Eileen Gunn: Stable Strategies and Others

Bob leaped for the control panel he had been warned away from. There was a joystick there, mated to a potentiometer. It was calibrated from a central point with positive and negative numbers, and the pointer was set to the extreme left. He slammed it all the way to the right.

Tesla snapped out of existence, leaving only a lingering aftereffect on Bob’s strained eyeballs, and a faint acrid odor, like a carbide lamp.

The now-familiar rumbling started again.

From a raging storm, the ship had been transported to a sea that was as still as glass. The sky was dark but it slowly filled with millions of twinkling mothlike creatures the shape and texture of doilies, and the size of delicate clumps of snowflakes. They glowed faintly. But they seemed to be harmless, though their trilling was threatening to get on Grace’s nerves.

Grace stood on deck, watching the snowflakes swirl. It was night here, wherever “here” was. By ship’s time, it was also night. Grace had set a watch and ordered all sailors not on watch to their bunks. Everyone was tired, and tired men made mistakes. She herself was weary to the bone. How long had it been since she had stopped to rest or had grabbed a bite to eat? She had volunteered for this assignment so eagerly! All she had wanted was a bit of experience at sea, all but impossible for a woman to get. And now she had a command.

The moon was almost full. Overhead, the snowflakes spun in the moonlight. Tiny flying flecks of lace, each about as big across as the tip of her little finger. A few of them landed on the deck, and she examined them. Each had a unique pattern on its lacy wings. Like snowflakes, maybe — no two alike.

Idly, she held out her hand and watched as a snowflake landed on it. Its tiny feet tickled her palm. Its wings, extended, formed a lacy circle around a tiny body no bigger than the head of a pin. As she was watching it, a snowflake landed on her other hand. She was idly studying the newcomer when two snowflakes that were somehow joined together fluttered past, just in front of her eyes. Were they mating?

Now there as a minuscule tickle on her right hand. Another snowflake had landed near the first. Then a chain of three snowflakes fluttered past her eyes. Startled, she stepped back, lifting the hand that held the snowflakes.

Two more snowflakes landed on her left hand, making three on that hand and two on the right. A chain of five circled her. She shook her head, astonished.

“Wherever we are, it’s an improvement.” It was Asimov, returning to the deck. “What are all these flying whatchamacallums?”

“They’re insects of some kind.” She laughed. “I think they are trying to teach me arithmetic.”

The snowflakes regrouped and tried something different. Two went by, then two more, followed by four. Three and two were followed by six, four and two by eight. “Multiplication,” she acknowledged. She flashed five fingers two times.

They regrouped again. Four came by, followed by two groups of two. Nine, followed by two groups of three. Sixteen, followed by two groups of four. “Square roots!” she said. She flashed five fingers five times with her left hand, then flashed five fingers twice with her right.

A third regrouping. Grace was expecting cube roots. Instead, the snowflakes glided by slowly in a long line: a flake, a space, a flake, a space, two flakes, a space, three flakes, a space, five flakes, a space, eight flakes, a space, thirteen flakes, a space….

“The Fibonacci sequence!” Asimov couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

“They’re talking to me ,” Grace complained jokingly, and flashed twenty-one fingers.

Asimov held out his hands. A snowflake landed on each, starting him out simply with one plus one.

“No short cuts,” said Grace.

“Perhaps they form some kind of collective intelligence,” Asimov mused. “The whole is more than the sum of the parts. That’s the theory behind computers, after all. Each relay is a binary decision point. But put them all together and….” He waved his hands. The snowflakes were up to three plus two: three on his left hand; two on his right.

Asimov was being patronizing again. But watching the snowflakes had mellowed Grace’s mood. “I know all that already. If we make it home,” she said, then corrected herself: “ When we make it home, I’ll be working with the Mark I.” The Mark I was the world’s first large-scale automatically sequenced digital computer.

“Oh,” Asimov said humbly. “I should have figured. I’m always attracted to beautiful older women who are smarter than I am.”

“Isaac, if you were a military man, that would be insubordination. But I’ll overlook it in a civilian,” Grace said absently. She addressed the snowflakes politely. “What I need to know is how to find our way home. Simple arithmetic won’t help me there. It’s more of a geometry problem.”

All the snowflakes formed a whirling ball in the air. Individual flakes flew out, one, one, two, three, five, eight…, the smaller groups converging loosely in a dome over Grace and Isaac, who for once stood speechless. The dome grew quickly until it contained hundreds of the insects, arranged in helical spirals like the seeds on a sunflower. Responding to invisible cues, they whirled in place, first to emphasize their arrangement in left-twisting spirals, then to emphasize their right-twisting spirals.

“I have no idea how to respond,” Grace said to Isaac. “I don’t know what answer they want from me on this one.”

As they watched, six snowflakes, along a single helix winding down from the top, started whirling madly, then curved in on one another in a small loop back to the top.

There was a message there for her, she was sure, but she couldn’t figure it out.

Grace felt something in the air — a crackle of static electricity. “Wait!” she cried, but the ship’s vibration drowned out her voice. St. Elmo’s fire crackled among the guy cables and railings. They were jumping again.

She closed her eyes, striving to retain the image of the snowflake sphere, with its helices and loop. Suddenly the air on her face was cold. The breeze carried a chemical taint that reminded Grace of drying paint and diesel exhaust. Her breath burned in her throat.

She opened her eyes. The snowflakes were gone. The moon was gone. The sun was low on the western horizon, setting cold and red over dark, still waters.

In her heart, she mourned the loss of all the snowflakes were about to teach her. Now she knew how it must have felt to an Alexandrian scholar to stand watching as the Great Library burned.

The vibrations shuddered to a stop. Duty called. Putting away all thought of the snowflakes, she asked, “Where are we?”

“At the end of the world,” Asimov murmured, his face bleak.

They found Heinlein on the main deck pushing through a crowd of sailors roused from sleep by the jump. The sailors clustered at the rail, staring at the dim sun that hung motionless over the black water. There was no life in that water; Grace knew that. And somehow, that absence of life was more threatening than any number of krakens and plesiosaurs.

Heinlein wore an expression that combined mortification and despair. Grace knew in a glance that he had been responsible for their last jump. “You pulled the switch,” she said. “Where was it?”

“I didn’t have a choi— ” He caught himself. “In the torpedo room.”

“You acted without consulting your commanding officer? You simply acted on whatever thought came into your head?” He had ruined their best chance of getting back now. “No wonder you were refused a commission, Mr. Heinlein. You are not cut out to be part of a military force.”