CHAPTER TWENTY

Midway through the morning two days after the probe’s first discovery of the survivors, the Scout lurched its way along the descending line of the ridge, which provided a relatively unobstructed route down from the plateau. With Agni online and behaving, Keene had been free of any pressing duty commitment at the time, and Gallian, up in the Varuna, had named him as his first choice for inclusion in the party that would make contact when Zeigler reported the situation and requested instructions.

Because of the difficulty Kronians had acclimatizing so early in the mission, the five others in the Scout were also all Terran-born. Ivor, an SA vehicle mechanic and electrical technician was driving. Sitting up front beside him was Jorff, also from the SA, a lieutenant standing in for Kelm. Keene was behind, next to a control panel for various instruments, communications systems, and outside cameras, with Naarmegen sitting opposite, his back to the cabin wall. The two females of the group were in the rear seat: Maria Sanchez, a medic, and Beth, Serengeti base’s current nearest thing to a resident psychologist, since she had once majored in psychiatric disorders at the University of California, Irvine. There were no further pictures of the survivors coming in from the probe at the moment to occupy them. Its presence had apparently caused consternation at the settlement, and Gallian had ordered it to be pulled back. Just at the moment, it was hovering a short distance ahead of the Scout, reconnoitering the way. So Naarmegen and Keene were back on the subject of where the genetic codes that directed the formation and function of all living things had come from.

“I talked a lot with Sariena too on the voyage out,” Naarmegen said above the growl of the Scout’s diesel—it used an independent electric motor on each wheel but was dual-equipped, being able to run them from either a pure electrical storage system or a motor-generator. One of the plans for Serengeti was to set up a fractionation tower to process fuel, oils, and other products from the readily accessible hydrocarbons that Athena had deposited over wide areas. “I was skeptical when I first moved out there. But I think the Kronians have convinced me.” It was interesting, Keene noted, that now back on Earth, Naarmegen was already referring to Kronians in the third person.

“That there has to be some kind of intelligence behind it all?” Beth said, leaning forward behind Keene.

Naarmegen glanced back at her. “Right. They’ve even devised objective ways of recognizing it.” He looked at Keene again. “Did Sariena tell you about that?”

“I haven’t really talked to her that much,” Keene confessed. “Too wrapped up in nuclear plasmas and induction physics for most of the time.” But he was interested. “Of recognizing what? Do you mean the results of intelligence at work?”

Naarmegen nodded, hanging onto a handrail. “Exactly.”

“Objective ways,” Keene repeated.

“Yes.”

“Okay, so how would I recognize it?”

Naarmegen made a gesture in the air that could have meant anything. “When you or I see something that’s been organized the way it is for a purpose—like the parts of a machine, or the codes in one of those processors behind you—we don’t have any difficulty distinguishing it from the results of pure, unguided, physical processes. So how do we do it? There’s obviously something we latch onto. Is it possible to identify what it is, even define some rules for measuring it—and then apply them to the natural world and see how it scores?”

Which would certainly be the way to go about it, Keene could see—if it could be made to work. “Is that what the Kronians have done?”

“Yes.”

“How?” Maria asked, beside Beth.

“Okay, let’s take an example.” Naarmegen thought for a moment. “Did you ever play that game they used to have, where you made words out of letter tiles and got double and treble scores on the good places? What was it called… ?”

“Scrabble?” Keene said.

“Yes, that was it. So suppose you found a jumble of tiles on the floor that said absolutely nothing at all. You’d have no reason to think they’d been arranged, right? If you had to guess, you’d say they got spilled and just fell that way.”

“All right,” Maria agreed.

“But now imagine you come across, let’s say, a hundred tiles all lined up, and they spell out a sentence from a book that you know. You wouldn’t hesitate to say that someone arranged it. It’s kind of obvious.” Naarmegen waved his free hand in the air. “But why is it obvious? What’s different that you’ve picked out? Can you put your finger on it?”

There was a short pause. “It’s too improbable,” Beth offered finally. “More complex.”

Naarmegen’s mouth split into a toothy grin behind his beard, and he nodded as if he had been expecting that answer. “Complex, yes,” he agreed. “But more complex? No. Every arrangement of a hundred tiles is as improbable as any other.”

“True,” Keene agreed.

“The second one—the sentence—contains more information,” Beth tried.

“Does it? But you’d need just as much information to construct any of the other sequences too. In fact, if they were random, you’d probably need more. You’d have to specify every letter. There’s no way to compress a random string.”

Beth shook her head. “No, that wasn’t what I meant. I meant it conveys information in a different sense… in a language. It carries meaning.”

“Meaning to whom?”

“To me—anyone who speaks English.”

“What if someone doesn’t speak English? It wouldn’t mean anything to them.”

Beth thought about it. “It doesn’t matter. The meaning is still there. It’s still encoded in a specific way. Not knowing how to decode it is a separate issue.”

Naarmegen nodded slowly, giving all the others time to digest that. “Yes, you’ve hit it,” he said finally. “The key word is encode. It encodes—or specifies—meaning according to an independent system of rules whose purpose goes beyond simply specifying a sequence. The Kronians call that property ‘specificity.’ “

“But you could still get some of that in the first example—the random one,” Maria pointed out. “English-language words, I mean. Small ones.”

“You mean like ‘it,’ or ‘so,’ or ‘and’?” Naarmegen said.

“Yes,”

“Why did you say they had to be small?”

“Well…” Maria shrugged. “They don’t have to be, I suppose. But you wouldn’t expect long ones.”

“Too improbable?”

“Yes, I’d say so. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Naarmagen made his gnomish grin again and looked back at her. “But we already said that any other string would be just as improbable anyway.”

Maria waved a hand helplessly. “I know what I mean. I’m just not sure how to say it.”

“You have to have both,” Naarmegen supplied. “The small strings that happen to be English are specific, yes, but not complex enough to rule out chance. When you see a highly complex arrangement that’s also highly specific in some form of language, that’s when you conclude it was put together that way by an intelligence that understood the language and did it for a reason. So there’s your answer.”

Keene had been following with interest. It explained a lot of things about the Kronian world view. “And you say they’ve been able to define these properties rigorously? And quantify them?” he queried. “They’ve measured them in things like genetic codes and protein sequences?”

“Right,” Naarmegen affirmed.

“And what did they find?”

“About as conclusive as you could get. They loaded all the numbers to be biased in the direction of caution—in other words, more likely to miss a signature of intelligence when it was really there and write it off as chance, than to misread a false indication of one where there wasn’t any.”

“Okay.”

“When the complexity becomes too vast and the specificity too tight, you can eliminate chance as the cause. So where’s the cutoff? Philosophers typically used to take an improbability of fifty orders of magnitude as a universal bound beyond which chance processes could be eliminated as the explanation. The Kronians applied a boundary—get this, Lan—of a hundred and fifty orders of magnitude! And they find organization that exceeds it.” Naarmegen smiled expectantly. Keene whistled and looked away for a few seconds to digest the information.

In the front passenger seat, Jorff took an incoming call from Serengeti to check the calibration of the navigation grid laid down by satellites deployed from the Varuna. Beside him, Ivor, who had been listening, glanced back over his shoulder as he drove. “You don’t need scientific criteria and numbers,” he told the others. “It’s all there in the Bible, and now it’s happened again. The old world became corrupt and abandoned God, and set up its own gods. So God destroyed it, and now He’s creating a new world.”

Naarmegen glanced at Keene. Keene shrugged and shook his head to say that the ball was Naarmegen’s. Naarmegen paused to choose his words before answering. “You could be right, Ivor. For now, we’re just concerned with detecting the work of an intelligence. Whether it’s the god of any religion or not, or what its reasons are is another matter. Science can’t answer that.”

“It’s all in the Bible,” Ivor said again.

Jorff’s voice came from up front. “Check three-seven-five and two-oh-nine. We’re coming down from the ridge entering a canyon to exit the plateau complex. It’s rough going but passable.” The Scout had independent swivel-axles for all of its six balloon-tired wheels, and could practically climb a mountain. The Kronians had a lot of experience in designing vehicles for rugged terrains.

“What’s your updated ETA?” the operator at Serengeti asked from Jorff’s panel.

“Oh… maybe a couple of hours, judging by what we’re seeing from the probe. There’s a scarp of steep, muddy gullies with what look like steam vents that we may decide to go around.”

“Is Landen Keene there?” another voice asked. It sounded like Gallian’s.

Jorff looked back from his seat. “Gallian is on the circuit, from up in the ship, Dr. Keene. He wants a word with you. You can take it on the panel back there.”

Keene turned to activate the panel’s screen; Gallian’s features appeared on it moments later. They had talked before the Scout departed, when Keene had agreed to be the mission’s impromptu diplomat. But with Gallian’s ebullient way of going about everything, no plan ever stayed set for too long without addendums and afterthoughts.

“Ah, Lan! How is it to be home?” he inquired.

“I’ve had smoother rides in my time. This isn’t exactly a Texas interstate. What’s up?”

“We’ve been going over the pictures that came up. Those people appear extremely primitive, and they might still be traumatized or otherwise disturbed. Don’t take chances. Give all your personnel sidearms. The two SA troopers are authorized to carry rifles. Just as a precaution, eh?”

Only Kronians would have deliberated over the question. It had never crossed Keene’s mind not to. “Okay,” he replied simply.

“And Charlie’s peeved because he can’t be in on it too. He says you could have saved some of the interesting stuff.” Charlie Hu was still up on the ship, analyzing planet-wide geological data and hadn’t managed to make it down to the surface yet.

“Tell him I’m sure there’ll be plenty more in store to keep him happy,” Keene said.

“Well then… good luck. That’s really all I wanted to say, I suppose.”

“We’ll just have to see how it goes. There isn’t any set game plan.”

“I’m sure you’ll improvise appropriately. We’ll just watch from the wings and leave you to it unless you call us in. We have every confidence in you and your team.”

Typical Gallian. Keene smiled inwardly. “Thanks,” he acknowledged.

Gallian cleared down.

“How are the seismic readings?” Jorff inquired in front, to the Serengeti operator. Steady earthquake and volcanic activity had been detected in the regions to the east, beyond the central range of shattered rocky desolation known as the “Spine,” ever since the first probes from the Varuna landed. Some of the lava lakes there were still molten in the centers.

“Holding steady. No signs of anything unusual building up.”

“Uh-huh.”

It took the Scout several hours to negotiate a path southward and down through the hilly region, avoiding several difficult patches and following a course roughly parallel to the river. Twice, it was forced to back up and find another route: first, from the top of steep slopes of mud and precarious rock falls that were revealed as more treacherous close up than they had seemed from the probe preview; and again by impassable fissures venting sulfur gases. But finally it emerged onto a boulder-strewn slope above the settlement, with the probe stationed high up and circling at an unobtrusive distance, watching through telescopic lenses. The Scout stopped a few hundred yards above the rude collection of huts and shelters, where smoke was rising from a cooking fire. Figures came out and stared. Some went back inside. After a short delay, a small group came out and approached warily.