Narbiton cleared his throat elaborately. ‘If you incrime Penta by stating any of this to her, I’ll go straight to an infopoint and file an Infringement myself.’
‘You’re still so bitter about her?’
Narbiton said, ‘In a way that’s irrelevant. When you took Penta off me I didn’t exactly like it. But I lived with it. Now something’s happened which seems to have warped your priorities. And we both know what that is.’
Krister said quietly, ‘We both have relatives who suffer from Forenthoris.’
‘And your sister is one of them.’
Krister felt like telling Narbiton what risks Penta was really taking — entirely on her own initiative at that. But Wels was not a reliable confidant. His claim to being protective toward Penta was as false as it sounded.
Narbiton was saying, ‘I’m not having Penta incrimed because of Clare’s illness.’
Krister controlled his temper and said, ‘In the first place I didn’t “take” Penta off you. What childish talk is that?’
‘She was my Entitlement.’
‘And it didn’t work out.’
‘It did till you came along.’
‘You make it sound like Victorian melodrama.’
Narbiton clenched his fists till they went white. ‘She was allotted to me by the Puter and I can prove it.’
‘Who’s denying that? You really are getting down to cases! And what a case it turns out to be. Your ticket to this clinic was supposed to be your liberalism — such as it was — but when it comes to the blast-off you revert to Orthodoxy and “Entitlements” and all the fallout of the Regime! You used to criticize it. Now you hide behind it. Or haven’t you noticed?’
‘You can pile on the insults all you like; but basically you’re all twisted up because your kid sister looks like a geriatric.’
‘As you said.’
Narbiton said, ‘You’re planning to incrime Penta against her will?’
Krister said, ‘Suppose I did tell Penta? Do you imagine she can’t make decisions for herself? If she wants to stay out, she’ll stay out.’
‘You can abort that line of thinking. If Penta knew what you were doing over this chap Prentice she would no more validate ignoring this than she would grow leaves. You don’t know her, Kin.’
‘And you do? What do you think doctors are for, anyway?’
‘Kin. The work we’ve been doing here has only been tolerated because we only go so far. And no further. And although we’ve sailed pretty close to the wind at times the Regime have put up with it because they think it’s safer that people like us — or people like you, if you prefer it — must have some sort of outlet. We’ve obeyed the alphanumeric of the law if not the spirit.’ Narbiton thumbed toward the patient beyond the one-way mirror. ‘Nothing can help that chap in there. He’s an advanced Phrenic and if — at this stage in his life — you ever succeeded in getting away with secret brainops and actually planted intermesh you’d almost certainly make him worse.’
‘I accept that.’
‘How long do you imagine he can go undetected without it?’
Krister stared straight back. ‘That depends on how long I can keep you from rushing to the nearest infopoint.’
‘If you think it’s only me you must be punchdrunk. How many times have the police been in here in the last few months? Four, five, half a dozen times? It’s getting to the point where they drop in, all nice and friendly, about once a week. And every time they come they insist on everyone — patients included — checking out on the infopoint. Just how can Prentice do that when he doesn’t have intermesh?’
‘Give me time.’
‘You haven’t got time. There’s no way round it.’
‘I’ll have to think my way round it.’
‘It’s evidently time I did the thinking for you. And here are my thoughts. Call an ambol right now, on interfono, and have that man sent straight to Central Pool. Let them decide what to do. If they think it’s safe for him, they’ll fit him out with intermesh and he’ll be able to live a normal life. Otherwise he’s at risk the whole time and so are you and so is this clinic.’
‘No dice.’
Narbiton put an arm on Krister’s shoulder. It was intended to be a friendly act. ‘Look, Kin, I understand. You have some vague idea that if that patient has some kind of hookup with the past, he might just have a remote inkling of how Forenthoris was caused in the first place. But — God’s Printout! — what an outside chance! Who knows what gem of information he might come up with? — The demise of the chocolate biscuit?’
‘I happen to know he’s a lot closer than that.’
‘You mean he got a lot closer to Clare than he should have. I’m not blind. I know she’s being sheltered by the IoM. No doubt they sent her to the PONEM to lure your friend into a trap — and it is a trap … whatever excuses you make. He belonged where he belonged — and his name is a name on a tombstone. Have you looked at your sister lately? Objectively? She’s an old hag! Face it! Even if you do discover the cause of Forenthoris, how can you possibly help a wizened old creep who would give my grandmother nightmares?’
‘Cool it.’
‘You talk about research but you don’t know how to make use of the information. What’s the good of just knowing?’
‘It might save others.’
‘I concede that you might be a bit more objective about that line of action — if only you really meant it.’
‘I assure you I do.’
‘And just how do you get past the Regime, when their whole policy is to sift out these threats to the race and isolate them? We don’t want them! Nobody does! Suppose you manage even to prevent the gene showing up? What proof is there that it isn’t recessive — liable to show up again in even greater profusion because by that time you’ve managed to make it legal for them to mate? But you know that won’t happen. You know that the Puter contains self-faking software which deliberately falsifies genetic information. Can you quote me one single pseudo-senile who’s been let off the hook from so-called voluntary euthanasia? You know you can’t. The Regime wants to get rid of bad blood and on the whole I think it’s right. No one pities Clare more than I do but that’s her way out — an abrupt and painless end to suffering. And that’s how it’s got to be.’
‘And do you intend to report me if I take a different view?’
‘It depends on how far you go. But one thing I promise you. If you communicon one word of this to Penta, I’m going straight to an info-point with the whole works.’
Krister said, ‘Once you showed signs of being a real doctor — not like those phonies up at Central Pool. It makes me pretty explosive to hear you threatening me because I want to help people other than by killing them.’
Narbiton said, ‘Play god all you like; but I treat people who can be cured. I don’t allow myself to get morbid about terminal cases. That kind of sentimentality went out with Santa Claus. Morrow. I’ve got a clinic in Exeter … for people I can help, not mope over.’
Krister stood there thinking, then motivated the see-through. He noted that Narbiton’s slouch had got worse. For all Wels’ insistence upon having valid goals, he knew himself to be a failure.
Krister watched him until his magnecraft disappeared along the old motorway, hovering the regulation nine inches from the surface. Krister found himself wondering whether, if Narbiton got called to an emergency, he’d even risk extending it to ten.
But Narbiton — and his threats — had to wait. There was work to do and a puzzle to solve. For Neil Prentice evidently didn’t know the one thing Krister did — that Norton had been razed to the ground by fire during the summer of 1976.
To Krister this was simply a matter of history. But what would it mean to a man who had projected himself through a PONEM out-of-era — before his real-time life was resolved?
5
Neil was beginning to find out how difficult it was to hold the universe steady.
You had to somehow concentrate on a remark
ably small planet called Earth, and try to ignore the fact that space was tearing past your point of observation at a velocity you could not measure. E=Mc2 all right; but how did Einstein’s formula behave when more than one universe was involved at the same time? To hold position was like attempting to tread water in a whirlpool … something was trying to suck you in all the time in a vortex where clocks had no meaning. You were forced to rely on the expansion rate of space/time itself. The mind simply couldn’t manage the sum.
Odd that space was so unlike a vacuum. It contained the aggregate of all that had ever happened and all that would; so that a conglomorate of events were superimposed on one another layer by layer, rather as one photographic transparency can be decked on another, and that on another, and so on, until none of them remains distinct. But the sensation was multi-dimensional and somehow you contrived to be both observer and participant. You belonged in one particular transparency and you had to avoid slipping into the next …
Or did you? Suppose you found you could move at will from one picture to any other? Could this be the way to solve the marrying of the events of one era with the results in another? Was it feasible — even in a state of schizophrenia?
… Then, out of this spacial disarray something tangible was trying to distil itself and dominate the pattern. For a moment the object was so gigantic it reached across the sky from one spiral nebula to another.
It was a human eye, a very beautiful human eye; and with it went a voice, a soft, gentle voice, infinitely far away and echoing through the time-slots of Möbiic tubes — recognizably similar to the tunnels of an earlier experience, one where such a Voice — albeit a different Voice — had warned him to jam a girder in the door.
But the new voice had a fresh tonality and pitch; and though it ran unevenly, like a record slipping on the turntable, it settled eventually until the message was intact. It ran, ‘Neil, are you really going to run away from me?’
Neil found that although he could hear his own voice in reply, it seemed out of sync with the movement of his lips; and moreover a huge satellite — manmade — had got in the way. It loomed huge for a second … the burned out shell of Apollo 13, the stage of the rocket you chuck away when you’ve finished with it. Then it fell away into the consuming sky.
Neil could recognize the girl’s voice. It was Ann Marie.
He said, ‘I’m not, I’m not. You’re here too. But in a different form.’
Excitedly the Voice said, ‘Explique!’
He tried. But the message came out as nonsense:
*
‘The other day, inside a hole
I saw a girl without a soul:
Her soul was somewhere else instead —
I wish her soul was in her head!’
*
The voice coming back contained both humour and alarm, as if Ann Marie were trying to reassure him when in fact she was close to panic herself. ‘Not quite the Lewis Carroll I have heard,’ she said. ‘You’ve changed it a bit.’
*
Krister checked that Neil was sleeping, then went to the foyer. Here stood the plastic bubble of the infopoint; and next to it, by absurd contrast — the cola dispensing machine. Krister dropped in a tally, collected the ice-cold carton … and privately noted that this — almost the only device in existence that was worked manually and didn’t involve intermesh — was just about the one machine that Neil would be able to operate. The thought somehow amused him.
Then he crossed to the infopoint and thunk the correct channel. The speak signal registered in his brain via intermesh. ‘Name file to be accessed.’
‘Neil Prentice.’
‘Job number?’
‘Not known.’
‘Your authority?’
He lied, ‘Department of Health and Social Security.’
‘Reference year?’
‘Mid nineteen-seventies.’
There was a brief pause. Then: ‘File in security store. Semi-compiled and non-available. Do not re-ask. This is an Infringement. Stop end finish.’
Krister felt that tiny shudder you got whenever the Puter mentioned that particular threat. Then he shrugged and returned to the patient, who was now stirring from his uneasy sleep. As he woke, Neil said: ‘The process of suffering does not recognize the significance of Time.’
Krister said, ‘Very eloquent.’
Neil said sharply, ‘I must have that information! About the patients in Schuber’s wing. She needs it immediately.’
Krister gulped the remainder of his cola and chucked the carton down the chute. ‘Aren’t you being a bit naïve? — You’re talking about an episode over a century ago and yet you use the word “immediately”!’
‘It’s immediate for her.’
‘True. But we are also talking history. In any case, passages of time do not correspond on a one-to-one basis. How can they? You’ve been here for hours — yet under TNA-1 you can’t have been on the theatre table for more than a few minutes. Timeflow in the interschizoid sense is not pegged down to the clock.’
Neil awoke fully. ‘Interschizoid — you’re aware of that terminology?’
Krister said, ‘That terminolog was in your paper. Some of us have read it, though as I’ve said, it’s banned. We have our own Braknells, believe me! You may think Braknell was a bit reactionary but I assure you his attitude was short of the hardliners of these times. I want to talk more about this interschizoid state. If possible I’d like to go into the business of Forenthoris with more precision.’
‘May I have a cigarette?’
Krister offered him a harmfree. He said, ‘It may not taste much like tobacco but you’ll live longer … if that makes sense in this situation.’
Neil said, ‘Interschizoid thinking is the process of working back from an imaginary point in the future and then reconciling the sequence of events so that they fit the present day.’
‘So when you started having worries about the work being done in G Block you applied this process?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what did it suggest?’
‘It … I must say I don’t think much of these harmfrees, Dr Krister! What do they make them out of — peat?’
‘Synthetic tobacco is derived from natural gas.’
‘I thought I recognized the smell.’ He stubbed it out. ‘The process suggested that an era demanding super-intelligence of a rather spurious sort — based purely on the old-fashioned IQ idea — would come about.’
‘Which it has.’
‘But I found a snag in the argument. You can’t have “intelligence” hanging from nothing, in mid-air. Intelligence is the product of learning — in other words, experience.’
‘Go on.’
‘Experience and learning takes time. You learn as you grow. The more experienced you get, the more you’re able to apply your intelligence. Ordinary logic, yes? Nothing interschizoid in that.
‘But when you try to fit it in with what was happening in research, you find a chicken and egg situation. Which comes first? The intelligence — or the experience? Superficially, of course, they happen together. But a research project can’t be approached like that. If you try and produce a human brain of ultra-high intelligence, there has to be some way of providing it with more experience for getting there. Right?’
Krister nodded. ‘Communicon.’
‘How do you do it? No one can experience more than goes in. And it can only go in at a certain rate. Therefore the only way of arriving at this super-duper intelligence is to speed up the rate of growth of the brain — and therefore the body containing it. And since you can’t treat one part of the body — in terms (as I called it) of “Virtual Age” — the whole person ages that much faster.’
Krister said, ‘God’s Printout! Forenthoris!’
‘But there’s an even worse pitfall than the disease itself. You see, people who do not apply interschizoid reasoning think the other way round. Instead of choosing an imaginary point somewhere in the future, thereafter work
ing back, they take the present and work towards an imaginary point in the future. In other words, they make forecasts. Well I’ve found that forecasting — even using computers — is nothing like so reliable. Furthermore the very fact that you’ve said something, and placed it on record, affects what people assume to be the case from then on. In my day a man called Enoch Powell forecast a sort of wild black invasion. The whole of England would — in no time — be faced with an exploding negro problem. Result — immediate prejudice against blacks. The forecast didn’t come true but the hatred did.
‘So where does that fit this situation? — It fits like this, it seems to me: The Puter — being a descendant of the original computer and having access to all the old files — responds to logic. It’s far more logical than the researchers in G Block who were so busy manipulating genes and chromosomes for the sheer love of the thing. In other words the computer knew the chicken and egg problem long before any person did.
‘But then we have to ask who programmed it, because the emphasis had to be placed on the egg rather than the chicken. I mean on the intelligence rather than the aging. Otherwise there was no point — and therefore no excuse — for those experiments. So what did the computer do wrong? Or, to put it the interschizoid way, what did it do right? It produced two completely different answers. A chicken answer (which was the truth) and an egg answer (which was what everyone at the time wanted to hear). If my guess is right, the chicken answer was totally disregarded, though it must still be somewhere on file. And if I’m right, it amounts simply to this: that whereas you can’t generate super-intelligence artificially without the process of rapid aging, you can certainly produce rapid aging without increasing the intelligence!’
The Prayer Machine Page 11