Markel could have leaned forward and moved it with one finger. Instead he hunched over the data console and piled his printouts on his lap. “It has been suggested we should visit Rushima instead. As a primarily agricultural colony, they should be in desperate need of our services, and certainly the Shenjemi Federation can afford to pay for them.”
If he didn’t know Ximena was only four years older than he was, Market thought, he would’ve taken her for a Council member herself instead of just somebody’s kid running an errand. She sounded as if she’d been in on the discussions. Sengrat was probably right … she was too old for him. She’d never look at a sixteen-year-old kid.
“They want all our best mathematicians and computechs to familiarize themselves with Dr. Hoa’s model en route,” Ximena went on. “So I’m afraid you two will have to give up your sim game, or whatever you were playing at.”
Markel wanted to protest that he had not been playing sim games, he “was way too old for that kid stuff, but realized saving so would only make him sound younger.
“You’re supposed to study the math, Johnny,” Ximena said, “and Markel, you’re assigned to the team to analyze the code.”
“Me?” Markel’s voice broke on the word in a humiliating croak, the sort of thing that hadn’t happened to him since he was thirteen … except around Ximena.
“But of course,” Ximena said, dark eyes wide as if she couldn’t imagine why he was surprised. “We couldn’t do without you on this, Markel Illart. Everybody knows you’re the fastest computech on the ship.”
A part of Markel’s mind noticed the way Ximena said “we,” as if she identified herself with the Council, but most of his mind was floating off into hyperspace. She knew? who he was-not just his name, but what he was good at-and she respected it!
“Even if you are the youngest,” Ximena added, and Markel came back into ordinary flat three-space with a dull thud.
For the three shifts it took them to reach Rushima and attain a stable orbit, Market was lost in the efficient beauty of Dr. Ngaen Xong Hoa’s approach to modeling atmospheric processes in terms of their electronic-potential differences. The paper which had been issued to him, modestly entitled, “On Certain Aspects of Chaotic Systems and Operations Theory,” outlined a global-weather model that was both more general and much more elegant than the one Johnny Greene had had Markel working from. And yet… ?
Markel frowned at the screen. Once you cut through the code to the underlying structure and mathematics of the model, this seemed essentially the same as the one in the earlier paper. True, Hoa had replaced his flip comment about the butterfly with weather predictions graded by reliability, but it was still true that until you got into the infinite loop of adding variables and revising the nonlinear-equations system, there were no predictions Hoa graded as reliable enough by his standards. He still had not solved the problem of the unpredictably large results owing to small variations that, according to Johnny, plagued all attempts to model complex chaotic systems.
Markel had just reached that point in his reasoning when Illart announced that it was time for their sleep shift. Under the circumstances, the only thing he could possibly do was wait until his father started snoring and then sneak a portable console into his sleep tube to try out the new model for himself. Despite Johnny Greene’s certainty that the built-in checks in the system would prevent his inadvertently crashing the ship’s computers, he decided that it would not be prudent to test the new model directly. Besides, it would take half the shift to download the amount of weather data he’d need. Instead, he wrote a quick and dirty driver program that would simulate the running and systems requirements of both Dr. Hoa’s models, given unlimited data.
The results were almost identical. The new version could handle more nonlinear equations than the old one before it crashed, but it still didn’t get anywhere near the predictions stage of the program. Markel switched off the portable console and lay with his arms behind his head, thinking. If Dr. Hoa’s work was this far from completion, why had he found it necessary to flee Khang Kieaan?