Acorna’s Quest Read online

  “The Council’s way,” Illart corrected him. “You wish to discuss changes in the charter, Sengrat? If so, you should have convened a full Council meeting instead of buttonholing the three of us privately. Nothing less can change the original charter.”

  “Nothing is less likely to change it,” Sengrat riposted. “I already know it’s no use going through the Council; they’ll do whatever you three want. And you’re living in the past. I should warn you that not all the original Starfarers see things your way. And the political refugees we’ve taken in from other places—why should they care about a dead planet they’ve never seen? People like Nueva Fallona aren’t interested in being permanent refugees crowded into a ship that’s turning into a slum, Illart.”

  “If we hadn’t taken in Nueva and the other refugees from Palomella, the ship wouldn’t be so crowded,” Andrezhuria pointed out. “If it weren’t for our charter and our commitment to aid other victims of political injustice, she wouldn’t be here. Perhaps she should bear that in mind before agitating to change the charter.”

  “She said you’d do that.” The metallic rasp was back in Sengrat’s voice. “That’s why I was chosen to present the opposition point of view to you. The Palomellese and other newcomers are underrepresented in Council—”

  “That will change with time,” Gerezan put in quietly. “They have the same voting rights as any other Starfarers.”

  “Some of us,” Sengrat said, “don’t think we should wait any longer. Some people don’t see any point in trying to work through the Council; whoever’s elected, it’s you three Speakers who run it, and Nueva was right—your minds are stuck in the past. I’m looking toward a future in which the Starfarers are truly free, not begging for favors from the Federation, but expanding in space and answerable to no planetary bureaucrats. If you’re wise, you three, you’ll join me. It’s past time for some real changes around here.”

  “Always so pleasant chatting with you and hearing your views, Sengrat,” Illart said. “Are you sure you can’t stay for kava? It’s a new strain, compliments of the genetic researchers from Sun Behind Clouds. They think we might actually be able to get enough yields from this strain to justify raising our own kava onboard. Of course they don’t understand dark-roasting, so I’m afraid it’s not as strong as you like it, but there’s a nutty flavor reminiscent of hazelnuts that I personally find quite enticing.”

  Sengrat’s rejoinder about frivolities and frippery was drowned out by the crackle of the shipboard com system. Sengrat wasn’t all wrong, Markel reflected as he stretched out in his tube and reached for the earplugs. Like far too many systems on the Haven, the com speakers desperately needed upgrading and refurbishment. The Starfarers might have the scientific and technical knowhow to take over entire planetary systems and hack into intergalactic corporate data bases, but their own equipment was held together by duct tape and prayers. The speaker in Illart’s quarters was so bad that whole words and phrases were drowned out by static. All Markel could make out was, “Kava shipment…message…. Xong…join…”

  Oh, great, he thought. Another political refugee, sneaking a cry for help out in the kava beans. Just what they needed, one more person on the overcrowded Haven. Or maybe fourteen or fifteen more people, he reflected gloomily. These Kieaanese ran to large families.

  He had just inserted one earplug when his father’s yell of excitement all but pierced the other ear. “Xong who?”

  “Not Hoo,” the voice on the speaker crackled, “Hoa. Ngaen Xong Hoa.”

  Gerezan and Andrezhuria burst into excited babbling until Illart hushed them. Whoever this Ngaen Xong Hoa might be, they seemed to think he would be worth his space on the Haven. Markel put the vid system aside again and wriggled out of his tube. Might as well find out what all the fuss was about. He would take his vid off into one of the service tunnels later and enjoy it in peace and quiet. The desire for privacy had long ago inspired Markel to explore all the nooks and crannies of the Haven where a slender boy could fit unobserved. He knew every supposedly unusable space where outmoded equipment had been yanked out and sold for scrap, as well as the whole system of the narrow air vents and the crawl spaces designed for access to the ship’s electrical system.

  The three Speakers were grinning and hugging one another when Markel entered the sitting area.

  “Such a pity Sengrat didn’t stay a little longer,” Andrezhuria said happily. “Then he could have heard the news ahead of everybody else!” She looked almost as young as Ximena, flushed with excitement, curly tendrils of her blond hair escaping from their severe braids to frame her face in light.

  “Just as well,” said Gerezan. “Why give him extra time to think about some way to put Ngaen Xong Hoa’s research to unethical uses?”

  “Oh, come off it, Gerezan. Even Sengrat couldn’t think of a way to misuse a weather-prediction system!”

  Illart cleared his throat. “I’m not so sure about that.” He tapped the data screen set into the wall behind Gerezan. “Here’s the complete text of his message.”

  Although still slender enough to fit into the air vents, Markel was already a good head taller than Andrezhuria. He had no trouble seeing the screen over her head. Ngaen Xong Hoa—and Markel still didn’t know who he was—requested political asylum on the Haven because he feared that one of the three governments of Khang Kieaan would misuse the results of his latest research.

  “Oh, he’s just saying that to make sure we’ll have him,” Andrezhuria said blithely. “And of course we will. If he’s finished the model he was discussing at the Chaos and Control Seminar, we should be able to sell it to agri planets for enough to take care of all the Haven’s maintenance problems forever!”

  “Not sell,” Gerezan said. “Rent. We keep control of the model.”

  “Are we counting our chickens before they’re hatched?” Illart inquired dryly. “We don’t even know he’s still working on the same thing. He may have given up on the chaos-theory problem and turned to some other line of research entirely.”

  In the brief silence that greeted this suggestion, Markel finally got a word in edgewise. “Who is this Ngaen Xong Hoa, anyway?”

  Illart reached out to put an arm round his son’s shoulders. “It’s kind of hard to explain if you don’t remember living planetside,” he said, “but…I guess you’d call him a weatherman.”

  “And that’s all he would say about it,” Markel complained later to Johnny Greene. Even if Johnny was of the same generation as his father, he wasn’t as stodgy as the original settlers. He’d only joined the Haven a few years earlier, after a near-calamitous escape from MME when Amalgamated had taken over the large mining company and caused huge redundancies among the specialists. In some ways Markel found Johnny could bridge the gap between his father’s generation, who could remember digging and growing things in dirt, and the young people of his own generation, who had been raised in space. “What’s a weatherman, anyway? I looked it up on the ship’s net, and all I could find was some junk about solar winds. I don’t see how that’s going to make us rich!”

  “Oh, that’s space weather,” Johnny Greene said. “Ngaen Xong Hoa’s work is on planetary weather systems, and he’s the prime researcher in the field. Although last I heard, even he hadn’t solved the chaos aspects.”

  “Who cares about planetary weather?” Markel demanded. If dirtsiders didn’t like being rained on, why didn’t they live in space like all sensible folk?

  “Markel,” Johnny said sharply, “stop pouting and use your brains! I know you’ve got some, heard ’em rattling round in there just the other day. Turn on a couple of processing bits, will you? Okay, so space colony ships like Haven don’t care about dirtside weather, neither do lunar colonies or high-tech cities in domes. But there are still plenty of people out there who live by growing food or raising animals on planetary surfaces, who have to guess right about the upcoming weather if they and their children are going to eat next year. Ninety percent of Khang Khieaan’s habitable surf
ace is good agricultural land; naturally they care about knowing whether it’s going to rain enough to raise their crops…or enough to drown them.”

  “Sounds like a simple enough question to me,” said Markel. “Just model the atmosphere and the ground surface and plug in your numbers. Nothing like as complicated as plotting a course through four-space to shortcut from one quadrant to another without meeting a neutron star.”

  “You think so, do you?” said Johnny. “Well, here. I’ll give you references to the latest weather-modeling theories, and you can download a complete data set on Khang Kieaan’s current weather. We’ll likely be here another two–three shifts to collect Hoa, so you’ll have plenty of time to predict…oh, the rainfall over the Green Sea, and the expected high temperature in the central plains area, that’ll do for starters. Just take a look at the models, decide which one works best, and…what was it you said?…plug in the numbers. Then we’ll see how close you came.”

  Markel hadn’t come to Johnny for extra homework, but he’d learned that if he did what Johnny Greene suggested, it usually worked out to his benefit in the long run. Besides which, once Johnny had given him a learning assignment like that he wouldn’t talk to Markel at all, not even to tell tales of mining adventure among the asteroids, until Markel could show that he’d done the work. So he copied the references over to his private storage files, set the system to download Khang Kieaan’s current weather data, and skimmed papers on weather modeling while he waited for the data to come in.

  He was waiting when Johnny came off duty two shifts later. “This stuff is crazy,” he complained. “Look, I programmed three different models—well, okay, I didn’t have to do them from scratch, most of the code was in files attached to the papers—and fed in the same numbers, and look at the results! This one says the Green Sea is going to get two inches of rain between dawn and noon tomorrow, this one says thirty percent chance of typhoons and doesn’t tell me anything about rain, and this one”—he waved the printout for emphasis—“this one only says, ‘If a butterfly flutters its wings in the rain forest, what is the probability of snow in Alaska?’”

  Johnny laughed. “Okay. Welcome to chaos theory. That last one is telling you it doesn’t have enough data.”

  “I gave it the same data set the others had.”

  “It’s more persnickety. The other two models are designed to give you their best guesses regardless of how close on they are—sort of the way traditional weathermen operate. This third one”—Johnny tapped the printout—“won’t give a prediction that can’t be relied upon. And it just happens that planetary weather is what we call a chaotic system—meaning that its adjacent solutions diverge exponentially in time. Such a system is very sensitive to the initial conditions, which means that a very slight change in the starting point—like the fluttering of a butterfly’s wing—can lead to enormously different outcomes.”

  “Then this last model is a joke,” Markel muttered.

  “Nope. It’s making a point: that none of the existing models is accurate. Did you look at the author’s name?”

  “Ngaen Xong Hoa. That’s the guy who’s supposed to be delivered with the last load of supplies from dirtside,” Markel said before realizing that he probably wasn’t supposed to have read the memo detailing exactly how the Haven planned to collect their scientist…even if there was nothing particularly new about the plan. “So?” Markel went on hastily to distract Johnny from the fact he’d been hacking into Council memoranda again. “They’re all excited about getting somebody who tells you Zen proverbs about the sound of one butterfly wing clapping?”

  “I think,” Johnny said cheerfully, “they’re excited about the chance that he’s solved the problem by now. And even if he hasn’t…take another look at that model. I bet you incorporated the code without reading it thoroughly. Want to bring it up on the screen in my quarters, take a second look?”

  A few minutes later Markel was following lines of code as they scrawled across Johnny’s screen in the highly abbreviated format of upper-level languages. “I don’t see the point in untangling this code,” he grumbled under his breath, “it’s just what he says in the paper. Put the data into canonical form, apply a series of nonlinear equations, and…oh.”

  “Now you see it?”

  Markel nodded. “If you don’t stop with the initial data set, but keep entering small changes as they’re monitored…but then you have too many variables. In fact, you could have an infinite series of variables. So you can’t define your nonlinear system until you know how many variables you’re dealing with, but you can’t tell how many variables you need until you’ve defined your nonlinear system, but…my head hurts,” he groaned. “But, okay, okay, I see what you mean. If you follow this path through the program, you don’t get a Zen proverb, anyway.”

  “Good. What do you get?”

  “Probably a system crash,” Markel said absently, studying the complex system of data structures and temporary processors that would have to be created, and then, “Johnny! You told me to implement a model that would’ve brought the Haven’s computer system down?”

  “Actually,” Johnny confessed, “I didn’t think you’d get that far. I thought you’d get bored by the time you’d implemented even one model, and then you’d bring the results back, and then we could have looked at the discrepancies between the prediction and what was actually happening dirtside, and that would be enough to convince you it wasn’t so simple.”

  “And then,” Markel said, “you’d have implied that I screwed up by not following through all three models in rigorous detail, and I’d have been embarrassed and quit bugging you about this stuff. John Greene,” he said slowly, “you are one twisty, devious s.o.b.”

  Johnny beamed. “Thank you, son. Does my heart good to have somebody recognize my true talents. And by the way…that last model wouldn’t have brought the whole system down. We do have fail-safes against infinitely expanding neural networks. Can’t ever tell what some kid might code in to run his sim games, you know,” he chuckled, referring to the time Markel had used up sixty percent of the system’s resources to simulate a series of space battles in real time for one of his war games.

  Markel flushed. “That was a long time ago,” he muttered. “I was just a kid then…fifteen….”

  “Last year,” Johnny grinned. “Sixteen is, of course, ever so much older and wiser than fifteen.”

  There was a tap on the door.

  “Johnny?” called a soft voice that sent Markel’s heart rate into fifth gear.

  Ximena Sengrat opened the door a crack. “I am sorry to disturb you,” she said, “but the com unit to your quarters is malfunctioning again.”

  Johnny snapped his fingers. “Damn wiring!” he said. “I really gotta get in there with some duct tape.”

  As Markel, Ximena, and everybody else knew, Johnny had the highly unauthorized habit of disabling the com system in his personal quarters whenever he got tired of the continuous flow of scratchy, squeaky announcements from Central; so they gave this “explanation” all the attention it deserved.

  “My father thought you would wish to know,” Ximena went on, “that Dr. Hoa is now on board, and he has brought with him the code for his new weather-modeling system. The Council feels it might be tactless to try to sell the results to Khang Kieaan.” She smiled and brushed her dark hair back, revealing more of the perfect oval of her face. One curling lock clung to her neck; Markel could have leaned forward and moved it with one finger. Instead he hunched over the data console and piled his printouts on his lap. “It has been suggested we should visit Rushima instead. As a primarily agricultural colony, they should be in desperate need of our services, and certainly the Shenjemi Federation can afford to pay for them.”

  If he didn’t know Ximena was only four years older than he was, Markel thought, he would’ve taken her for a Council member herself instead of just somebody’s kid running an errand. She sounded as if she’d been in on the discussions. Sengrat was pr
obably right…she was too old for him. She’d never look at a sixteen-year-old kid.

  “They want all our best mathematicians and computechs to familiarize themselves with Dr. Hoa’s model en route,” Ximena went on. “So I’m afraid you two will have to give up your sim game, or whatever you were playing at.”

  Markel wanted to protest that he had not been playing sim games, he was way too old for that kid stuff, but realized saying so would only make him sound younger.

  “You’re supposed to study the math, Johnny,” Ximena said, “and Markel, you’re assigned to the team to analyze the code.”

  “Me?” Markel’s voice broke on the word in a humiliating croak, the sort of thing that hadn’t happened to him since he was thirteen…except around Ximena.

  “But of course,” Ximena said, dark eyes wide as if she couldn’t imagine why he was surprised. “We couldn’t do without you on this, Markel Illart. Everybody knows you’re the fastest computech on the ship.”

  A part of Markel’s mind noticed the way Ximena said “we,” as if she identified herself with the Council, but most of his mind was floating off into hyperspace. She knew who he was—not just his name, but what he was good at—and she respected it!

  “Even if you are the youngest,” Ximena added, and Markel came back into ordinary flat three-space with a dull thud.

  For the three shifts it took them to reach Rushima and attain a stable orbit, Markel was lost in the efficient beauty of Dr. Ngaen Xong Hoa’s approach to modeling atmospheric processes in terms of their electronic-potential differences. The paper which had been issued to him, modestly entitled, “On Certain Aspects of Chaotic Systems and Operations Theory,” outlined a global-weather model that was both more general and much more elegant than the one Johnny Greene had had Markel working from. And yet…?

  Markel frowned at the screen. Once you cut through the code to the underlying structure and mathematics of the model, this seemed essentially the same as the one in the earlier paper. True, Hoa had replaced his flip comment about the butterfly with weather predictions graded by reliability, but it was still true that until you got into the infinite loop of adding variables and revising the nonlinear-equations system, there were no predictions Hoa graded as reliable enough by his standards. He still had not solved the problem of the unpredictably large results owing to small variations that, according to Johnny, plagued all attempts to model complex chaotic systems.