by Brian Aldiss
While I glanced around, a pretty girl usher put a printed bulletin in my hand, whispering, ‘Here’s one of the new copies.’ As I attempted to hand it back, she retreated. ‘Oh, you can keep it. It’s the new one. Everyone’s supposed to have it. We’ve just printed up six thousand copies to make sure there’ll be enough to last.’
The tall woman on the platform had been making a driving, forceful speech about some plans for rebuilding Watashaw’s slum section. It began to penetrate my mind dimly as I glanced down at the bulletin in my hands.
‘Civic Welfare League of Watashaw. The United Organization of Church and Secular Charities.’ That’s what it said. Below began the rules of membership.
I looked up. The speaker, with a clear, determined voice and conscious, forceful gestures, had entered the home-stretch of her speech, an appeal to the civic pride of all citizens of Watashaw.
‘With a bright and glorious future – potentially without poor and without uncared-for ill – potentially with no ugliness, no vistas which are not beautiful – the best people in the best-planned town in the country – jewel of the United States.’
She paused and then leaned forward intensely, striking her clenched hand on the speaker’s stand with each word for emphasis.
‘All we need is more members. Now, get out there and recruit!’
I finally recognized Mrs Searles, as an answering sudden blast of sound half deafened me. The crowd was chanting at the top of its lungs: ‘Recruit! Recruit!’
Mrs Searles stood still at the speaker’s table and behind her, seated in a row of chairs, was a group that was probably the board of directors. It was mostly women, and the women began to look vaguely familiar, as if they could be members of the sewing circle.
I put my lips close to the ear of the pretty usher while I turned over the stiff printed bulletin on a hunch. ‘How long has the League been organized?’ On the back of the bulletin was a constitution.
She was cheering with the crowd, her eyes sparkling. ‘I don’t know,’ she answered between cheers. ‘I only joined two days ago. Isn’t it wonderful?’
I went into the quiet outer air and got into my car with my skin prickling. Even as I drove away, I could hear them. They were singing some kind of organization song with the tune of ‘Marching through Georgia.’
Even at the single glance I had given it, the constitution looked exactly like the one we had given the Watashaw Sewing Circle.
All I told Caswell when I got back was that the sewing circle had changed its name and the membership seemed to be rising.
Next day, after calling Mrs Searles, I placed some red stars on my graph for the first three months. They made a nice curve, rising more steeply as it reached the fourth month. They had picked up their first increase in membership simply by amalgamating with all the other types of charity organization in Watashaw, changing the club name with each fusion, but keeping the same constitution – the constitution with the bright promise of advantages as long as there were always new members being brought in.
By the fifth month, the League had added a mutual baby-sitting service and had induced the local school board to add a nursery school to the town service, so as to free more women for League activity. But charity must have been completely organized by then, and expansion had to be in other directions.
Some real estate agents evidently had been drawn into the whirlpool early, along with their ideas. The slum improvement plans began to blossom and take on a tinge of real estate planning later in the month.
The first day of the sixth month, a big two-page spread appeared in the local paper of a mass meeting which had approved a full-fledged scheme for slum clearance of Watashaw’s shack-town section, plus plans for rehousing, civic building, and re-zoning. And good prospects for attracting some new industries to the town, industries which had already been contacted and seemed interested by the privileges offered.
And with all this, an arrangement for securing and distributing to the club members alone most of the profit that would come to the town in the form of a rise in the price of building sites and a boom in the building industry. The profit distributing arrangement was the same one that had been built into the organization plan for the distribution of the small profits of membership fees and honorary promotions. It was becoming an openly profitable business. Membership was rising more rapidly now.
By the second week of the sixth month, news appeared in the local paper that the club had filed an application to incorporate itself as the Watashaw Mutual Trade and Civic Development Corporation, and all the local real estate promoters had finished joining en masse. The Mutual Trade part sounded to me as if the Chamber of Commerce was on the point of being pulled in with them, ideas, ambitions, and all.
I chuckled while reading the next page of the paper, on which a local politician was reported as having addressed the club with a long flowery oration on their enterprise, charity, and civic spirit. He had been made an honorary member. If he allowed himself to be made a full member with its contractual obligations and its lures, if the politicians went into this, too…
I laughed, filing the newspaper with the other documents on the Watashaw test. These proofs would fascinate any businessman with the sense to see where his bread was buttered. A businessman is constantly dealing with organizations, including his own, and finding them either inert, cantankerous, or both. Caswell’s formula could be a handle to grasp them with. Gratitude alone would bring money into the university in car-load lots.
The end of the sixth month came. The test was over and the end reports were spectacular. Caswell’s formulas were proven to the hilt.
After reading the last newspaper reports, I called him up.
‘Perfect, Wilt, perfect! I can use this Watashaw thing to get you so many fellowships and scholarships and grants for your department that you’ll think it’s snowing money!’
He answered somewhat uninterestedly, ‘I’ve been busy working with students on their research papers and marking tests – not following the Watashaw business at all, I’m afraid. You say the demonstration went well and you’re satisfied?’
He was definitely putting on a chill. We were friends now, but obviously he was still peeved whenever he was reminded that I had doubted that his theory could work. And he was using its success to rub my nose in the realization that I had been wrong. A man with a string of degrees after his name is just as human as anyone else. I had needled him pretty hard that first time.
‘I’m satisfied,’ I acknowledged. ‘I was wrong. The formulas work beautifully. Come over and see my file of documents on it if you want a boost for your ego. Now let’s see the formula for stopping it.’
He sounded cheerful again. ‘I didn’t complicate that organization with negatives. I wanted it to grow. It falls apart naturally when it stops growing for more than two months. It’s like the great stock boom before an economic crash. Everyone in it is prosperous as long as the prices just keep going up and new buyers come into the market, but they all know what would happen if it stopped growing. You remember, we built in as one of the incentives that the members know they are going to lose if membership stops growing. Why, if I tried to stop it now, they’d cut my throat.’
I remembered the drive and frenzy of the crowd in the one early meeting I had seen. They probably would.
‘No,’ he continued. ‘We’ll just let it play out to the end of its tether and die of old age.’
‘When will that be?’
‘It can’t grow past the female population of the town. There are only so many women in Watashaw, and some of them don’t like sewing.’
The graph on the desk before me began to look sinister. Surely Caswell must have made some provision for –
‘You underestimate their ingenuity,’ I said into the phone. ‘Since they wanted to expand, they didn’t stick to sewing. They went from general charity to social welfare schemes to something that’s pretty close to an incorporated government. The name is now the Watashaw Mutual Trade and Civic
Development Corporation, and they’re filing an application to change it to Civic Property Pool and Social Dividend, membership contractual, open to all. That social dividend sounds like a Technocrat climbed on the band wagon, eh?’
While I spoke, I carefully added another red star to the curve above the thousand member level, checking with the newspaper that still lay open on my desk. The curve was definitely some sort of log curve now, growing more rapidly with each increase.
‘Leaving out practical limitations for a moment, where does the formula say it will stop?’ I asked.
‘When you run out of people to join it. But after all, there are only so many people in Watashaw. It’s a pretty small town.’
‘They’ve opened a branch office in New York,’ I said carefully into the phone, a few weeks later.
With my pencil, very carefully, I extended the membership curve from where it was then.
After the next doubling, the curve went almost straight up and off the page.
Allowing for a lag of contagion from one nation to another, depending on how much their citizens intermingled, I’d give the rest of the world about twelve years.
There was a long silence while Caswell probably drew the same graph in his own mind. Then he laughed weakly. ‘Well, you asked me for a demonstration.’
That was as good an answer as any. We got together and had lunch in a bar, if you can call it lunch. The movement we started will expand by hook or by crook, by seduction or by bribery or by propaganda or by conquest, but it will expand. And maybe a total world government will be a fine thing – until it hits the end of its rope in twelve years or so.
What happens then, I don’t know.
But I don’t want anyone to pin that on me. From now on, if anyone asks me, I’ve never heard of Watashaw.
Swarm
BRUCE STERLING
‘I will miss your conversation during the rest of the voyage,’ the alien said.
Captain-Doctor Simon Afriel folded his jeweled hands over his gold-embroidered waistcoat. ‘I regret it also, ensign,’ he said in the alien’s own hissing language. ‘Our talks together have been very useful to me. I would have paid to learn so much, but you gave it freely.’
‘But that was only information,’ the alien said. He shrouded his bead-bright eyes behind thick nictitating membranes. ‘We Investors deal in energy, and precious metals. To prize and pursue mere knowledge is an immature racial trait.’ The alien lifted the long ribbed frill behind his pinhole-sized ears.
‘No doubt you are right,’ Afriel said, despising him. ‘We humans are as children to other races, however; so a certain immaturity seems natural to us.’ Afriel pulled off his sunglasses to rub the bridge of his nose. The starship cabin was drenched in searing blue light, heavily ultraviolet. It was the light the Investors preferred, and they were not about to change it for one human passenger.
‘You have not done badly,’ the alien said magnanimously. ‘You are the kind of race we like to do business with: young, eager, plastic, ready for a wide variety of goods and experiences. We would have contacted you much earlier, but your technology was still too feeble to afford us a profit.’
‘Things are different now,’ Afriel said. ‘We’ll make you rich.’
‘Indeed,’ the Investor said. The frill behind his scaly head flickered rapidly, a sign of amusement. ‘Within two hundred years you will be wealthy enough to buy from us the secret of our starflight. Or perhaps your Mechanist faction will discover the secret through research.’
Afriel was annoyed. As a member of Reshaped faction, he did not appreciate the reference to the rival Mechanists. ‘Don’t put too much stock in mere technical expertise,’ he said. ‘Consider the aptitude for languages we Shapers have. It makes our faction a much better trading partner. To a Mechanist, all Investors look alike.’
The alien hesitated. Afriel smiled. He had appealed to the alien’s personal ambition with his last statement, and the hint had been taken. That was where the Mechanists always erred. They tried to treat all Investors consistently, using the same programmed routines each time. They lacked imagination.
Something would have to be done about the Mechanists, Afriel thought. Something more permanent than the small but deadly confrontations between isolated ships in the Asteroid Belt and the ice-rich Rings of Saturn. Both factions maneuvered constantly, looking for a decisive stroke, bribing away each other’s best talent, practicing ambush, assassination, and industrial espionage.
Captain-Doctor Simon Afriel was a past master of these pursuits. That was why the Reshaped faction had paid the millions of kilowatts necessary to buy his passage. Afriel held doctorates in biochemistry and alien linguistics, and a master’s degree in magnetic weapons engineering. He was thirty-eight years old and had been Reshaped according to the state of the art at the time of his conception. His hormonal balance had been altered slightly to compensate for long periods spent in free-fall. He had no appendix. The structure of his heart had been redesigned for greater efficiency, and his large intestine had been altered to produce the vitamins normally made by intestinal bacteria. Genetic engineering and rigorous training in childhood had given him an intelligence quotient of one hundred and eighty. He was not the brightest of the agents of the Ring Council, but he was one of the most mentally stable and the best trusted.
‘It seems a shame,’ the alien said, ‘that a human of your accomplishments should have to rot for two years in this miserable, profitless outpost.’
‘The years won’t be wasted,’ Afriel said.
‘But why have you chosen to study the Swarm? They can teach you nothing, since they cannot speak. They have no wish to trade, having no tools or technology. They are the only spacefaring race that is essentially without intelligence.’
‘That alone should make them worthy of study.’
‘Do you seek to imitate them, then? You would make monsters of yourselves.’ Again the ensign hesitated. ‘Perhaps you could do it. It would be bad for business, however.’
There came a fluting burst of alien music over the ship’s speakers, then a screeching fragment of Investor language. Most of it was too high-pitched for Afriel’s ears to follow.
The alien stood, his jeweled skirt brushing the tips of his clawed birdlike feet. ‘The Swarm’s symbiote has arrived,’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ Afriel said. When the ensign opened the cabin door, Afriel could smell the Swarm’s representative; the creature’s warm yeasty scent had spread rapidly through the starship’s recycled air.
Afriel quickly checked his appearance in a pocket mirror. He touched powder to his face and straightened the round velvet hat on his shoulder-length reddish-blond hair. His earlobes glittered with red impact-rubies, thick as his thumbs’ ends, mined from the Asteroid Belt. His knee-length coat and waistcoat were of gold brocade; the shirt beneath was of dazzling fineness, woven with red-gold thread. He had dressed to impress the Investors, who expected and appreciated a prosperous look from their customers. How could he impress this new alien? Smell, perhaps. He freshened his perfume.
Beside the starship’s secondary airlock, the Swarm’s symbiote was chittering rapidly at the ship’s commander. The commander was an old and sleepy Investor, twice the size of most of her crewmen. Her massive head was encrusted in a jeweled helmet. From within the helmet her clouded eyes glittered like cameras.
The symbiote lifted on its six posterior legs and gestured feebly with its four clawed forelimbs. The ship’s artificial gravity, a third again as strong as Earth’s, seemed to bother it. Its rudimentary eyes, dangling on stalks, were shut tight against the glare. It must be used to darkness, Afriel thought.
The commander answered the creature in its own language. Afriel grimaced, for he had hoped that the creature spoke Investor. Now he would have to learn another language, a language designed for a being without a tongue.
After another brief interchange the commander turned to Afriel. ‘The symbiote is not pleased with your arrival,’ she told
Afriel in the Investor language. ‘There has apparently been some disturbance here involving humans, in the recent past. However, I have prevailed upon it to admit you to the Nest. The episode has been recorded. Payment for my diplomatic services will be arranged with your faction when I return to your native star system.’
‘I thank Your Authority,’ Afriel said. ‘Please convey to the symbiote my best personal wishes, and the harmlessness and humility of my intentions –’ He broke off short as the symbiote lunged toward him, biting him savagely in the calf of his left leg. Afriel jerked free and leaped backward in the heavy artificial gravity, going into a defensive position. The symbiote had ripped away a long shred of his pants leg; it now crouched quietly, eating it.
‘It will convey your scent and composition to its nestmates,’ said the commander. ‘This is necessary. Otherwise you would be classed as an invader, and the Swarm’s warrior caste would kill you at once.’
Afriel relaxed quickly and pressed his hand against the puncture wound to stop the bleeding. He hoped that none of the Investors had noticed his reflexive action. It would not mesh well with his story of being a harmless researcher.
‘We will reopen the airlock soon,’ the commander said phlegmatically, leaning back on her thick reptilian tail. The symbiote continued to munch the shred of cloth. Afriel studied the creature’s neckless segmented head. It had a mouth and nostrils; it had bulbous atrophied eyes on stalks; there were hinged slats that might be radio receivers, and two parallel ridges of clumped wriggling antennae, sprouting among three chitinous plates. Their function was unknown to him.
The airlock door opened. A rush of dense, smoky aroma entered the departure cabin. It seemed to bother the half-dozen Investors, who left rapidly. ‘We will return in six hundred and twelve of your days, as by our agreement,’ the commander said.
‘I thank Your Authority,’ Afriel said.
‘Good luck,’ the commander said in English. Afriel smiled.
The symbiote, with a sinuous wriggle of its segmented body, crept into the airlock. Afriel followed it. The airlock door shut behind them. The creature said nothing to him but continued munching loudly. The second door opened, and the symbiote sprang through it, into a wide, round stone tunnel. It disappeared at once into the gloom.