John Brunner – Jagged Orbit

“Sorry, Professor. It’s something I’ll never make dear. You’d have had to be inside my head at Mikki Baxenwhen 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 beit had set up an unstable feedback from the preto the future-

“Right!” Lyla cried.

“But,” he continued 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 doubt”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 conpattern, 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 withof Lares Penates from the market on that backof 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. Somemy confidence in my own judgment tends to falter. It’s a fine thing to have it restored by someone as exas 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.

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