by John Brunner
“Literally?”
“The computers identified him instantly as the third subject. Obviously they know more about him than I do. They may even know more about him than he does himself. It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened. And come to think of it …” His voice trailed away and he combed thoughtfully at his beard with hooked fingers.
“Yes?”
“I just remembered something!” Agitated, Reedeth tensed. “Look, while you were setting things up for the pythoness, I asked my desketary what Mogshack thought of Flamen turning up fully laden with recording equipment, and I got an answer which … Well, frankly at the time I thought it was kind of a wisecrack, and something else came up which distracted me, so I’ve only this moment thought of it again. Ariadne, have you ever known a machine to make a joke?”
“Make a joke?” she echoed incredulously. “No, of course not!”
“In that case, it’s not just Madison that the automatics know more about than I do, but Mogshack too! My God! This is terrible!”
Staring at him in bewilderment, Ariadne said, “Jim, you—what’s wrong? You look haggard all of a sudden. You look old!”
“I’m not surprised,” he answered grimly. “Here, let’s see if I can recover the recording.” He glanced at his watch. “Now the time must have been—hmmm … Oh, roughly between fourteen-thirty and fifteen.” Turning to the desketary, he ordered it to review the recordings it had made during the relevant period.
“Find me the passage concerned with Dr. Mogshack’s reasons for approving of Matthew Flamen,” he concluded. There was a pause. Obediently the machine replayed the dialogue with the time-labeling tick in the background.
Reedeth: “How does Mogshack feel about this idea—Flamen recording the show for possible transmission?”
Automatics: “Any publicity which may help to dispel common misapprehensions about conditions in this hospital, where so many citizens of New York State are likely to spend part of their—”
Reedeth: “Look, I don’t want a PR handout! You wouldn’t expect Mogshack to welcome publicity on a spoolpigeon show like Flamen’s. People mainly associate him with exposés and scandals. So why should Mogshack give permission for this recording?”
Automatics: “Dr. Mogshack approves of anything which may further his personal ambition.”
Reedeth: “And what’s that?”
Automatics: “To find at least the population of New York State, and preferably the entire United States, committed to his care.”
A click cut short the recorded sound of Reedeth chuckling, but this time it didn’t seem in the least funny.
FORTY-SIX
WHY’S, AFTER THE EVENT
“Even with the advantage of a certain degree of historical perspective, such as we might expect to enjoy from our standpoint a few decades later, it is by no means easy to define the reasons why late twentieth-century society underwent so violent a process of fragmentation following a relatively long period of consolidation and homogenization. Two factors render the analysis especially difficult: first, the human mind is not particularly well adapted to reconciling information from disparate sources (e.g. personal experience with the content of a school history-lesson, data from a printed page with those from a vuset), and the alleged simplistic linearity of the Gutenberg era—if it ever existed—came to an end before it had affected more than a minuscule proportion of the species; and second, the process is not merely still going on—it’s still accelerating.
“However, one can tentatively point to three major causes which, like tectonic events in the deep strata of the Earth’s crust, not only produce reverberations over enormous areas but actually create discontinuities sharp enough to be uniquely attributed: what one might call psychological landslides.
“By far the most striking of these three is the unforeseen rejection of rationality which has overtaken us. Perhaps one might argue that it was foreshadowed in such phenomena as the adoption by that technically brilliant sub-culture, the Nazis, of Rassenwissenschaft, Hoerbiger’s pre-scientific Welteislehre, and similar incongruous dogmas. However, it was not until about two generations later that the principle emerged in a fully rounded form, and it became clear that the dearest ambition of a very large number of our species was to abdicate the power of reason altogether: ideally, to enjoy the same kind of life as a laboratory rat with electrodes implanted in the pleasure centers of his brain, gladly starving within reach of food and water.
“Roughly sixty percent of the patients currently in mental hospitals throughout North America are there because they did their best to achieve this ambition with the help of psychedelic drugs.
“But this is not the only level on which the effects of the process are detectable. It is notorious that one of the boom industries of the twenty-first century is the charm-and-idol business, spearheaded by the multi-billion dollar corporation of Conjuh Man Inc. with its tight grip on all the Negro enclaves and most of the ex-colonial countries, and rapidly expanding into supposedly more sophisticated areas in the wake of such firms as Lares & Penates Inc.
“For once it is perfectly clear why they’ve had this swift and resounding success. Our society is no longer run by individuals, but by holders of offices; it’s complexity is such that the average person’s predicament compares with that of a savage tribesman, his horizons bounded by a single valley, for whom knowledge of the cycle of the seasons is a hard-won intellectual prize and whose only possible reaction when confronted with drought, or flood, or blighted crops, is to hypothesize evil spirits which he must placate by sacrifice and self-denial. There are no economic counterparts of weather forecasts available to the public. The data which might enable them to be issued over the vu-beams are jealously guarded by the priests serving corporation gods, and outsiders are compelled to put up with the physical consequences of mysterious incomprehensible seasons. Take a vacation; you come back to discover that an urban landmark has vanished as completely as though an earthquake had felled a mountain. …
“Closely allied to this first factor is the second, which might be termed the socialization of paranoia. In a single generation individual anxiety at our inability to deal with the massed resources of computerized corporations, government agencies and other public bodies has resulted in the mushrooming of contract law into a bigger industry than advertising. A simple purchase can turn into a week-long wrangle involving the submission of a contract to three, four or more computerized consultancies. There are contracts for everything—merely for having a tooth stopped, one must evaluate, argue over, amend, and eventually sign a document running to five or six thousand words. Parents make contracts with schools for the education of their children; doctors make them with their patients, and if the patients are too ill or too mentally disturbed to pass a computer examination, then they refuse to proceed with treatment until someone who is legally compos mentis can be found to act as proxy. In the richest society of all history, we behave like misers terrified of parting with a single coin.
“Accepting that behind the smiling face of that salesman, the grave sympathy of that doctor, the formal authority of that bureaucrat, there lies the indescribable power of a megabrain computer, we are naturally enough driven to endow ourselves with symbols of power of our own, and the cheapest and—as one might put it—the most vivid of such symbols are arms.
“Twice in my own lifetime I’ve seen my country threaten to fly apart like a tire stripping its tread: first during the black insurrections of the early eighties, and again during the war scare of the nineties. The first of these events put a new word into the language, and the second branded it on our minds permanently. The cartel founded by Marcantonio Gottschalk is deliberately structured on the lines of a family—that basic social unit which a man feels he is defending when he installs armored picture-windows instead of the old glass, plants mines as carefully as rosebushes in his front garden. And the technique has proved psychologically apt.
“Nowadays the average family chang
es its guns as often as our grandparents changed their cars; they have their grenades serviced like their fire-extinguishers; husband, wife and teenage kids go shooting the way people once used to go bowling. It is taken for granted that tonight, or tomorrow, or sometime, it will be necessary to kill a man.
“Along with the flight from rationality and the socialization of paranoia, there is a third factor at work which interlocks with them both. Where do you turn when traditional sources of reassurance fail you? Man needs some kind of psychological sheet-anchor and always has. In some countries it has proved possible to maintain a public image of government which meets that need, but here it was out of the question. For one thing, the majority of Americans have always been distrustful of government interference. Government is a long way away in a big country, and our mental roots go deeper back in time than the advent of modern high-speed communications. For another, the monstrous complexity of our society makes it impossible for any single man, no matter how well-intentioned, to achieve major reforms in his term of office—he’s bucking too great a weight of administrative inertia. (Besides, well-intentioned men don’t run for office any more! They have too much sense to expose themselves to assassination, and only delusible idiots like our current chief executive can be persuaded to don the robes of high office. Nice guys don’t crave power.)
“What drove the final nail into the coffin of that particular hope, however, were the black insurrections of the eighties, which demonstrated that the Federal authorities were incapable of controlling large sections of their own cities up to and including Washington DC.
“Organized religion likewise failed—spectacularly—simultaneously with government and for roughly similar reasons, when it became clear that the so-called ‘godless’ rivals to our own way of life not only commanded far more loyalty but made better use of their relatively limited resources.
“People found themselves with virtually nothing left but the idol of the computer, in which the less imaginative now tend to invest their surplus of otherwise valueless faith, and a handful of what might be termed gurus—doctors, psychologists, sociologists, anyone who talks as though he (or she) understands and can control the inchoate forces that are universally sensed and universally feared.
“To illustrate how absurd the process has become: there are quite a number of people who call themselves ‘Conroyans’ after myself. I want to stress that they do so without my permission and also, so far as I can manage, without my connivance. I don’t approve of my, or anyone else’s, name being taken in vain.”
—Preamble to lecture notes issued by Xavier Conroy to students taking his course in Contemporary American Studies
FORTY-SEVEN
PLEA OF INSANITY
Eventually Ariadne gave a harsh laugh. “Jim, you’re not going to take that seriously! Aren’t you overlooking the fact that Harry Madison is after all a patient here? I’m not really familiar with his case, and I know you keep saying he ought to have been discharged long ago, but you surely have to assume there are good reasons why he hasn’t been! And certainly”—her tone grew more assertive—“if he’s getting so well acquainted with our automatics that he can rig them to utter that sort of rubbish, that’s no index of sanity. It’s more the opposite!”
Reedeth dropped back into his chair as though his legs would no longer support him. “Madison can’t tinker with the main data banks,” he said. “All he can do is make adjustments to the remotes, like eliminating censor circuits—which is what he seems to have done to my desketary. To get at the main banks you need a secret IBM code, and however clever Harry may be I refuse to believe he can deduce that from just studying the remotes! Am I right?”
“Y-yes. I mean, I guess so.”
“I’m telling you. Do you trust the automatics here?”
“Well …”
“Yes or no?”
“One has to!” Ariadne snapped.
Reedeth leaned forward. “All right then: you’ve just had a clear diagnosis of megalomania from these trustworthy automatics. A few minutes ago you consented to accept what they told you about the pythoness’s oracles, didn’t you? What’s different in this case? Only the subject.”
“Jim, you’re deluding yourself,” Ariadne said firmly. The sound of shutters going up around her mind, armored against anything short of a nuke, was very nearly audible in the room. Once more the cold, composed archetypal doctor-figure to which her patients were accustomed, stable pillar of authority in a chaotic universe—even her lips visibly narrowed from the soft sensuality of their recent love-making—she marched towards the door.
“If you’re so eager to believe what your desketary can tell you now that one of the patients has tampered with it,” she concluded, “I suggest you ask it to give you some insight into your own jealousy of Dr. Mogshack!”
And she was gone.
FORTY-EIGHT
AN ALL-STATIONS FROM ISM
“This is a pink alert for NYC east and north zones, yellow statewide, repeat pink for NYC east and north zones. It was anticipated that the X Patriot demonstrators assembled at Kennedy would disperse peacefully following the announcement that Morton Lenigo had cleared customs and immigration but unfortunately this has not proved to be the case. A number of inflammatory speeches were made claiming that his admission is the forerunner of a major kneeblank victory. X Patriots and other extremists are closing on NYC by skimmer, ground transport and possibly by rapitrans. Most are armed, many are orbiting and all are potentially violent. Citidef groups stand to stand to stand to. Await orders from Internal Security Maintenance officers. Repeat pink alert NYC east and north. Ends ends ends. Stand by for further announcements.”
FORTY-NINE
IF YOU’RE AFRAID OF THE DARK YOU CAN ALWAYS CARRY A FLASHLIGHT BUT THERE’S NO CHEAP PORTABLE PROTECTION AGAINST LONELINESS
On her way from the elevator Lyla checked the comweb at the end of the corridor; like most fitted in these cheap recent apt blocks, it was big and ugly and armored and would need a bomb to put it out of action. When she dipped in the message slot, though, all she found was a drying puddle of activator fluid—the management had let it run out of fax paper again. No use having the thing in working order if there was nothing to record on.
But her spirits were too low for her to get annoyed. Her depression had set in before she left Flamen’s place, and had only been aggravated by seeing him so pleased about something she didn’t understand, the fruit of his cryptic conversation with the fat man called Lionel. The world had abruptly turned drab for her. Perhaps the after-effect of the sibyl-pill was responsible, but she had no previous experience to judge by. She had never before been slapped out of trance.
Worse yet: she wouldn’t have believed Dan’s unsupported word, but having seen Flamen’s recording she couldn’t contest the necessity any longer. Echo-traps had been the—mental, if not physical, and hence even worse—death of at least three pythonesses she knew of.
So there were endless problems to worry her: falling into the echo-trap (for what conceivable reason?), the uncertain consequences of trying to metabolize the remainder of the drug in the non-trance state, and that weird hangover which had caused her to speak what amounted to an oracle during the skimmer-flight to Flamen’s home.
Applying her Punch key, with its unique magnetic pattern, to the lock of the apt’s door, she struggled to decide whether or not the same person had been referred to as the one whose presence had driven her into an echo-trap. Allegedly—but pythoness talent was too fragile to take kindly to laboratory examination—there must have been some exceptionally powerful personality present in the audience, one whose aura of authority overwhelmed her best attempts to move away and tackle another subject.
Flamen himself? It was unlikely; they had spent half an hour or so running over the three oracles she had managed to utter in complete form, and concluded that none of them applied to him. He had been very obviously relieved.
She slipped rapidly under the deadfall, whic
h was inactivated when the lock was fitted with the proper key and remained safe until the door was closed again, and shut out the world with a slam.
Tossing her yash to the peg—it missed and she had to pick it up and make a second try—she called, “Dan?”
No answer.
Going to the icebox, she found a partly-eaten loaf with mold on it and some peanut butter so old the oil had separated. But she wasn’t hungry. In the freezer compartment there was a range of blue and green and brown phials which had to be kept very cold to prolong their usable life; in one of the brown ones labeled in Dan’s handwriting she found one and a half joylets and took them.
Nothing much happened. They were probably stale. She went to the kitchen wallboard and scrawled joylets in bold chalked capitals at the foot of the current shopping list. And there was no mescal ready or anything else like that, and right now she couldn’t face the chore of preparing some. No liquor, no joints, no nothing in the place. She thought of Mikki Baxendale in her luxury penthouse and felt a stab of pity for Dan who had come so near to money.
But the bed hadn’t been fixed and she started to be angry with him instead. Dumping herself like a badly-stuffed doll into a patched inflatable chair, she leaned back and scowled at the ceiling.
She had never felt like this before after a session. Ordinarily she was excited, pleased at the hints of relevance which peeped out of the doggerel of her oracles, eager to trace clues half-hidden in a tangle of sub-conscious associations, and by nightfall—or whenever—very sexy.