Resurgence

“Tally, I know you are eager to leave, but I have kept you here because I have a task for you.”

At last. After a full day of idleness. Tally switched his circuits from background to turbo mode. “I am ready.”

“This will involve colossal amounts of computation. It will possibly exceed your resources.”

“We shall see.”

Tally was merely being polite. Of course, it had come nowhere close to straining his capabilities. The amount of calculation was gigantic, but he had it completed, checked, and re-checked in a few hours. Now, surely, he would be allowed to leave.

But no. Once again he was obliged to sit in stand-by mode, this time for an even longer period. At last the second call came.

“The results that you provided are most satisfactory. Are you still prepared for departure?”

“I am completely ready. My ship is also ready.” In fact, I have been ready for days, while you have brooded over the doings of Professor Lang and Captain Rebka and the results that I gave you. Tally kept the last sentence to himself—another of the many improvements installed in his new embodiment.

“Then you may proceed with your mission. Good luck, and do not forget to keep me informed as to whatever you may discover.”

Do not forget. As though an embodied computer ever would or could forget. “I will keep you informed.”

Tally took the final steps to free his own ship, the Tally-ho, from its magnetic bonds to the Pride of Orion. As he did so, it occurred to him that his current embodiment was perfect, in that it could not be improved.

In a sense he was correct. It could not be improved, because no one had ever managed to define good judgment, still less create a working algorithm to provide it.

* * *

Tally had not wasted time while Julian Graves kept him tied to the Pride of Orion’s apron strings. For three full days he had studied the stellar system to which their last Bose transition had brought them, working with unmatched speed and focus, endless patience, and the powers offered by his new ability to handle multi-valued logic systems.

The members of the expedition party from the Orion Arm were all in full agreement: they had not chosen this destination. It had been fed to them as Bose network coordinates, derived from the log of the Chism Polypheme’s ship. When they arrived at an obviously dead system, everyone said, Oh, that’s so typical of a Polypheme. It lied, they always lie. But suppose that the Polypheme had lied, and at the same time told the truth? Then in that case the stellar system to which they had come was both the wrong place to find the Marglotta home world, and at the same time the right place.

E.C. could live with that notion. When the Tally-ho pulled away from its docking he knew exactly where he wanted to go. Of course, he would eventually head for the edge of the dark zone, just as he had said he would, and hope in that way to arrive at the world of the Marglotta. Before taking his leave, however, there were points of interest right here in this system.

One of them was Iceworld, but Professor Lang had already staked her claim to that. Tally had read every report beamed back from the Savior, and he questioned Lang’s assessment that no matter what had been done to it recently, the big, hollow world had begun as a Builder artifact. Unlike everyone else on the Pride of Orion, he did not reject Darya Lang’s idea of a second super-race (perhaps a race of computers?). But didn’t it then make sense that they, rather than the Builders, had created Iceworld?

If so, the rest of the system was wide open as a possible hiding place for real Builder artifacts. Tally, after analysis that would have taken any human a million years of calculation, had a candidate.

His conversation with Julian Graves on the subject had been less than satisfactory.

* * *

“This body.” E.C. Tally indicated on a whole-system display a medium-sized planetoid moving in an orbit far out from the dark star that formed the center of the gravitating set of worlds.

“What about it?” Julian Graves glared at the insignificant object, his great bald brow furrowed with impatience or suspicion. Sometimes Tally wondered if Graves approved of embodied computers. “I’ve never seen a more average lump of rock.”

“Councilor, it doesn’t rotate.”

“I can see that. But it’s very common for planets and moons not to rotate. They become tidally locked to some other body.”

“Tidally locked bodies do rotate. They turn so that they always present the same face to the parent, which means their day is the same as their year. But they rotate. Everything rotates, everything in the universe: electrons, protons, atoms, molecules, moons, planets, stars, gas clouds, galaxies—everything but that planetoid in the display.”

“Let me see the data.” Julian Graves stared at the screen filled with numbers provided by E.C. and went silent for half a minute.