Eyes of the Calculor (25 page)

"Why is it that so many hundreds of advanced scientific and engineering books have survived only as fragments, while Arnold Schwarzenegger's New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding has survived two thousand years without so much as losing a page?"

"I think I shall add these one-arm triceps extensions to my training scheme," declared Velesti.

"Why would you want to look like that!" asked Zarvora, bending down through Velesti's shoulder and peering at the photographs illustrating the exercise.

"Sheer vanity," replied Velesti.

"Keep turning, I have scanned that page for you."

"Anyway, it is a matter of impression and impressiveness. If people are impressed by you, they leave you alone."

"Are you trying to tell me that people do not already leave you alone?"

"Well, yes. Only last week a galley train navvy pinched my bottom. I do not want it to happen again."

"You cut off his hand, Frelle Velesti. It is extremely unlikely that it will happen again."

"He earns his living pushing pedals with his legs, it's not as if he was a watchmaker. Besides, if I had had better upper chest and shoulder development he would not have pinched me in the first place."

Within minutes they had leafed through the book.

"All right, all right, I have stored your stupid book and processed it for keyword search. Can we go on to my next book?"

"Brown and Kipple, Basic Principles of Numerical Meteorological Modeling on Supercomputers for Global Systems."

"For a change, it looks comparatively intact."

"It looks obscenely difficult," observed Velesti, flicking through it. "Why do the most demanding of books have words like basic, introductory, and elementary in their titles? Why not have a title like Exceedingly Difficult Ways to Forecast Weather Using Giant, Complicated, and Stunningly Expensive Machines!"

"So you did understand the title."

"Mostly. What is a supercomputer?"

"A very big and powerful calculor. Would you mind turning the pages?"

Velesti leafed through the ancient text while Zarvora scanned and stored the pages. Frightened Dragon Librarian guards watched in the distance.

"You know, I have reached a conclusion about you," said Velesti as she turned the pages. "You are no more intelligent than Zarvora."

"But I am Zarvora."

"You are Zarvora's image, stored in the structure of Mirrorsun. You now have a huge and perfect memory, you command powers that would frighten even the ancient gods of legend, and you can learn fantastically fast, but you do not come up with new ideas any faster than the rest of us."

"Should I be ashamed?"

"Not ashamed, but I know you are frightened."

"Frightened?"

"Frightened of your ignorance, and frightened that humanity could catch up with you. That's why you burned all electrical essence machines from the face of the earth, is it not? People were advancing too fast; in a hundred years they would have had spacewings flying to you, controlling you, threatening you."

"People are free to have electrical machines in shielded cages or deep underground."

"Unless machines are in common use and convenient to access they will develop infinitely more slowly."

"If they developed infinitely more slowly they would never develop at all," replied Zarvora smugly.

"Correct!" said a triumphant Velesti. "Relative to you, humans and aviads will never advance."

"Why is this bad?" asked Zarvora without a trace of guilt. "The world had access to electrical essence for a mere three decades after I destroyed the automated orbital battlestations and their EMP bombards, yet humanity merely spent those decades building better weapons, spreading lies and deceit by sparkflash and radio transmitters, and developing long-term plans to destroy me. I just struck first."

"Yet you need us, you need our knowledge."

"I need to stay ahead of you humans and aviads, Frelle Velesti. Were none of you here, I could easily live on forever, learning about the universe at my own pace. This is merely self-defense. Were I to wage war on creatures such as you I could be very bad company."

"Until six years ago you were one of us."

"We are all stuck with our relatives."

Bickering all the way, they scanned the pile of books and finally came to Velesti's next selection.

"Australian Muscle, September 2015," said Zarvora's hologram with a sneer of contempt.

"Yes, it is the special Ms. Olympia issue," said Velesti, eagerly, slowly leafing through the 1,946-year-old magazine. "Look at this! A free sports bra designed by Ms. Olympia 2014 with every dozen ten-pound packs of Hyper-Gro Concentrate . . . which has added ion exchange whey protein hydrolysate—"

"I think the offer has expired," Zarvora pointed out.

"A sports bra," said Velesti thoughtfully.

"They hold your breasts securely during training—"

"I know, it's obvious from the picture. I want one."

"If I help, will you promise to scan those other five piles of books tonight?"

"How can you help? You have no substance."

Without another word Zarvora sat down into Velesti, merging with her completely. A moment later she stood up, her body a green wire-frame mockup of Velesti from the neck down.

"Are we agreed that this is you?" asked Zarvora.

"Are my biceps really so small?"

Zarvora doubled the size of the wire-frame biceps.

"Happy?"

"Stop it!"

A white sports bra mockup materialized over the breasts and shoulders of the holographic figure.

"Is this what you want?" asked Zarvora.

"Well. . . yes."

"Then just relax, I am going to take over your motor functions."

Velesti's movements suddenly became precise and mechanical as

she took a charblack stylus and began to draw precise lines and curves on a large sheet of poorpaper. After several minutes Velesti was free again, and a design pattern lay on the reading desk in front of her.

"In the morning, get a tailor to make up one of those," said Zarvora, morphing her wire-frame image into the Libris uniform of thirty years earlier. "In the meantime, get to work on leafing through my piles of books."

Velesti returned to her work, and the piles quickly shrank. By the time another hour had passed she had finished.

"I shall need some days to make sense of what I have scanned tonight," Zarvora admitted.

"Perhaps a week?" asked Velesti.

"Perhaps. I shall contact you, but for now, good-bye."

"Wait! I have questions."

"Questions? But I might not have answers."

"When you destroyed the electrical machines you caused deaths."

"True, but not many."

"Yet this thing around my neck is an electrical machine."

"Yes. I can spare areas as small as a circle ten feet in diameter. There were several of my own devices on Earth, devices that I cannot reproduce and which are of immense value to me. There were two collars such as yours in Australia and one in America, and there was a small sunwing ferry circling empty over the Pacific Ocean. These I spared, and for my own good reasons."

"And you burned the machines of everyone else."

"Yes. Good and bad, innocent and guilty, strong and weak, all of their electrical machines died."

"Why?"

"Survival. I am Earth's fourth species. A massive, space-bound calculor with an intelligence living inside it, and I am alone. I wield godlike powers to keep myself alive and free, and believe me, there are many who want me dead or constrained. I understand what and who I am up against, Velesti. I once walked the earth, fought for my beliefs and visions, ran Libris, built the first new calculor in two

thousand years, gave birth to children, ruled half a continent—and

was assassinated. I know what it is like to die." "I do too," replied Velesti. "Very depressing." "Agreed, and I do not want it to happen again."

Euroa, the Rochestrian Commonwealth

I he Monastery of St. Roger at Euroa was highly regarded within the Commonwealth, and had a reputation for scientific research surpassing any university on the continent. While all scientific monasteries were by now taking the greatest interest in what was happening to Mirrorsun, the monks at St. Roger in particular now discovered themselves to have a great and powerful patron.

The abbot paced the stone stage of the open air amphitheater, occasionally glancing out over the four hundred faces that were his audience. In the distance the assembly bell continued to ring, but at last Abbot Ashman made a chopping motion with his hand. Moments later the bell ceased to ring. The abbot paused at the center of that stage, his arms folded behind his back, his body stooped a trifle as he faced the monks.

"As you and everyone else should know by now, Brothers, Mirrorsun is not only spinning faster than its orbit requires, it is still gathering speed. It appears to be doing this by making use of vast sails, each the size of the Rochestrian Commonwealth. Now, the idea of sails in the void of space would probably baffle the average citizen, but can anyone here explain how they would work?"

Four hundred hands shot into the air. The abbot called a monk in the front row to join him on stage. Brother Lartensen was exceedingly shortsighted and wore thick spectacles. He was not intimidated by his audience of four hundred because he could see them only as a brownish blur.

"From the observation of comets we see that the dust and vapors emanating from their surface is always in a stream that points away from the sun," Brother Lartensen cried in a shrill drawl. "This sug-

gests that light from the sun exerts a pressure. This pressure is very small, but is as persistent as sunlight itself, although in my paper of 1725 GW, 'Quantified Speculations Concerning the Nature of Solar Radiation,' I suggested that it may also be due to the pressure of thermal radiation, better known as heat, which is thought to agitate the vapors and dust from the cometary surface in the first place."

"Thank you, Brother, that is enough."

"Actually the combination of thermal radiation and visible radiation, and possibly some other forms of radiation not yet discovered, may also account for the antisolar vector in the tails of comets—aagh!"

The abbot had by now marched Brother Lartensen to the edge of the stage and pushed him off. There was muted laughter, which quickly died away.

"I can now tell you that secret experiments in the Physics Cloisters have confirmed that sunlight—in fact any light—can exert pressure. Mirrorsun is indeed making use of this fact of physics, and this raises several questions. As a man of God, dedicated to His scientific truth, I am curious about this, but the Dragon Librarian Service also has an interest in the matter."

Considerable muttering and murmurs greeted this news, as the abbot had expected.

"The Highliber of Libris has been in contact with me through a secret intermediary, and has posed the following questions. Why is Mirrorsun doing this? How is it doing this? What are the consequences for Mirrorsun? What are the consequences for us? I now call upon Brother Nikalan of Siding Springs, who has been seconded to us, to supply what answers are currently available."

A gaunt man, even more stooped than the abbot, shuffled onto the stage and walked to the blackstone circle that marked the acoustic focus of the auditorium.

"Why? Don't know," began Brother Nikalan bluntly. "How? Sunlight. Consequences for Mirrorsun? Rupture. Consequences for us? Shower of fragments."

The abbot resumed possession of the focus point.

"Experiments with Mirrorsun materials show that it is exceed-

ingly strong, and observations and calculations show that there is a vast amount of it," said the abbot. "Were it to burst, the fragments could do a number of things. The most likely is that they would enter a harmless elliptical orbit and not affect us. However, they could also enter a highly elliptical orbit, then crash down to Earth. If it is spinning even faster at the time of the burst, the pieces would fly off into space, like a comet. Now, this may seem like a relief, but the orbit of this Mirrorsun comet would intersect that of Earth, and one day it would return and crash down, again with catastrophic consequences. Mirrorsun is very big and very tough. A direct hit on our continent would wipe us out. Doomsday, in other words."

The abbot correctly anticipated a great deal of muttering, hand waving, and tracings of orbits in the air. He allowed a half minute to elapse before he called for attention again.

"Now, the Dragon Librarian Service is naturally concerned about this from a point of view of public order, and I have agreed that the librarians can work closely with us to—Brother Varlian, wipe that smirk off your face! Ah, to work with us to determine what will happen, and when. We have been promised gold, artisans, labor, materials, and access to any other resources that we require. Brother Nikalan has been sent here from Siding Springs to manage the calculation of orbits. Brother Varlian will manage experiments to determine the material properties of Mirrorsun. I shall manage all aspects of the observational astronomy."

The abbot withdrew from the focus stone, and Brother Nikalan again stepped forward to speak.

"An old-style calculor, a twin processor model, is to be built here," he announced. "Two processors, one hundred souls each, running in three eight-hour shifts. The same configuration as in the earliest form of the original Calculor in Libris."

"Six hundred souls required," called Brother Lartensen from the audience. "That does not add up."

"St. Roger's contains four hundred souls, of which one hundred fifty cannot be spared from the materials and observational projects. The Highliber of Libris has convinced the Bishop of Rochester to allow certain additional religious personnel to be in residence here

for the duration of this project. One hundred of those will be monks from sundry other mayorates, to help with construction, catering, and cleaning. Fifty will be monks to help populate the sinister processor of the St. Roger Calculor. The three hundred souls for the dexter processor will be nuns from the convent of St.—"