Year's Best Scifi 7 Part 51

If Setterholm had been murdered-pushed into the creva.s.se-he might have been trying to pa.s.s on a message about his murderer. Clavain imagined his pain, legs smashed; knowing with absolute certainty he was going to die alone and cold, but willing himself to write Iverson's name...

But why would the climatologist have wanted to kill Setterholm? Setterholm's fascination with the worms was perplexing but harmless. The information Clavain had collected pointed to Setterholm being a single-minded loner; the kind of man who would inspire pity or indifference in his colleagues, rather than hatred. And everyone was dying anyway-against such a background, a murder seemed almost irrelevant.

Maybe he was attributing too much to the six faint marks a dying man had scratched on the ice.

Forcing suspicion from his mind-for now-Clavain stepped into Iverson's room. The room was spartan but serene, with a small blue holographic window set high in one white wall. Clavain wasresponsible for that. Left to the Conjoiners-who had taken over an area of the main American base and filled it with their own pressurized s.p.a.ces-Iverson's room would have been a grim, gray cube. That was fine for the Conjoiners-they moved through informational fields draped like an extra layer over reality.

But though Iverson's head was now drenched with their machines, they were only there to a.s.sist his normal patterns of thought, reinforcing weak synaptic signals and compensating for a far-from-equilibrium mix of neurotransmitters.

So Clavain had insisted on cheering the place up a bit; Iverson's bedsheets and pillow were now the same pure white as the walls, so that his head bobbed in a sea of whiteness. His hair had been trimmed, but Clavain had made sure that no one had done more than neaten Iverson's beard.

"Andrew?" he said. "I'm told you're awake now. I'm Nevil Clavain. How are you feeling?"

Iverson wet his lips before answering. "Better, I suspect, than I have any reason to feel."

"Ah." Clavain beamed, feeling that a large burden had just been lifted from his shoulders. "Then you've some recollection of what happened to you."

"I died, didn't I? Pumped myself full of anti-freeze and hoped for the best. Did it work, or is this just some weird-a.s.s dream as I'm sliding toward brain-death?"

"No, it sure as h.e.l.l worked. That was one weird-heck-a.s.s of a risk..." Clavain halted, not entirely certain that he could emulate Iverson's century-old speech patterns. "That was quite some risk you took.

But it did work, you'll be glad to hear."

Iverson lifted a hand from beneath the bedsheets, examining his palm and the pattern of veins and tendons on the rear. "This is the same body I went under with? You haven't stuck me in a robot, or cloned me, or hooked up my disembodied brain to a virtual-reality generator?"

"None of those things, no. Just mopped up some cell damage, fixed a few things here and there and-um-kick-started you back to the land of the living."

Iverson nodded, but Clavain could tell he was far from convinced. Which was unsurprising: Clavain, after all, had already told a small lie. "So how long was I under?"

"About a century, Andrew. We're an expedition from back home. We came by stars.h.i.+p."

Iverson nodded again, as if this was mere, incidental detail. "We're aboard it now, right?"

"No ... no. We're still on the planet. The s.h.i.+p's parked in orbit."

"And everyone else?"

No point sugaring the pill. "Dead, as far as we can make out. But you must have known that would happen."

"Yeah. But I didn't know for sure, even at the end."

"So what happened? How did you escape the infection, or whatever it was?"

"Sheer luck." Iverson asked for a drink. Clavain fetched him one, and at the same time had the room extrude a chair next to the bed.

"I didn't see much sign of luck," Clavain said.

"No; it was terrible. But I was the lucky one; that's all I meant. I don't know how much you know.

We had to evacuate the outlying bases toward the end, when we couldn't keep more than one fusion reactor running." Iverson took a sip from the gla.s.s of water Clavain had brought him. "If we'd still had the machines to look after us..."

"Yes. That's something we never really understood." Clavain leaned closer to the bed. "Those von Neumann machines were built to self-repair themselves, weren't they? We still don't see how they broke down."

Iverson eyed him. "They didn't. Break down, I mean."

"No? Then what happened?"

"We smashed them up. Like rebellious teenagers overthrowing parental control. The machines were nannying us, and we were sick of it. In hindsight, it wasn't such a good idea."

''Didn't the machines put up a fight?"

"Not exactly. I don't think the people who designed them ever thought they'd get trashed by the kids they'd lovingly cared for."

So, Clavain thought-whatever had happened here; whatever he went onto learn, it was clear that theAmericans had been at least partially the authors of their own misfortunes. He still felt sympathy for them, but now it was cooler; tempered with something close to disgust. He wondered if that feeling of disappointed appraisal would have come so easily without Galiana's machines in his head. It would be just a tiny step to go from feeling that way toward Iverson's people to feeling that way about the rest of humanity... and then I'd know that I'd truly attained Transenlightenment...

Clavain snapped out of his morbid line of thinking. It was not Transenlightenment that engendered those feelings; just ancient, bone-deep cynicism.

"Well, there's no point dwelling on what was done years ago. But how did you survive?"

"After the evacuation, we realized that we'd left something behind-a spare component for the fusion reactor. So I went back for it, taking one of the planes. I landed just as a bad weather front was coming in, which kept me grounded there for two days. That was when the others began to get sick. It happened pretty quickly, and all I knew about it was what I could figure out from the comm links back to the main base."

"Tell me what you did figure out."

"Not much," Iverson said. "It was fast, and it seemed to attack the central nervous system. No one survived it. Those who didn't die of it directly seemed to get themselves killed through accidents or sloppy procedure."

"We noticed. Eventually someone died who was responsible for keeping the fusion reactor running properly. It didn't blow up, did it?"

"No. Just spewed out a lot more neutrons than normal; too much for the s.h.i.+elding to contain. Then it went into emergency shutdown mode. Some people were killed by the radiation, but most died of the cold that came afterward."

"Hm. Except you."

Iverson nodded. "If I hadn't had to go back for that component, I'd have been one of them.

Obviously, I couldn't risk returning. Even if I could have got the reactor working again, there was still the problem of the contaminant." He breathed in deeply, as if steeling himself to recollect what had happened next. "So I weighed my options, and decided dying-freezing myself-was my only hope. No one was going to come from Earth to help me, even if I could have kept myself alive. Not for decades, anyway.

So I took a chance."

"One that paid off."

"Like I said, I was the lucky one." Iverson took another sip from the gla.s.s Clavain had brought him.

"Man, that tastes better than anything I've ever drunk in my life. What's in this, by the way?"

"Just water. Glacial water. Purified, of course."

Iverson nodded, slowly, and put the gla.s.s down next to his bed.

"Not thirsty now?"

"Quenched my thirst nicely, thank you."

"Good." Clavain stood up. "I'll let you get some rest, Andrew. If there's anything you need; anything we can do-just call out."

"I'll be sure to."

Clavain smiled and walked to the door, observing Iverson's obvious relief that the questioning session was over for now. But Iverson had said nothing incriminating, Clavain reminded himself, and his responses were entirely consistent with the fatigue and confusion anyone would feel after so long asleep-or dead, depending on how you defined Iverson's period on ice. It was unfair to a.s.sociate him with Setterholm's death just because of a few indistinct marks gouged in ice, and the faint possibility that Setterholm had been murdered.

Still, Clavain paused before leaving the room. "One other thing, Andrew-just something that's been bothering me, and I wondered if you could help."

"Go ahead."

"Would the initials I, V and F mean anything to you?"

Iverson thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. "Sorry, Nevil. You've got me there."

"Well, it was just a shot in the dark," Clavain said.

Iverson was strong enough to walk around the next day. He insisted on exploring the rest of the base, not simply the parts of it which the Conjoiners had taken over. He wanted to see for himself the damage that he had heard about, and see the lists of the dead-and the manner in which they had died-which Clavain and his friends had a.s.siduously compiled. Clavain kept a watchful eye on the man, aware of how emotionally traumatic the whole experience must be. He was bearing it well, but that could easily have been a front. Galiana's machines could tell a lot about how his brain was functioning, but they were unable to probe Iverson's state of mind at the resolution needed to map emotional well-being.

Clavain, meanwhile, strove as best he could to keep Iverson in the dark about the Conjoiners. He did not want to overwhelm Iverson with strangeness at this delicate time; did not want to shatter the man's illusion that he had been rescued by a group of "normal" human beings. But it turned out to be easier than he had expected, as Iverson showed surprisingly little interest in the history he had missed. Clavain had gone as far as telling him that the Sandra Voi was technically a s.h.i.+p full of refugees, fleeing the aftermath of a war between various factions of solar-system humanity-but Iverson had done little more than nod, never probing Clavain for more details about the war. Once or twice Clavain had even alluded accidentally to the Transenlightenment-that shared consciousness state which the Conjoiners had reached-but Iverson had shown the same lack of interest. He was not even curious about the Sandra Voi herself; never once asking Clavain what the s.h.i.+p was like. It was not quite what Clavain had been expecting.

But there were rewards, too.

Iverson, it turned out, was fascinated by Felka, and Felka herself seemed pleasantly amused by the newcomer. It was, perhaps, not all that surprising: Galiana and the others had been busy helping Felka grow the neural circuitry necessary for normal human interactions, adding new layers to supplant the functional regions which had never worked properly-but in all that time, they had never introduced her to another human being whom she had not already met. And here was Iverson: not just a new voice but a new smell; a new face; a new way of walking-a deluge of new input for her starved mental routines.

Clavain watched the way Felka latched onto Iverson when he entered a room; her attention snapping to him, her delight evident. And Iverson seemed perfectly happy to play the games that so wearied the others; the kinds of intricate challenge which Felka adored. For hours on end he watched the two of them lost in concentration; Iverson pulling mock faces of sorrow or-on the rare occasions when he beat her-extravagant joy. Felka responded in kind, her face more animated-more plausibly human-than Clavain had ever believed possible. She spoke more often in Iverson's presence than she had ever done in his, and the utterances she made more closely approximated well-formed, grammatically sound sentences than the disjointed shards of language Clavain had grown to recognize. It was like watching a difficult, backward child suddenly come alight in the presence of a skilled teacher. Clavain thought back to the time when he had rescued Felka from Mars, and how unlikely it had seemed then that she would ever grow into something resembling a normal adult human, as sensitized to others' feelings as she was to her own. Now, he could almost believe it would happen-yet half the distance she had come had been due to Iverson's influence, rather than his own.

Afterward, when even Iverson had wearied of Felka's ceaseless demands for games, Clavain spoke to him quietly, away from the others.

"You're good with her, aren't you."

Iverson shrugged, as if the matter was of no great consequence to him. "Yeah. I like her. We both enjoy the same kinds of game. If there's a problem-"

He must have detected Clavain's irritation. "No-no problem at all." Clavain put a hand on his shoulder. "There's more to it than just games, though, you have to admit..."

"She's a pretty fascinating case, Nevil."

"I don't disagree. We value her highly." He flinched, aware of how much the remark sounded like one of Galiana's typically flat statements. "But I'm puzzled. You've been revived after nearly a century asleep.

We've come here by a s.h.i.+p that couldn't even have been considered a distant possibility in your own era.

We've undergone ma.s.sive social and technical upheavals in the last hundred years. There are things aboutus-things about me-I haven't told you yet. Things about you I haven't even told you yet."

"I'm just taking things one step at a time, that's all." Iverson shrugged and looked distantly past Clavain, through the window behind him. His gaze must have been skating across kilometers of ice toward Diadem's white horizon, unable to find a purchase. "I admit, I'm not really interested in technological innovations. I'm sure your s.h.i.+p's really nice, but... it's just applied physics. Just engineering.

There may be some new quantum principles underlying your propulsion system, but if that's the case, it's probably just an elaborate curlicue on something that was already pretty baroque to begin with. You haven't smashed the light barrier, have you?" He read Clavain's expression accurately. "No-didn't think so. Maybe if you had..."

"So what exactly does interest you?"

Iverson seemed to hesitate before answering, but when he did speak Clavain had no doubt that he was telling the truth. There was a sudden, missionary fervor in his voice. "Emergence. Specifically, the emergence of complex, almost unpredictable, patterns from systems governed by a few, simple laws.

Consciousness is an excellent example. A human mind's really just a web of simple neuronal cells wired together in a particular way. The laws governing the functioning of those individual cells aren't all that difficult to grasp-a cascade of well-studied electrical, chemical and enzymic processes. The tricky part is the wiring diagram. It certainly isn't encoded in DNA in any but the crudest sense. Otherwise why would a baby bother growing neural connections that are pruned down before birth? That'd be a real waste-if you had a perfect blueprint for the conscious mind, you'd only bother forming the connections you needed. No; the mind organizes itself during growth, and that's why it needs so many more neurones than it'll eventually incorporate into functioning networks. It needs the raw material to work with, as it gropes its way toward a functioning consciousness. The pattern emerges, bootstrapping itself into existence, and the pathways that aren't used-or aren't as efficient as others-are discarded." Iverson paused. "But how this organization happens really isn't understood in any depth. Do you know how many neurones it takes to control the first part of a lobster's gut, Nevil? Have a guess, to the nearest hundred."

Clavain shrugged. "I don't know. Five hundred? A thousand?"

"No. Six. Not six hundred, just six. Six d.a.m.ned neurones. You can't get much simpler than that. But it took decades to understand how those six worked together, let alone how that particular network evolved. The problems aren't inseparable, either. You can't really hope to understand how ten billion neurones organize themselves into a functioning whole unless you understand how the whole actually functions. Oh, we've made some progress-we can tell you exactly which spinal neurones fire to make a lamprey swim, and how that firing pattern maps into muscle motion-but we're a long way from understanding how something as elusive as the concept of 'I' emerges in the developing human mind.

Well, at least we were before I went under. You may be about to tell me you've achieved stunning progress in the last century, but something tells me you were too busy with social upheaval for that."

Clavain felt an urge to argue-angered by the man's tone-but suppressed it, willing himself into a state of serene acceptance. "You're probably right. We've made progress in the other direction-augmenting the mind as it is-but if we genuinely understood brain development, we wouldn't have ended up with a failure like Felka."

"Oh, I wouldn't call her a failure, Nevil."

"I didn't mean it like that."

"Of course not." Now it was Iverson's turn to place a hand on Clavain's shoulder. "But you must see now why I find Felka so fascinating. Her mind is damaged-you told me that yourself, and there's no need to go into the details-but despite that damage, despite the vast abysses in her head, she's beginning to self-a.s.semble the kinds of higher-level neural routines we all take for granted. It's as if the patterns were always there as latent potentials, and it's only now that they're beginning to emerge. Isn't that fascinating? Isn't it something worthy of study?"

Delicately, Clavain removed the man's hand from his shoulder. "I suppose so. I had hoped, however, that there might be something more to it than study."

"I've offended you, and I apologize. My choice of phrase was poor. Of course I care for her."

Clavain felt suddenly awkward, as if he had misjudged a fundamentally decent man. "I understand.Look, ignore what I said."

"Yeah, of course. It-um-will be all right for me to see her again, won't it?"

Clavain nodded. "I'm sure she'd miss you if you weren't around."

Over the next few days Clavain left the two of them to their games, only rarely eavesdropping to see how things were going on. Iverson had asked permission to show Felka around some of the other areas of the base, and after some initial misgivings Clavain and Galiana had both agreed to his request. After that, long hours went by when the two of them were not to be found. Clavain had tracked them once, watching as Iverson led the girl into a disused lab and showed her intricate molecular models. They clearly delighted her; vast fuzzy holographic a.s.semblages of atoms and chemical bonds which floated in the air like Chinese dragons. Wearing c.u.mbersome gloves and goggles, Iverson and Felka were able to manipulate the mega-molecules; forcing them to fold into minimum-energy configurations which brute-force computation would have struggled to predict. As they gestured into the air and made the dragons contort and twist, Clavain watched for the inevitable moment when Felka would grow bored and demand something harder. But it never came. Afterward-when she had returned to the fold, her face s.h.i.+ning with wonder-it was as if Felka had undergone a spiritual experience. Iverson had shown her something which her mind could not instantly encompa.s.s; a problem too large and subtle to be stormed in a flash of intuitive insight.

Seeing that, Clavain again felt guilty about the way he had spoken to Iverson, and knew that he had not completely put aside his doubts about the message Setterholm had left in the ice. But-the riddle of the helmet aside-there was no reason to think that Iverson might be a murderer beyond those haphazard marks. Clavain had looked into Iverson's personnel records from the time before he was frozen, and the man's history was flawless. He had been a solid, professional member of the expedition, well-liked and trusted by the others. Granted, the records were patchy, and since they were stored digitally they could have been doctored to almost any extent. But then much the same story was told by the handwritten diary and verbal log entries of some of the other victims. Andrew Iverson's name came up again and again as a man regarded with affection by his fellows; most certainly not someone capable of murder. Best, then, to discard the evidence of the marks and give him the benefit of the doubt.

Clavain spoke of his fears to Galiana, and while she listened to him, she only came back with exactly the same rational counter-arguments that he had already provided for himself.

"The problem is," Galiana said, "that the man you found in the creva.s.se could have been severely confused; perhaps even hallucinatory. That message he left-if it was a message, and not a set of random gouge marks he left while convulsing-could mean anything at all."

"We don't know that Setterholm was confused," Clavain protested.

"We don't? Then why didn't he make sure his helmet was on properly? It can't have been latched fully, or it wouldn't have rolled off him when he hit the bottom of the creva.s.se."

"Yes," Clavain said. "But I'm reasonably sure he wouldn't have been able to leave the base if his helmet hadn't been latched."

"In which case he must have undone it afterward."

"Yes, but there's no reason for him to have done that, unless..."

Galiana gave him a thin-lipped smile. "Unless he was confused. Back to square one, Nevil."