,” he said. “I got lots of chances for reading. Military life is mostly waiting around, es-specially in peacetime. I am interested. But besides, de Domination tries hard for its officers to keep on learning after dey have left school.” His laugh barked. “Partly, yas, we feel shy over being less cultured dan various of our client peoples.” Quickly serious again: “However, we got a practical need. We do not want to blunder blind into horrible mistakes like earlier nations did. For having any chance of saving ourselves from dat, we need leaders who can t’ink as well as act. And how can you t’ink unless you know t’ings to t’ink about?”