The Shockwave Rider

by John Brunner

  “Literally the only one?”

  “Oh, even he scarcely believed it. He published his data and always swore he wasn’t holding anything back, but other researchers found they couldn’t get the same results. In the end it became a joke for him. He used to say, ‘I just have red fingers.’ ”

  “I see. Like a gardener has green ones.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What were his methods?” The question was more rhetorical than literal. But she answered anyway.

  “Don’t ask me, go punch a code. All the data are on open reels. Seemingly the government must hope another red-fingered genius will chance on them some day.”

  Eyes fixed on nowhere, he said in a musing tone, “I got disenchanted with biology, but I do recall something about the Lilleberg Hypothesis. An ultrarefined subcategory of natural selection involving hormonal influence not only on the embryo but on the gonads of the parents, which was supposed to determine the crossover points on the chromosomes.”

  “Mm-hm. He was ridiculed for proposing it. He was slandered by all his colleagues, accused of trying to show that Lysenko was right after all. Which,” she added hotly, “was a transparent lie! What he actually did was advance an explanation why in spite of being wrong the Lysenkoists could have fooled themselves. Sandy, why does an establishment always fossilize so quickly? It may be my imagination, but I have this paranoid notion that people in authority today make a policy of seizing on any really original idea and either distorting it or suppressing it. Ted Horovitz was saying something about people being discouraged from digging into the Disasterville studies, for example.”

  “Do you really have to ask about government?” he countered grayly. “I’d have thought the reason was plain. It’s the social counterpart of natural selection. Those groups within society that craved power at the expense of everything else—morality, self-respect, honest friendship—they achieved dominance long ago. The mass of the public no longer has any contact with government; all they know is that if they step out of line they’ll be trodden on. And the means exist to make the statement literal. … Oh, they must hate Precipice, over there in Washington! A tiny community, and its citizens can thumb their noses at any federal diktat!”

  She shuddered visibly. “But the scientists … ?” she said.

  “Their reaction is a different matter. The explosion of human knowledge has accelerated to the point where even the most brilliant can’t cope with it any more. Theories have rigidified into dogma just as they did in the Middle Ages. The leading experts feel obligated to protect their creed against the heretics. Right?”

  “That certainly fits in Dad’s case,” Kate said, nodding and biting her lip. “But—well, he proved his point! Bagheera’s evidence, if nothing else.”

  “He wasn’t an isolated success, was he?”

  “Hell, no. But the only one Dad was able to save from being sold to the big circus at Quemadura. It was just getting started then, and people were investing a lot of money in it and—Say, look there!”

  They were passing a patch of level grass where two young children were lying asleep on a blanket. Beside them was a dog the same type and color as Natty Bumppo but smaller, a bitch. She was gazing levelly at the strangers; one corner of her upper lip was curled to show sharp white teeth, and she was uttering a faint—as it were a questioning—growl.

  Now she rose, the hair on her spine erect, and approached them. They stopped dead.

  “Hello,” Kate said, with a hint of nervousness. “We’re new here. But we’ve just been to call on Ted, and he and Suzy say we can live in the old Thorgrim house.”

  “Kate, you can’t seriously expect a dog to understand a complex—”

  He broke off, dumbfounded. For the bitch had promptly wagged her tail. Smiling, Kate held out her hand to be smelt. After a moment he copied her.

  The dog pondered a while, then nodded in an entirely human fashion, and turned her head to show that on the collar she wore there was a plaque with a few words stamped on it.

  “Brynhilde,” Kate read aloud. “And you belong to some people called Josh and Lorna Treves. Well, how do you do, Brynhilde?”

  Solemn, the dog offered each of them her right paw, then returned to her guard duty. They walked on.

  “Now do you believe me?” Kate murmured.

  “Yes, damn it, I have to. But how on earth could a bunch of your father’s dogs have found their way here?”

  “Like the mayor said, they probably escaped from a research station and went looking for a good home. Several centers had dogs bred by Dad. Say, I wonder how much further it is to Great Circle Course. Can we have come too far? No street names are marked up anywhere.”

  “I noticed. That’s of a piece with everything else. Helps to force you back from the abstract set to the reality. Of course it’s something that can only work in a small community, but—well, how many thousands of streets have you passed along without registering anything but the name? I think that’s one of the forces driving people to distraction. One needs solid perceptual food same as one needs solid nutriment; without it, you die of bulk-hunger. There’s an intersection, see?”

  They hurried the last few paces, and—

  “Oh, Sandy!” Kate’s voice was a gusty sigh. “Sandy, can this possibly be right? It’s not a house, it’s a piece of sculpture! And it’s beautiful!”

  After a long and astonished silence he said to the air, “Well, thank you!”

  And in a fit of exuberance swept her off her feet and carried her over the not-exactly-a-threshold.

  THE LOGICALITY OF LIKING

  “I wonder what made you like Precipice so much,” Freeman muttered.

  “I’d have thought it was obvious. The people there have got right what those at Tarnover got completely wrong.”

  “To me it sounds like the regular plug-in life-style. You arrive, you take on a house that’s spare and waiting, you—”

  “No, no, no!” In a crescendo. “The first thing we found when we walked in was a note from the former occupier, Lars Thorgrim, explaining that he and his family had had to move away because his wife had developed a disease needing regular radiation therapy so they had to live closer to a big hospital. Otherwise they’d never have moved because they’d been so happy in the house, and they hoped that the next people to use it would feel the same. And both their children sent love and kisses. That’s not the plug-in life-style, whose basis consists in leaving behind nothing of yourself when you move on.”

  “But just as when you joined G2S you were immediately whisked away to a welcome party—”

  “For pity’s sake! At places like G2S you need the excuse of a new arrival to hold a party; it’s a business undertaking, designed to let him and his new colleagues snuff around each other’s assholes like wary dogs! At Precipice the concept of the party is built into the social structure; those parties were going to be held anyhow, because of a birthday or an anniversary or just because it was a fine warm evening and a batch of homemade wine was shaping well enough to share. I’m disappointed in you. I’d imagined that you would have seen through the government’s attempt to deevee Precipice and gone back to the source material.”

  For the first time Freeman seemed to be visibly on the defensive. He said in a guarded tone, “Well, naturally I—”

  “Save the excuses. If you had dug deep, I wouldn’t be giving you this as news. Oh, think, man, think! The Disasterville U.S.A. study constitutes literally the only first-rank analysis of how the faults inherent in our society are revealed in a post-catastrophe context. Work done at other refugee settlements was trivial and superficial, full of learned clichés. But after saying straight out that the victims of the Bay Quake couldn’t cope because they’d quit trying to fend for themselves—having long ago discovered that the reins of power had been gathered into the hands of a corrupt and jealous in-group—the people from Claes College topped it off with what Washington felt to be the ultimate insult. They said, ‘And this is how to put it
right!’ ”

  A dry chuckle.

  “Worse still, they proceeded to demonstrate it, and worst of all, they stopped the government from interfering.”

  “How long after your arrival were you told about that?”

  “I wasn’t told. I figured it out myself that same evening. It was a classic example of the kind of thing that’s so obvious you ignore it. In my case specifically, after my last contact with Hearing Aid I’d unconsciously blanked off all further consideration of the problem. Otherwise I’d have spotted the solution at once.”

  Freeman sighed. “I thought you were going to defend your obsession with Precipice, not excuse your own shortcomings.”

  “I enjoy it when you needle me. It shows that your control is getting ragged. Let me tatter it a bit more. I warn you, I intend to make you lose your temper eventually, and never mind how many tranquilizers you take per day. Excuse me; a joke in poor taste. But—oh, please be candid. Has it never surprised you that so few solid data emerged from the aftermath of the Bay Quake, the greatest single calamity in the country’s history?”

  Freeman’s answer was harsh. “It was also the most completely documented event in our history!”

  “Which implies that a lot of lessons should have been learned, doesn’t it? Name a few.”

  Freeman sat silent. Once again his face gleamed with sweat. He interlocked his fingers as though to prevent them trembling visibly.

  “I think I’m making my point. Fine. Consider. Vast hordes of people had to start from scratch after the quake, and the public at large felt obliged to help them. It was a perfect opportunity to allot priorities: to stand back and assess what was and was not worth having among the countless choices offered by our modern ingenuity. Years, in some cases as much as a decade, elapsed before the economy was strong enough to finance the conversion of the original shantytowns into something permanent. Granted that the refugees themselves were disadvantaged: what about the specialists from outside, the federal planners?”

  “They consulted with the settlers, as you well know.”

  “But did they help them to make value judgments? Not on your life. They counted the cost in purely financial terms. If it was cheaper to pay this or that community to go without something, that’s what the community wound up lacking. Under the confident misapprehension that they were serving the needs of the nation by acting as indispensable guinea pigs. Where was the follow-up? How much money was allocated to finding out whether a community without veephones, or without automatic instant credit-transfer facilities, or without home encyclopedia service, was in any sense better or worse than the rest of the continent? None—none! What halfhearted projects were allowed to show their heads were axed in the next session of Congress. Not profitable. The only place where constructive work was done was Precipice, and that was thanks to amateur volunteers.”

  “It’s easy to prophesy after the event!”

  “But Precipice did succeed. The founders knew what they wanted to do, and had valid arguments to support their ideas. The principle of changing one factor and seeing what happens may be fine in the lab. In the larger world, especially when you’re dealing with human beings who are badly disturbed following a traumatic experience and have been forcibly returned to basics—hunger, thirst, epidemics—you aren’t compelled to be so simplistic. Evidence exists from the historical record that certain social structures are viable and others aren’t. The people from Claes recognized that, and did their best to assemble a solid foundation for a new community without bothering to forecast what would evolve from it.”

  “Evolution … or devolution?”

  “An attempt to backtrack to that fork in our social development where we apparently took a wrong turning.”

  “Invoking all kinds of undocumented half-mystical garbage!”

  “Such as—?”

  “Oh, this ridiculous notion that we’re imprinted before birth with the structure of the aboriginal family, the hunter-and-gatherer tribe and the initial version of the village.”

  “Have you ever tried to silence a baby?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Humans make mouth noises with the intention of provoking a change in the outside world. Nobody denies any longer that even a dumb baby is printed in advance for language. Damn it, enough of our simian cousins have shown they can use a sound-to-symbol relationship! And equally nobody denies that habit patterns involving status, pack leadership—Whoops, hold everything. I just realized I’ve been manipulated into defending your viewpoint against myself.”

  Freeman, relaxing, allowed himself a faint smile.

  “And if you continue, you’ll expose a basic fallacy in your argument, won’t you?” he murmured. “Precipice may indeed function, after a fashion. But it does so in isolation. Having worked for a Utopia consultancy, you must realize that if they’re efficiently shielded from the rest of humanity the craziest societies can work … for a while.”

  “But Precipice is not isolated. Every day between five hundred and two thousand people punch the ten nines and—well, make confession.”

  “Thereby painting a picture of the state of things outside which can be relied on to make Precipicians shudder and feel thankful. True or false, the impression is no doubt comforting.”

  Freeman leaned back, conscious of having scored. His voice was almost a purr as he continued, “You spent time actually listening to some of the calls, I presume?”

  “Yes, and at her own insistence so did Kate, though since she wasn’t planning to stay she wasn’t obliged. They’re quite literal about their service. From the central, they route calls to private homes where one adult is always on duty. And someone literally sits and listens.”

  “How about the people who can talk for hours nonstop?”

  “There aren’t many of them, and the computers almost always spot them before they’re well under way.”

  “For a community so proud of having evaded the data-net, they rely a great deal on computers, don’t they?”

  “Mm-hm. Must be the only place on Earth where they’ve made a cottage industry out of the things. It’s amazing how useful they are when you don’t burden them with irrelevancies, like recording a transaction worth fifty cents.”

  “I must find out some time where you draw your dividing line: fifty cents, fifty dollars, fifty thousand dollars … But go on. What were the calls like?”

  “I was astonished at how few cranks there were. I was told that cranks get disheartened when they find they can’t provoke an argument. Someone who’s convinced all human faults are due to wearing shoes, or who just found evidence to impeach the president scrawled on the wall of a public toilet, wants to be met with open disagreement; there’s an element of masochism there which isn’t satisfied by punching pillows. But people with genuine problems—they’re a different matter.”

  “Give some examples.”

  “Okay. It’s a platitude you yourself have used to me to say that the commonest mental disorder now is personality shock. But I never realized before how many people are aware they’re lapsing into its subclinical penumbra. I recall one poker who confessed he’d tried the White House Trick, and it had worked.”

  “What sort of trick?”

  “Sometimes it’s known as going to the Mexican laundry.”

  “Ah. You route a credit allotment—to avoid either tax or recriminations—into and out of a section of the net where nobody can follow it without special permission.”

  “That’s it. When income-tax time rolls around, you always hear people mentioning it with an envious chuckle, because it’s part of modern folklore. That’s how politicians and hypercorp execs get away with a tenth of the tax you and I cough up. Well, this shivver I was listening to had vaulted half a million. And he was beside himself with horror. Not terror—he knew he couldn’t be caught—but horror. He said it was his first-ever lapse from rectitude, and if his wife hadn’t left him for a richer man he’d never have been tempted. Once having done
it and found how easy it was, though … how could he ever trust anyone again?”

  “But he was trusting Hearing Aid, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, and that’s one of the miracles performed by the service. While I was a minister I was resigned to having the croakers monitor the link to my confessional, even though what was said face-to-face in the actual booth was adequately private. And there was nothing to stop them noticing that a suspect had called on me, ambushing him as he left, and beating a repeat performance out of him. That type of dishonesty is at the root of our worst problem.”

  “I didn’t know you acknowledged a ‘worst’—you seem to find new problems daily. But go on.”

  “With pleasure. I’m sure that if I start to foam at the mouth there’s a machine standing by to wipe my chin. … Oh, hell! It’s hypocritical hair-splitting that makes me boil! Theoretically any one of us has access to more information than ever in history, and any phone booth is a gate to it. But suppose you live next door to a poker who’s suddenly elected to the state congress, and six weeks later he’s had a hundred-thousand-dollar face-lift for his house. Try to find out how he came by the money; you get nowhere. Or try confirming that the company you work for is going to be sold and you’re apt to be tossed on the street with no job, three kids and a mortgage. Other people seem to have the information. What about the shivver in the next office who’s suddenly laughing when he used to mope? Has he borrowed to buy the firm’s stock, knowing he can sell for double and retire?”

  “Are you quoting calls to Hearing Aid?”

  “Yes, both are actual cases. I bend the rules because I know that if I don’t you’ll break me.”

  “Are you claiming those are typical?”

  “Sure they are. Out of all the calls taken, nearly half—I think they say forty-five percent—are from people who are afraid someone else knows data that they don’t and is gaining an unfair advantage by it. For all the claims one hears about the liberating impact of the data-net, the truth is that it’s wished on most of us a brand-new reason for paranoia.”