James P. Hogan (30 page)

The road that the gang was working on ran between rows of corn, at the base of a series of terraced plantations of vines, fruit trees, soybeans, and tomatoes. Above, through the transparent roof section by the nearby agricultural station, one of the minor spokes soared upward to merge into the clutter of the hub structure a half mile overhead. A mild breeze was blowing from the west, and the environment provided a welcome change from Zamork for the guards as well as for the prisoners, which meant that nobody was in any hurry to get the job done, so supervision was minimal. Two of the guards were playing cards across the hood of one of the trucks and another was sitting reading in the driver’s seat, while the rest sauntered about casually, sometimes exchanging words with the prisoners. McCain was working with Koh a short distance away from the others, using rakes to spread a sticky gray concoction of lunar-rock furnace slag and binding compound processed from industrial leftovers.

“So, what did you do?” McCain asked.

“How do you mean?” Koh replied. McCain had the feeling that Koh knew quite well what he meant.

“You said once that you’d tell me sometime about what you did to wind up in here.”

Koh worked on in silence for a while. McCain thought he was ignoring the question, when suddenly Koh chuckled. “Do you remember the incident at the Asian Industrial Fair in Chungking a couple of years ago?”

“Seems to ring a kind of a bell…. There was a fire, wasn’t there? Something to do with the KGB.”

“A Chinese traditionalist movement called White Moon was making a nuisance of itself, campaigning against industrialization and modernization,” Koh said. “They staged a demonstration at the Chinese pavilion… or at least, that was the way it was supposed to look.”

McCain nodded. “Now I remember. Except they weren’t White Moon people at all. They were importers. It was a stunt set up by the Chinese intelligence sendee to discredit them and justify imposing tighter restrictions, But later, the guy who authorized it admitted he was working for the KGB. So all the time, it was a deception orchestrated by Mosc…” McCain’s voice trailed away. He stopped what he was doing and looked up suddenly. “Wait a minute, Nakajima-Lin Kohmei-Tso-Liang – it was
you
! You were the KGB’s inside man, the head of Chinese intelligence.”

“Deputy head,” Koh said.

“Whatever. So what went wrong? How’d you wind up in here?”

Koh chuckled again. “Yes, it was my idea – a bit unfair, I suppose, but you’ve no idea how difficult White Moon was becoming. It was just intended to be a demonstration. The people we hired weren’t supposed to burn the whole pavilion down. That was entirely due to an overzealous subordinate. But it was my responsibility, and we do have a strong sense of honor…” Koh shook his head from side to side, and his breath came in quick, shaking gasps, as if what was amusing him was too much to bear. “But, you see, the KGB had nothing to do with it, hee-hee-hee…. I only made that confession after everything was blown anyway.”

“You mean you never worked for the KGB?

“No. It was probably the first piece of international mischief in which they were genuinely innocent, ha-ha-ha… and nobody believed them!”

McCain smiled and turned back to his raking. “And so?”

“So, the KGB kidnapped me to make sure I wouldn’t do anything like that again, and here I am.”

The dump truck arrived to deposit another load of material and then went to collect a fresh charge from the mixer at the far end of the workings. One of the guards came close to inspect what they were doing, then moved away. They worked on in silence for a while. Finally McCain said, “Scanlon told me I should talk to you.”

“Oh yes?”

“Have you ever heard of an escape committee, back at Zamork?”

“One hears all kinds of things in Zamork.”

“Do you think it’s possible at all – escaping from here?”

“They say all things are possible.”

It seemed McCain was going to have to work for it. He tried a more oblique approach. “If there were an escape committee, and if it were up to you, who would you trust to recruit into it?” he asked.

“I get the impression that you are already doing an excellent job of working that out for yourself,” Koh said.

“Who are the dangerous ones? Who would you leave out?” Koh didn’t answer at once, and McCain prompted.

“I’d assume not Luchenko and that bunch at the far end, for a start – Nolan and the rest.”

Koh frowned. “I’m not so convinced Nolan is one of them,” he said at last. “I don’t doubt he’s a true believer, but that doesn’t mean they’d trust him enough to be a plant. Their leaders tend to be contemptuous of true Marxists, you know. Stalin wasn’t at all happy when Beria proposed recruiting upward-bound idealists from English universities back in the nineteen-thirties. He didn’t think people who believed such twaddle could make reliable spies.”

At least Koh was talking more out here than he usually did. McCain sought to keep it going. “What motivates people like Nolan?” he asked.

“Fear of freedom.”

“That sounds like a strange thing to say.”

“Not if you think about it. In the long term, humanity is evolving toward the emergence of individualism. Merging the Western philosophy of individual freedom and the political and economic principles that go with that into its own culture is probably the greatest single thing that has happened to Asia. It’s the force that is shaping the twenty-first century.”

“The good old American system.”

“Yes. But nobody ever said it had to stay in America. In any case, it originated in Europe.”

“Okay.”

Koh went on, “But sometimes social changes are too fast for people to adapt to. When that happens, people are left feeling insecure, threatened by forces they don’t understand and can’t cope with. So they try to escape by turning the clock back. Early social orders like the feudal systems suppressed individuality, but in return they provided security and certainty. You knew who you were, where you belonged, and what was expected of you – as in childhood, where the authority of the family constrains, but at the same time protects.”

“Children have to grow up eventually.”

“Yes, and so do people. But when, the change is too fast and leaves them feeling isolated, people turn to authoritarianism for the certainty and security they have lost. Hence the rise of Reformation religions of Luther and Calvin when European feudalism collapsed. The middle classes flocked to prostrate themselves before an all-powerful God whose strength would protect them.”

“That’s just about what happened with Nazi Germany, too,” McCain said as he worked.

“Precisely. They weren’t ready to become a liberal democracy when the Allies tried to impose it on them after 1918. They, too, yearned for the kind of authority they were used to, and for a strong leader who would take responsibility and make the decisions.” Koh shrugged. “And they found one.” He lifted a hand from his rake to gesture vaguely at the colony around them. “And the same thing is true of this Soviet political monstrosity. Progressive? Pah! Nothing of the kind. It’s the last relic of an order that’s on its way out.”

“You and Scanlon seem to talk about that kind of thing a lot,” McCain said.

“Aren’t all the Irish supposed to be philosophers of life, ‘which means everything’?” Koh replied.

McCain straightened up and drew a handkerchief from his pants pocket to wipe the sheen of perspiration from his forehead. “Getting back to Scanlon,” he said. “About four days ago he told me —”

Koh cut him off with a wave of his hand. “You can save yourself the lengthy explanation.” He nodded toward the truck a hundred yards back along the road, which carried the tools, lunch bags, and other oddments. “When you pick up your jacket, look in the inside pocket. You will find something there that should answer your questions. Think of it as a gesture of good faith by the escape committee. They feel there might be grounds for you and them to get together. I get the impression that you feel the same way.”

“Then, it does really exist?”

“Certainly.”

“But how?…”

Koh smiled and shook his head, “Never mind how I know the things I know. Let’s just say, Mr. Earnshaw, that both of us know something about the intelligence business.”

When the gas pedal of an automobile is pressed harder, the vehicle goes faster. Within the throttle’s operating range, the output of the process changes smoothly with input. The mathematical relationship connecting the two is an example of a “linear” function. When pressure is steadily increased on the trigger of a gun, on the other hand, the operation is markedly nonlinear: nothing much happens until the mechanism is on the point of tripping, after which an infinitesimally small further increase of input brings about an abrupt and spectacular change in system output – the gun fires.

Most mathematical representations of nature take the form of functions that change smoothly. The real-world processes that they model, however, invariably lead to discontinuities when taken far enough, and the models turn out to be merely approximations that are close enough to be useful over limited ranges. Thus, solids eventually melt, liquids boil, a star condenses, or a new species emerges: suddenly a phase change occurs in which the former behavior breaks down, new laws supplant the old, and all the previous limits and projections cease to mean anything. These boundaries are the places where the really interesting things in nature happen. Crossing them is what is called Evolution.

Paula had received her first insight into the astonishing complexities that can arise from nonlinear systems when she was studying complex-number theory at college. A “complex” number consists of two independent parts, like the latitude and longitude components of a map reference. And like the points on a map, the total field of all complex numbers can be represented by the infinity of points on a plane – unlike ordinary, one-part numbers, all of which can be represented by the points on an endless line. Now, infinitely many points exist between any two points on a plane, however close to each other they might be; and an infinity of numbers exists between any two of the numbers in the complex-number plane. Therefore, if an arbitrary path is traced across the plane, the value of the numbers that the path passes over will change smoothly with the distance moved: an infinitesimally small change of position will yield an infinitesimally small change in number value. There are no sudden jumps.

The function that particularly excited Paula is called the “Mandelbrot Set,” and has been described as the most complicated object known to mathematics. Yet the method of generating it is amazingly uncomplicated. A point is taken on the complex plane, and the number that it corresponds to is used as the input to a simple equation. The equation is then evaluated to produce a result. Depending on the range that the result falls in, a color is assigned to the corresponding point on a display screen. Repeating the procedure for all the other points generates a color map of how the result obtained changes from place to place for the originally smooth-changing number field. The outcome is not a mixture of formless patches as might be supposed, which would denote lumplike properties varying steadily from region to region. Instead, what emerges is highly organized, infinitely detailed
structure
! Totally unexpected discontinuities and instabilities appear, in which the minutest variations of input send the results fleeing away to infinity; and yet a curious connectedness remains, producing spirals, snowflakes, filaments, and strangely beautiful compound forms, ever-varying in an unending regress of successive levels of detail down to whatever resolution might be explored.

Reflecting on how a simple mathematical relationship could create such astounding richness of form out of nothing more than a smoothly graded number field, Paula had suddenly made the connection to the generation of form and structure in the natural world – for the shapes and whirls and connecting threads revealed in the graphics imagery were compellingly evocative of the structures found in nature. And was not the entire physical universe the product of physical “processors” operating analogously upon steadily varying gradients of electric and magnetic fields, chemical concentrations, pressures, temperatures, velocities, and densities, from the molecular fields that guide the differentiation of growing embryos to the ridges and chasms of space-time that mold galaxies? That was when she had experienced her first true excitement at the world of the physical sciences, from which had grown the compulsion to comprehend more of its workings that she had known ever since.

She was reminded of those natural hairspring mechanisms now, as she sat staring at a display screen in a computer-graphics lab in the Government Center at Turgenev. One of the things the
Valentina Tereshkova
experiment was revealing already was that there was still much to be learned about maintaining complex closed ecologies. With Olga’s help, Paula had ended up working in a section of the Environmental Department, creating computer models of plant and microorganism interaction cycles. The hope was eventually to integrate such models into a comprehensive simulation of the colony’s entire biology – although that goal could easily be still many years away. She traveled with an escorted party of others to Turgenev every day through a five-day week, and back to Zamork in the evening. She spent most of her time there in the graphics lab of the central computer facility. The lab was located in a less restricted part of the same general computing complex in which Magician had met his downfall.

On the screen, an intricate, constantly changing network of colored symbols interconnected by flow lines and feedback loops modeled dynamically the collective metabolism of one of the closed aquatic ecosystems being tested in the biolab area at Landausk. Currently the ecology inside
Valentina Tereshkova
was sustained by using industrial engineering processes to produce atmospheric gases, recycle water, and remove wastes. The longer-term intention was to develop a self-regulating biological system to perform these functions – an Earth-type ecology in miniature, But the subtleties and complexities of the interactions involved, even in a small, isolated aquatic system simpler than any farmyard pond, were endless and fascinating. She had thought for a long time at the back of her mind about quitting the Air Force and defense work for a field to which she could devote herself with total absorption. But for some reason she had always put it off for just one more year….