Charles Sheffield - Dark as Day

“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, nigged 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.

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 ? or e or Euler’s constant, y, 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 ?’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 ? 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 ?, 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.