Resurgence

It was an odd definition of luck, but Hans understood. The powdery layer had advanced to within a few meters of their feet. He said, “No point in waiting. Let’s hope we were right about the destabilizing field. I’m going to turn mine on now.”

“Me, too. Hans, I hope I’ll meet you on the other side—wherever that is.”

“You have to. Remember, you promised me there would be a better time? You can’t renege on that.”

Hans raised his gaze to the upper edge of his suit’s faceplate. He glanced in turn at each element of the control sites that would cause his suit to generate a cancellation field. The suit’s sensors, tracking his eye movements, turned the field on.

He had time for one more moment of worry. Would the field’s active radius be enough to include Ben, whose body Hans was still holding? If not, what would happen to both of them?

And then there was no time for either worries or actions. The weak gravity of the planet seemed to vanish. Hans was in freefall, still holding his burden, dropping down through the deadly surface of Iceworld and on toward the unknown interior.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN The perfect embodied computer

E. Crimson Tally had been reluctant to talk at any length to Julian Graves and the others about the changes and improvements made since his first embodiment. That would sound too much like boasting.

For example, having attosecond circuitry seemed on the face of it like a good thing, something you would want all of the time. Years ago, within days of his initial embodiment and activation, he had learned otherwise. Yes, he could think trillions of times as fast as any organic intelligence, and with an accuracy and repeatability beyond their imagining; but as one consequence of that speed he had been obliged to spend almost all his time waiting, as he was now waiting. How would Darya Lang like it, if she asked E.C. a question and then had to hang around ten years before she had an answer?

He had learned to get by, sitting quietly and calculating the first ten billion prime numbers or seeking repeating digit strings in pi while he waited for the first word of response, but you could only stand so much of that. Among the improvements in his second embodiment was one that he had specifically requested: he wanted a stand-by mode. And he didn’t mean simply the one he’d had before, which dropped his internal clock rate by a factor of a thousand or a million. No, he wanted a genuine stand-by mode, in which he could “sleep” the way that others slept, brought back to consciousness only when his senses were jogged by some external event—such as someone finally getting around to answering his question.

Now he had that ability to sleep, and it was better than anyone else’s. Like them, he could wake when provided by an outside stimulus. But he could also set his internal timer to a precise interval and become active when a second, a week, a month, or a century had passed.

E.C. Tally’s own logic circuits made him amend that thought. He could not be certain that sleep for a long interval would work, since he himself had only tested periods up to one day. On the other hand, the required changes had been put in place by Sue Harbeson Ando and Lee Boro, back on Miranda, and those two ladies were perfectionists. True, they had never managed to fix his smile so it didn’t make other humans shudder, but that was nerves and muscle connections, not computer functions. He had complete confidence in Ando and Boro. They had certainly tightened and adjusted him in other desirable ways.

Deliberately, E.C. allowed his thoughts to wander to time travel and to the paradoxes that the idea introduced. Suppose that a man went back in time, and killed his own grandfather? Would he then cease to exist? Maybe he would, and maybe he wouldn’t. Tally felt quite comfortable, whereas considerations of time travel in his earlier unimproved form had sent him into a loop from which only a cold start could rescue him.

And quantum theory, with all its now-you-see-it now-you-don’t peekaboo elements? He was just as comfortable with that. His brain could now handle everything from Lukasiewicz’s three-valued logic, to Reichenbach’s infinite-valued logic with its continuous range of truth-values.

Tally permitted himself the luxury of one final test. He turned his mind to Russell’s statement of the granddaddy of all true/false problems: “A barber in a certain village shaves all those, and only those, who do not shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself?”

Well, if he doesn’t shave himself, then since he shaves everyone who doesn’t shave himself, he shaves himself. On the other hand, if he shaves himself . . .

E.C. pursued the endless logical trail, on through the theory of types, meta-set theory, and fuzzy logic. It ate up idle time in a pleasant manner. Only the greater pleasure of a call from Julian Graves could exceed it.