The Mind Like A Strange Balloon | Page 7

Her gaze was clear and focused straight ahead.
Before we left her office she showed me what Aleph was doing. On one data window, the lie--an orderly flow of decisions, the careful, complex structures I had seen in holographic splendor in the Ops Room--the three-dimensional mandalas upon which the KEs meditated. On another window, the actuality--stupid subroutines forced to masquerade as IA systems, queues building until Aleph could return to them; meanwhile, the greater part of the system was engaged in processing Diana's sight.
The longer this went on, the more difficult it was for Aleph to handle--the end result was the slowdown.
Sitting in her quarters, we drank hot tea, something that smelled of jasmine and spice. "It's quite a juggling act," I said. "But I don't know how long Aleph can keep it up. Besides, what does that matter? Take this to Toshi and Alice, to the ICOG Board. You shouldn't be hiding this. Tell them it needs to be pursued in the right way--not with you working in isolation, stealing their system, but with all the resources you want. They'll have to buy it."
"Will they?"
"Don't you think they'll have to? They'll see the importance."
"Why? What's in it for Siemens or Bechtel or Nippon Electric? Think about it, Jerry. I've jeopardized all their projects, the orbital energy grid, maybe ICOG itself. God knows what I've done to Aleph."
She may have been right. Epochal discovery is a fine thing, especially in retrospect and when you don't have to pay for it. But right now ICOG was playing animal trainer to a bunch of mean and various beasts, and they had to be fed.
If she told them, would they allow her to pursue her research, or would they just fire her? Who, if anyone, would be willing to pay the tab on a new Aleph system? And would they welcome her as director of the new project? And there was Aleph itself. What did it, in whatever peculiar fashion, want? Imponderables.
But for the present she was riding the storm, going . . . I don't know where . . . her own will and intelligence guiding, small enough comfort in a large gale, but perhaps enough to steer by, enough to work the force of the dense-vectored wind.
From that point on I stayed away from Biops/I-Sight. "Nothing there," I told Alice and Toshi. "I don't think there's anything happening with the subsystems. If you want, I'll help you work with the logistics programs." Laying a trail away.
But after walking like automatons through the empty working days, Diana and I would meet in her rooms to sail the currents of our own storm. There was no steerage there, just a careening trip across the landscape that hung far below.
Finally I could avoid it no longer I called a meeting with Toshi and Alice. We used a small, plain conference room that featured a viewport on one side. Close in, a tug glided by, a snarl of crates, pallets, and rude assemblages, the pilot's head clearly visible, upside down, as he passed by.
"I believe my work is finished," I said. "Unfortunately I am unable to specify the exact nature of the problems affecting performance of the Aleph-Nought system. It remains unclear that such problems in fact exist. The periodic slowdowns may be a result of inherent systems vice, artifacts of the systems architecture" Set speeches for the memo tape. "I have prepared a menu of recommended changes in subsystems logic. They may effect optimum decision capacity in the total operational domain." Good, bureaucratic, hand-washing gibberish, to be supported by a set of plausible fictions, cosmetic subtleties that Alice and the KEs would have to institute to find out whether they had any effect at all.
Alice was puzzled. "Is that it, Jerry? It's not much."
"I'm sorry, Alice. I've done what I could. If you're not satisfied, you ought to get someone else."
The rest of the meeting was brief. Toshi stopped me in the corridor afterward. "You seem troubled," he said. 'Also reticent. I want to assure you that even complex problems can most often be worked out to mutual satisfaction." He let that statement lie--his attempt to bring me into the charmed circle of ringi seido, the process of joint consultation that is the soul of Japanese decision making. It was a nice gesture but meaningless. I just wasn't feeling Japanese.
I went to my compartment, where she was waiting. Her skin was hot to the touch. A last time, in seeming slow motion, we came together. She had just begun her period, and with her blood we traced scarlet arabesques across the sheets, across our thighs. Standing in the shower stall, I started to wash the blood away, but I didn't.
The tug fell from high orbit. ICOG had arranged a rendezvous below with a military shuttle.