Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (29 page)

And what if the laws of physics, after all, turned out to permit an exception now and then?

There was the matter of the Heechee ships, and how could one apply known physical law to them? As with every other thinking person in the world, the questions raised by the Heechee had intrigued S. Ya. for a long time. The Gateway asteroid had been discovered while she was still a schoolgirl. The headlines announcing new findings had come every few weeks, all through her college years. Some of her classmates had taken the plunge and specialized in the theory of Heechee control systems. Two were on Gateway now. At least three had shipped out and never returned.

The Heechee ships were not uncontrollable. They could in fact be controlled precisely. The superficial mechanics of the process were known. Each ship possessed five main-drive verfliers, and five auxiliaries. They located coordinates in space (how?), and, once set, the ship went there. Again, how? It then returned unerringly to its place of origin, or usually did, if it did not run out of fuel or encounter a mischance-a triumph of cybernetics that S. Ya. knew no human agency could reproduce. The difficulty was that until this very second no human being knew quite how to read the controls.

But what about the next second, or the one after that? With information pouring in, from the Food Factory and Heechee Heaven; with Dead Men talking; with at least one semicompetent human pilot, the boy, Wan-with all this, and especially with the flood of new knowledge that might be unlocked from the prayer fans. . .

How long before some of the mysteries were solved? Perhaps not very long at all.

S. Ya. wished she could be a part of it all, as her classmates had become. As her husband had become. She wished even more that she did not suspect what part he most wanted to play. But the suspicion remained. If Robin could make a Heechee ship fly him to any destination he chose in all the universe, she thought she knew what that destination would be.

Semya Yagrodna Lavorovna-Broadhead called to her secretary, “How much time do I have?”

The program appeared and said, “It is now five twenty-two. Dr. Liederman is expected at six forty-five. You will then be prepared for the procedure, which will occur at eight o’clock. You have a little more than an hour and a quarter. Perhaps you would like to rest?”

S. Ya. chuckled. It always amused her when her own programs offered her advice. She did not, however, feel any need to respond to it. “Have menus been prepared for today and tomorrow?” she asked.

“Nyet, gospozha.”

That was both a relief and a disappointment. At least Robin had not prescribed more fattening foods for today-or perhaps his prescription had been overruled, because of the operation? “Select something,” she ordered. The program was quite capable of preparing menus. It was only because of Robin himself that either of them ever gave a thought to such routine chores. But Robin was Robin, and there were times when cooking was a hobby for him, cutting onions paper-thin for a salad and standing to stir a stew for hours. Sometimes what he produced was awful, sometimes not; Essie was not critical, because she was not very interested in what she ate. And also because she was grateful that she felt no need to concern herself with such matters; in this respect, at least, Robin surpassed her father. “No, wait,” she added, struck with a thought. “When Robin comes home he will be hungry. Serve him a snack-those crullers, and the New Orleans coffee. As at the Cafe du Monde.”

“Da, gospozha.” How devious you are, thought Essie, smiling to herself. One hour and twelve minutes left.

It would do no harm to rest.

On the other hand, she was not sleepy.

She could, she thought, interrogate her medical program again. But she had no real wish to hear about the procedures she faced an additional time. Such large pieces to take from someone else’s body for the sake of her own! The kidney, yes. One might well sell that and still have something left. As a student, Essie had known comrades who had done that, might even have done it herself if she had been just a shade poorer than she actually was. But, although she knew very little more of anatomy than her father had taught her at his knee, she knew enough to be sure that the person, or persons, who had given her all those other tissues would not have enough left to go on living with. It was a queasy feeling.

Almost as queasy as that other feeling that came with knowing that, even with Full Medical, from this particular invasion of her person by Wilma Liederman’s knives she might not return.

Still an hour and eleven minutes.

Essie sat up once more. Whether she was to live or not, she was as dutiful a wife as she had been a daughter, and if Robin wished her to concern herself with prayer fans and Heechee she would. She addressed the computer terminal. “I wish the Albert Einstein program.”

When Essie Broadhead said, “I wish the Albert Einstein program,” she set a large number of events in motion. Very few of these events were visible to the unaided senses. They did not take place in the macroscopic physical world, but in a universe composed largely of charges and pathways operating on the scale of the electron. The individual units were tiny. The total was not, being made up of some sixty billion gigabits of information.

At Akademogorsk, young S. Ya.’s professors had schooled her in the then current computer logics of ion optics and magnetic bubbles. She had learned to trick her computers into doing many marvelous things. They could find million-digit prime numbers or calculate the tides on a mud-flat for a thousand years. They could take a child’s scribble of “House” and “Daddy” and refine it into an engineer’s rendering of an architectural plan, and a tailor’s dummy of a man. They could rotate the house, add a sunporch, sheath it in stucco or cover it with ivy. They could shave off a beard, add a wig, costume the man for yachting or golfing, for boardroom or bar. These were marvelous programs for nineteen-year-old Semya. She found them thrilling. But she had grown since then. By comparison with the programs she was now writing, for her secretary, for “Albert Einstein” and for her many clients, those early ones were slow and stumbling caricatures. They did not have the advantage of circuits borrowed from Heechee technology, or of a circulating memory store of 6 X b’9 bits.

Of course, even Albert did not use all sixty billion gigabits all the time. For one thing, they were not all shared. Even the shared stores were occupied by tens of thousands of programs as subtle and complicated as Albert, and by tens of millions of duller ones. The program called “Albert Einstein” slipped through and among the thousands and the millions without interference. Traffic signals warned him away from occupied circuits. Guideposts led him to subroutines and libraries needed to fulfill his functions. His path was never a straight line. It was a tree of branching decision points, a lightning-stroke of zigzag turns and reverses. It was not truly a “path”, either; Albert never moved. He was never in a specific place to move from. It is at least arguable whether Albert “was” anything at all. He had no continuous existence. When Robin Broadhead was through with him and turned him off he ceased to be, and his subroutines picked up other tasks. When he was turned on again he recreated himself from whatever circuits were idle, according to the program S. Ya. had written. He was no more real than an equation, and no less so than God.

“I wish-“ S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead had said.

Before her voice was halfway through the first vowel the sound-activated gate in the monitor’s receiver summoned up her secretarial program. The secretary did not appear. She read the first trace of the name that followed- “-the Albert Einstein-“

matched it against her command store, made a probabilistic assessment of the rest and issued an instruction. That was not all the secretary did. Before that she had recognized the voice of S. Ya. and confirmed that it was that of an authorized person-the person who had written her, in fact. She checked her store for undelivered messages, found several, and weighed their urgency. She made a quick sweep of Essie’s telemetry readings to estimate her physical condition, retrieved the memory of her proximate surgery, balanced them against the messages and the present instruction, and decided the messages need not be delivered, and in fact could be handled by Essie’s surrogate. All that took very little time and involved only a minor fraction of the secretary’s full program. She did not need to remember, for instance, what she was supposed to look like or how her voice was supposed to sound. So she did not bother.

The secretary’s instruction woke “Albert Einstein”.

He did not at first know that he was Albert Einstein. As he read his program he discovered several things about himself. First, that he was an interactive information-retrieval program, whereupon he searched for and found addresses for the principal categories of information he was supposed to supply. Second, that he was heuristic and normative, which obliged him to look for the rules, in the form of go and no-go gates, that determined his decision-making. Third, that he was the property of Robin- a.k.a. Robinette, Rob, Robby, Bob or Bobby-Stetley Broadhead and would be required to interact with him on a basis of “knowing” him. This impelled the Albert program to access the Robin Broadhead files, and rehearse their contents-by far the most time-consuming part of his task so far. When all this was done he discovered his name and the details of his appearance. He made a series of arbitrary choices of costume-pullover sweater, or stained gray sweatshirt; slippers or frayed tennis shoes with a toe poking out; socks or none-and appeared in the tank of the monitor in the guise of the real Albert Einstein, pipe in hand, mild eyes humorously inquiring, before the last echo of the command had died.

“-program.”

He had had plenty of time. It had taken Essie nearly four-tenths of a second to speak his name.

As she had spoken in English, he greeted her in the same language. “Good-“ quick check of local time, “morning,-“ fast assessment of Essie’s mood and condition, “Mrs. Broadhead.” If she had been dressed for the office he would have called her “Lavorovna.”

Essie studied him appraisingly for several seconds, an infinity of time for Albert. He did not waste it. He was a shared-time program, and the parts of his capacity that were not in active use at any particular pico-second busied themselves at other tasks.

Whatever task was going. While he waited, parts of him were excused to help other programs make a weather forecast for a sport-fishing vessel leaving Long Island Sound, teach the conjugation of French verbs to a little girl, animate a sexual doll for a wealthy, and quirky, old recluse, and tally gold prices received from the Peking exchange. There were almost always other tasks on line. When there were not, there were the waiting batch-process files of less urgent problems-nuclear particle path analysis, the refinement of asteroid orbits, the balancing of a million checkbooks-that any of the sixty billion gigabits might turn a hand to in an idle moment.

Albert was not the same as Robin’s other programs-the lawyer, the doctor, the secretary, the psychoanalyst, or any of the surrogates who functioned for Robin Broadhead when Robin was busy or disinclined. Albert shared many memories with them. They freely accessed each other’s files. Each had a specific universe of action, tasked for specific needs; but they could not carry out their tasks without awareness of each other.

Apart from that, they were each the personal property of Robin Broadhead, slaved to his will. So sophisticated was Albert that he could read contextual clues and deduce imperatives. He was not limited in his responses by what Robin said to him. He was able to read deeper questions from the totality of everything Robin had ever said, to any of his programs. Albert could not betray a confidence of Robin’s, or fail to recognize what was confidential. Generally.

There were exceptions. The person who had written Albert’s program in the first place could easily write an overriding command, and had.

“Robin instructed you to prepare summaries for me,” Essie told her creation. “Give them to me now.” She watched critically and also admiringly as the program she bad written nodded, scratched its ear with its pipestem and began to speak. Albert was quite a good program, she thought with pride. For a collection of electronic impulses living in rag stores-weakly crystalline dichalcogenides with the structure of a wet dishrag-Albert was a rather attractive person.

She adjusted her tubes and piping and leaned back against pillows to listen to what Albert had to say. It was all most exceedingly interesting. Even to her, even at this time when in-what was it?-in less than one hour ten minutes she would be sponged and stripped and shaved and basted for further invasions of her inner person. As all she demanded of the Albert program at this time was edited memories of conversations that had already occurred, she knew that he had dismissed large parts of himself to other work. But what was left, she observed critically, was quite solid. The transition from the interactive Albert waiting for her question to the remembered Albert talking to her husband was done smoothly and without jumps-if one did not look for such minor imperfections as that the pipe was suddenly alight, and the socks abruptly pulled up over the ankles. Satisfied, Essie paid attention to the content of what was going on. It was not just one conversation, she perceived. There were at least three. Robin must have been spending a lot of time talking to his science program in Brasilia, and while one part of her mind was listening to the exciting news from Heechee Heaven another part was smiling at herself. How amusing that she should be pleased at this evidence that he had not used his hotel suite for other purposes! (Or at least not exclusively, she amended.) He could not have been blamed if he had chosen a living companion instead. Even a female one. Under the circumstances, with a main lover in no condition to be very responsive, she would certainly have felt free to do the same. (Well, not certainly. There was enough early Soviet prudishness left in Essie for at least a doubt.) But she admitted to herself that she was pleased, and then made herself attend to the truly fascinating things that were being said. So much happening! So much to absorb!