Here it came, the moment Alex had been dreading. Kate held her glass in front of her face, so he couldn’t see her mouth and chin as she said, “What about us?”
“Us?”
“Us. Do you want it spelled? U-S. You and me. I suppose all this pressure of important family business has made it escape your attention, but you and I have been sharing a bed for the past two months. I had the illusion that you were enjoying it. What happens if the great family union is achieved, you are the popular choice, and Lucy becomes Mrs. Alex Ligon?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I do.” Kate slammed her glass down hard, so that the sweet and sticky liquor splashed out onto the table. “I’m not a possessive person, but sharing a dick with somebody else — even if she’s the heir to the whole Mobarak fortune — isn’t my idea of a good time. You go fuck Lucy if you want to. And while you’re at it you can go fuck yourself.”
Kate stared at Alex, her eyes blinking rapidly. Then she stood up, nigged her dress higher so that it covered her to the neck, turned, and was gone.
Alex sat alone. He had hoped to share with Kate his concerns over his mother. He had examined Lena Ligon closely during the meeting at family headquarters, and believed he saw evidence that the Commensal his mother had become was profoundly different from the original person.
He wasn’t going to be able to talk about those worries tonight; nor would any bed he slept in have Kate Lonaker by his side. The evening stretched out in front of him, empty and barren.
He stood up and headed for his office. Should he run his computer models now, rather than waiting for the morning? Maybe not. So far, the glories of Seine-Day had not lived up to their billing.
6
Humans had been listening for messages from the stars for a hundred and fifty years. What were the chances that you, Milly Wu, would here-and-now discover the first one ever?
Milly told herself, all the time, that the odds were enormously against her; and yet, every morning, as she sat down in her little cubicle she felt an odd frisson of expectation.
It was her third week of work, and the routine was already familiar. Incoming signals from all wavelengths went first to the central “mill” of the station, for basic processing and reduction to a standard format. The mill was fully automated, and no human played any part in the operation.
Next came a series of computations and tests, again without human involvement, designed to discover deviations from randomness. There is a fine line between a signal that is unpredictable but well-determined, and one that is totally random. For example, the digits of such numbers as ? or e or Euler’s constant, y, form an infinite sequence in any number base you care to choose. You can calculate each element of that sequence, such as the number-string that begins ?’s base-10 representation, 3.14159265358979323846… for as long as you have time and patience. No matter where you stop, at the millionth or the billionth or the trillionth digit, there will always be a specific and unique next digit. The number ? is therefore well-determined, with absolutely nothing random about it. At the same time, no matter how far you go, the next digit cannot be predicted from what you have already.
Of course, if you were to discover the first thousand or ten thousand digits of ?, to any number base, in a signal received from space, that would be another matter. It would provide proof, without doubt and without the need for any other information, that an alien intelligence was broadcasting to the universe.
Milly had known all that, long before she applied for a position with Project Argus. It was also a safe bet that the Argus computers, billions of times faster and more accurate than any human, were screening for untold millions of digit sequences drawn from pure mathematics and physics.
So what did this leave for humans to do? Exactly what Milly was doing now: using the human ability, so far unmatched by any machine, to see patterns.
Every morning, the mill produced a variable number of signals with some element of strangeness. Every morning, eighteen humans in their separate cubicles were provided a quota of data sets for individual examination. No one in the analysis group knew how many signals the mill produced on any particular day for human inspection, and all assumed that on some occasions two or more people would be given the same data. In principle no data set was more than one day old, but Hannah Krauss had told Milly that new arrivals would often in their first weeks be given an old anomaly, to see what they made of it. Jack Beston calibrated and compared the quality of people as well as signals.
He was more than an Ogre, he was a paranoid Ogre. Milly and her fellow-workers at the Argus Station could eat together if they wished and interact socially as much as they liked. What they were not supposed to do, ever, was compare notes about their work. Anomalies were not to be advertised, nor were they a subject for group discussion. They were to be reported directly to Jack Beston.
The data for individual analysis were divided into what on the L-4 station were known as “cells.” As Milly pulled in the first cell of the day, she reflected that she too might as well be in a cell. Worse than that, she was in solitary confinement. The cubicle to her left was occupied by a mournful-faced woman in her middle fifties who apparently had no other existence than work. Lota Danes was never in the dining area, and no matter how early Milly came to her cubicle, the door of the neighboring cubicle was always closed and the red sign outside showed that it was occupied. The hyperactive man who sat on Milly’s other side was at the other extreme of behavior. Simon Bitters kept random hours, popped in and out of his cubicle all the time, stuck his head now and again into Milly’s own little partition, placed his right index finger on the end of his nose, then ducked out again without a word. He apparently spent the whole of his working days wandering the station. Milly wondered how he ever fulfilled his daily quota. But apparently he did, otherwise Jack Beston would have shredded him at the weekly review meetings.
“You’ll be a long way from home,” her stepfather had said, just before Milly left Ganymede. “Make friends there, so you won’t feel lonely.”
Sure. But how, with eccentrics like these?
Maybe Milly was one herself. This wasn’t what she had expected when she signed up to come to the L-4 location and the Argus Project, but Hannah Krauss’s warning after her first couple of weeks in some ways matched her stepfather’s. “The work here is challenging and interesting, but it’s lonely. Try to make friends, and find activities outside your work. Do you know the occupational hazards of mathematicians, logicians, and cryptanalysts?”
“Depression?”
“Depression, yes. Also insanity, paranoia, and suicide. And isolation increases the odds.”
Now they warned you, when you were already here. Milly examined the screen in front of her. She could process the cell that she had just loaded in endless different ways. It came in as a long string of binary digits, anything from a million to billions of 1’s and 0’s. She could transform that to any number base, introduce any breaks that she liked, look for repeating strings, present the data factored into two- or three-dimensional arrays, transform the results to polar or cylindrical or any other orthogonal set of coordinates, examine the Fourier transforms and power spectra of the result, cross-correlate any section with any other, compute the sequence or image entropy, seek size or shape invariants, and display any or all of those results in a wide variety of formats. In the first few days she had developed her own preferred suite of processes, with a shell of operations to run their sequence automatically. All she had to do was sit, observe the results, and allow her imagination to run free in its search for oddities, or — there was always hope — meaningful patterns.