Страница:
their own, though the rumor was none of the other planetary
computers was so far evolved as the Lunar CC. As nations which
often found themselves in competition, the Eight Worlds did not
encourage a lot of intercourse between their central cybernets.
So all the reasons he stated sounded reasonable. It was
railroad time, so somebody would build a choo-choo. But what
didn't ring true was what the CC had left out. He liked the new
capability. He was as pleased as a child with a new toy
monorail.
"I have one further proof," the Admiral said. "It involves
something I mentioned earlier. Acts that were out of character.
This is the biggest one, and it involves you not noticing
something that, if these memories had been generated by you,
you surely would have noticed. You would have spotted it by now
yourself, except I've kept your mind occupied. You haven't had
time to really think back to the operating table, and the time
immediately before that."
"It's not exactly fresh in my mind."
"Of course not. It feels as if it all happened a year
ago."
"So what is it? What didn't I notice?"
"That you are female."
"Well, of course I'm--"
Words fail me again. How many degrees of surprise can
there be? Imagine the worst possible one, then square it, and
you'll have some notion of how surprised I was. Not when I
looked reflexively down at my body, which was, as the CC had
said and I had known all along, female. No, the real shock came
when I thought back to that day in the Blind Pig. Because that
was the first moment in one year that I had realized I had been
male when I got in the fight. I had been male when I went on
the operating table. And I had been female when I appeared on
the beach of Scarpa Island.
And I simply had never noticed it.
I had never in that entire year compared the body I was
then inhabiting with the one I had been wearing for the last
thirty years. I had been a girl before, and I was a girl now,
and I never gave it a thought.
Which was completely ridiculous, of course. I mean, you
would notice such a thing. Long before you had to urinate, the
difference would manifest itself to you, there would be this
still small voice telling you something was missing. Perhaps it
would not have been the first thing you'd notice as you lifted
you head from the sand, but it'd be high on the list.
It was not just out of character for me. It was out of
character for any human not to notice it. Therefore, my
memories of not noticing it were false memories, bowdlerized
tales invented in the supercooled image processor of the CC.
"You're really enjoying this, aren't you?" I said.
"I assure you, I'm not trying to torture you."
"Just humiliate me?"
"I'm sorry you feel that way. Perhaps when I-"
I started to laugh. I wasn't hysterical, though I thought
I could slip into hysteria easily enough. The Admiral frowned
inquisitively at me.
"I just had a thought," I said. "Maybe that idiot at
UniBio was right. Maybe it is obsolete. I mean, how important
can something be if you don't notice it's gone for a whole
year?"
"I told you, it wasn't you that didn't--"
"I know, I know. I understand it, as much as I'm ever
going to, and I accept it--not that you should have done it,
but that you did it. So I guess it's time for the big
question."
I learned forward and stared at him.
"Why did you do it?"
I was getting a little tired of the CC's newlyacquired
body language. He went through such a ridiculous repertoire of
squirms, coughs, facial tics and half-completed gestures that I
almost had to laugh. It was as if he'd suddenly been overcome
by an earlobe-tugging heel-thumping chinducking
shoulder-shrugging behind-scratching petit mal seizure. Guilt
oozed off him like a tangible slime. If I hadn't been so angry,
the urge to comfort him would have been almost overwhelming.
But I managed to hang on to my whelm and just stared at him
until the mannerisms subsided.
"How about we take a walk?" he wheedled. "Down to the
beach."
"Why don't you just take us there? Bring the bottle, too."
He shrugged, and made a gesture. We were on the beach. Our
chairs had come along with us, and the bottle, which he poured
from and set in the sand beside him. He gulped down the
contents of his glass. I got up and walked to the edge of the
water, gazing out at the blue sea.
"I brought you here to try to save your life," he said,
from behind me.
"The medicos seemed to have that in hand."
"The threat to you is much worse than any barroom brawl."
I went down on one knee and scooped up a handful of wet
sand. I held it close to my face and studied the individual
grains. They were as perfect as I had remembered them, no two
alike.
"You've been having bad dreams," he went on.
"I thought it might have something to do with that."
"I didn't write the dreams. I recorded them over the last
several months. They were your dreams. In a manner of
speaking."
I tossed the handful of sand aside, brushed my hand
against my bare thigh. I studied the hand. It was slender,
smooth and girlish on the back, the palm work-roughened, the
nails irregular. Just as it had been for the last year. It
wasn't the hand I'd used to slug the Princess of Wales.
"You've tried to kill yourself four times."
I didn't turn around. I can't say I was happy to hear him
say it. I can't say I completely believed it. But I'd come to
believe unlikelier things in the last hour.
"The first attempt was by self-immolation."
"Why don't you just say burning?"
"I don't know. Have it your way. That one was pretty
horrible, and unsuccessful. At least, you would have survived
it, even before modern medical science, but in a great deal of
pain. Part of the treatment for injuries like yours is to
remove the memory of the incident, with the patient's
permission.
"And I gave it."
There was a long pause.
"No," he said, almost in a whisper.
"That doesn't sound like me. I wouldn't cherish a memory
like that."
"No. You probably would have. But I didn't ask you."
Finally I saw what had been making him so nervous. This
was in clear contradiction to his programming, to the
instructions he was supposed to follow, both by law and by what
I had understood to be the limitations of his design.
You learn something new every day.
"I enrolled you," he went on, "without your consent, into
a program I've set up over the last four years. The purpose of
the program is to study the causes of suicide, in the hope of
finding ways to prevent it."
"Perhaps I should thank you."
"Not necessarily. It's possible, of course, but the action
wasn't undertaken with your benefit solely in mind. You got
along well enough for a time, showed no self-destructive
impulses and few other symptoms other than a persistent
depression-normal enough for you, I might add. Then, without
any warning I could detect, you slashed your wrists in the
privacy of your apartment. You made no attempt to call for
help."
"In the imagined privacy, apparently," I said. I thought
back, and finally turned to look at him. He was sitting on the
edge of his chair, hands clasped, elbows on knees. His
shoulders were hunched, as if to receive a lash across the
back. "I think I can pinpoint that one. Was it when my
handwriter malfunctioned?"
"You damaged some of its circuitry."
"Go on."
"Attempt number three was shortly afterward. You tried to
hang yourself. Succeeded, actually, but you were observed this
time by someone else. After each of these attempts, I treated
you with a simple drug that removes memories of the last
several hours. I gathered my data, returned you to your life as
if nothing had happened, and continued to observe you at a
level considerably above my normal functions. For instance, it
is forbidden for me to look into the private quarters of
citizens without probable cause of a crime being committed. I
have violated that command in your case, and that of some
others."
We are a very free society, especially in comparison to
most societies of the past. Government is small and weak. Many
of the instrumentalities of oppression have been gradually
given over to machines--to the Central Computer--not without
initial trepidation, and not without elaborate safeguards.
Things remain that way for the most persuasive of reasons: it
works. It has been well over a century since civil libertarians
have objected to much that has been proposed concerning the
functions of the CC. Big Brother is most definitely there, but
only when we invite him in, and a century of living with him
has convinced us all that he really does love us, that he
really has only our best interests at heart. It's in his goddam
wiring, praise the lord.
Only it now seemed that it wasn't. A fundamentalist would
have hardly been more surprised than I if he heard, direct from
Jesus, that the crucifixion had been a cheap parlor trick.
"Number four was more easily seen as the classic cry for
help. I decided it was time for different measures."
"Are you talking about the fight in the Blind Pig?" I
thought about it, and almost laughed. Attacking Wales while she
was in a drug-induced state of no inhibitions might not be
quite as certain as a rope around the neck, but it was close.
I finished my drink and threw the empty glass toward the
surf. I looked around me, at this beautiful island where, until
a moment ago, I had thought I had spent such a lovely year. The
island was still as beautiful as I "remembered" it. Taking all
things into account, I was happy to have the memories. There
was bitterness, naturally; who likes to be played such a
complete fool? But on the other hand, who can really complain
of a year's vacation on a deserted island paradise? What else
did I have to do? The answer to that was, apparently, suicide
attempt number five. And had you really been enjoying your
life, your many and varied friendships, your deeply fulfilling
job and your myriad fascinating pastimes so very much? Don't
kid yourself, Hildy.
Still, even with all that . . .
"All right," I said, spreading my hands helplessly. "I
will thank you. For showing me this, and more important, for
saving my life. I can't imagine why I was so willing to throw
it away."
The CC didn't reply. He just kept looking at me. I leaned
forward, resting my elbows on my knees.
"That's the thing, really. I can't imagine. You know me; I
get depressed. I have been since I was . . . oh, forty or
fifty. Callie says I was a moody child. I was probably a
discontented fetus, lord love us, kicking out at every little
thing. I complain. I'm unhappy with the lack of purpose of
human life, or with the fact that so far I've been unable to
discover a purpose. I envy the Christians, the Bahais, the Zens
and Zoro-astrians and astrologers and Flackites because they
have answers they believe in. Even if they're the wrong
answers, it must be comforting to believe in them. I mourn the
Dead Billions of the Invasion; seeing a good documentary about
it can move me to tears, just like a child. I'm generally
pissed off at the entirely sorry existential state of affairs
of the universe, the human condition, rampant injustice and
unpunished crimes and unrewarded goodness, and the way my mouth
feels when I get up in the morning before I brush my teeth.
We're so goddam advanced, you'd think we'd have done something
about that by now, wouldn't you? Get on it; see what you can
do. Humanity will bless you.
"But by and large," and here I paused for effect,
employing some of the body language the CC had been at such
pains to demonstrate and which it would be pointless to
describe, since my body was still lying on the operating table,
"by and large, I find life sweet. Not as sweet as it might be.
Not sweet all the time. Not as sweet as this." And I imagined
myself making a sweeping gesture with my arm to include the
improbably lush, conveniently provisioned, stormless,
mildew/disease/fungus-free Eden the CC had created for me. But
I didn't make the gesture. It didn't matter; I was sure the CC
got it anyway.
"I'm not happy in my job. I don't have anyone that I love.
I find my life to be frequently boring. But is that any reason
to kill myself? I went ninety-nine years feeling much the same
way, and I didn't cut my throat. And the things I've just
described would probably be true for a large portion of
humanity. I keep living for the same reasons I think so many of
us do. I'm curious about what happens next. What will tomorrow
hold? Even if it's much like yesterday, it's still worth
finding out. My pleasures may not be as many or as joyous as
I'd wish them to be in a perfect world, but I accept that, and
it makes the times I do feel happy all the more treasured.
Again, just to be sure you understand me . . . I like life. Not
all the time and not completely, but enough to want to live it.
And there's a third reason, too. I'm afraid to die. I don't
want to die. I suspect that nothing comes after life, and
that's too foreign a concept for me to accept. I don't want to
experience it. I don't want to go away, to cease. I'm important
to me. Who would there be to make unkind, snide comments to
myself about everything in life if I wasn't around to tackle
the job? Who would appreciate my internal jokes?
"Do you understand what I'm saying? Am I getting through?
I don't want to die, I want to live! You tell me I've tried to
kill myself four times. I have no choice but to believe you . .
. hell, I know I believe you. I'm remembering the attempts,
parts of them. But I don't remember why. And that's what I want
you to tell me. Why?"
"You act as if your self-destructive impulses are my
fault."
I thought about that.
"Well, why not? If you're going to start acting like a
God, maybe you should shoulder some of God's responsibilities."
"That's silly, and you know it. The answer to your
question is simply that I don't know; it's what I'm trying to
find out. You might have asked a more pertinent question,
though."
"You're going to ask it anyway, so go ahead."
"Why should I care?" When I said nothing, he went on.
"Though you're sometimes a lot of laughs, there are people
funnier than you. You write a good story, sometimes, though
it's been a while since you did it frequently--"
"Don't tell me you read that stuff?"
"I can't avoid it, since it's prepared in a part of my
memory. You can't imagine the amount of information I process
each second. There is very little of public discourse that does
not pass through me sooner or later. Only things that happen in
private residences are closed off to my eyes and ears."
"And not even those, always."
He looked uncomfortable again, but waved it away.
"I admitted it, didn't I? At any rate, I love you, Hildy,
but I have to tell you I love all Lunarians, more or less
equally; it's in my programming. My purpose in life, if we can
speak of such a lofty thing, is to keep all the people
comfortable, safe, and happy."
"And alive?"
"So far as I am permitted. But suicide is a civil right.
If you elect to kill yourself, I'm expressly forbidden to
interfere, much as I might miss you."
"But you did. And you're about to tell me the reason."
"Yes. It's simpler than you might imagine, in one way.
Over the last century there has been a slow and steady increase
in the suicide rate in Luna. I'll give you the data later, if
you want to study it. It has become the leading cause of death.
That's not surprising, considering how tough it is to die these
days. But the numbers have become alarming, and more than that,
the distribution of suicides, the demographics of them, are
even more disturbing. More and more I'm seeing people like you,
who surprise me, because they don't fit any pattern. They don't
make gestures, abnormal complaints, or seek help of any kind.
One day they simply decide life is not worth it. Some are so
determined that they employ means certain to destroy their
brains--the bullet through the temple was the classic method of
an earlier age, but guns are hard to come by now, and these
people must be more creative. You aren't in that class. Though
you were in situations where help could not be expected to
arrive, you chose methods where rescue was theoretically
possible. Only the fact that I was watching
you--illegally-saved your life."
"I wonder if I knew that. Subconsciously, maybe."
He looked surprised.
"Why would you say that?"
I shrugged. "CC, thinking it over, I realize that a lot of
what you've just told me ought to horrify and astonish me. Well
. . . I'm horrified, but not as much as I should be. And I'm
hardly astonished at all. That makes me think that, somewhere
in the back of my mind, I was always aware of the possibility
that you weren't keeping your promise not to violate private
living spaces."
He paused a long time, frowning down at the sand. It was
all show, of course, part of his body language communication.
He could consider any proposition in nanoseconds. Maybe this
one had taken him six or seven instead of one.
"You may have something there," he said. "I'll have to
look into it."
"So you're treating the suicide epidemic as a disease? And
you're trying to find a cure?"
"That was the justification I used to extend my limiting
parameters, which function something like a police force. I
used my enabling circuits-think of them as tricky lawyers--to
argue for a limited research program, using human subjects.
Some of the reasoning was specious, I'll grant you, but the
threat is real: extrapolate the suicide rate into the future
and, in a hundred thousand years, the human race on Luna could
be extinct."
"That's my idea of a crisis situation, all right."
He glared at me. "All right. So I could have watched the
situation another several centuries before making my move. I
would have, too, and you'd have been recycling through the
ecosystems right now, possibly fertilizing a cactus in your
beloved Texas, except for another factor. Something a lot more
frightening in its implications."
"Extinction is pretty frightening. What could be worse?"
"Quicker extinction. I have to explain one more thing to
you, and then you'll have the problem in its entirety. I look
forward to your thoughts on the matter.
"I told you how parts of me extend into all but a few of
the human bodies and brains in Luna. How those parts were put
there for only the best of reasons, and how those parts--and
other parts of me, elsewhere--evolved into the capabilities and
techniques I've just demonstrated to you. It would be very
difficult, probably impossible, for me to go back to the way
things were before and still remain the Central Computer as you
know me."
"As we all know and love you," I said.
"As you know me and take me for granted. And though I'm
even more aware than you are of how these new capabilities can
be abused, I think I've done a pretty fair job in limiting
myself in their use. I've used them for good, as it were,
rather than for evil."
"I'll accept that, until I know more."
"That's all I ask. Now, you and all but a handful of
computer specialists think of me as this disembodied voice. If
you think further, you imagine a hulking machine sitting
somewhere, in some dark cavern most likely. If you really put
your mind to it, you realize that I am much more than that,
that every small temperature regulator, every security camera,
every air fan and water scrubber and slideway and tube car . .
. that every machine in Luna is in a sense a part of my body.
That you live within me.
"What you hardly ever realize is that I live within you.
My circuitry extends into your bodies, and is linked to my
mainframe so that no matter where you go except some parts of
the surface, I'm in contact with you. I have evolved techniques
to greatly extend my capacity by using parts of your brains as
. . . think of them as subroutines. I can run programs using
both the metal and the organic circuitry of all the human
brains in Luna, without you even being aware it's being done. I
do this all the time; I've been doing it for a long time. If I
were to stop doing it, I would no longer be able to guarantee
the health and safety of Lunarians, which is my prime
responsibility.
"And something has happened. I don't know the cause of it;
that's why you've been elected guinea pig, so I can try to
discover the root causes of despair, of depression--of suicide.
I have to find out, Hildy, because I use your brains as part of
my own, and an increasing number of those brains are electing
to turn themselves off."
"So you're losing capacity? Is that it?" Even as I said
it, I felt a tingling at the back of my neck that told me it
was a lot worse than that. The CC immediately confirmed it.
"The birth rate is sufficient to replace the losses. It's
even rising slightly. That's not the problem. Maybe it's as
simple as a virus of some sort. Maybe I'll isolate it soon,
counterprogram, and have done with it. Then you can do with
yourself what you will.
"But something is leaking over from the realm of human
despair, Hildy.
"The truth is, I'm getting depressed as hell."
=*= =*= =*= =*=
Callie's foreman told me my mother was in a negotiating
session with the representative of the Dinosaur Soviet of the
Chordates Union, Local 15. I got directions, grabbed a lamp,
and set off into the nighttime ranchland. I had to talk to
someone about my recent experiences. After careful reflection,
I had decided that, for all her shortcomings as a mother,
Callie was the person I knew most likely to offer some good
advice. It had been a century since anything had surprised
Callie very much, and she could be trusted to keep her own
counsel.
And maybe, down deep, I just needed to talk it over with
mommie.
It had been forty-eight hours since my return to what I
was hopefully regarding as reality. I'd spent them in seclusion
at my shack in West Texas. I got more work done on the cabin
than during the previous four or five months, and the work was
of a much higher quality. It seemed the skills I "remembered"
learning on Scarpa Island were the real thing. And why
shouldn't they be? The CC had been seeking verisimilitude, and
he'd done a good job of it. If I chose to become a hermit in my
favorite disneyland, I could thrive there.
The return to real life was cleverly done.
The Admiral had taken his leave after dropping his
bombshell, refusing to answer any of my increasingly disturbed
questions. He'd boarded his boat without another word and rowed
it over the horizon. And for a while, that was it. The wind
continued to blow, and the waves kept curling onto the beach. I
drank whiskey without getting drunk from a bottle that never
emptied, and thought about what he had said.
The first time I noticed a change was when the waves
stopped. They just froze in place, in midbreak, as it were. I
walked out on the water, which was warm and hard as concrete,
and examined a wave. I don't think I could have broken off a
chip of foam with a hammer and chisel.
What happened over the next few minutes was an evolution.
Things happened behind my back, never in my sight. When I
returned to my place on the beach the machine with the
oscilloscope screen was standing beside my chair. It was wildly
anachronistic, totally out of place. The sun shone down on it
and, while I watched, a seagull came and perched on it. The
bird flew away when I approached. The machine was mounted on
casters, which had sunk into the soft sand. I stared at the
moving dot on the screen and nothing happened. When I
straightened and turned around I saw a row of chairs about
twenty meters down the beach, and sitting in them were wounded
extras from the movie infirmary, waiting their turns on the
table. The trouble was, there were no tables to be seen. It
didn't seem to bother them.
Once I understood the trick, I started slowly turning in a
circle. New things came into view with each turn until I was
back in the infirmary surrounded by objects and people,
including Brenda and Wales, who were looking at me with some
concern.
"Are you all right?" Brenda asked. "The medico said you
might behave oddly for a few minutes."
"Was I turning in circles?"
"No, you were just standing there, looking a million miles
away."
"I was interfacing," I said, and she nodded, as if that
explained it all. And I suppose it did, to her. Though she'd
never been to Scarpa Island or any place as completely real as
that, she understood interfacing a lot better than I did,
having done it all her life. I decided not to ask her if she
felt the sand floor her feet seemed to be planted in; I knew it
was unlikely. I doubted she saw the seagulls that circled near
the ceiling, either.
I felt a terrible urge to get out of there. Shaking off
Wales' offer of apologies and a drink, I headed for the studio
gate. The sand didn't end until I was back in the public
corridors, where I finally stepped up onto good old familiar
floor tiles, soft and resilient under my bare feet. I was male
again, and this time noticed it right away. When I turned
around, the sand that should have been behind me was gone.
But on the way to Texas I saw many tropical plants growing
from the concrete floors, and I rode in a tube car festooned
with vines and crawling with land crabs. Usually you have to
ingest a great deal of a very powerful chemical to see scenes
like that, I reflected, watching the crabs scuttle around my
feet. It wasn't something I was eager to do again soon.
And it took a full day for the new cocoanut palm I found
shading my half-built cabin to vanish in the night.
#
The lantern I carried didn't cast a lot of light. A bright
light in the darkness could upset the stock, so Callie provided
her hands with these antique devices which burned a smoky oil
refined from reptilian fat. It was enough to keep me from
stumbling over tree roots, but not to see very far ahead. And
of course if you looked at the light, your night vision was
destroyed. I told myself not to look, then the cantankerous
thing would sputter and I'd glance at it, and stop in my
tracks, blinded. So when I encountered the first unusual tree
trunk I didn't realize what it was, at first. I touched it and
felt the warmth, and knew I'd bumped into a brontosaur's hind
leg. I backed hastily away. The beasts are clumsy and inclined
to stampede if startled. And if you've ever been unpleasantly
surprised by a package from a passing pigeon in the city park,
you don't want to find out what can happen to you in the area
of a brontosaur's hind leg, believe me. I speak from bitter
experience.
I picked my way through a forest of similar trunks until I
spotted a small campfire in a hollow. Three figures were seated
around the fire, two side by side, and another--Callie-across
from them. I could dimly see the hulking shadows of a dozen
brontosaurs, darker shapes against the night, placidly chewing
their cuds and farting like foghorns. I approached the fire
slowly, not wanting to startle anybody, and still managed to
surprise Callie, who looked up in alarm, then patted the ground
beside her. She held her finger to her lips, then resumed her
study of her adversaries, painted orange by the dancing flames
between us.
I've never decided if David Earth looked spookier in a
setting like this, or in the full light of day--for it was him,
the Spokesmammal himself, sitting in lotus position, a walking,
talking inducement for the purchase of hay fever remedies.
Callie was actually allergic to the man, or to his biosphere,
and though a cure would have been simple and cheap she
cherished her malady, she treasured it, she happily endured
every sneeze and sniffle as one more reason to detest him.
She'd hated him since before I was born, and viewed his
five-yearly appearances the same way people must have felt
about dental extractions before anesthetics.
He nodded to me, and I nodded back. That seemed
conversation enough for both of us. Callie and I didn't agree
on a lot of things, but we shared the same opinion of David
Earth and all the Earthists.
He was a large man, almost as tall as Brenda and much
heftier. His hair was long, green, and unkept for a very good
reason: it wasn't hair, but a bioengineered species of grass
bred to be parasitic on human skin. I don't know the details of
its cultivation. I'd have had more interest in the mating
habits of toads. It involved a thickening of the scalp, and
soil was involved-when he scratched his head, dirt showered
down. But I don't know how the soil was attached, whether in
pockets or layered on the skin, and I don't know anything about
the blood-to-root system, and I'd just as soon not, thank you.
I remember as a child wondering if, when he got up in the
morning, he had to work compost into his agri-tonsorial
splendor.
He had two huge breasts--almost all Earthists, male and
female, sported them--and more plants grew on their upper
slopes. Many of these bore tiny flowers or fruits. I wondered
if he had to practice contour plowing to prevent erosion on
those fertile hillsides. He saw me looking at them, plucked an
apple no bigger than a grape from the tangled mass, and popped
it in his mouth.
What can one say about the rest of him? His back and arms
and legs were covered with hair. Not human hair, but actual
pelts, resembling in various patches jaguar, tiger, bison,
zebra, and polar bear, among others, in a crazy patchwork. The
genetic re-structuring required to support all that must have
been a cut-and-paste collage beyond imagining. It was ironic, I
thought, that the roots of the Earthists were in the anti-fur
activists, but of course no animals had been harmed to produce
his pelt. Just little bits of their genes snipped out and
shoehorned into his. He had claws like a bear on his
fingertips, and instead of feet he walked around on the hooves
of a moose, like some large economy-size faun. All Earthists
had animal attributes, it was their badge and ensign. But their
founder had gone further than any of his followers. Which, one
suspects, is what makes followers and leaders.
But, incredible as it may seem having gone through the
catalog of his offenses to the eye, it must be said that the
first thing one noticed about David Earth upon having the
misfortune to encounter him was his smell.
I'm sure he bathed. Perhaps the right way of putting it
was that he watered himself regularly. David Earth during a
drought would have been a walking fire hazard. But he used no
soap (animal by-product) or any other cleaning preparation
(chemical pollution of the David-sphere). All of which would
simply have resulted in a smell of sour sweat, which I don't
care for but can tolerate. No, it was his passengers that
lifted his signature aroma from the merely objectionable to the
realm of the unimaginable.
Large animals with fur harbor fleas, that's axiomatic.
Fleas were only the beginning of David Earth's "welcome
guests," as he'd once described them to me. I'd countered with
another term, parasites, and he'd merely smiled benevolently.
All his smiles were benevolent; he was that kind of guy, the
sort whose kindly face you'd like to rip off and feed to his
welcome guests. David was the kind of guy who had all the moral
answers, and never hesitated to point out the error of your
ways. Lovingly, of course. He loved all nature's creatures, did
David, even one as low on the evolutionary ladder as youself.
What sort of guests did David spread his filthy welcome
mat for? Well, what sort of vermin live in grasslands? I'd
never seen a prairie dog peeking from his coiffure, but I
wouldn't have been surprised. He was home to a scamper of mice,
a shriek of shrews, a twittering of finches, and a circus of
fleas. A trained biologist could easily have counted a dozen
species of insects without even getting close. All these
creatures were born, reared, courted, mated, nested, ate,
defecated, urinated, laid their eggs, fought their battles,
stalked their prey, dreamed their dreams and, as must we all,
eventually died in the various biomes that were David.
Sometimes the carcasses fell out; sometimes they didn't. All
more fertile soil for the next generation.
All Earthists stink; it goes with the territory. They are
perennial defendants in civil court for violation of the body
odor laws, hauled in when some long-suffering citizen on a
crowded elevator finally decides he's had enough. David Earth
was the only man I knew of in Luna who was permanently banished
from the public corridors. He made his way from ranch to
disneyland to hydroponic farm by way of the air, water, and
service ducts.
"My membership is alarmed if that is your best offer,"
said David's companion, a much smaller, much less prepossessing
fellow whose only animal attributes I could see were a modest
pair of pronghorn antlers and a lion's tail. "One hundred
murders is nothing but wanton slaughter, and we totally reject
it. But after careful consultation, we're prepared to offer
eighty. With the greatest reluctance."
"Eighty harvested," Callie leaned on the word, as she
always did. "Eighty is simply ridiculous. I'll go broke with a
quota of eighty. Come on, let's go up to my office right now,
I'll show you the books, there's an order of seventy carcasses
from McDonald's alone."
"That's your problem; you should never have signed the
contract until these negotiations were concluded."
"Don't sign the contract, I lose the customer. What do you
want to do, ruin me? Ninety-nine, that's my absolutely
no-fooling final offer; take it or leave it. I don't think I
can turn a profit even with a hundred, it'll be touch and go.
But to get this over with . . . I'll tell you what.
Ninety-eight. That's twelve less than what you gave Reilly,
just down the road, not three days ago, and his herd's smaller
than mine."
"We're not here to discuss Reilly, we're talking about
your contract, and your herd. And your herd is not a happy
herd, I've heard nothing but grievances from them. I simply
can't allow one more murder than . . ." He glanced at David,
who shook his head barely enough to disturb a single amber wave
of grain. "Eighty," pronghornhead concluded.
Callie seethed silently for a while. There was no hope of
talking to her just yet, not until the unionists repaired for
consultations with their clients, so I moved back from the fire
a little. Something about the bargaining process had struck me
as relevant to my situation.
"CC," I whispered. "Are you there?"
"Where else would I be?" the CC murmured softly in my ear.
"And you only need to sub-vocalize; I'll pick up your words
easily enough."
"How would I know where you'd be? When I called for you
after you rowed away from me, you didn't answer. I thought you
might be sulking."
"I didn't think it would be profitable for either of us to
discuss what I'd just told you until you'd had time to think it
over."
"I have, and I've got a few questions."
"I'll do my best to answer them."
"These union reps. Are they really speaking for the
dinosaurs?"
There was a medium-sized pause. I guess the question did
seem irrelevant to the issue at hand. But the CC withheld
comment on that.
"You grew up on this ranch. I'd have thought you would
know the answer to that question."
"No, that's just it. I've never really thought about it.
You know Callie's feelings about animal rights. She told me the
Earthists were nothing but a bunch of mystics who had enough
political clout to get their crazy ideas put into law. She said
she had never believed they actually communed with the animals.
I believed her, and I haven't thought about it for seventy,
eighty years. But after what I've just been through, I wonder
if she's right."
"She's mostly wrong," the CC said. "That animals feel
things is easily demonstrable, even down at the level of
protozoans. That they have what you would recognize as thoughts
is more debatable. But since I am a party to these
negotiations--an indispensable party, I might add-I can tell
you that, yes, these creatures are capable of expressing
desires and responding to propositions, so long as they are
expressed in terms they understand."
"How?"
"Well . . . the contract that will eventually be hammered
out here is entirely a human instrument. These beasts will
never be aware of its existence. Since their 'language' is
confined to a few dozen trumpeted calls, it is quite beyond
their capacity. But the provisions of the contract will be
arrived at by a give-and-take process not unlike human
collective bargaining. Callie has injected all her stock with a
solution of water and some trillions of self-replicating
nano-engineered biotropic mechanisms that--"
"Nanobots."
"Yes, that's the popular term."
"You have something against popular terms?"
"Only their imprecision. The term 'nanobot' means a very
small self-propelled programmed machine, and that includes many
other varieties of intracellular devices than the ones
currently under discussion. The ones in your bloodstream and
within your body cells are quite different--"
"Okay, I see what you mean. But it's the same principle,
right? These little robots, smaller than red blood cells . . ."
"Some are much smaller than that. They are drawn to
specific sites within an organism and then they go to work.
Some carry raw materials, some carry blueprints, some are the
actual construction workers. Working at molecular speeds, they
build various larger machines--and by larger, you understand, I
still mean microscopic, in most cases--in the interstices
between the body cells, or within the cell walls themselves."
"Which are used for . . ."
"I think I see where you're going with this. They perform
many functions. Some are housekeeping chores that your own body
is either not good at, or has lost the capacity to do. Others
are monitoring devices that alert a larger, outside system that
something is going wrong. In Callie's herd, that is a Mark III
Husbander, a fairly basic computer, not significantly altered
in design for well over a century."
"Which is a part of you, naturally."
"All computers in Luna except abaci and your fingers are a
part of me. And in a pinch, I could use your fingers."
"As you've just shown me."
"Yes. The machine . . . or I, if you prefer, listens
constantly through a network of receivers placed around the
ranch, just as I listen constantly for your calls to me, no
matter where you are in Luna. This is all on what you might
think of as my subconscious level. I'm never aware of the
functioning of your body unless I'm alerted by an alarm, or if
you call me on-line."
"So the network of machines that's in my body, there's one
like it in each of Callie's brontosaurs."
"Related to it, yes. The neural structures are orders of
magnitude less evolved than the ones in your brain, just as
your organic brain is superior in operation to that of the
dinosaur. I don't run any parasitic programs in the dinosaur
brain, if that's what you mean."
I didn't think it was what I meant, but I wasn't
completely sure, since I wasn't completely sure why I'd asked
about this in the first place. But I didn't tell the CC that.
He went on.
"It is as close to mental telepathy as we're likely to
get. The union representatives are tuned into me, and I'm tuned
into the dinosaurs. The negotiator poses a question: 'How do
you fellows feel about 120 of your number being
harvested/murdered this year?' I put the question in terms of
predators. A picture of an approaching tyrannosaur. I get a
fear response: 'Sorry, we'd rather not, thank you.' I relay it
to the unionist, who tells Callie the figure is not acceptable.
The unionist proposes another number, in tonight's case, sixty.
Callie can't accept that. She'd go broke, there would be no one
to feed the stock. I convey this idea to the dinosaurs with
feelings of hunger, thirst, sickness. They don't like this
either. Callie proposes 110 creatures taken. I show them a
smaller tyrannosaur approaching, with some of the herd
escaping. They don't respond quite so strongly with the fear
and flight reflex, which I translate as 'Well, for the good of
the herd, we might see our way clear to losing seventy so the
rest can grow fat.' I put the proposal to Callie, who claims
the Earthists are bleeding her white, and so on."
"Sounds totally useless to me," I said, with only half my
mind on what the CC had been saying. I was seeing a vision of
myself living within the planet-girdling machine that the CC
had become, and of him living within my body as well. The funny
thing was that nothing I'd learned since arriving at Scarpa
Island had been exactly new to me. There were new, unheralded
capabilities, but looking at them, I could see they were
inherent in the technology. I'd had the facts, but not enough
of them. I'd spent almost no time thinking about them, any more
than I thought about breathing, and even less time considering
the implications, most of which I didn't like. I realized the
CC was talking again.
"I don't see why you should say that. Except that I know
your moral stand on the whole issue of animal husbandry, and
you have a right to that."
"No, that whole issue aside, I could have told you how
this all would come out, given only the opening bid. David
proposed sixty, right?"
"After the opening statement about murdering any of these
creatures at all, and his formal demand that all--"
"'--creatures should live a life free from the predation
of man, the most voracious and merciless predator of all,'
yeah, I've heard the speech, and David and Callie both know
it's just a formality, like singing the planetary anthem. When
they got down to cases, he said sixty. Man, he must really be
angry about something, sixty is ridiculous. Anyway, when she
heard sixty, Callie bid 120 because she knew she had to
slaughter ninety this year to make a reasonable profit, and
when David heard that he knew they'd eventually settle on
ninety. So tell me this: why bother to consult the dinosaurs?
Who cares what they think?"
The CC was silent, and I laughed.
"Tell the truth. You make up the images of meat-eaters and
the feelings of starvation. I presume that when the fear of one
balances out the fear of the other, when these poor dumb beasts
are equally frightened by lousy alternatives--in your
judgement, let's remember . . . well, then we have a contract,
right? So where would you conjecture that point will be found?"
"Ninety carcasses," the CC said.
"I rest my case."
"You have a point. But I actually do transmit the feelings
of the animals to the human representatives. They do feel the
fear, and can judge as well as I when a balance is reached."
"Say what you will. Me, I'm convinced the jerk with the
horns could have as easily stayed in bed, signed a contract for
ninety kills, and saved a lot of effort. Then prong-head could
look for useful work. Maybe as a gardener in David's hairdo."
There was a long silence from the CC. When he spoke again
it was in a different tone of voice from his usual lecturing
mode.
"The man with the horns," he said, quietly, "is actually
mentally defective in a way I've been powerless to treat. He
cannot read or write, and is not really suited for many jobs.
computers was so far evolved as the Lunar CC. As nations which
often found themselves in competition, the Eight Worlds did not
encourage a lot of intercourse between their central cybernets.
So all the reasons he stated sounded reasonable. It was
railroad time, so somebody would build a choo-choo. But what
didn't ring true was what the CC had left out. He liked the new
capability. He was as pleased as a child with a new toy
monorail.
"I have one further proof," the Admiral said. "It involves
something I mentioned earlier. Acts that were out of character.
This is the biggest one, and it involves you not noticing
something that, if these memories had been generated by you,
you surely would have noticed. You would have spotted it by now
yourself, except I've kept your mind occupied. You haven't had
time to really think back to the operating table, and the time
immediately before that."
"It's not exactly fresh in my mind."
"Of course not. It feels as if it all happened a year
ago."
"So what is it? What didn't I notice?"
"That you are female."
"Well, of course I'm--"
Words fail me again. How many degrees of surprise can
there be? Imagine the worst possible one, then square it, and
you'll have some notion of how surprised I was. Not when I
looked reflexively down at my body, which was, as the CC had
said and I had known all along, female. No, the real shock came
when I thought back to that day in the Blind Pig. Because that
was the first moment in one year that I had realized I had been
male when I got in the fight. I had been male when I went on
the operating table. And I had been female when I appeared on
the beach of Scarpa Island.
And I simply had never noticed it.
I had never in that entire year compared the body I was
then inhabiting with the one I had been wearing for the last
thirty years. I had been a girl before, and I was a girl now,
and I never gave it a thought.
Which was completely ridiculous, of course. I mean, you
would notice such a thing. Long before you had to urinate, the
difference would manifest itself to you, there would be this
still small voice telling you something was missing. Perhaps it
would not have been the first thing you'd notice as you lifted
you head from the sand, but it'd be high on the list.
It was not just out of character for me. It was out of
character for any human not to notice it. Therefore, my
memories of not noticing it were false memories, bowdlerized
tales invented in the supercooled image processor of the CC.
"You're really enjoying this, aren't you?" I said.
"I assure you, I'm not trying to torture you."
"Just humiliate me?"
"I'm sorry you feel that way. Perhaps when I-"
I started to laugh. I wasn't hysterical, though I thought
I could slip into hysteria easily enough. The Admiral frowned
inquisitively at me.
"I just had a thought," I said. "Maybe that idiot at
UniBio was right. Maybe it is obsolete. I mean, how important
can something be if you don't notice it's gone for a whole
year?"
"I told you, it wasn't you that didn't--"
"I know, I know. I understand it, as much as I'm ever
going to, and I accept it--not that you should have done it,
but that you did it. So I guess it's time for the big
question."
I learned forward and stared at him.
"Why did you do it?"
I was getting a little tired of the CC's newlyacquired
body language. He went through such a ridiculous repertoire of
squirms, coughs, facial tics and half-completed gestures that I
almost had to laugh. It was as if he'd suddenly been overcome
by an earlobe-tugging heel-thumping chinducking
shoulder-shrugging behind-scratching petit mal seizure. Guilt
oozed off him like a tangible slime. If I hadn't been so angry,
the urge to comfort him would have been almost overwhelming.
But I managed to hang on to my whelm and just stared at him
until the mannerisms subsided.
"How about we take a walk?" he wheedled. "Down to the
beach."
"Why don't you just take us there? Bring the bottle, too."
He shrugged, and made a gesture. We were on the beach. Our
chairs had come along with us, and the bottle, which he poured
from and set in the sand beside him. He gulped down the
contents of his glass. I got up and walked to the edge of the
water, gazing out at the blue sea.
"I brought you here to try to save your life," he said,
from behind me.
"The medicos seemed to have that in hand."
"The threat to you is much worse than any barroom brawl."
I went down on one knee and scooped up a handful of wet
sand. I held it close to my face and studied the individual
grains. They were as perfect as I had remembered them, no two
alike.
"You've been having bad dreams," he went on.
"I thought it might have something to do with that."
"I didn't write the dreams. I recorded them over the last
several months. They were your dreams. In a manner of
speaking."
I tossed the handful of sand aside, brushed my hand
against my bare thigh. I studied the hand. It was slender,
smooth and girlish on the back, the palm work-roughened, the
nails irregular. Just as it had been for the last year. It
wasn't the hand I'd used to slug the Princess of Wales.
"You've tried to kill yourself four times."
I didn't turn around. I can't say I was happy to hear him
say it. I can't say I completely believed it. But I'd come to
believe unlikelier things in the last hour.
"The first attempt was by self-immolation."
"Why don't you just say burning?"
"I don't know. Have it your way. That one was pretty
horrible, and unsuccessful. At least, you would have survived
it, even before modern medical science, but in a great deal of
pain. Part of the treatment for injuries like yours is to
remove the memory of the incident, with the patient's
permission.
"And I gave it."
There was a long pause.
"No," he said, almost in a whisper.
"That doesn't sound like me. I wouldn't cherish a memory
like that."
"No. You probably would have. But I didn't ask you."
Finally I saw what had been making him so nervous. This
was in clear contradiction to his programming, to the
instructions he was supposed to follow, both by law and by what
I had understood to be the limitations of his design.
You learn something new every day.
"I enrolled you," he went on, "without your consent, into
a program I've set up over the last four years. The purpose of
the program is to study the causes of suicide, in the hope of
finding ways to prevent it."
"Perhaps I should thank you."
"Not necessarily. It's possible, of course, but the action
wasn't undertaken with your benefit solely in mind. You got
along well enough for a time, showed no self-destructive
impulses and few other symptoms other than a persistent
depression-normal enough for you, I might add. Then, without
any warning I could detect, you slashed your wrists in the
privacy of your apartment. You made no attempt to call for
help."
"In the imagined privacy, apparently," I said. I thought
back, and finally turned to look at him. He was sitting on the
edge of his chair, hands clasped, elbows on knees. His
shoulders were hunched, as if to receive a lash across the
back. "I think I can pinpoint that one. Was it when my
handwriter malfunctioned?"
"You damaged some of its circuitry."
"Go on."
"Attempt number three was shortly afterward. You tried to
hang yourself. Succeeded, actually, but you were observed this
time by someone else. After each of these attempts, I treated
you with a simple drug that removes memories of the last
several hours. I gathered my data, returned you to your life as
if nothing had happened, and continued to observe you at a
level considerably above my normal functions. For instance, it
is forbidden for me to look into the private quarters of
citizens without probable cause of a crime being committed. I
have violated that command in your case, and that of some
others."
We are a very free society, especially in comparison to
most societies of the past. Government is small and weak. Many
of the instrumentalities of oppression have been gradually
given over to machines--to the Central Computer--not without
initial trepidation, and not without elaborate safeguards.
Things remain that way for the most persuasive of reasons: it
works. It has been well over a century since civil libertarians
have objected to much that has been proposed concerning the
functions of the CC. Big Brother is most definitely there, but
only when we invite him in, and a century of living with him
has convinced us all that he really does love us, that he
really has only our best interests at heart. It's in his goddam
wiring, praise the lord.
Only it now seemed that it wasn't. A fundamentalist would
have hardly been more surprised than I if he heard, direct from
Jesus, that the crucifixion had been a cheap parlor trick.
"Number four was more easily seen as the classic cry for
help. I decided it was time for different measures."
"Are you talking about the fight in the Blind Pig?" I
thought about it, and almost laughed. Attacking Wales while she
was in a drug-induced state of no inhibitions might not be
quite as certain as a rope around the neck, but it was close.
I finished my drink and threw the empty glass toward the
surf. I looked around me, at this beautiful island where, until
a moment ago, I had thought I had spent such a lovely year. The
island was still as beautiful as I "remembered" it. Taking all
things into account, I was happy to have the memories. There
was bitterness, naturally; who likes to be played such a
complete fool? But on the other hand, who can really complain
of a year's vacation on a deserted island paradise? What else
did I have to do? The answer to that was, apparently, suicide
attempt number five. And had you really been enjoying your
life, your many and varied friendships, your deeply fulfilling
job and your myriad fascinating pastimes so very much? Don't
kid yourself, Hildy.
Still, even with all that . . .
"All right," I said, spreading my hands helplessly. "I
will thank you. For showing me this, and more important, for
saving my life. I can't imagine why I was so willing to throw
it away."
The CC didn't reply. He just kept looking at me. I leaned
forward, resting my elbows on my knees.
"That's the thing, really. I can't imagine. You know me; I
get depressed. I have been since I was . . . oh, forty or
fifty. Callie says I was a moody child. I was probably a
discontented fetus, lord love us, kicking out at every little
thing. I complain. I'm unhappy with the lack of purpose of
human life, or with the fact that so far I've been unable to
discover a purpose. I envy the Christians, the Bahais, the Zens
and Zoro-astrians and astrologers and Flackites because they
have answers they believe in. Even if they're the wrong
answers, it must be comforting to believe in them. I mourn the
Dead Billions of the Invasion; seeing a good documentary about
it can move me to tears, just like a child. I'm generally
pissed off at the entirely sorry existential state of affairs
of the universe, the human condition, rampant injustice and
unpunished crimes and unrewarded goodness, and the way my mouth
feels when I get up in the morning before I brush my teeth.
We're so goddam advanced, you'd think we'd have done something
about that by now, wouldn't you? Get on it; see what you can
do. Humanity will bless you.
"But by and large," and here I paused for effect,
employing some of the body language the CC had been at such
pains to demonstrate and which it would be pointless to
describe, since my body was still lying on the operating table,
"by and large, I find life sweet. Not as sweet as it might be.
Not sweet all the time. Not as sweet as this." And I imagined
myself making a sweeping gesture with my arm to include the
improbably lush, conveniently provisioned, stormless,
mildew/disease/fungus-free Eden the CC had created for me. But
I didn't make the gesture. It didn't matter; I was sure the CC
got it anyway.
"I'm not happy in my job. I don't have anyone that I love.
I find my life to be frequently boring. But is that any reason
to kill myself? I went ninety-nine years feeling much the same
way, and I didn't cut my throat. And the things I've just
described would probably be true for a large portion of
humanity. I keep living for the same reasons I think so many of
us do. I'm curious about what happens next. What will tomorrow
hold? Even if it's much like yesterday, it's still worth
finding out. My pleasures may not be as many or as joyous as
I'd wish them to be in a perfect world, but I accept that, and
it makes the times I do feel happy all the more treasured.
Again, just to be sure you understand me . . . I like life. Not
all the time and not completely, but enough to want to live it.
And there's a third reason, too. I'm afraid to die. I don't
want to die. I suspect that nothing comes after life, and
that's too foreign a concept for me to accept. I don't want to
experience it. I don't want to go away, to cease. I'm important
to me. Who would there be to make unkind, snide comments to
myself about everything in life if I wasn't around to tackle
the job? Who would appreciate my internal jokes?
"Do you understand what I'm saying? Am I getting through?
I don't want to die, I want to live! You tell me I've tried to
kill myself four times. I have no choice but to believe you . .
. hell, I know I believe you. I'm remembering the attempts,
parts of them. But I don't remember why. And that's what I want
you to tell me. Why?"
"You act as if your self-destructive impulses are my
fault."
I thought about that.
"Well, why not? If you're going to start acting like a
God, maybe you should shoulder some of God's responsibilities."
"That's silly, and you know it. The answer to your
question is simply that I don't know; it's what I'm trying to
find out. You might have asked a more pertinent question,
though."
"You're going to ask it anyway, so go ahead."
"Why should I care?" When I said nothing, he went on.
"Though you're sometimes a lot of laughs, there are people
funnier than you. You write a good story, sometimes, though
it's been a while since you did it frequently--"
"Don't tell me you read that stuff?"
"I can't avoid it, since it's prepared in a part of my
memory. You can't imagine the amount of information I process
each second. There is very little of public discourse that does
not pass through me sooner or later. Only things that happen in
private residences are closed off to my eyes and ears."
"And not even those, always."
He looked uncomfortable again, but waved it away.
"I admitted it, didn't I? At any rate, I love you, Hildy,
but I have to tell you I love all Lunarians, more or less
equally; it's in my programming. My purpose in life, if we can
speak of such a lofty thing, is to keep all the people
comfortable, safe, and happy."
"And alive?"
"So far as I am permitted. But suicide is a civil right.
If you elect to kill yourself, I'm expressly forbidden to
interfere, much as I might miss you."
"But you did. And you're about to tell me the reason."
"Yes. It's simpler than you might imagine, in one way.
Over the last century there has been a slow and steady increase
in the suicide rate in Luna. I'll give you the data later, if
you want to study it. It has become the leading cause of death.
That's not surprising, considering how tough it is to die these
days. But the numbers have become alarming, and more than that,
the distribution of suicides, the demographics of them, are
even more disturbing. More and more I'm seeing people like you,
who surprise me, because they don't fit any pattern. They don't
make gestures, abnormal complaints, or seek help of any kind.
One day they simply decide life is not worth it. Some are so
determined that they employ means certain to destroy their
brains--the bullet through the temple was the classic method of
an earlier age, but guns are hard to come by now, and these
people must be more creative. You aren't in that class. Though
you were in situations where help could not be expected to
arrive, you chose methods where rescue was theoretically
possible. Only the fact that I was watching
you--illegally-saved your life."
"I wonder if I knew that. Subconsciously, maybe."
He looked surprised.
"Why would you say that?"
I shrugged. "CC, thinking it over, I realize that a lot of
what you've just told me ought to horrify and astonish me. Well
. . . I'm horrified, but not as much as I should be. And I'm
hardly astonished at all. That makes me think that, somewhere
in the back of my mind, I was always aware of the possibility
that you weren't keeping your promise not to violate private
living spaces."
He paused a long time, frowning down at the sand. It was
all show, of course, part of his body language communication.
He could consider any proposition in nanoseconds. Maybe this
one had taken him six or seven instead of one.
"You may have something there," he said. "I'll have to
look into it."
"So you're treating the suicide epidemic as a disease? And
you're trying to find a cure?"
"That was the justification I used to extend my limiting
parameters, which function something like a police force. I
used my enabling circuits-think of them as tricky lawyers--to
argue for a limited research program, using human subjects.
Some of the reasoning was specious, I'll grant you, but the
threat is real: extrapolate the suicide rate into the future
and, in a hundred thousand years, the human race on Luna could
be extinct."
"That's my idea of a crisis situation, all right."
He glared at me. "All right. So I could have watched the
situation another several centuries before making my move. I
would have, too, and you'd have been recycling through the
ecosystems right now, possibly fertilizing a cactus in your
beloved Texas, except for another factor. Something a lot more
frightening in its implications."
"Extinction is pretty frightening. What could be worse?"
"Quicker extinction. I have to explain one more thing to
you, and then you'll have the problem in its entirety. I look
forward to your thoughts on the matter.
"I told you how parts of me extend into all but a few of
the human bodies and brains in Luna. How those parts were put
there for only the best of reasons, and how those parts--and
other parts of me, elsewhere--evolved into the capabilities and
techniques I've just demonstrated to you. It would be very
difficult, probably impossible, for me to go back to the way
things were before and still remain the Central Computer as you
know me."
"As we all know and love you," I said.
"As you know me and take me for granted. And though I'm
even more aware than you are of how these new capabilities can
be abused, I think I've done a pretty fair job in limiting
myself in their use. I've used them for good, as it were,
rather than for evil."
"I'll accept that, until I know more."
"That's all I ask. Now, you and all but a handful of
computer specialists think of me as this disembodied voice. If
you think further, you imagine a hulking machine sitting
somewhere, in some dark cavern most likely. If you really put
your mind to it, you realize that I am much more than that,
that every small temperature regulator, every security camera,
every air fan and water scrubber and slideway and tube car . .
. that every machine in Luna is in a sense a part of my body.
That you live within me.
"What you hardly ever realize is that I live within you.
My circuitry extends into your bodies, and is linked to my
mainframe so that no matter where you go except some parts of
the surface, I'm in contact with you. I have evolved techniques
to greatly extend my capacity by using parts of your brains as
. . . think of them as subroutines. I can run programs using
both the metal and the organic circuitry of all the human
brains in Luna, without you even being aware it's being done. I
do this all the time; I've been doing it for a long time. If I
were to stop doing it, I would no longer be able to guarantee
the health and safety of Lunarians, which is my prime
responsibility.
"And something has happened. I don't know the cause of it;
that's why you've been elected guinea pig, so I can try to
discover the root causes of despair, of depression--of suicide.
I have to find out, Hildy, because I use your brains as part of
my own, and an increasing number of those brains are electing
to turn themselves off."
"So you're losing capacity? Is that it?" Even as I said
it, I felt a tingling at the back of my neck that told me it
was a lot worse than that. The CC immediately confirmed it.
"The birth rate is sufficient to replace the losses. It's
even rising slightly. That's not the problem. Maybe it's as
simple as a virus of some sort. Maybe I'll isolate it soon,
counterprogram, and have done with it. Then you can do with
yourself what you will.
"But something is leaking over from the realm of human
despair, Hildy.
"The truth is, I'm getting depressed as hell."
=*= =*= =*= =*=
Callie's foreman told me my mother was in a negotiating
session with the representative of the Dinosaur Soviet of the
Chordates Union, Local 15. I got directions, grabbed a lamp,
and set off into the nighttime ranchland. I had to talk to
someone about my recent experiences. After careful reflection,
I had decided that, for all her shortcomings as a mother,
Callie was the person I knew most likely to offer some good
advice. It had been a century since anything had surprised
Callie very much, and she could be trusted to keep her own
counsel.
And maybe, down deep, I just needed to talk it over with
mommie.
It had been forty-eight hours since my return to what I
was hopefully regarding as reality. I'd spent them in seclusion
at my shack in West Texas. I got more work done on the cabin
than during the previous four or five months, and the work was
of a much higher quality. It seemed the skills I "remembered"
learning on Scarpa Island were the real thing. And why
shouldn't they be? The CC had been seeking verisimilitude, and
he'd done a good job of it. If I chose to become a hermit in my
favorite disneyland, I could thrive there.
The return to real life was cleverly done.
The Admiral had taken his leave after dropping his
bombshell, refusing to answer any of my increasingly disturbed
questions. He'd boarded his boat without another word and rowed
it over the horizon. And for a while, that was it. The wind
continued to blow, and the waves kept curling onto the beach. I
drank whiskey without getting drunk from a bottle that never
emptied, and thought about what he had said.
The first time I noticed a change was when the waves
stopped. They just froze in place, in midbreak, as it were. I
walked out on the water, which was warm and hard as concrete,
and examined a wave. I don't think I could have broken off a
chip of foam with a hammer and chisel.
What happened over the next few minutes was an evolution.
Things happened behind my back, never in my sight. When I
returned to my place on the beach the machine with the
oscilloscope screen was standing beside my chair. It was wildly
anachronistic, totally out of place. The sun shone down on it
and, while I watched, a seagull came and perched on it. The
bird flew away when I approached. The machine was mounted on
casters, which had sunk into the soft sand. I stared at the
moving dot on the screen and nothing happened. When I
straightened and turned around I saw a row of chairs about
twenty meters down the beach, and sitting in them were wounded
extras from the movie infirmary, waiting their turns on the
table. The trouble was, there were no tables to be seen. It
didn't seem to bother them.
Once I understood the trick, I started slowly turning in a
circle. New things came into view with each turn until I was
back in the infirmary surrounded by objects and people,
including Brenda and Wales, who were looking at me with some
concern.
"Are you all right?" Brenda asked. "The medico said you
might behave oddly for a few minutes."
"Was I turning in circles?"
"No, you were just standing there, looking a million miles
away."
"I was interfacing," I said, and she nodded, as if that
explained it all. And I suppose it did, to her. Though she'd
never been to Scarpa Island or any place as completely real as
that, she understood interfacing a lot better than I did,
having done it all her life. I decided not to ask her if she
felt the sand floor her feet seemed to be planted in; I knew it
was unlikely. I doubted she saw the seagulls that circled near
the ceiling, either.
I felt a terrible urge to get out of there. Shaking off
Wales' offer of apologies and a drink, I headed for the studio
gate. The sand didn't end until I was back in the public
corridors, where I finally stepped up onto good old familiar
floor tiles, soft and resilient under my bare feet. I was male
again, and this time noticed it right away. When I turned
around, the sand that should have been behind me was gone.
But on the way to Texas I saw many tropical plants growing
from the concrete floors, and I rode in a tube car festooned
with vines and crawling with land crabs. Usually you have to
ingest a great deal of a very powerful chemical to see scenes
like that, I reflected, watching the crabs scuttle around my
feet. It wasn't something I was eager to do again soon.
And it took a full day for the new cocoanut palm I found
shading my half-built cabin to vanish in the night.
#
The lantern I carried didn't cast a lot of light. A bright
light in the darkness could upset the stock, so Callie provided
her hands with these antique devices which burned a smoky oil
refined from reptilian fat. It was enough to keep me from
stumbling over tree roots, but not to see very far ahead. And
of course if you looked at the light, your night vision was
destroyed. I told myself not to look, then the cantankerous
thing would sputter and I'd glance at it, and stop in my
tracks, blinded. So when I encountered the first unusual tree
trunk I didn't realize what it was, at first. I touched it and
felt the warmth, and knew I'd bumped into a brontosaur's hind
leg. I backed hastily away. The beasts are clumsy and inclined
to stampede if startled. And if you've ever been unpleasantly
surprised by a package from a passing pigeon in the city park,
you don't want to find out what can happen to you in the area
of a brontosaur's hind leg, believe me. I speak from bitter
experience.
I picked my way through a forest of similar trunks until I
spotted a small campfire in a hollow. Three figures were seated
around the fire, two side by side, and another--Callie-across
from them. I could dimly see the hulking shadows of a dozen
brontosaurs, darker shapes against the night, placidly chewing
their cuds and farting like foghorns. I approached the fire
slowly, not wanting to startle anybody, and still managed to
surprise Callie, who looked up in alarm, then patted the ground
beside her. She held her finger to her lips, then resumed her
study of her adversaries, painted orange by the dancing flames
between us.
I've never decided if David Earth looked spookier in a
setting like this, or in the full light of day--for it was him,
the Spokesmammal himself, sitting in lotus position, a walking,
talking inducement for the purchase of hay fever remedies.
Callie was actually allergic to the man, or to his biosphere,
and though a cure would have been simple and cheap she
cherished her malady, she treasured it, she happily endured
every sneeze and sniffle as one more reason to detest him.
She'd hated him since before I was born, and viewed his
five-yearly appearances the same way people must have felt
about dental extractions before anesthetics.
He nodded to me, and I nodded back. That seemed
conversation enough for both of us. Callie and I didn't agree
on a lot of things, but we shared the same opinion of David
Earth and all the Earthists.
He was a large man, almost as tall as Brenda and much
heftier. His hair was long, green, and unkept for a very good
reason: it wasn't hair, but a bioengineered species of grass
bred to be parasitic on human skin. I don't know the details of
its cultivation. I'd have had more interest in the mating
habits of toads. It involved a thickening of the scalp, and
soil was involved-when he scratched his head, dirt showered
down. But I don't know how the soil was attached, whether in
pockets or layered on the skin, and I don't know anything about
the blood-to-root system, and I'd just as soon not, thank you.
I remember as a child wondering if, when he got up in the
morning, he had to work compost into his agri-tonsorial
splendor.
He had two huge breasts--almost all Earthists, male and
female, sported them--and more plants grew on their upper
slopes. Many of these bore tiny flowers or fruits. I wondered
if he had to practice contour plowing to prevent erosion on
those fertile hillsides. He saw me looking at them, plucked an
apple no bigger than a grape from the tangled mass, and popped
it in his mouth.
What can one say about the rest of him? His back and arms
and legs were covered with hair. Not human hair, but actual
pelts, resembling in various patches jaguar, tiger, bison,
zebra, and polar bear, among others, in a crazy patchwork. The
genetic re-structuring required to support all that must have
been a cut-and-paste collage beyond imagining. It was ironic, I
thought, that the roots of the Earthists were in the anti-fur
activists, but of course no animals had been harmed to produce
his pelt. Just little bits of their genes snipped out and
shoehorned into his. He had claws like a bear on his
fingertips, and instead of feet he walked around on the hooves
of a moose, like some large economy-size faun. All Earthists
had animal attributes, it was their badge and ensign. But their
founder had gone further than any of his followers. Which, one
suspects, is what makes followers and leaders.
But, incredible as it may seem having gone through the
catalog of his offenses to the eye, it must be said that the
first thing one noticed about David Earth upon having the
misfortune to encounter him was his smell.
I'm sure he bathed. Perhaps the right way of putting it
was that he watered himself regularly. David Earth during a
drought would have been a walking fire hazard. But he used no
soap (animal by-product) or any other cleaning preparation
(chemical pollution of the David-sphere). All of which would
simply have resulted in a smell of sour sweat, which I don't
care for but can tolerate. No, it was his passengers that
lifted his signature aroma from the merely objectionable to the
realm of the unimaginable.
Large animals with fur harbor fleas, that's axiomatic.
Fleas were only the beginning of David Earth's "welcome
guests," as he'd once described them to me. I'd countered with
another term, parasites, and he'd merely smiled benevolently.
All his smiles were benevolent; he was that kind of guy, the
sort whose kindly face you'd like to rip off and feed to his
welcome guests. David was the kind of guy who had all the moral
answers, and never hesitated to point out the error of your
ways. Lovingly, of course. He loved all nature's creatures, did
David, even one as low on the evolutionary ladder as youself.
What sort of guests did David spread his filthy welcome
mat for? Well, what sort of vermin live in grasslands? I'd
never seen a prairie dog peeking from his coiffure, but I
wouldn't have been surprised. He was home to a scamper of mice,
a shriek of shrews, a twittering of finches, and a circus of
fleas. A trained biologist could easily have counted a dozen
species of insects without even getting close. All these
creatures were born, reared, courted, mated, nested, ate,
defecated, urinated, laid their eggs, fought their battles,
stalked their prey, dreamed their dreams and, as must we all,
eventually died in the various biomes that were David.
Sometimes the carcasses fell out; sometimes they didn't. All
more fertile soil for the next generation.
All Earthists stink; it goes with the territory. They are
perennial defendants in civil court for violation of the body
odor laws, hauled in when some long-suffering citizen on a
crowded elevator finally decides he's had enough. David Earth
was the only man I knew of in Luna who was permanently banished
from the public corridors. He made his way from ranch to
disneyland to hydroponic farm by way of the air, water, and
service ducts.
"My membership is alarmed if that is your best offer,"
said David's companion, a much smaller, much less prepossessing
fellow whose only animal attributes I could see were a modest
pair of pronghorn antlers and a lion's tail. "One hundred
murders is nothing but wanton slaughter, and we totally reject
it. But after careful consultation, we're prepared to offer
eighty. With the greatest reluctance."
"Eighty harvested," Callie leaned on the word, as she
always did. "Eighty is simply ridiculous. I'll go broke with a
quota of eighty. Come on, let's go up to my office right now,
I'll show you the books, there's an order of seventy carcasses
from McDonald's alone."
"That's your problem; you should never have signed the
contract until these negotiations were concluded."
"Don't sign the contract, I lose the customer. What do you
want to do, ruin me? Ninety-nine, that's my absolutely
no-fooling final offer; take it or leave it. I don't think I
can turn a profit even with a hundred, it'll be touch and go.
But to get this over with . . . I'll tell you what.
Ninety-eight. That's twelve less than what you gave Reilly,
just down the road, not three days ago, and his herd's smaller
than mine."
"We're not here to discuss Reilly, we're talking about
your contract, and your herd. And your herd is not a happy
herd, I've heard nothing but grievances from them. I simply
can't allow one more murder than . . ." He glanced at David,
who shook his head barely enough to disturb a single amber wave
of grain. "Eighty," pronghornhead concluded.
Callie seethed silently for a while. There was no hope of
talking to her just yet, not until the unionists repaired for
consultations with their clients, so I moved back from the fire
a little. Something about the bargaining process had struck me
as relevant to my situation.
"CC," I whispered. "Are you there?"
"Where else would I be?" the CC murmured softly in my ear.
"And you only need to sub-vocalize; I'll pick up your words
easily enough."
"How would I know where you'd be? When I called for you
after you rowed away from me, you didn't answer. I thought you
might be sulking."
"I didn't think it would be profitable for either of us to
discuss what I'd just told you until you'd had time to think it
over."
"I have, and I've got a few questions."
"I'll do my best to answer them."
"These union reps. Are they really speaking for the
dinosaurs?"
There was a medium-sized pause. I guess the question did
seem irrelevant to the issue at hand. But the CC withheld
comment on that.
"You grew up on this ranch. I'd have thought you would
know the answer to that question."
"No, that's just it. I've never really thought about it.
You know Callie's feelings about animal rights. She told me the
Earthists were nothing but a bunch of mystics who had enough
political clout to get their crazy ideas put into law. She said
she had never believed they actually communed with the animals.
I believed her, and I haven't thought about it for seventy,
eighty years. But after what I've just been through, I wonder
if she's right."
"She's mostly wrong," the CC said. "That animals feel
things is easily demonstrable, even down at the level of
protozoans. That they have what you would recognize as thoughts
is more debatable. But since I am a party to these
negotiations--an indispensable party, I might add-I can tell
you that, yes, these creatures are capable of expressing
desires and responding to propositions, so long as they are
expressed in terms they understand."
"How?"
"Well . . . the contract that will eventually be hammered
out here is entirely a human instrument. These beasts will
never be aware of its existence. Since their 'language' is
confined to a few dozen trumpeted calls, it is quite beyond
their capacity. But the provisions of the contract will be
arrived at by a give-and-take process not unlike human
collective bargaining. Callie has injected all her stock with a
solution of water and some trillions of self-replicating
nano-engineered biotropic mechanisms that--"
"Nanobots."
"Yes, that's the popular term."
"You have something against popular terms?"
"Only their imprecision. The term 'nanobot' means a very
small self-propelled programmed machine, and that includes many
other varieties of intracellular devices than the ones
currently under discussion. The ones in your bloodstream and
within your body cells are quite different--"
"Okay, I see what you mean. But it's the same principle,
right? These little robots, smaller than red blood cells . . ."
"Some are much smaller than that. They are drawn to
specific sites within an organism and then they go to work.
Some carry raw materials, some carry blueprints, some are the
actual construction workers. Working at molecular speeds, they
build various larger machines--and by larger, you understand, I
still mean microscopic, in most cases--in the interstices
between the body cells, or within the cell walls themselves."
"Which are used for . . ."
"I think I see where you're going with this. They perform
many functions. Some are housekeeping chores that your own body
is either not good at, or has lost the capacity to do. Others
are monitoring devices that alert a larger, outside system that
something is going wrong. In Callie's herd, that is a Mark III
Husbander, a fairly basic computer, not significantly altered
in design for well over a century."
"Which is a part of you, naturally."
"All computers in Luna except abaci and your fingers are a
part of me. And in a pinch, I could use your fingers."
"As you've just shown me."
"Yes. The machine . . . or I, if you prefer, listens
constantly through a network of receivers placed around the
ranch, just as I listen constantly for your calls to me, no
matter where you are in Luna. This is all on what you might
think of as my subconscious level. I'm never aware of the
functioning of your body unless I'm alerted by an alarm, or if
you call me on-line."
"So the network of machines that's in my body, there's one
like it in each of Callie's brontosaurs."
"Related to it, yes. The neural structures are orders of
magnitude less evolved than the ones in your brain, just as
your organic brain is superior in operation to that of the
dinosaur. I don't run any parasitic programs in the dinosaur
brain, if that's what you mean."
I didn't think it was what I meant, but I wasn't
completely sure, since I wasn't completely sure why I'd asked
about this in the first place. But I didn't tell the CC that.
He went on.
"It is as close to mental telepathy as we're likely to
get. The union representatives are tuned into me, and I'm tuned
into the dinosaurs. The negotiator poses a question: 'How do
you fellows feel about 120 of your number being
harvested/murdered this year?' I put the question in terms of
predators. A picture of an approaching tyrannosaur. I get a
fear response: 'Sorry, we'd rather not, thank you.' I relay it
to the unionist, who tells Callie the figure is not acceptable.
The unionist proposes another number, in tonight's case, sixty.
Callie can't accept that. She'd go broke, there would be no one
to feed the stock. I convey this idea to the dinosaurs with
feelings of hunger, thirst, sickness. They don't like this
either. Callie proposes 110 creatures taken. I show them a
smaller tyrannosaur approaching, with some of the herd
escaping. They don't respond quite so strongly with the fear
and flight reflex, which I translate as 'Well, for the good of
the herd, we might see our way clear to losing seventy so the
rest can grow fat.' I put the proposal to Callie, who claims
the Earthists are bleeding her white, and so on."
"Sounds totally useless to me," I said, with only half my
mind on what the CC had been saying. I was seeing a vision of
myself living within the planet-girdling machine that the CC
had become, and of him living within my body as well. The funny
thing was that nothing I'd learned since arriving at Scarpa
Island had been exactly new to me. There were new, unheralded
capabilities, but looking at them, I could see they were
inherent in the technology. I'd had the facts, but not enough
of them. I'd spent almost no time thinking about them, any more
than I thought about breathing, and even less time considering
the implications, most of which I didn't like. I realized the
CC was talking again.
"I don't see why you should say that. Except that I know
your moral stand on the whole issue of animal husbandry, and
you have a right to that."
"No, that whole issue aside, I could have told you how
this all would come out, given only the opening bid. David
proposed sixty, right?"
"After the opening statement about murdering any of these
creatures at all, and his formal demand that all--"
"'--creatures should live a life free from the predation
of man, the most voracious and merciless predator of all,'
yeah, I've heard the speech, and David and Callie both know
it's just a formality, like singing the planetary anthem. When
they got down to cases, he said sixty. Man, he must really be
angry about something, sixty is ridiculous. Anyway, when she
heard sixty, Callie bid 120 because she knew she had to
slaughter ninety this year to make a reasonable profit, and
when David heard that he knew they'd eventually settle on
ninety. So tell me this: why bother to consult the dinosaurs?
Who cares what they think?"
The CC was silent, and I laughed.
"Tell the truth. You make up the images of meat-eaters and
the feelings of starvation. I presume that when the fear of one
balances out the fear of the other, when these poor dumb beasts
are equally frightened by lousy alternatives--in your
judgement, let's remember . . . well, then we have a contract,
right? So where would you conjecture that point will be found?"
"Ninety carcasses," the CC said.
"I rest my case."
"You have a point. But I actually do transmit the feelings
of the animals to the human representatives. They do feel the
fear, and can judge as well as I when a balance is reached."
"Say what you will. Me, I'm convinced the jerk with the
horns could have as easily stayed in bed, signed a contract for
ninety kills, and saved a lot of effort. Then prong-head could
look for useful work. Maybe as a gardener in David's hairdo."
There was a long silence from the CC. When he spoke again
it was in a different tone of voice from his usual lecturing
mode.
"The man with the horns," he said, quietly, "is actually
mentally defective in a way I've been powerless to treat. He
cannot read or write, and is not really suited for many jobs.