Corrupting Dr. Nice

by John Kessel

  "That's good." Gruber contemplated the highway, as if there were nothing more to say. "It's good to be realistic."

  Realistic. Simon was silent for a moment. "I have been studying, and it has come to me that whenever one of you speaks of the need to be realistic, one may be sure that this is always the prelude to some bloody deed."

  "You've caught hold of the true modern temperament there, Simon. But the past is full of bloody deeds, too. You see this scar on my wrist? I got this in Napoleon's tent before the battle of Austerlitz. I rodgered the little man's mistress, but he caught me pissing in his bordeaux. 'Be realistic,' I told him. 'It wasn't very good wine to begin with.' He yanked out his pistol and shot me as I was diving out the door. Never liked the French; it's heredity with me."

  "I have not forgotten that you haven't answered my question yet."

  "Question?"

  "About working on both sides of this trial."

  "Oh, that. Well, it's simply that one of Rosethrush Vannice's companies bought the rights to the trial."

  "Which explains why you need me to create a good impression. The trial is being broadcast."

  Gruber looked at him. "You didn't waste your time in jail, did you."

  "This Mr. Thrillkiller of the Committee to Protect the Past. Is he working for Ms. Vannice as well? Is he perhaps going to make sure that I am convicted?"

  "No, he's a completely independent agent. His committee is against time exploitation. Nothing would please him better than to see you acquitted."

  "Does he expect me to make public appearances?"

  "You'll have to talk to him about that. I wouldn't be surprised."

  "And he wants me to be sympathetic. Or perhaps simply pathetic?"

  Gruber smiled. "Publicity is vital to our modern legal system, Simon. Do you know what a legal AI is?"

  "I have some idea."

  "Well, the decision will be handed down by LEX, a legal AI. The question of who has jurisdiction over you historicals had been snarling up things, until the Saltimbanque corporation agreed to submit its claim to LEX.

  "LEX is programmed with the legal code. But the reason the old U.S. legal system broke down is that it consistently tried to eliminate public opinion from its workings. You might as well try to breathe without air. So we've incorporated the opinion of subscribers to the legal system into LEX. Twenty percent of LEX's judicial temperament is bound to scientifically sampled cross section of subscriber opinion. It's up to you and your lawyers to see that such opinion goes your way."

  "I must work to create a favorable impression."

  "If you want to maximize your chance of acquittal."

  "And Ms. Vannice is willing to help Thrillkiller accomplish this. Despite the fact that her son was almost killed?"

  "I think the operative term there is 'almost,' Simon. Why not assume that she's grateful to you for not killing her son?"

  As long as the publicity is good, Simon thought. He sat in silence as the rain ended and they entered the outskirts of New York City. Simon had taken a virtual trip to New York while in prison, but the reality was impressive. Hundred-year-old glass towers glittered in the sun, verdant gardens spilled over the sides of architectural ramparts, signs flashed and music blared. The wet pavement shone. The car carried them down the West Side Highway, until Gruber took control and drove it to an underground garage beneath a complex of buildings towering above the river.

  Gruber led Simon out into a pedestrian mall of stupendous proportions. Swarms of people in colorful clothing, shouting children, more music. The gabble of voices echoed off a skylight far overhead. Bright sunlight filtered down between the branches of trees, was broken into fragments by a fountain noisy as a waterfall. Everywhere were screens and display boards and advertisements talking above the noise of the crowd. Huge faces, smiling. Bright clothes. Yet more insistent music. It was the celebrity world he had seen over the prison television, and he was in it.

  They needed a celebrity for this trial. Well, perhaps he could give them one. As he walked along behind Gruber, Simon smiled and waved at the people who passed, just to see how many would wave back at a complete stranger. A surprising number did.

  FIVE: DANCING IN CONNECTICUT

  Owen had spent the afternoon running intelligence tests on Wilma. In cleaning up afterwards he found an opened box of surgical gloves in his supply cabinet. Someone was messing with his dinosaur. He looked for further signs of tampering, but found none.

  By that time he was late for the ball. But he could not leave Wilma without taking some precautions. He broke open a case of security midges and spent fifteen minutes programming them. "Bill," he said. "I'm going to hook the alarm into your remote."

  =Smart idea.=

  He turned on the midges, which flitted into the shadowy corners of the greenhouse, then he locked the doors and hurried back to the house. It was already 6:00. The dance would take place in the college commons ballroom, and the college was in Alcott’s Corner, twenty-three miles from Thornberry. His parents had gone on ahead. Owen ate some newfood, stripped off his sweaty coveralls, took a shower, grabbed a white shirt and tuxedo. On the wall a TV tuned to one of his mother's outlets blared away. It was a report on the upcoming zealot trial. A video of the hotel siege ran through the depressingly familiar security pix of Owen’s kick-boxing frenzy and culminated with Simon refusing to shoot Owen as the SWAT team broke in. The report switched to a clip of the New York press conference following Simon's release on bail. Simon's handlers had gotten him up in traditional first-century clothes.

  They had to be more comfortable than Owen's tux. He cast a longing glance at his mood boots and settled on sadistic genuine leather dress shoes. He hoped his parents appreciated what he was willing to go through for the family.

  But why kid himself. Owen would not have gone to the dance had it not been for the chance to see Emma Zume there. He had been able to think of little else since her visit. He only hoped he could get her alone.

  He checked his watch. It was after seven. He moussed and combed his still-wet hair, and ran down to his car.

  "To the College of Advanced Thought," he told the BMW, and the car glided out of the drive. Owen tried to collect his thoughts. With all the rushing around he was sweating like crazy. He could feel the wet hair lying on his collar. He rolled down the window and let the breeze blow his hair dry.

  The two lane country road was beautiful in the darkening evening. As the sun set, the boles of the trees flitted by in darkness, while the tops were still in bright orange light. On one side a white board fence ran along the road, surrounding a pasture as tidy as a Puritan kitchen. A couple of horses looked up to watch him pass. The traffic was light, and the BMW hummed along with a machine's efficiency.

  He supposed the gloves could have been used by Thrillkiller, though Owen had not seen him wearing any. Could ComPP be trying to steal Wilma? But then why would they approach him so openly? It might be a reverse ruse to draw suspicion away from themselves if Wilma disappeared later. But he had to be turning as paranoid as Bill even to come up with such a scheme.

  Arriving at the campus, he pulled up in front of the union, got out of the car. "Go charge yourself," he told it. He straightened his tux, took a deep breath, and entered.

  The College of Advanced Thought had originally been Word of God Ag & Tech, a post-millennium sectarian school that went belly up after the religious upheavals resulting from time travel. Ralph Vannice bought the physical plant and stocked it with his eccentric collection of historical figures and cast-off celebrities. Most of the buildings were in the old New Millennial architecture of sixty years ago, full of fins and setbacks, private courts and security ziggurats. The red-brick union building was an exception, with genuine ivy and tall, many-paned clerestory windows.

  For a number of reasons, the college had not made back its investment. The faculty of historicals had a certain novelty attraction, but their academic credentials were not recognized by current institutions. Most of the teach
ers were out of touch with their disciplines and were taking a pharmacopoeia of contemporary drugs just to cope.

  But it made great tabloid news. In publicity for the family enterprises Owen supposed the college might be paying off after all.

  By the time Owen entered the ballroom the dance had moved past the opening minuet into a waltz. Around the gleaming hardwood whirled women in gowns adorned with feathers, men in formal black jackets and waistcoats, white ties and gloves. Two massive crystal chandeliers hung from the high ceiling. Midges glided throughout the room, recording the glitterati for later PR. At the far end of the ballroom, a Victorian orchestra played "The Beautiful Blue Danube," under the direction of Strauss himself.

  Rosethrush Vannice had called in every client on her list. Wearing a gown that showed her bosom to good effect, she stood chatting with Shakespeare, flown in from Hollywood, resplendent in a white tux, hair down over his collar and a ruby stud glinting in his ear. The Bard of Paramount had his arm around a woman in white whose décolletage made Rosethrush’s gown look modest. Owen's father was there too, sporting a Ben Franklin personality mod: he wore knee breeches, a fur hat and wire-rimmed bifocals. Which was ironic, as a young Franklin, the real one, was standing not ten feet away dressed in the fatigues of a lunar colonist. Franklin's brown hair stood up in a fright cut.

  Owen spotted Emma Zume and Lance Thrillkiller together at the entrance to one of the drawing rooms. Before he had taken two steps his mother's voice rose above the music. "Owen! Come here! You must meet someone."

  Owen smiled, pointed at his ear as if he could not hear, and powered toward the drawing room. When he entered there was no sign of Emma.

  The room was crowded with the well and oddly dressed. Although Owen could not always tell the faculty from the guests, he did recognize some of the more notorious historicals. A young Einstein and a younger Goethe had cornered Dorothy Parker by the bookshelves, but she seemed to be holding her own. In bizarrely accented English, Gandhi swapped stories with Cortez. Owen wandered through the room, eavesdropping. The economics department had seized the conversation pit, where Marx and Friedman went at it. "If you want to help the indigent seize control of their lives, abolish their civil rights," Friedman was saying. "You can't legislate human nature."

  “There is no human nature independent of culture,” another man said.

  “Help me out,” Owen subvocalized. "Who's that?"

  =Clifford Geertz,= Bill whispered. =20th century anthropologist.=

  “There is no human nature independent of coture,” an elegant man observed in French-accented English.

  =Hubert de Givenchy.=

  “Ah, yes--clothes make the man,” quipped another.

  =That's either Vladimir Nabokov or Groucho Marx.=

  A man Bill could not identify was inhaling scotch and talking space. "Exploration has come along somewhat since your time," he explained to an older one with an impressive beard.

  =Santa Claus there is Konstantin Tsiolkovksy.=

  "Colonies on the Moon, Mars. Expeditions to Io, Titan. Orbital scientific stations around Venus. Some historicals are involved: Oberth, Korolev."

  "Korolev? A Russian?"

  "The Chief Designer of the Soviet program. You know who the soviets were?”

  “It is hard to grasp history that happened after your own death.”

  “Berman physics has opened wormholes for space travel. You can take a step to Mars. We pipe air and water from old Moment Universes up there."

  "Why not simply send colonists to the Mars of the past, when it had an atmosphere?"

  "That old Mars is hard to find. The solar system's moved a long way in the last billion years."

  A remarkably beautiful woman that Bill tagged as Sarah Bernhardt. ". . . but if Jesus got involved, that might swing some sympathy to the Zealots."

  "Jesus is only twenty-three. He was taken from Galilee long before he was involved with the zealots," another woman said. “He doesn't even know Simon. He's got his career to think about."

  “How about Yeshu?"

  "What, he must be fifty now. No, the defense's only chance is to mount a major publicity campaign. Get Simon to weep on the net . . ."

  ". . . this place will never be accredited," a portly man blared. "Not in science, anyway. In a real university AIs do most of the heavy lifting. Nothing compares with the cool rationality of machine intelligence. The kind of physics these fossils do would be part of the humanities. The history of science is full of intuitive missteps, ideas rejected because of fear, envy and simple inability to change. Look at the Copernican revolution, evolutionary theory, relativity, chaos, the IQ debates. Just go to one of Vannice's faculty meetings and you'll see the errors of the past living on. How could anyone accredit such a farrago?"

  Still no sign of Emma. Owen was about to take another chance on the ballroom when he was accosted by a short man with a neatly trimmed beard. He peered at Owen. "Your parents' soirées are indeed a hair-raising experience." He chuckled. "How are you, my boy?"

  "I'm fine, Professor Jung."

  "And your dinosaur?"

  "She's fine. You must come to see her. She's gotten much bigger."

  "Not surprising."

  A dour bearded man stood a few feet away, clearly eavesdropping. He did not turn to them, but spoke loud enough so that people's heads swiveled his way all around the room "I would not put much credence in anything Jung tells you, young man."

  =I give you three guesses.=

  "Dr. Freud? Nice to meet you. Father said you had joined the faculty." Owen could not imagine what psych department meetings must be like with both Freud and Jung on staff.

  Freud seemed to be focusing on a point somewhere past Owen's left ear. "So, young man, why the interest in such large, extinct animals? Animals with long, snakelike necks, not so?"

  "Let the boy be, Sigmund. He's not interested in your archaic reductionist quackeries."

  "Always you are afraid, Carl. You fashion your dreams into collective fantasies rather than face the neuroses they indicate. I am trying to keep this boy from wasting his life, as you have."

  "If I've wasted my life, then why am I here? Have you read the papers I wrote after you died?"

  "You didn't write them. They brought you forward before you got to them."

  "I would have written them. And yes, they did bring me here--ten years before they got around to bringing you."

  "It took them that long to see through your unscientific mystifications. Ten years they wasted before they figured out they needed to go to the source, not some polluted tributary."

  "Excuse me," Owen said. "I think I forgot to wind the grandfather clock on the east landing."

  "Grandfathers, he says now." Freud nodded significantly.

  "Just a minute, Owen," Jung said. "Tell Herr Freud about that dream of yours--the one with the Australopithecus and the garden hose. I challenge him to analyze it."

  Owen pointed toward the door. "Isn't that Moses calling me?" He pumped Freud's hand vigorously and fled the lounge.

  In the corner of the ballroom behind a jungle of potted plants, Owen located the bar. He ordered a scotch, then scanned the room in search of Emma Zume. Had she left already? The bartender sorted cocktail napkins, watching Owen. Finally he meandered back. "Quite a circus they run here," he ventured.

  "Complete with costumes," Owen said.

  "I wouldn't mind having some of the cash Vannice senior spends to stock this gene pool. But I wouldn't waste it on dead people."

  Owen looked him over. "It brings jobs to the area. Must have been pretty quiet around here when the old college closed down."

  "There was more drinking at the church school," The bartender said. "I'm thinking of emigrating."

  "Where to?"

  "Nineteenth century America. I figure I could even live right in the area here, a couple hundred years ago."

  "What would you do?"

  "The government gives you a hundred acres, technological support, medical.
Sure it's primitive, but hey, at least you got a chance to respect yourself."

  "No VR clubs. No twanking salons. No flash parlors."

  "Have I got the cash to get twanked? In the past, instead of being behind the curve, I'll be ahead of it. I know a lot of things those historicals don't. I'll be part of the ruling elite instead of third class."

  "Why not just go to Mars?"

  "I like a place with air. What do you care, Dr. Vannice? You're sitting pretty."

  Owen was nonplused. "Have we met before?"

  "No. But if your conscience is bothering you, you can get me into your mother's agency. I've got a degree in drama from Yale, for what it's worth. Which is not much when every job on Broadway goes to people who were dead before I was born."

  "I'll see what I can do."

  "You ought to. Enjoy the party," The bartender turned his back and adjusted a bottle on the shelf behind him.

  Was that some sort of threat? "Bill, is everything all right with Wilma?" he subvocalized.

  =Copacetic.=

  How much credence should he put in the resentments of bartenders? Owen scanned the room. Still no sign of Emma, and he'd also lost track of his parents. People looked at him strangely. Discomfited, Owen left through the French doors at the end of the hall. The limpid sky, the darkest of blues edging toward black, set him to thinking about the sky over Jerusalem. A big magnolia at the corner of the stone balustrade proffered blossoms the side of dinner plates, and its sweet scent wafted across the lawns. A number of guests, elegant in evening wear, were strolling down to the lake at the heart of the campus. Owen found a quiet place at the end of the verandah and tried to collect his thoughts.

  A few moments had passed when a woman in a white ball gown glided outside. She came directly over to him. "Hello, Dr. Vannice."

  It was the improbably beautiful blonde who had been with Shakespeare. "Are you sure you've got the right Dr. Vannice?" Her forwardness indicated that she was not familiar with the protocols of a formal dance. She must be a historical from a non-Victorian era.

  She took his hand. Hers was quite warm and, to Owen's surprise, a trifle moist. "You're the right man."