He had learned to get by, sitting quietly and calculating the first ten billion prime numbers or seeking repeating digit strings in pi while he waited for the first word of response, but you could only stand so much of that. Among the improvements in his second embodiment was one that he had specifically requested: he wanted a stand-by mode. And he didn’t mean simply the one he’d had before, which dropped his internal clock rate by a factor of a thousand or a million. No, he wanted a genuine stand-by mode, in which he could “sleep” the way that others slept, brought back to consciousness only when his senses were jogged by some external event—such as someone finally getting around to answering his question.
Now he had that ability to sleep, and it was better than anyone else’s. Like them, he could wake when provided by an outside stimulus. But he could also set his internal timer to a precise interval and become active when a second, a week, a month, or a century had passed.
E.C. Tally’s own logic circuits made him amend that thought. He could not be certain that sleep for a long interval would work, since he himself had only tested periods up to one day. On the other hand, the required changes had been put in place by Sue Harbeson Ando and Lee Boro, back on Miranda, and those two ladies were perfectionists. True, they had never managed to fix his smile so it didn’t make other humans shudder, but that was nerves and muscle connections, not computer functions. He had complete confidence in Ando and Boro. They had certainly tightened and adjusted him in other desirable ways.
Deliberately, E.C. allowed his thoughts to wander to time travel and to the paradoxes that the idea introduced. Suppose that a man went back in time, and killed his own grandfather? Would he then cease to exist? Maybe he would, and maybe he wouldn’t. Tally felt quite comfortable, whereas considerations of time travel in his earlier unimproved form had sent him into a loop from which only a cold start could rescue him.
And quantum theory, with all its now-you-see-it now-you-don’t peekaboo elements? He was just as comfortable with that. His brain could now handle everything from Lukasiewicz’s three-valued logic, to Reichenbach’s infinite-valued logic with its continuous range of truth-values.
Tally permitted himself the luxury of one final test. He turned his mind to Russell’s statement of the granddaddy of all true/false problems: “A barber in a certain village shaves all those, and only those, who do not shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself?”
Well, if he doesn’t shave himself, then since he shaves everyone who doesn’t shave himself, he shaves himself. On the other hand, if he shaves himself . . .
E.C. pursued the endless logical trail, on through the theory of types, meta-set theory, and fuzzy logic. It ate up idle time in a pleasant manner. Only the greater pleasure of a call from Julian Graves could exceed it.
“Tally, I know you are eager to leave, but I have kept you here because I have a task for you.”
At last. After a full day of idleness. Tally switched his circuits from background to turbo mode. “I am ready.”
“This will involve colossal amounts of computation. It will possibly exceed your resources.”
“We shall see.”
Tally was merely being polite. Of course, it had come nowhere close to straining his capabilities. The amount of calculation was gigantic, but he had it completed, checked, and re-checked in a few hours. Now, surely, he would be allowed to leave.
But no. Once again he was obliged to sit in stand-by mode, this time for an even longer period. At last the second call came.
“The results that you provided are most satisfactory. Are you still prepared for departure?”
“I am completely ready. My ship is also ready.” In fact, I have been ready for days, while you have brooded over the doings of Professor Lang and Captain Rebka and the results that I gave you. Tally kept the last sentence to himself—another of the many improvements installed in his new embodiment.
“Then you may proceed with your mission. Good luck, and do not forget to keep me informed as to whatever you may discover.”
Do not forget. As though an embodied computer ever would or could forget. “I will keep you informed.”
Tally took the final steps to free his own ship, the Tally-ho, from its magnetic bonds to the Pride of Orion. As he did so, it occurred to him that his current embodiment was perfect, in that it could not be improved.
In a sense he was correct. It could not be improved, because no one had ever managed to define good judgment, still less create a working algorithm to provide it.
Tally had not wasted time while Julian Graves kept him tied to the Pride of Orion’s apron strings. For three full days he had studied the stellar system to which their last Bose transition had brought them, working with unmatched speed and focus, endless patience, and the powers offered by his new ability to handle multi-valued logic systems.
The members of the expedition party from the Orion Arm were all in full agreement: they had not chosen this destination. It had been fed to them as Bose network coordinates, derived from the log of the Chism Polypheme’s ship. When they arrived at an obviously dead system, everyone said, Oh, that’s so typical of a Polypheme. It lied, they always lie. But suppose that the Polypheme had lied, and at the same time told the truth? Then in that case the stellar system to which they had come was both the wrong place to find the Marglotta home world, and at the same time the right place.
E.C. could live with that notion. When the Tally-ho pulled away from its docking he knew exactly where he wanted to go. Of course, he would eventually head for the edge of the dark zone, just as he had said he would, and hope in that way to arrive at the world of the Marglotta. Before taking his leave, however, there were points of interest right here in this system.
One of them was Iceworld, but Professor Lang had already staked her claim to that. Tally had read every report beamed back from the Savior, and he questioned Lang’s assessment that no matter what had been done to it recently, the big, hollow world had begun as a Builder artifact. Unlike everyone else on the Pride of Orion, he did not reject Darya Lang’s idea of a second super-race (perhaps a race of computers?). But didn’t it then make sense that they, rather than the Builders, had created Iceworld?
If so, the rest of the system was wide open as a possible hiding place for real Builder artifacts. Tally, after analysis that would have taken any human a million years of calculation, had a candidate.
His conversation with Julian Graves on the subject had been less than satisfactory.
“This body.” E.C. Tally indicated on a whole-system display a medium-sized planetoid moving in an orbit far out from the dark star that formed the center of the gravitating set of worlds.
“What about it?” Julian Graves glared at the insignificant object, his great bald brow furrowed with impatience or suspicion. Sometimes Tally wondered if Graves approved of embodied computers. “I’ve never seen a more average lump of rock.”