Julius Graves gave a loud grunt of disapproval. Birdie shuddered and felt inclined to echo it. Had he survived Summertide, then, only to be wiped out in space? Not if he could help it. But surely he didn’t need to do anything. This was the moment where Graves would exercise his override authority as a council member and veto the whole journey, no matter what E. C. Tally wanted to do. It was unacceptably dangerous.
“I am sorry, Tally,” Graves said — there, he was going to use his authority, just the way Birdie had hoped. “But we are forced to take exception to your statement. Steven calculates that there is a sixty-percent chance of catastrophic failure — no more!”
“I beg to differ.” Tally looked down his well-designed nose at Graves. “I think that if you itemize the parameter inputs appropriate to the case, as follows, you will find these additional sources of danger…”
And away they went.
The Steven Graves vs. E. Crimson Tally stakes; that was the way Birdie was coming to think of it. As the Incomparable — Birdie was inclined to agree with that name for the rotting hulk — creaked and groaned its smelly and rust-covered way to the outer system, Steven Graves and E. C. Tally went on with their endless arguments.
Who was the winner? Birdie was not sure. The trip out to Gargantua was long and — thank God! — uneventful, and there were few people around to argue the point with. From sheer perversity Birdie went to an unlikely source — and consulted Julius Graves about the Steven-Tally dispute.
The councilor took the question perfectly seriously, wrinkling his bald, scarred forehead before he replied.
“I believe that I can be impartial. And I think it is a standoff. E. C. Tally has the advantage over Steven when it comes to anything involving computational speed — which is no surprise, given that his basic circuitry is many trillions of times as fast. The real surprise is that Steven can do as well as he does. So far as I can tell — Steven and I have discussed this several times — Tally employs direct formula computation whenever possible. Steven, on the other hand, makes extensive use of precomputed and memorized lookup tables and interpolation. Normally Tally will reach a conclusion faster on anything calling for straight computation — but not always.
“Steven’s advantage comes in other areas. Like any human, he enjoys a degree of parallelism that no computer, embodied or not, has ever achieved. To take one simple example, Steven and you and I are capable of remarkable feats of pattern recognition. We can distinguish and name an object familiar to us in a fraction of second, no matter how far off or at what angle we see it. You know who I am at once when we meet, regardless of lighting conditions or distance. Given the slow speed of organic memory, that cannot require more than about one hundred full cycles of our brains, which means tremendous parallel processing. To do the same job of recognition, the inorganic brain of E. C. Tally needs hundreds of billions of serial calculation cycles. Naturally, he will eventually reach the same result. But in this case, Steven will often be faster.”
“Two heads are better than one, you mean.” Birdie was unsmiling. “Either one of them may win. Sounds like we ought to hear from both Steven and E. C. Tally before we make any decision.”
“There is a certain logic to that idea. The other surprise is in information storage. Steven has far slower access, but he has better information packing density. He knows many more facts than E. C. Tally, but he takes longer to retrieve them.” Graves thought for a few moments longer. “And, of course, the final weakness of E. C. Tally is unrelated to computation speed or to memory capacity. It is his inability to allow for the effects of emotion when considering human issues. He will always do his best to make the right decision — his makeup gives him no choice — but his judgment on both human and alien issues will always be impaired. And the farther he is away from the environment in which his principal experience was drawn, the more suspect his decision processes will be.” Graves peered around, making sure that Tally was not lurking somewhere near. “It occurs to me that you and I had better keep a close eye on him. Especially you. He will seek to hide his motives from me, because he knows that I am part of the Council. You must inform me at once if his actions ever appear dangerously simplistic, or insensitive to the subtleties of organic intelligence.”
Birdie nodded. At the first opportunity he went for a quiet chat with E. C. Tally.
“Your observations have merit,” Tally said carefully, after a few milliseconds’ pause for substantial introspection. “The minds of Julius and Steven Graves possess certain attributes that may supplement mine. There is virtue in massively parallel processing, although on the whole it does not compensate for the painfully sluggish speed of an Organic’s neural circuits.” Tally looked carefully around him. “However, Julius and Steven Graves possess one weakness that could be fatal. In an emergency they — especially Julius — will tend to make judgments that are clouded by emotion. I was warned of this by the council. Perhaps you can assist me here. Graves will seek to hide the effects of his emotions from me, because he knows that I will be reporting to the Council. You must tell me at once if his actions ever appear dangerously emotional, or unduly colored by the hormonal influences of organic intelligence.”
“Sure. You can count on me.”
“Hmm. Indeed?” There was a moment’s pause. “Aha! You employ the verb idiomatically, not literally.” E. C. Tally nodded with heavy satisfaction. “Yes, indeed you do. Logic, and the slowness of your arithmetic circuits, require that must be the case. It is rewarding to know that the ways of organic intelligence are becoming apparent to me.”
He wandered off through the interior, with its lingering aroma of rancid fat.
Birdie felt a moment’s satisfaction, which was quickly replaced by a disturbing thought: Graves is as crazy as a Varnian, and E. C. Tally is no better. What’s wrong with me, when both sets of weirdos take me into their confidence?
Entry 18: Varnian
Distribution: The Varnian cladeworld, Evarnor, orbits an F-type star near the center of the ellipsoidal gas cloud known in the Fourth Alliance as the Swan of Hercules. The cloud lies approximately 170 light-years from Sol, in a direction bisecting the angle between the galactic normal and the vector to the galactic center.
Varnians spread from their original home via sublight-speed ships to thirteen other planets prior to their discovery by human explorers. All fourteen of these Varnian worlds lie within or on the boundaries of the Swan of Hercules.
Subsequent to that first discovery (in E. 1983, by the members of the Dmitriev Ark), small groups of Varnians have been spread by human contact throughout the Fourth Alliance and the Cecropia Federation. Spiral-arm regulations prohibit the formation of any colony of Varnians in excess of four thousand members, except on Evarnor itself or on one of the original thirteen Varnian colony worlds. Despite Varnian petition, this edict is judged unlikely to change in the foreseeable future (see Culture, below).
The population of Varnians throughout the spiral arm is estimated at 220 million. Although in no danger of extinction, they represent one of the rarer intelligences of the region.
Physical Characteristics: The Varnians are versatile metamorphs, capable of extensive physical transformation. Since Evarnor is a low-temperature planet, close to the limit for oxygen breathers, the Varnians who live there adopt in repose a spherical configuration that maximizes heat conservation. They extrude variable-width pseudopods as required, but they rarely deviate far from the overall spheroid.