Dark as Day (8 page)

* * *

“Let me get this straight.” Kate had stopped fiddling with the top of her dress as Alex went on with his description of the meeting. Now she was sitting totally still. “All this talk about a ‘family union.’ Do they mean marriage?”

“I guess so.” When Kate stared at him, he added, “That is what they mean.”

Alex had been told a hundred times that he was the System’s least perceptive man when it came to reading women’s feelings. But when Kate still said nothing, he went on, “Are you against marriage?”

“No, no.” Kate’s blue eyes looked away. “I think that the whole marriage business is a bit, well,
old-fashioned
, especially if people haven’t lived together. But if someone wants to get married, it’s up to them. Maybe Mobarak’s daughter feels like that. But in
your
family—is this your mother again?”

“Of
course
it’s my mother again.” And then he was forced to make a correction. “No, it’s not just mother. It’s the whole damned family.”

“But what right have
they
to decide?” Now Kate could not sit still. She was rubbing her hand along the tabletop, spreading a ring of condensation from her glass. “It would be an
arranged
marriage. You’d think we were in India or Persia, a thousand years ago. Have you seen pictures of this Lucy woman?”

“Yes.”

“Well?”

“She looks nice.”

“Nice? That’s the best you can come up with? Strawberries and cream are
nice
. Is she pretty?”

“Yes, but I think she’s been worked over quite a bit.”

“I’ll bet. Mobarak can afford the best surgeons and splices. Have you met her?”

“Not yet. But Hector has, and he says she’s stunning.”

“Is Hector a candidate to marry her? Isn’t he the cousin with a turnip where his brain should be?”

“No one is talking about Hector.”

“They are talking about
you
. Right?”

“They want me to meet with her.”

“And are you
going
to meet her?”

“I don’t see that I have much choice.” Alex realized that wasn’t enough. “It’s hard to describe what the situation is like to somebody who has never been in one of the meetings. Family needs take precedence over everything.”

“Like hell they do. Family needs weren’t considered when your cousin Juliana opted to become a Commensal, with permanent sterility. Suppose that Mobarak’s second child had been a boy? Family needs didn’t make your mother become a Commensal, either.”

“I wish she hadn’t. I worry about that. Nobody really knows what being a Commensal can do in the long run.”

“But she did it anyway. And so did one of your great-aunts.”

“Agatha.”

“So they are allowed to choose multi-organism symbiosis and sterility, in exchange for guaranteed health and beauty. But you can’t. Let’s get back to the subject. To be a negotiable asset with Cyrus Mobarak, you have to be young, male, of adequate intelligence, and able to
breed
. Like you. It’s a miracle they let you come and work here in the first place. Who knows who you might sleep with? Who knows what diseases you might pick up? And there’s another thing.”

Here it came, the moment Alex had been dreading. Kate held her glass in front of her face, so he couldn’t see her mouth and chin as she said, “What about us?”

“Us?”

“Us. Do you want it spelled? U-S. You and me. I suppose all this pressure of important family business has made it escape your attention, but you and I have been sharing a bed for the past two months. I had the illusion that you were enjoying it. What happens if the great family union is achieved, you are the popular choice, and Lucy becomes Mrs. Alex Ligon?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I do.” Kate slammed her glass down hard, so that the sweet and sticky liquor splashed out onto the table. “I’m not a possessive person, but sharing a dick with somebody else—even if she’s the heir to the whole Mobarak fortune—isn’t my idea of a good time. You go fuck Lucy if you want to. And while you’re at it you can go fuck yourself.”

Kate stared at Alex, her eyes blinking rapidly. Then she stood up, tugged her dress higher so that it covered her to the neck, turned, and was gone.

Alex sat alone. He had hoped to share with Kate his concerns over his mother. He had examined Lena Ligon closely during the meeting at family headquarters, and believed he saw evidence that the Commensal his mother had become was profoundly different from the original person.

He wasn’t going to be able to talk about those worries tonight; nor would any bed he slept in have Kate Lonaker by his side. The evening stretched out in front of him, empty and barren.

He stood up and headed for his office. Should he run his computer models now, rather than waiting for the morning? Maybe not. So far, the glories of Seine-Day had not lived up to their billing.

6

Humans had been listening for messages from the stars for a hundred and fifty years. What were the chances that you, Milly Wu, would here-and-now discover the first one ever?

Milly told herself, all the time, that the odds were enormously against her; and yet, every morning, as she sat down in her little cubicle she felt an odd
frisson
of expectation.

It was her third week of work, and the routine was already familiar. Incoming signals from all wavelengths went first to the central “mill” of the station, for basic processing and reduction to a standard format. The mill was fully automated, and no human played any part in the operation.

Next came a series of computations and tests, again without human involvement, designed to discover deviations from randomness. There is a fine line between a signal that is unpredictable but well-determined, and one that is totally random. For example, the digits of such numbers as π or
e
or Euler’s constant, γ, form an infinite sequence in any number base you care to choose. You can calculate each element of that sequence, such as the number-string that begins π’s base-10 representation, 3.14159265358979323846 … for as long as you have time and patience. No matter where you stop, at the millionth or the billionth or the trillionth digit, there will always be a specific and unique next digit. The number π is therefore well-determined, with absolutely nothing random about it. At the same time, no matter how far you go, the next digit cannot be predicted from what you have already.

Of course, if you were to discover the first thousand or ten thousand digits of π, to any number base, in a signal received from space, that would be another matter. It would provide proof, without doubt and without the need for any other information, that an alien intelligence was broadcasting to the universe.

Milly had known all that, long before she applied for a position with Project Argus. It was also a safe bet that the Argus computers, billions of times faster and more accurate than any human, were screening for untold millions of digit sequences drawn from pure mathematics and physics.

So what did this leave for humans to do? Exactly what Milly was doing now: using the human ability, so far unmatched by any machine, to see
patterns
.

Every morning, the mill produced a variable number of signals with some element of strangeness. Every morning, eighteen humans in their separate cubicles were provided a quota of data sets for individual examination. No one in the analysis group knew how many signals the mill produced on any particular day for human inspection, and all assumed that on some occasions two or more people would be given the same data. In principle no data set was more than one day old, but Hannah Krauss had told Milly that new arrivals would often in their first weeks be given an old anomaly, to see what they made of it. Jack Beston calibrated and compared the quality of people as well as signals.

He was more than an Ogre, he was a paranoid Ogre. Milly and her fellow-workers at the Argus Station could eat together if they wished and interact socially as much as they liked. What they were not supposed to do, ever, was compare notes about their work. Anomalies were not to be advertised, nor were they a subject for group discussion. They were to be reported directly to Jack Beston.

The data for individual analysis were divided into what on the L-4 station were known as “cells.” As Milly pulled in the first cell of the day, she reflected that she too might as well be in a cell. Worse than that, she was in solitary confinement. The cubicle to her left was occupied by a mournful-faced woman in her middle fifties who apparently had no other existence than work. Lota Danes was never in the dining area, and no matter how early Milly came to her cubicle, the door of the neighboring cubicle was always closed and the red sign outside showed that it was occupied. The hyperactive man who sat on Milly’s other side was at the other extreme of behavior. Simon Bitters kept random hours, popped in and out of his cubicle all the time, stuck his head now and again into Milly’s own little partition, placed his right index finger on the end of his nose, then ducked out again without a word. He apparently spent the whole of his working days wandering the station. Milly wondered how he ever fulfilled his daily quota. But apparently he did, otherwise Jack Beston would have shredded him at the weekly review meetings.

“You’ll be a long way from home,” her stepfather had said, just before Milly left Ganymede. “Make friends there, so you won’t feel lonely.”

Sure. But how, with eccentrics like these?

Maybe Milly was one herself. This wasn’t what she had expected when she signed up to come to the L-4 location and the Argus Project, but Hannah Krauss’s warning after her first couple of weeks in some ways matched her stepfather’s. “The work here is challenging and interesting, but it’s lonely. Try to make friends, and find activities outside your work. Do you know the occupational hazards of mathematicians, logicians, and cryptanalysts?”

“Depression?”

“Depression, yes. Also insanity, paranoia, and suicide. And isolation increases the odds.”

Now
they warned you, when you were already here. Milly examined the screen in front of her. She could process the cell that she had just loaded in endless different ways. It came in as a long string of binary digits, anything from a million to billions of 1’s and 0’s. She could transform that to any number base, introduce any breaks that she liked, look for repeating strings, present the data factored into two- or three-dimensional arrays, transform the results to polar or cylindrical or any other orthogonal set of coordinates, examine the Fourier transforms and power spectra of the result, cross-correlate any section with any other, compute the sequence or image entropy, seek size or shape invariants, and display any or all of those results in a wide variety of formats. In the first few days she had developed her own preferred suite of processes, with a shell of operations to run their sequence automatically. All she had to do was sit, observe the results, and allow her imagination to run free in its search for oddities, or—there was always hope—
meaningful
patterns.

While she worked, spectral figures from the past wandered through Milly’s mind. They were her heroes and heroines. Here was Thomas Young, the universally gifted nineteenth-century Englishman who moved so easily from medicine to physics to linguistics. He had taken the multi-language inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone to gain a first handle on interpreting Egyptian hieroglyphics. The polymath Young had dismissed his work casually, as “the amusement of a few leisure hours.” Here was the Frenchman, Jean-François Champollion, finishing the work that Young had begun, and writing his book on the subject that had so fascinated Milly at seventeen—the same age at which Champollion had been made a full professor at Grenoble.

A century later than Champollion, the quiet American classicist Alice Kober had patiently begun to unravel the mysteries of the Cretan language, Linear B, work that after her early death was completed by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick. By Chadwick’s side, as a fellow worker at an English classified facility during wartime, stood the enigmatic and tragic figure of Alan Turing. Turing, with his rumpled clothes, dirty nails, and unshaven face, had been a nonpareil cryptanalyst, as well as the godfather of all the computers that now surrounded Milly. His life had ended with the suicide that Hannah Krauss warned of for workers in cryptanalysis. Behind Turing, a century earlier, stood another computer godfather, Charles Babbage, himself a noted cryptanalyst who had cracked the “unbreakable” Vigenère cipher and who straddled the line between genius and eccentricity.

The godmother for Milly’s own field, the interpretation of signals from the stars, had been born a generation later than Turing. Jocelyn Bell, when she was no older than Milly herself, sat alone day after day and night after night studying radio telescope signals, until one day she came across curious repeating patterns of electronic noise that she had named “scruff.” For a time, Jocelyn Bell and her research supervisor believed that what she had found was what Milly now longed so desperately to see: synthetic signals from far across the galaxy, sent by intelligent beings. They even—in private if not in public—called them “LGM objects,” the initials standing for Little Green Men. Jocelyn Bell’s actual discovery, of natural signals sent out by the rapidly rotating neutron stars known as pulsars, was a great surprise and a great event in the history of astrophysics; but it must also have been, in some ways, a disappointment.

And that, Milly reflected, was both the promise and the curse of SETI. If you did discover a pattern, the odds were long against it being what you hoped. Far more likely, you had accidentally come across a natural phenomenon. Nature had a thousand ways of producing a signal with some repeating pattern. Almost everything in space—planets, moons, stars, galaxies—rotated, and each had its own magnetic field. The combination of field and spin could spit pulses of electromagnetic energy in any direction, across thousands or millions of light-years. Discovery of a new such phenomenon might be a great scientific event, but it was not a message from intelligent aliens.

And if what you saw was not natural, then it was most likely a man-made signal, thrown out casually and carelessly by some human activity within the solar system.