Amos seemed to disappear. An invisibly fast force leaped from where he had stood, a force that touched one thug after another. You could see the progression of the force by the roll of violent jerking across the crowd. The thugs dropped in stunning succession. Leslie heard the soft, soggy sound of human bodies falling.
The violent force paused for a moment; Amos appeared where it had left off, reorienting himself. The remaining thugs held their ground, but seemed dazed by the attack. Amos disappeared again.
A gunshot barked. Amos reappeared, sliding across the green grass. When the sliding stopped, Amos lay unmov-ing, his face filled with the impassive calm Leslie had known so often. Now, however, his calmness seemed unnatural.
Leslie returned to the building and called the police again. A helicopter came to the rescue, filled with paramedics. They arrived too late.
Kira stood before the flat dullness of the apartment door and stared into the peephole. Of course, from her side of the door, she could see nothing. But she had come for a confrontation; let it start even now, before the door opened. With an angry swing of her wrist, she raised the knocker and struck home once, twice, three times.
She waited. Dull thudding suggested the motion of a large man. When the sound stopped, she knew he had come to the peephole, and that his confusion mounted with every passing moment. She smiled disarmingly, and wondered whether the smile confused him even more.
Click. The door sprang open in response to the strength of a forceful man, a determined man. Bill Hardie stared down at her with an astonishing display of teeth, halfway between a smile of greeting and a snap of fangs. Though he spoke softly, his voice blurred with the intensity of his emotion. “You wiped my tape,” he said.
“Yes.” They stared at each other, fencers seeking an opening. “Let me in,” she said.
His eyes widened with amazement, then amusement. His arms spanned the distance from the door to the doorframe, blocking her entry. He crossed his legs into a more casual stance. With this simple motion he declared how little of his power he needed to deny her demand.
Kira stepped forward, crossing the threshold. Now, to close the door, he would have to physically push her away. Her eyes drew down from his half-mocking eyes, across the dark tan of his throat, slightly mottled in color, to his open shirt collar. She could see the lean lines of muscles spreading across the exposed part of his chest; she could sense their extension under the cotton of his shirt, down his arms to the massive strength of his hands. He had large hands—hands meant to lift great weights, to hold and control the flight of a ballerina.
She stepped forward again, a small step. She could feel the slow, steady surge of his breath as he exhaled.
Her smile widened as she reached forward to press her hands against him, to force him to accept her arrival. With his arms spread wide, he was completely vulnerable, even though he stood unyielding before her.
He did not let her touch him. With the snap of an uncoiling spring, Bill whirled away. One hand still held the door. His other hand turned up, offering her the sweep of the living room. “Please, the apartment is yours,” he said with a mocking lilt in his voice. “You can go anywhere but the bedroom.”
“f m flattered. I doubt that you make that offer to other women who come here.” She flipped her hair behind her head and strode into the living room. He followed at a distance, the hint of a swagger in his step.
She tossed her briefcase on one end of the couch and turned to face him. She caught him watching her legs, the firmness of her calves. For a moment, she allowed him to enjoy the sight of her body. “I came to tell you what a jerk you are.”
His eyes flew up to her face in contempt. “What a jerk I am? Should I remind you that you are the one who destroyed my property?”
Kira pushed his comment aside with a wave of her hand. “The way I deceived you is nothing compared to the way you’ve deceived people all over the world.”
“Really.” He was mocking her again. He crossed his arms. One shoulder dropped as he leaned toward her. He made Kira think of a tree bowing into the wind. “I’ve given them the truth!”
“You’ve given them perversions of the truth.” Kira warmed with anger at his sarcastic attitude. “You’ve twisted the language from a means of helping people think, to a weapon to shut the mind off. You’ve denied them the undistorted facts needed to form intelligent opinions.”
“Undistorted facts!” His arms broke apart, then slapped against his legs as he snorted. “A newscast doesn’t have the time for undistorted facts, little girl. But that’s okay, because I give my audience something better: undistorted truth. I collect all those facts of yours together and distill them to find the truth. And then I select the facts that best present the truth, and give the people those facts. That’s the problem with you Zetetics—you are Zetetic, right? You have this cockeyed idea that facts are more important than truth.”
“Unfortunately, there’s a massive flaw in your definition of truth. You don’t understand that you can only extract the truth from the facts by using an unbiased mind.”
“An unbiased mind?” Bill rolled his eyeballs. “Your Zetetics are biased all the time. Every one of your experts wears his biases like a collar on a dog. You can’t describe a problem to them without hearing about their lists of starting prejudices.”
“But of course. A Zetetic expert is trained to recognize his own biases, and state the assumptions that form the basis of his arguments. And he is trained to know the one form of bias that can be tolerated. It is the one form of bias that must be tolerated—the bias that makes good thinking possible.”
Kira watched Bill squeeze his lips together as if he knew that she was waiting for his cue, as if he knew that he should not give it to her, as if he knew that he would give it to her anyway. “And what is this one oh-so-important bias?”
“The bias of extensive knowledge. The man who has detailed knowledge about the ten alternatives under consideration has the right—has the duty —to bias his opinion based on that knowledge. The legitimate expert always has a bias based on his information.”
“Sure, little girl. Just how do you tell whether he’s biased by his information or by his emotion?”
‘There are at least two ways.” She ticked the alternatives off with her fingers. “The first way is to have him tell you all his information and to make your own decision based on that. The second is to watch him as he gathers new information. If his bias is based on information, it will change as the information arrives. If his bias is based on emotion, it won’t change until he’s faced with personal destruction.”
“And that’s how you think I am, right? I won’t change my opinion until I’m faced with personal destruction?” Mockingly he held his hands forward, clenched in the fists of a boxer. “Do you plan to destroy me?”
“I don’t know.” She turned from him to open her briefcase, and riffled through it for papers. The pause gave her a chance to reflect on the meaning of her upcoming actions. Softly, sympathetically, she continued, “I came to tell you that in addition to being a jerk, you’re a stupid jerk.”
“Oh ho.” Bob. Weave. “You almost got me that time. You have a great vocabulary, did you know that?”
“Yes.” Her moment of weakness, her sympathy, passed easily. “And you’re a dupe as well. A puppet. A puppet of the Wilcox-Morris Corporation—the biggest tobacco company in the world.”
Bill stopped waving his hands in the air. “What?”
She turned to the first page of a thick folder and started reading. It was merely a list of undistorted facts; she left the truth to Bill to determine. The facts listed were the names and positions of people who were invited to parties and sporting events and special art exhibitions. People from magazines and advertising agencies and television stations—all the people who had even the least chance of influencing decisions to give a special newscaster a special chance.
The facts included a list of the special-interest groups supported by Wilc
ox-Morris donations, with their newsletters that suggested which newscasters might be most interesting to listen to. It described pep talks with employees of tobacco companies, in which certain programs and articles received glowing praise, and where the employees heard that writing to the owners of those magazines and TV stations to praise certain editorials might be helpful to the survival of their companies, and the survival, therefore, of their jobs.
The facts included the dates when these campaigns of hidden persuasion peaked: they matched the dates oi #Bill’s strongest attacks against the Zetetic Institute. The correspondence formed a fascinating nonfactual but possibly true study in coincidence.
Bill tore the folder from her hands and stared at the mere facts for himself. His proud face took on the lines of tortured anguish. She knew he wanted to tear the folder to pieces and fling it in her face, but he could not quite do it. His disrespect for facts did not run quite deep enough.
He spoke with the tense strength of a violin string snapping. “None of this could make the difference. I had to be able to make it without them; they didn’t force anybody to cover me.”
“Yes, you poor fool.” Kira shook her head. “You could have made it on your own. That’s what made you the perfect dupe. They had to find someone with the talent to become a great newscaster. Then all they had to do was give him the chance—and make sure that he learned, indirectly, that his chances came fastest when he did the work they wanted done. They needed someone to attack the Zetetic Institute. They found him.”
She watched his jaw muscles swell and subside. She softened again. She knew that she herself had played loose with the difference between fact and truth in this encounter. “Let me point out that I have lied several times since I arrived here.” He jumped, as if afraid of the touch of her words. “As a Zetetic scholar, I must point out the inaccuracies of my statements. It is not true that you are a jerk; it is only true that you have acted like a jerk many times. Nor is it true that you are stupid; you have only acted stupid repeatedly. Nor is it true that you are a dupe; you have the power to stop being a dupe, or an idiot, or a jerk, any time you desire. All you have to do is choose to think.”
His eyes were upon her face, yet he did not see her. For the first time, she noticed the scars on his knuckles, and wondered what fights he had fought, what walls he had beaten to take such hurts.
When she left, he still stood in the center of the room, a tree that has been cracked in the middle, but that has not quite broken.
December 8
America never remembers the past The Soviet Union never forgets.
—IndustriaVAge Societies: A Historical Perspective
Leslie stood outside the intricately etched doorway, reluctant even to make his presence known. He felt the eyes of the kid behind him, and the eyes of the house in front of him. None of it felt good.
This time the house did not sing to him with Amos Leungs voice. He searched the porch for a doorbell, found none. As he finished searching, the door opened.
Flo—beautiful, graceful Flo—appeared as a wraith. “Colonel Evans. You are quite punctual/’ She spoke with the same melodious precision as always, but with little animation. “Please come in.”
Les stepped to the side, motioning to Ronnie. “Thanks. But first let me introduce Ronnie Dwyer. Ronnie just finished his MS in computer science from RPI. We’re hoping he can help you with the comm problems.”
Squeezing his hands together nervously, Ronnie stepped forward and shook hands with Flo.
Flo smiled with good grace, saying, “I am pleased to meet you.”
Ronnie offered her a smile in return and mumbled hello.
The living room in red and gold had not changed; only the encompassing presence of Amos Leung was absent. Leslie kicked one of the beautiful cushions accidentally. The feeling of goatlike awkwardness that Amos always brought upon him returned. He snorted.
“What did you say, Colonel Evans?” Flo asked.
“Nothing,” Les replied. In some sense, Amos Leung’s presence remained.
“Would you care for some tea?”
Les nodded, but Ronnie spoke rapidly. “No thanks. I don’t drink caffeine.”
Les rolled his eyes; Flo just smiled at the boy. “I see. Do you drink water?”
“Uh, yeah.”
Flo disappeared into the kitchen.
They sat in the quiet peace of Amos’s living room for a while. At length Ronnie whispered, “She’s beautiful.”
“She certainly is. She’s also old enough to be your mother.”
“I guess so. Man, I wish I were here for some reason other than because her husband …”
The cup of tea appeared beside Leslie’s cheek, giving off a warm and luscious aroma. “Because my husband died?” Flo finished the sentence.
Ronnie choked; Flo handed him his water.
“My husband was a wonderful man. It will be a great challenge for us to complete our small project without him.” She turned away for a moment, then turned back. “But we shall.”
Ronnie jumped into the work at hand. “What exactly was Dr. Leung working on at the end?”
“We had submitted part of the HopperHunter’s obstacle-dodging software to Mr. Dante-Cortez for testing.”
“Have you gotten the results back?”
“Yes. It worked quite well.” Flo did not notice the look of shock on Ronnie’s face; that kind of software could not possibly work well on first test. Leslie easily guessed the thoughts behind Ronnie’s expression: No one writes code that good. Flo continued, “Of course, we had planned to make a few optimizations. The responsiveness of the simulated Hopper lagged when approaching a ridge crest.”
Ronnie sipped his water. “What kind of documentation do you have for this stuff?”
“I am the documentation,” Flo sang. She pointed at her head. “It is all here. That is why we will work together.” She turned to Leslie. “I am sorry I cannot complete this task on my own. I did not … quite … learn enough to create new software by myself.”
Leslie shook his head. “Of all the things to worry about,
Flo, that’s not one of them. I think Ronnie’ll fill the missing part of this team quite effectively.”
Leslie listened to the two new partners as they spoke together. The contrast struck him as garish—perhaps similar to the one Amos might have seen when Leslie himself spoke with Florence.
They agreed that they would continue to work there in Flo s home, since the development system Amos had built was unique. Leslie shook his head in amazement. Ronnie didn’t belong here, in this house filled with Amos’s presence, and surely Flo knew it. Her pain at the thought must be terrific, yet it remained submerged when she spoke. Only her gauntness and a heaviness in her walk that few would notice revealed her sorrow.
Les yearned to take Flo into another room, to talk with her, to reach inside and caress her mind. Her loss in Amos paralleled his own loss in Jan.
He did not attempt to console her. He knew he could not reach behind her smile and her bright eyes, for an unyielding dijferentness sheltered her. Les realized that the house could yield to Ronnie’s strange presence. Flo might even redecorate, an affirmation of the reality of her loss. She would adapt, brilliantly, outside that inner differentness.
In the meantime, Les saw hope that this unlikely collaboration would work. For the Sling’s sake, it had to: on the PERT chart outside his office, a blood-red stream of boxes carved a grim scar across the body of the Sling.
Yurii smiled. Despite the harsh snow outside, despite the gentle crumbling of the General Secretary across the table, he felt at peace with the world. “We’ve been so successful negotiating with the Americans, I can’t think of anything else we would want to take away from them.”
Sipyagin wheezed, then commended him. “Yurii, you have outdone yourself this time. I can hardly believe what you’ve wrought myself, even though I have always firmly believed the Americans had the desire to commit suicide. How did you talk them int
o this incredible agreement?”
Yurii shrugged; when one’s victory was as stupendous as this, one could afford humility. “I confess it hardly took any effort on my part other than the suggestion. They wanted to surrender the one area in which they have always had the ability to overwhelm us.”
“Can it be that, deep within their souls, the Americans are afraid of their own technology? They must be, despite their endless parade of shiny new gadgets.”
“Perhaps.” Yurii frowned. “And yet, I cannot quite believe it. Perhaps the American politicians are afraid of technology. In some important sense, American technology does not belong to them. It belongs to the engineers who create it, and the businessmen who sell it.” He shook his head. “Or their attitude could simply be pragmatic. For the past several decades, the American power to create technical wonders has not helped their military machine. Why, even in the late 1980s, they were using radios from the Korean war—radios with vacuum tubes in them! I heard reports about American attempts to build computerized command and control systems, while they were depending on those radios for communications. It was laughable. “
The General Secretary chuckled deep in his throat.
Yurii shrugged. “Despite their technical wizardry, the Americans make clumsy weapons.”
“Except for their airplanes.”
Yurii nodded. “Yes, their airplanes and their submarines are very good indeed. But even in those areas they manage to hurt themselves. They build machines so expensive that even the Americans, wealthy as they are, cannot afford many of them.” He paused, refocusing on the question of why the Americans had made their latest agreement. “Perhaps this treaty reflects a new American understanding of how poorly their technology has served them. Perhaps they have recognized this ongoing failure, and have resigned themselves to it. Perhaps they would have carried out the terms of the treaty even without our signing it.” He smiled. “Well, our signing certainly hastened the process.”
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