The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  No. The problem underlying everything seemed to be that humans knew no better now than in the beginning how do deal with the New People. In developing them out of their own mixed stock, the men of 2000 had been reaching for the goal long dreamed of—controlled mutation, and the transformation of man into superman. This would be the last victory of the flower of the old science, actually greater in significance then the as-yet-undiscovered faster-than-light drive. For they had cast aside the old myths about a mere physical specimen, a superman of body; they were reaching for the mind. And then they would have planned programmed men who would, under careful supervision, carry them to heights unreachable in the random, recursive, agonizingly slow processes of nature. They would, in short, not wait to grow into the garden of Earthly delights, nor would they countenance stumbling into it by accident, but would storm it by force, the force of the mind. But the program, starting innocently enough with experiments with lower life-forms, had progressed steadily through ever more complex forms; and when at last they had performed the final, half-magical reading and attempted programming of human DNA, they found that they had not constructed an avenue into the future but instead constructed a strange and mysterious door into an unknown and unknowable future. A door which only worked one way, and one that only the key of DNA would unlock. After a hundred years of “production,” the door was finally sealed; and then destroyed.

  Nothing was ever forgotten; it was rather that the whole discipline became discredited, then unprofitable, then unfunded. One thing technology never solved: it was frightfully expensive to alter DNA under controlled conditions in which results could be expected. And, paradoxically, unlike every other essentially technological process, the cost did not go down as it was repeated. The last ler brought into being artificially cost virtually the same as the first. In a time when a thousand projects were worthy of more attention, they beggared the planet to make something they couldn’t use for themselves. Mankind wisely concluded, reinforcing the judgments of the theologians, that however thrilling it might have been to play God, it was also damned expensive. To do as well as the original might well be feasible, but it could not be paid for.

  Physiologically, humans knew the ler easily enough, although the number who made such an area their interest steadily declined with time. But physiognomy was only the smallest part of reality, and the cultural gap widened yearly. Man opted for efficiency, the ler for harmony. Everyone had, rich and educated, ignorant and poor alike, anticipated the supermen: they would be large in size, strong, dominant of disposition, possessed of keen analytical minds, masters of technology at last, knowing all consequences in advance. There would be no haven for superstition and vanity.

  But the New People—or ler as they decided to call themselves in their own developed language, meaning “new” but also “innocent”—were determinedly unheroic. On the average, they were smaller in overall size, lighter in weight, and slimmer in build than the average human. Moreover, they retained into adulthood what seemed to humans as an excess of human adolescent features. That this was the natural result of forced evolution, a process called neoteny, in which youthful stages were expanded at the expense of older mature stages, did not reassure those who insisted upon viewing them as children, something their adult members were not. And by the time a truly ler culture had begun to develop and take root, the specimens were increasingly wrapped in impenetrable veils of language, ritual, mysticism, and an eclectic, bucolic philosophy that seemed to deny every common-sense notion of progress. “How quaint,” cried the harsh voices of the cult of expediency, entirely missing sight of the fact that ethic and ritual protect us from one another. . . .

  And so Parleau spent each day in his office, hoping over the distraction of the other sides of Seaboard South, that there would never be a problem, which his contemporaries and peers might have referred to as “an opportunity to excel.” And after dayshifter hours, which were his permanently by virtue of his high position, he would return to his set of cubicles alone25 and hope, all the more fervently, that the next day would be quiet as well.

  The quiet had come to an end. Parleau knew and faced it matter-of-factly. It had been coming, of course. He could see as well as the next with hindsight, but he could also see, even without the Situational Analysis training the controllers got, that this situation could not remain stable and peaceful forever. Why should it? Nothing else in the known universe did. So at some point, the hostility would have to take an overt form. Then what? It appeared that the humans still held all the cards. But that was the weakness. It was a dependent and vulnerable command position. The Old People were in fact completely vulnerable to the output of the Institute, so much so that now, in this century, continued stability (they had long since ceased calling it progress) was tied directly into its steadily increasing output. There was no way out of it: the Institute tinkered with basic efficiencies, the very stuff of which a million lives a day hung in the balance, hung upon five hundredths of a percentage point of difference. Yes. Things were that tight. Had it been something so simple as some material shortage, Parleau felt that they could have coped, some way. Done without, maybe. Invented substitutes. But all those avenues had been explored already. The time had passed, several hundred years ago, when they could deal with simple shortages. The very idea. It was the hardest problem civilized man had ever faced, and Parleau did not expect to solve it himself in the course of an afternoon.

  Consider mathematics and the classical three-body problem: even with computers to speed up the process of computation a millionfold, they still couldn’t conceptualize it as it was, three-simultaneously, but ran it as a series of twos. Now blow that up, enlarge it, complicate it to a billion-body problem, crank in several theories of economics, five major schools of politics, including anarchy, add the now-semicontrolled ecology of the entire planet, and muddy it with an unconnected human population which had continued unreduced, if slowed to virtual zero growth, at the unimaginable level of twenty billion. Yet, in a limited way, this was just what the Institute attempted to do, one question at a time. The human members posed narrow and specific questions, and the researchers designed alternatives they called parametered solutions, series of iffy courses of actions whose basic trade-offs were known or strongly suspected. The questioners debated and made the value judgments.

  It was painfully clear from this that the ler and their Institute had become indispensable, which was the utter horror of every leader and bureaucrat since Hammurabi. Indispensable man has a handle on you. Only when you can make all men and indeed all creatures immanently dispensable and interchangeable can this threat to the superstition of executive omnipotence be made to fade into insignificance. And the solution that came most often to mind—simply eliminate them and rationalize it afterward for the muddy thinkers—was in this case both ethically repugnant and obviously disastrous. They had long since assumed that to go it alone now without the ler partnership was possible, but all things considered, it wasn’t desirable at all. There was a most delicate balance of tomorrows.

  Now this thing, Parleau thought, suddenly too agitated to sit still behind his desk, the symbol for which he had worked so hard, and made so many resentful enemies along the way to it. A girl about whom almost nothing was known, save that she appeared to be circumstantially connected with some minor and unimportant vandalism. A simple incident, surely, but somehow along the way she managed to lose her bloody mind. Then responsible parties discovered that she was a ler adolescent. That they could see for themselves. Parleau stood by the corner of his desk, shuffling through the morning reports from the previous eve and mid-shifts; the quality control data, the indexes, the graphs. He was not interested in them, but only in the answer to the question, Why me?

  The administrator in the outer office signaled that the visitors Parleau had called earlier were now assembled and waiting there. The time had come. Parleau cleared his throat, sighed deeply, and recomposed his expression from one of worry and concern to one o
f stern action. And they would not have to worry about interruptions, either. All other business save natural disasters and civil unrests had been tabled for the day. They had to know, here, now; that was for sure. This could prove to be either a nothing incident, forgettable and forgotten, or an invitation to conspicuous failure.

  He depressed a button on the desk, signaling assent, and soon his visitors began to enter. They were all well-known figures, key personnel of the local regional upper administration, but at the same time Parleau recognized that he knew none of them well. They were all either holdovers from the previous regime or imports like himself, brought in from other parts of the world.

  Edner Eykor entered first. He was one of those who had come from somewhere else. Parleau had looked in the records, but had not assigned the facts any importance, and had consequently forgotten them. Like the other users of programmed names, Eykor’s surname lent no clue as to place or origin. Where had it been? Europe, somewhere, Parleau thought. Eykor was a thin, nervous man who always seemed to be in a hurry, always on the verge of missing some item, at least in appearance. A bad sign, Parleau had thought more than once. Nervousness in an intelligence man. Not good at all. His opinion was that an intelligence man at the staff level should be as impassive as an idol. Eykor had sandy, nondescript thinning hair and a long, horselike countenance, upon which a set of rubbery lips ruminated aimlessly.

  The second was Mandor Klyten, the Regional ler Expert. He was a curious one, for his post was almost totally unconnected with the Institute. Until Klyten had filled it, it had been little more than an academic post, a sinecure. Give Klyten credit: at least he had done much of his own field work, a notion unheard of for years, indeed if not generations. He studied and worked hard, and his advice regarding ler matters, while curiously unspecific, was always worth listening to. Outside the reservation, he was as well-informed as it was possible to be. Klyten was a short, plump, rather disorganized man of middle age; Parleau was not confused by the absentminded appearance. Under that thinning gray hair lurked a formidable and keen intelligence. Parleau did wonder at the turn of preferences that led such a one to scholasticism.

  Aseph Plattsman was the last to enter. The analyst and Controller. In an earlier day, Plattsman might, from his general appearance, have been a musician, an artist. Today, a Controller. One who watched and monitored, who supervised, who managed. Who controlled. Odd, that, but again, not so odd. Parleau had heard more than once that the discipline of the Controllers, Situational Analysis, had become the last art form. And equally often, Parleau had also heard that the majority of Regional Chairmen were former Controllers. Not vast majority. Just majority. Plattsman was long and aesthetic, dark of complexion, having black, unruly hair and deep chocolate eyes that expressed little but observed everything. He moved without obvious gesture or mannerism, but with an effortless exactitude, as if every motion were exactly what he had intended it to be. Youngest by far on the staff, Plattsman could easily move to some Region as chairman someday. Slow and deliberate, when the pressure was on he could change into one of the most serious and stern of taskmasters. Parleau felt no particular threat from Plattsman, knowing it would be years yet; Plattsman had not been sent to replace him, but to learn. Parleau understood these things, and the loneliness of this path; after a time, nothing was worth any effort but the work and the power. Still, he felt the most empathy here, to Plattsman, and wished him continued success.

  The three visitors waited by their accustomed places until Parleau gestured to them that they should be seated, lowering himself into his own chair as he did. He waved at them impatiently. “Good day, good day, daymen. Shall we leave the pleasantries and go to the matter at hand?”

  They nodded, and began unpacking briefcases and untidy portfolios. Eykor, so it appeared, had the smallest pile, so by common consent he would be the first to speak.

  He began “Why we are here relates to security, so I propose that we ...”

  Parleau interrupted. “Wait. I have read the résumés. Who reported the information and how far upchannel did it go?”

  Plattsman answered, “CenRegCon did, Chairman. The original B-twenty-seven report was on late mids. I have the pertinent duty logs. The first, capture, was routine and normal, so it went, eventually, all the way up. ConSec. No further, though. Not to my knowledge. The second one, of last night, was stopped here for comment or amendment before going on.”

  Parleau breathed deeply. Shorted out by the wily Controllers, just on suspicion, until it could be checked against the files. And it matched. And they held it. They could have let it go, and who could have taken clear reprisals against them? The Controllers were notoriously independent-minded; so they were saving him, but for what reasons? He would have to run that one later.

  Plattsman produced several sheets of electroprint and read, from the forms; “Thirty-one Tenmonth two-three-four-five local hour . . . Item forty-six incident of suspected terrorism, Regional Museum of Technology and applications. Watchman reports certain instruments in the Petro section dismantled, destroyed by acid. . . . The next entry is . . . yes, Item sixty-two. A member, female, reported apprehended without papers or reasonable explanation near Museum, attempting to cross River Five on a methane pipeline from the composting dumps. Remanded to Interrogation.”

  He paused, shuffling the papers some more. “Then here’s a follow-up, ‘subject member refused to give name of number. Remanded back to Interrogation.’ ”

  “And here . . . the last report, a follow-up, which we stopped. It looked wrong. By this time there’s a case number on it. We were going to have a look into it anyway, but then this Medic Venle reports that Interro had somehow put a live female ler into a sensory deprivation chamber. While inside, something so far undetermined occurred to the subject, who we may now refer to as ‘Item forty-six,’ and Item forty-six upon recovery was observed to have no measurable mental processes beyond infant state; some kind of regression had taken place. One of the things that stood out was that this report was made in B format, but of course a B is not appropriate because as a ler, she never had an A submitted on her. It was kicked out of process control. When we cross checked, we found the references. That’s all, Chairman.”

  Parleau said, “We will have to follow it up and finalize, because at Continental there’s an open case file. Understand? But careful, now. Nothing on this goes out without my initials.” He tamed to Eykor. “Now. What’s gone on there?”

  “Chairman, it’s all pretty much as in the reports. I was present part of the time, because the interrogators said that they could not crack her. We tried, but nothing. It was minor, of course, but the more we said, the tighter she became. We did not try drugs or stimuli, but total isolation seemed to be a good idea. At the time—we had no idea. . . .”

  Klyten asked, “And what was her age?”

  “She never said. We took tissue samples, along with the other routine identification procedures, but they read out too young using human data base. We didn’t have the ler data and didn’t want to ask for it, you understand, but fifteen certainly seemed too low.”

  Klyten commented, “You’re right, there. It is too low. I might say a better guess would put her, say, about twenty. Yes, twenty, plus or minus a year. How long did you give her in the box?”

  “Well, at the time she was taken out, about twenty-five days.”

  “Twenty-five days? I’ve heard that hard human cases break in ten!”

  “Well, now, Klyten, that’s more or less true, but we just assumed she’d react similarly.”

  “Judging from events, a poor assumption, something even a student adviser would have advised against. Or did you know then that they have the ability to autoforget, dump all the mnemonic data they have collected since birth?”

  “No, we . . . well, hell, so we made an error. But all the same, we had enough evidence to connect her to the Museum job, and terrorism is a capital offense anyway, so . . .”

  Parleau interrupted Eykor again. “
Wait. Terrorism, is it? You must have a live victim to have terrorism.”

  “Chairman, we interpreted the destruction of valuable instruments and artifacts as a distinct crime against society, harming the people in general. After all, there were persons on duty about the Museum also.”

  Parleau looked off into space for a moment, then turned back to Eykor. “Eykor, all sorts of deeds, good and bad, have been done in human history, and they all carry the same reason: that they were done for the good of the people. Now I’m no moralist or ethicist, nor squeamish when it comes down to what must be done. Let it roll! But whatever we do here, please let us all use more rigor in our definitions that ‘it’s for the people.’ That’s just bullshit, and you and I alike know it. Now what were these valuable instruments?”

  “Some ancient devices used in geodesy and petroleum exploration, to search out likely sites.”

  “Specifically, what?”

  “A highly miniaturized Magnetic Anomaly Detector, apparently originally towed behind an aircraft. The other was a Gravity Field Sensor, likewise miniature. That was why the acid. This last measured the local field strength of gravity. The custodian informed us that both instruments were reputed to be very sensitive and capable of precise resolutions, say, on the order of a handsbreadth across.”

  Parleau said, “Curious, curious. What could possibly have been her motive?”

  Eykor answered, “We have no idea.”

  Parleau looked at Klyten, who shrugged. Then at Plattsman. At first he shook his head, but began tapping on the metal desk surface with his long fingers. After a time, he said, hesitating, “... The instruments were used to find subsurface oil sites, you say?”