by John Brunner
The hell with that.
But what he got next was circus—as everybody called it, despite the official title ‘experiential reward and punishment complex.” He must have hit on a field-leader—perhaps the most famous of all, which operated out of Quemadura CA taking advantage of some unrepealed local statute or other—because it was using live animals. Half a dozen scared, wide-eyed kids were lining up to walk a plank no more than five centimeters wide spanning a pool where restless alligators gaped and writhed. Their eager parents were cheering them on. A bold red sign in the corner of the screen said that each step each of them managed to take before slipping would be worth $1000. He switched once more, this time with a shudder.
The adjacent channel should have been spare. It wasn’t. A Chinese pirate satellite had taken it over to try and reach midwestern American émigrés. There was a Chinese tribe near Cleveland, so he’d heard, or maybe it was Dayton. Not speaking the language, he moved on, and there were commercials. One was for a life-styling consultancy that he knew maintained private wards for those clients whose condition was worsened instead of improved by the expensive suggestions they’d been given; another was for a euphoric claimed not to be addictive but which was—the company marketing it was being sued by the FDA, only according to the mouth-to-mouth circuit they’d reached the judge, he was good and clutched, and they’d have cleared their profit and would be willing to withdraw the product voluntarily before the case actually came to trial, leaving another few hundred thousand addicts to be cared for by the underfunded, overworked Federal Health Service.
Then there was another pirate broadcast, Australian by the accents, and a girl in a costume of six strategic bubbles was saying, “Y’know, if all the people with life-style crises were laid end to end … Well, I mean, who’d be left to actually lay them?”
That prompted him to a faint grin, and since it was rare to pick up an Australian show he had half-decided to stick with this for a while when a loud buzzer shrilled at him.
Someone was in the confessional booth at the main gate. And presumably at this time of night therefore desperate.
Well, being disturbed at all hours was one of the penalties he’d recognized as inescapable when he created the church. He rose, sighing, and shut off his screen.
Memo to selves: going into three-vee for a while might be a good idea. Get back in touch with the media. Or has priesthood used up the limited amount of public exposure the possessor of a 4GH can permit himself in a given span of time? If not, how much left?
Must find out. Must.
Composing his features into a benign expression, he activated the three-vee link to the confessional. He was apprehensive. It was no news to the few who kept in circuit that the Billykings and the Grailers had counted seven dead in last week’s match, and the latter had come out ahead. As one might expect; they were the more brutal. Where the Billykings were normally content to disable their captives and leave them to struggle home as best they might, the Grailers’ habit was to rope and gag them and hide them in some convenient ruin to die of thirst.
So the caller tonight might not be in need of counsel or even medication. It might be someone sussing out the church with a view to razing it. After all, in the eyes of both tribes it was a pagan shame.
But the screen showed him a girl probably too young to be inducted in either tribe: at a glance, no older than ten, her hair tousled, her eyes red-rimmed with weeping, her cheeks stained with dust down which tears had runneled. A child who had overreached her ability to imitate an adult, presumably, lost and frightened in the dark—Oh! No! Something more, and worse. For he could see she was holding a knife, and on both its blade and her green frock there were smears so red they could well be fresh blood.
“Yes, little sister?” he said in a neutral tone.
“Father, I got to make confession or I’ll be damned!” she sobbed. “I shivved my mom—cut her all to bits! I guess I must have killed her! I’m sure I did!”
Time seemed to stop for a long moment. Then, with what calm he could summon, he uttered what had to be said for the benefit of the record … because, while the booth itself Was sacrosanct, this veephone circuit like all such was tied into the city police-net, and thence to the tireless federal monitors at Canaveral. Or wherever. There were so many of them now, they couldn’t all be in the same place.
Memo to selves: would be worth knowing where the rest are.
His voice as gritty as a gravel road, he said, “My child”—aware as ever of the irony in the phrase—“you’re welcome to unburden your conscience by confiding in me. But I must explain that the secrecy of the confessional doesn’t apply when you’re talking to a microphone.”
She gazed at his image with such intensity he fancied for a moment he could see himself from her point of view: a lean dark man with a broken nose, wearing a black jerkin and a white collar ornamented with little gilt crosses. Eventually she shook her head, as though her mind were too full of recent horror to leave room for any new shocks.
Gently he explained again, and this time she connected.
“You mean,” she forced out, “you’ll call the croakers?”
“Of course not. But they must be looking for you now in any case. And since you’ve admitted what you did over my mikes … Do you understand?”
Her face crumpled. She let fall her knife with a tinkling sound that the pickups caught, faint as fairy bells. A few seconds, and she was crying anew.
“Wait there,” he said. “I’ll be with you in a moment.”
RECESS
A sharp wind tasting of winter blew over the hills surrounding Tarnover and broke red and gold leaves off the trees, but the sky was clear and the sun was bright. Waiting his turn in line at the best of the establishment’s twenty restaurants, redolent of old-fashioned luxury up to and including portions of ready-heated food on open display, Hartz gazed admiringly at the view.
“Beautiful,” he said at length. “Just beautiful.”
“Hm?” Freeman had been pressing his skin on both temples toward the back of his head, as though attempting to squeeze out overpowering weariness. Now he glanced at the window and agreed, “Oh—yes, I guess it is. I don’t get too much time to notice it these days.”
“You seem tired,” Hartz said sympathetically. “And I’m not surprised. You have a tough job on your hands.”
“And a slow one. Nine hours per day, in segments of three hours each. It gets wearing.”
“But it has to be done.”
“Yes, it has to be done.”
HOW TO GROW DELPHINIUMS
It works, approximately, like this.
First you corner a large—if possible, a very large—number of people who, while they’ve never formally studied the subject you’re going to ask them about and hence are unlikely to recall the correct answer, are nonetheless plugged into the culture to which the question relates.
Then you ask them, as it might be, to estimate how many people died in the great influenza epidemic which followed World War I, or how many loaves were condemned by EEC food inspectors as unfit for human consumption during June 1970.
Curiously, when you consolidate their replies they tend to cluster around the actual figure as recorded in almanacs, yearbooks and statistical returns.
It’s rather as though this paradox has proved true: that while nobody knows what’s going on around here, everybody knows what’s going on around here.
Well, if it works for the past, why can’t it work for the future? Three hundred million people with access to the integrated North American data-net is a nice big number of potential consultees.
Unfortunately most of them are running scared from the awful specter of tomorrow. How best to corner people who just do not want to know?
Greed works for some, and for others hope. And most of the remainder will never have any impact on the world to speak of.
Good enough, as they say, for folk music …
A MOMENT FOR MILLSTONES
&n
bsp; On the point of undogging his trailer’s sealed door and disconnecting the alarms, he hesitated.
Sunday. A moderately good collection, if not a record-breaker. (He sniffed. Hot air. From the smelter.)
And she might be a precociously good actress …
He pictured a tribe raiding, looting, vanishing before the croakers swooped, leaving behind no one but a minor immune from police interrogation, hysterical with laughter at the success of her “practical joke.”
Therefore, prior to shutting down the alarms, he activated all the church’s electronics except the coley music system and the automated collection trolleys. When he rounded the base of the altar—ex-screen—it was as though fire raged in the whale’s-belly of the dome. Lights flashed all colors of the rainbow and a few to spare, while a three-vee remote over his head not only repeated his image monstrous on the face of the altar but also stored it, minutely detailed, in a recorder buried beneath a yard of concrete. If he were attacked, the recording would be evidence.
Moreover, he carried a gun … but he was never without it.
These precautions, slender though they were, constituted the maximum a priest was expected to take. More could easily worry the federal computers into assessing him as a potential paranoid. They’d been sensitive on such matters ever since, last summer, a rabbi in Seattle who had mined the approaches to his shul forgot to turn off the firing-circuit before a bar mitzvah.
Generally the Fedcomps approved of people with strong religious convictions. They were less likely than some to kick up a fuss. But there were limits, not to mention mavericks.
A few years ago his defenses would have been adequate. Now their flimsiness made him tremble as he walked down the wall-less aisle defined by the black rubber streaks car tires had left over decades. Sure, the fence at the base of the dome was electrified except where access had to be left for the confessional, and the booth itself was explosive-resistant and had its own air supply against a gas attack, but even so … !
Memo to selves: next time, a role where I can take more care of life and limb. Privacy is fine, and I needed it when I arrived here. But this place was never meant to be operated by a single individual. I can’t scan every shifting shadow, make sure no nimble shivver is using it for cover!
Thinking of which as I stare around: my vision is unaided. At forty-six??? Out of three hundred million there are bound to be some people that age who have never bought corrective lenses, most because they can’t afford them. But suppose the Bureau of Health or some pharmo-medical combine decided there were few enough middlers without glasses to organize an exhaustive study of them? Suppose the people at Tarnover decided there must be a genetic effect involved? Ow.
Memo to selves, in red italics: stay closer to chronological age!
At that point in his musing he entered the confessional—and found that through its shatterproof three-centimeter window he was not looking at a little girl in a dress spattered with blood.
Instead, the exterior section of the booth was occupied by a burly blond man with a streak of blue in his tightly curled hair, wearing a fashionable rose-and-carmine shirt and an apologetic smile.
“So sorry you’ve been disturbed, Father,” he said. “Though it’s a stroke of luck that little Gaila found her way here… My name’s Shad Fluckner, by the way.”
This poker looked too young to be the girl’s father: no more than twenty-five, twenty-six. On the other hand, his congregation included women married for the third or fourth time and now to men as much as twenty years younger. Stepfather?
In that case, why the smile? Because he’d used this kid he didn’t give a plastic penny for to rid himself of a rich but dragsome older wife? Fouler things had been admitted in this booth.
Foggily he said, “Are you kin to—ah—Gaila, then?”
“Not in law, but you could say that after what we’ve been through together I’m closer to her than her legal kinfolk. I work for Anti-Trauma Inc., you see. Very sensibly, the moment Gaila’s parents detected signs of deviant behavior in her, they signed her up for a full course of treatment. Last year we cured her sibling rivalry—classic penis-envy directed against her younger brother—and right now she’s working into her Electra complex. With luck we’ll progress her to Poppaea level this coming fall. … Oh, incidentally: she babbled something about you calling in the croakers. You don’t need to worry. She’s on file with the police computers as a non-act case.”
“She told me”—slowly and with effort—“she’d stabbed her mother. Killed her.”
“Oh, far as she’s concerned, sure she did! Just like she’s unconsciously wanted to ever since her mother betrayed her by letting her be born. But it was all a setup, naturally. We dosed her with scotophobin and shut her in a dark room, to negate the womb-retreat impulse, gave her a phallic weapon to degrade residual sexual envy, and turned an anonymous companion loose in there with her. When she struck out, we turned up the lights to show her mother’s body lying all bloody on the floor, and then we gave her the chance to run like hell. With me trailing her, of course. Wouldn’t have wanted her to come to any harm.”
His slightly bored tone indicated that for him this was just another routine chore. But when he had concluded his exposition, he brightened as though a sudden idea had occurred to him. He produced a recorder from his pocket.
“Say, Father! My publicity department would welcome any favorable comment about our methods you may care to make. Coming from a man of the cloth, it would carry extra weight. Suppose you said something to the effect that enabling kids to act out their most violent impulses in a controlled situation is preferable to letting them commit such crimes in real life, thereby endangering their immortal—”
“Yes, I do have a comment you can record! If there is anything more disgusting than war, it’s what your company is doing. At least in warfare there is passion. What you do is calculated, and more likely by machines than men!”
Fluckner withdrew his head a fraction, as though afraid he might be punched through the intervening glass. He said defensively, “But what we’ve done is to enlist science in the service of morality. Surely you see—”
“What I see is the first person I ever felt justified in cursing. You have offended against our little ones, therefore a millstone shall be tied around your neck and you shall be cast into the depths of the sea. Depart from me into eternal darkness!”
Fluckner’s face grew mottled-red on the instant, and harsh anger invaded his voice.
“You’ll regret saying that, I promise you! You’ve insulted not just me but thousands of good citizens who rely on my company to save their children from hellfire. You’ll pay for that!”
He spun on his heel and marched away.
LIGHT AND POWER CORRUPT
“Yes, of course Gaila’s doing fine! What happier discovery could a kid make—what more welcome reinforcement can you offer her—than to find the mother she consciously loves, yet unconsciously hates, has been killed and in spite of that is still alive? We’ve been over that before!”
He had to wipe his forehead, hoping his mask of perspiration would be ascribed to the summer heat.
“And now may I use your phone? Alone, if you don’t mind. It’s best for the parents not to know too many details of our methods.”
In a bright room with an underfloor pool reflecting sparkling random lights across an ecumenical array of a crucifix, a Buddha and a six-handed Kali draped with roses, Shad Fluckner composed the code of Continental Power and Light’s anonymous-denunciation department.
When he heard the proper tone, he followed it with the code for the Church of Infinite Insight, then a group equating to “fraudulent misapplication of charitable donations,” then another for “assets sequestered pending legal judgment,” which would automatically deevee the minister’s credit rating, and lastly one for “notify all credit-appraisal computers.”
That should do the trick. He dusted his hands in satisfaction and left the room. There was effec
tively no chance of the call being traced to him. It had been two years since he worked for Power and Light, and their personnel was turning over at sixty-five percent annually, so any of half a million people might have fed in the false data.
By the time Reverend Lazarus fought his way through the maze of interlinked credit-appraisal computers and nailed the tapeworm that had just been hatched, he could well be ragged and starving.
Serve him right.
ON LINE BUT NOT REAL TIME
During a lull in the proceedings, while a nurse was spraying the subject’s throat to restore his voice, Hartz glanced at his watch.
“Even if this is a slow job,” he muttered, “you can’t run at this rate very often, obviously—less than a day per day.”
Freeman gave his habitual skull-like smile. “If so, I’d still be questioning him about his experience as a life-style counselor. But remember: once we knew where to look, we were able to put all data concerning his earlier personae into store. We know what he did; now we need to find out how he felt. In some cases the connection between a key memory and his unusually strong reaction is fairly plain, and you’ve been lucky today in that we’ve hit on such a link.”
“His identifying with the girl who was running in panic? A parallel with his own hunted life?”
“More than that. Much more, I’m afraid. Consider the curse he pronounced on this man Fluckner, and the trigger that provoked it. That was consistent with the attitudes of Reverend Lazarus, certainly. What we have to find out is how deeply it reflected his real self. Nurse, if you’ve finished, I’d like to carry on.”
MOVING DAY, OVERCAST AND HOT
Must must learn to control my temper even in face of an insult to humanity like—