The kernel’s control panel was a compact unit sitting on the curved shield surface. Aybee squatted down by it. “So far, so good. Want first crack at it?”
“I wouldn’t know where to start. But if you know a way to tell what’s inside the shields, you can check what Bey suggested to me when we were working on the message. He thinks there’s some new form-change product in there, something that can survive near a kernel. He tried to scan the shield interior back on the Marsden Harvester, looking for something unusual, but he didn’t find a thing. He wasn’t sure he was doing it right, though. Leo Manx told him to ask you, because this is your line of work. But you were off having fun on the space farm.”
“Yeah. Had a great time there. Real pleasure trip.” Aybee was already at the control panel, staring vacantly at its complicated console. “This layout’s a strange one for a power kernel console. Too many functions. And it’s directly linked with the habitat’s central computer.”
“Can you scan the interior?”
“Dunno.” Aybee listed the control function menu and studied it for a few seconds. “Guess I can. Only thing inside the kernel shield—apart from the kernel—should be the radiation monitors. I’ll use them to do an interior scan and output it to the screen. We’ll pick up an image of anything inside the shields. But I’ll bet my butt that we don’t find anything in there.”
He turned on the display and set the interior monitors to perform a slow scan within the innermost kernel shield. The kernel itself, pouring out gigawatts of radiation and particles, appeared as a tiny, intense point of light on the monitor. The triple shields, reflecting back that sleet of energy, showed on the same monitor as a softer continuous glow.
They both stared at the screen, waiting in vain for any anomalous pattern. When the scan had finished, Sylvia shook her head. “That does Bey in. He was sure there had to be something inside. What now?”
“We gotta use pure logic.” Aybee was back at the controls. “One: There’s an information source inside the kernel shields. Two: There’s nothing inside the shield but the kernel. Therefore—nice clean syllogism—the kernel must be the information source. I’ve been skirting that for weeks, wondering if I’m off my head—but no one would let me get near a kernel and find out!”
“Aybee, let’s not get too ridiculous. A kernel is a power source. It isn’t an information source. And how can there be anything inside a kernel? It’s only billionths of a centimeter across. And even if there were anything inside, it couldn’t ever get a message out. A kernel is a black hole!”
Aybee was shaking his head and changing the scale on the output display. He had zoomed in to the area around the kernel itself. “Come off it, Sylv. Black holes stopped being black in the 1970s, two hundred and fifty years ago! Hell, you know that—why else do you need shields? You know black holes pump out particles and radiation. Every kernel has its own radiation temperature and its own entropy. Maybe its own signal.”
“But it’s too small! You couldn’t possibly pack a signal generator in such a tiny volume.”
“We don’t know how much space there is inside, or what the inside of a kernel is like—no idea at all. The interior has its own geometry, its own space-time signature, probably its own physical laws. Hell, people have been saying for centuries that the inside of a black hole is a ‘separate universe,’ but we never bother to think through the implication of that. If the inside of each kernel is a separate universe, anything could be in there—including somebody capable of communication.”
“Somebody? You mean something alive? How did it get in there?”
“Hey, you’d better define life for me. If you mean something capable of generating nonrandom signals, then, yeah, I mean alive. As for how it got there—it’s been in there all along.”
“But how? And what could something inside a kernel possibly want to say?”
“One question at a time, Sylv. Do you want to find out what’s going on, or do you want to run a debate? Remember, thermodynamics only tells what’s happening on average for a kernel’s radiation. It doesn’t say what gets emitted at any particular moment—so let’s take a look at this.” Aybee turned on a second screen. “We don’t see a thing when we just monitor the total radiation output of the kernel, because the average level is so high. But I can display the time variation of the radiation—the deviation from the average. See that fluctuation? Now, it could be a signal. Information, coming from the kernel—from nowhere. Just what Bey was looking for, as bad inputs to the form-change process. And I’ll bet this could be responsible for breakdown of communications all through the system. Don’t forget there are active kernels in all the important places, everywhere from the harvesters to the space farms. It could be the cause of the snake wrapped around the Kernel Ring, the giant woman walking across the space farm collector, flaming blue swords, giant red space hounds—you name it.”
Sylvia was studying the rise and fall of the radiation pattern. “But it doesn’t look like a signal. It’s like pure noise.”
“A perfectly efficient signal looks like noise—until you know the rules.” Aybee was tracing the circuits leading from the kernel monitors. “Before the signal can be interpreted, it needs to be decoded. And that’s where the computer systems must come in. See, this signal is fed as an input data stream to the computer—the central computer for Ransome’s Hole. Let’s have a look at what the computer thinks it is seeing. It starts by—uh oh.” He was staring at a new signal on the screen.
“What’s wrong?”
“Bad news for Bey.” The alert signal vanished and was replaced by a flashing message. “While I was playing with the com system, I took a precaution. I set up a priority interrupt for information about Ransome.” Aybee was frowning at the screen. “According to this, Ransome is in two places at once on the habitat. I asked for positional fixes, but all I get as an answer is ‘No Defined Location.’ Bey might run into the real Ransome.”
“Can you do anything about it?”
“Not one thing. We don’t even know where he is.”
“Then we have to keep going.” Sylvia was more intrigued than she had realized. “Let’s find out what we’ve got here. What’s the next step?”
Aybee did not answer for a minute or two, then marked a point on the screen with the cursor. “See that trace? It says there’s a program on the main computer system, one designed as an interface with this kernel. It ought to be the code/decode algorithm. We can try it. You stay right here, Sylv, and tell me what happens. I’ll go to the upper console and execute that module.”
Aybee scampered back up the ladder, leaving Sylvia to wonder what they were hoping to accomplish. It was difficult to see how fiddling with kernels could help them escape from Ransome’s Hole. But it was hard to stop Aybee when he had the bit between his teeth—and she did not want to stop any more than he did.
The lighting in the kernel shield chamber was poor, and Sylvia was forced to lean close to see the miniature control display. For another minute or two there was nothing to claim her attention. Then she noticed that the spin-up/spin-down mechanism on the kernel had suddenly been brought into action. It was adding and subtracting tiny bursts of angular momentum, far too little to make sense as power supplies.