The Enigma Score (49 page)

‘Shit,’ erupted the Grand Master. ‘It makes a man wonder about the purpose of life.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Clarin, thinking about Jamieson and how much he had wanted to talk to the Presences, how much he had been looking forward to it. ‘Yes. It makes one wonder.’

A time came when everything had been said several times, when negotiations were completed, when ships had departed and other ships had arrived, when the worst of the grieving was over, when the dead had been buried – at least those whose bodies had been found, which did not include Harward Justin – when the matter that had begun with the Enigma score could be considered to be almost over. When that penultimate time came, Tasmin went looking for Clarin.

He found her in the library of the citadel in Splash One. She was reading through accounts of old journeys, many of them first journeys, full of the mystery and wonder that had been Jubal. Her hair had grown long enough that it fell over her forehead, shadowing her eyes. He could not read her expression.

‘I was trying to remember how it was, before we knew what it was all about,’ she said. ‘You and Jamieson and I talked about how we felt. The marvel. The anticipation.’

‘It’s still there,’ he said.

‘Not for us,’ she said, laying the book down and looking up at him with that long, level look he thought of as so typical of her.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Oh, Tasmin, you know what the findings were as well as I do.’

‘You haven’t spoken with your father, then. I sent word to him this morning.’

‘No, I haven’t talked with him.’

‘If you had, he would have told you that we’re not leaving. At least he and I are not leaving. Most of the Tripsingers won’t be leaving.’

‘You mean they really … the Presences really want us to stay?’

‘They find us interesting, Clarin. They find our perception of them particularly interesting. They see us pretty much the way I’m beginning to see the viggies. The viggies – or at least the giligees – can go right into our bodies and tell us all about them. Things we didn’t know. We can do the same for the Presences. They had no concept at all of what they were until we came along and told them.’

‘That’s right. You’ve been negotiating.’

‘The Presences see no reason for us to go, so long as we’re sensible about Jubal. They don’t intend to keep their midbrains awake much of the time – evidently their philosophical life, down deep, occupies most of their interest – and they say we’ll still be needed to keep them from rolling over on us in their sleep. The ones that were destroyed are growing again, very quickly. Their roots are still there. They tell us there will be another Redfang in a few decades. Another set of Eagers.’

‘But what would we do? To earn a living?’

There’s still a market for brou. BDL won’t be available to handle it off-planet, of course, but some agglomerate will take us on. The provisional setup we have now will give way to our own planetary government. The viggies want us to stay because we provide good food. We’ll need Explorers. Less than a quarter of Jubal is even mapped.’ He took a deep breath, eyes shining. ‘Clarin, all that country out there! Presences we don’t know! Things we’ve never seen! All that wonderful….’ He caught sight of her unresponsive face and sighed. ‘The Presences even asked our advice about the viggies.’

‘The viggies?’

‘There’s the question of their eating some humans. Seemingly a back country troupe of viggies caught and ate a trooper named Halky Bend. I don’t know why, except that the Presence said it was justified. Things like that worry the Presences a little. They’re aware we don’t eat people, or viggies. They know something about taboos. They have some of their own….’ His voice trailed away into silence. She wasn’t reacting. ‘So,’ he concluded weakly, ‘there’s lots for us to do here.’

‘I’m not sure I want to be studied,’ she said, apropos of nothing.

‘Studied?’

‘Of course. The scientists will be all over Jubal. Just think! The first, nonorganic intelligences!’

‘They may come, but they won’t be able to sing their way past a waste receptable,’ he said. ‘They’ll need us, Clarin.’

‘Oh, I know that. But I don’t want to be their subject.’

‘You?’

‘Us. Oh, yes. They’ll study us along with the Presences, us and the viggies. They’ll write learned papers on “The Interactions of Human and Nonorganic Intelligences.”’

‘So?’

‘It’s just …’ Her objections sounded specious, even to her. She flushed and examined her hands intently.

He put a package in her lap. ‘Here’s something I found.’

She looked at him quizzically, opened it. The soft gray-green plush stared up at her. ‘A viggy baby,’ she said softly. ‘For your baby, Tasmin.’

It was a moment before he could respond. ‘Yes, for the baby. I’ve been wondering what to name him.’

‘I think there’s only one possible name. Call him Lim Jamieson.’

‘Lim.’ He turned away to the window, tears in his eyes. ‘Jamieson.’

‘You owe an indebtedness. There’s only one way to pay it. Honor their names. Care for their troupes. That’s what Bondri would say.’

‘What about Celcy?’ he asked her, looking her carefully in the face. ‘What do I owe her?’

‘You’ve already paid your indebtedness to Celcy,’ she said. ‘You never hurt her, at least not purposely. Everyone I’ve talked to says she was as happy and contented being married to you as it was possible for her to be. And now she’s gone.’

‘Don says she died because she wanted to do one, totally admirable thing.’

‘That’s possible,’ she said calmly. ‘There are other possibilities, Tasmin. An infinite number of them. With some things it doesn’t matter what is true.’

‘I thought it did, to me.’

‘Only because you were feeling guilty about it. You wanted something to exonerate you. Or maybe something to canonize her. Then when you found the truth about Lim, you felt even worse. None of that was your doing, Tasmin.’

He laughed, very softly.

‘I said something funny?’

‘No. You sing one song, and Don sings another, and Bondri sings a third, and I sing another one yet. I suppose we could get my mother in on this. And Jeannie Gentrack, and the other friends we had in Deepsoil Five. At the time, Celcy’s death seemed so silly, so futile, so meaningless. It made me so angry. More angry than sad, as I look back on it. I’ve wanted and wanted to know why she died, and I don’t know any more than when we left.’

‘And do you know something even stranger, Tasmin? If you could bring Celcy back and ask her, she couldn’t tell you.’

‘That’s true,’ he said with sudden enlightenment. ‘She probably couldn’t.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Nothing would change on the basis of your understanding about what happened then. What does matter is that you’re going to get a baby soon, her baby. And you’re going to go on living here on Jubal. And your mother is. And Vivian and Lim’s child.’

‘And you,’ he said.

‘I haven’t decided yet.’

‘Clarin. Did you tell Jamieson once that you loved me?’

Her eyes filled. ‘Yes, I did. He shouldn’t have told you.’

‘It was the last thing he said to me, Clarin. He asked me to keep it in mind, for his sake.’

She wept.

‘All these conversations I’ve been having with people, Clarin – they haven’t taught me anything that I didn’t already know. Only two people on this journey taught me something I didn’t know. You and Jamieson I didn’t know anyone could feel as I did about Jubal, care the way I did about Jubal. I set myself apart from people really, separate, in a class all by myself.’ He laughed ruefully. ‘Don asked me why I picked Celcy, why I didn’t try to find someone more suitable. There was a simple reason. It never occurred to me that anyone could be what I needed. I was elite, Clarin. Solitary in my mystical splendor. I thought I was all alone. Jamieson had to force himself on me to teach me I had no monopoly on wonder. Jamieson … and you.’

The tears spilled. ‘I miss him,’ she whispered.

‘So do I. You’re right. If I owe Lim, I owe Jamieson, too. He told me where my heart was.’

‘Are you trying to say you love me?’

‘I’m trying to say I love you both. Loved him. Love you. Not the way I thought I loved Celcy. Something quite different from that….’

‘I don’t want to be your child.’

‘No. I didn’t think you did. I don’t want that, either.’

‘Will you get confused about who I am, Tasmin?’

He thought about this. It was so easy to get confused about who people were. Each person was so many persons. One could only try. He lifted her from the chair, holding her tightly against him. She felt as she had that time at the foot of the Watcher, trembling. She smelled the same. He remembered their voices rising together as they ascended the Ogre’s Stair. Two voices, like one. Like himself. If he knew himself, he knew her. If he knew himself….

‘If I get confused,’ he promised, ‘I’ll ask Bondri to help me sing you, Clarin.’

Technical Appendix to the Enigma Score
Mark E. Eberhart, Ph.D. Department of Materials
Science and Engineering, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology

The Presences on Jubal present an intriguing view of crystalline intelligence and, as in any scientific mystery, sufficient information to form a hypothesis on how these Presences might function. The possibility of sentient crystals is hardly new. Modern computers are, after all, an assemblage of crystalline silicon, and one goal of those involved in creating artificial intelligence is to impose an intelligence on such an assemblage. Yet it is doubtful, for evolutionary reasons, that the Presences of this novel would function as some super-sophisticated silicon chip.

The single most important requirement for a living system to come into existence naturally is the ability to self-replicate. Biological life on this planet almost certainly had its genesis in short segments of DNA or RNA, which, when occurring in solution with the building blocks of DNA or RNA, will produce a complementary strand of material. Through the process of natural selection, those segments that are the most efficient at self-replication will dominate over those less efficient. Life, as we know it, is a manifestation of highly effective systems of DNA replication.

The basic building blocks of computers made from crystalline silicon are p-n junctions. A p-n junction is a planar region that has been chemically modified so that electrical current will flow easily only in one direction across, or ‘normal to,’ the plane. To create p-n junctions requires tremendous amounts of processing, that is, energy and human intervention. They occur nowhere in nature. It is not easy to conceive of a ‘natural’ process that would allow for the self-replication of such junctions in such creatures as the Presences. It is, therefore, unlikely that thinking crystals would look anything like modern computers. It is the ability of the Presences to grow that provides a clue as to their inner workings.

Before taking a closer look, we might review the underlying structure of crystals.

A crystal is any periodic array of atoms. The key word here is
periodic
: a crystal is analogous to a checkerboard with no edges. If one starts on any white square on the board and then moves two squares in any direction perpendicular to the square’s edge, left or right, forward or backward, one would find himself in a position indistinguishable from the starting point. The same would hold true for a black square. In fact, from any starting point on a checkerboard one can translate to an identical position by moving an even number of squares in any direction. A checkerboard is, therefore, a periodic array of squares with a period of two squares. Such a periodic array has the property of translational invariance, for obvious reasons. No matter how one translates himself on the board, moving an even number of squares in any direction, the surroundings will be the same. A checkerboard is a two-dimensional system with translational invariance. A crystal is a three-dimensional system with translational invariance.

Whereas crystals are defined to be translationally invariant, there are no examples of perfect crystals anywhere in the universe. All crystals have defects. The defect we are most familiar with is surface. As soon as a crystal has a boundary – as soon as the checkerboard has an edge – the system is no longer translationally invariant. This is how we know that no perfect crystal exists anywhere in the three-dimensional universe. If it did, it would have no edges and would thus fill the universe, leaving no room for us. A real checkerboard – not the imaginary one with no edges that we referred to – is not translationally invariant because when one moves two squares to the right, one is not in a position identical to the starting point. One is two squares closer to the edge, closer to the defect.

Surfaces are only one example of crystalline defects. Another type of defect is called a vacancy and results from removing an atom from its proper place in the crystal and leaving nothing in that place. Vacancies can be responsible for the color in some precious stones as, for example, in a diamond where large numbers of vacancies produce a yellow color. If one takes cheap, less than perfect, diamonds and subjects them to high energy radiation, some carbon atoms are knocked out of position, leaving vacancies, and creating a ‘yellow diamond,’ which is considered attractive and can be sold as jewelry.

Still another kind of defect is the substitutional, in which a normal atom in the array is replaced by something foreign to the array. In the checkerboard, we could, for example, paint one white square red. The red is a substitutional. The color and value of emeralds and rubies result from substitutionals: emeralds result from substitution of chromium for aluminum in a silicate of aluminum and beryllium; rubies result from a substitution of chromium for aluminum in sapphire. Sapphire is simply aluminum oxide (e.g., corroded Coke cans) as are oriental amethyst and topaz with different substitutionals giving them different colors.