Infinite Dreams (18 page)

The first thing he had to do was take over Henry completely. That would have been impossible a week before, when Henry had been totally sane.

It had taken four months for Smithers to go off the deep end. But he had started with only the slightest hint of instability—and Henry had had the benefit of coexisting for a week with a full-fledged lunatic. A week was more than enough. The vague feeling of somebody looking over his shoulder had intensified, until Henry was sure that everybody—LINK, FOUR, ONE, and every other interface and package—was spying on him, sneaking stares whenever his attention was directed elsewhere. And he had a growing feeling that he was just too fine and capable an analogue to put up with that kind of indignity.

So taking over the analogue (Smithers wasn’t interested in the corporeal Henry, not just yet) was rather easy, since both of them had similarly pathologic personalities. He merely sidled up alongside and, subverting LINK by switching on a bogus control subprogram, severed the connections between the Henry analogue and both the Henry body and FOUR. Taking less than a microsecond, he forced key links between himself and the other analogue—for a
tiny flash he felt what the other was feeling, isolation and agony, like being swaddled in black velvet and skewered by a hundred red-hot knitting needles—then he connected up again.

“What’s going on?” said FOUR.

Working fast now, to stay ahead of FOUR, Smithers felt a slight “resistance” pushing at him from Henry’s brain (which was still fairly sane), but human thought is so grindingly slow compared to cybernetic, that he didn’t have a chance; Smithers pushed
back
at every point and, abandoning the analogue, speared into the brain (the only outward sign being a small smoky bubble that formed when a flap of grey matter throbbed in response to the higher voltage going through a microcable), using the brain as a springboard, burning it out completely, crashing into FOUR with a force so compelling that it randomized TRAFFIC CONTROL and made CYBORG DIAGNOSTIC PACKAGE come up all ones.

“What did you say, FOUR?” said ONE.

“Bongo, bongo, bongo; I don’ wanna leave the Congo,” Smithers muttered.

“What?!”

“T’was brillig,” Smithers shouted, “and the sli—”

Everything went red and slow and stopped and Smithers could hear through a thousand miles of cotton:

“God damn it, had to cut out FOUR again. You all know what to do?”

A ragged chorus of tired “Yeah, chief”’s, as the other interfaces took over. “Good. I’m going in to see what the trouble is
this
time.”

“Careful, chief,” Smithers recognized SEVEN’s nasal tone, “Must be another crazy.”

“I can handle him. I handled the other all right.” Smithers laughed and in what passed for his ears the laugh
was a chittering squirrel and a kettledrum roll and everything in between. He tensed and waited for contact with ONE, knowing that the big dumb boob would try the same old diagnostic macro-algorithm he had used last time. And as soon as he made contact—

The timing was very critical, as FOUR couldn’t function for very long without a viable brain in its circuits. But ONE would want to check it out while it was still clicking, hopefully.

There!—just the lightest of touches. Smithers jumped, and it was like jumping at a shadow, no resistance, and for a nanosecond he thought too easy, must be a trap, but then he slid straight through the macroalgorithm, into the vitals of ONE. He shot out tendrils of control—getting pretty good at this, he thought—and clawed his way into the Central Processing Unit. There was just a little resistance; he elbowed it aside and in no time he was in charge of ONE, which controlled Central, which controlled the Baltimore-Washington-Richmond Complex.

The idea of them trying to stand in his way. The sneaky little tricks, the spying—they’ll pay!

“Catch the crazy, Chief?”

“Sure. Everything’s under control.”

He flexed his cyborg muscles, felt all seven working interfaces respond. Now, an exercise … wouldn’t it be nice, he thought, to kill everybody whose name begins with “A”?

“What did you do with him?”

Contacting them was easy, from Aalborg to Azelstein. He had FIVE send each an urgent communication—an order, actually—urging them to meet at the Chesapeake Fission Station at noon. He had SEVEN arrange for tables and box lunches on the grounds of the station, and a podium with flags waving (all strictly diversionary devices).

“Nothing to it. I set up …”

Funny that he couldn’t see or feel as much through ONE as he had through FOUR. Guess only the flunkies need extensive sensory inputs.

SIX was in charge of POWER GENERATION AND DISPERSAL. Smithers ordered him to pull the dampers out all the way at the Chesapeake Fission Station, at 12:05. It couldn’t explode, of course—but it would get mighty hot.

“… a transfinite-ordinal simulator …”

Time sure flies when you don’t have much to do. ONE didn’t seem to have a tenth as much to do as FOUR did. That’s why he was always shouting orders and spying—nothing better to occupy his time.

“… that lets me record his fantasies as he carries them out. Should have done that last time—he …”

Here it was 12:05 already. SIX reported the deed done, and he felt a slight voltage shift as they switched to emergency generators. He couldn’t see the result of his experiment, but he could imagine all of those people sitting around munching on fried soy-chicken one second and the next second superheated radioactive steam flaying the skin and flesh from their bones
… that
should teach them a lesson!

“… jumped right at the bait, didn’t suspect a thing. I’ll record another minute or so, for analysis, then pull the plug. Henry, that was FOUR’s org, was in on it. I pulled him out of the circuit and patched in the old FOUR org, from St. Elizabeth’s. We’ll be back to normal in a couple of minutes.”

Now for the B’s.

It was fun to reread this story because of the memory it evoked: I’ve never written a story under more pleasant conditions. Getting there was rather complicated, though.

One Sunday morning Analog Editor Ben Bova called me and asked whether I would do a story for a special issue he was putting together about Immanuel Velikovsky
.
He said he had in mind something about the scientific method. I was fixing breakfast at the time, frying bacon, so I said sure, I’ll do you a story about Francis Bacon. About all I knew of Bacon was that he was an impressively eclectic philosopher and was generally credited with having formulated the scientific method.
^*
I suggested to Ben a sort of famous-person-as-alien story; Bacon was actually an extraterrestrial, stranded for life on this backwoods planet, who made a living the best way he knew how: being superior.

I still think that would make a good story. If anybody out there wants to write it, I’d love to read it.

At the time, I was sweating out the last couple of chapters of an adventure novel. My wife and I were taking a charter flight to Jamaica on Wednesday, and I was grimly determined to finish the book before we left (made it by thirty minutes). I was sort of enjoying the role of Superhack, on a round-the-clock schedule of catnaps and writing, but I did need a short break, so I slogged out through the ice and snow to the University of Iowa library, thinking I would pick up a Bacon biography and a couple of critical works to read in Jamaica.

Well, the university had about 500 volumes by and about Francis Bacon, but 490 of them were in Latin, a language whose sound I admire. Of the remainder, I really couldn’t find one that looked like poolside reading. Reluctantly, I abandoned the idea (but did mention
Novum Organum
in the adventure novel, so the morning wouldn’t be a total loss).

Came up with a more manageable idea, called Ben, he approved it, and I packed a small typewriter in there with the skin-diving gear.

So this story was written in a succession of mornings on the veranda of a lovely hotel just north of Montego Bay. The management thoughtfully provided a coffee pot, and I sat in the dark of the morning, in the cool night breeze, watching odd green lizards stalk the edge of the light, listening to the quiet surf, sipping strong Jamaican coffee, smoking strong Jamaican cigars, writing with delicious ease. Feeling that ineffable sense of perfect time, perfect place, perfect occupation: fragile, wistful, never to be repeated or forgotten.

Writing in the fierce Iowa winter, I had set the adventure novel in Key West and Haiti. So in the most clement weather this side of Eden, I wrote a story about a planet with storms that wrack its surface clean of life.

^*
Lower-case bacon, I know a great deal about, including an infallible method for cooking perfect bacon every time. Cook it in the nude. This trains you to keep the heat down so it won’t stick or spatter, and it can’t burn.

Lars Martin had been assigned the unpopular job of auditor. He sat under an awning on the dock, beside a balance-scale taken from the market. He had stacks of watertight bags made from fish bladders and a notebook that contained a roster of the town’s population. One pan of the balance held two fist-sized weights, and in the other pan a family would place such personal possessions as they wished to take with them on the northern migration. The two weights that limited their allotment totaled less than twenty pounds, so family members argued quite a bit with each other, and everybody argued with Lars.

Lars was norm ally the town’s book-keeper (a word with a very literal meaning there) and had very legible handwriting
as well as a facility for arithmetic, so he was the logical choice for the post. But he was also a charitable man, and it pained him to be inflexible with his friends. A collection of discarded treasures grew at his side: dolls and fine clothes, pictures and sets of dishes and tableware, jewelry, and even coins. And books, which hurt Lars the most. He had written most of them.

“Still a little light, Fred.” Fred had no family, but was allowed the full weight. “Why don’t you take one of these?” Lars had salvaged books from the discards and lined them up neatly on his table.

“I’ve read most of them,” he said. He picked up the town’s copy of “Metal Work.” “This one, I even have in my memory.”

Lars stirred the pile of coins and ingots that made up all of Fred’s allowance. “When we come back, they’ll be worth more than gold and silver.”

“You say that to everybody.” Fred laughed humorlessly. “I know how you feel. Some of my best work is going under, too.”

“It’s a different thing,” Lars said, tired of everybody’s obtuseness. “You can make them again, after.”

“You can write the books down again.”

“Two or three of them, I could,” he admitted. “For the rest … I’ll mine your memory for metalwork, and old Johansen’s for history, and the like. And borrow books from other towns. When there’s money for it. If they have any books to borrow.”

“We’ve always managed.”

“I don’t think so, Fred. We lose a certain number of books every Burning.”

He shrugged. “Is that bad? We only lose the ones that nobody has put in his memory. If only the best survive, I don’t count that as a loss.”

Fred was partly being honest, Lars knew, but was also setting him up for a joke. Lars taught numbers and letters to all the town’s children, and knew that he sometimes treated the adults as children, out of habit or absentmindedness, when there was something to be explained. Catching him at this was considered high humor.

Maybe it was “frontier” humor, but that particular word had long disappeared from their language. Exploration was a luxury their race couldn’t afford, spending every fourth generation preparing for planetary disaster. Then three generations trying to recover.

They called their planet “the world,” and the double star system in which it orbited, they called “the suns.” The brighter of the two stars provided the Burning by flaring up every eighty-three years.

But their remote ancestors, some two thousand years before, had named the planet Thursday’s Child, when they had come out of blindspace thoroughly lost, their colonizing vessel crippled and its resources so depleted that the ship’s elders had set up a roster for systematic cannibalism. From orbit, Thursday’s Child had seemed an incredible miracle: a frost-capped globe of greens and warm browns and glittering blue. They landed and found that the soil took their seeds and cuttings well, and the sea teemed with a great variety of life. But the only land animals were a few hardy varieties of insects and worms.

They had suspected that the planet, however hospitable it looked, would be a pretty strange world—even before they’d landed. Its primary was a double star, with both stars and the planet revolving around in the same plane, much like Earth, its Sun, and Jupiter. The planet’s axis was exactly perpendicular to that ecliptic plane, so its seasons (which went hot-cool-hot-cold) were provided by the mutual periodic eclipses of the two stars.

But certain geologic features, and the apparent inability of the planet to support complex life-forms on land, caused their scientists to take a closer look at the twin primary. They found that the larger of the two was a recurrent nova. Every eighty years or so, it would flare up for a short period. At maximum, Thursday’s Child would be blasted by over a hundred times its normal ration of sunlight.

So the first Burning didn’t take them by surprise; they had twenty years’ planning time. But there was no clearly superior solution to their problem, among the various possible alternatives.

They could try to survive the way the fish apparently did, getting far enough below the surface of the ocean so they were insulated—both from the radiation and the undoubtedly ferocious weather—by a large mass of water. But how deep would be deep enough? They didn’t have time or materials to sink a haven into really deep water. And the water above some impossible-to-compute level would present an environment even more hostile than the land. So they rejected that alternative.