Resurgence (21 page)

"Exactly. Which leaves a single question, but one with huge potential consequences: we can reenter the same node by which we came here. It is sitting a few minutes away. But what transition sequence from here might take us to Marglotta?"

Teri and Torran glanced across at one of the displays, where a faint circle of opalescence indicated the presence of the nearby Bose node.

The theory that explained the Bose network in terms of multi-connected spacetimes was so complex that very few people understood it. The practical use was another matter. It was often said that any fool with a suitably equipped ship could enter a Bose node; but that only an absolute fool would try it, without first being in possession of the eighty-four digits that specified the connection between an entry node and the desired exit point. Used correctly, the Bose network had a zero failure rate. Used incorrectly, by specifying an invalid digit stream, one of two things would happen. If you were lucky and you made an error in the
entry point
digits, the string would be rejected and you would pop back into normal space exactly where you had entered the node. If you were unlucky and you made an error in the
exit point
digits, you might know your fate but no one else would. Ships which were discovered by retrospective analysis to have used an invalid exit digit set were never heard from again.

"An impossible problem." Julian Graves was closely watching the expression on the others' faces. "We know where we are, which gives us the input coordinates for a Bose transition. We could follow the method used by Louis Nenda and the
Have-It-All
, pick some other Bose node, generate the entire digit string, make the jump, and hope we arrive where we want to be. With the screening process they propose, that certainly won't be the Marglot system. But it might be a place where someone can tell them how to reach that system. Fairly simple, probably fairly safe, but at best an indirect approach. However, I don't want just any exit node. I want the digit string of the
correct
exit node—in the Marglot system."

Teri said, "Which means we must know the exact string of forty-two numbers. I don't like those odds."

"Nor do I. I asked—or, to be more specific, Steven, who is better at this kind of thing than I am, asked—how much those odds might be improved using other information. We cannot achieve
certainty
, that would be too much to ask for, but can we reduce the risk to an acceptable level?"

Torran Veck raised his eyebrows, which Teri took to mean,
Are you out of your mind?
 

But no one spoke, until Julian Graves continued. "What do we know? Well, we have the exact sequences for a couple of thousand Bose nodes in our own Orion Arm, plus everything for the Bose nodes defined in the Sag Arm and held within the data bank of the Polypheme's ship. If Bose digit strings were random, that would not be any use at all. We would be ruling out only a few thousand numbers, and leaving endless trillions of trillions of possible but incorrect sequences. It does not take the computational powers of Steven or E.C. Tally to recognize that avenue leads nowhere. At the same time, I remained convinced that we were all missing something. The clue as to what that might be came when I was pondering the way that the Chism Polypheme at Miranda Port died. We know that a Polypheme will normally live for many thousands of years—we don't know quite how many—before it succumbs to natural causes. That's why it was so surprising to encounter a dead one. But turn that logic around. A Polypheme will live for ages, but it can be killed, like anything else, by violence or by accident. We often emphasize that Polyphemes don't tell the truth, but maybe we should emphasize even more that
they do not take risks
. Think how averse to danger you would be if your normal life expectancy extended over many thousands of years. That tells us something else. No Polypheme would ever expose itself to the totally avoidable risk of attempting a Bose transition with an invalid digit string. And that has another implication."

Torran said softly, "The Polypheme had all the sequences to bring us here. He must also have possessed the correct sequence to return to the final Marglot destination."

"Exactly so. He would not have risked
remembering
it. Nor would he store the sequence in an open file. The number string must have been stored somewhere in the ship's data banks, in a hidden place from which the Polypheme could recall it when it was needed."

"But the data banks—" Teri paused. "They don't have just millions or billions of numbers, they have many trillions of them. Everything from artifact catalogs to navigational data to engineering data. I'm sure they also contain all the standard encyclopedias for many worlds and many species."

"Quite true. An impossible job, right, to find the forty-two digit sequence that we need? Impossible to us, that is—but not impossible to E.C. Tally. It's a natural for him. Remember, he already downloaded everything in the Polypheme ship's data banks into his own memory.

"I asked him to do four things. First, to take the known digit sequences of every known Bose node, and derive from them as many characteristic string properties and statistics as he could. Second, to sort out from the data banks of the Polypheme ship every discrete and identifiable forty-two-digit sequence—I knew there would be trillions of them. Third, to test every one of those sequences to see if they possessed the statistical properties derived from known Bose node sequences. And finally, to provide a ranked list of matches in order of their goodness of fit, together with some numerical measure of confidence in the result."

Teri muttered, almost to herself, "An absolutely monstrous job."

"Agreed. It is monstrous, even Steven admitted that it would be quite beyond him. But it's meat and drink to an embodied computer like Tally. He ate it up. I had no idea how long it might take him, days or weeks or months. But he was finished in a few hours. Do you want to see the results?"

The councilor did not wait for an answer. A long table of figures appeared on the wall display behind him. While Torran and Teri studied it, he went on, "As you can see, we have no certainties, no hundred percent fit."

"But isn't that wrong?" Torran Veck was scowling at the screen. "If the number one choice really does represent a Bose node, shouldn't it be on the list?"

"I don't think so. The Chism Polypheme didn't want his private navigation secrets revealed to anybody who tapped his ship's data banks. He deliberately excluded the Bose coordinates of the final destination from his 'official' list of nodes."

"Seventy-two percent probability." Teri had scanned the whole list. "That's the best fit. It's not very good. And the next one is way down, at only eight percent odds."

"Is the glass half full, or is it half empty? Seventy-two percent doesn't sound too great, I agree. But it's so enormously better than eight percent, what are the chances that one match so good would pop up at random?"

Torran said, "You tell us."

"I'll tell you what Steven says. It's only one in a thousand that the digit string you are looking at isn't a genuine Bose sequence. But that doesn't mean most of you will survive if you try it and it's wrong. It's all, or it's nothing. And I'm certainly not going to try to persuade you to take the risk. I'd be quite happy if you would agree to stay here, with the
Pride of Orion
, and serve to coordinate whatever anyone else learns."

Teri asked, "While you do what?"

"While I grow another ship, and make a Bose transition with it."

"Forget that." Torran tried to stand up, but there was not enough space at the table to permit it. "We were trained as survival team members. You just told us that we were the best of the group. Arabella Lund as much as said the same thing. If you go, we go. What are
your
qualifications in survival training?"

"Very limited. I could say that I have survived a large number of dangerous situations, but most of those could have been pure luck. However, that is irrelevant. Do you—both of you—wish to make the Bose transition with me?"

In unison, "We do." Torran added, "Damn right we do. If you like
we'll
go without
you
—we were trained in survival techniques. But no way are you going without us."

"Then there are numerous preparations to be made. A new ship must be grown. Since the
Pride of Orion
will be without a crew, it must be left in a suitable condition to receive and relay all messages arriving from others. I must also send word of our proposed actions to Professor Lang's group, and to E.C. Tally. If you will excuse me . . . "

Graves hurried out. Torran Veck, pushing hard, moved the table far enough for him to move from behind it and stand up. He said, "A bit eager to leave us, don't you think? You know what that means?"

"I have a good idea."

"Graves had all his information days ago, before E.C. Tally left. He has been sitting on it, waiting."

"Right." Teri, penned in by Torran, was at last free to move from her seat. "Waiting until we went stir crazy and came looking for him. He knew that by now we would be so keen to see action, we would go along with whatever he suggested."

"So we were manipulated." Torran shook his head. "By a master. He's damn good at it. Maybe that's what it takes to be an Ethical Councilor—patience and cunning. I hope there's more to it than that."

"We could always back out." They stared at each other, until Teri laughed. "No way, right? Better death than terminal boredom. But we have only seventy-two percent odds in our favor. That means there's a twenty-eight percent chance that we'll make a Bose jump, and end up God-knows-where, or nowhere at all. What then?"

"
Then?
" Torran draped his massive arm over Teri's shoulder. "Why, then we find out how good as survival specialists we really are. Come on, Teri. If we're going to kill ourselves, I'd rather get it over with sooner than later."

The
No Regrets
, created from the shrinking body of the
Pride of Orion
and newly named by Teri Dahl, stood at the very edge of the Bose node. Torran Veck was checking the final matching of entry velocity.

"As good as it gets," he said. "If the exit sequence is wrong, a few millimeters a second won't make any difference at all. We'll be in limbo. Whenever you are ready."

Julian Graves was at an observation window. He was staring not at the nearby pearly radiance of the Bose node, but far off to where Iceworld, invisible to all sensors, orbited its dark primary.

"I wish we could have had word from Professor Lang before we left," he said. "We have received nothing—not even their signal beacon."

"Whenever you are ready."

"I heard you." Graves sighed. "Go ahead. After three days of silence, another minute is unlikely to make a difference. And the
Pride of Orion
will continue to wait for signals, from us or the others, for as long as needed."

Torran Veck guided the
No Regrets
forward into the Bose node. Behind them, the parent ship began its lonely vigil. The power supply was enough to allow it to monitor events for a million years. Even so, Julian Graves was wrong when he said that the ship would wait for their signals for as long as needed. Neither Graves nor the ship's computer knew it, but all members of the
Pride of Orion
's crew, human and alien, had departed this stellar system and would never return.

Until he ran into Sinara Bellstock on his way into the
Pride of Orion
, Louis Nenda had never met anyone who called herself a "survival specialist." Didn't everybody do their best to survive? Consider the alternative.

Louis listened, at first with interest and then with horror, as Sinara explained.

"Martial arts, of course. We have experience in every known form of weapon. I received the maximum possible class grade for the use of projectile devices. Our work was done in every environment you can imagine—free-fall, high gravity, low gravity, dense atmosphere, poisonous atmosphere, hard vacuum, and intense radiation fields. I trained on frozen ice caps of water and solid nitrogen, and deep in oceans of water and liquid methane."

"Hold on a minute. Are you saying you were taken to planets with all of these?"

"Not exactly. We operated in simulated setups. I mean, our budget was generous, but there were limits. It was all right, though, the training facility on Persephone can mimic any place you care to mention."

There were places Nenda didn't care to mention or ever think about again. He asked, "What about aliens? Were you trained to deal with aliens?"

"Naturally. We expected that we would have to work with any clade, in any part of the spiral arm. I mean our own spiral arm, of course—no one ever thought we would be sent to the Sag Arm. But we are ready for anything. Did I mention that I had long sessions in unarmed combat?" Sinara gave Louis an enigmatic smile. "Those were with humans as well as aliens. If you would like to test me out, maybe you and I could try a tussle—sometime when we have more privacy."

Was that what it sounded like? Nenda plowed on. "So, for instance, you could tackle somebody like At there?"

He gestured to Atvar H'sial. The Cecropian was sitting at the other side of the
Have-It-All
's most comfortable cabin, silent but doing the pheromonal equivalent of glowering.

"Well, tackle is probably the right word." Sinara eyed the hulking alien. "She's huge, isn't she? I never met one before, but I know from the simulations that a Cecropian is very strong. I'd do well to hold my own with her."

"Right. Hold your own. And how about that lot?" Nenda's jerk of the thumb included J'merlia, Kallik, and Archimedes, huddled together in a strange heap at the end of the cabin that led to the ship's main galley.

"As I understand it, a Lo'tfian won't fight, no matter what you do to him. We didn't have training experience with a simulated Zardalu, because we were told that they had been extinct for thousands of years. I certainly never expected to meet one." Sinara frowned, as though a suspicion that her training might have been less than complete had crossed her mind. "I was supposed to fight a Hymenopt, though. It seemed unfair, they're so little and cuddly. I heard that the poor things used to be hunted for their fur. Is that true?"