“Aren’t you still at it?” Conroy interrupted.
“No. I had an invitation from Dr. Spoelstra at the Ginsberg to come and audition, you might say, for the new director—but I said no.”
“What have you been doing, then?”
“I went home. I’m calling from there. I’ve just been sitting and thinking for weeks on end. And arguing with my family, but that’s nothing new.” She gave an amusing wry grimace. “It took me a hell of a lot of effort to get around to applying to your university, but I did call up and inquire, and when they told me your course was already full I thought maybe if I appealed to you directly …”
“Well, I’d certainly be very pleased to accept you as a student of mine, of course, but I’m afraid you’ll have to furnish a pretty compelling reason.”
“I’m going to try,” Lyla said. “That’s why I called up.” She leaned earnesdy to the camera at her end.
“Look, Professor, I’ve read some of your books and met you and listened to you, and what you said back in Flamen’s office has never stopped haunting me. I hope it never will. I don’t know what makes me a pythoness, and apparently no one else knows either, but—but it’s not the right way to tackle whatever the problem is. I don’t know what it is, but I think it may be that people are just shutting themselves away from each other, until it takes someone with a special mental gift and a hell of a dangerous drug to break down the barriers between us. And it doesn’t have to be that way. I told you, I haven’t taken a sib for more than a month; I’ve been walking around my home town looking at people, I’ve been talking to my parents and my brother, and I’ve been getting to—to see them all over again. I’ve got a mind as well as a peculiar talent, and I can control my mind, and I can remember what I learn with it instead of having to sit and listen to the replay of a tape made while I was in trance. Being a pythoness is like being a machine, which just sits there knowing all kinds of astonishing things but won’t come out and share them until someone puts the proper questions to it. I’m not a machine, but a girl with hormones and emotions and some intelligence and good looks and—” She made a helpless gesture.
“I want someone to show me more than what Harry Madison managed in the short time he was free. There was this person Berry that I thought was a friend of Dan’s and mine—you remember? And he squatted in our apt because he thought now’s my chance to go grabbing. Friend or no friend, that was what he thought about first, not seeing what he could do to help me or clear up the mess Dan’s death left, or anything like that. Professor, am I making myself clear?”
“Not very,” Conroy said grimly. “But you’re talking about the right subject. Go on.”
“Well, like I said it’s inside me, and I’m simply not used to bringing out things like this and trying to explain them. But there was this terrible-looking problem I had, no home, no one to help me, and Harry just evaluated it and in spite of never having met me before that same day he straightened it out. Granted he was kind of special, like he went through a locked door without a key and caught the hundred-kilo deadfall and all like that: it was using what he could do for that purpose which got kind of branded on my mind.”
“And that decided you to give up being a pythoness?”
“Oh no!” Lyla scowled up at the ceiling, seeming frustrated at her own lack of ability to make herself clear. “I can’t ever give that up—I am one, like someone has perfect pitch or someone else has night vision or someone else maybe could have a trick gift with mathematics. It’s what you do with what you’ve got that matters. I don’t want to make a fortune out of it and wind up bored and sadistic like Mikki Baxendale. I want to leam how to put this thing to work for me, because I can’t make it work for other people until I’ve done that. And because of all the sense you talked about the way people are cutting themselves off from each other, I want to study under you. Not about the pythoness talent—no one can help me with that, not even the other people who possess it, because the mind’s turned off while it’s working full blast. But about the people the talent is telling me about. Professor, I want this so much I think it would kill me to have to wait until next year to join your course!”
“If I have to let you camp out in this study of mine because there isn’t room in the dormitories,” Conroy said decisively, “I’ll get you here. I haven’t heard someone of your age—excuse the reference, but I’m dreadfully aware of the age-gap in this environment—I haven’t heard anyone as young as you talk so much sense in five minutes for the past ten years. Right now, what with the reaction against Mogshack and my unlooked-for status as his chief rival, I’m in a position of some influence, and I’m having to try and control myself because it’s been a long time …” He fingered his beard thoughtfully.
“I have to admit,” he resumed after a pause, “that I still do find it difficult to imagine why I could have been so dogmatic about Madison being right in the things he said, when they were so patently absurd. Talking about things that hadn’t yet happened, and what’s more things which haven’t happened subsequently—”
“Professor,” Lyla interrupted, “if it hadn’t been for us they would have.”
“What?”
“They would have. There was this new super-computer in Nevada, wasn’t there? And something went wrong with it, and I know what went wrong.”
“Yes, of course, but—You know what went wrong with it?” Conroy echoed skeptically.
“Of course.” She spoke with simple certainty. “The same thing that once happened to me. What they call an echo-trap.”
Conroy’s hands dropped to his lap and he stared at her for an endless moment. He said in a changed voice, “I think … No, you’ll have to explain what you mean.”
“Suppose it is true that Madison was—was part of, or in contact with, or somehow associated with this machine up there in the future when civilization had collapsed. Then, the moment he learned that the Gottschalks had tried to buy out the Holocosmic network to stifle the Flamen show, he’d have realized he was beaten. Both ways. I mean, it would have realized it was beaten. Against the century of extra experience it had up there in 2113 it had to balance the fact that its own memory showed it had acted to prevent exactly the kind of exposure necessary to alter history and preserve enough wealthy people to buy the System C weapons when they were offered. Zink—zonk—zink—zonk …” She pantomimed patting an imaginary string-suspended ball back and forth in the air between her palms. Seeing the look of disbelief on Conroy’s face, she broke off with a sigh.
“Sorry, Professor. It’s something I’ll never make clear. You’d have had to be inside my head at Mikki Baxendale’s when I’d taken a subcritical dose of the sibyl drug and I sensed all these direct experiences of fighting and killing as they raced through Harry’s mind. No one man in a lifetime could collect that sort of data; he’d have to be so committed to violence he’d have been killed seven times over. But to me it spoke louder than words. It told me he, or something in back of him, was turning him into a machine for killing. And he did kill. He threw that man out of a forty-fifth story window, didn’t he? I’ve been checked up ever since. I even know what it was that made me vomit right at the end. Of all the people who’ve ever devoted themselves to killing, the worst were a heretical Zen sect in Japan and Korea in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, who cultivated killing literally as an art. If you can imagine the ecstasy you get from painting and music and poetry rolled up together and then suddenly realizing that this is a man’s life being ended, you’ll see why I was so sick.”
“You’ve been taking this very seriously, haven’t you?” Conroy said slowly, and without waiting for an answer went on. “Certainly I get the same disturbing feeling I had, as I recall, in Flamen’s office—a sense of truths peering out of what I’d ordinarily dismiss as obvious nonsense. Your idea of the computer going insane because it had set up an unstable feedback from the present to the future—”
“Right!” Lyla cried.
“But,” he c
ontinued as though she hadn’t spoken, “it’s too big a break with my ordinary habit-patterns to think in those terms. You, perhaps?” He looked at her doubtfully. “Yes, I don’t see why not. How old are you, Miss Clay?”
“It’s my twenty-first birthday today.”
“And already you’ve had experiences most people will never have. I once saw pythoness talent defined as the ability to think with other people’s minds; does that fit?”
“Yes, I’ve said that myself.”
“In which case, if I don’t petrify your mind in a conformist pattern, I guess I might just possibly be able to help you find what you say you want. And I’m always on guard against mental rigidity.”
“You’re more open-minded than anyone else I know,” Lyla said warmly. Conroy inclined his grizzled head.
“I haven’t had a sincerer compliment in years, Miss Clay. I look forward to having you join my course, and I promise to do my best for you. We’re sorely in need of people like yourself, and we’re going to need them worse than ever in the next few decades. What with the withdrawal of Lares & Penates from the market on that backwash of anti-knee panic, and the reaction against that, and the sudden loss of confidence in the Gottschalks after the revelation of their internal dissensions …” He sighed. “This old planet of ours is rocking like a badly spun top, and if we don’t find a nucleus of hard-headed, sensible people to drag us back on course, we’re going to go into a sort of jagged orbit like a tumbling rocket with the engines jammed, sometimes straight up, sometimes straight down, and sometimes at weird angles in between. But I’ve somehow managed to cling to this irrational optimism all my life, this sense of expectation that someone will turn up to rescue us in the nick of time and balance our gyroscopes for us.”
He leaned back and smiled at the pretty face in the comweb screen.
“Thanks for asking me this favor, Miss Clay. Sometimes my confidence in my own judgment tends to falter. It’s a fine thing to have it restored by someone as exceptional as yourself.”
She looked at him for a long moment. Suddenly she pursed her lips and blew him a kiss before cutting the connection with a mischievous grin.
NINETY-NINE
PUT MYSELF IN YOUR PLACE
You–
ONE HUNDRED
CHAPTER NINETY-NINE CONTINUED
-nification.
John Brunner, The Jagged Orbit
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