“What I’ve done here is being done everywhere such records have been recorded and stored, Forster,” Merck whispered. “On Earth, on Mars, in every library and museum and university. Everywhere. It only remains to destroy the two minds that could reveal the truth.
You
would do so willingly. I can’t blame you for that. And of course I could be forced.”
“Somebody bombed the Hesperian Museum,” the commander said, his throat full of gravel. “Proboda pulled Forster from the wreckage. Bad burns over about seventy percent of his body–nothing the medics can’t fix in a few days. Merck’s dead–not enough left to reconstruct.”
“Got there in three minutes, waded in, got burned himself. Vik’s no intellectual, but he’s just earned himself another commendation.” The commander touched Sparta’s arm to indicate that she should take a right where the corridor branched toward the helipad.
Sparta looked at Blake, and for a moment her eyes were moist. Blake had never seen her cry, and she didn’t oblige him now. Instead, awkwardly, she took his hand. They looked at each other as the people-mover trundled along, but she would not move to him and he would not force himself on her.
Blake and Sparta broke away from each other. Sparta said nothing; her throat was swollen with the effort to control her emotions.
“The bombing of the Hesperian looks like part of a pattern,” the commander said. “Archaeological stuff. All over the place. Some stolen, some destroyed.” His tone indicated he couldn’t imagine why anyone would be interested in “archaeological stuff.” “How about you, Redfield? Any ideas?”
2) Double letters, if they occur in a pair, must be divided by an X or a Z. For example, the double L’s in WILL NEED become LX LN, etc. (But the three S’s in FORTRESS SEEKING become SX SZ SE, etc.; using X once and Z the next time avoids calling attention to a letter that has been enciphered twice in the same way. Such a hint could betray part of the layout of the alphabet square.)
So Blake’s first step was to write out the plaintext thus: TO HE LE NF RO MP AR IS IF YO UF IN DT HI SF IN DM EI NT HE FO RT RE SX SZ SE EK IN GT HE FI RS TO FX FI VE RE VE LA TI ON SY OU WI LX LN EX ED AG UY DE
The Playfair alphabet square is five letters wide by five letters high. First the keyword is written (but no letters are repeated), and then the remaining letters of the alphabet are written, with I and J treated as the same letter. Blake’s keyword was SPARTA, thus his Playfair square was:
The Playfair transformation is based on the fact that the letters of each pair in the plaintext can occur in only one of three states. The pair can be together in the same row, together in the same column, or–most commonly–together in neither.
3) Each letter in a pair of letters that appears in neither the same row nor the same column is replaced by the letter occurring at the
intersection
of its own row and its partner’s column. Pair order must be preserved: first determine the intersection of the first letter’s row with the second letter’s column, then the intersection of the second letter’s row with the first letter’s column. It helps to imagine that the two plaintext letters determine two corners of a square inside the alphabetical square; then the ciphertext letters lie at the opposite corners of this smaller square. For example TO becomes
au
.
Knowing that the system was Playfair, and surmising that the key was SPARTA, Sparta had only to divide the ciphertext into pairs, reconstruct the alphabet square, and, using the same rules, transform each cipher pair back into its plain equivalent:
Although the second volume of the
Venus Prime
series encapsulates one of my favorite science-fiction dventure stories, whose action and surprising denouement depend on the straightforward mathematics of perturbation theory–a story told pretty much as Arthur told it the first time around, in “Maelstrom II”–the transformations of the written word are what this novel is really about.
Partly that’s because any six-volume series needs a backbone, and in true Clarkeian fashion the backbone of this series is the discovery of the solar system’s ancient visitation by an alien race. I could have imagined different ways of uncovering ancient visits, of course, some of them pretty mundane. For example, we know that the Bronze Age civilization of Crete established trading posts in Syria, Asia Minor, the Aegean islands, and mainland Greece because we find the Minoans’ pottery and other trade goods in those places.
But usually when a scholar says, “I’ve discovered a new civilization!”–a cry rarely heard nowadays but often enough in recent centuries–he or she means “I’ve deciphered a previously undeciphered text.” The archaeologists in
Venus Prime 2
do it the old-fashioned way, they decipher it, and indeed I’ve done my best to cast them as old fuddy-duddies.
Plot is never much more than a good excuse for a writer to write about what’s close to the bone, so there’s another reason that this tale, only the second episode in an ongoing saga of the search for the alien among us, pays so much attention to the written word. Writing–or “text,” in a loathsome locution at long last reaching the end of its postmodernist rope–has the same peculiar hold on my imagination that it must have, or so I suppose, for everyone who feels compelled to write. In my case, however, writing is explicitly tied to cipher, on which critics have no patent.
My first exposure to the notion of code and cipher (not counting the code rings they were pitching on television in the 1950s) came when I was an eleven-year-old visiting my grandparents’ house and stumbled upon Poe’s “The Gold-Bug.” That same summer I started reading everything backwards, claiming I was talking Martian; if a sign read “Do Not Enter,” it came out of my mouth as “Od Ton Retne.”
Soon I could read whole paragraphs this way without hesitation; I could read them upside down. At first I was proud of my fluency in Martian; then I realized I couldn’t stop–for years afterward, well into my teens, I involuntarily read lines of printed text backward, meanwhile trying to hide the embarrassing proclivity. I’ve met other people who had the same quirk. Apparently it’s not a rare affliction, but for me it conveyed–indeed, encoded–a message about the complicated mysteries of written language.
It will come as no surprise, then, that two of the books that most influenced this particular science-fiction mystery-adventure were Ernst Doblhofer’s
Voices in Stone
, subtitled
The Decipherment of Ancient Scripts and Writings
(in which, as a teenager, I first encountered Minoan Linear B, long before I had the opportunity to inspect some of the original clay leaves on Crete) and David Kahn’s
The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing
(where I learned the delightful Playfair Cipher).
In most science fiction stories the author is supposed to make an effort to anticipate future developments, and in
Venus Prime 2
I did my best with the near future of writing. I got fax machines right–not exactly prescient, since consumer units were coming into use as I wrote. (My first novel,
The Gates of Heaven
, which appeared early in 1980, had a fax machine curiously mounted on the back of the protagonist’s front door, just where his mail slot would have been.) I even got books on tape and chip and “disk” right; if one were generous, disks could be taken to mean CD-ROMs.
I missed email entirely. I failed to imagine a medium that could restore to whole generations the joy of writing letters while simultaneously dissolving those letters into the electricity as quickly as they were read. Quasi-interactive, virtually instantaneous when the Net isn’t clogged, and–lacking deliberate effort–no more permanent than a wisp of smoke, email may not be the death of the written word, but it could well be the death of the lasting word.
The words you are reading now were transmitted to the publisher by email, I confess. But you are reading them–signifying that some words, somewhere, will persist long enough to guide future children to buried treasures.