Alex recalled the image that had begun unblurring in the holo tank as they probed the monster’s involute topology. It was horrible, voracious, and beautiful to behold. Undeniably there was a genius somewhere … someone a whole lot better than Alex at his own game. The realization was humbling, and a bit frightening.
Immersed in his own thoughts, he had been driving the little Tangoparu company car on mental autopilot, threading past one bottleneck after another. Just when it seemed traffic would open up again, red brake lights forced him to stop hard. Shouts and horns blared somewhere up ahead.
Alex leaned out the window to get a better look. Emergency strobes flashed. A bobbing magnus-effect ambulance hovered near one of the massive, blocky tourist hotels, where budget-conscious travelers rented tiny, slotlike units by the cubic meter. The vehicle’s spherical gas bag rotated slowly around a horizontal pivot, using small momentum shifts to maneuver delicately near white-suited emergency workers. Alex had no view of the injured, but stains on the clothes of shocked bystanders told of some bloody episode that must have gone down only moments ago.
The crowds suddenly parted and more police hove into view, wrestling along a figure swaddled in restraint netting, who howled and writhed, wild-eyed, with face and clothes flecked in blood and spittle. A green gas cannister at his belt showed him to be a dozer—one of those unfortunates more affected by excess carbon dioxide than other people. In most, such borderline susceptibilities caused little more than sleepiness or headaches. But sometimes a wild mania resulted, made far worse by the close press of crowding human flesh.
Apparently, supplemental oxygen hadn’t helped this fellow … or the poor victims of his murderous fit. Alex had never seen a mucker up close like this before, but on occasion he had witnessed the effects from a distance.
“You don’t get anything, but what something else gets taken away …” He distantly recalled Jen saying that last time he visited her office in London, as they stood together at the window watching the daily bicycle jam turn into a riot on Westminster Bridge. “True-Vu tech put a stop to purposeful street crime,” she had said. “So today most killings are outrages of pure environmental overload. Promise me, Alex, you’ll never be one of those down there … the honestly employed.”
Horribly fascinated, they had observed in silence as the commuter brawl spread onto Brunner Quay, then eastward toward the Arts Center. Recalling that episode, Alex suddenly saw this one take an unexpected turn. The officers hauling the wild-eyed mucker, distracted by frantic relatives at their sleeves, let their grip loosen for just a moment. Even then, a normal man might not have been able to tear free. But in a burst of hysterical strength the maniac yanked loose and ran. Ululating incoherently, he knocked down bystanders and then hurtled through the traffic jam—directly toward Alex’s car!
The mucker’s arms were pinned. He can’t get far, Alex thought. Somebody will stop him.
Only no one did. Nobody sensible messed with a mucker, bound or unbound.
Deciding at the last moment, Alex kicked his door open. The madman’s eyes seemed to clarify in that brief instant, replacing rage with an almost lucid, plaintive expression—as if to ask Alex, What did I ever do to you? Then he collided with the door, caroming a few meters before tumbling to the street. Somehow Alex felt guilty—as if he’d just beaten up a helpless bloke instead of possibly saving lives. That didn’t stop him, though, from leaping out and throwing himself atop the kicking, squalling man—now suddenly awash with incongruous tears as he cursed in some inland dialect of Han. With no better way to restrain him, Alex simply sat on him till help arrived.
The whole episode—from breakaway to the moment officers applied the spray sedatives they should have used in the first place—took little more than a minute. When the trussed-up mucker looked back at him through a crowd of snapping True-Vu lenses, Alex had a momentary feeling that he understood the fellow … far better, perhaps, than he did the gawking tourists around him. There was something desperately fearful and yet longing in those eyes. A look reminding Alex of what he sometimes saw in a mirror’s momentary, sidelong glance.
It was a queer, disturbing instant of recognition. We all create monsters in our minds. The only important difference may be which of us let our monsters become real.
After wading through congratulatory backpats to his car, Alex looked down and saw for the first time that his clothes were smeared with blood. He sighed. Why does everything happen to me? I thought academics were supposed to lead boring lives.
Oh, what I wouldn’t give for some good old-fashioned British boredom about now.…
No sooner was he seated than the driver behind him blew his horn. So much for the rewards of heroism. Edging around a final tourist bus he saw open lanes ahead at last. Carefully Alex fed the engine hydrogen, spun up the little car’s flywheel, and gradually built up speed. Soon the northern reaches of the Mamaku range sped by as he left Rotorua behind and set off across the central plateau.
This highway shared the chief attribute of Kiwi roads—a stubborn resistance to straight lines. Driving entailed carefully swooping round hairpin bends and steep crags, intermittently staring over precipices into gaping, cottony nothingness.
It was easy to see how New Zealand had got its Maori name—Ao Tearoa—Land of the Long White Cloud. Mist-shrouded peaks resembled recumbent giants swathed in fog. The slumbering volcanoes’ green slopes supported rich forests, meadows, and over twenty million sheep. The latter were kept mostly for their wool nowadays, though he knew George Hutton and many other natives ate red meat from time to time and saw nothing wrong with it.
In this land of steam geysers and rumbling mountains, one never drove far without encountering another of Hutton’s little geothermal power stations, each squatting on a taproot drilled near a vein of magma. Mapping such underground sources had made George wealthy. The network of sensors left over from that effort now helped Alex’s team define what was happening in the Earth’s core.
Not that anyone expected the scans to offer hope. How, after all, do you get rid of an unwanted guest weighing a million million tons? A monster ensconced safely in a lair four thousand kilometers deep? You surely don’t do it the way the Maori used to placate taniwha … demons … by plucking a hair and dropping it into dark waters.
Still, George wanted the work continued, to learn how much time was left, and who was responsible. Alex had wrung one promise from George, in case they ever did find the culprit. He wanted an hour with the fellow … one hour to talk physics before George wreaked vengeance on the negligent genius with his own hands.
Thinking about the poor man he had encountered so roughly back in Rotorua—remembering the sad yet bloody look in the mucker’s eyes—Alex wondered if any of them really had a right to judge.
He had always liked to think he had a passing education in fields outside his own. Alex had known, for instance, that even the greatest mountains and canyons were mere ripples and pores on the planet’s huge bulk. Earth’s crust—its basalts and granites and sedimentary rocks—made up only a hundredth of its volume and half a percent of its total mass. But he used to picture a vast interior of superdense, superhot melt, and left it at that. So much for geology.
Only when you truly study a subject do you find out how little you knew all along.
Why, just two months ago Alex had never heard of Andrija Mohoroviĉić!
In 1909 the Yugoslav scientist had used instruments to analyze vibration waves from a Croatian earthquake. Comparing results from several stations, Mohoroviĉić discovered he could, like bats or whales, detect objects by their reflected sound alone. On another occasion he found a thin layer that would later bear his name. But in 1909 what he heard were echoes of the Earth’s very core.
As instruments improved, seismic echolocation showed other abrupt boundaries, along with fault lines, oil fields, and mineral deposits. By century’s end, millions were being spent on high-tech listening as desperate multinationals sought ever-deeper veins,
to keep the glory days going just a little longer.
A picture took shape, of a dynamic world in ceaseless change. And while most geologists went on studying the outer crust, some curious men and women cast their nets much deeper, beyond and below any conceivable economic reward.
Such “useless” knowledge often makes men rich—witness George Hutton’s billions. Whereas Alex’s own “practical” project, financed by money-hungry generals, had turned unprofitable to a rare and spectacular degree.
It just goes to show … he thought. You never can tell what surprises life has in store for you.
Even as Alex admitted his ignorance of geophysics, it was his own expertise that Hutton’s techs called upon as they struggled to improve their tools. The gravity antennas employed superconducting wave generators like those in a cavitron—the still-unlicensed machine he’d used in Iquitos. So he was able to suggest shortcuts saving months of development.
It was fun exchanging ideas with others … building something new and exciting, out of sight of the suspicious bureaucrats of the scientific tribunals. Unfortunately, each time they laughed together, or they celebrated overcoming some obstacle, someone inevitably stopped short and turned away, remembering what it was all about and how futile their work was likely to be in the long run. Alex doubted that even his great-grandparents’ generation, during the awful nuclear brinksmanship of the cold war, had ever felt so helpless or hopeless.
But we have to keep trying.
He switched on the radio, looking for some distracting music. But the first station he found carried only news bulletins, in Simplified English.
“We now tell you more news about the tragedy of Reagan Station. Two weeks ago, the American space station exploded. The ambassador to the United Nations, from Russia, accuses that the United States of North America was testing weapons on Reagan Station. The Russian ambassador does say that he has no proof. But he also does say that this is the most likely explanation …”
Most likely explanation indeed, Alex thought. It just goes to show … you never can tell.
In olden times, to be “sane” meant you behaved in ways both sanctioned by and normal to the society you lived in.
In the last century some people—especially creative people—rebelled against this imposition, this having to be “average.” Eager to preserve their differences, some even went to the opposite extreme, embracing a romantic notion that creativity and suffering are inseparable, that a thinker or doer must be outrageous, even crazy, in order to be great. Like so many other myths about the human mind, this one lingered for a long time, doing great harm.
At last, however, we have begun to see that true sanity has nothing at all to do with norms or averages. This redefinition emerged only when some got around to asking the simplest of questions.
“What are the most common traits of nearly all forms of mental illness?”
The answer? Nearly all sufferers lack—
flexibility— to be able to change your opinion or course of action, if shown clear evidence you were wrong.
satiability—the ability to feel satisfaction if you actually get what you said you wanted, and to transfer your strivings to other goals.
extrapolation—an ability to realistically assess the possible consequences of your actions and to empathize, or guess how another person might think or feel.
This answer crosses all boundaries of culture, age, and language. When a person is adaptable and satiable, capable of realistic planning and empathizing with his fellow beings, those problems that remain turn out to be mostly physiochemical or behavioral. What is more, this definition allows a broad range of deviations from the norm—the very sorts of eccentricities suppressed under older worldviews.
So far so good. This is, indeed, an improvement.
But where, I must ask, does ambition fit under this sweeping categorization? When all is said and done, we remain mammals. Rules can be laid down to keep the game fair. But nothing will ever entirely eliminate that will, within each of us, to win.
—From The Transparent Hand, Doubleday Books, edition 4.7 (2035) [ hyper access code 1-tTRAN-777-97-9945-29A.]
• EXOSPHERE
“… the most likely explanation. Come now, Captain Tikhana. Surely you aren’t taken in by that silly cover story they’re spreading? That America was conducting secret weapons tests aboard Erehwon?”
Teresa shrugged, wondering again why she had let Pedro Manella set up this luncheon meeting in the first place. “Why not?” she responded. “The space secretary denies it. The President denies it. But you press people keep printing it.”
“Exactly!” Manella spread his hands expansively. “The government’s charade is working perfectly. It’s a venerable tactic. Keep loudly denying something you didn’t do, so nobody will look for what you really did!”
Teresa stared as he twirled a forkful of linguini and made a blithe insouciance of taking it under the portal of his moustache. Fighting a nascent headache, she pressed the pressure points above her eyes. The plastic table top rocked under her elbows, setting plates and glasses quivering.
“Exactly–what–are–you–talking–about?” she said irritably, speaking the words individually. “If you don’t start making sense soon, I’m going to switch languages. Maybe you can make yourself understood in Simglish.”
The reporter gave her a look of distaste. Known to be fluent in nine tongues, he clearly had no love for the experimental bastard son of English and Esperanto.
“All right, Ms. Tikhana. Let me spell it out for you. I think your husband’s team on the space station’s Farpoint platform was experimenting with captive black holes.”
She blinked, then broke out laughing. “I knew it. You are crazy.”
“Am I?” Manella wiped his moustache and leaned toward her. “Consider. Although cavitronics research is allowed in a few places, in only one location have investigators been licensed to go all the way—to create full-scale singularities. And then only in orbit around the moon.”
“So?”
“So imagine some government decided to do an end run around the international team. What if they wanted to experiment on singularities of their own, in secret, to get a technological head start before the moratorium ends?”
“But the risks of getting caught—”
“Are substantial, yes. But those repercussions would be lessened by keeping all experiments at high altitude until everyone is sure microholes are safe and the tribunals start issuing licenses. Look what happened to that poor imbecile Alex Lustig, when he got caught jumping the gun right on the Earth’s surface.”
Teresa shook her head. “You’re implying the United States was engaged in secret, illegal research in space,” she said coolly.
Manella’s smile was patronizing, infuriating. Teresa steeled herself to ignore everything but content.
“I’m suggesting,” he replied. “That your husband might have been involved in such a program, and never bothered telling you about it.”
“I’ve heard enough.” Teresa crumpled her napkin and threw it on the table. She stood, but then stopped as she saw the reporter pull out several glossy photographs and lay them between the place settings. Teresa’s fingertips traced the outline of Jason’s face.
“Where was this taken?”
“At a conference on gravity physics last year, in Snowbird. See? You can read his name tag. Of course he wasn’t in uniform at the time …”
“Do you carry a secret camera in your bow tie?”
“In my moustache,” he said, with such a straight face that Teresa almost believed him. “This was back when I was hunting for clues to Alex Lustig’s whereabouts, before I broke the story on his own particular—”
Teresa flipped the last picture aside. “Nobody trusts photographs anymore, as proof of anything at all.”
“True enough,” Manella conceded. “They could be faked. But it was a public conference. Call the organizers. He used his own name.”
Tere
sa paused. “So? Among other things, Jason was studying anomalies in the Earth’s gravitational field. They’re important to orbital mechanics and navigation.” Because of that aspect, Teresa had done more than a little reading on the subject herself.
Manella commented with his shoulders. “The Earth’s field is twenty orders of magnitude less intense than the sort of gravity they talk about at conferences on the theory of black holes.”
Teresa slumped into her seat again. “You’re crazy,” she repeated. But this time her voice didn’t carry as much conviction.
“Come now, Captain. You’re an adult. Do not sink to abuse. Or at least keep the abuse relevant. Call me overzealous. Or pushy. Or even pudgy. But don’t say I’m crazy when you know I might be right.”
Teresa wanted to look anywhere but into the man’s dark, piercing eyes. “Why can’t you just leave it alone! Even if everything you suspect were true, they paid for it with their lives. The only ones they harmed were themselves.”
“And the taxpayers, Ms. Tikhana. I’m surprised you forget them. And perhaps your space program. What will happen to it during the lengthy investigations?”
Teresa winced, but said nothing.
“Besides, even if they only harmed themselves, does that excuse their bosses for violating basic principles of international law? True, most physicists agree cavitrons can’t make anything truly dangerous. But until that’s verified by a science tribunal, the technology is still quarantined. You know the reasons for the New Technologies Treaty as well as I do.”
Teresa felt like spitting. “The treaty’s a millstone, dragging us back—” But Manella disagreed, interrupting.
“It’s our salvation! You, of all people, should know what harm was done before its enactment. Care to try stepping outside right now without protection? Our grandparents could do so safely, even on a day like today.”
She glanced through the coated panes of the restaurant. It was bright out, not a cloud in the sky. Many strollers were enjoying an afternoon on the Mall. But everyone, without exception, wore sun hats and protective glasses.