Bret Trinli broke the silence. "Don't feel so bad for them. They're taking a big chance, but if they win, they'll have the Customers we were all expecting there."
"I know—and we're guaranteed to arrive at Namqem with nothing. Bet we'll lose theReprise. " She shook herself, visibly pushing back the worries that always seemed to gnaw her. "Okay, in the meantime we're going to create one more trained crewmember." She nailed Pham with a mock-glare. "What specialty do we need the most, Bret?"
Trinli rolled his eyes. "You mean that can bring us the most income? Obviously: Programmer-Archeologist."
The question was, could a feral child like Pham Nuwen ever become one? By now, the boy could use almost all the standard interfaces. He even thought of himself as a programmer, and potentially a ship's master. With the standard interfaces, one could fly theReprise, execute planetary orbit insertion, monitor the coldsleep coffins—
"And if anything goes wrong, you're dead, dead, dead" was how Sura finished Pham's litany of prowess. "Boy, you have to learn something. It's something that children in civilization often are confused about, too. We've had computers and programs since the beginning of civilization, even before spaceflight. But there's only so much they can do; they can't think their way out of an unexpected jam or do anything really creative."
"But—I know that's not true. I play games with the machines. If I set the skill ratings high, I never win."
"That's just computers doing simple things, very fast. There is only one important way that computers are anything like wise. They contain thousands of years of programs, and can run most of them. In a sense, they remember every slick trick that Humankind has ever devised."
Bret Trinli sniffed. "Along with all the nonsense."
Sura shrugged. "Of course. Look. What's our crew size—when we're in-system and everybody is up?"
"One thousand and twenty-three," said Pham. He had long since learned every physical characteristic of theReprise and this voyage.
"Okay. Now, suppose you're light-years from nowhere—"
Trinli: "You don't have to suppose that, it's the pure truth."
"—and something goes wrong. It takes perhaps ten thousand human specialties to build a starship, and that's on top of an enormous capital industry base. There's no way a ship's crew can know everything it takes to analyze a star's spectrum, and make a vaccine against some wild change in the bactry, and understand every deficiency disease we may meet—"
"Yes!" said Pham. "That's why we have the programs and the computers."
"That's why we can't survive without them. Over thousands of years, the machine memories have been filled with programs that can help. But like Bret says, many of those programs are lies, all of them are buggy, and only the top-level ones are precisely appropriate for our needs." She paused, looked at Pham significantly. "It takes a smart and highly trained human being to look at what is available, to choose and modify the right programs, and then to interpret the results properly."
Pham was silent for a moment, thinking back to all the times the machines had not done what he really wanted. It wasn't always Pham's fault. The programs that tried to translate Canberran to Nese were crap. "So... you want me to learn to program something better."
Sura grinned, and there was a barely suppressed chuckle from Bret. "We'll be satisfied if you become a good programmer, and then learn to use the stuff that already exists."
Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father's castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines—flying machines, the peasants said—from the great days of Canberra's original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within theReprise 's local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra's past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders' method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely...the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems.
