Blonde Bombshell (11 page)

17

New York

Mark Twain yawned.

He’d never yawned before. For a moment, he had no idea what was happening to him: My god, I’m ill! Something’s wrong with me! Is it fatal? Am I going to die? Then his internal search engine tracked down the symptoms in his Dirter medical database. He downloaded the diagnosis, wondered for a moment about a species that
did
that, and carried on with what he’d been doing.

He’d been at his desk all night. Mostly, of course, because he had nowhere else to go. Didn’t need anywhere else to go; he was, after all, a probe, a machine, a bomb (but that was beginning to feel very long ago and far away. Was he really a bomb? What an extraordinary thing to be!), and therefore didn’t need sleep. The organic receptacle or shell currently housing his operating system had hinted once or twice that it wouldn’t mind forty winks or so, but he’d ignored it. Damned if he was going to be dictated to by a bunch of molecules.

Instead, he’d spent the night working. The building had emptied out round about midnight, and that had been a good thing. Peace, silence, no distractions. When there were Dirters about, the sounds they made had a ghastly habit of forming themselves into rhythms (the clack of feet on a tiled floor, the clatter of fingertips on a keyboard) and the rhythms became little tunes, and suddenly his mind wasn’t his own any more. In the dead silence of an empty building, it was harder for the tunes to break through. Also, he didn’t have to be on his guard all the damn time. He hadn’t anticipated that blending in unobtrusively was going to be so demanding. It was practically a full-time job, and, although he was confident he’d got away with it so far, it’d only take one silly, careless slip and they’d get suspicious. Dirters, he’d learned, watched each other constantly. They noticed things. From what he could gather, they had an obsession with mental health and stability. Back home, the Ostar didn’t worry about that sort of stuff. If someone decided he wanted to howl at the moon or ruin round in circles chasing his own tail, nobody gave a damn; folks like to let off steam now and again by doing something a bit crazy. Here, if you didn’t act in accordance with the vast and labyrinthine corpus of The Rules, people reckoned it was only a matter of time before you started laying about you with a machete. Another symptom of an inferior society, Mark Twain concluded, but that wasn’t a lot of help.

The silence and the absence of Dirters had allowed him to make some real progress. It was maddening, of course, to have to use their appallingly primitive technology; it was like cutting down a tree with a nail file, or getting in the
grr’k
harvest with scissors, one stalk at a time. Around 2 a.m. he’d given in and allowed himself a few short-cuts, little patches of Ostar code that he knew he could get rid of quickly and cleanly as soon as the Dirters came back. That had helped, a bit. Even so, it had been slow, painstaking work, but he was getting somewhere.

He’d started by analysing Dirt’s dominant computer software system, PaySoft XB. No doubt about it, there were definitely bits and pieces in there that didn’t belong on this planet. At 03:13:43 he’d found something that put it beyond reasonable doubt: a small recursive algorithm that was distinctively, undeniably Ostar. He’d called it up on the screen, then downloaded the exact same code from his own operating system. Side by side on the screen in front of him, they were identical. He cross-referenced, and found an article in a five-year-old
Code Monthly.
Lucy Pavlov’s stroke of genius, the author declared, was breaking away from the restricting chains of base ten and opening her mind to the extraordinary possibilities of base four. After all, the author went on, what’s so special about tens? We only have this thing about them because we evolved from a ten-fingered species.

He’d thought about that, a lot. It was possible, of course, that Lucy Pavlov had somehow come across a few scraps of Ostar code from somewhere and pirated them to make her fortune. Where? Well, the wreckage of the Mark One was the likeliest candidate, unless there had been other, earlier contacts between Dirt and Ostar that he wasn’t aware of. He analysed PaySoft with this hypothesis in mind, and found that his shiny new theory didn’t quite work.

If Pavlov had merely been lucky and found some Ostar fragments lying around somewhere, he reasoned, what would she have done — a Dirter, with a Dirter brain and ten little pink digital appendages? She’d have done, essentially, what he’d just done to save time: patch them on to the home-grown junk to make it work faster. But that wasn’t how PaySoft worked. More to the point, that was
why
PaySoft worked. The fundamental ideas behind it weren’t just better than Dirt standard, they were completely different. True, they still travelled at the speed of an hourly paid snail, but the mind that had conceived them, he was absolutely certain,
thought
in base four.

His chair was horribly uncomfortable. He got up, turned round three times and sat down again.

He went back and started again. As he scrutinised the code, a possibility occurred to him. What would a system be like, he thought, if an Ostar wrote it with a view to selling it to Dirters? A bit like trying to design a jet engine that could be manufactured and safely used by cavemen: you’d have to get a load of cows, to produce methane, and fireflies to act as natural spark plugs, and instead of a titanium housing you’d need to find a really, really big conch shell or something like that. And that, in essence, was what Lucy Pavlov had done. She’d thought in Ostar, then used a considerable degree of ingenuity to make it work in Dirter.

Put together a critical mass of little answers and they form a new big question. Who was this Lucy Pavlov, and where the hell did she come from? The evidence of her work strongly suggested that she was Ostar. He thought about that. It wasn’t unknown for Ostar to do that sort of stuff: find a primitive planet populated by semi-evolved creatures, set themselves up as gods to massage their egos. It had happened four, five times (and those were only the ones that had been found out; and S’jjrnk had managed to stay hidden for two hundred years on Glostula Prime by masking his radio signals and avoiding tell-tale industrial emissions that could be detected by long-range probes) . Maybe Pavlov was another would-be supreme being, getting her jollies out of lording it over the local wildlife.

Yes, but she wasn’t doing that, was she? There were none of the usual signs; no temples dedicated to the Divine Pavlov, no statues, no votive offerings of bones piled up on street corners. You wouldn’t come all this way and go to all that trouble just to be fairly rich, moderately famous and generally liked. He went back over the Pavlov dossier he’d compiled. The patterns of behaviour it revealed were nothing like those of S’jjrnk on Glostula, or Okmmd on Ukyd’d Seven. Ytt’oog had had the entire southern continent of Ooma Three terraformed into a giant statue of himself. Also, all five of the divine wannabes so far documented had retained their Ostar physiognomy. Far from blending in, they’d made a point of being entirely different. Understandably; why go under cover if you intend to be a god?

No, he was missing something. He swivelled his chair away from the terminal, closed his eyes and tried to think. Assume Pavlov is Ostar. Right. An Ostar comes to Dirt, changes into a Dirter body, subtly and unobtrusively upgrades basic Dirt technology just a little bit, but not enough that the locals will notice. Meanwhile, the homeworld starts getting bombarded with the terrible, society-destroying tunes and jingles that were causing such havoc that the race’s leaders felt they have no choice but to blast the source of the nuisance out of the sky. A bomb is launched, and vanishes without trace.

Put like that … Mark Twain felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. Another question was taking shape in his mind, one that he really should have addressed earlier: why Dirt? Why this scruffy, uninviting little planet with no interesting or unusual resources, and such a very primitive and unlovable dominant species? He could think of at least two dozen other worlds that’d be far more attractive to a self-made god, or even just someone who fancied living somewhere else. What was it about Dirt that made it special? To which he could only think of one reply: the music. The Ostar had surveyed hundreds of planets where some form of sentience had evolved, but nowhere else had the indigenous life come up with that pernicious blend of noise and maths.

So; if you want to destroy the Ostar, you go where there’s a weapon. How long had Pavlov been here? According to the data, she was young, even in Dirter terms, but that didn’t mean anything. She could have been here for years before adopting human shape. Alternatively, Lucy Pavlov could simply be the latest addition to her wardrobe. The palms of his hands were damp, and he didn’t need to check the medical database to know what that meant. If he was scared, there was something to be scared about.
One of our own is doing this to us.

He cross-checked. Pavlov owned a Web network, which included six music channels. What that meant was that somewhere on the planet a bunch of Dirters spent their working day projecting tunes into the atmosphere, amplifying the signal so that it reached every part of Dirt, permeated the atmosphere, burst through it and escaped into space— Something he was missing here. He dried his hands on his trouser legs and made himself think it through. Think about sound. Sound moves very, very slowly: three hundred or so metres a second, practically standing still. Even boosted and amplified, it crawls through space like a wounded slug. How long would it take stray radio signals to reach Ostar? Centuries. Therefore it stood to reason that the signals currently tormenting Homeworld must’ve left Dirt hundreds of years ago. Which brought him back to how long Pavlov had been here. That long? He had no way of knowing, of course. Yes, but PaySoft was very recent indeed. If Pavlov had arrived, say, three hundred years ago, and PaySoft was no more than half a decade old, what had she been doing all that time?

It was making his head hurt, and he stopped to consider that. Only a few days ago, he hadn’t had a head. The organic stuff that was throbbing like a malevolent subsidiary heart had been parts of the bomb — deck plating, console plastic, wiring insulation, dust —which the synthesiser had drawn upon and used to shape the body he was now wearing. Now, he found it hard to imagine not having a body. That, he couldn’t help thinking, was bad. He’d heard unsettling stories about artificial intelligences that got corrupted and went biological; according to everything he stood for and believed in, it was about the worst thing a machine could do. Gee, he thought, something else to worry about, just what I need right now.

Concentrate on the matter in hand. Hypothesis: a dangerously crazy Ostar comes to Dirt with the aim of using the music weapon against her own kind. She launches radio waves. Centuries later, they reach Homeworld; we respond by sending a bomb. The bomb gets here, fails.
Around that time,
Lucy Pavlov supposedly invents PaySoft.

Question: how did the Dirters defeat the Mark One?

There was a wooden stick lying on the desk. It had a graphite core running through its middle, but it was still a wooden stick. He picked it up and started chewing it.

Safe to assume they didn’t just shoot it down with a gun or something. The outer shell of an Ostar bomb was a masterpiece of technology; it could collide with a star, and it’d be the star that’d end up wishing it had been looking where it was going. No, the vulnerable part of a bomb was its brain; it had to be, there was no way round it, because a bomb has to be trained, it’s essential that it obeys commands, which means it has to be open to communication. Anybody who can talk to a bomb and sound convincingly like its master can control it, including ordering it to self-destruct.

If you want to control an O star bomb, you need to talk to it in Ostar. And, around that time, scraps of Ostar code turn up in a Dirter-written program.

The scenario set his palms off sweating again. Lucy Pavlov detects the bomb. As it enters orbit, she talks to it, the way an Ostar talks to his human.
Bad boy; stop it; sit; stay.

Explode.

And so the bomb exploded, causing the severe damage to the climate and the ozone layer he’d already recorded. That had been a fundamental part of his initial interpretation — hard to imagine how they’d got there otherwise. That, on the other hand, suggested that the explosion and its catastrophic effects had happened
recently;
in which case, he had to admire the Dirters for their attitude. A mere pawful of years ago the very existence of their planet had hung in the balance, and they’d cheerfully put it behind them and got on with their lives, never mentioning it, even in passing.

No, that couldn’t be right. In which case-He heard a voice and looked up. Two Dirter females had arrived for the new working day; they were talking to each other (another thing about this species; they never stopped talking) as they took off their coats and draped them over the backs of their chairs. They caught his eye. He smiled. They looked away quickly.

No bad thing. He was, he knew, irresistibly attractive to Dirter females; he’d included that feature in the design specifications, just in case he had to use charm, glamour and seduction as data-acquisition techniques. He hadn’t realised at the time how utterly obsessed these creatures were with mating rituals. If he wasn’t careful, his outstanding good looks might easily prove to be a hindrance rather than an advantage. It might be a wise move to imply at some point that he was already pair-bonded, which seemed to make a difference, according to the social-mores dossier. The smile was all right, though. The dossier was quite clear on that score. Smile, it categorically stated, and the planet smiles with you.

He turned back to his screen and called up the wodge of Dirter-compatible code he’d put together as camouflage. It was a search engine, so primitive it was practically coal-fired, but at least fifty years ahead of anything the Dirters had right now. Under other circumstances, creating such an artefact would have been strictly forbidden under the draconian Ostar cultural cross-contamination regulations. As it was, it couldn’t really do any harm. After all, as soon as he’d figured out the answer to the mystery of the Mark One, he was going to blow this planet into fine sparkly dust— He stared at the screen, his eyes wide. Just ruin that last thought again. Any day now, he was going to activate himself and kill a worldful of people;
these
people, these funny little primates with their screwed-up behavioural conventions and their bizarre but endearing socio-cultural quirks and their absurd little button noses that couldn’t smell a pig in a desert. And himself, of course, though that didn’t matter, because it was what he’d been built for. But the ordinary Dirters, the countless thousands of them who scampered about in the streets below his window, hadn’t done the Ostar any harm. At worst, it was just their leaders; quite possibly, if his theory was correct, it wasn’t Dirters at all, it was a single rogue Ostar. Slaughtering the lot of them just because they wouldn’t turn the music down seemed a trifle excessive.