Achilles choice

Chapter i6

She asked, “What’s that on your chest?”

Of the myriad questions whirling through her head, she’d found one to surprise him. His smile flickered. Then he pulled his sweater over his head. There was a pocket in his rumpled shirt, and a clear plastic envelope in the pocket, and a dozen colored sticks in that.

“Shirt protector.”

“What’s in it?”

“Things for writing and drawing. These days I’d have a wrist link, or just use the neural net. Ever see one of these?” He pulled, from a pants pocket that couldn’t have been deep enough, a flat wooden stick painted white with fine black markings. “My father had one. Slide rule.”

She remembered: a slide rule came somewhere between an abacus and a pocket calculator. “That must be worth a fortune.”

Almost unconsciously, her hand had drifted out toward it. Her “ghost” snatched it out of reach in a gesture reminiscent of a ten-year-old protecting a sheaf of trading chits. A sheepish smile. “Let’s save some time, Jillian. The Council doesn’t know about this interview and never will. The car is headed for Denver. So’s your luggage. The records will show you arranged it all yourself. Half the passengers in another car are listed as traveling on this car. So we’ve got plenty of time to solve any little mysteries that are still bothering you, but let’s not abuse it, okay? I need some of my attention for the rest of the planet.”

Jillian examined the Old Bastard, seeing too much weakness. The thin shoulders, the baggy body, the eager, friendly eyes. This was the monster who controlled the Council? She felt disorientation, savage disappointment, and an almost morbid distaste.

She said, “You arranged for my gold, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve killed Osa.”

“Osa bribed her way in. Not likely to pass her genes on, either. She’ll try again in four years.”

“And Abner.”

“Because of our research, Abner lived long enough to coach you.”

She paused. “And my mother?”

“She was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Accident?”

“Jillian, it’s the kind of accident that happens when things aren’t running right. Mining and Agricorp were dancing. Certain machines didn’t get serviced. A program picked up some noise. A waldo claw picked up just the top of a habitat when… sorry.” The boy flickered and was in a different position, palms raised in supplication. “Calm down, Jillian. Maybe I’m giving you this too fast—”

Her voice trembled, rose to a half-scream. “Just tell me why.”

“I can’t do that short.”

“Long, then.”

He nodded once. “It’s been an even century since I looked like this. Computer nerds, they called us. We didn’t get along well with people, but we got along fine with computers.

“Computers don’t deal in nuances. If I type, ‘Is there no friend to rid me of this pestilential priest?’ my computer doesn’t kill Thomas a Becket for me. It says, ‘Bad command or file name’ and waits for me to say what I mean. Sanskrit was one of the few spoken languages with no ambiguity. Using it produced a useful clarity of thought, and birthed a body of philosophy. Computer programmers speak a language of mathematics. When that language became integrated into our natural thought patterns, it was the beginning of an entirely new human culture, Jillian.”

“Capable of mastering the world?”

“Capable, with the eventual development of Linkage, of mastering our own nervous systems.”

Jillian wanted to laugh. “It doesn’t seem to have helped Donny. You still have wars.”

He brushed it off. “I’ll get to that. You still listening?”

He waited for her nod.

“We learned computers,” he said. “We made computers and programs. Some of us used computer power to keep track of the stock market He saw her eyebrows arch. “It tracked the worldwide flow of wealth. Often you can move wealth to where it’s worth more. Some of us got rich. Some played politics. Around nine hundred of us took major risks, played with our brains and bodies, linked ourselves directly to infrared and UV sensors, satellite broadcasts, digital telescopes and microscopes, computer memory, data sources like the stock exchange and traffic monitors and police bands, and of course we developed our own.”

“And you turn geniuses into weaklings. You kill innocent people.”

This time he ignored her. “Some died. Some went Feral. Eighty of us had control of most of the world’s wealth before we came into serious conflict. Eleven of us are left, and another eighteen who came later, and we constitute the Council. But as for war, it’s more like a quarrel at a bridge club—”

“You must have killed thousands of people by now!”

“You’re misusing the word, but it’s not your fault. We’ve altered the records.” For an instant he looked haggard. “After you’re Linked, spend an hour reading about war. You’ll have access to the reality. The death rate could be millions.”

She didn’t want to think about that at all. She said, “You don’t really call yourself the Old Bastard.”

“I call myself Saturn. You could hunt up my original name, but it wouldn’t tell you much.”

Saturn? Leave it. “What do you look like now?”

Then she jumped. There was a great oval bed in the car with them; its far edge was beyond where the tramcar’s wall should have been. Its surface rolled in slow shallow waves, a sluggish ocean, as if the bed were more alive than the patient. Machinery hovered above the bed, fading above the tramcar’s roof, extending thick umbilicals that bifurcated repeatedly to cover the patient in a fur of silver spiderweb.

That impossibly ancient figure seemed to be part man, part machine. Just as she decided that the thing must be dead, its head popped up and slurred, “Did you ever see a movie called Two-Thousand-One? Eh, eh,” and fell back.

The kid said earnestly, “That’s me. Barely. It’s the pattern that’s important, and the pattern is in the bubbles… recorded in bubble memory,” he amplified before she could say, Huh?

“So why not kill the thing?”

The old man’s head lifted again. It spoke with mushy difficulty. “Here I have senses I don’t have elsewhere. Smell. Memory. Shtuff that’s hard to retrieve, but imposh-impossible to copy over. I don’t mean I can’t make it work. I mean, impossible.”

“Saturn. Are you still human?”

The ancient smiled; the boy spoke. “Very good, Jillian. But leave it for a moment, okay?” Again he’d answered instantly. He never stopped to think.

His holographic appearance was older than she had originally thought. Twenty-five? His posture: he was not awkward, not diffident, not watching a desirable woman and praying she wouldn’t notice. He leaned forward, looking directly into her eyes, challenging, good smile lines at the corners of his mouth.

Jillian said, “Okay. There are problems the Council doesn’t solve. Crime. Disaster control. Safety designs. We could make Paradise, and I’m not the only Olympic contender who’s proved it. Saturn, what’s wrong with Paradise?”

“Wrong problem.”

“Then why did Lilith Shomer die?”

He said, “A small group of people can control an entire world. Can evaluate a trillion bytes of data without a moment’s personal experience. Can reduce people, animals, plants, whole populations and ecologies to integers to be manipulated. The Council does that.”

“Nobody cared enough?”

“That’s part of it. Jillian, it is very tempting.”

“Why aren’t you tempted?”

For the first time, Saturn broke eye contact with her. “If you look at a human being as a machine,” he said softly, “as a stimulus-response loop, what happens when every urge can be met with a trickle of electricity? When fantasies are as powerful as reality? The world… your world is no more real than what’s in the bubbles… what happens in my own mind. Megalomania and catatonia are very real companions to the Link. That’s the rest of the problem, Jillian. Citizens die when we go Feral.”

Oh.

“I give Donny five years.”

“And the rest of humanity?”

“That’s up to you, Jillian.”

Now it was Jillian’s turn to be silent.

“Why me?” she asked finally. “What is this all about? And what makes you any different?”

“I created the game. And when I Linked, and lived more in the machine than in my body, and could create or reexperience every sensation imaginable, I thought I would be happy.”

“And you weren’t?”

“No, and it frightened me. If you have everything, and the hunger still exists, then the hunger has nothing to do with stimulus and response. The answer doesn’t lie in the realm of objective reality or subjective experience. It has to do with the function of the observing mind in the creation of its world. Jillian, who is the ‘I’ that sees and desires?”

“That. -.,” she said carefully, “is a very old question.”

“And a very new one. Am I really in the bubbles? We need an answer. For the first time in human history, we can have literally anything that we want, including immortality… and the Linked are proving that it’s not enough. We wage petty power-game wars. Homicidal intrigue. We totter into insanity. It’s the furthest reach of human technology and experience, and it might be a dead end.”

Perhaps for dramatic effect, the light had shifted to highlight Saturn. She noticed that the bed was gone, patient, machinery and all. Saturn was a sensitive host.

Jillian said, “You thought you were a machine, didn’t you?”

Saturn nodded quietly.

“That’s why you buried yourself in a world of mathematics. In retrospect, it makes sense that the whole thing is coming apart.”

Again, the almost imperceptible dip of the chin.

“But you still dream, don’t you, Saturn? You still desire? You think you should be free of the flesh, of all this, and you’re not, and you don’t know what to make of it.”

The tube car was silent, save for a distant hiss of air through the ventilation system. “I have access to all the information in the world,” he said. “And I can’t answer that question.”

“Where do I come in? Do I? Is it that you want to be told that you have a soul?”

He waved it away. “You can’t answer that question. This isn’t about me, Jillian—”

“Isn’t it? Has it ever been about anything else?”

“It’s about saving humanity—”

“Which you are a part of, like it or not.”

He glared at her. “I deal in what is quantifiable, Jillian. I never wonder how many angels can dance on the head of a pin-that question being, incidentally, an exercise in quantum mechanics—”

“I’m not interested in a lecture,” she said flatly.

“Jillian, shall I turn up the heat?”

“Please.” Quite suddenly, she was freezing. And he’d known before she did!

“Done. I wonder,” he said, “if you realize how many ways there are to be human. Maoris, Nazis, Mormons, abos in the Australian outback, slaves and slavers, drug cultures in the United States in the sixties and then the eighties, don’t even start to cover it. There are all the dead cultures, too. The French and Soviet reigns of terror. Ancient half-humans who ate shellfish and each other. Mental hospitals. Christian sects wherein the men castrated themselves. Rosicrucians. The Velvet Underground.

“You could take most of the aliens in science fiction and match their lifestyles to somebody. I remember a critic who thought Bram Stoker’s Dracula was about syphilis. Or take Ursula Le Guin’s—”

“I haven’t—”

“You did, too. Third year of high school, English Lit. You wrote a paper, ‘Vampirism as a Venereal Metaphor.’ It was quite explicit, and led to what you described to your diary as an ‘affair of incandescent intensity, sufficient to set the moon ablaze’ with your Lit tutor.” He grinned happily, an innocent voyeur. “You read Le Guin, too.”

Her face was burning. “How dare you! Do you think peeping into the emotions of real human beings makes you more alive? You’re a ghoul, Saturn. You don’t even have the courage to lie down and die.” She felt violated. Saturn had pried into Beverly! He must know everything, every hope and prayer, every childhood memory. How could he?

“Are we done? Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness. Le Guin’s aliens are a branch of the human race, but they’re neuter most of the time, and when they develop a gender you can’t guess which one She remembered then, and he saw it. “Okay. Good science fiction, but do you think I can’t find people like that in Oakland?

“But the other side is, whenever I wonder about something, it starts a subprogram. I’ve got access to most of human knowledge.

“Twenty-six years ago I wondered if I was human. I had an answer with ninety-one percent confidence in just under two minutes. In ten minutes I had four nines of confidence. Every known human culture had been explored. Le Guin’s aliens were human, Dracula was human, but by any reasonable standard, I’m not.”

“Imagine my surprise,” Jillian said bitterly.

“Rise above it, Jillian. More is at stake here than your feelings.”

“They’re what make me human!”

“Having them, or wallowing in them? I thought you prized discipline. Strength. Achievement. Emotional control makes it possible. Do you see the implications of what I said? Maybe the Council’s not human, either?”

“So you keep replacing them. Your children. Saturn.”

“You got it.”

“How long? Until you get it right?”

“I’m getting closer. The younger Linked are staying human longer. I need to keep them under control, too. You spoke of motives. I don’t trust theirs. Mine you must have guessed— No? All right, Jillian, what would you do if you were me?”

She felt bone-weary. It was all too much, too quick. Her head was reeling, and she yawned mightily. “Sleep for a week.”

“Coffee under the seat. Jillian, I can’t do this twice. The Council can see patterns. I won’t make you a target, Jillian. This conversation ends at Denver.”

Fair enough.

Under the seat was a wrinkled plastic bag. It held a small thermos and a Bullocks sales slip and a package of oat bran cookies with several missing. My God, he’s thorough. The coffee was black and sweet, not too hot. She could feel it pulling her awake.

She said, “Kill them all and then suicide.” She surprised herself that time: there wasn’t any bitterness in that suggestion.

Again Saturn answered instantly. “What about the equipment? Software, computers, never-linked sensing devices, tailored medical procedures like Boost, everything that made us what we are: what about that? If the capability is there, there will be more Linked.”

“That… that’s why the new stuff stopped appearing in the shops!”

“Yes, that was me.”

“Mph. You could destroy… How far back would we have to go to be safe? Nineteen fifty?”

“Destroy the information?” Saturn shrugged. “Making transistors disappear may be beyond me. No, that’s not the way to go. I want a human being who can use everything that was and is available to me, and still remain human. What do I have to do to accomplish that?”

“You’d have to… a training program? You son of a bird. You changed the Olympics.”

“Yes. To help me find people like you, or shape them. Mind and body and spirit. I had to make some compromises, but that won’t last. One day a majority of the Council will be Olympic winners. They won’t put up with the current death rate. Will you?”

Will I. “Not likely. What have you got in mind?”

“Change the rules. Even so, the pattern I’m looking for includes courage. I get that through the Olympics. I’m trying other approaches too. Give computer equipment to primitives after they reach fifty. Gene carving—”

“Only a monster of arrogance would decide what constitutes human.”

“Give me a human and I’ll let him rewrite my specs! I don’t dare. Jillian, the Link techniques are too good. They must be used. The Linked will be the human race. They’re a wall across the future, even if they’re a blind alley. If they go Feral and rip up the Earth, that’s the future too. If they can stay human— I just need one.”

“To be your… child?”

“Partner. Successor. You’re too filled with doubt, Jillian. Power won’t turn you into a monster. It may kill you, tear you apart, but you’re no stranger to inner conflict. I think you’d say that was part of your birthright as a human being, wouldn’t you?”

She was silent.

“Wouldn’t you say it was a natural result of the soul’s attempt to achieve perfection in human form? Wouldn’t you tell me of Christ’s temptation in the desert, his despair on the cross?”

“Shut up,” Jillian said flatly. “Just shut up. Don’t mock me, Saturn. If you don’t believe in the human soul, then you don’t know who I am, no matter how many facts you may have stored away.”

“You have friends who aren’t Christian. You won’t demand that I convert.”

Fair enough. But-“What do you want from me, Saturn?” -

“Not much. I protected you when you were using Holly Lakein to get information. I’ve put you among the Linked. You’ll be one of the powers that rule the human race, on the Earth and off—”

“You’ve made this speech before.”

“To all who’d listen. To the others I’m the old one, the crazy one.”

“You’re not offering much, either, are you?”

“I don’t interfere with the dominance games, no. You’ll be on your own, and I’ll be watching, hoping you can become what I’m hoping to see. If you make it, then welcome to the human race. A small, select group.”

She stared at him. He waited… probably busy elsewhere, a hundred elsewheres, leaving a tendril of attention for the hologram in the subway car.

She sipped coffee, and thought.

She no longer feared death… she had finally accepted that she need not. What she feared now was that she would become Saturn.

Presently she said, “Here it is, Saturn, like it or not. You could have gone to six decimal points, or twenty, and it wouldn’t make any difference. What it is to be human can’t be determined by what we were. Human evolution is too sensitive to initial conditions. My religion says that we bring something into this life which is beyond flesh, or mind, or emotion. I can’t prove it, you can’t disprove it. I choose to believe it. I think that you’re so totally human you scare yourself. You look at me and say, ‘Ah, she has the humanity I gave up,’ and it’s a crock. Your brain is alive. Your heart is asleep. Wake up, damn you. You may be the only chance we have.”

She held her breath for a long beat. Saturn was motionless. Five seconds, perhaps. How many worlds of possibility did he spin through in that moment? Was he reviewing the entirety of his life? Or a thousand futures, projecting fractal probabilities to the nth power?

Then he sighed, and smiled timidly. Saturn held out an ethereal hand to her.

“God help me.”

“Help us both,” Saturn said.

Was he mocking her? She couldn’t tell. She must trust him until she learned more.

She extended her hand. There was no sensation of touch or pressure, just a man’s hand melting into hers, sealing a bargain whose implications she was just beginning to consider. Then she was alone, falling beneath the earth at three miles per second.