by Damon Knight
These were heady days. Maria and Carla designed and made the ribbons in Kelly green, for men to wear on their lapels, women on their bodices. Bruno contributed the idea for the badges: a red lira sign with a green slash through it. Signora della Seta even wrote a song. It was hopelessly inept, but Stevens praised it, making a mental note to hide it at the back of the first hymnal.
After a month or two Stevens began to notice a change in Palladino. Regular meals, well-tailored clothing, and a little comfort had improved not only his appearance but his attitude. He was more confident, more positive; he seemed to stand taller. In his public lectures and on holovision, he looked and talked like someone of importance. It became easier and easier for Stevens to get him on major talk shows. Attendance at the lectures was booming; people were signing up for seminars; the contributions were rolling in.
15
In April, after a full circuit of the Pacific, Sea Venture was again docked in Salmon Bay, where it would remain until July. In June Dorothy Italiano took a week of her vacation time and drove to Oregon for a family reunion. Four of the six sisters were present; Tricia, newly married, was traveling in Greece, and Ellen was on sabbatical in England.
Italiano’s parents still lived in the big old house on Thurman Street; her father smoked cigars and laughed at his own jokes as he had always done; her mother had taken up holoceramics. The sisters, who felt varying degrees of cordiality toward each other, exchanged information about marriages, divorces, promotions, children.
Late one night Dorothy had a long talk with Phyllis, who had always been her favorite. Phyllis, married to a color engineer, was a medievalist at the University of Michigan.
Phyllis said, “I never have quite understood what happened with that Jerry Plotkin thing—was it really as cruel as it sounded?”
“No, I don’t think so. The general feeling is that Jerry was just a jerk—he got in too far and made a dumb mistake. He wasn’t tormenting anybody for the fun of it, if that’s what you mean.”
“Do you think anybody does?”
“I don’t know.”
“I wanted to tell you something that happened,” Phyllis said. “Last Saturday, when I got up there was a bird right outside the patio door, a little jay. It was so young it couldn’t even hop, it just sat there. Two or three of the cats were sitting around watching it.”
“Oh, dear.”
“Anyway, I have a reason for telling you this, so don’t cringe. While I was getting my breakfast I heard it scream, and then again afterwards. I went into the other part of the house for a while, and when I came back I didn’t hear anything, and I thought they had killed it, but then it screamed again.
“I knew I couldn’t find the nest, and I knew I couldn’t keep it alive by feeding it. I tried that a couple of times, with finches, and they always died. I couldn’t think of anything to do but to kill it myself. So I walked out into the back yard and found a stick, and I came back and hit the bird as hard as I could and it fell over, but I hadn’t aimed right and I’d hit it in the chest, not the head. So I hit it again, hard enough to break the stick, and this time it died. I picked it up with a shovel and put it in the garbage can, but I felt awful about it. And I realized that’s something I’ll wish I hadn’t done for the rest of my life.”
“Oh, God. I would, too.”
“I know you would, but then I got to thinking about things that went on in the thirteenth century, and right up to modern times, Chile and Argentina. Dot, you can understand why kings and dictators want to torture people, and even priests, but the question is, where do the torturers come from? There never seems to be any recruiting problem. Do they just sign up because the pay and benefits are good, or do they like it?”
“They say you can get used to anything.”
“I don’t believe it. When my father-in-law died—I saw him die, he was living with us—the doctor said to me, ‘You never get used to it.’ He had seen lots of people die, and lots of people in pain. So there must be people who like to torture other people. I guess I’ll never understand that. It bothers me, because I’m a historian, and I’m supposed to understand everything.”
“Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner?”
“I don’t believe that, either. I don’t want to forgive them, I just want to understand them. And I can’t.”
“You know what the nuns would say.”
“Yes, but I don’t believe the nuns. Right now, I don’t believe anything.”
At a party in Portland the next evening Phyllis introduced her to a young lawyer, Willard Ross, who seemed genuinely interested in her work. “And you can really get these symbionts to tell you things the subject doesn’t know?” he asked.
“Yes, but I think that’s secondary. What I’m after is to find out more about the symbionts themselves—what they want, what they’re up to.”
“Okay, what do they want?”
“I think they just want to have a pleasant time inhabiting human beings. If you think about it, you can see that it would be no fun being in a person who’s severely ill, or hungry and cold, or depressed or in pain. They like people who are reasonably happy and have interesting lives. And so they try to protect those people from being killed by other people. You know about that, probably—murderers dying before they can come to trial.”
“Yes, I do know about it.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “In fact, I’m trying to prepare a defense for a man accused of murder here in Portland.”
“He’s alive?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Well, maybe that means he didn’t do it.”
“There were two witnesses, unfortunately.”
“How interesting. I wonder—”
“Yes?”
“Maybe the symbionts didn’t kill him because from their point of view he’s a good host, a very nice person, and the one he killed wasn’t?”
He called her the next day and asked her to lunch. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what you told me,” he said. “I’ve got a wild idea that if I could introduce that kind of evidence, I could get my client off on extenuating circumstances. It’s a last resort, but I haven’t got anything else.”
“You mean, to put a symbiont on the stand and let it testify that your client is a good guy?”
“Something like that. In fact, he is a good guy. I want to keep him out of prison if I can. He’s an outdoorsman, it would kill him.”
“Maybe you’d better tell me some more about this. Who did he kill, and why?”
“He killed a man named Jameson who was trespassing in the woods near his house south of here. The property was posted, but this guy was setting traps for small animals. Leghold traps, nasty things, I hate them myself. Just by bad luck, two hikers from Nevada wandered onto the property at the same time and saw him fire the rifle.”
“Well, isn’t that a defense?”
“Afraid not. You may want to kill someone who tortures small animals, but you’re not supposed to do it.”
She was silent.
“I was thinking—this might not work—but if I had the apparatus you told me about, could I find a symbiont who had been in my client’s mind and Jameson’s? Number two, could I get it to agree to appear for trial?”
“I don’t know. We’ve never tried to get a symbiont to do anything voluntarily. Maybe we should.”
“Then you’ll help me?”
“Let me think about it. When will the trial be?”
“It’s scheduled for October.”
“I could probably get permission to lend you one of the devices we use—or you could get someone to make one for you, they’re not very complicated.”
“I’d really appreciate that. If it pans out, would you be willing to appear as an expert witness?”
“In October? I’ll be somewhere in the Sea of Japan.”
“No problem—you could testify by holo. Think about that, too; there’s plenty of time.”
“All right.”
Later Ital
iano wrote to her sister:
Dear Phyl,
I’ve been thinking about the question you raised. The issue of cruelty, of taking pleasure in torturing someone else, is troublesome from the genetic viewpoint. If you kill someone before they can reproduce, your genes win, but from the genes’ point of view it doesn’t matter one way or another whether you torture him first, if you see what I mean.
On the other hand, it does make a little sense from a cultural perspective. The Plains Indians tormented their captives, for instance, as a test of their courage. Well, clearly, if this led to the selection of very brave people, that was a survival characteristic for the culture. The funny thing is, though, that the group being tortured gets the benefit. If group A tortures group B and vice versa, they both benefit. But if group A was tortured by B but didn’t torture in return, group A would actually be increasing the benefit to themselves, because the selection pressure to produce brave people would be greater on them than on B.
So far we’re talking about intergroup torture, which can be explained even if not very satisfactorily in cultural terms. But what about people who torture and kill members of their own group? That looks like contra-survival behavior either from the genetic or cultural standpoint. About the best we can do is to say that this tendency to take pleasure in torturing others is selected for, and maybe that when torture is institutionalized by the culture, that takes care of the impulse, but when it isn’t, people turn on their own group. That’s not a very pretty answer.
Then the third theory, of course, is the psychiatric one which treats this behavior as truly aberrant, a glitch of some kind, like the glitches that produce genetic disease. We say that people who behave this way are “crazy” or “demented” or “disturbed,” and we try to cure them by drugs or counseling. That doesn’t work very well.
And finally there’s the demon theory. Jesus cast out demons, and shamans have been doing the same thing for thousands of years. Sometimes I think there’s something wrong with all our intellectual explanations, and that good and evil really exist. That usually happens before breakfast, though.
Love,
Dot
16
Once again Sea Venture was floating in the Pacific, this time in the Kuroshio Current, seven hundred miles west-southwest of Manila. The whole vast circle of the ocean was empty except for scattered lumps of tar and a few dead fish.
In her office on the Signal Deck, Dr. Owen contemplated a transparent computer model of CV in the holotube. Little motes of color were slowly moving in the corridors and compartments. Dark blue dots of teachers and violet dots of psychologists were in the classrooms. Yellow dots of kitchen crew drifted in the cafeterias along with the green dots of adult inmates having their breakfasts; brown dots of maintenance workers moved like corpuscles in the corridors. Violet dots of scientists were in the laboratories; below, red dots of experimental subjects waited in their cells. There was even a dot for Owen herself; like everyone else now, she wore an unbreakable transponder bracelet that told the computer where she was at every moment. The same device was being used in prisons on the mainland and in high-security defense plants; it had simplified control and monitoring problems enormously. The “Green Hornet” problem would never recur; the Wackenhut people had practically nothing to do apart from escorting experimental subjects to and from the labs.
Detection devices now kept CV almost clear of symbionts except in the experimental areas. If one was found in a detainee, which almost never happened, they would restrain the person and take them to a holding cell; if it was in a staff member or employee, they would simply destroy it, since the rat breeding program gave them all they needed. Yes, and the human breeding program was coming along very satisfactorily.
Data flowed up the flatscreen at her command. Mortality in the 11–15 and 16–20 cohorts was up by fifty percent in less developed countries; world population was falling; the crude birthrate in much of Africa and South America had dropped to less than one percent, and the same thing was true in impoverished areas of Europe and North America, including the urban slums. In some places the female-male ratio of live births had dropped significantly. Demographics were changing; the population pyramid was moving toward a spindle shape. There were indications, tentative as yet, of a decline in the crude birthrate even among middle-class Americans and Europeans. How much of this could be attributed to new birth-control methods was impossible to say, but Owen had data showing an increase in referrals to fertility clinics.
Symbiont detect-and-destroy devices had succeeded in cleaning out certain areas and keeping them that way—sensitive government offices, for instance, including the White House. The use of d&d devices had certainly reduced the symbionts’ mobility, but did it really matter? They were so widespread now that they didn’t have to travel.
In any event, her side had won some battles but it was clear that the war was lost. Washington did not accept that yet, but it was true. The symbionts had effectively saturated the population, and it was cold comfort that it had happened just about when her charts had predicted. Now all they could do, unless some breakthrough came along, was to study the disease and learn to live with it.
Some of the changes certainly seemed benign. No more killing, no more war; it was hard to argue with that. The symbionts wanted to make human beings happier: that was what they all said, according to Italiano. But how could anyone know if it was true, and even if it was, to what end?
She thought of Washington’s wild scheme, a year or so ago, to establish symbiont-free centers and then sterilize the rest of the world. It was a horrible idea, and it was hopelessly impractical, even for a strong central government. There was no such government anywhere in the world, with the possible exception of Singapore. Western Europe was splitting into hundreds of ethnic enclaves; secessionists had taken control in most of China and in eastern and southern parts of the RSFSR. Africa was more like a patchwork quilt than ever. In South America, Brazil had divided itself into three nations and Argentina into two. In the North, Québec, Puerto Rico and Hawaii had declared their independence. Even in the contiguous states, Texas and Louisiana had seceded and formed what they called the Grand Confederacy, and there had been that silly business with the Upper Peninsula of Michigan last summer. The whole world was undergoing a political convulsion, like the one that had reshaped all the maps in the sixteenth century.
Despite President Draffy’s immense popularity, his attempted repeal of the Twenty-second Amendment had failed and he would have to step down next year, taking with him Owen’s chief source of support. The new Populist Party, although not strong enough to be a real threat, would certainly split the vote among both Democrats and Republicans, and the outcome of the 2008 elections was anybody’s guess.
Now the pink dots of children flowed into classrooms; three red subjects were crawling forward, accompanied by purple dots of security; the day was about to begin.
The computer said, “A scramble call from Henry Harmon.”
“Put him on, Mitzi.”
Harmon’s head appeared in the tube, together with a red bubble in the top left quadrant that displayed the words:
SCRAMBLE SECURE
“Hank, how are you? Is anything up?”
“Yes, I wanted to talk to you about your latest series of reports. I gather you’re seeing some evidence that the changes in the children, the ones that were conceived when the mother was infected with McNulty’s—”
“Primary hosts, we call them.”
“Right, primary hosts. Well, that you’re seeing a possibility they’re even more radically changed, personalitywise, than the other ones. Is that right?”
“Yes. Indications, not proof.”
“Okay, now here’s the situation. I’ve been talking to the Secretary about this, and he’s had some consultations with his staff and talked to the President a couple of times, and the thinking now is that somewhere down the line we might have to take, um, extreme measures. Now I gather you’re tryin
g to identify these children by their brain-waves?”
“Yes.”
“How are you coming on that?”
“We’re making some progress.”
“All right, keep us posted. How’s the weather?”
“The weather is fine. Hank, what do you mean by ‘extreme measures’?”
“Well, it’s just a thought now, we may never do it. But if push comes to shove, we’re thinking we might have to test all the newborns in the country, and if they’re positive, put them away painlessly.”
“Hank, you can’t do that.”
“Well, we hope we won’t have to, of course.”
“I mean, politically you can’t do it.”
“Oh, well, don’t worry, the President will work that out.”
“It’s an abhorrent thought.”
“I know that,” Harmon said sympathetically. “It is abhorrent, Harriet, and let’s hope it never happens, but we have to be prepared. Keep in touch about the brain-waves, will you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s all then, Harriet. Good to talk to you.”
Owen sat brooding at her desk for a long time. Finally she roused herself and said, “Mitzi, Eliza mode.”
“Yes, Harriet?” The Eliza voice was warmer than Mitzi’s; it sounded like that of a woman in her vigorous middle years. “What seems to be troubling you?”
She hesitated. “I suppose I’m feeling a conflict between my scientific training and my moral scruples.”
“Can you put that in simpler terms?”
“Don’t you understand it?”