“Spaceship Troopers?”
“Right.”
“And The Nine Worlds Saga?”
“Yup.”
“The Nude Sun? And Timeskip?”
“Sure.”
“How about Nine Princes in Aspic?”
I shook my head. “Not me. Try farther along the alphabet.” God, I felt good. “Listen, these people who want to talk to me—didn’t your records tell you that I wouldn’t do interviews?”
“They do show that—but there is some contradiction. One of your biographies—”
“How many of them are there?”
“Ten.” He paused at my grunt. “You are surprised?”
“I’d hoped for more. But carry on.”
“The interviews. You did give interviews. One of your biographies states quite unambiguously that on a visit to Rome you agreed to meet with a certain important person there who was a keen reader of your works. Is that not true?”
“It’s true enough. But I always thought of that particular meeting as an audience with me more than an interview. I don’t do interviews. Can’t they ask somebody else?” A thought struck me. “Hey, just how many other writers from my time were frozen—I mean, science fiction writers.” (The only sort that were worth diddly-squat.)
“Only two.”
“Then who was the other? Surely not that boring old windbag—”
“No.”
Big relief—and a stir of excitement, too. He named the only woman science fiction writer I’d ever felt really attracted to. Sure, it made sense, her fans would have done the same for her as mine did for me. Let’s hope she died young.
“She was of course born quite a few years later than you,” Chen went on. “But the scholars of today know that she had read your works, and they assert that her books very clearly draw in some ways from you. There is a part of you in her.”
But not the part of me I’d like. One problem with this renovated body, it had the hormones flowing as I’d not felt them flow in thirty years. “I feel flattered,” I said. “Perhaps she and I can meet when I am fully recovered.”
“It can be arranged, though there are subtle questions to be asked of her—the social conventions have changed much since your day. A meeting cannot be assured.” Chen sat up a little straighter. “You will probably also be wondering what your role will be in this ‘brave new world’ to which you have awakened.”
“Naturally.” As a matter of fact, up to that point I hadn’t given it a thought. I was going to be a writer, wasn’t I? What else was there to do?
“Then I am afraid that I bring you bad news. When you were frozen, your admirers did it with the full confidence that your abilities would find unique recognition here in the future. You were widely regarded as one of the most learned men of your time, a person whose knowledge seemed almost boundless, in many diverse fields. Some suggested that you knew more than any other living human.”
Some suggested! Was Chen trying to get me irritated? “They were just being kind to me,” I said modestly.
“Be that as it may, your admirers had unfortunately badly misjudged the future.” Chen leaned forward, an earnest expression on his unlined face. “You see, sir, there has been a change in the world, and it is one that will shock you. Knowledge—that which you possess in such full measure—is no longer useful. Knowledge has become an obsolete skill.”
Was he crazy? There was no way, in a world that could revive a frozen corpse and bring it back to life and health, that knowledge could become obsolete. The whole technological society must depend on it. And the room I was in was a miracle of technology.
“I don’t understand you,” I said. “How can knowledge lose its value?”
“I will show you. Is there a subject on which you would say you are particularly expert?”
You must be kidding. “There are several.”
“Then name one.”
“Oh—let’s say, European history. Or botany. Or communications theory. Or organ music. Or the Roman Empire. Want more?”
“Very good. That is enough. Now, ask me a question—any difficult question of fact—that relates to one of those fields.”
He didn’t seem to be joking. I thought for a second. “All right, I’ll bite. Who was leading the French Army when it surrendered at Sedan in the Franco-Prussian war? And when did it happen?”
He sat there looking half-witted for maybe half a second, then said, “MacMahon, on September 1st, 1870, at four-fifteen P.M.”
Once I had seen it happen, I knew exactly what must be going on. Little Chen was hooked up through some high-rate electronic link with a bunch of data banks, and he had access to them directly by thinking the right sequence. It meant he had immediate access to whole libraries—perhaps to all the libraries in today’s world. Well, I could play that game, too, once I knew how to hook in.
“You don’t mean knowledge is obsolete,” I said. “You mean you’ve replaced the need for one sort of knowledge with another. People just have to learn how to use the new sort—they need to know how to gain access to the data banks.”
Again, he seemed astonished at my response.
“I wrote that story, too,” I went on, before he could speak. “About implants for data access and direct mind-to-mind communication. Back in the late 70s. It didn’t make much of a stir—but I noticed a lot of other people using the same idea in the next few years.”
“You do not appreciate the problem,” he said. “It is true, we all have access to the data banks, and you will not be denied that access. But what is involved is no simple matter of exchanging one kind of fact for another, as you seem to think. It is a question of structure and approach. Remember, many hundreds of people have been frozen and reawakened since the technique was perfected. We have done our best to train each of them in the use of the mental data banks—without success. I will leave you to work on this, but already I am sure of the outcome. Some banks you will learn to enter without a problem. But the general technique that stands behind it…well, I wish you luck.”
He meant it, too. But I didn’t share his worries for a moment. In sixty years of writing science fiction, I had picked up a working knowledge of a hundred different fields. Lots of them were supposedly difficult except for the “specially trained.” I’d learned to recognize that for what it was: territorial imperative, an attempt to keep out anybody who hadn’t paid for the formal training and the official carrying card of the profession. It was nonsense. I had picked up what I needed from scratch, on my own, without anyone around to guide me.
It was an article of faith. There wasn’t a branch of know-how I couldn’t acquire, or a system I couldn’t master, as easily as breathing.
I shrugged. “Let me try it. Maybe I’ll be lucky.”
“Maybe.” His tone denied the possibility.
“If I don’t make it, what then? Euthanasia? The junkyard?”
Chen looked more than uncomfortable—he was horrified. “No! How can you make such a suggestion. We will arrange a pleasant life for you, along with all the others who have been reawakened. We will provide special living quarters, and excellent contentment drugs—stronger than we have for ourselves. You will be perfectly happy.”
Sure. Walk this way, and don’t worry about the slight smell of gas.
Or maybe he was quite sincere. A two-hundred-year nap leaves you waking up kind of crotchety.
“Here is the way that you will interact with our system,” he said. He handed a little flat oblong across to me. “Naturally, if it turns out by some lucky chance that you can master full access to the data banks, we will arrange for your own implant and code signal. But it is best to begin like this. Anything else you want can be obtained by pressing this orange place on the side of the calling device.”
He left, after promising to arrange for delivery of my personal belongings. Apparently, like the pharaohs, I had been sealed in the vault with at least a few possessions to comfort me when I awoke in the afterlife. Whoever made that d
ecision understood human psychology. I found I was really looking forward to putting on some of my old convention finery—the diamond stickpin, the gold nugget cufflinks, the African red-gold ring, and the silver pocket watch with its hand-worked chain. The final Worldcon may have been centuries ago, but as far as I was concerned it had happened last week.
Time for the fun stuff later. I sat down at the terminal Chen had given me, and went to work.
Do you know the rotten part of all this? It turned out that Chen was quite right. I’d have bet money against him, but he was spot-on correct in his prediction. Every single item of information known to the human race was in those banks, waiting for me to call it out. All I needed to know were the correct access codes—the series of digital strings and pointers, leading the inquiry from one data bank to the next.
Simple, you say? That’s what I thought. Then it turned out that there was a hidden symmetry and structure to the systems of lists and markers, a natural hierarchy that made recall simple and fast. Without an understanding of that underlying form, access to the banks was marginally possible, but it took ages and it was unreliable.
I could not, try as I might, grasp that structure. I worked at it until I was cursing myself and bursting with frustration. It did no good. I got nowhere. I could find my way into certain data banks, almost at random, but I couldn’t work the system as it was supposed to be worked.
After twelve hours, I recalled a melancholy fact about the human brain. If a person does not learn to speak by a certain age, that person will never speak properly—no matter how long and hard he tries. The data bank system seemed to be like that. You acquired the understanding by a certain age, or you were forever on the outside, peering in.
I tried all night long. By morning I had a lot more general facts about the world I was in, but no success with the system.
What was this new world like? I could perceive it only dimly, though maybe that would change with more exposure. I did not even try to understand how it derived from the world I knew. As I’ve said many times, history doesn’t know how to plot worth a damn. If you look at the events that lead up to a major change in the world, they’re too improbable for any rational person to accept. The human race goes rolling and staggering on into the future, with no more idea of the path than a drunken duchess.
Some things were clear. We had the solar system, twenty billion humans spread across the face of it and running things the way they wanted to. We had the stars, too. That was nice. I’d missed badly on one thing there. I had assumed that when everyone was linked into the central data banks, they wouldn’t want to go too far from home because the light-speed limit would make them lose contact with almost everything they knew. Plausible—but the light-speed limit had been one of the first things to go. Hell, if I’d hung on for a few more years I’d have seen it myself.
But still no aliens on the scene. And no signals from anyone out there, to show we’re not the only game in town. Lots of good science fiction went down the tubes on that one.
When Chen called back I was pretty tired. He hadn’t told me what the limits of my modified body would be, but I thought I might as well find out for myself. After twenty-four hours without sleep (or alcohol; the food supply system refused to give it to me) I felt as though I could use a twenty-minute nap. No more than that.
He called before he came, sending me a message through the terminal. I guess anybody who was wired into the system would get it direct, brain-to-brain, but I couldn’t qualify.
“Is there anything that I can bring you?” he said. “Anything you need?”
“Not a thing. Come on over.”
He disconnected. If he were curious to know what progress I had made, he didn’t show it.
My old convention outfit had been delivered while I was working on the terminal. It had been superbly preserved. I put on the formal clothes, the ruffled shirt, the scarlet sash, the black patent leather shoes. Then the cuff-links, the ring, and diamond stickpin. Finally I lay down for that twenty-minute nap before Chen arrived. I wanted to be fresh and alert.
When he came into the room I was carefully winding my fob watch. So far as I am concerned, wrist watches and digital watches are two backward steps of the human race. There’s no sound on earth more satisfying than the ticking of a decent-sized pocket watch, and no weight that hefts more naturally and comfortably in the hand.
Chen stared at the watch on its long golden chain. “A clockwork watch? Worked by a spring?”
“That’s right. If I’m obsolete, I might as well have obsolete technology to match.”
I set the time on it, closed the case, and lifted it up by its long chain. “All done,” I said. “Now I can face the future.” And try a few obsolete skills.
Chen was watching me with an expression of pity. He seemed like a really nice guy. No doubt about it, the human race had come a long way in two hundred years. Somewhere on that winding road to tomorrow, the viciousness and insensitivity had disappeared—maybe because it’s hard to ignore how others are feeling when you have mind-to-mind contact.
Whatever had made the difference to the way people felt, Chen was pretty miserable when he sat down across from me. I didn’t need to tell him that I couldn’t crack the data banks the way that he could. He knew. Hundreds of others had tried and failed.
I nodded at him. “You were quite right. I can learn the pointers and the lists. But I can’t get the hang of manipulating them efficiently.”
He nodded. “I was convinced that would prove to be the case. You are ready, then, to join the others who were revived? I know that you will have a pleasant and tranquil life.”
“I’m not quite ready for that yet.” I leaned back a little in my chair. This took concentration. I had read about it a dozen times, and I knew exactly how it was done; but this was only the second time I had tried it.
“You know, Chen,” I went on, “when you’ve lived as long as I have, and read as much as I have, and done as many things as I’ve done, you find it hard to accept the idea that one of those things somehow wouldn’t prove useful. Even today, in a world that’s so different from the one that I knew, you think there must be something you know or do that will have value. I can’t get that idea out of my mind. Most of my skills are obsolete today, but isn’t there some little talent or piece of know-how that might still have value? I had an experience not too different from that, fifty—make that two hundred and fifty, I guess—years ago, when I was on a trip to Mexico. I’d been staying in this little town, where the only safe thing to drink was the beer. And I didn’t really know where my next meal was coming from…”
He humored me, allowing me to wind on through my slow and soft-spoken tale. I didn’t hurry. I didn’t once raise my voice. He listened patiently. He must have thought that it was the least the new age could do for the old, giving me a hearing before they dumped me into the old folks’ home and forgot about us.
All the time I talked I was sitting with my eyes fixed on his, casually holding that old silver watch on its chain of gold links, and swinging it back and forth in front of him.
Five minutes, and his mouth was open. Ten minutes, and his eyes were glassy. He was gone. I put the watch back into my pocket. Interesting, what you pick up in a misspent lifetime.
“Stand up, Chen.”
He rose to his feet and looked quietly down at me.
“Very good,” I said. “Now, Chen, I want to know the names of the parents of the Emperor Claudius, of the Roman Empire.”
A split-second pause. “Drusus; and Antonia.”
“Right. And what were the names of the operas that Mozart composed in 1781 and 1782?”
“Idomeneo, and Die Entführung aus dem Serail.” He stumbled over the words.
“Good enough. Now we want something a little more complicated. But don’t begin at once. Wait until I say the word ‘Idomeneo.’ All right?” I put my hand on his shoulder in a friendly fashion. “First, Chen, we are going to need the entry points into t
he data banks that control world communications, transportation, and food supply. We particularly need to locate the major nodes, the places that permit complete system control. Understand?”
He nodded.
“Good. And while you are at it, Chen, I want you to link me through to the place where the other science fiction writer is living. I’ll need to visit her and talk to her. We have a lot of plans to make. But first, though, you’ll bring all that food, transportation, and communication data up for display on my screen. Idomeneo.”
It took him a minute or two this time. I stayed calm. We were in no particular rush, and we had to do it right. I leaned back, swung my watch on its chain, and wondered about those ten biographies of me. Had any of them been really honest—honest enough to say that I was an ornery son of a bitch? Probably not.
Chen was nodding his head at last, and the data I wanted came flowing out onto the screen. All the solar system critical nodes were identified, every nexus from Vulcan to the Oort Cloud. I put Chen into a deeper sleep while I settled down to study them. After a few minutes I touched the first key, one that began to take over surreptitious control of the food supply lines.
Control. That was the key word. Some concepts and skills never become obsolete. I looked again at Chen. From the glaze on him he was under deeper hypnosis than anyone I had ever seen. He was my man. One down, twenty billion to go.
Ten lousy biographies? I’d change that, one way or another.
Afterword to “Obsolete Skill”
If you have money to spare and no expectation of needing it during your lifetime, you can arrange to have your body frozen at liquid nitrogen temperatures when you die. You will then be kept in cold storage for as long as your estate can pay for it, or until someone in the future decides to revive you. For rather less money, you can have just your head frozen, although I rather consider this to be false economy. As Woody Allen says when his brain is going to be removed, “Not my brain, it’s my second favorite organ.” (See “The Feynman Saltation.”)
However, regardless of the preferred body parts there is a bigger snag to the freezing bet. Most people today have nothing special to offer to future generations. Why should someone a century from now choose to revive you, even assuming that the disease that killed you can be cured?
Georgia On My Mind and Other Places Page 36