Maelstrom (30 page)

“What I’ve done here is being done everywhere such records have been recorded and stored, Forster,” Merck whispered. “On Earth, on Mars, in every library and museum and university. Everywhere. It only remains to destroy the two minds that could reveal the truth.
You
would do so willingly. I can’t blame you for that. And of course I could be forced.”

Forster looked at the thing on the case beside Merck. “What the devil is . . .”

 

He lunged for Merck. A flash of intense light and a wall of seared air blew him back. His last image of Merck was of a tall blond man sheathed in flame.
Epilogue
The commander was waiting for Sparta and Blake as they stepped off the shuttle at Newark. He was crisp in his blue uniform. They were dressed for a vacation.

 

Sparta’s greeting lacked warmth. “Our appointment is at your office tomorrow.”

 

“Something’s come up,” the commander said hoarsely. He turned his blue stare on Blake. “Hello, Redfield.” “Blake, it’s time you knew who this man really is. This is my boss. Commander . . .”

 

“Sorry, still no time to get acquainted,” he said to Blake, interrupting her, but he gave Blake’s hand a quick, very hard squeeze. “We’ll have to talk as we go,” he said to Sparta.

 

Blake looked at Sparta. “Am I included in this?”

 

“I don’t know,” she said. “Don’t let me out of your sight.” They hurried to join the commander, pushing past other passengers on the high-speed people-mover to reach his side.

“Somebody bombed the Hesperian Museum,” the commander said, his throat full of gravel. “Proboda pulled Forster from the wreckage. Bad burns over about seventy percent of his body–nothing the medics can’t fix in a few days. Merck’s dead–not enough left to reconstruct.”

“What happened?”

 

“We’re not sure. Forster’s having a little trouble remembering the last minute or two before the bomb went off.”

 

“Proboda saved him?”

“Got there in three minutes, waded in, got burned himself. Vik’s no intellectual, but he’s just earned himself another commendation.” The commander touched Sparta’s arm to indicate that she should take a right where the corridor branched toward the helipad.

“We rate a helicopter to headquarters?”

 

“We’re not going to headquarters,” said the commander. “They’re holding a loaded shuttle for us. It’s going back up as soon as you’re on it.”

 

She was silent a moment. “There goes the R & R you keep promising me,” she said at last.

 

“We’ll owe you,” said the commander.

Sparta looked at Blake, and for a moment her eyes were moist. Blake had never seen her cry, and she didn’t oblige him now. Instead, awkwardly, she took his hand. They looked at each other as the people-mover trundled along, but she would not move to him and he would not force himself on her.

The commander looked sternly away and kept quiet, until at last he cleared his throat loudly and said, “Watch your step. Change to the right coming up.”

Blake and Sparta broke away from each other. Sparta said nothing; her throat was swollen with the effort to control her emotions.
“The bombing of the Hesperian looks like part of a pattern,” the commander said. “Archaeological stuff. All over the place. Some stolen, some destroyed.” His tone indicated he couldn’t imagine why anyone would be interested in “archaeological stuff.” “How about you, Redfield? Any ideas?”

“Well, sir . . .”

 

“What you told Troy you were doing in Paris, for example?” He glanced at her. “You leave anything out of that report, Troy?”

 

“Nothing of importance, sir.” Her whisper was defiant.

 

“Now that you’ve blown your cover with these weirdos, Redfield, we probably ought to recruit you, but it will have to wait.”

 

“Where are you sending me, sir?” Sparta asked huskily.

 

“Thing causing the most stir is this Martian plaque.”

 

“The Martian plaque?”

 

“Disappeared yesterday from Labyrinth City. You’re going to get it back.”

 

“Mars.” She swallowed. “Commander, I wonder if you would allow me a few minutes to talk to Blake before boarding.”

 

“Sorry, no time.”

 

“But sir,” she said angrily, “if you send me to Mars we won’t see each other for months.”

 

“That’s up to him,” said the commander. “We’re holding two seats, but he’s a civilian. He doesn’t have to go with you if he doesn’t want to.”

 

It took a moment for it to sink in. Then Blake shouted and Sparta grinned. They clutched each other. The commander never cracked a smile.
Appendix: The Playfair Cipher

T
he Playfair cipher was devised by the scientist Charles Wheatstone in 1854. His friend the Baron Playfair lobbied so effectively to have the cipher adopted by the British government that it became known by Playfair’s name instead of Wheatstone’s. Playfair turns plaintext into ciphertext by first preparing the plaintext in a specific way, then transforming the plaintext according to certain rules, using an alphabet square. The layout of the alphabet square varies according to a keyword.

This was Blake’s plaintext:

 

TO HELEN FROM PARIS IF YOU FIND THIS FIND ME IN THE FORTRESS SEEKING THE FIRST OF FIVE REVELATIONS YOU WILL NEED A GUYDE

 

The rules for preparing plaintext are:

 

1) The plaintext letters are divided into pairs; for example, TO HELEN becomes TO HE LE, etc.

2) Double letters, if they occur in a pair, must be divided by an X or a Z. For example, the double L’s in WILL NEED become LX LN, etc. (But the three S’s in FORTRESS SEEKING become SX SZ SE, etc.; using X once and Z the next time avoids calling attention to a letter that has been enciphered twice in the same way. Such a hint could betray part of the layout of the alphabet square.)

3) J in the plaintext is treated as if it were I. (Blake’s plaintext contained no J’s.)

So Blake’s first step was to write out the plaintext thus: TO HE LE NF RO MP AR IS IF YO UF IN DT HI SF IN DM EI NT HE FO RT RE SX SZ SE EK IN GT HE FI RS TO FX FI VE RE VE LA TI ON SY OU WI LX LN EX ED AG UY DE

The Playfair alphabet square is five letters wide by five letters high. First the keyword is written (but no letters are repeated), and then the remaining letters of the alphabet are written, with I and J treated as the same letter. Blake’s keyword was SPARTA, thus his Playfair square was:

S P A R T

 

B C D E F

 

G H IJ K L

 

M N O Q U

 

V W X Y Z

The Playfair transformation is based on the fact that the letters of each pair in the plaintext can occur in only one of three states. The pair can be together in the same row, together in the same column, or–most commonly–together in neither.

1) Each letter in a pair of letters that falls in the same
row
is replaced by the letter to its right; for example, ED becomes
fe
. The letter to the “right” of the last letter in a row is the first letter in the same row.

 

2) Each letter in a pair of letters that falls in the same
column
is replaced by the letter below it; for example, RQ becomes
ey
. The letter “below” the last letter in the
column
is the top letter in the same column.

3) Each letter in a pair of letters that appears in neither the same row nor the same column is replaced by the letter occurring at the
intersection
of its own row and its partner’s column. Pair order must be preserved: first determine the intersection of the first letter’s row with the second letter’s column, then the intersection of the second letter’s row with the first letter’s column. It helps to imagine that the two plaintext letters determine two corners of a square inside the alphabetical square; then the ciphertext letters lie at the opposite corners of this smaller square. For example TO becomes
au
.

• • A R T

 

• • D E F

 

• • IJ K L

 

• • O Q U

 

• • • • •

 

4) Since I and J are identical, a transformation to IJ may be written as either I or J, at the encipherer’s whim.

 

Blake transformed the plaintext thus:

 

TO HE LE NF RO MP AR IS IF YO UF IN DT HI

 

au kc fk uc aq ns rt ga ld xq zl ho fa ik

 

SF IN DM EI NT HE FO RT

 

tb ho bo dk up kc du ts

 

RE SX SZ SE EK IN GT HE FI RS TO FX FI VE RE

 

ek av tv rb kq ho ls kc dl tp au dz dl yb ek

 

VE LA TI ON SY OU WI

 

yb jt al qo rv qm xh

 

LX LN EX ED AG UY DE

 

jz hu dy fe si qz ef

 

Sparta found the cipher in this form:

 

aukcfkucaqnsrtgaldxqzlhofaiktbhobodkupkcdutse
kavtvrbkqholskcdltpaudzdlybekybjtalqorvqmxhjzhudy
fesiqzef

Knowing that the system was Playfair, and surmising that the key was SPARTA, Sparta had only to divide the ciphertext into pairs, reconstruct the alphabet square, and, using the same rules, transform each cipher pair back into its plain equivalent:

au kc fk uc aq ns rt ga TO HE LE NF RO MP AR IS • • •
Afterword
by PAUL PREUSS

 

W
riting, reading, displaying, transmitting, storing (preserving, if you’re optimistic), sometimes hiding and enciphering, sometimes, by accident or design, recovering and deciphering: these are among the things we do with written language, whether we are working with ink on papyrus or incisions in alien metal.

Although the second volume of the
Venus Prime
series encapsulates one of my favorite science-fiction dventure stories, whose action and surprising denouement depend on the straightforward mathematics of perturbation theory–a story told pretty much as Arthur told it the first time around, in “Maelstrom II”–the transformations of the written word are what this novel is really about.

Partly that’s because any six-volume series needs a backbone, and in true Clarkeian fashion the backbone of this series is the discovery of the solar system’s ancient visitation by an alien race. I could have imagined different ways of uncovering ancient visits, of course, some of them pretty mundane. For example, we know that the Bronze Age civilization of Crete established trading posts in Syria, Asia Minor, the Aegean islands, and mainland Greece because we find the Minoans’ pottery and other trade goods in those places.

But usually when a scholar says, “I’ve discovered a new civilization!”–a cry rarely heard nowadays but often enough in recent centuries–he or she means “I’ve deciphered a previously undeciphered text.” The archaeologists in
Venus Prime 2
do it the old-fashioned way, they decipher it, and indeed I’ve done my best to cast them as old fuddy-duddies.

Plot is never much more than a good excuse for a writer to write about what’s close to the bone, so there’s another reason that this tale, only the second episode in an ongoing saga of the search for the alien among us, pays so much attention to the written word. Writing–or “text,” in a loathsome locution at long last reaching the end of its postmodernist rope–has the same peculiar hold on my imagination that it must have, or so I suppose, for everyone who feels compelled to write. In my case, however, writing is explicitly tied to cipher, on which critics have no patent.

My first exposure to the notion of code and cipher (not counting the code rings they were pitching on television in the 1950s) came when I was an eleven-year-old visiting my grandparents’ house and stumbled upon Poe’s “The Gold-Bug.” That same summer I started reading everything backwards, claiming I was talking Martian; if a sign read “Do Not Enter,” it came out of my mouth as “Od Ton Retne.”

Soon I could read whole paragraphs this way without hesitation; I could read them upside down. At first I was proud of my fluency in Martian; then I realized I couldn’t stop–for years afterward, well into my teens, I involuntarily read lines of printed text backward, meanwhile trying to hide the embarrassing proclivity. I’ve met other people who had the same quirk. Apparently it’s not a rare affliction, but for me it conveyed–indeed, encoded–a message about the complicated mysteries of written language.

It will come as no surprise, then, that two of the books that most influenced this particular science-fiction mystery-adventure were Ernst Doblhofer’s
Voices in Stone
, subtitled
The Decipherment of Ancient Scripts and Writings
(in which, as a teenager, I first encountered Minoan Linear B, long before I had the opportunity to inspect some of the original clay leaves on Crete) and David Kahn’s
The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing
(where I learned the delightful Playfair Cipher).

In most science fiction stories the author is supposed to make an effort to anticipate future developments, and in
Venus Prime 2
I did my best with the near future of writing. I got fax machines right–not exactly prescient, since consumer units were coming into use as I wrote. (My first novel,
The Gates of Heaven
, which appeared early in 1980, had a fax machine curiously mounted on the back of the protagonist’s front door, just where his mail slot would have been.) I even got books on tape and chip and “disk” right; if one were generous, disks could be taken to mean CD-ROMs.

I missed email entirely. I failed to imagine a medium that could restore to whole generations the joy of writing letters while simultaneously dissolving those letters into the electricity as quickly as they were read. Quasi-interactive, virtually instantaneous when the Net isn’t clogged, and–lacking deliberate effort–no more permanent than a wisp of smoke, email may not be the death of the written word, but it could well be the death of the lasting word.

Words always say more than they state, and what they say changes from generation to generation, from century to century, from millenium to millenium. We need to keep them around, even the tedious ones.

The words you are reading now were transmitted to the publisher by email, I confess. But you are reading them–signifying that some words, somewhere, will persist long enough to guide future children to buried treasures.