Enigma from Tantalus
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Synopsis
'We won't be landing anywhere just yet', Waters said to the other passengers on the spaceship Fulmar. 'I was pretty mystified by this story of mechanical breakdown, so I've been checking up.' He hefted his little box. 'I've spent the past half hour successfully tapping your subspace circuits, Captain, so I know the truth and I propose to share it with everyone. We're not to land. We're to orbit in space, indefinitely.' Beloved Sister Dorcas's screams pierced the quiet. 'You see,' Waters continued, holding up his hand for silence, 'this is being done on the direct orders of Master Brand . . . you don't know the name?' He glanced inquiringly around. 'No? Well, he happens to be one of the powers of Earth, and there is nobody in the galaxy to overrule him.' (First published 1965)
Release date: September 29, 2011
Publisher: Gateway
Print pages: 83
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Enigma from Tantalus
John Brunner
ON ALL OF Tantalus there were either seventy-nine or eighty minds. Harry Gamaliel had never been able to decide which figure
was correct. There was no possible doubt about the current total of seventy-eight human beings on the planet; there was even
less doubt about the Tantalan itself. But as to thing thing here …
Shivering in the cool dawn air at the entrance to the high long data-analysis hall, he found the question disturbing him anew.
We aren’t studying the Tantalan. How could we—humans, individuals? We aren’t built to that scale!
He moved forward slowly between the man-tall memory banks: entropy tracking, chemical movement, chemical analysis, gross-physical
mass-location, micro-physical mass-location … How did it feel to exist in such complex extension? Like God, omnipresent, immanent?
Parasite.
He slapped the thought down, conscious that his confidence was already at an excessively low level, and paused as he arrived
before the display panels. A hundred square feet of calibrated dials, gauges with pointers, yes-no lights shining red, white,
green, continuous-variable meters, integrated resultant curves …
Eighty minds. This monstrous machine, spread over nearly as much of the planet’s surface as the Tantalan itself, must have passed
the indefinable point at which awareness set in. It considered, evaluated, made decisions; it communicated, asked questions,
sensed its environment—what more was required of a mind?
Yet the pretense had to be maintained. Sighing, he let his eyes rove across the display board. The machine was telling him
everything it knew, as usual, and as usual he would have to ask for it all to be explained, and as usual Lynette was keeping
him waiting.
He was tempted to start work anyway, but there was no point in going through the whole elaborate process twice. Restless,
he turned aside to a spiraling stairway at the end of the hall and climbed it, his feet hushing on the soft thick plastic
pad of each step. At the top he emerged into a gallery with continuous windows on either side; the view was of pale blue sky,
translucent like deep water, and forests and fields and distant hills under a yellow sun of the right size, the right brilliance
and spectral type.
Voidech was right. Tantalus was the only possible name.
Far to the left from where he stood, a herd of grubbers moved into sight, a cell of the Tantalan urging them along towards
water. A frown creased his sallow forehead. The development of grubbers was currently occupying a good deal of his attention.
The Tantalan’s interest in inorganic mining was a post-contact phenomenon. When men first reached this world, the master of it was concerned entirely with organic substances,
especially living ones; now there were the grubbers, secreted rather than bred in modified exowombs, and the hills on the
horizon were riddled with exploratory tunnels. And there were the salamanders, too. Voidech’s expedition had done a remarkably
complete survey considering the limitations of their equipment, and surely they couldn’t have overlooked the salamanders if
they had already been developed.
Fire and iron …?
No, there was no comparison between the subjective experience of the Tantalan and the human concept of divine awareness. There
was no human standard to go by at all. The apparent intelligence of the Tantalan was unalarming—it was measurable on a human
scale. It was just the breadth of it which was beyond human grasp.
He closed his eyes, trying to imagine how it would feel to be conscious of a little finger out of sight beyond the horizon.
He had tried a thousand times, and always failed.
Lynette Guignard/Gamaliel came into the data-analysis hall wiping a trace of morning coffee from her upper lip. She was a
handsome, rather than a pretty, woman; she had a high forehead as white as pearl, and brilliant, deep-set eyes. Looking at
her, people concentrated on these two features which seemed to hold the clue to her personality, ignoring her thin-lipped
mouth and rather masculine jaw. She moved with athletic grace down the spinal way of the hall, peering ahead in the expectation
of seeing Harry by the display board.
“Harry?” she called in her soft clear voice, and a moment later, realizing, added, “are you up in the gallery?”
A sound of footsteps, and her husband appeared at the head of the stairway.
“Sorry! Didn’t hear you come in.”
She gave him an understanding smile. “Back at the usual game—trying to think yourself into Tantalan shoes?”
He forced a grimace by way of reply; then, as though against his will, followed the idea through, his eyes reverting to the
dials and meters on the display board. “Lyn, how could you infer the use of writing if you were blind and had to deduce the
existence of light from heat-patterns on your skin? Are we any better equipped to tackle this job?”
“You spent too much time with that horrible man Caversham,” Lynette told him in a practical tone. “You let him infect you
with his cynical dislike of people, and it’s got you down.”
“You don’t do him justice,” Harry countered. “Veliz liked to make him out a pathological misanthrope, but he’s not. He’s—”
He stopped, groping in the air for the right word. “He’s a question-putter,” he finished lamely. “And the questions he asks
don’t happen to be palatable ones. They’re still valid.”
“I’m glad Veliz sent him packing,” Lynette said firmly. “I never could work out why they let him come here in the first place.
They might as well have sent us that dreadful missionary woman who was on the ship—no, cancel that; I guess you’d have wound
up wondering if the Tantalan was the Beast with seven horns, or something.” She blunted the sarcasm with an affectionate pat
on his arm, and nodded at the display board. “Shall we start?”
Harry shrugged and complied, dropping into one of the two operator’s chairs facing the panels. “Caversham was brought here
for the same reason they took the passengers from the ship over the whole set-up before they lifted again: on the off-chance.
We have no better principle to go by, after all. Something welds the Tantalan into a functioning whole, and so far we have a word for it: telepathy. An empty box!”
“A black box,” Lynette murmured, taking the second chair.
“What?” Reaching for the detail-examination switches, Harry gave her a sidelong glance.
“A black box. Forgotten your history of physics course?”
“Oh yes, I remember!” He turned the phrase over in his mind. “Apt, I guess … Lyn, doesn’t it ever bother you—the frustration of it, not even being able to find a point of attack?”
“Not really.” Lynette chuckled. “I still maintain Caversham got at you! It took us millennia to make sense of our own mental
processes, so it’s bound to take a good long time to evaluate the first non-human intelligence we run across. And we came
to it, remember. We’re here on Tantalus, and before we arrived the Tantalan hadn’t even solved the problem of crossing the
equatorial ocean.”
“I wonder why we had to strike a bargain with it if we’re so superior,” Harry said sourly.
“Harry!” Genuinely shocked, Lynette swiveled her chair to face him. “What would you rather we did? Blackmailed it into letting
us stay here? Wiped it out so we could steal its planet? What?”
“I’m sorry,” Harry muttered. “Perhaps you’re right about Caversham’s effect on me. Let’s get to work, shall we?”
He pushed home the master switch. With patronizing ease and speed the machine proceeded to take apart the overall pattern
of the past day’s events and display it, detail by petty detail.
Routine, routine, routine. The Tantalan’s standard summer growth rate had been maintained, and the entropic and organic consumption
readings were correspondingly up. Some breeding going on: basic units, grubbers, salamanders, foresters, farmers and herd-masters
predominated, with a slight peak in the curve for soldier-cells to replace the loss sustained from a recent bearhound raid.
There was also a slight rise in the total of exowombs used f. . .
was correct. There was no possible doubt about the current total of seventy-eight human beings on the planet; there was even
less doubt about the Tantalan itself. But as to thing thing here …
Shivering in the cool dawn air at the entrance to the high long data-analysis hall, he found the question disturbing him anew.
We aren’t studying the Tantalan. How could we—humans, individuals? We aren’t built to that scale!
He moved forward slowly between the man-tall memory banks: entropy tracking, chemical movement, chemical analysis, gross-physical
mass-location, micro-physical mass-location … How did it feel to exist in such complex extension? Like God, omnipresent, immanent?
Parasite.
He slapped the thought down, conscious that his confidence was already at an excessively low level, and paused as he arrived
before the display panels. A hundred square feet of calibrated dials, gauges with pointers, yes-no lights shining red, white,
green, continuous-variable meters, integrated resultant curves …
Eighty minds. This monstrous machine, spread over nearly as much of the planet’s surface as the Tantalan itself, must have passed
the indefinable point at which awareness set in. It considered, evaluated, made decisions; it communicated, asked questions,
sensed its environment—what more was required of a mind?
Yet the pretense had to be maintained. Sighing, he let his eyes rove across the display board. The machine was telling him
everything it knew, as usual, and as usual he would have to ask for it all to be explained, and as usual Lynette was keeping
him waiting.
He was tempted to start work anyway, but there was no point in going through the whole elaborate process twice. Restless,
he turned aside to a spiraling stairway at the end of the hall and climbed it, his feet hushing on the soft thick plastic
pad of each step. At the top he emerged into a gallery with continuous windows on either side; the view was of pale blue sky,
translucent like deep water, and forests and fields and distant hills under a yellow sun of the right size, the right brilliance
and spectral type.
Voidech was right. Tantalus was the only possible name.
Far to the left from where he stood, a herd of grubbers moved into sight, a cell of the Tantalan urging them along towards
water. A frown creased his sallow forehead. The development of grubbers was currently occupying a good deal of his attention.
The Tantalan’s interest in inorganic mining was a post-contact phenomenon. When men first reached this world, the master of it was concerned entirely with organic substances,
especially living ones; now there were the grubbers, secreted rather than bred in modified exowombs, and the hills on the
horizon were riddled with exploratory tunnels. And there were the salamanders, too. Voidech’s expedition had done a remarkably
complete survey considering the limitations of their equipment, and surely they couldn’t have overlooked the salamanders if
they had already been developed.
Fire and iron …?
No, there was no comparison between the subjective experience of the Tantalan and the human concept of divine awareness. There
was no human standard to go by at all. The apparent intelligence of the Tantalan was unalarming—it was measurable on a human
scale. It was just the breadth of it which was beyond human grasp.
He closed his eyes, trying to imagine how it would feel to be conscious of a little finger out of sight beyond the horizon.
He had tried a thousand times, and always failed.
Lynette Guignard/Gamaliel came into the data-analysis hall wiping a trace of morning coffee from her upper lip. She was a
handsome, rather than a pretty, woman; she had a high forehead as white as pearl, and brilliant, deep-set eyes. Looking at
her, people concentrated on these two features which seemed to hold the clue to her personality, ignoring her thin-lipped
mouth and rather masculine jaw. She moved with athletic grace down the spinal way of the hall, peering ahead in the expectation
of seeing Harry by the display board.
“Harry?” she called in her soft clear voice, and a moment later, realizing, added, “are you up in the gallery?”
A sound of footsteps, and her husband appeared at the head of the stairway.
“Sorry! Didn’t hear you come in.”
She gave him an understanding smile. “Back at the usual game—trying to think yourself into Tantalan shoes?”
He forced a grimace by way of reply; then, as though against his will, followed the idea through, his eyes reverting to the
dials and meters on the display board. “Lyn, how could you infer the use of writing if you were blind and had to deduce the
existence of light from heat-patterns on your skin? Are we any better equipped to tackle this job?”
“You spent too much time with that horrible man Caversham,” Lynette told him in a practical tone. “You let him infect you
with his cynical dislike of people, and it’s got you down.”
“You don’t do him justice,” Harry countered. “Veliz liked to make him out a pathological misanthrope, but he’s not. He’s—”
He stopped, groping in the air for the right word. “He’s a question-putter,” he finished lamely. “And the questions he asks
don’t happen to be palatable ones. They’re still valid.”
“I’m glad Veliz sent him packing,” Lynette said firmly. “I never could work out why they let him come here in the first place.
They might as well have sent us that dreadful missionary woman who was on the ship—no, cancel that; I guess you’d have wound
up wondering if the Tantalan was the Beast with seven horns, or something.” She blunted the sarcasm with an affectionate pat
on his arm, and nodded at the display board. “Shall we start?”
Harry shrugged and complied, dropping into one of the two operator’s chairs facing the panels. “Caversham was brought here
for the same reason they took the passengers from the ship over the whole set-up before they lifted again: on the off-chance.
We have no better principle to go by, after all. Something welds the Tantalan into a functioning whole, and so far we have a word for it: telepathy. An empty box!”
“A black box,” Lynette murmured, taking the second chair.
“What?” Reaching for the detail-examination switches, Harry gave her a sidelong glance.
“A black box. Forgotten your history of physics course?”
“Oh yes, I remember!” He turned the phrase over in his mind. “Apt, I guess … Lyn, doesn’t it ever bother you—the frustration of it, not even being able to find a point of attack?”
“Not really.” Lynette chuckled. “I still maintain Caversham got at you! It took us millennia to make sense of our own mental
processes, so it’s bound to take a good long time to evaluate the first non-human intelligence we run across. And we came
to it, remember. We’re here on Tantalus, and before we arrived the Tantalan hadn’t even solved the problem of crossing the
equatorial ocean.”
“I wonder why we had to strike a bargain with it if we’re so superior,” Harry said sourly.
“Harry!” Genuinely shocked, Lynette swiveled her chair to face him. “What would you rather we did? Blackmailed it into letting
us stay here? Wiped it out so we could steal its planet? What?”
“I’m sorry,” Harry muttered. “Perhaps you’re right about Caversham’s effect on me. Let’s get to work, shall we?”
He pushed home the master switch. With patronizing ease and speed the machine proceeded to take apart the overall pattern
of the past day’s events and display it, detail by petty detail.
Routine, routine, routine. The Tantalan’s standard summer growth rate had been maintained, and the entropic and organic consumption
readings were correspondingly up. Some breeding going on: basic units, grubbers, salamanders, foresters, farmers and herd-masters
predominated, with a slight peak in the curve for soldier-cells to replace the loss sustained from a recent bearhound raid.
There was also a slight rise in the total of exowombs used f. . .
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