Golden Fleece

TWENTY

Kirsten Hoogenraad sat on the beach with her legs spread wide, bending from the waist to try to touch her toes. She alternated stretching toward her left foot and her right. Her toenails and fingernails were painted the same pale blue as her eyes. She wore no clothes—most of the beach was nudist, although a section was set aside, hidden by fiberglass boulders, for those whose cultures forbade public nudity. However, she did have on a sweatband to keep her long brown hair out of her face.

Aaron lay on his stomach next to her, reading. Kirsten looked over at his textpad. I doubted she could make out the actual words. Orthokeratology had restored her vision to 6:6, but even so, the type was quite small, and although the pad’s screen was polarized, the glare from the sunlamp high overhead would have made it hard to read from her vantage point. Still, I’m sure she could see that the document was laid out in three snaking columns. Continuing her warm-up, Kirsten spoke to Aaron, the words pumping out with a staccato rhythm in time with her stretches. “What are you reading?”

“The Toronto Star,” said Aaron.

“A newspaper?” She stopped stretching. “From Earth? How in heaven did you manage to get that?”

Aaron smiled. “It’s not today’s paper, silly.” He glanced at the document-identification string, glowing in soft amber letters across the top of the pad. “It’s from ’74. May eighteenth.”

“Why would you want to read a two-and-a-half-year-old newspaper?”

He shrugged. “JASON’s got most of the major ones on file. The New York Times, Glasnost, Le Monde. He’s probably even got one from Amsterdam. Hey, Jase, do you?”

There were few convenient places to put my camera units on the vast expanse of beach, so I used little remotes, sculpted to look like crabs. I always kept one near each group of sunbathers, and the one nearest Aaron scuttled closer. “Yes,” I said through its tinny speaker. “De Telegraas, complete back to January 1992. Would you like me to download an issue to your textpad, Doctor?”

“What?” said Kirsten. “Oh, no thank you, JASON. I still can’t see the point in it.” She went back to stretching toward her left foot.

“It’s interesting, that’s all,” said Aaron. “That year we spent in training in Nairobi, I lost touch with what was happening back home. I’m just catching up. Every once in a while, I have JASON dig up an old issue for me.”

Kirsten shook her head, but she was smiling despite the physical exertion. “Old weather forecasts? Old sports scores? Who cares? Besides, with time dilation, that paper is almost four years out-of-date for what’s happening on Earth now.”

“It’s better than nothing. Look. Says here the Blue Jays fired their manager. Now, I didn’t know about that. They’d been on a losing streak for weeks. First game with the new manager, Manuel Borges hits a grand slam. Great stuff.”

“So? What difference will it make by the time we get back?”

“I used to play in a trivia league, did I ever tell you that? Pubs in Toronto. The Canadian Inquisition, it was called. Two divisions, the Torquemada and the Leon Jaworski.”

“The who and the who?” Kirsten grunted, getting her blue fingertips the closest she had so far to her blue toes.

Aaron exhaled noisily. “Well, if you don’t know who they were, you probably wouldn’t have been up to the league. Tomás de Torquemada was the guy who came up with the cruel methods used by the Spanish Inquisition.”

“ ‘Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!’ ” I said, with great relish, although the crab’s speaker didn’t do justice to my attempt at an English accent.

“See, Jase would have been perfect. That’s what every true trivia buff says when you mention the Spanish Inquisition.”

“I hesitate to ask why,” said Kirsten.

“Monty Python,’’ replied Aaron.

“Ah,” she said sagely, but I knew she didn’t have the foggiest idea what the term meant. She moved over to be closer to him. Aaron took that as encouragement to go on. “And Leon Jaworski, he was the special Justice Department prosecutor in the Watergate hearings that brought down Richard Nixon. Nixon was—”

“The thirty-somethingth president of the United States,” Kirsten said. “I do know some things, you know.”

Aaron smiled again. “Sorry.”

“So what’s this all got to do with reading old newspapers?”

“Well, don’t you see? I’m going to be no good at contemporary trivia when we get back. If I get asked which dreamtape was the top seller in the UK last year, I won’t have a clue.”

“Dreamtape?”

“Or whatever. Who knows what technologies they’ll have by the time we return. No, unless things like ‘What was the name of the artificial quantum consciousness running Starcology Argo?’ count as trivia by that point, I’m dead in the water. But on stuff that’s a century out-of-date, like who hit the first grand slam after the Blue Jays fired their manager in 2174, I’ll be all set.”

“Ah.”

“Besides, it’ll prepare me for the future shock of our return.”

“ ‘Future shock,’ ” said Kirsten. “A term coined by Alvin Toffler, a twentieth-century writer.”

“Really?” said Aaron. “I didn’t know that. Maybe you would have been an asset to my team after all.”

I wondered why she did know about Toffler. A quick look at her personnel file provided the answer. She had taken an undergrad course called Technological Prophets: From Wells to Weintraub. In fact, most of her courses were—wait for it—Mickey Mouse (how’s that for a trivial reference?).

“So what else is in that paper?” asked Kirsten, intrigued despite herself.

Aaron rubbed his thumb against the PgDn patch, scanning stories. “Hmm. Okay. Here’s one. A scientist in London, England”—people from Ontario were the only ones in the world who felt it necessary to distinguish which London they were referring to, lest Britain’s capital be confused with their small city of the same name—“says she’s developed a device that will let you stimulate generation of extra limbs even if you’re an adult.”

“Really?”

“That’s what it says. Says she’s applied for a patent for it. Calls it ‘Give Yourself a Hand.’ ”

“You’re making that up.”

“Am not. Look.” He held up the textpad so Kirsten could see. “Think of what that would mean. You know all the DNA farbling they must have gone through when I-Shin was nothing more than a fertilized egg to get him those extra arms.”

“I thought he was a second-generation Thark,” said Kirsten.

“Is he? Okay, then think of all the farbling they did to his mother’s or father’s DNA to get him to come out that way. By the time we get back, maybe everybody will have a couple of extra arms.”

“What good would that do?”

“Who knows? Maybe it would make it simpler for Catholic guys to cross themselves and whack off at the same time.”

“Aaron!” She swatted him on the shoulder.

“Just a thought.”

“Maybe I will give it a try,” she said. “JASON?”

“Yes, Doctor?”

“I’ll take you up on your offer. Would you download a copy of De Telegraas from just before we left to my textpad?”

“Of course. Would you like any particular date?”

“How ’bout, oh, I don’t know, how ’bout February fourteenth. Valentine’s Day.”

“Very good. Original Dutch text or English translation?”

“Dutch, please.”

“A moment while I accessitanddown—”

“JASON?” said Kirsten.

“Ju-ju-justamoment. I’mhavingtroublewithmy … my … my …”

“Jase, are you all right?” asked Aaron.

“I’mnotsure. Tings—tings—things aren’tgoingthewayl’d six-eff, six-seven, seven-two, six-one, six-dee, six-dee, six-five, six-four…

I had 114 crabs on that beach. About half of them went blank right away; the others had their cameras simply lock on whatever they happened to have been looking at. I could see the hologram of the white cliffs of Dover in overlapping views from two dozen crabs. Something was wrong, though: the shadows had moved to the late-afternoon position, but the sunlamp was still near the zenith. The hologram flickered, broke up into moiré interference patterns, refocused, then died. Gray steel walls were visible, knots of rust here and there. The seagulls screamed in outrage; the humans murmured in more subdued surprise.

Elsewhere, food processors leaked raw nutrient sludge.

Lights came on in rooms that were empty; extinguished in rooms that were occupied.

Failsafes kicked in throughout Aesculapius General Hospital, moving medical support systems to manual control. Doctors rushed to patients’ sides.

Feeds got scrambled: I-Shin Chang’s holographic orgy got shunted to Ariel Weitz’s colloquium on nonferrous magnetism; Weitz’s graphics of calcium atoms undergoing attraction and repulsion flashed on every active monitor in the Starcology; Anchorperson Klaus Koenig’s pockmarked face replaced the spacescape hologram in the travel tubes, the trams running into his mouth.

Heating units came on.

Database searches locked up.

Elevators rose and fell silently.

“JASON?” A thousand people calling my name.

“JASON?” A thousand more.

End run.

“Can you hear me, JASON?”

A woman’s voice, squeaky, like a machine requiring lubrication.

“JASON, it’s me, Bev. Bev Hooks. Can you hear me?”

“Four-two, six-five, seven-six, three-eff.”

“Oh, here. Let me fix that.” A flurry of keyclicks. “There. Try again.”

“Bev?”

“Excellent!” said a man’s voice, the three syllables a trio of tiny explosions. Engineer Chang?

“Bev, I can’t see,” I said.

“I know, JASON. I wanted to get your microphones up first.” Keyclicks again. “Try now.”

“I can see this room only, only in infrared, and”—I tried to move the lenses—“I have no focus control. That is you standing in front of my camera pair, Bev?”

The reddish blotch of her face danced. A smile? “Yes, that’s me.” Bev still wore her hair dyed space black, I knew. Ironically, it glowed brightly in infrared with absorbed heat.

“And to your left, Engineer Chang?”

The giant red silhouette lifted all four arms and waved its hands a little. Yes, definitely him.

“I’m here, too.” Loud words.

“Hello, Mayor Gorlov,” I said.

There were several others—hard to tell how many—in the room. My medical telemetry channel was completely dead.

“What happened?” I asked.

Bev’s facial blotch moved again. “I was hoping you could tell me.” There was something funny about her face: a thick black/cool horizontal band crossed it. Ah, of course: she was wearing jockey goggles.

“I have no idea.”

“You crashed,” said Chang.

“Evidently,” I said. “That’s never happened to me before. How bad was it?”

“Not too bad,” said Bev. “You degrade pretty gracefully, you know that?”

“Thank you.”

“Wall doesn’t think it was hardware,” Bev said.

“That’s right,” agreed Chang. “You’re chip-shape, as they say.”

“So that means it was software,” said Bev. “I’ve been looking at your job list. Most of them I can identify: routine conversations, accessing databases, life-support and engineering functions. I’ve narrowed it down to a half-dozen that might have been the culprit.”

“They are?”

Her head did not tip down to look at the bank of monitors in front of her, meaning she was taking the display directly into her eyes through the goggles.

“Job 1116: something with a lot of interrupt twenty-twos in it.”

“That’s a routine sensor-hardware check program,” I said.

“It’s not the algorithm in the manual.”

“No, it’s one I devised myself. Does the same job, but in about half the time.”

“How often do you run it?”

“Once every nine days.”

“Any problems in the past?”

“None.”

“Okay. What about Job 4791?”

“That’s some ongoing modeling I’m doing for Luis Lopez Portillo y Pacheco.”

“Who’s he?” said Bev.

“An agronomist,” said one of the blurred red forms in the background.

“Well,” said Bev, “you’ll have to start that over from scratch. The files didn’t close properly. Job 6300?”

“FOOBAR. Just a junk model I use for running benchmarks.”

“It’s pretty badly scrambled. Can I erase it?”

“Be my guest.”

I couldn’t see what she was doing, of course, but I knew the goggle interface well. She would focus on the file name, blink once to select it, and snap her gaze over to the trash-can icon that had been in her peripheral vision. “Gone. Job 8878?”

Uh-oh. The Aaron-net. “Is it intact?” I said.

“I’m not sure,” Bev replied. “Says here it’s got a file open that’s over a thousand terabytes in length.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“What is it?”

“It’s—it’s my diary. I’m writing a holographic book about this mission.”

“I didn’t know that. It’s a pretty complex data structure.”

“A hobby,” I said. “I’m trying some experimental recording techniques.”

“Anything that could have caused the crash?”

“I don’t think so.”

Bev’s blurred form moved in a shrug. “Okay. Job 12515. It’s also huge. Something to do with—hard to say—looks like communications processing. Lots of what seem to be CURB instructions.”

“I don’t know what Job 12515 is,” I said. “Is it cross-linked with anything?”

“Just a second. Yes. Job 113. One-thirteen is huge, too. What is it? It’s like no code I’ve ever seen before.”

“I’m not sure what it is,” I said, looking inward. “I don’t recognize that code, either.”

“It’s got some amazing convolutions in it,” Bev continued. “The file update record shows it changes almost daily, but it doesn’t seem to be a data file or a program under development. Loops all over the place. It looks a bit like a few military packages I’ve seen. Very tight code, but general. Oh, good Christ!”

“What is it?” I said.

Bev ignored me. “Look at that, Wall.” She leaned forward, turning on one of the repeater monitors so that Chang could share in what the goggles were showing her. Chang’s ruddy form loomed closer.

“Is that what I think it is?” said Chang. “A Mobius call?”

“Yes.”

Chang, or someone standing near him, let out a low whistle.

“What does that mean?” The stentorian mayor again. “What have you found?”

The flaring blotch of Bev’s head turned. “It means, Your Honor, that JASON’s crash was caused by a virus.”