This Alien Shore Page 5

  As always, the nantana’s insistence on questioning the obvious irritated him. “What are the conditions?”

  “You’ll have full access to the details of our own investigation, and to the Guild members in charge. You can have an assistant if you want—”

  Another nantana? God forbid. “I work alone.”

  The Guildsman bowed his head. “As you wish. Needless to say, all your expenses will be covered, all equipment you require will be supplied, any support which you request will be provided. And of course, being part of the outernet, you’ll have access to unlimited data—”

  Masada stiffened. “Part of the outernet?”

  For a moment the Guildsman was silent. No doubt he was digesting Masada’s statement, perhaps even running it through his brainware to isolate the cause of his objection. At last he said, “It was assumed that you would come to the outworlds. An investigation like this can hardly be managed with a sizable time lag in communication.”

  He said it quietly, firmly: “I have never left Guera.”

  The Guildsman spread his hands as if in offering. “Then this is a very special opportunity, Dr. Masada. One long overdue, for a theorist of your stature.”

  Leave Guera. He’d considered it before, when professional opportunities beckoned, but each time he had chosen to stay where he was. It was the easier course. More comfortable. Safer. Could the nantana understand that? Or would Masada have to find words to express his misgiving, to give it parameters?”

  After a very long silence, he dared, “You’re asking me to work among aliens.”

  The Guildsman drew in a sharp breath. “If you mean the Hausman Variants, let me remind you that you are one, Dr. Masada. As am I. The fact that our ancestors didn’t suffer from any somatic distortion doesn’t mean they weren’t altered. You of all people should know that.”

  He shook his head, frustrated by the man’s lack of understanding. “I didn’t mean that. You should know I didn’t mean that.” Now it was his turn to lean forward on the table, not because it felt natural to him—such posturing never did—but because he knew intellectually that it would give his words more weight. “Must I remind you how the Terrans feel about my kaja? The very cognitive style which makes me so valuable on Guera is considered ‘abnormal’ among those people. They did everything they could to eradicate it from their gene pool, and if by some unlucky chance it surfaces now despite those efforts, they use drugs or DNA therapy to ‘correct’ it. Even if the price of that correction is the crippling of a mind, the death of a unique human soul. These are the people you want me to work among? The Terrans are more alien to me than any Hausman Variants ever could be. And you know they dominate the outworlds.”

  “Dr. Masada.” The Guildsman’s tone had changed in some subtle way, but Masada lacked the skill to interpret it. “You’re a Holist—some say the father of Holism. Don’t you want to see the outworlds for yourself? You’ve been theorizing about the outernet for years; don’t you want to experience it for yourself, just once? I’m offering you that opportunity. Can you look at me and honestly say that it has no appeal?”

  When Masada said nothing, he reached into a fold of his sleeve and brought forth a small data chip. “We ask only that you look at this.” He slid the chip across the table until it was within Masada’s reach. “No more.” Through its thin cover the spectral shimmer of a storage disk could be seen. “It contains a copy of the virus we isolated, as well as our offer. We ask only that you consider both before you make your final decision.”

  For a moment Masada said nothing. Did nothing. Then, very slowly, he reached out and took the small chip in his hand. Tiny words shimmered on its surface, along with an icon meant to trigger defensive programs in any equipment reading it. WARNING, it said. GRADE A CONTAGIOUS MATERIAL. LEVEL 1 PRECAUTIONS REQUIRED. He considered for a moment, then said, “I’ll need a copy of the code it was embedded in.”

  The Guildsman scowled, and for a moment Masada thought he might refuse his request. He had, after all, asked for a copy of one of the Guild’s most secret programs. Never mind that the request was a valid one; it was also a test of how much they trusted him, and how much they wanted him on this project.

  For a long minute the Guildsman said nothing, merely gazed at him through narrowed eyes as if that expression could give him access to the man’s brain. Finally, with a short, stiff nod, he pulled a second chip out of his sleeve and slid it across the table. It was the proper answer, and Masada nodded his approval.

  “How much time do I have?” Masada asked.

  “As much as you require.” The Guildsman’s tone made it clear that he understood the first phase of their negotiations was now complete. Either the virus would prove interesting enough to lure Kio Masada from his Gueran refuge, or it would not; mere words could no longer change that. “Take your time. Evaluate the situation. Our offer is on the first chip, along with instructions for contacting me. I’ll wait to hear from you.”

  He stood then, and offered his hand. Masada hesitated only briefly, then clasped it. Such contact with strangers was uncomfortable for him, but the Guildsman was nantana and would require ritual closure. In matters like this, his kaja had precedence.

  It’s a small price to pay, Masada mused, for a social structure that enables aliens to communicate.

  If only the outworlds were equally civilized!

  He didn’t return to his apartment until after all the day’s obligations had been dealt with, because he knew himself all too well; once he got wrapped up in some new cognitive puzzle he was likely to forget mundane things like meetings, and deadlines, and even meals. Once, when he had been in the middle of a particularly difficult project, he had even shut down part of his brainware because its constant reminders of an upcoming faculty session were distracting him.

  It had been hard not to think about the Guild’s offer for so many hours. Hard not to put on a headset and upload the small chip he carried, to get a look at the virus responsible for it. Only the fact that such rashness might prove downright suicidal enabled him to make it through the day, to wait until he returned to the one place on Guera where he could work undisturbed, and in safety.

  His apartment was small and neat, furnished simply and without aesthetic fanfare. In the comer of the living room a three-tiered keyboard loomed, sleek and polished, and as he entered, he went over to it and put a hand to it: gently, reverently, as the ancient Jews had done when they touched their fingers to a piece of holy scripture upon entering a home. It had been his wife’s, her pride and joy. Now, with her gone, it served as a repository of memories, pictures frozen in time that were brought to life each evening by this ritual touch.

  He saw her sitting there, slender and graceful, her fingers dancing over the keys in the old style of performance (she disdained to use the headset for composition, saying she liked the feel of the music in her hands), flicking upward for one note out of a hundred to adjust the tone of the instrument, always striving for perfection. Once she had begun a piece, nothing could distract her, and if for some reason she needed to play one part again, she began the whole thing from the beginning, as if incapable of judging a handful of notes out of context.

  She had been iru, as he was, and their marriage had been based on that one compatibility. It was enough. He understood the periodic distortions in sensory perception that affected her interactive skills; she understood that for the sake of his work he had programmed his brainware to compensate for such distortions, and thus had sacrificed a portion of his natural essence. He understood that when she performed—weaving together strands of music from Bach to Omesi, creating a tapestry of musical history that critics called breathtaking and insightful—she was making contact with something far greater than a human soul could understand, a mathematical perfection whose mere shadow inspired symphonies. She understood that only in his work could he attain the control he longed for, sculpting patterns of computer code with the same meticulous care that a Classical Greek artist might have
used to refine his marble masterpieces. He hadn’t loved her, not in the way a nantana would understand the word; he lacked the neural circuitry necessary to experience that kind of emotion. But their ten years of marriage had been good years, an oasis of companionship in the life of a kaja that all too often tended toward isolation ...

  And then there was the pod accident.

  And the oasis was gone.

  With a sigh he let his hand fall from the keyboard, allowing the memories to fade. Despite his eagerness to begin work he forced himself to go into the kitchen and eat a hurried meal, not tasting it, not even caring what it was, merely acknowledging the need for caloric energy in the hours that lay ahead. Then and only then did he move into his office, which had been set up in the apartment’s second bedroom. In addition to stacks of state-of-the-art equipment—some purchased, some lent to him by the university, some supplied by companies for his analysis—there were several old dinosaurs of technology, bulky processors and flatscreen monitors that had no place in modem life, but which were necessary for the safe handling of contagious material. He set the first chip down before them, printed side up. GRADE A CONTAGIOUS MATERIAL. LEVEL 1 PRECAUTIONS REQUIRED.

  It was time.

  In an insulated safe at the end of the room he kept half a dozen sterile headsets, prepared for just such a moment; he retrieved one of them and ran it through a decontamination procedure again, just in case. The process took a while, and he watched it through each step as his program matched every byte of the headset’s machine code to a copy of the original. Such extreme precautions were rarely required, but a Level One contaminant demanded it. At last it was confirmed to be both free of infection, and safe from any marginal damage that a past infection might have caused. He’d had enough “healthy” systems fouled up by the latter to know just how important that was.

  Carefully then, with meticulous clarity, he visualized the series of icons that would shut down his brainware response systems. Because sight was the most easily manipulated of all the human senses, it had been the centerpiece of brainware control since the first biotech system was inserted in a human subject centuries ago. The result was a nearly perfect interface; the waking brain couldn’t tell the difference between images processed by the optic nerve, those produced by conscious visualization, and those supplied by a mechanical source. It was a useful system, and one which human society now totally depended upon, but it had its drawbacks.

  Look at a virus too closely and your brainware might accept it as input; focus your vision on its invasive code and you might become infected yourself. Handling such material required a sealed brain, one which would accept no new input. The sensation of that was acutely claustrophobic, but it was something Masada had done before, and he took a few deep breaths and waited, letting his wellseeker deal with the rising tide of panic. There were those who couldn’t handle the sensation, he knew, but to him it was just one more facet of his work. And any pain which allowed him to get closer to this virus was a pain worth enduring.

  He laid out the sterile headset before him, slid the chip into it, uploaded its contents. (Was this what biohazard experts felt like when they handled a bacterium that could decimate planets? When they knew that one prick of their safesuit would give the enemy access to their own flesh?) He used a thin cord to connect the headset to an old-fashioned monitor, and saw the latter flicker to life as contact was made. Then: the U-shaped device was settled onto his head, its receivers made contact with the transmitters implanted just behind his ears, and he visualized the commands that would set the whole system to working.

  There was introductory material on the chip, which basically reviewed what the Guildsman had told him. He fast-scanned that part, glanced briefly at the Guild’s offer for his services (and it was indeed generous, but money wasn’t the main issue here), and then had to give the program his Guild security codes in order to proceed. Few surprises there. The program digested his response, mused silently for a second or two ... and then the virus itself began to scroll onto the screen.

  It was a vast creature, seemingly endless. It took hours just to scan the code, hours more to go over parts of it in detail. At some point his brainware alerted him to the need for nourishment. He ignored it. Hours later, it alerted him to the need for sleep. He ignored that, too.

  The virus was complex. It was effective. It was fertile.

  It was ... beautiful.

  He read through it again and again, and each time he discovered subtler and subtler patterns embedded within it. There were nested loops that intertwined with mobius complexity, altering at each pass and then interacting with their earlier versions. There were parts that altered external code and parts that devoured it and parts that analyzed the devouring process ... and in the end the virus became something greater than it had been: more subtle, more powerful, infinitely more contagious.

  It evolved.

  He put a hand to the monitor screen as if somehow that contact could bring him closer to it. He had seen self-editing infections before, but never anything of this complexity. This program would mutate within its host each and every time it ran, and send new offspring into the outernet at every opportunity. There must be thousands of copies out there already, he thought—perhaps millions—each “spore” struggling to do its job more perfectly than the last, each one handing over its store of data and then self-destructing when a more efficient version dominated it. It was survival of the fittest at its most basic level, the mathematics of success leached of all fleshbound drives. It was life, of a sort. Life as he had theorized it, life as he had known it must be, but had never seen before.

  Without break for food or rest—despite his wellseeker’s insistence that he needed both—he loaded in the second chip. He was familiar with outpilot programming, having worked with it before, and scanned through it quickly at first. It didn’t surprise him that the segment they had given him dealt mainly with the Guild’s medical programs—he had assumed it would, based on how the virus had struck—but what was a surprise was that the code wasn’t as clean as he remembered it. Guild programmers were notorious for paring down their work to an absolute minimum, but this had marked redundancies throughout, and segments of code that seemed to have no other purpose than—

  For a moment he almost stopped breathing. A concept had taken shape within his brain, and for a moment he felt that if he moved—or even thought too much—he would lose it.

  He put the outpilot program into storage and called back the virus to his screen. He studied it again, searching for confirmation.

  My God.

  It had left a doorway behind it: two or three sections of code that would help its offspring back through the security wall, should they choose to invade. Why would a programmer want that? What possible purpose could it serve?

  He thought he knew. He couldn’t quite believe it, but what other explanation was possible?

  He set up the computer to run a comparison between the two programs, then took a precious moment to push back in his seat and stretch his stiffened limbs. A glance out the window told him that the sun had set and risen and maybe risen again; in his preoccupation with the virus he had lost all sense of time. Without bothering to ask his brainware for the date—what was the point?—he ate again, and was settling down for a brief nap when his brainware flashed him a message.

  MEETING WITH DEAN SUMPTER AT 10:30.

  “Damn.” He called up the current time, and saw that there were only two hours until the meeting. Not long enough to finish what he was doing. He called out for the vid to connect him with the Dean’s office. God willing the man would be up, and in, and approachable.

  He was. “Dr. Masada. I’ve been expecting to hear from you.”

  It was hard to switch gears, from the clean and straightforward language of code to the cluttered layering of human communication. “Sir?”

  “Guildmaster Hsing spoke to me yesterday regarding your obligations here. I’ve agreed to have Dr. Alesia cover for you t
his morning, and Towcester this afternoon. We’ll need you at the Standards Committee meeting tomorrow noon—no way around that one—but after that we can make do without you, if we have to.” He paused, and perhaps another man could have read some meaning into his expression. “I know how important your Guild work is to you.”

  What on Guera had the Guildsman said to him, to make him so agreeable? If Masada were a different man, he might have been suspicious, but as it was, he was simply grateful for the reprieve. “Thank you, sir.” Possibly the Guild had donated a large amount to some university fund that was near and dear to Dean Sumpter’s heart; the amount they had offered to Masada implied a large enough budget for that kind of gesture. And Sumpter could certainly be bought.

  Guildmaster Hsing. He hadn’t thought to ask the man’s name, he realized, or his rank. The fact that a Guildmaster had come all this way, forsaking control of an outworld station for more than an E-year to meet with him ... it meant that they were determined to hire him at any cost, under whatever conditions were necessary, and had sent a man with the authority to make binding promises. The Guild clearly didn’t intend to take no for an answer.

  Energized by that discovery—and by his sudden reprieve from scholastic duty—he took up the headset again to see what his comparison program had uncovered.

  “It’s called a hide-and-seek,” he told the Guildmaster. “A sophisticated spy program meant to invade your outpilot’s brainware, copy certain information into its code, and then spin off ‘spore’ programs to reinfest the outemet. Meanwhile it would be improving itself and its offspring as well, and creating a back door through your security programs. So that if someday a version developed which could uncover more of your secrets it would have a guaranteed way back in.”

  “Why did it attack our outpilot?”

  “I believe that may have been an accident. A side effect, if you like, of the virus’ true function. This one was designed to collect data during the pilot’s transition period; it may have simply dominated his brainware at the moment when he needed full access to his circuits. I would need more time to be sure of that,” he cautioned, “but right now it’s my best guess.”