Heads. Part 1

HEADS.

Greg Bear, 1990.

Two hundred years in the future, the Moon is emerging from an age of innocence. Once pioneers, the easiest motto for these Lunar families is Cut the politics. They think they are safe from the sophistication and corruption of political intrigue.

William Pierce is searching for absolute zero. No scientist has yet succeeded, and William is almost there... His wife Rho has bought 410 heads, cryogenically frozen centuries before in the hope of resurrection. She thinks she can read them for information.

There are dangers.

William doesn't quite understand that his experiments could distort s.p.a.ce and time. Rho doesn't realise that her heads will bring interference from a new and deadly faction, the devotedly religious Logologists.

Cut the politics. But they can't. And the politics of this society could destroy much, much more than Rho and William's work ...

Greg Bear is a compelling, story-teller, creating his fiction from state-of-the-art science, real characters and a powerful imagination. His set-pieces are famed, being awesome in scale and undeniably moving. Like the cla.s.sic SF writers, Bear's work truly evokes the sense of wonder. He is today's leading science fiction author.

Order and cold, heat and politics. The imposition of wrong order: anger, death, suicide and destruction. I lost loved ones, lost my illusions and went through mental and physical h.e.l.l, but what still haunts my dreams, thirty years after, are the great silvery refrigerators four storeys tall hang motionless in the dark void of the Ice Pit; the force disorder pumps with their constant sucking soundlessness; the dissolving ghost of my sister, Rho; and William Pierce's expression when he faced his lifetime goal, in the Quiet ...

I believe that Rho and William are dead, but I will never be sure. I am even less sure about the four hundred and ten heads.

Fifty metres beneath the cinereous regolith of Ocean Procellarum, in the geographic centre of the extensive and largely empty Sandoval territories, the Ice Pit was a volcanic burp in the Moon's ancient past, a natural bubble almost ninety metres wide that had once been filled with the aqueous seep of a nearby ice fall.

The Ice Pit had been a lucrative water mine, one of the biggest pure water deposits on the Moon, but it had long since tapped out.

Loath to put family members out of work, my family, the binding multiple of Sandoval, had kept it as a money-losing farm station. It supported three dozen occupants in a s.p.a.ce that had once housed three hundred. It was sorely neglected, poorly managed, and worst of all for a lunar establishment, its alleys and warrens were dirty. The void itself was empty and unused, its water-conserving atmosphere of nitrogen long since leaked away and its bottom littered with rubble from quakes.

In this unlikely place, my brother-in-law William Pierce had proposed seeking absolute zero, the universal ultimate in order, peace and quiet. In asking for the use of the Ice Pit, William had claimed, he would be turning a sow's ear into a scientific silk purse. In return, Sandoval BM would boast a major scientific project, elevating its status within the Triple, and therefore its financial standing. The Ice Pit Station would have a real purpose beyond providing living s.p.a.ce for several dozen idle ice miners masquerading as farmers. And William would have something uniquely his own, something truly challenging.

Rho, my sister, supported her husband by using all her considerable energy and charm - and her standing with my grandfather, in whose eyes she could do no wrong.

Despite Grandfather's approval, the idea was subjected to rigorous examination by the Sandoval syndics - the financiers and entrepreneurs, as well as the scientists and engineers, many of whom had worked with William and knew his extraordinary gifts. Rho skilfully navigated his proposal through the maze of scrutiny and criticism.

By a five-four decision of the syndics, with much protest from the financiers and grudging acceptance from the scientists, William's project was approved.

Thomas Sandoval-Rice, the BM's director and chief syndic, gave his own approval reluctantly, but give it he did. He must have seen some use for a high-risk, high-profile research project; times were hard, and prestige could be crucial even for a top-five family.

Thomas decided to use the project as a training ground for promising young family members. Rho spoke up on my behalf, without my knowledge, and I found myself a.s.signed to a position far above what my age and experience deserved: the new station's chief financial manager and requisitions officer.

I was compelled by family loyalties - and the pleas of my sister - to cut loose from formal schooling at the Tranquil and move to the Ice Pit Station. At first I was less than enthusiastic. I felt my calling to be liberal arts rather than finance and management; I had, in family eyes, frittered away my education studying history, philosophy and the terrestrial cla.s.sics. But I had a fair apt.i.tude for the technical sciences less apt.i.tude for the theoretical - and had taken a minor in family finances. I felt I could handle the task, if only to show my elders what a liberal mentality could accomplish.

Ostensibly I was in charge of William and his project, answerable to the syndics and financial directors alone; but of course, William quickly established his own pecking order. I was twenty years old at the time; William, thirty-two.

Inside the void, foamed rock was sprayed to insulate and seal in a breathable atmosphere. I oversaw the general clean-up, refitting of already existing warrens and alleys, and investment in a relatively spartan laboratory.

Large refrigerators stored at the station since the end of ice mining were moved into the void, providing far more cooling capacity than William actually needed for his work.

Vibration is heat. The generators that powered the Ice Pit laboratory lay on the surface, their noise and reverberation isolated from the refrigerators and William's equipment and laboratory. What vibration remained was damped by suspension in an intricate network of steel springs and field levitation absorbers.

The Ice Pit's heat radiators also lay near the surface, sunk six metres deep in the shadow of open trenches, never seeing the sun, faces turned towards the all-absorbing blackness of s.p.a.ce.

Three years had pa.s.sed since the conversion. Again and again, William had failed to meet his goal. His demands for equipment had become more extravagant, more expensive, and more often than not, rejected. He had become reclusive, subject to even wider mood swings.

I met William at the beginning of the alley that led to the Ice Pit, in the main lift hollow. We usually saw each other only in pa.s.sing as he whistled through the cold rock alleys between home and the laboratory. He carried a box of drinker files and two coils of copper tubing and looked comparatively happy.

William was a swarthy stick of a man, two metres tall, black eyes deep-set, long narrow chin, lips thin, brows and hair dark as s.p.a.ce, with a deep shadow on his jaw. He was seldom calm or quiet, except when working; he could be rude and abrasive. Set loose in a meeting, or conversing on the lunar corn net, he sometimes seemed contentious to the point of self-destruction, yet still the people closest to him loved and respected him. Some of the Sandoval engineers considered William a genius with tools and machines, and on those rare occasions when I was privileged to see his musician's hands prodding and persuading, seducing all instrumentality, designing as if by willing consensus of all the material parts, I could only agree; but I loved him much less than I respected him.

In her own idiosyncratic way, Rho was crazy about him; but then, she was just as driven as William. It was a miracle their vectors added.

We matched step. 'Rho's back from Earth. She's flying in from Port Yin,' I said.

'Got her message,' William said, bouncing to touch the rock roof three metres overhead. His glove brought down a few lazy drifts of foamed rock. 'Got to get the arbeiters to spray that.' He used a distracted tone that betrayed no real intent to follow through. 'I've finally straightened out the QL, Micko. The interpreter's making sense. My problems are solved.'

'You always say that before some new effect cuts you down.' We had come to the large, circular, white ceramic door that marked the entrance to the Ice Pit and stopped at the white line that William had crudely painted there, three years ago. The line could be crossed only on his invitation.

The hatch opened. Warm air poured into the corridor; the Ice Pit was always warmer than ambient, being filled with so much equipment. Still, the warm air smelled cold; a contradiction I had never been able to resolve.

'I've licked the final source of external radiation,' William said. 'Some terrestrial metal doped with twentieth-century fallout.' He zipped his hand away. 'Replaced it with lunar steel. And the QL is really tied in. I'm getting straight answers out of it - as straight as quantum logic can give. Leave me my illusions.'

'Sorry,' I said. He shrugged magnanimously. 'I'd like to see it in action.'

He stopped, screwed up his face in irritation, then slumped a bit. 'I'm sorry, Mickey. I've been a real wart. You fought for it, you got it for me, you deserve to see it. Come on.'

I followed William over the line and across the forty-metre-long, two-metre-wide wire and girder bridge into the Ice Pit.

William walked ahead of me, between the force disorder pumps. I stopped to look at the ovoid bronze toruses mounted on each side of the bridge. They reminded me of abstract sculptures, and they were among the most sensitive and difficult of William's tools, always active, even when not connected to William's samples.

Pa.s.sing between the pumps, I felt a twitch in my interior, as if my body were a large ear listening to something it could barely discern: an elusive, sucking silence. William looked back at me and grinned sympathetically. 'Spooky feeling, hm?'

'I hate it,' I said.

'So do I, but it's sweet music, Micko. Sweet music indeed.' Beyond the pumps and connected to the bridge by a short, narrow walkway, hung the Cavity, enclosed in a steel Faraday cage. Here, within a metre-wide sphere of perfect orbit-fused quartz, the quartz covered with a mirror coating of niobium, were eight thumb-sized ceramic cells, each containing approximately a thousand atoms of copper. Each cell was surrounded by its own superconducting electromagnet. These were the mesoscopic samples, large enough to experience the macroscopic qualities of temperature, small enough to lie within the microscopic realm of quantum forces. They were never allowed to reach a temperature greater than one-millionth Kelvin.

The laboratory lay at the end of the bridge, a hundred square metres of enclosed work s.p.a.ce made of thin shaped steel framing covered by black plastic wall. Suspended by vibration-damping cords and springs and field levitation from the high dome of the Ice Pit, three of the four cylindrical refrigerators surrounded the laboratory like the pillars of a tropical temple, overgrown by a jungle of pipes and cables. Waste heat was conveyed through the rubble net at the top of the void and through the foamed rock roof beyond by fle3dble tubes; the buried radiators on the surface then shed that heat into s.p.a.ce.

The fourth and final and largest refrigerator lay directly above the Cavity, sealed to the upper surface of the quartz sphere. From a distance the refrigerator and the Cavity might have resembled a squat, old-fashioned mercury thermometer, with the Cavity serving as bulb.

The T-shaped laboratory had four rooms, two in the neck of the T, one extending on each side to make the wings. William led me through the laboratory door - actually a fle3dble curtain - into the first room, which was filled with a small metal table and chair, a disa.s.sembled nano-works arbeiter, and cabinets of cubes and disks. In the second room, the QL thinker occupied a central platform about half a metre on a side. On the wall to the left of the table were a manual control board - seldom used now - and two windows overlooking the Cavity. The second room was quiet, cool, a bit like a cloister cell.

Almost from the beginning of the project, William had maintained to the syndics - through Rho and myself; we never let him appear in person - that his equipment could not be perfectly tuned by even the most skilled human operators, or by the most complicated of computer controllers. All of his failures, he said in his blackest moods, were due to this problem: the inability of macroscopic controllers to be in sync with the quantum qualities of the samples.

What he - what the project - needed was a quantum logic thinker. Yet these were being manufactured only on Earth, and they were not being exported. Because so few were manufactured, the black market of the Triple had none to offer, and the costs of purchasing, avoiding Earth authorities and shipping to the Moon were vast. Rho and I could not convince the syndics to make such a purchase. William had seemed to blame me personally.

Our break came with news of an older-model QL thinker being offered for sale by an Asian industrial consortium. William had determined that this so-called obsolete thinker would suit our needs - it was suspiciously cheap, however, and almost certainly out of date. That didn't bother William.

The syndics had approved this request, to everybody's surprise, I think. It might have been Thomas's final gift and test for William - any more expensive requisitions without at least the prospect of a success and the Ice Pit would be closed.

Rho had gone to Earth to strike a deal with the Asian consortium. The thinker had been packaged, shipped, and had arrived six weeks before. I had not heard from her between the time of the purchase and her message from Port Yin that she had returned to the Moon. She had spent four weeks extra on Earth, and I was more than a little curious to find out what she had been doing there.

William leaned over the platform and patted the QL proudly. 'It's running almost everything now,' he said. 'If we succeed, the QL will take a large share of the credit.' The QL itself covered perhaps a third of the platform's surface. Beneath the platform lay the QL's separate power supplies; by Triple common law, all thinkers were equipped with supplies capable of lasting a full year without outside replenishment.

'Who'll get the n.o.bel, you or the QL?' I asked. I bent to the QL's level to peer at its white cylindrical container. William shook his head.

'n.o.body off Earth has ever gotten a n.o.bel, anyway,' he said. 'Surely I get some credit for telling the QL about the problem.' I felt the most affection for my brother-in-law when he reacted positively to my acidulous humour.

'What about this?' I asked, touching the interpreter lightly with a finger. Connected to the QL by fist-thick optical cables, covering another half of the platform, the interpreter was a thinker in itself. It addressed the QL's abstruse contemplations and rendered them, as closely as possible, in language humans could understand.

'A marvel all by itself.'

'Tell me about it,' I said.

'You didn't study the files,' William chided.

'I was too busy fighting with the syndics to study,' I said. 'Besides, you know theory's never been my greatest strength.'

William knelt behind the opposite side of the table, his expression contemplative, reverent. 'Did you read about Huang-Yi Hsu?'

'Tell me,' I said patiently.

He sighed. 'You paid for it out of ignorance, Mickey. I could have misled you grievously.'

'I trust you, William.'

He accepted that with generous dubiety. 'Huang-Yi Hsu invented post-Boolean three-state logic before 2010. n.o.body paid much attention to it until 2030. He was dead by then; had committed suicide rather than submit to Beijing's Rule of Seven. Brilliant man, but I think a true anomaly in human thought. Then a few physicists in the University of Washington's Cramer Lab Group discovered they could put Hsu's work to use solving problems in quantum logic. Post-Boolean and quantum logic were made for each other. By 2060, the first QL thinker had been built, but n.o.body thought it was successful.

'Fortunately, it was against the law by then to turn off activated thinkers without a court order, but n.o.body could talk to this one. Its grasp of human languages was inadequate; it couldn't follow their logic. It was a mind in limbo, Mickey; brilliant but totally alien. So it sat in a room at Stanford University's Thinker Development Center for five years before Roger Atkins - you know about Roger Atkins?' 'William,' I warned.

'Before Atkins found the common ground for any functional real logic, the Holy Grail of language and thought ... his CAL interpreter. Comprehensible All Logics. Which lets us talk to the QL. He died a year later.' William sighed. 'Swan song. So this,' he patted the interpreter, a flat grey box about fifteen centimetres square and nine high, 'lets us talk to this.' He patted the QL.

'Why hasn't anybody used a QL as a controller before?' I asked.

'Because even with the interpreter, the QL - this QL at any rate - is a monster to work with,' he said. He tapped the display b.u.t.ton and a prismatic series of bars and interlacing graphs appeared over the thinker. 'That's why it was so cheap. It has no priorities, no real sense of needs or goals. it thinks, but it may not solve. Quantum logic can outline the centre of a problem before it understands the principles and questions, and then, from our point of view, everything ends in confusion. More often than not, it comes up with a solution to a problem not yet stated. It does virtually everything but linear, time's arrow ratiocination. Half of its efforts are meaningless to goal-oriented beings like ourselves, but I can't prune those efforts, because somewhere in them lies the solution to my problems, even if I haven't stated the problem or am not aware that I have a problem. A post Boolean intelligence. It functions in time and s.p.a.ce, yet ignores their restrictions. it's completely in tune with the logic of the Planck-Wheeler continuum, and that's where the solution to my problem lies.'

'So when's your test?

'Three weeks. Or sooner, if there aren't any more interruptions.'

'Am I invited?'

'All doubters, front row seats,' he said. 'Call me when Rho gets in. Tell her I've got it.'

My office lay along a north warren, in an insulated cylindrical chamber that had once been a liquid water tank. It was much larger than I needed, cavernous in fact, and my bed, desk, slate files and other furnishings occupied one small section of about five metres square near the door. I entered, set myself down in a wide air-cushion seat, called up the Triple Exchange - monetary rates within the Greater Planets economic sphere of Earth, Moon and Mars - and began my daily check on the Sandoval Trust. I could usually gauge the Ice Pit's annual operating expenses by such auguries.

Rho's shuttle landed at Pad Four an hour later. I was engrossed in trust investment performances; she buzzed my line second. William was not answering his.

'Micko, congratulate me! I've got something wonderful,' she said.

'A new terrestrial virus we can't set for,' I said.

'Mickey. This is serious.'

'William says to tell you he's very very close.'

'All right. That's good. Now listen.'

'Where are you?'

'In the personnel lift. Listen.'

'Yes.'

'How much extra cooling capacity does William have?'

'You don't know?'

'Mickey ...'

'About eight billion calories. Cold is no problem here. You know that.'

'I have a load of twenty cubic metres coming in. Average density like fatty water, I a.s.sume. What would that be, point nine? It's packed in liquid nitrogen at sb4 K. Keeping it colder would be much better, especially if we decide on long-term storage ...'

'What is it? Smuggled nano machines to liberate lunar industry?'

'You wish. Nothing quite so dangerous. Forty stainless steel Dewar containers, quite old, vacuum insulated.' 'Anything William would be interested in?' 'I doubt it. Can he spare the extra capacity now?' 'He's never used it before, even when he was close, very close. But he's in no mood for-'

'Meet me at home, then we'll go to the Ice Pit and tell him.'

'You mean ask.'

'I mean tell,' Rho said.

The Pierce-Sandoval home was two alleys south of my office, not far from the farms, off a nice double-width heated mining bore with smooth white walls of foamed rock. I palmed their home doorplate a half-hour later, allowing her time to freshen from the Copernicus trip, never a luxury run.

Rho came out of the bathnook in lunar cotton terry and turban, zaftig by lunar standards, shook out her long red hair, and waved a brochure at me as I entered.

'Have you ever heard of the StarTime Preservation Society?' she asked, handing me the ancient glossy folio.

'Paper,' I said, hefting the folio carefully. 'Heavy paper.' 'They had boxes full of these on Earth,' she said. 'Stacked up in a dusty office comer. Leftovers from their platinum time. Have you heard of it?'

'No,' I said, looking through the brochure. Men and women in cold suits; gla.s.s tanks filled with mysterious raist; bare rooms blue with cold. A painting of the future as seen from the early twenty-first century; the Moon, oddly enough, gla.s.s domes and open-air architecture. 'Resurrection in a time of accomplishment, human maturity and wonder...'