Interlude in darkness

The Mind had an image to illustrate its information capacity. It liked to imagine the contents of its memory store written

out on cards; little slips

of paper with tiny writing on them, big enough for a human to read. If the characters were a couple

of millimeters tall and the paper about ten

centimeters square and written on both sides, then ten thousand characters could

be squeezed onto each card. In a meterlong drawer of such

cards maybe one thousand of them—ten million pieces of information—could

be stored. In a small room a few meters square, with a corridor in

the middle just wide enough to pull a tray out into, you

could keep perhaps a thousand trays arranged in close-packed cabinets: ten billion

characters in all.

A square kilometer of these cramped cells might contain as many as one hundred thousand rooms; a thousand such floors would

produce

a building two thousand meters tall with a hundred million rooms. If you kept building those squat towers, squeezed

hard up against each other

until they entirely covered the surface of a largish standard-G world—maybe a billion square kilometers—you

would have a planet with one

trillion square kilometers of floor space, one hundred quadrillion paper-stuffed rooms, thirty

light-years of corridors and a number of potential

stored characters sufficiently large to boggle just about anybody’s mind.

In base 10 that number would be a 1 followed by twenty-seven zeros, and even that vast figure was only a fraction of the capacity

of the

Mind. To match it you would need a thousand such worlds; systems of them, a clusterful of information-packed globes…

and that vast capacity

was physically contained within a space smaller than a single one of those tiny rooms, inside the Mind….

In darkness the Mind waited.

It had counted how long it had waited so far; it had tried to estimate how long it would have to wait in the future. It knew

to the smallest

imaginable fraction of a second how long it had been in the tunnels of the Command System, and more often

than it needed to it thought about

that number, watched it grow inside itself. It was a form of security, it supposed; a small

fetish; something to cling to.

It had explored the Command System tunnels, scanning and surveying. It was weak, damaged, almost totally helpless, but it

had been

worthwhile taking a look around the maze-like complex of tunnels and caverns just to take its attention off the fact

that it was there as a refugee.

The places it could not get to itself it sent its one remaining remote drone into, so that

it could have a look, and see what there was to be seen.

And all of it was at once boring and frighteningly depressing. The level of technology possessed by the builders of the Command

System

was very limited indeed; everything in the tunnels worked either mechanically or electronically. Gears and wheels,

electric wires,

superconductors and light-fibers; very crude indeed, the Mind thought, and nothing it could possibly interest

itself in. A glance through any of the

machines and devices in the tunnel was sufficient to know them exactly—what they were

made of, how they had been made, even what they

were made for. No mystery, nothing to employ the mind.

There was something too about the inexactitude of it all that the Mind found almost frightening. It could look at some carefully

machined

piece of metal or some delicately molded bit of plastic, and know that to the people who had built the Command System—to

their eyes—these

things were exact and precise, constructed to fine tolerances with dead straight lines, perfect edges, smooth

surfaces, immaculate right

angles… and so on. But the Mind, even with its damaged sensors, could see the rough edges, the

crudity of the parts and the components

involved. They had been good enough for the people at the time, and no doubt they

had fulfilled the most important criterion of all; they

worked….

But they

were

crude, clumsy, imperfectly designed and manufactured. For some reason the Mind found this worrying.

And it would have to

use

this ancient, crude, shop-soiled technology. It would have to

connect

with it.

It had thought it through as best it could, and decided to formulate plans for what to do if the Idirans did get somebody

through the Quiet

Barrier and threatened it with discovery.

It would arm, and it would make a place to hide in. Both actions implied damage to the Command System, so it would not act

until it knew it

was definitely threatened. Once it knew it was, it would be forced to risk the Dra’Azon’s displeasure.

But it might not come to that. It hoped it wouldn’t; planning was one thing, execution was another. It was unlikely to have

very much time

either to hide or to arm. Both plans might perforce be rather crudely implemented, especially as it had only

one remote drone and its own badly

crippled fields with which to manipulate the engineering facilities of the System.

Better than nothing, though. Better still to have problems than to let death eradicate them all….

There was, however, another less immediately relevant, but more intrinsically worrying, problem it had discovered, and it

was implied in the

question: who was it.

Its higher functions had had to close down when it had transferred from four- to three-dimensional space. The Mind’s information

was held

in binary form, in spirals composed of protons and neutrons; and neutrons—outside a nucleus, and also outside hyperspace—decayed

(into

protons, ha-ha; not too long after entering the Command System, the vast majority of its memory would have consisted

of the stunningly

illuminating message: “0000000…"). So it had effectively frozen its primary memory and cognitive functions,

wrapping them in fields which

prevented both decay and use. It was working instead on back-up picocircuitry, in real space,

and using real-space light to think with (how

humiliating).

In fact, it could still access all that stored memory (though the process was complicated, and so

slow

), so all was not lost there…. But as for

thinking, as for

being itself

—another matter entirely. It wasn’t its real self. It was a crude, abstracted copy of itself, the mere ground plan for the

full labyrinthine complexity of its true personality. It was the truest possible copy its limited scale was theoretically

capable of providing, and it

was still sentient; conscious by even the most rigorous of standards. Yet an index was not the

text, a street plan was not the city, a map not the