The Ships of Earth: Homecoming: Volume 3 (12 page)

She had simply assumed that Volemak would keep the Index in his own tent, but of course that would not do—Zdorab and Issib would be using the Index all the time, and could hardly be expected to arrange their schedule around such inconveniences as an old woman whose husband let her sleep too late in the morning.

Rasa stood outside the door of the small tent and clapped twice.

“Come in.”

From the voice she knew at once that it was Issya. She
felt a stab of guilt, for last night she had hardly spoken to the boy—the man—that was her firstborn child. Only when she and Volya had spoken to the four unmarried ones all at once, really. And even now, knowing that he was inside the tent, she wanted to go away and come back another time.

Why was she avoiding him? Not because of his physical defects—she was used to
that
by now, having helped him through his infancy and early childhood, having fitted him for chairs and floats so he could move easily and have a nearly normal life—or at least a life of freedom. She knew his body almost more intimately than he knew it himself, since until he was well into puberty she had washed him head to toe, and massaged and moved his limbs to keep them flexible before he slowly, painfully learned to move them himself. During all those sessions together they had talked and talked—more than any of her other children, Issib was her friend. Yet she didn’t want to face him.

So of course she parted the door and walked into the tent and faced him.

He was sitting in his chair which had linked itself to the solar panel atop the tent so he wasn’t wasting battery power. The chair had picked up the Index and now held it in front of Issib, where it rested against his left hand. Rasa had never seen the Index but knew at once that this had to be it, if only because it was an object she had never seen.

“Does it speak to you?” she asked.

“Good afternoon, Mother,” said Issib. “Was your morning restful?”

“Or does it have some kind of display, like a regular computer?” She refused to let him goad her by reminding her of how late she had arisen.

“Some of us didn’t sleep at all,” said Issib. “Some of us lay awake wondering how it happened that our wives-to-be were brought in and dumped on us with only the most cursory of introductions.”

“Oh, Issya,” said Rasa, “you know that this situation is the natural consequence of the way things are, and nobody
planned it. You’re feeling resentful? Well, so am I. So here’s an idea—I won’t take it out on you, and you don’t take it out on me.”

“Who else
can
I take it out on?” said Issib, smiling wanly.

“The Oversoul. Tell your chair to throw the Index across the room.”

Issib shook his head. “The Oversoul would simply override my command. And besides, the Index isn’t the Oversoul, it’s simply our most powerful tool for accessing the Oversoul’s memory.”

“How much does it remember?”

Issib looked at her for a moment. “You know, I never thought you’d refer to the Oversoul as
it
.”

Rasa was startled to realize she had done so, but knew at once why she had done so. “I wasn’t thinking of
her
—the Oversoul. I was thinking of
it
—the Index.”

“It remembers everything,” said Issib.

“How much of everything? The movements of every individual atom in the universe?”

Issib grinned at her. “Sometimes it seems like that. No, I meant everything about human history on Harmony.”

“Forty million years,” said Rasa. “Maybe two million generations of human beings. A world population of roughly a billion most of the time. Two quadrillion lives, with thousands of meaningful events in every life.”

“That’s right,” said Issib. “And then add to those biographies the histories of every human community, starting with families and including those as large as nations and language groups and as small as childhood friends and casual sexual liaisons. And then include all natural events that impinged on human history. And then include every word that humans ever wrote and the map of every city we ever built and the plans for every building we ever constructed . . .”

“There wouldn’t be room to contain all the information,” said Rasa. “Not if the whole planet were devoted to nothing but storing it. We should be tripping over the Oversoul’s data storage with every step.”

“Not really,” said Issib. “The Oversoul’s memory isn’t stored in the cheap and bulky memory we use for ordinary computers. Our computers are all binary, for one thing—every memory location can carry only two possible meanings.”

“On or off,” said Rasa. “Yes or no.”

“It’s read electrically,” said Issib. “And we can only fit a few trillion bits of information into each computer before they start getting too bulky to carry around. And the
space
we waste inside our computers—just to represent simple numbers. For instance, in two bits we can only hold four numbers.”

“A-1, B-1, A-2, and B-2,” said Rasa. “I
did
teach the basic computer theory course in my little school, you know.”

“But now imagine,” said Issib, “that instead of only being able to represent two states at each location, on or off, you could represent
five
states. Then in two bits—”

“Twenty-five possible values,” said Rasa. “A-1, B-1, V-1, G-1, D-1 and so on to D-5.”

“Now imagine that each memory location can have thousands of possible states.”

“That certainly does make the memory more efficient at containing meaning.”

“Not really,” said Issib. “Not yet anyway. The increase is only geometric, not exponential. And it would have a vicious limitation on it, in that each
single
location could only convey one state
at a time
. Even if there were a billion possible messages that a single location could deliver, each location could only deliver one of those at a time.”

“But if they were paired, that problem disappears, since between them any two locations could deliver millions of possible meanings,” said Rasa.

“But still only
one
meaning at any one time.”

“Well, you can’t very well use the same memory location to store contradictory information Both G-9
and
D-9.”

“It depends on how the information is stored. For the Oversoul, each memory location is the interior edge of a
circle—a very tiny, tiny circle—and that inside edge is fractally complex. That is, thousands of states can be represented by protrusions, like the points on a mechanical key, or the teeth on a comb—in each location it’s either got a protrusion or it doesn’t.”

“But then the memory location is the tooth, and not the circle,” said Rasa, “and we’re back to binary.”

“But it can stick out farther or not as far,” said Issib. “The Oversoul’s memory is capable of distinguishing hundreds of different degrees of protrusion at each location around the inside of the circle.”

“Still a geometric increase, then,” said Rasa.

“But now,” said Issib, “you must include the fact that the Oversoul can also detect teeth
on
each protrusion—hundreds of different values from each of hundreds of teeth. And on each tooth, hundreds of barbs, each reporting hundreds of possible values. And on each barb, hundreds of thorns. And on each thorn, hundreds of hairs. And on each hair—”

“I get the idea,” said Rasa.

“And then the meanings can change depending on
where
on the circle you start reading—at the north or the east or south-southeast. You see, Mother, at every memory location the Oversoul can store trillions of
different
pieces of information at once,” said Issib. “We have nothing in our computers that can begin to compare to it.”

“And yet it’s not an infinite memory,” said Rasa.

“No,” said Issib. “Not infinite. Because eventually we get down to the minimum resolution—protrusions so small that the Oversoul can no longer detect protrusions
on
the protrusions. About twenty million years ago the Oversoul realized that it was running out of memory—or that it
would
run out in about ten million years. It began finding shorthand ways of recording things. It devoted a substantial area of memory to storing elaborate tables of
kinds
of stories. For instance, table entry ZH-5-SHCH might be, ‘quarrels with parents over degree of personal freedom they permit and runs away from home city to another city.’ So where a person’s biography is stored, instead
of explaining each event, the biographic listing simply refers you to the vast tables of possible events in a human life—it’ll have the value ZH-5-SHCH and then the code for the city he ran away to.”

“It makes our lives seem rather sterile, doesn’t it? Unimaginative, I mean. We all keep doing the same things that others have done.”

“The Oversoul explained to me that while ninety-nine percent of every life consists of events already present in the behavior tables, there’s always the one percent that has to be spelled out because there’s no pre-existing entry for it. No two lives have ever been duplicates yet.”

“I suppose that’s a comfort.”

“You’ve got to believe that
ours
is following an unusual path. ‘Called forth by the Oversoul to journey through the desert and eventually return to Earth’—I bet there’s no table entry for
that
.”

“Oh, but since it has happened now to sixteen of us, I’ll bet the Oversoul
makes
a new entry.”

Issib laughed. “It probably already has.”

“It must have been a massive project, though, constructing those tables of possible human actions.”

“If there’s one thing the Oversoul has had plenty of, it’s time,” said Issib. “But even
with
all that, there’s decay and loss.”

“Memory locations can become unreadable,” said Rasa.

“I don’t know about that. I just know that the Oversoul is losing satellites. That makes it harder for it to keep an eye on us. So far there aren’t any blind spots—but each satellite has to bring in far more information than it was originally meant to. There are bottlenecks in the system. Places where a satellite simply
can’t
pass through all the information that it collects fast enough not to miss something going on among the humans it’s observing. In short, there are events happening now that aren’t getting remembered. The Oversoul is controlling the losses by guessing to fill in the gaps in its information, but it’s only going to get worse and worse. There’s still plenty of memory left, but soon there’ll be millions of lives that are remembered
only as vague sketches or outlines of a life. Someday, of course, enough satellites will fail that some lives will never be recorded at all.”

“And eventually all the satellites will fail.”

“Right. And, more to the point, when those blind spots occur, there will also be people who are not under the influence of the Oversoul in any way. At that point they’ll begin to make the weapons again that can destroy the world.”

“So—why not put up more satellites?”

“Who? What human society has the technology to build the ships to carry satellites out into space? Let alone building the satellites in the first place.”

“We make computers, don’t we?”

“The technology to put satellites into space is the same technology that can deliver weapons from one side of Harmony to the other. How can the Oversoul teach us how to replenish its satellites without also teaching us how to destroy each other? Not to mention the fact that we could probably then figure out how to reprogram the Oversoul and control it ourselves—or, failing that, we could build our own
little
Oversouls that key in on the part of our brain that the Oversoul communicates with, so that we’d have a weapon that could cause the enemy to panic or get stupid.”

“I see the point,” said Rasa.

“It’s the quandary the Oversoul is in. It must get repaired or it will stop being able to protect humanity; yet the only way it can repair itself is to give human beings the very things that it’s trying to prevent us from getting.”

“How circular.”

“So it’s going home,” said Issib. “Back to the Keeper of Earth. To find out what to do next.”

“What if this Keeper of Earth doesn’t know either?”

“Then we’re up to our necks in kaka, aren’t we?” Issib smiled. “But I think the Keeper knows. I think it has a plan.”

“And why is that?”

“Because people keep getting dreams that aren’t from the Oversoul.”

“People have always had dreams that aren’t from the Oversoul,” said Rasa. “We had dreams long before there
was
an Oversoul.”

“Yes, but we didn’t have the
same
dreams, carrying clear messages about coming home to Earth, did we?”

“I just don’t believe that some computer or whatever that’s many lightyears from here could possibly send a
dream
into our minds.”

“Who knows what’s happened back on Earth?” said Issib. “Maybe the Keeper of Earth has learned things about the universe that we don’t begin to understand. That wouldn’t be a surprise, either, since
we’ve
had the Oversoul making us stupid whenever we tried to think about really advanced physics. For forty million years we’ve been slapped down whenever we used our brains too well, but in forty million years the Keeper of Earth, whoever or whatever it is, might well have thought of some really useful new stuff. Including how to send dreams to people lightyears away.”

“And all this you learned from the Index.”

“All this I dragged kicking and screaming from the Index, with Zdorab’s and Father’s help,” said Issib. “The Oversoul doesn’t like talking about itself, and it keeps trying to make us forget what we’ve learned about it.”

“I thought the Oversoul was cooperating with us.”

“No,” said Issib. “We’re cooperating with
it
. In the meantime, it’s trying to keep us from learning even the tiniest bit of information that isn’t directly pertinent to the tasks it has in mind for us.”

“So how did you learn all that you just told me? About how the Oversoul’s memory works?”

“Either we got around its defenses so well and so persistently that it finally gave up on trying to prevent us from knowing it, or it decided that this was harmless information after all.”