by John Brunner
What the hell?
He emerged with a gasp from coma-like sleep. Last night he had lain awake for hours with Fluckner’s threat reverberating in memory, and ultimately resorted to a pill. It took, a long time for an all-important fact to penetrate his muzzy mind.
The hum of the air compressor had stopped.
Rolling over, he checked the self-powered illuminated clock at the head of his bed. It showed 7:45 a.m. But the windows of his trailer were solidly dark, although by now the sun must be high in the sky, the forecast had been for more fine weather, and when it was stretched taut the plastic membrane of his roof was quite translucent.
Therefore the power had been cut off and the dome had collapsed. All twenty-two and a half tons of it.
Naked, feeling terribly vulnerable, he swung his feet out of bed and fumbled for the switch of the nearest lamp to confirm his deduction. The darkness was oppressive; worse, the air had grown foul already—no doubt from the deposit of dirt, grease and fetid moisture which while the dome was distended had formed an unnoticeable film but now had been condensed into a layer like the muck lining a sewer pipe.
The light duly failed to shine.
A strike? Hardly likely; those key workers who still had the leverage to close down the nation’s automated power system always waited for frost and snow before striking. An overload blackout? Scarcely more probable. There hadn’t been a summer overload since 1990. People had seemingly been cured of regarding power as free like air.
Admittedly, a whole new generation had grown up since 1990 … including himself.
A reactor meltdown?
After last year’s triple-header of disasters, the Delphi boards currently showed much money riding on a lapse of two full years before the next such. Nonetheless he grabbed his one and only battery radio. By law an all-news monophonic station was still required to broadcast in each conurbation of a million or more people, so that the public could be warned of riots, tribal matches and disasters. The cells were low on power, but by placing the set close to his ear he determined that the duty newscaster was talking about record bets on today’s football fatalities. If there had been a meltdown, radiation warnings would have been pouring out nonstop.
So what in the world … ? Oh. Fluckner?
He felt a shiver crawl down his spine, and realized that he was gazing hungrily at the little blurred glow from his clock, as though this darkness were symbolic of the womb (echoes of Gaila and those like her, condemned to grow up not as human beings but as mules, offspring of a bastard mating between Freudian psychoanalysis and behaviorism), and that mysterious glimmer presaged his emergence into a strange new world.
Which, as he admitted to himself with a pang of disappointment, it obviously did.
At least, even though the air stank, it wasn’t overfull of CO2; he had no headache, just a hint of nausea. Somewhat reassured, he felt his way into the living zone, where against emergencies he kept a big battery lamp. Its cells were still powerful, being automatically recharged from the main supply. But when he clicked it on its yellowish gleam made everything around him menacing and unfamiliar. As he moved it, shadows scuttered on the polished metal walls, mimics of those that last night he had imagined offering cover to teeners bent on the work of Baron Samedi, Saint Nicholas or even Kali.
He splashed his face with what should have been ice water from the middle faucet over his washbasin. It didn’t help. The power had been off so long, the tank was tepid. Unrefreshed, he opened the trailer door and looked out. Under the graceful curve formed by the plastic as it slumped over the altar a distant glimmer of light suggested he might be able to escape unaided.
But it would be preferable to get his power back.
In his office the smelter was cold and the copper ingot lay ready for removal. The desk computer, with a more demanding task, had been caught before finishing it. The fourth—no, the fifth—of today’s Delphi assessments protruded from it like a pale stiff tongue, duly stamped with his automatic notary’s seal. That, however, was not important right now. What he had to discover was whether Fluckner (who else could or would have discredited him overnight?) had contrived to isolate his phone as well as his power supply.
The answer was yes. A sweet recorded voice told him his phone credit was in abeyance pending judgment in the lawsuit that was apt to end with all his assets being garnisheed. If he wanted service to be renewed he must furnish proof that the verdict had gone in his favor.
Lawsuit? What lawsuit? Surely you can’t take someone to court in this state for wishing a curse on you?
Then the answer dawned on him, and he almost laughed. Fluckner had resorted to one of the oldest tricks in the store and turned loose in the continental net a self-perpetuating tapeworm, probably headed by a denunciation group “borrowed” from a major corporation, which would shunt itself from one nexus to another every time his credit-code was punched into a keyboard. It could take days to kill a worm like that, and sometimes weeks.
Unless the victim possessed a means to override the original command. This one did. Any 4GH code-holder—
His embryo laughter died. What if, since he last exploited its potential, the validity of a 4GH had been downgraded or even deeveed?
There was only one way to find out. Dutiful, the machinery was waiting for him to furnish the asked-for evidence. He punched his full code into the phone, added the standard group for “input error due to malicious malpractice,” and tailed it with an order to give the reference number of the lawsuit he had allegedly been cited in.
The normal dial tone sounded within seconds.
He had been holding his breath, unaware, and let it go with a gasp that sounded terribly loud in the unfamiliar silence. (How many separate soft hums had ended? Computer, water cooler, water heater, air conditioner, alarm monitor … et cetera. It was not customary to recall offhand how many powered devices one owned; therefore he didn’t.)
Promptly he sent a retaliatory worm chasing Fluckner’s. That should take care of the immediate problem in three to thirty minutes, depending on whether or not he beat the inevitable Monday morning circuit overload. He was fairly sure he wouldn’t. According to recent report, there were so many worms and counterworms loose in the data-net now, the machines had been instructed to give them low priority unless they related to a medical emergency.
Well, he’d know as soon as the lights came on.
Now it was time for Reverend Lazarus to commit suicide. Fortified by a glass of lukewarm mock orange juice, sickly-sweet but not actively harmful to his metabolism—he was careful about the brands he patronized—he pondered the details of his next incarnation.
Thirty minutes and the power returned. Sixty, and the dome was inflated. Ninety, and he started on his rebirth.
It was always a bad experience, this computerized parturition. Today, because he had not intended to give up the Lazarus role yet and in consequence had not properly prepared his mind, it was the worst ever. His skin crawled, his heart hammered, sweat made his palms slippery, and his buttocks—bare, since he had not wasted time on getting dressed—itched all over the area in contact with his chair.
Even having found out that his code remained valid, he had to break off twice while priming the Fedcomps with his new lies. His fingers were trembling so badly, he was afraid of mis-hitting the phone buttons, and regular phones like this weren’t equipped with a “display-last-five” facility.
But eventually he punched the final group to activate the phage that would eliminate all trace of Lazarus, the super-tapeworm compared to which Fluckner’s was negligible, and he was able to stretch and scratch and do all the other things he had to forgo in order not to interrupt the invention of his new self.
No one below congressional level was entitled to call for a printout of the data stored behind a 4GH. It must have been devised for people with official permission to live other lives than their own. More than once he had been tempted to try to discover just what sort of person his code in theory
made him—an FBI operative on undercover assignment, a counter-espionage agent, a White House special representative mopping up the mess his boss had left. … But he had never actually been so foolish. He was like a rat, skulking in the walls of modern society. The moment he showed his nose, the exterminators would be sent for.
He dressed in the wrong clothes and collected what he felt he need not leave behind, a single bagful of oddments like transferable Delphi tickets and his new copper ingot. He also pocketed two inhalers of tranquilizer, which he knew he would require before the day was out.
Finally he set a bomb under his desk and wired it to the phone so that he could trigger it whenever he chose.
The destruction of the church might figure in the media’s daily crime list—murders so many, robberies so many, rapes so many—but quite often they didn’t get down as far as arson because there wasn’t time. That, so long as nobody filed a claim for insurance money, would be that. With ready-made suspects at hand in the shape of the Grailers and the Billykings, the harried local police would be content to treat the case as open and shut.
He gave one final glance around as he prepared to quit the plastic dome for the last time. Traffic hummed on the highway, but there was nobody in sight who might have paid special attention to him. In some ways, he reflected, this was a much less complex century to live in than the twentieth must have been.
If only it were as simple as it looked.
THE NUMBER YOU HAVE REACHED
Back when it was still TV and not three-vee, a famous, crusty, cynical historian named Angus Porter, who had survived long enough to become a Grand Old Man and whose lifelong leftist views were in consequence now tolerated as forgivable eccentricity, had put the matter in a nutshell.
Or, as some would-be wit promptly said, in a nut case.
Invited to comment on the world nuclear disarmament treaty of 1989, he said, “This is the third stage of human social evolution. First we had the legs race. Then we had the arms race. Now we’re going to have the brain race.
“And, if we’re lucky, the final stage will be the human race.”
THE PERSONIFICATION OF A TALENT
“So that’s how he managed it!” Hartz said, marveling. He stared at the shaven body in the steel chair as though he had never seen this man before. “I’d never have believed it possible to punch a whole new identity into the net from a domestic phone—certainly not without the help of a computer larger than he owned.”
“It’s a talent,” Freeman said, surveying the screens and lights on his console. “Compare it to the ability of a pianist, if you like. Back before tape, there were soloists who could carry twenty concerti in their heads, note-perfect, and could improvise for an hour on a four-note theme. That’s disappeared, much as poets no longer recite by the thousand lines the way they apparently could in Homer’s day. But it’s not especially remarkable.”
Hartz said after a moment, “Know something? I’ve seen a good few disturbing things, here at Tarnover, and been told about a great many more. But I don’t think anything has …” He had to force himself to utter the next words, but with a valiant effort he made the confession. “So frightened me as hearing you say that.”
“I’m not sure I follow you.”
“Why, calling this amazing talent ‘not especially remarkable’!”
“But it isn’t.” Freeman leaned back in his padded chair. “Not by our standards, at any rate.”
“That’s just it,” Hartz muttered. “Your standards. Sometimes they don’t seem altogether …”
“Human?”
Hartz nodded.
“Oh, but I assure you they are. We’re a very gifted species. Most of what we’re doing here is concerned with the recovery of talents we’ve neglected. We’ve been content to remain shockingly ignorant about some of our most precious mental resources. Until we’ve plugged those gaps in our knowledge, we can’t plan our path toward the future.” He glanced at his watch. “I think we’ve had enough for today. I’ll call the nurse and have him taken away for feeding and cleansing.”
“That worries me, too. Hearing you speak about him in—in such depersonalized terms. While I admire your thoroughness, your dedication, I have reservations about your methods.”
Freeman rose, stretching slightly as he did so to relieve his cramped limbs.
“We use those methods which we’ve found to work, Mr. Hartz. Moreover, please recall we’re dealing with a criminal, a deserter who, if he’d had the chance, would willingly have evolved into a traitor. There are other people engaged in projects similar to ours, and some of them are not just single-minded but downright brutal. I’m sure you wouldn’t wish people of that stamp to outstrip us.”
“Of course not,” Hartz said uncomfortably, running his finger around his collar as though it had suddenly grown too tight.
Freeman smiled. The effect was that of a black turnip-ghost.
“Shall I have the pleasure of your company tomorrow?”
“No, I have to get back to Washington. But—uh …”
“Yes?”
“What did he do after leaving Toledo in such a hurry?”
“Oh, he took a vacation. Very sensible. In fact, the best thing he could possibly have done.”
FOR PURPOSES OF RE-IDENTIFICATION
At present I am being Sandy (short, as I admit to people when I get stonkered and confidential, not for good old Alexander but for Lysander, of all things!) P. (worse yet, for Pericles!!!) Locke, aged thirty-two, swingle and in view of my beardless condition probably skew. However, I’m trying to give that up and might even consider getting married one of these years.
I shall remain Sandy Locke for a while at least, even after I finish my vacation at this resort hotel in the Georgia Sea Islands, medium-fashionable, not so boringly up-to-the-second as some even if it does boast an underwater wing for womb-retreat therapy and the manager is a graduate psychologist. At least there’s no obligatory experiential R&P.
It’s my second vacation this year and I shall take at least one further in late fall. But I’m among people who aren’t likely to mistake “taking another vacation” for “surpled and unemployable,” as some would that I can think of. Many of my fellow guests are taking their third this year already and plan to make the total five. These latter, though, are considerably older, shut of the care and cost of kids. To be a triple-vacationer at thirty-two marks me as a comer … in all three senses. Right now the third kind matters; I need a job.
I’ve picked a good age, not so difficult as forty-six to put on when you’re chronologically twenty-eight (the sudden recollection of spectacles! Ow!) and youthful enough to attract the middlers while being mature enough to impress the teeners. Memo to selves: could thirty-two be stretched until I’m actually, say, thirty-six? Keep eyes and ears ajar for data.
WINED AND DENIED
Past forty but not saying by how much, beautiful and apt to stay so for a long while yet, currently looking her best by reason of a bright brown tan, hair bleached by sun instead of shampoo, and an hour more sleep per night than she’d enjoyed for ages, Ina Grierson was also tough. Proof lay in the fact that she was heading the transient-executive recruitment dept at the Kansas City HQ of Ground-to-Space Industries Inc., world’s largest builders of orbital factories.
The question was, though: tough enough?
She thought of the old saying about being promoted to your level of incompetence—what was it called, the Peter-Pays-Paul Principle, or something like that?—and fumed and fretted. Her daughter kept declining to quit school, just signed up year after year for weirder and wilder courses of study (and all at the same university, for heaven’s sake! Wouldn’t be so bad if she’d consent to go someplace else). Ina felt tied, wanted to break away, move to the Gulf or Colorado or even the Bay Area, given that the slippage techniques were as efficient as the seismologists claimed and there wasn’t going to be another million-victim quake, not ever … or at least for fifty years.
On her o
wn terms, of course—no one else’s.
Last year she’d rejected five offers. This year, so far only one. Next year?
Having a daughter out of step like Kate—hell! Why couldn’t the stupid slittie act normal like everybody else, dig up her roots and plug them in some other socket, preferably on a different continent?
If Anti-Trauma Inc. had started up soon enough …!
Tactless people sometimes wondered publicly why Ina insisted on remaining in the same city as her daughter who was, after all, twenty-two and had had her own apt since entering college and was not noticeably clinging or dependent. But Ina hated to be asked about that.
She never like being asked questions she couldn’t answer.
One week into her two-week vacation Ina wanted to be cheered up but the man she’d kept company with since arrival had left today. That meant dining alone. Worse and worse. Eventually, with much effort she put on her favorite red-and-gold evening gear and went to the open-air dining terrace where soft music mingled with the hush of waves. She felt a little better after two drinks. To put the regular sparkle back in her world, what about champagne?
And a minute later she was shouting at the waiter (this being an expensive and exclusive establishment instead of the cast-from-a-mold type where you dealt always with machines that kept going wrong … not that human beings were immune from that): “What the hell do you mean, there isn’t any?”
Her shrill voice caused heads to turn.
“That gentleman over there”—pointing—“just ordered the last bottle we have in stock.”
“Call the manager!”
Who came, and explained with regret that was probably unfeigned (who likes to find his pride and joy deeveed by a mere bunch of circuitry?) why there was nothing he could do. The computer in charge of resources utilization at the HQ of the chain controlling this and a hundred other hotels had decided to allot what champagne was available to resorts where it could be sold at twice the price the traffic in the Sea Islands could bear. The decision was today’s. Tomorrow the wine list would have been reprinted.