New Writings in SF 18 - [Anthology]

by Edited By John Carnell

  On his left. Ran Wade decorously removed his own, brown Vice-Presidential wig: with a comforting sense of superiority, Jenkins noticed the implanted lump under his skin of the standard Medicare feeling control receiver: all persons (if you could call them that) of four-star or lower rating were fitted with these from birth; they were under the control of broadcast transmissions from the Government and of the overriding short-range transmitters carried by all five-star men and women (the real people, you might say); and there were only three settings—neutral (open to symbolic communication), plus (ecstatic joy), and minus (indescribable Angst). He also noticed that the upper part of young Wade’s head was shadowed with fuzz.

  ‘Wade,’ he said sharply: ‘You’ve not shaved this morning. Ain’t respectful.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Up all night, and working to the last minute to get this presentation set up for you. You taught me yourself, sir, profitability trumps even propriety in emergencies.’

  “F you weren’t the only trouble-shooter here who ever shot any trouble, I’d not believe any emergency could be that hot. Must be the first time in the history of publishing, somebody tells the chief exec of the leading house he’s gotta believe he’s gotta hire a certified crazy and grade-labelled bent. How you goin’ sell me that, boy ?’

  Wade waved at the screen in front of them, which immediately began to show, first a fine-grain scanning raster, then the title (set in Playbill) ‘Django Maverick: 2023.’

  ‘You understand, sir,’ Wade whispered, ‘we have no live recordings of Maverick’s past: this is a reconstruction, played by actors; but as near true as any reconstruction of the past can be; we can base policy on it.’

  With a brisk, crisp snap of snare drum, the screen showed a school learning room, early twenty-first-century decor, seen from the back, high on the right: a hundred children are hunched over their individualised teaching machines, earphones on; the group teaching screen at the far end of the room (screen deep) is blank. One child’s head (screen left, high corner) turns, and the editor pounces in to a choker close-up of part of a child’s grubby, tear-stained face, then freezes. Voice over freeze: ‘It all began when a child began to think.’ Cuts home to the learning room (as before): the teaching screen lights up; a woman’s face appears on the teaching screen, says, ‘731 Maverick, at once to the Head Programmer’s room.’

  In a large office, his back to the camera, a small boy is standing in front of a desk; behind the desk, a seated man, fifty-ish, silver hair, and opium pipe; standing at his shoulder, a woman in glasses; behind them a whole wall of computer Ins and Outs, very antiquated (push button input and monochrome view out), typical of a lower quartile urban school in the early twenty-first century.

  ‘Look, Maverick,’ the man says, ‘you’re here to be trained to do it the way it’s done. The big teacher doesn’t want the answers to the problems, it wants to see you arrive at the answers the right way, the way everybody else does. If you do things different, you know, you won’t get work when you have to leave here, because you won’t be able to do the work there is along with the people there are.’

  The boy answers: ‘But it takes so long to figure that way, with only two different marks for the numbers. Look’ (he says, holding up his hands), ‘I have ten marks for numbers, one for each finger: I call them Al, Bill, Charlie, Dave, Ernie, Fred, George, Harry, Ike, and Nobody; I write them A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and O for an empty hole. It doesn’t take so much space to write as the big teacher’s way, and I can do the sums quicker (even in my head) than the big teacher can.’

  The woman smiles: ‘Yes, Maverick. And you do get the answers right: what I mean, we know you get the answers right, because big teacher sets problems with answers he knows. But when you go out to work, it’s different: people don’t know the answers to sums about real things until alter they have been worked; so if somebody wants to be sure that you have worked a sum right, he can only tell by checking through the way you did it; and if you did it a funny way, he wouldn’t be able to know you were right, even when you were. See?’

  The boy’s back stiffens: ‘No. Why act dumb, when you’re smart? Why do things the hard way, when there’s an easy way?’

  The man, gruffly now: ‘You aren’t smart, Maverick: the tests say you’re not smart; if you were smart, the tests would have shown it, and you wouldn’t be here—you’d be in one of the creative conformity schools the big corporations run for the flyers, the people they want to own when they’re grown.’

  The boy goes forward away from the camera on to the desk-top, flailing with small fists at the pink face, the silver hair, snatching the opium pipe and throwing it in the woman’s face. An alarm bell begins to ring, shaking the whole world. A policeman in period flak-jacket and riot helmet slips swiftly in from screen right: the boy is soon enclosed in the police net, injected with the usual sedative, and carried off screen left (like a load of Christmas presents) on the policeman’s bent back.

  The woman drops her hand on the man’s shoulder: ‘You shouldn’t have done that, Hero; shouldn’t provoke a one-star boy to hit a three-star man: for that, they have to put him in a change tank.’

  ‘Where else can he go, Delia ? He isn’t plastic: probably the one who did his plasticity rating test had been crossed in love the day before, or something, and the kid slipped into a regular school when he should have been in a change tank all along. My job is to make the normal conformal, not to do hospital work with crazy kids. Is it, now?’

  ‘S’pose so. Come to think, a change tank may be best for him after all. He’d soon have to leave here, and then he’d never get work; not honest work, only in the criminal gangs. And then, in the change tanks they don’t bother what you think or what you feel, so long as you keep your nose and your cell clean: they’re supposed to reform people, or re-educate them, or cure them, or something, but they haven’t got the staff; the change tanks aren’t so different from the old prisons as we like to think and are supposed to say. Whereas on the outside you have to think right and feel right or else.’

  ‘Right, Delia: close the file. Dinner tonight?’

  ‘Mmmmm!’

  The screen faded to a black blank. Murray Jenkins had pointedly replaced his silver wig of office; the other executives, noticing this now, hastily put back their own brown, blond, black, and red wigs of office, each according to his station.

  * * * *

  A new title appeared on the screen (in Grotesque sans eight): ‘Django Maverick: 2031.’ A scowling young man is hustled past and down a corridor, by a couple of heavy change-tank therapists in the usual fibre-glass armour. A third follows, carrying some things that look very like, but not quite like, a mop and pail. They all disappear through a door at the far end (screen deep) of the corridor. Now the young man, his two therapists, and the third other man are standing with their backs half to camera in an office. Facing them sternly, from his chair behind a desk, is a gross, silver-wig man with a big, black sink-brush moustache, wearing a short white coat; behind him, a heavily barred window and a picture of B. F. Skinner on the wall.

  ‘731 Maverick, Governor,’ says one of the heavy therapists : ‘Up to you for Deviant Behaviour, sir!’

  ‘What seems to be his trouble?’ says the Governor, with a ritual steepling of his fingers before the sink-brush moustache.

  The third therapist points. The mop and pail suddenly loom in close-up, and it is possible to see that the pail has been mounted on an improvised wheeled chassis (like a child’s go-cart), while the mop has been adapted (with a piece of string netting and some packing wire) so that you can squeeze it without bending down.

  The young man says: ‘But, sir, this way I can do my stint of cleaning twice as fast with half the fatigue; don’t have to bend down to squeeze the mop, or to shift the bucket. If we all did it this way, there would be twice as much time for Group Therapy, and we would all get better quicker.’

  The Governor (frowning): ‘You don’t seem to grasp the fact, 731, that you’re here t
o learn how to do things the way things are done. Outside, floors are cleaned by automatic swabmats; inside, floors are cleaned with issue mops and issue pails, in the issue way. Anyway, there is an insuperable shortage of qualified group therapists. Prescription : one hour of thump therapy, to plasticise the mind, followed by ten days of meditation therapy in the private room, with adjuvant ascetic diet to facilitate the therapeutic meditations. That will be all, gentlemen.’

  Chaos, as the young man leaps forward on to the desk top to attack the Governor. For a moment, before he is subdued by the hulking therapists in their fibre-glass armour, he gets his fingers into the Governor’s sink-brush moustache, and the Governor’s eyes pop as he pulls at it. Soon, he is laced into a safety suit and carried away. Fade to black.

  Murray Jenkins forced a cough: ‘Bit fantastic, isn’t it, Wade? Hard to believe there was all that open, crude violence, even in those days. Makes me doubt the rest, boy.’

  ‘There really was, sir. Any student of the period will confirm that. Before there were implants, violence had to be done to the sensors, from outside, rather than by direct contact with the appropriate part of the brain: you had to use a lot of violence to produce even a small effect, and you had to use it visibly; naturally, it looks barbarous to us. Nowadays, of course, we can use violence after the model of love: from inside, using a very little power to produce even the greatest effect; it doesn’t show.’

  The smell of fear in the viewing room had become ranker: it was all right for Wade, a creative man, to say this sort of thing; but, all the same, to compare violence with love was to make the sort of serious joke that’s better not made; it wasn’t eufunctional, somebody who told that kind of joke (or even laughed at that kind of joke) could easily be rated dysfunctional, stripped of his stars, and sent to a change tank. Of course, it was just that you were sick, the change tanks were where you got the very best medical treatment to change you back into a well man; but everybody knew it was best to stay out of the change tanks if you could.

  * * * *

  Now the screen was showing a third title (Perpetua bold): ‘Django Maverick: 2033.’Accompanied by striding bassoon music, a change tank therapist in his hulking fibre-glass armour shoulders through the crowd in a hallucinogen bar, up to a sinister man who is openly smoking a bootleg carcinogen and drinking God knows what from a big, silver pocket flask. Over faded bassoon notes, the change tank therapist hisses:

  ‘I tell you, Tonio, he’s crooked creative. A wrong C. Just what you tell me to keep an eye open for. Sure! We’re always having to rough him up and dump him to stew in solitary, for DB: you know, doing it different. N’I mean diff-erent, not the old way with nice new trimmings; real different, so it bugs you. He’s just what you tell me you need. You want to spring him ?’

  A large packet of money changes hands. Dissolve to an office: there is a Magritte on the back wall, beside an engraving of Carl Friederich Gauss; a man with a Bermuda tan and a tall forehead is sitting at an antique desk; on the desk are a high-velocity Oerlikon 0.25 sub-machine gun, a ten-inch slide rule, a hand-punch for falsifying IBM cards, and other things characteristic of criminals of that decade (as a disembodied voice-over-picture points out). The sinister man from the hallucinogen bar comes in screen right, helps himself to a large carcinogen (Jamaica) from a cedar-wood box on the desk.

  ‘It’s a good lead. Capo,’ he says, puffing luxuriously: ‘This contact of mine in the County change tank was a real head-doctor before he got busted to therapist for viewing heterodox technical tapes (s’why he needs the extra money I slip him; used to a higher standard of living): if he says this 731 Maverick is a five-star crooked C, then that’s what Maverick is. F’I were you I’d spring him fast, bring him into the family.’

  The man behind the desk makes a gracious gesture of assent. Fade to black.

  Murray Jenkins turned to Wade: ‘Never knew that, boy: they had this trouble back in the twenty-thirties, did they?; bootleg creativity, creative work sold outside channels, at cut prices.’

  As he hit the operative words in each shorthand description of unethical activity, the massed executives behind him winced in unison. Bootleggers, channel dodgers, price-cutters—these were the people who made things difficult for management, by giving customers alternative sources of supply (cheaper and faster too, because these unethicals didn’t look after their staffs properly, didn’t load the cost of that into their charges), by giving stockholders alternative sources of management skills and consulting aid. A manager was supposed to know about such things, of course (the way a head-doctor was supposed to know about DB), so that he could take proper precautions and proper remedial action; but it always felt queer to be discussing such things in public, especially when people both above you and also below you in star rating were present; made you feel naked.

  * * * *

  With a ripple of high clarinet music, modulating into the lower register (with walking bass and marching bass drum behind) the screen showed a fourth title (in hand lettering, dry brush on rough cartridge): ‘Django Maverick : 2034.’ The man behind the desk in front of the Magritte offers the young man from the change tank a big carcinogen, takes one himself, and they light up.

  ‘Look, Maverick ... uh ... look, Jan: your probation is over now. You’re in. But that means you’re not a kennel dog any longer: got to be a hunting dog, or starve. You dream up a better way of doing something, find somebody to bootleg it to, you cut a straight half of the profits. The family takes the other half, for keeping you alive and on the outside; gives us a big interest in looking after you. You don’t dream up anything, or you dream up anything you don’t leg; well, then, you get nothing, we get nothing, and we don’t care what happens to you: we let the change tanks care.’

  Cut to big head of TV newscaster, screen on screen, speaking urgently into a microphone carrying the an monogram plate of Americas News. He is saying: ‘... just heard, that Jan Maverick, age 21 years, was charged by the Management Consultants Association police, Special Investigation Division, with skill-legging, deviant behaviour, and price-cutting. According to the MCA police. Maverick had been trading under cover with clients of data processing corporations belonging to the MCA: it is skill-legging for a non-member of the MCA to offer data processing services in any of the advanced industrial countries; his deviant behaviour (DB) consisted in performing hand-tabulation and mental calculation operations, instead of using standard methods that can be checked by a third party carrying out an efficiency audit; his tenders for the work undercut those of MCA members by an average of divisor 1010, threatening fair-deal employment policies maintained by MCA members for the benefit of the staff. Judge Marcantonio Tenebroso, after a two-minute recess (to make a telephone call) threw the case out of court; on the grounds that the MCA police had failed to satisfy the requirement, that corporate police bringing charges of white collar crime before a federal court must show (i) that the alleged criminal behaviours are not in the public interest, or (ii) that the said criminal behaviours are subversive of advanced industrial society. In an obiter dicta (legal joke irrelevant to the case being tried), Judge Tenebroso suggested that cut-price skill-legging, using new money-saving techniques, was what had made the Americas great, and what (God willing) would keep the Americas great. As he left the courtroom, Jan Maverick was pelted with flowers by grateful stockholders of the great corporations, most of them past retiring age and living on their investments. Sources close to the MCA say that Judge Tenebroso has a long-standing association with the Family to which Django Maverick belongs: this Family, of course, finances and controls the Fitzgerald machine in 124 states of the Americas, and Judge Tenebroso was a Fitzgerald appointment in 2029. Americas News.’

  Fade to black, with dying fall of triumphal trumpets.

  Murray Jenkins put another quarter-turn of boost on his presidential aplomb and gave Ran Wade two seconds of his third most chilling paternalistic smile.

  ‘Wade,’ he grumbled, ‘this Maverick character has mad
e himself real unpopular with the MCA: they don’t like people cutting them and getting away with it. Either we’d be hiring ourselves an incipient corpse and paying out pension to his widow for all the years he ought to’ve been making money for us, or else we’d be buying ourselves years of Grade A harassment from the MCA enforcers—do you want the MCA goosing up a stockholders’ posse and offering to efficiency-audit us on their behalf for nothing?; (won’t even mention what they mightn’t get along to, if they found that smooth plays weren’t scoring for them). This Maverick has got to have something wild, to make him worth hiring.’

  ‘T’isn’t so much what he can do for us, sir: it’s more what he could do to a publishing business like Tellus, if we don’t hire him in and get control of his activities. You’ll see in the next reel of tape: this is a dramatic reconstruction, time telescoped in, from information we got through a microbug in the office of the head of Maverick’s family (hidden in a bigger bug they know about and turn off when they talk secrets rather than stalls).’

  Wade waved to the projectionist, and (with a crescendo of snarling brass, mounting kettle-drum thumps) the screen flared into the title (set in horror movie Black Letter) ‘Django Maverick : 2051.’ Once again, the screen shows the office with the Magritte on the wall, the man with the Bermuda tan and tall brow (facing us), and the sinister accoutrements on his desk. A scarred man of about forty comes in screen right, sits into a straight cut to an over-shoulder close-up of Bermuda tan, who says: