than that,” Kamblin added. “The most baffling problem of all is that the
computer seems, all by itself, to have evolved a new mathematics to handle
this material, which we’re finding very difficult to interpret from scratch.
Though I don1 understand how such a thing could be, it has all the stigmata
of an original invention.”
“Creativity from machinery?” Ailiss said. “Thaes impossible. There must be
some other explanation.”
“I think there is,” Jorn said slowly. “I’ve never mentioned it before,
since the evidence I had for it seemed to be so wispy. But I’ve been
suspecting for some years now, nearly five years, in fact, that the various
computers within the armada had begun to work out a sort of Grand Log of
their own. Certainly we fed into our computer everything in the way of data
that we could get from the rest of the fleet, but that’s not quite what I
mean. I think theres also been some kind of direct connection.”
“A lot of machines are no more creative than one machine,” Ailiss objected.
“True enough; and I think it very likely that the new mathematical system
you’re talking about did have a human inventor-but on some other ship,
maybe one that has been out of range of us for years. There would be no
reason for any of the computers to store his name, they’re not interested
in personalities, they just gobble up data and processes.”
“Well, whoever he was, he was good,” Kamblin said reflectively. “We’ve
still got a lot to learn about this scholium, but we can already see enough
of the principles on which it seems to be based to suspect that it may be