by Greg Bear
The interim legislature created an agency called Point One, and assigned it twin tasks: security of the executive branch, and gathering of information for the government as a whole. Ti Sandra had mused that the tasks would have to be separated eventually, or a fifth branch of government would arise — "The branch of intrigue and back-stabbing." So far, however, things were working smoothly.
In the tiny headquarters at Many Hills, I spoke with Ti Sandra about the end of our government and the transition to the elected government. I hoped to continue working with the Olympians, at least until a fully capable Office of Scientific Research could be established; I mentioned acquiring an enhancement. Ti Sandra expressed interest in what sort of enhancement I would employ — I had not decided yet — and then sprung her own surprise.
The President walked along the display that filled an entire wall of the President's Office. The media links had been established just the day before. On the new display, projected statistics for much of Mars could be called up instantly, as well as ports to all public ex nets. Dedicated thinkers performed image and concept searches on all LitVid communications, and constantly glossed the mood of the planet. We hoped to buy similar (though less comprehensive) services for other parts of the Triple, including Earth.
Our conversation turned to the coming election. "We're not so bad, you know," she said. "Have you seen the lists?"
Many candidates had declared, but none seemed especially popular in the pre-campaign polling.
"I've seen them," I said.
"If we declared, we'd probably win," she said with a deep sigh.
I tensed. "You're serious?"
Ti Sandra laughed and hugged me. "What should we do, show honorable Martian reserve and retire to our farms, to advise the lesser politicians like elder statesfolk?"
"Sounds fine to me," I said.
Ti Sandra clucked disapprovingly. "You've mapped out your territory. You want to keep track of Charles Franklin."
I gave her a shocked look.
"I mean, of course, what he's doing."
I seldom became angry at the President, but now my blood stirred. "It's not trivial. If it's not directed properly, it's the biggest source of trouble we'll face for years,"
"I know," Ti Sandra said, raising her hands in placation. "I shudder when I think about it. And I can't think of anyone better than you to oversee the project. But . . . What makes you think a completely fresh batch of elected officials will be so wise?"
"I'll help them," I said.
"What if they refuse your help?"
The possibility hadn't occurred to me.
"Election is a chancy thing," Ti Sandra said. "We haven't proven we know how to do it on Mars. The most delicate time is transition."
"Transition is confounded by leaders who won't give up power," I reminded her.
"And muddled by leaders who don't know how to govern," she said.
"You'd want me to declare with you?"
"I depend on you," she said. "And ... I'd give you the Olympians as your special problem. It would be a pity to pour all that money into an enhancement and sit on the outside, looking in."
I considered for a moment. Being a part of history mattered much less to me than pulling Mars through a frightening time. To accept her offer, I would have to give up more time with Ilya, years more of my private life. But Ti Sandra was right. Most of the candidates who had declared were not impressive. At least we had some experience.
Personal considerations had to be put aside; where would I be most effective? I had hoped to be able to offer expertise and keep myself separate from the killing strain of elected office.
"You don't look enthusiastic," Ti Sandra said.
"I feel ill," I said, exaggerating only a little.
"Those leaders are best who least desire to lead," Ti Sandra said.
"I don't believe that for a minute," I said.
"It's a good slogan," she said. "Are you with me?" I considered in silence. Ti Sandra stood patiently, a tall broad tree of a woman whose presence filled the room, and whom I had come to love like a mother. I nodded, and we shook hands firmly. Beyond any doubt, I was now a politician.
The best place to choose, purchase, and install an enhancement was Shinktown. I conferred with Charles about which Martian brand was best, and what level would suit my purposes.
"Something less than a mini-thinker," he suggested, "and more than a LitVid download. The best in that category is a design by Marcus Pribiloff, licensed through Wah Ming BM. It's two hundred thousand Triple dollars, but I can arrange for a discount."
I asked why he had never had an enhancement installed. "I won't presume to say I couldn't use it," he said. "But for creative work, they're really not all that useful. Too fixed and linear."
Shinktown had changed little in the past six years. The atmosphere of cheap entertainment and student food prevailed; the architecture still embodied the worst Mars had to offer. But a new district had grown in the southwest quarter, catering to students and faculty who wished to compete with Earth-based academics.
There had always been those on Mars who used enhancements. Economists had led the population at first, followed by mathematicians, physical scientists, sociologists, and finally physicians. But now Martians with no particular professional need were coming to Shinktown. Sales of enhancements had tripled at UMS in the past three years.
Attitudes were changing. Mars was becoming more like Earth; in twenty years, I thought, we might catch up.
I took time off to travel to Shinktown. There, I visited Pribiloff's office with trepidation. The decor was Old Settlement Modern, incorporating the ingenuity of Martian design when goods were in very short supply, but with a flip of near-satire. I liked the style, but it didn't slack my nervousness.
A human secretary, female and motherly, very conservative, gave me a quick med check and verified my stats. Then I was escorted into Doctor Pribiloff's inner sanctum. He stood by the door as I entered, shook my hand firmly, and sat on a stool, offering me a comfortable chair in a spot of light. The rest of the small room was in shadow, including Pribiloff.
The doctor appeared to be about my age, with earnest features, a high forehead, deeply melanic skin; attractive in a scholarly way. He wore a simple suit and dress tunnel boots. Conspicuous by its absence was a slate pocket; no doubt he carried his slate internally.
"You've made an interesting choice, Madam Vice President," Pribiloff began. "Not many politicians choose a specific science enhancement. You haven't shown much interest in these subjects before . . . May I ask why you're interested now?"
I smiled politely and shook my head. "Actually, it's personal," I said.
"Hobby enhancement doesn't always satisfy," Pribiloff informed me, shifting on the stool. "State of the art still requires a fair amount of motivation and concentration. The model you've' requested . . . I've never installed one before. It's a version of a Terrie enhancement, rarely installed even there."
"Why do you need to know?" I asked.
"It's not just curiosity, Miss Majumdar," Pribiloff said. "We'll need to match your neural syntax with the enhancement, and this model works best only in a certain range of syntactical complements. I think you'll match — "
"I made sure of that before I came here," I told him.
"Yes. But the enhancement still takes up a fair amount of attention. It's more aggressive, we say. Some would say it intrudes."
"How?" I asked.
"For one thing, it will modify your visual cortex by drawing a direct route between mathematical imagination and internal visualization. It's not a permanent change, but if you keep the enhancement for more than three years, and remove it, you'll have an awkward period of adjustment."
"Withdrawal," I said.
"Some have described it that way. With the enhancement, you'll think a little differently, a little more analytically, about certain things. Even social relationships may be seen in a new light."
"You sound uncomfortable w
ith my choice, Doctor," I said.
"Not at all. I just want my customers to understand the potentials and limits. If you have sufficient motivation, it will work out fine. But if you don't ..."
"I do," I said.
"All right. Let me describe the levels available. This unit is standard size, but unlike a purely fact-based enhancement, it contains a great many problem-solving algorithms. Concepts and equations for direct memory retrieval, and neural net aids for high-level thinking. You won't become a scientific genius, but you'll understand what the geniuses are talking about, and you'll have a wonderful toolbox for exploring a wide variety of subjects, concentrating on physical theory."
"Perfect," I said.
"As you requested, this model will be upgraded to include the latest work, and you can download supplements from the ex net. In fact, we can handle your subscription to a variety of base language services."
"Good."
Pribiloff stared at me for a moment, then said, "The procedure is painless, of course. The enhancement is placed subcutaneously near the foramen magnum, in a cushioned hyperimmune sheath. Nano fibers will make neural connections within an hour of the implanting, and you should be able to experience heightened abilities — certainly heightened knowledge — within twenty-four hours. I'll need multiple consent forms, credit release, and agreement to provide daily reports on your progress for the first ten days. The enhancement carries its own diagnostic, and all you need to do is transfer the report over the ex net. Not reporting nullifies all warranties."
"I understand."
"Doctor-patient privilege applies, of course," Pribiloff said.
"Of course."
"When would you like the procedure?"
"As soon as possible," I replied.
"Fine. I perform all insertions and implantings myself. Would tomorrow at fifteen be convenient?"
The next day, more nervous than ever, I returned to the office and lay on my stomach on a comfortable couch in the dim room. A spot of light appeared over my neck and a small arbeiter moved into place, graceful curving arms gently applying themselves to the nape of my neck.
Pribiloff showed me the enhancement, a flat thin jet-black disk, barely a centimeter wide. Other than product ID coded on its face, there were no obvious features. Before insertion, Pribiloff dipped the tiny disk in nano charge and wakeup nutrients, then inserted it into the guide. I closed my eyes and slept for about five minutes. The procedure was swift and did not hurt.
I left the office feeling as if I had lost another kind of virginity, betraying my body and the mother who gave it to me. I wondered if I would tell my father; Ilya would know, and Charles, but why reveal my change to anybody else? After a few hours, I felt ashamed of my silly conservatism; but the dark mood lingered.
And then the way I saw the world began to change.
Old friends, old adversaries, and old acquaintances of much ambiguity, started returning to my life and making fresh marks. I hadn't seen Diane Johara in three years, but my slate received a message from her while I was in Pribiloff's office. We spoke by satcom while I cleared out the Shinktown room I'd rented for the enhancement operation.
I would be passing through Diane's home station, Mispec Moor, on a constitutional campaign tour in Mariner Valley. Ilya would be there for me. After meetings with LitVid reporters, we had half a day and an evening free; we gleefully arranged for dinner.
"It's wonderful to talk to you again!" Diane enthused. "I've been so reluctant to drop a note — I thought you'd think I was, you know, peddling influence or something. Casseia, what you've done!"
"Not bad for someone who thinks too much, hm?"
Diane laughed. "Not at all like the old student radicals who fought the Statists."
"Have you changed your tune, Diane?"
"Casseia, I'm so respectable. I've even been working on the Mariner Constitutional Committee. Are we really Statists? Is it possible?"
"We'll use some other name, okay?"
"And I'm married. More than lawbonded . . . it's really more. I've gone over to Steinburg-Leschke. I've converted to New Reform Judaism. You'll meet Joseph. He's very special."
"You'll love Ilya, too. Things have changed, Diane."
We completed arrangements and signed off. I sat in the room's lone chair, packed bags at my feet, and considered the nature of time. I was not very old, just fifteen, but measuring time as a string of memorable events, I seemed positively ancient.
My head filled with time as reflection of motion, arbiter of change, conveyer and dissipater of information; time is what's left when nothing happens, time is the distance between then and now,- time marked in a haze of multi-colored equations, malleable, nonexistent for massless particles, for them an eternal now and the universe as flat and direct as a sheet of paper.
I recognized the signs then: the enhancement was integrating and informing, organizing areas of shared information and ability within my brain. The process was safe — billions on Earth and a few hundred thousand on Mars had gone through it, some, like Orianna, dozens of times. But for me it was unfamiliar and at once unsettling and hypnotic.
I lost an hour in that chair, in that bleak little Shinktown room, simply pondering motion, and gravitation, and how pressing on a wall meant the wall pressed back with equal force. I puzzled through angular momentum and torque as analogs of straightforward linear momentum and force, and thought of how a wheel, subjected to a force perpendicular to its axis, behaves when not spinning, and when spinning. I broke physical systems down into parts, and ran those parts through their paces while tracking the changes in their simplest characteristics, and how the changes affected the larger system.
Staring at the metabolic carpet, I traced in my imagination the path of a photon passing through a translucent fiber, slowing and echoing. I saw all the possible paths of the photon converge on the eventual real path, sum over histories, and the photon emerging on the other side of the fiber with supreme economy of energy and motion, minimum action, shortest time.
The entire room, spare and dreary, became a fog of forces as fascinating as a party filled with talking people. Behind the fagade of electromagnetic interactions — all I would ever touch, see, smell, or be sensually connected with — lay a plenipotential void far richer and stranger than matter and energy, the ground on which my being was so lightly painted as to be negligible . . . and yet I saw, and seeing, I gave the ensemble shape and meaning.
I struggled out of reverie, stood, grabbed my case, and ordered the door to open. As I marched down the corridor, I tried to dam the flood of insight.
Did Charles think and see this way all the time?
* * *
The Republic Information Office had scheduled three interviews for me in a six-hour period, beginning fifteen minutes after my arrival in Mispec Moor. Ilya gave me a quick squeeze as we walked onto the shuttle platform, into a blast of warm moist air from the protein farms. Mispec Moor was strictly hardscrabble protein production and carbonifer mining.
"You're on your own," he whispered in my ear. "I hate the limelight."
"Thanks," I said ruefully. "Enjoy the view." He would be given a tour of Mispec Moor's rather common fossil formations while I met the reporters. His attendance was as ceremonial and political as mine, but we still pretended Ilya was above the fray.
The info officer accompanying me introduced two reporters from Mars and Triple Squinfo, a moderate but influential LitVid firm that kept a heavy emphasis on substance and revelation. I had only interviewed with reporters from MTS once before. It had been a tough go.
The officer, a pleasant young man connected by marriage to Klein BM, escorted the reporters and me into a threadbare lounge.
The reporters had come in from North Noachis on a mid-speed train, a journey of eight hours through cratered flatness. They did not seem in a good mood.
We sat on the worn couches and the older of the two reporters placed his slate on the table between us, voice and vid active. The younger,
a nervous woman with thick black hair, began the questioning.
"Your interim government has two more months to bring Cailetet and the other dissident BMs into the fold," she said. "There's been talk by some members of the transition team that Cailetet simply needs to be given incentive, and that you have a personal grudge against Achmed Crown Niger."
I raised my eyebrows and smiled, then quickly decided to preempt what the young woman must have thought was a terrific bit of research. "Mr. Crown Niger once represented Freechild Dauble, and presided over the incarceration of a group of students at University of Mars Sinai. I suppose that's what you're referring to?"
The reporter nodded, eyes intent on the prey.
"That was a long time ago. Mars has changed, I've changed — "
"But do you believe Crown Niger has changed?" the second reporter chimed in. He leaned forward. I felt like a mouse circled by hawks.
"He's certainly moved up in the world," I said. "Advancement changes people."
"And you think your government can work with him, bring him into the fold before the elections?" the first reporter asked. The third seemed content to listen and bide his time.
"We aim for complete participation. We'd hate to have Mars divided any longer than necessary."
"But Cailetet says that the interim government supports projects that may endanger stability in the Triple," said the second reporter.
"I haven't heard that."
"It's a general release to the LitVids, dated for spread on the ex net and broadband Squinfo at twenty-two Triple Standard."
He gave me a second slate with the message. I read it quickly.
"Have you made contact with the Olympians?" the first reporter asked.
"That's not for me to say one way or another."
"How could they endanger the Triple?"
I laughed. "I don't know."
"We've actually dug into this a bit," the first reporter continued, "and we've discovered that Cailetet funded these scientists for a while before cutting. The scientists went elsewhere — supposedly to UMS. They've actually come to you now, haven't they?"