And, shortly after daybreak, were awakened by the growl of their door-summoner. When they opened the door a man was standing there. A human man, and not a young one, either. He was dressed in a sober jacket and neatly pressed trousers and a subdued, striped cravat. He had a kindly smile, and piercing eyes, and he asked politely, "May I intrude on you? I'm Sigfrid von Shrink. I'm a subset of Rob Broadhead's shipmind, Albert—you know who Mr. Broadhead is, of course. I specialize in psychiatry. Since the Heechee have no expertise in that sort of thing, when one of their people began to show signs of mental illness they sent for help. I'm it."
9
The Story of a Stovemind
I
My name is Marc Antony, a matter which I wish to clear up.
The fact of my name does not mean that I am an ancient male Roman. I am not, any more than my associate, Thor Hammerhurler, is an old Scandinavian god. Actually, like Thor, I am not a man of any kind, since in essence I am nothing more than a simple computer drudge. (I used the term "simple." I don't mean really simple.) I was generated merely to be one among the ten-to-the-tenth computer intelligences that the human persons and the Heechee created to do odd jobs for them, when those two races built the Wheel some centuries ago. Which Wheel was constructed for the purpose of keeping track of that extragalactic nest of nonmaterial entities which are collectively known as the Assassins, the Foe or, more recently, the Kugelblitz. (I don't need to say any more about them now, as I will say enough later on.)
Why, then, am I called Marc Antony? The reason—I do not say it is a good reason—has nothing to do with the real Antony's status as sexual partner of the Egyptian queen, Cleopatra. I have no expertise at all in this area. The particular trait of Antony's which caused me to be called by his name is his reputation as a foodie. Or, as one might say more politely, an epicure. It is told—I do not say that this is a true story, either—that Antony's tastes were so rarefied that his cooks were required to prepare six serial dinners for him every day, so that at whatever hour he might choose to dine one of those dinners would always he ready to be served at its peak of perfection. (I don't know what they did with the other five dinners. Most likely Marc Antony had extremely well fed kitchen slaves.)
The way in which I do resemble Marc Antony is just that we both have exquisite taste.
In any practical regard the original Marc Antony and I are not so much twins as opposites. Antony never cooked a dish in his life. He wouldn't have known where to start. His only interest in food was in the consumption of it. I, on the other hand, consume no food of any kind, unless you consider energy a food. What I am, or at least what that primary subroutine of mine that defines me is, a gran toque blanc master in the art of food preparation. There is very little that I do not know about haute cuisine—no, to be truthful, there is nothing about haute cuisine that I do not know, and almost nothing about it that I can't put into practice. (With the aid, of course, of my effectors. Most AIs don't have them. I do.) All this requires, of course, that I have access to a competent Food Factory.
Most of my clients have no appreciation for the trouble I go to for them. Haute cuisine was all wasted on, for instance, my friend Harry. Harry's palate had been spoiled by the forty-five human years he spent marooned on the depopulated planet of Arabella. He had been hungry there, and he had been there for a long time. Simple calories were what he struggled to find, not gourmet subtleties. Consequently, now he doesn't care what he eats, as long as he's eating all he can possibly hold—in the sense, that is, that he eats at all.
When Harry entered my surround, he was wearing his usual silk polo shirt, cutoff shorts and sandals, and he was munching on a Granny Smith apple I had simulated for him earlier. "Hey there, Markie," he said. "You busy? How would you like to go for a ride?"
I wasn't actually any busier than usual. Besides the routine tasks of the kitchen, plus my side jobs of keeping the books on the eleven Wheel restaurants I serve, observing the emanations from the Kugelblitz and maintaining a state of military readiness, I was physically preparing some Hawaiian bread pudding from scratch for the Lorenzini family. "What kind of a ride?" I asked.
He was craning his neck—well, that isn't exactly what he did; more accurately, he was entering into my operational surround to see what I was cooking up in my physical kitchen. "They want me to go back to Arabella," he said, sniffing.
Well, he wasn't exactly smiling, either. Machine entities like Harry and me don't have physical noses, so we can't react directly to airborne molecules. The instrumentation in the kitchen area can, though, and I've taught Harry how to interpret the readouts as cooking aromas. It's what I do myself.
In Harry's case, it doesn't much matter what I am cooking, he always says the same thing: "Hey, that smells good. What is it?" He said it this time, too.
It saves time to answer Harry's questions when he asks them, so I told him about the sweet Molokai bread I had already baked, and what went into the sauce I was making for it—a sort of sweet Hollandaise, with a half-kilo of powdered sugar and a deciliter of melted butter introduced to the sauce, a little bit at a time, as my effectors mixed it.
When I told him he said, "Hum. Hah. Hey, Markie, how come you do all that stuff? It's just all different atoms, right? So why don't you just line up all the atoms where you want them instead of all that cooking?"
Well, I don't actually "cook," but I didn't argue the point. "Do you know how many atoms are involved in this one dish? About ten to the 24th—that's a ten followed by 24 zeroes after it. I can do a lot, but I can't keep track of ten to the 24th atoms at once."
"Yeah?" He began to display the smirk that means he is about to start teasing me. "You say you can do a lot? How much is that, exactly, Markie?"
Now, how do you answer a question like that? My primary program alone is pretty large. I never know when I'm going to be asked for something like Vietnamese fish sauce, or haggis, or baby back ribs, New Orleans style, so I have to keep an accessible store of nearly thirty thousand specific recipes, from the cuisines of nearly five hundred nations, regions and ethnicities. That's plus the chemical and physicochemical formulae for all the ingredients. (You have to have both, especially for the polysaccharides, where cellulose and starch are basically the same compound; the only difference is the way the glucose rings that make them up are joined. If I got the geometry wrong, my clients would be getting cellulose to eat and then they'd all starve to death—well, unless they were termites, they would.) There are over twelve thousand standard ingredients, from pears and pearl onions to beets (five varieties) and radicchio and you name it, because you'd be surprised what some people will eat. Plus programs for the instant retrieval of any of them, in any combination. How much does that come to? About enough, I would say, to run four or five major manufacturies at once, or to fight a medium-sized war. Actually I'm one of the most powerful programs on the Wheel.
However, I gave Harry a short answer. "It comes to plenty," I said. "Eat your apple. And listen, you didn't tell me why you were going to Arabella."
"Oh, it's just one of those research projects," he said, shrugging as though research projects happened to him all the time. (I knew they didn't, though. After Harry was rescued, he had very few usable skills. Mostly he had nothing at all to do with his time on the Wheel.) "It's some idea they've got about wanting more dope about the planet. Arabella, that is. They want me to go back and take a look. They said I should bring a pure machine intelligence along, not another salvaged organic human like me. I thought of you right away."