Divergence

CHAPTER 1

“Blink your left eye. Very good. Now close your right eye, hold it closed until I say ‘Ready,’ and then open it and smile at the same time.”

“May I speak?”

“In a moment. Ready.”

The bright blue eye opened. Thin lips drew back to reveal even white teeth. Sue Ando studied the grinning face for a few seconds, then turned to her assistant. “Now that needs attention. It’s enough to scare a Cecropian. We need an upward curve on it, make it look more friendly.”

“I’ll take care of it.” The other woman made a note on her computer scratchpad.

“May I speak?”

Ando nodded to the naked male figure standing in front of her. “Go ahead. We want to test your speech patterns anyway. And stop smiling like that — you give me the shivers.”

“I am sorry. But why are you going through all this again? It is quite unnecessary. I was thoroughly checked before I left the Persephone facility, and I was found to be physically perfect.”

“I should hope so. We don’t take rejects. But that was a month ago, and I’m checking for changes. There’s always a settling-in period for an embodied form. And you’ll be going a long way, to a place where they’ve probably never even seen an embodiment. If you run into stability problems you won’t be able to drop in to a shop for an adjustment the way you can around Sol. All right. One more test, then we have to get you to the briefing center. Look at me and lift one foot off the floor.”

As the bare foot was raised, Sue Ando stabbed with her fist at the unprotected jaw. One hand began to move up in self-defense, but it was too slow. Ando’s knuckles came into hard contact with the chin.

“Damnation!” She put her fist to her mouth and sucked at the bruised joints. “That hurt. Did you feel it?”

“Of course. I have excellent sensory equipment.”

“Not to mention tough skin. But now do you see what I mean about settling in to that body? I should never have got within a hand’s length of you. A month ago I wouldn’t have. Your reflexes need to be turned up a notch. We’ll take care of it later today, after your briefing. It will mean popping your brain out for a few minutes.”

“If you insist. However, I should mention that my embodied design is intended for continuous sensory input.”

“We can arrange that, too. I’ll run a neural bundle from your brain to your spine, so you’ll receive your sensory feeds for all but the few seconds it takes to plug in the bundle at both ends.”

“That will be appreciated. May I speak again?”

“I’m not sure we can stop you. Go ahead, talk as much as you like. Talk is going to be your main mode of communication.”

“That is exactly the point I wish to make. I do not understand why I am to be provided with information in such an inefficient manner. I am wholly plug-compatible. With the use of a neural bundle, I can in one second send and receive many millions of data items. Humans are painfully slow. It is truly ridiculous to dole information to me via such a medium, or force me to provide it to another entity at a similar meager rate.”

Sue Ando smiled at her assistant’s expression. “I know, Lee. You think I ought to tone down his asperity level. But you’re wrong. Where he’s going annoyance at inefficiency will be a survival trait.” She turned to the expressionless male figure. “Sure, you can send and receive faster than we can — to another computer. But you’re going to the Dobelle system. It’s poor and it’s primitive, and I doubt if anyone there has ever seen an embodied computer. They certainly can’t afford the facilities for direct data dumps with you. Your sources of information are going to be humans, and maybe other Organics. We may be slow and stupid, but you’re stuck with us. Get used to that as soon as you can.”

She turned back to Lee Boro. “Anything else we need before the briefing?”

Lee consulted her checklist. “Body temperature is a couple of degrees below human normal, but we’ll fix that. Ion balances are fine. A name. We ought to settle one before we go any further.”

“May I speak?”

Sue Ando sighed. “If you must. We’re running out of time.”

“I will be brief. Another name is unnecessary. I already have a complete identification. I am Embodied Computer 194, Crimson Series Five, Tally Line, Limbic-Enhanced Design.”

“We know that. And I have a complete identification, too. I’m Sue Xantippe Harbeson Ando, human female, Europa homeworld, Fourth Alliance Group, Earth clade. But I wouldn’t dream of using that as my name, it’s three times too long to be useful. Your name is going to be—” She paused. “Something nice and simple. Embodied Computer Tally. E.C. Tally. How’s that sound, Lee? E. Crimson Tally, if he wants to get formal.”

Lee checked her computer. “It’s not taken. I’ll make an isomorphism between E. Crimson Tally and the full identification.” She entered the note. “E. C. Tally for short. And we’ll call you just Tally. All right?”

“May I speak?”

Sue Ando sighed. “Not again. They’re waiting for you at the briefing station. All right. What’s your problem now? Don’t you like that name?”

“The identification that you propose is quite satisfactory. However, I am puzzled by two other things. First, I perceive that I am without clothing, while both of you wear your bodies covered.”

“My Lord. Are you telling us you feel embarrassed?”

“I do not think so. I lack an internal state corresponding to a condition labeled embarrassment. I merely wonder if I am to wear clothing when in the Dobelle system.”

“Unless they don’t wear any. You’ll do what they do. The whole point of your embodiment is to make you as acceptable to them as possible. What’s your other problem?”

“I have been embodied in male human form, and I wonder why.”

“For the same reason. You’ll mainly be interacting with humans, so we want you to look human. And it’s a lot easier to grow your body from a human DNA template, rather than trying to make some inorganic form that comes close to it.”

“You have only partially answered my question: namely, you have explained why I am in human form.” E. C. Tally pointed down at his genitals. “But as you see, I have been embodied in the male figure. The female figure, the one that both you and Lee Boro wear, appears lighter in construction and needs less food as fuel. Since I will be obliged to eat, I wonder why I was provided with the larger and less efficient form.”

Sue Ando stared at him. “Hmm. You know, Tally, I don’t have any answer to that. I’m sure that the Council has a reason for it, and it’s probably got something to do with where you’re going. But you should ask during your briefing. One thing’s sure, it’s too late to change bodies now. You’re supposed to get to the Bose Network and head for Dobelle in three days.”

“May I speak?”

“Certainly.” Ando smiled. “But not now, and not to me. You’re overdue with the briefing group. Go on, E. C. Tally. When you get there you can bend their ears as much as you like.”

Three standard days before departure: that was seventy-two hours — 259 thousand seconds, 259 billion microseconds, 259 billion trillion attoseconds. The grapefruit-sized sphere of E. C. Tally’s brain had a clock rate of eighteen attoseconds. Three days should have been enough to ponder every thought that had ever been thought by every organic entity in the whole spiral arm.

And yet Tally was learning that those three days would be insufficient. The hours were flying by. It was not the facts that provided the problem, even though they came trickling in with painful slowness from the human intermediary. The difficulty came with their implications, and with the surges they produced in the unfamiliar query circuits added at the time of E. C. Tally’s embodiment.

For example, he had been told that the choice of male form had been made because the government of Dobelle was predominantly male. But every analysis of human events suggested that in a male-dominated society the effects of a single female could be maximized. How did Organics manage to ignore the evidence of their own history?

Tally put such ineluctable mysteries to one side, pending the long trip out to his destination. For the moment he would concentrate on the simpler question of galactic power groups.

“Dobelle is a double-planet system, part of the Phemus Circle of worlds.” The man providing the briefing was Legate Stancioff, brought in specially from Miranda. He also seemed to Tally to have been chosen specifically for his leaden vagueness in thought and speech. He was staring at Tally with furrowed brow. “Do you know anything about the Phemus Circle?”

Tally nodded. “Twenty-three stellar systems. Primitive and impoverished. Sixty-two habitable planets, some of them marginal. They form a loose federation of worlds, on the overlapping boundary of the territories of the Fourth Alliance, the Cecropia Federation, and the Zardalu Communion. They are roughly one hundred parsecs away from Sol. They contain one Builder artifact, the Umbilical. That artifact is to be found in the Dobelle system.”

The machine-gun delivery ended. Those facts, and a million others about the suns and planets of the spiral arm, had been stored in Tally’s memory long before he assumed the embodied form, and he had seen no reason to question them. What had just recently been added to his internal states, and what consumed trillions of cycles of introspection time to achieve even partial answers, was the need to examine motivation.

The Dobelle system was a planetary doublet, twin worlds known as Opal and Quake that spun furiously about their common center of mass. They were joined by the twelve-thousand-kilometer strand known as the Umbilical. The orbit of their mass center about the star Mandel was highly eccentric, and the time of closest approach to the stellar primary induced prodigious land and sea tides in Quake and Opal. That closest approach was known as Summertide. The most recent Summertide had been an exceptional one, because the approach of Mandel’s binary partner, Amaranth, and a gas-giant planet, Gargantua, had led to a lineup of bodies, the Grand Conjunction, that took place only once every 350,000 years.

Very good. Tally knew all that, and he understood it perfectly. Wild as the celestial motions might be, nothing stood in defiance of either logic or physics; to induce such a breakdown, apparently Organics were needed.

“You tell me that a group of humans and aliens converged on Quake and Opal for the last Summertide,” he said to Legate Stancioff. “And they went there voluntarily. But why? Why would anyone go at that time, when the surfaces of the planets were at their most dangerous? They could have been destroyed.”

“We have reason to believe that some of them were.”

“But surely humans and Cecropians and Lo’tfians and Hymenopts don’t want to die?”

“Of course not.” Stancioff was in the human condition that E. C. Tally was coming to recognize as senescence. He was probably no more than ten years away from lapsing to a nontransitional internal state. Already his hands shook slightly as they were talking, in what was clearly a nonfunctional oscillation. “But humans,” Stancioff went on, “and aliens, too, I suppose, though I don’t actually know many aliens — we take risks, when we feel we have adequate reasons. And they all had different interests. Professor Lang, of Sentinel Gate, went to Dobelle because of her scientific interest in Builder artifacts and in Summertide itself. Others, like the Cecropian Atvar H’sial and the augmented Karelian human Louis Nenda, went there, we suspect, for personal gain. The Lo’tfian, J’merlia, and the Hymenopt, Kallik, are slaves. They were present because their masters ordered them to be there. The only beings on Quake in line of official duties were three humans: Commander Maxwell Perry, who controlled all outside access to the Dobelle system at Summertide; Captain Hans Rebka, who is a Phemus Circle troubleshooter sent to Dobelle as Perry’s superior; and Councilor Julius Graves, of our own Fourth Alliance, who was present on Council business. Don’t you wish to make notes of all these names?”

“It is unnecessary. I do not forget.”

“I suppose you don’t.” Stancioff stared at E. C. Tally. “That must be nice. Now, where was I? Well, never mind. There’s a whole lot of information in the files about everyone who was on Quake at Summertide, much more than I know about it. Not one of them ever came back, that’s the real mystery, even though Summertide was over weeks ago. We want you to find out why they all stayed. You should study each dossier while you are traveling to Dobelle, and form your own conclusions as to each person’s needs and desires.”

Needs and desires! Those were exactly what were missing in Tally’s internal states; but if they decided so many human and alien actions, he must learn to simulate them.

“May I speak?”

“You’ve certainly shown no reluctance so far.”

“I am perplexed by my suggested role in this matter. At the beginning I understood that I was to go to the Mandel system and assess the problems there on a logical basis. Now I learn that at least two other individuals are qualified to deal with the problem. Hans Rebka, according to your own words, is a ‘troubleshooter,’ and Julius Graves is actually a Council member. Given their presence, what do you expect me to accomplish?”

“I am glad you asked that question. It is a good omen for the success of your mission.” Legate Stancioff moved out of his chair and came to stand in front of Tally. His hands had stopped shaking, and the vagueness was gone from his manner. “It would be an even better sign if you were to answer the question yourself. Can you do so, if I tell you that on this assignment I am assuming that your weakness may also be your strength?”

After a millisecond of analysis, Tally nodded. “It can only be because I am not an Organic. My weakness is my lack of human emotions. Therefore my failure to share organic motivations and emotions is also my strength. You must believe that Graves and Rebka acted from emotion in deciding not to leave the Mandel system.”

“Correct. We cannot prove that. But we suspect it.” Legate Stancioff placed his hands on Tally’s firm shoulders. “You will find out. Go to Dobelle. Learn what you can and report back to us. I do not want to risk another human in finding out what happened at Summertide.”

Whereas you, as an embodied computer, are quite expendable.

E. C. Tally was learning. He was able to make that inference within a microsecond. It produced no reaction within him. It could not. If he had no human emotions, he lacked the internal state to resent the suggestion that his loss was acceptable, while a human loss was not. But he began structuring the first simulation circuits. There might be situations where an understanding of human emotions could be useful.