As for Michael Rennie, he turned out to be a professor by the name of Frank Faraday, and was an astrophysics lecturer in the learning zone. Somehow I hadn’t pictured him being a scriptwriter for a comedy show, although I have to admit his crack to Paula about looking for another job wasn’t bad. At least, not bad for someone who had very little sense of humor and took himself way too seriously. His wife was a sweet blonde who obviously adored him. They were as apparently mismatched as Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. But since no one had told them they were incompatible they hadn’t realized it, and seemed to get along fine. She introduced herself as Margot, and said she was a homemaker.
Michael Rennie asked what we did, but fortunately the loudspeakers crackled into life again, signaling an announcement was imminent and saving me from disclosing my vocation. I’m not ashamed of what I do, it’s just that people—well, Names—tend to get edgy when they discover you’re with LogiPol, even if they’ve done nothing wrong and you’re not doing anything to make them think you suspect they have. And these four would be edgy enough around Paula as it was. At least until they saw she wasn’t like other Numbers. The crackle of the loudspeakers also saved me from inventing a title for myself so I wouldn’t feel out of my depth, what with a couple of doctors on one side of me and a professor on the other. I think ‘Commander Travis’ has quite a nice ring to it, but I’m not sure anyone except Margot would have bought it.
“Passengers for Niagara Falls, be advised that boarding takes place in ten minutes,” the Voice of Reason informed us. “On insertion of your ID card in the reader to the left of the airlock doors you will each be allocated eight filters from the adjacent dispenser. There is no need to use them during the flight as the passenger cabin is a sealed unit. Flight time is two hours and twenty three minutes, and you will have four hours at Niagara.”
“I hope they give us a barrel to go over the falls in,” I said.
Paula gave me an ‘I can’t take you anywhere look.’
I gave her my best boyish smile.
Her heart melted and she smiled back.
Well, okay, that’s not exactly true. What she actually did was roll her eyes again. I leaned forward and whispered, “If you keep doing that, one of these days your eyes’ll go all the way around, and then where’ll you be?”
Her heart might not have melted, but at least she smiled. Actually, she was fighting back a laugh. I didn’t think my crack about her eyes rolling backward was all that funny. Then I realized she was looking over my shoulder at Frank Faraday. I half turned and saw the professor had hauled a pipe out of the pocket of his coveralls. There was no tobacco in it, of course—smoking was outlawed from day one in the communities. At first there were lots of conduct violations and penalty points levied on people who’d scavenged cigarettes and tins of tobacco from the old cities, but the problem sorted itself out when there was no more tobacco left to scavenge. However there was no law against shoving an antique pipe in your mouth. Which was a pity, because I found it intensely irritating watching the professor chew on his. I wondered if he found it an aid to concentration, or if it was pure affectation. Or maybe it was something deeper, a subconscious way of denying the Numbered blood I was sure ran through his veins. Then again, he might just like to have something other than some teeth and a tongue in his mouth.
I could imagine him taking it out in class—the pipe, that is, not his tongue—and tapping the empty bowl in the palm of his hand while he pondered something profound, or conducting an imaginary orchestra with it in the privacy of his apartment.
I was going to ask if he wanted a light, but Paula dragged me away before I had a chance. She can’t have known what I was about to say, but she knew I was about to say something and no doubt guessed it would be better if Professor Faraday was out of earshot when I said it.
“Behave, Travis!” she scolded as she led me over to the seats vacated by the Paretos.
“I’m just excited,” I told her. “I’ve always wanted to see somewhere like this.”
After a few moments Paula said, “Is it the sort of thing you’re thinking about when you look without seeing?”
“I’m sorry?”
“When you daydream, I’ve always wondered what sort of things you dream about.”
“I dream about lots of things.”
“Tell me about some of them, Travis.”
“Only if you call me Ben—for today, at least.”
“I could bring you up on charges for blackmailing a superior officer.”
I offered her my hands and said, “Go on, cuff me.”
“Why do I get the feeling I’d be acting out some sort of fantasy for you if I did?”
“Looks like you already know what I dream about.”
She laughed. But when the laughter died away her expression was more thoughtful than if she’d only been thinking about my handcuff fantasy. “What do you really daydream about, Ben?” she asked.
So I told her: “Blue skies and far horizons; breaking waves and tall grass blowing in the wind.
“Places with names that sound like they come from lines of poetry: Shanghai, Samarkand and Marrakech; Timbuktu and Kathmandu. Traveling to them on steam trains, sailing ships and propeller-driven planes; by gypsy wagon or caravan of camels.
“Seeing the sights that lined the Silk Route, Salt Road and Frankincense Trail; the Way of a Thousand Kasbahs, the Royal Road of the Incas… Following in the wake of Columbus, the footsteps of Marco Polo, Livingstone and Stanley, Lewis and Clarke. I dream of seeing the world the way it was when Calum Tait saw it.”
“I’ve heard of the others but not of him,” Paula said.
“He was a travel writer near the end of the Old Days. I analyze his articles—that’s my contribution to The Search for Meaning—then I use the pleasure points I earn to go on timesphere trips to the times and places he wrote about. Somehow those trips never capture my imagination the way his words do, though. In the timesphere I can see the big things he wrote about: the castles and cathedrals, palaces and bridges, mountains and beaches—”
“What’s missing then?”
“The little delights he said make life come alive.”
“Such as?”
“Unexpected things that are different in each place, that he’d never read about in guidebooks. Things like a butterfly with brilliant blue wings as big as his hand in a rainforest in Brazil; two dragonflies doing a mid-air dance around a 1000-year-old scholar tree near the Forbidden City in Beijing; seahorses drifting with their tails entwined like lovers in the Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town…
“Things like seeing perfectly sober people stop to listen to buskers in Barcelona and start to dance right there in the street…
“Sitting on the slopes of the acropolis in Athens at sunset and listening to people who’d been washed up by the tides of travel all around him; hearing every language under the sun and not understanding a single word, but knowing what was being said by watching the people as they spoke—the lovers with their arms around each other, the loneliness of solitary travelers looking on…
“Seeing the body of a saint being carried through the streets of Seville and feeling a kind of religious awe, even though he wasn’t sure if he believed in God, let alone religion…
“Visiting the Kennedy Space Center and hearing a young boy ask an astronaut what size spaceships were, and the astronaut answering that spaceships come in all shapes and sizes but the most important one is planet Earth, and we’re all part of the crew…
“Watching a bride and groom being toasted with vodka in St Petersburg, hearing chants of ‘Gorko! Gorko!’ and learning that the word means bitter, and Russians used to shout it after a wedding because they believed life could be bitter like vodka, but the kiss of a bride made it sweet.”
Paula went very quiet, then said, “I love the sound of those names and places and things, but I can’t connect with them or relate to them like you so obviously do. It’s as if I lack an imagination for these things to
capture, a race memory for them to awaken. They belong to a world so different from the community that I can’t conceive of it—it takes more imagination than I have. If I read those articles it would be like they were written in a foreign language. They wouldn’t fill me with wonder, they’d leave me cold. And listening to you talk about them makes me feel less than human in some way.”
“Believe me, you didn’t seem less than human in the library, Paula.”
She gave me something like a smile, then said, “Speaking of libraries, I brought along a book to read on the flight. I didn’t want to annoy you by playing with a logic puzzle.”
“You can tell that annoys me?”
She answered me with a laugh, unslung her shoulder bag and brought out a tattered old book. Lichens and Mosses of the World.
“How far did you get before I took it from you to give Annie MacDougall a read?” I asked.
“Halfway through the third sentence of the second paragraph on Page 97.”
She could doubtless tell me word for word what the sentence said.
“I’ve been meaning to ask what was on your mind before the call came in about the druggie the other day, when you handed the book to me and said: ‘Does this mean anything to you?’“
“I’ll show you,” I said. I reached for the tattered old volume and flicked through the pages until I came to the photo of the golden moss. “It looks like this is the last page Doug MacDougall read,” I told her as I handed back the book. “I’d been going to ask if you could think why those underlined words would change how he viewed life and the world.”
Like all Numbers, Paula loves a cerebral challenge. She turned her attention to the book and I got the feeling she’d forgotten I was there. The color drained from her face as she read the paragraph in question. She swallowed and read it again, and I knew it meant a whole lot more to her than it did to me.
“What is it?” I asked.
For once she was lost for words.
I took the book from her and re-read the underscored sentences, trying to see what I’d missed first time around and Paula had spotted right away.
Immaculata solaris, pictured above, has no common name because it is not commonly known, living only in the most extreme of alpine environments. Studies show it to be remarkable for more than its vivid color and hardiness, for it is not part of any food chain—it does not feed on anything but sunlight, and nothing feeds on it.!!!
I could have looked at the paragraph forever and not seen anything more than a collection of innocuous words. “Paula—”
“I can see why he was killed,” she said, staring at the photo of the moss. “But not how. Unless, it must have been…”
“Paula, what’s going on?”
She looked from the book to me, and said, “Don’t you see: ‘it is not part of any food chain—it doesn’t feed on anything but sunlight, and nothing feeds on it’.”
“So?” I said, exasperated at not being able to grasp the significance of the brief passage. “I can’t think of anything less meaningful. I can’t think of any less likely motive for murder.”
“It changes everything,” she said, as if thinking aloud rather than speaking to me. “At least, from the Ecosystem’s point of view.”
“WHY?”
I’d spoken so loudly the other two couples looked over. I wasn’t caring about them or Niagara Falls any more. All I cared about was discovering what had got Doug MacDougall killed and cast some sort of spell over Paula. Something in my voice must have broken that spell, because Paula looked at me and said, “Don’t you see? If the moss isn’t part of any food chain it’s not part of any bigger picture, of any grand design. It’s tangible proof life can exist for its own sake, just to enjoy the light and warmth of the sun.”
“And?”
“Consider the implications for the Ecosystem.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Think about it: The Search for Meaning and Purpose is an integral part of the Ecosystem. At first people were drawn together by the crisis that destroyed the Old World. Now that we’ve adjusted to a new way of life, and are no longer faced by crisis, we need another common cause to unite us. That’s what The Search for Meaning is.” She looked at the photo of immaculata solaris. “This moss undermines the very foundations of The Search.”
Now I saw what she was getting at, but still it was hard to connect the little patch of color in the faded photograph with a threat to life as we’d come to know it.
Paula helped me out. “It raises the possibility that there is no meaning, that our only purpose is to enjoy the light and warmth of the sun and blossom in beautiful colors before fading away.”
“So why has all this only come to light now, after the Ecosystem’s been going for over fifty years? Hundreds of people will have read the book in that time.” Remembering how dull it was, I revised my estimate: “Well, tens.”
“Not many Names would make the connection. Most Numbers would, but it’s not the sort of book a Number would read. MacDougall must have been the first person to reach the profound conclusion about immaculata solaris—but, unfortunately, he didn’t realize its wider implications.”
“So he’d have put together a thesis, expecting a vast reward in pleasure points—”
“But the Ecosystem identified the threat this new knowledge posed, and wiped out the thesis—and the man who’d written it,” Paula said.
“A computer couldn’t kill Doug MacDougall.”
“No, but it could have issued a directive ordering his death.”
“I’ve a good idea who would carry out such a directive without question.”
“A Pareto,” Paula said.
I nodded.
“A Pareto could move like a ghost, because the Ecosystem would literally open doors for it, and wipe all trace of its movements from the database,” Paula said.
I was glad I was sitting down because I felt dizzy as I tried to take it all in.
Paula was a couple of steps ahead of me, and those steps had taken her to an even more frightening place. “Tra—” She corrected herself and continued in a dread-filled voice, “Ben, have you used the Ecosystem to make any inquiries about immaculata solaris?”
I nodded. A cold sweat broke out on my forehead and palms as I realized what she was getting at. If Doug was killed for what he knew, and the Ecosystem had reason to believe we were on the brink of finding out what Doug knew…
Suddenly my lottery win looked more like the upswing of an executioner’s axe than a stroke of good fortune.
Paula’s next words echoed my last thoughts: “Do you think it’s just a coincidence your number came up?”
“I’m not a big believer in coincidence.”
“Neither am I. Especially when my life’s at stake.”
I looked at the other two couples. They were deep in animated conversation, oblivious to the possibility they might be marked for death because of something I’d done. “What about them?” I said. “Isn’t life sacrosanct to the Ecosystem? Isn’t that one of its guiding principles?”
“Yes, but its over-riding imperative is to further the greater good. It would take whatever action is needed to ensure the good of the many, regardless of the cost to a few.”
“Still, wouldn’t it have found a way to get rid of the two of us without sacrificing innocent lives, like it managed to do with Doug MacDougall?”
Paula looked at the two couples standing at the window and said, “Nobody bought their tickets for this flight, did they?”
“Apparently not.”
“Maybe their lottery win didn’t have any more to do with good fortune than yours, Ben. I think we should go and speak to them, find out a bit more about what they do.”
I nodded. Worried I’d be distracted by that ludicrous pipe I said to Paula, “You better take Michael Rennie and—”
“What?”
“Sorry, the professor and his wife.”
Bemused, she nodded.
We got up and went ou
r separate ways.
Reasoning it was a safe bet Jonny Adams didn’t pose any sort of threat to the Ecosystem, I concentrated my charm on his good wife, the researcher at Community General. There wasn’t much time, but one of the things they teach you in LogiPol is how to get people to tell you things you want to know without them realizing what either of you are doing.
It turned out her special interest was a bacterium called deinococcus radiodurans, which can apparently survive thousands of times as much radiation as a human. It was the sort of subject that would glaze my eyes under normal circumstances. But the present circumstances weren’t exactly normal, and I didn’t have to feign interest when I asked her to tell me more.
Alarm bells went off when she told me she’d recently discovered the enzyme which allowed dinosaurus radiowhat-ever to repair its damaged chromosomes.
My eyes did start glazing over when she started going into details, and I used the old ‘cocking my head to one side and pretending I’d just had a call on my hear-ring’ routine to excuse myself.
I didn’t know if Paula’d had a chance to find anything out, but there wasn’t any more time to spare because the boarding call would be coming over the loudspeaker at any minute. So, after extricating myself from the clutches of Mrs. Dr. Adams and her bacteria, I extricated Paula from the clutches of the professor. This time it wasn’t difficult to avoid making any cracks about his pipe because I had something else on my mind. I got it off my mind as soon as we were out of earshot of the Faradays and the Adams Family. “Heather Adams has made some sort of breakthrough in discovering an enzyme that lets chromosomes damaged by radiation repair themselves,” I told Paula. “I’m thinking that’s got to have implications for repairing DNA damaged by pollution.”
Tomorrow’s World Page 20