His Masters Voice

16

And so everything went back to the way it was before — except that one new face appeared at the sessions of the Council, that of Hugh Fenton. Fenton the Phantom, he was called, or the Invisible Man, because he somehow existed microscopically — not that he was small, but he kept himself in the shadows. Winter meant frequent storms, but of sand, not rain. Rain hardly ever fell. It was not difficult for us to jump back into our former routine of work — of existence, rather. Again I went to Rappaport’s to chat, and again I sometimes met Dill there; it seemed to me that the Project was my life, that the one would end with the other.

The only new thing were the weekly seminars, quite unofficial, during which various topics would be discussed in turn — such topics as the prospects for the auto-evolution (that is, controlled evolution) of intelligent beings.

What did that hold for us? Supposedly it would put us on the track of the anatomy, physiology, and thereby the civilization of the Senders. But in a society that had reached a level of development similar to ours, there appeared antithetical long-range trends whose distant outcome could not be foreseen. On the one hand, the technologies already formed exerted pressure on the existing culture and, to some extent, inclined people to subordinate themselves adaptively to the needs of the instrumentalities set in motion. Thus you had indications of competition between intellectual man and the machine, and also of various forms of symbiosis between the two — and both psychology and physio-anatomical engineering discovered “weak links,” shoddy parameters in the human organism, and from there the path led to the planning of necessary “improvements.” Out of this same trend came the idea of manufacturing “cyborgs,” partly artificial people, designed specially for work in space and the exploration of planets whose conditions were drastically different from Earth’s; and the idea of connecting a human brain directly to reservoirs of machine memory, of making devices in which an unprecedented marriage of man and instrument would take place, on the mechanical and/or intellectual level.

This whole stream of technological pressures threatened to cleave the biological homogeneity of the species, hitherto intact. It was not just a single civilization for all men that such changes could render a fossil from the dead past, but even the single, universal physical shape of man. Man might in effect transform his society into a psychozoic type of ant colony.

On the other hand, the sphere of instrumental technologies might be made subordinate to cultural influences, to social mores. This could result in the biotechnological extension of the factors that determined — for example — fashion. The technologies of fashion as yet did not go beyond the boundary of the human skin. Some claimed, true, that their influence went further, but this was only because at various periods different physical variations of man have been promoted as especially valuable, as models. One need only think of the difference between Rubens’s ideal of feminine beauty and the woman of today. It might appear, to an outside observer of human affairs, that in women (who more obviously conformed to the dictates of fashion), in accordance with the requirements of the passing seasons, now the shoulders would widen, and now the hips, now the breasts would grow large, and now diminish, now the legs would fill out, and now they would again be thin and long, and so on. But such waxings and wanings of the flesh were an illusion only, produced by the selection, out of the variety of the entire set, of those physical types that gained the approval of the day. Such a state might be subjected to biotechnological correction. Genetic control would then shift the range of racial variety in the direction desired.

Of course, genetic selection for purely anatomical traits seemed a frivolous thing in comparison with a multitude of culture-creating transformations, yet at the same time a desirable thing for aesthetic reasons (the opportunity to make physical beauty universal). But we were speaking of the first steps along a path to which one could affix the sign: REASON IN THE SERVICE OF THE URGES. This, because the overwhelming majority of the material products of the mind were channeled into sybaritic pursuits. An ingeniously constructed television set dispersed intellectual garbage; sophisticated transportation technologies made it possible for a degenerate, instead of getting soused in his own backyard, to dress up as a tourist and do the same in the vicinity of Saint Peter’s basilica. If this tendency were to lead to the invasion of the human body by technological contrivances, undoubtedly the idea would be to expand the gamut of pleasurable sensations to the maximum, and perhaps even to bring into being — besides sex, narcotics, culinary happiness — other, as yet unknown, kinds of sensual stimulation and gratification.

If we had, in the brain, a “pleasure center,” then what prevented us from connecting to it synthetic sense organs that would allow the reaching of orgasms mystical and nonmystical, through actions specially designed and devised as triggers of multiphase ecstasy? The carrying out of such an auto-evolution would constitute a definitive closure in the culture and mores; it would entail a withdrawal from all things extraterrestrial. It would be an exceptionally pleasant form of intellectual suicide.

Science and technology without question would be able to come up with devices that would meet equally the requirements of both the first and the second paths of development. The fact that both seemed to us rather monstrous, each in a different way, as yet meant nothing.

Negative assessments of such transformations were quite groundless. The directive that one should not “overly indulge” oneself could be rationalized only as long as the satisfaction of one individual meant, at the same time, the detriment of another (or the detriment of one’s own body or soul, which happened, say, in the case of drug addiction). This directive could be the expression of plain necessity, and then one had better submit to it without argument; but the whole thrust of technology was precisely to eliminate, one by one, all necessities that limited possible action. Those who said that civilization would always face certain necessities, in the form of limits to personal freedom, were in fact adherents of the naïve faith that the Cosmos was arranged not without thought to the “duties befitting” intelligent beings. This was a common extension of the Biblical injunction about working for one’s daily bread in the sweat of one’s brow. It was not, as such naïve people often thought, an ethical judgment, but one clearly ontological. Existence, as a habitat for us, was furnished in such a way that one could not, not by any discoveries, attain the situation of “dizziness with success.”

But there was no way to base far-reaching forecasts on so primitive a faith. If not on “puritanical” and “ascetic” grounds, people sometimes voiced these sentiments out of a fear of change. That fear sat at the bottom of all scientific arguments that ruled out, to begin with, the possibility of building “intelligent machines.” Humankind always felt most at home — though never comfortable — in situations that were slightly desperate: that spice did not bring solace to the body, but did appease the soul. But the call of “all forces and reserves to the front of science” was stirring as long as “intelligent machines” were not able to replace the scientists effectively.

Of the real nature of both directions — the expansive-“ascetic” and the “encysting”-hedonistic — we could say nothing sensible. A civilization could take either path: storming the Cosmos or cutting itself off from it. The neutrino signal seemed to prove, at least, that certain civilizations did not shut themselves away from the world.

A civilization as “spread out” techno-economically as ours, with the front lines swimming in wealth and the rear guard dying of hunger, had by that very spread already been given a direction of future development. First, the troops behind would attempt to catch up with the leaders in material wealth, which, only because it had not yet been attained, would appear to justify the effort of that pursuit; and, in turn, the prosperous vanguard, being an object of envy and competition, would thereby be confirmed in its own value. If others imitated it, then obviously what it did must be not only good, but positively wonderful! The process thus became circular, since a positive feedback loop of motivation resulted, increasing the motion forward, which was spurred on, in addition, by the jabs of political antagonisms.

And further: a circle would result because it was difficult to come up with new solutions when the given problem already possessed some solutions. The United States, regardless of the bad that could be said of it, undoubtedly existed — with its highways, heated swimming pools, supermarkets, and everything else that gleamed. Even if one could think up an entirely different kind of felicity and prosperity, this could still only be, surely, in the context of a civilization that was both heterogeneous and — overall — not poor. But a civilization that reached a state of such equality and thereby became homogeneous was something completely unknown to us. It would be a civilization that had managed to satisfy the basic biological needs of all its members; only then, in its national sectors, would it be possible to take up the search for further, more varied roads to the future, a future now liberated from economic constraints. And yet we knew, for a certainty, that when the first emissaries of Earth went walking among the planets, Earth’s other sons would be dreaming not about such expeditions but about a piece of bread.