New Writings in SF 23 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kenneth Bulmer

  ‘Many, many thanks for the lecture, Doctor Elberfeld.’

  ‘Believe me, Minister, I am not presuming to instruct you: I just want to show you that I have learned my lesson.’

  ‘Learned, yes. How do you account for the fact that your education did not prevent you from learning? That seems to be a weakness in your argument, dear boy.’

  ‘Nothing is perfect. Minister. My education didn’t take— as your experts have evidently discovered from their tests, or I wouldn’t he here.’

  ‘You appreciate your danger, Doctor Elberfeld?’

  ‘Of course. People like me must obviously be let in or eliminated: no middle way is possible.’

  ‘Quite. The thing about in, dear boy, is that it is not exactly win or lose, as in the liveware circle outside: more like live or die—indeed, precisely live or die. But for people like you and me, Doctor Elberfeld—”real people”, in your own words—it’s the only game in town; we would rather be dead than out. But tell me, why does education not always “take”?’

  ‘Mostly, I think, because our symbol systems are inevitably imperfect. Antinomies lurk in them, like the problem of explaining how a good God can permit evil, or the paradoxes of set theory in foundational mathematics. To the extent that symbol experts can deal with these antinomies at all, they can do so only by soaring to levels of abstraction so general that really nothing is being said, or something that succeeds in being both counter-intuitive and illogical: such as the blank assertion that all antinomies are resolved in the absolute, or belief in the subsistence somewhere outside space and time of an uncountably infinite set of real numbers in the interval between zero and one. There are analogues in political argument, which I won’t discuss: though I will just point to, say, Aristotle’s conclusion that there are two kinds of men, those born to be users of tools and those born to be used as tools; or the notion that inequities in society can always be dissolved in “growth”, time without end. Again, Minister, I am not lecturing: only wagging my tail.’

  ‘Good dog. Hah! Good doc ... I can make serious puns too, my dear Hans: we shall get along, we shall get along fine ... but tail is good ... mmm ... tail is good. Now, to business! I understand that there has been some sort of neurological breakthrough, or claimed breakthrough, in Chile in the Americas, which has caused major changes in policy both in the Americas and in the SU; and some people at Oxford, whom some say are competent, confirm the Chilean experiments. This, my dear Hans, is why you are here, rather than in the hands of the police.’

  ‘I take your point, er...’

  ‘You can call me Harry, in private. Now get on, get on, man!’

  ‘Well, Harry, people have for many years been playing around with electrodes inserted into the human brain, and it’s well known that you can control a person’s experience to some extent in this way: put your bit of platinum wire here, and you produce visual illusions; there, sexual pleasure; somewhere else, intolerable pain; and so on. Well, it immediately looked as if this was going to be the answer lo the perennial liveware problem: Tanner, for instance, suggested that simple miniature radio receivers could be implanted inside the skull and connected into the nerve net, so that real people with transmitters could produce great pleasure or intolerable pain in a unit of liveware, simply by pushing a green or red button on a pocket transmitter, while mass control could be done by broadcast transmissions from a stationary satellite. As Tanner pointed out, this would be a way of making the old, unreliable, wasteful stick-and-carrot system completely reliable and economical: so that we could in fact go back to it, and get rid of all this complicated business of preaching religions like Marxism and Liberalism, cowboy series on television and the rest of the symbolic apparatus, and shorten the whole process of inculcation and maintenance of education by maybe an order of magnitude.

  ‘Quite a lot of work was done on the rat, the dog and primates, and it turned out that there was a difficulty: the brain is not altogether rigidly structured, not all of its “programs” are “wired-in” like the hardware logic of a computer; new nets can grow even in the adult brain, as after injury, insult by a tumour, lobotomy and so on. Oddly enough, the individual brain is much less rigid, much more plastic, than a symbol system like mathematics or Marxism, which are hard to change because they are, so to say, located and held rigid in thousands of millions of brains, books, magnetic tapes and what have you. Now, an interesting thing about pain and pleasure is, that they are not—as might be supposed—irreducible physiological functions: higher functions of the brain interpret activities in lower parts of the brain as “pleasure” or as “pain”—morphine, for instance, is known to affect the interpretation of lower activity by higher functions as “pain”, instead of affecting the lower activity itself. Well, to cut a long story short, it is just these higher brain functions which are most plastic: the brain adapts itself to the implants after a time and no longer feels “pain” or “pleasure” when stimulated by the implants. You follow me, Harry ?’

  ‘Perfectly, Hans. The trick won’t work, because the brain cunningly grows blocks, or bypasses or something in the net, so that the implants are isolated and ineffective. Right?’

  ‘In the right parish. Frankly, we don’t know if the brain grows new wiring, or re-programs itself without changing the hardware net, or if it can and does do either or a mix of both as required. But, somehow, it makes these implants ineffective—sometimes in a few days. At any rate, it did..:

  ‘... Ah! This is where the Chilean work comes in, yes?’

  ‘Exactly. The Chilean team were doing routine work screening new synthetic drugs for the property of giving major analgesia, in the heroin class, without producing addiction or dependence. They were working with pigs, and using implants to produce the experimental pain. One of the dugs they tried turned out to have the property of maintaining the effectiveness of the implant—in the longest series, for twelve years.’

  ‘How, man? How?’

  ‘Nobody knows. The Chileans lucked into it. Oh, there are n speculative theories, of course, but nothing beyond intellectual play: since we don’t have the slightest idea how the brain isolates the implants, we naturally don’t have any clues to what the drug might be acting on, so we’re very much at sea.’

  ‘But it works, Hans? It works?’

  ‘It works, Harry. The Oxford group have done an impressive series with cats and chimpanzees, and they have already maintained the effectiveness of the implants in a group of chimpanzees for three years. Carter does very good work, and I don’t think there’s any finite risk that his results are shaky.’

  ‘Yes. Well, Hans, what you say confirms what I’ve already been told. It means we can’t ignore it, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Harry: it’s like the atom bomb, we know enough to be sure we can’t afford the risk of not getting it if it works. That’s the size of it. And, in one way, we may already be ahead of the world.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It so happens that Carter’s group in Oxford have more experience than anybody else in the world in chemotherapy by implanting drugs in the body, so that they dissolve gradually and keep the body dosed. The Chilean drug, of course, is effective in vanishingly small doses, like some of the hallucinogenic drugs, so it would be possible to give a lifetime dose by implanting one pellet of the drug, anywhere where the dissolving drug would get into the bloodstream going to the brain. Stick it in a baby, and he’d be under the drug for a hundred years, if he lived that long. You see the implications?’

  ‘My God, yes, Hans. If you implant the receiver and a pellet of the drug, the receiver stays effective for life. Completely reliable and predictable liveware. The millennium!’

  ‘Quite. The only serious problem I can see is the economic problem. There would be a hell of a lot of surgery to be done, and ...’

  ‘Horse feathers! If we can provide every family with a car, sometimes two, and colour television, we can hack that without sweating.’

  ‘But it would take years t
o train all the surgeons, surely?’

  ‘Nah! nah! nah! You’re one of the grown-ups now, Hans: you don’t have to take that Royal College union stuff about twelve years training. If we want to train nurses’ aides in routine brain surgery, in six-month crash courses, there’s no sensible reason why we can’t: Israel did it in the Nine Year War, and what they can do we can do in trumps.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right. But what about the liveware? Will they stand still for having things put in their heads, and in their kids’ heads?’

  ‘If it’s the only way to get on, they will. After all, they’ll learn Anglo-Saxon so they can get a piece of paper and go off to work in the advertising business. We’ll introduce implants as a privilege for the middle classes: then, before we know where we are, the egalitarians will have forced us reluctantly to extend it to the lower liveware classes. No sweat, Hans!’

  ‘But what about the real people? I mean, if everybody gets these things put in their heads, then there just wouldn’t be any real people left to run things.’

  ‘A good point, Hans. As Plato said, of course, there would have to be a class of Guardians: preferably an elective class, so that we get a self-perpetuating institution like the Church of Rome or the CPSU: these are much more stable than hereditary Guardian classes, because you don’t have to take what the accidents of birth supply. It would be quite easy to put, shall we say?, slightly different things in these heads. It’s the millennium all right, Hans, an endless age of impenetrable fraud, much to be preferred to the perennial pendulum-swings between fraud, violence and a new fraud welcomed by the exhausted combatants.’

  ‘So what do we do now?’

  ‘What you do, Hans, is to put together a team to develop this to feasibility; time matters, cost doesn’t, you can crash-program it. I give you political support. And I’ll see your first draft proposals inside a week, please.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘One more thing before you go. Doctor Elberfeld, do you know a tall, red-headed girl, goes about with bare feet?’

  ‘I don’t know her, even to speak to. I do often see her about, usually on the station and sometimes in the rapid, when I come up to the West End by tube. Why, Minister?’

  ‘Mmmmm. Well, when my security people were investigating you for your clearance, they naturally followed you about a good deal. They say she was following you about too. No, we don’t think she’s an agent—or not in the usual sense. She belongs to a little group of kooks, quite well known to security, who are politically clean in the sense that they don’t seem to be working for anybody but themselves and are too weak and incompetent to make real trouble. It’s difficult to get too worried about an organisation that uses a six-foot redhead with bare feet as a tail, wouldn’t you say?”

  ‘What’s this group’s thing, then?’

  ‘If it’s crank, you name it and it’s their thing. You must have seen the slogan they keep spraying on walls? No? It goes: “Your order is chaos: therefore there are explosions.” Typical incompetence, it’s much too long to stick in the liveware mind.’

  ‘So she ... I mean, they are harmless enough.’

  ‘Yes and no. Certainly, they’re not going to put through a revolution: society is safe. But it shouldn’t be beyond them to ... say ... well, push you in front of your tube train one morning. I don’t like them showing an interest in you, just when you and your knowledge have become indispensable to us.’

  ‘Are they likely to do anything like that?’

  ‘Likely schmikely: who can tell with kooks ? I’ll tell you one thing though—that big redhead has published a number of poems and short stories, in little mimeo magazines, all with one obsessive fantasy theme: a blonde circus midget, who kills the ringmaster and lets the animals out of their cages. How does that grab you?’

  ‘If they write it, they almost never do it: that’s what writing’s about.’

  ‘But only almost never, dear boy. If there’s a risk, however small, I think I’ll pull that whole lot in and send them up to the change camp in Wester Ross.’

  ‘On what grounds. Minister? Suspicion?’

  ‘Nah! As there’s more than one of them, we can always convict them of conspiracy. It’s a good catch: the way the law of conspiracy stands, everybody is technically guilty of conspiracy if they have any social life at all. Now, be off with you, wagtail, and do some work.’

  ‘Sir.’

  As he left the Min Ed social complex, he saw the barefoot girl standing on the opposite pavement, outside a bank: she had one long arm outstretched, and a pigeon perched on the wrist was eating something from the cupped palm of the hand. Her red hair was tangled across her face by the breeze.

  He walked quickly on, to the tube station, stopping often to look carefully behind him for a follower. On the station platform, he kept well back from the edge, against the wall, until the train was standing.

  He slept fitfully that night in his austere room, remembering dreams in the waking intervals. Once, he had watched a surgical operation, green masks, overpowering clinical smell, heat of lights over the table: the theatre sister, with her board of numbered hooks for the bits and pieces, was four foot tall and bleached blonde; the surgeon had bad breath, and—when he held up the extracted tumour, stripped off his green mask and laughed triumphantly—gold teeth razzed in his mouth. Then attendants took the shrouded patient from the table, thrust it down a chute to one side into glimpsed flames, and the midget sister said through her green mask: ‘Wonderful, Doctor Killdare —you’ve saved the cancer.’

  At times he swam between the stars and galaxies, visiting strange planets. On one, great machines were silent, clogged and bound with red, blowing growths of some thread-like plant. On another, a slime mould as big as an ocean had eaten all the other living things of the planet and was slowly starving to death, distracting itself from the pain by developing abstract algebras from arbitrary postulates and seeing how far it could push them. Somewhere, a tricom horse explained to him that the galaxies are mere neurons in the net of a great brain, connected by rivers of neutrinos, and a plastic man with only one eye gave him scientific proofs that the brain was mad.

  Towards morning, he remembered parts of another dream. He was kissing some feet—dirty, with broken nails, calluses, warts, corns; he couldn’t stop thinking about the huge population of bacteria on the skin of the feet, and he couldn’t stop kissing them, so he tried to take his mind off the bacteria by making it dance the grave minuets of mathematics. She reached down, ten miles down, to put him gently away from her feet: she couldn’t have him distracting her while she was feeding the hairless monkey chattering on her wrist. A blood red comet tail blew across her frown, streaming out to the end of time, and he woke up still worrying about the possibility that he had caught a disgusting disease and would have to be put down.

  He was pleased to discover that this feeling was only a trace of the dream. The dreams, he thought, had had some mildly interesting structural properties: binary oppositions, mirror isomorphisms, reverse mappings and the like; it was really a pity that the content of dreams was so context-dependent as to be unamenable to any intellectually respectable mode of analysis.

  On the dot of 0600, he got up; washed himself very carefully all over; brushed his teeth for twice as long as usual, as if specifying double-precision arithmetic; booked a personal call to Professor Carter at the Oxford Institute of Experimental Neurobiology; and began to pencil draft budgets, organisation tables and research programmes on the backs of the scratch print-outs he kept in a stack under his narrow truckle bed.

  Outside the dormer window behind him, the sun rose bloody orange red in the chill mining mist.

  <>

  * * * *

  MADE TO BE BROKEN

  E. C. Tubb

  There used to be a fad for jokes wherein aliens addressed Earthly artifacts of similar configuration to themselves with the resounding words: ‘Take me to your leader!’ When it comes to the real thing, however, as E. C. Tubb
points out in this story where, further to complicate the situation, empirical and academic learnings clash, that’s only the beginning of the problem.