* * *
It began to dawn on Guinevere by slow degrees that for the first time ever since she took to throwing forfeits parties the arrival of her well-briefed gang of sparewheels in the neighbourhood of the victims chosen for the first of the grand forfeits, the set-pieces that would include dialogue and climax in acts of maximum humiliation to get rid of people she was tired of knowing, had not signalled silence and giggling and craning of necks and climbing on furniture for a better view. Instead, on the far side of the room, a large number of the guests were talking to each other with serious faces, apparently sceptical but not scoffing. She waited a moment. A few people drifted away from the unidentified focus of attention and others joined; somebody hurried out of the room and came back with half a dozen friends also to be told—whatever the news might be.
“Hullo!” Norman said softly. “What’s going on? Guinevere isn’t getting the rapt audience she counts on.”
“Think war’s broken out?” Chad muttered and grabbed a fresh drink from a passing tray.
Alarm transfixed Donald like a lightning strike. The randomness of his activating this morning, unaccountable in terms of what the news channels were carrying, made him think for a moment that it could all too easily be war.
“Chad, what did you say about crying wolf in The Hipcrime Vocab?”
“Howinole do you expect me to remember? I’m drunk!”
“Wasn’t it something about—?”
“Ah, sheeting hole! I said it was an ad-hoc form of Pavlovian conditioning adopted by those with a lust for power to prevent the people due to be slaughtered in the next war from taking them out and humanely drowning them. Okay?”
“Why do you hate Miss Steel so much?” Elihu asked Norman under his breath.
“I don’t hate her personally, though if she were enough of a person to be worth such a strong emotion I think I easily could. What I hate is what she represents: the willingness of human beings to be reduced to a slick visual package, like a new television set—up-to-the-minute casing, same old works.”
“I hope I can believe that,” Elihu said unhappily.
“Why?”
“People who hate in concrete terms are dangerous. People who manage to hate only in abstracts are the only ones worth having for your friends.”
“Plagiarist!” Chad threw at him.
“Did you say that?”
“Christ yes. Put it in a book.”
“Someone quoted it to me once.” A look of wonder crossed Elihu’s face. “As a matter of fact it was Zad Obomi.”
“Profit but no honour in my own country,” Chad grunted.
“What’s she going to do now?” Norman said, watching Guinevere intently. They all turned to look; they were in a good spot from which to see what happened, able to view it along a sort of alley between the clump of people who had congregated to witness the humiliation of the fat girl and the thin one, and the other group worriedly muttering to each other about the as yet mysterious news.
“Shelley-lover,” Guinevere said to the man at the centre of the latter assembly, “if the news you’re spreading is so millennially important don’t you think you should share it with everybody rather than letting it wander around on its own, suffering the folk-process? What is it—have the Chinese towed California out to sea, possibly, or has the Second Coming been announced?”
“Second!” someone unidentifiable said within earshot of Don. “Prophet’s beard, you should try that new stiffener Ralph’s been feeding me!”
Guinevere looked for him with a glare of murderous ferocity and failed to locate him.
“Well, it’s something that was on SCANALYZER earlier this evening, Gwinnie,” the man she had addressed as Shelley explained in an apologetic manner. “Apparently the government of Yatakang has announced a two-generation programme based on a new breakthrough in tectogenetics. First off they’re going to optimise their population by making sure that only children of first-class heredity get born, and later, when they’ve done that, they’re going to start improving the genalysis and—well, I guess the only way you can put it is to say they propose to breed supermen.”
* * *
There was a stunned pause. The woman whose six-year-old son had been killed in an accident and who had by then re-married a husband forbidden to father children shattered the silence with a moan, and instantly everyone was talking, forfeits forgotten, except Guinevere, who stood in the middle of a clear patch of floor with her face whiter than chalk and her long sharp chromed nails digging deep, deep into the palms of her hands. Watching her, Norman saw how the tendons stood out on the backs of them like thick knotty cables feeding power into a machine.
“You!” Chad said. “You there—what’s your name! Don Hogan! This is your line, isn’t it? Is it dreck or not?”
At first Donald couldn’t answer. This must be why they’d activated him. Somewhere, ten years in the past, someone—or far more likely, something, since it would have been a computer analysis they trusted to make forecasts on such an important subject—had suspected the possibility of a development along these lines. Against that vanishingly small risk they had taken precautions; they had chosen, and nurtured, a man who—
“Are you going deaf, codder?”
“What? Oh—sorry, Chad, my mind was wandering. What did you say?”
Listening to the repetition of Chad’s question, already aware of what it was, Donald cast his eyes around nervously for Sergeant Schritt, and there he was, a few places distant in the throng. But his cocksure manner of earlier had faded in an instant; he looked, in fact, as though he was going to cry.
His lips moved. He didn’t see Donald before him although he raised his face and his gaze swept across where the other was standing. Off the writhing mouth Donald read what he was saying too quietly for it to carry through the mounting chatter. It was approximately, “Sheeting hole, sheeting hole, and they wouldn’t let me and where is she now who’s got her who’s making her preg—?”
It went on. Donald, embarrassed, turned his eyes away. He felt he had just looked into another man’s personal hell.
But in a state like that Schritt wasn’t going to worry about his charge delivering classified information to a potential subversive like Chad Mulligan. In any case, everything Donald knew about the subject was thanks to his college courses and the New York Public Library. Only the all-encompassing patterns he had been able to formulate out of what he read were in any sense less than public knowledge.
He said tiredly, “It doesn’t have to be dreck. SCANALYZER carries both gossip and hard computer-evaluated fact, and the guy didn’t say it had been in the rumour slot.”
“Who’ve they got over there who could handle such a programme?” Chad was leaning forward now, elbows on knees, eyes sharp and alert, his drunkenness magically forgotten. Also, Elihu and Norman were listening intently to what Donald and he were saying.
“Well, the first part—the simple optimising of your embryos—has been theoretically possible since the 1960s,” Donald sighed. “Reimplantation of externally fertilised ova is offered in this country as a commercial service, though it’s never been popular enough to become cheap. Governmental decree, though, might—”
He stopped short and snapped his fingers. “Of course!” he exploded. “Chad, you impress the hole out of me, know that? You did ask, didn’t you, ‘who’ve they got over there?’”
Chad nodded.
“It was the right question. For the second stage—the bit about going beyond the mere purification of your gene-pool to actual improvement of the stock—you do need the genius of someone with high-level breakthrough capacity. And they have a man like that, somebody who hasn’t been heard of for almost ten years except as a professor at Dedication University.”
“Sugaiguntung,” Chad said.
“That’s right.”
Elihu looked, puzzled, at Chad first, then Donald, asking a question with lifted eyebrows.
“Sugaiguntung was the man who pu
t Yatakang into the tailored bacteria market when he was in his twenties,” Donald said. “Brilliant, original, supposed to be one of the world’s greatest tectogeneticists. Then he—”
“Something about rubber,” Chad interrupted. “It’s coming back to me now.”
“Right. He developed a new strain of rubber-tree which replaced the natural strains in all the Yatakangi plantations and as a result it’s the last country anywhere on Earth where synthetics can’t compete with tree-grown latex. I didn’t know he’d been working on animal stocks, but—”
“Has he any? What would you need, anthropoid apes?”
“Ideally, but I imagine quite a lot could be done on pigs.”
“Pigs?” Norman echoed in a disbelieving tone.
“That’s right. Pig-embryos are often used for teaching purposes—the resemblances are astonishing until very shortly before birth.”
“Yes, but we’re not talking about the embryonic scale,” Chad pointed out. “This is deep-down stuff, right inside the germ-plasm. Orang-outangs?”
“Oh my God,” Donald said.
“What?”
“I never made the connection before. The Yatakangi government has been diligently preserving and breeding orang-outangs for the past five or six years. Right out of the blue they imposed a death penalty for killing one and offered a reward equal to about fifty thousand dollars for capturing them and bringing them in alive.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Chad said with decision, dumping his glass on the nearest table and jumping to his feet.
“Yes, let’s,” Norman agreed. “But—”
“I don’t mean stop talking about it,” Chad snapped. “You live together, don’t you? We’ll go to your place. Elihu, will you come along too? When we’ve sorted this out there are still more questions I want to ask you about Beninia. Okay? Right, let’s blast off out of this freaking awful party and go find some peace and quiet!”
They were not the only ones who had had the same idea. Glancing back as they waited for a chance to filter through the exit door, the last thing Donald saw was Sergeant Schritt leaning on the wall with one hand, with the other holding a large glass of vodka or gin from which he tossed gulp after gulp down his throat to put out the fire of sorrow in his heart.
And by tomorrow, how many more like Sergeant Schritt?
context (13)
THE OLD NEWSPAPER
“BOY SHOOTS FIVE DEAD IN BEAUTY SCHOOL
“Mesa, Arizona, 12 November
“FIVE PEOPLE, including a mother and her three-year-old daughter, were shot dead today by a boy who forced them to lie down on the floor of a beauty school here.
“Two other victims—including the three-month-old baby of the dead mother—are in hospital.
“It was the third mass murder in the United States in four months. In August a sniper shot dead 15 people in Austin, Texas, and in July eight student nurses were strangled or knifed in Chicago.”
“THE LONGEST RISK YET IN SPACE
“by our Science Correspondent
“ASTRONAUT Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin opened the hatch of his Gemini-12 spacecraft yesterday and stood up in space. Two hours and 28 minutes later he withdrew, having set a record for direct exposure to the hazards of space.”
“NEW EINSTEINS FROM ‘CUTTINGS’
“by JOHN DAVY, our Science Correspondent
“IT MAY soon be possible to propagate people in much the same way as we now propagate roses—by taking the equivalent of cuttings.
“According to the Nobel prize–winning geneticist, Professor Joshua Lederberg, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, we should consider the implications of this now, since it would offer the possibility of making dozens or hundreds of genetically identical individuals like multiplied identical twins …
“The techniques are likely to be tried ‘even without an adequate basis of understanding of human values, not to mention vast gaps in human genetics.’ This makes it essential to think out the implications beforehand, since otherwise policies are likely to be based on ‘the accidents of the first advertised samples.’ Public opinion might be determined by the nationality or public esteem of the cloned person, or ‘the handsomeness of para-human progeny.’
“The prediction and modification of human nature, the professor urges, badly need the planning and ‘informed foresight’ which we apply to other aspects of life.”
—Three adjacent news-stories from the front page of the London Observer, 13th November 1966
continuity (13)
MULTIPLY BY A MILLION
Riding home from Guinevere’s, Donald felt the Yatakangi claim oppressing his mind, a monstrous mattress of news. He hardly spoke to the others in the cab. He was half-dead from fatigue, having contrived only a couple of hours’ sleep before Delahanty broke in on his rest. Tiredness and the tranks he had taken had combined to mute his feelings all day long. He had not even been able to convert his fury at Schritt dogging him into decisive action.
Yet knowing he had let himself slide through his last day as a free agent before the maw of government engulfed him did not seem to disturb him unduly, and the reason why gradually emerged into awareness.
Yesterday, when he had left the Public Library after his stint of duty, the illusion had overtaken him that all the masses of New York were animate dolls, less than human, and he among them. Determined to prove he was not really inhabiting a hostile world, he had wandered from illusion into the harsh reality of a riot. A small one, granted—not like some that had taken place in Detroit, for example, with a death-toll in the hundreds—but final enough for the copter pilot who had been killed with clubs.
Suddenly, today, this was not the familiar world he had lived in for the past decade, but another plane of reality: a fearful one, like a jungle on an alien planet. The police captain had said that on present evidence it was a hundred per cent certain he would start a riot if he went for a harmless evening stroll. So not only the world, but he himself, was different from what he had imagined.
Caught like this, suspended between the wreck of former convictions and the solidification of new ones, he could no more have rebelled against the decision of the computer in Washington to activate him than he could have brought the dead pilot back to life.
Apathetically, not assigning meanings to the words, he heard Norman address Elihu.
“Did you put the scheme to GT today as you intended?”
“Yes.”
“And—?”
“Shalmaneser had already given them four possible reasons for my approaching them. This was the one he—I mean it—rated highest.” Elihu shuddered. “They had contingency plans prepared, trial budgets, even a tentative advertising programme. And they loved every moment while they were explaining how they’d pre-guessed me.”
“Their security must have been better than usual,” Norman said. “Not a word of it filtered through to me.”
“You referred to Shalmaneser as ‘he’,” Chad said. “Why?”
“The people at GT do it all the time,” Elihu muttered.
“Sounds as though he’s becoming one of the family. Norman, is there any truth in this propaganda about making Shalmaneser genuinely intelligent?”
Norman made a palm-up gesture to pantomime ignorance. “There’s a non-stop argument over whether his reactions are simple reflex any longer. But it’s out of my range, I’m afraid.”
“I think,” Chad grunted, “that if he really is intelligent nobody will recognise the fact. Because we aren’t.”
“When are they going to make the news public?” Norman inquired of Elihu.
“Not yet awhile. I insisted. I’m going back for further discussions tomorrow, and someone from State is supposed to join us—probably Raphael Corning, the synthesist. And you too, naturally, because I think you should make the first contact with Zadkiel on the company’s behalf.”
He concluded bitterly, “In view of what I’m wishing on them, though, I can’t help wondering if the
Beninians will ever forgive me.”
It’ll be a relief to get away from here, Donald realised with amazement. Christ, I think I’d have been glad if they’d put me in jail this morning. I’d take a job on the moon, or at MAMP—anything, even in Yatakang—for the sake of being in a place that I expect to take me by surprise instead of my home city where things I thought were comfortable and ordinary got up and kicked me in the face.
* * *
When they entered the apt, Chad set off on a survey of the premises without asking permission, peering into each room in turn and shaking his head as though in wonderment. Over his shoulder he said, “Like coming back to a dream, know that? Like waking, and going back to sleep next night, and finding the dream’s been going on without you and here you are entering it at a later stage.”
“Do you think the kind of life you’ve been living the past few years is—is more real, then?” Elihu inquired. No one had invited him to sit down; because it was closest he took Norman’s favourite Hille chair and settled his bulk in it with much adjustment of his Beninian robe. He set aside his velvet-and-feathers headdress, rubbing the line it had indented across his forehead.
“More real? Sheeting hole, what a question! But the whole of modern so-called civilised existence is an attempt to deny reality insofar as it exists. When did Don last look at the stars, when did Norman last get soaked in a rainstorm? The stars as far as these people are concerned are the Manhattan-pattern!” He jerked his thumb at a window beyond which the city’s treasure-house of coloured light glimmered gaudily. “To quote myself—the habit that persuaded me I ought to quit trying to influence people because I’d run out of new ways to express my ideas—where was I? Oh yes. The real world can take you by surprise, can’t it? We just saw it happen at Gwinnie’s party. The real world got up in the middle of the apt and did it ever shake the foundations of those people!”
Sober, Norman said, “What’s the effect going to be, do you think?”