Tally put such ineluctable mysteries to one side, pending the long trip out to his destination. For the moment he would concentrate on the simpler question of galactic power groups.
“Dobelle is a double-planet system, part of the Phemus Circle of worlds.” The man providing the briefing was Legate Stancioff, brought in specially from Miranda. He also seemed to Tally to have been chosen specifically for his leaden vagueness in thought and speech. He was staring at Tally with furrowed brow. “Do you know anything about the Phemus Circle?”
Tally nodded. “Twenty-three stellar systems. Primitive and impoverished. Sixty-two habitable planets, some of them marginal. They form a loose federation of worlds, on the overlapping boundary of the territories of the Fourth Alliance, the Cecropia Federation, and the Zardalu Communion. They are roughly one hundred parsecs away from Sol. They contain one Builder artifact, the Umbilical. That artifact is to be found in the Dobelle system.”
The machine-gun delivery ended. Those facts, and a million others about the suns and planets of the spiral arm, had been stored in Tally’s memory long before he assumed the embodied form, and he had seen no reason to question them. What had just recently been added to his internal states, and what consumed trillions of cycles of introspection time to achieve even partial answers, was the need to examine motivation.
The Dobelle system was a planetary doublet, twin worlds known as Opal and Quake that spun furiously about their common center of mass. They were joined by the twelve-thousand-kilometer strand known as the Umbilical. The orbit of their mass center about the star Mandel was highly eccentric, and the time of closest approach to the stellar primary induced prodigious land and sea tides in Quake and Opal. That closest approach was known as Summertide. The most recent Summertide had been an exceptional one, because the approach of Mandel’s binary partner, Amaranth, and a gas-giant planet, Gargantua, had led to a lineup of bodies, the Grand Conjunction, that took place only once every 350,000 years.
Very good. Tally knew all that, and he understood it perfectly. Wild as the celestial motions might be, nothing stood in defiance of either logic or physics; to induce such a breakdown, apparently Organics were needed.
“You tell me that a group of humans and aliens converged on Quake and Opal for the last Summertide,” he said to Legate Stancioff. “And they went there voluntarily. But why? Why would anyone go at that time, when the surfaces of the planets were at their most dangerous? They could have been destroyed.”
“We have reason to believe that some of them were.”
“But surely humans and Cecropians and Lo’tfians and Hymenopts don’t want to die?”
“Of course not.” Stancioff was in the human condition that E. C. Tally was coming to recognize as senescence. He was probably no more than ten years away from lapsing to a nontransitional internal state. Already his hands shook slightly as they were talking, in what was clearly a nonfunctional oscillation. “But humans,” Stancioff went on, “and aliens, too, I suppose, though I don’t actually know many aliens — we take risks, when we feel we have adequate reasons. And they all had different interests. Professor Lang, of Sentinel Gate, went to Dobelle because of her scientific interest in Builder artifacts and in Summertide itself. Others, like the Cecropian Atvar H’sial and the augmented Karelian human Louis Nenda, went there, we suspect, for personal gain. The Lo’tfian, J’merlia, and the Hymenopt, Kallik, are slaves. They were present because their masters ordered them to be there. The only beings on Quake in line of official duties were three humans: Commander Maxwell Perry, who controlled all outside access to the Dobelle system at Summertide; Captain Hans Rebka, who is a Phemus Circle troubleshooter sent to Dobelle as Perry’s superior; and Councilor Julius Graves, of our own Fourth Alliance, who was present on Council business. Don’t you wish to make notes of all these names?”
“It is unnecessary. I do not forget.”
“I suppose you don’t.” Stancioff stared at E. C. Tally. “That must be nice. Now, where was I? Well, never mind. There’s a whole lot of information in the files about everyone who was on Quake at Summertide, much more than I know about it. Not one of them ever came back, that’s the real mystery, even though Summertide was over weeks ago. We want you to find out why they all stayed. You should study each dossier while you are traveling to Dobelle, and form your own conclusions as to each person’s needs and desires.”
Needs and desires! Those were exactly what were missing in Tally’s internal states; but if they decided so many human and alien actions, he must learn to simulate them.
“May I speak?”
“You’ve certainly shown no reluctance so far.”
“I am perplexed by my suggested role in this matter. At the beginning I understood that I was to go to the Mandel system and assess the problems there on a logical basis. Now I learn that at least two other individuals are qualified to deal with the problem. Hans Rebka, according to your own words, is a ‘troubleshooter,’ and Julius Graves is actually a Council member. Given their presence, what do you expect me to accomplish?”
“I am glad you asked that question. It is a good omen for the success of your mission.” Legate Stancioff moved out of his chair and came to stand in front of Tally. His hands had stopped shaking, and the vagueness was gone from his manner. “It would be an even better sign if you were to answer the question yourself. Can you do so, if I tell you that on this assignment I am assuming that your weakness may also be your strength?”
After a millisecond of analysis, Tally nodded. “It can only be because I am not an Organic. My weakness is my lack of human emotions. Therefore my failure to share organic motivations and emotions is also my strength. You must believe that Graves and Rebka acted from emotion in deciding not to leave the Mandel system.”
“Correct. We cannot prove that. But we suspect it.” Legate Stancioff placed his hands on Tally’s firm shoulders. “You will find out. Go to Dobelle. Learn what you can and report back to us. I do not want to risk another human in finding out what happened at Summertide.”
Whereas you, as an embodied computer, are quite expendable.
E. C. Tally was learning. He was able to make that inference within a microsecond. It produced no reaction within him. It could not. If he had no human emotions, he lacked the internal state to resent the suggestion that his loss was acceptable, while a human loss was not. But he began structuring the first simulation circuits. There might be situations where an understanding of human emotions could be useful.
Entry 14: Human
Distribution: Humans, plus derived or augmented forms, can be found in three principal regions of the spiral arm: the Fourth Alliance, the Zardalu Communion, and the Phemus Circle. Of these, the Fourth Alliance is the biggest, the oldest, and the most populous. It includes the whole of Crawlspace, the Sol-centered, seventy-two-light-year sphere explored and colonized by humans in sublight-speed ships before the development of the Bose Drive and Bose Network. Almost eight hundred inhabited planets belong to the Fourth Alliance. They lie within an ellipsoid with Sol at one focus, stretching out seven hundred light-years in a direction roughly opposite to that of the galactic center. The supergiant star Rigel sits almost at the farthest boundary of Fourth Alliance territory. Humans are the dominant species of the Fourth Alliance and account for sixty percent of all intelligent beings there.
By contrast, the Phemus Circle consists of just a score of impoverished worlds, ninety percent human, nestled near the part of the Fourth Alliance closest to the center of the galaxy. The Phemus Circle shares a region where the Fourth Alliance, the Cecropia Federation, and the Zardalu Communion all have overlapping territories. It is a measure of the poverty of this group that none of the larger neighbors has shown interest in developing the Phemus Circle, although the Circle is nominally under the control of the Fourth Alliance and recognizes the authority of the Alliance’s Council members.