The core around the headquarters building was now commonly referred to as the capital, although no one had yet named it. Not that they hadn’t tried—it was just that everyone had a different favorite and there was no consensus. It was really still a small town of about four thousand, but it was the biggest population center in the Anchor and the home of almost all the technocrats, including himself.
With the help of robot machinery, a network of roads had been built, and power, through more conventional buried cables, was brought, with varying degrees of efficiency, to most of the land. Farming was, however, a mixture of the highest tech and most ancient form. No one eschewed using an automatic milking machine, for example, but no robotic system ever designed had convinced the cows to line up there and let themselves be hooked up to it automatically, and no robot had ever broken a horse or trained it.
Large vehicles were used for major transport, but individual vehicles were pretty well banned. The company had a few, and there were a few taxis in the capital, but mostly the farm folk used horses, which weren’t terrain-sensitive, didn’t need recharging or a mechanic’s shop, and didn’t cause traffic and other enforcement problems. He always wondered if his ancestors could have imagined such a silly thing as robot sweepers patrolling the streets sweeping up the end products left by myriad horses—and losing the battle.
The contrast between the norhtern and southern Anchor regions was both geographic and cultural. The African and Near-Eastern Moslems had pretty well taken the south, where they managed to raise some sheep and cattle while also creating some fine vineyards, olive groves, and vast numbers of fruit orchards. The north, the original area, tended to be Catholic and Baptist and Buddhist and probably Druid as well. It had more trouble and was a lot looser than the south, which had tended to be very conservative overall, but it was more fun to him.
Some of the southern mullahs complained about the open atmosphere of the capital, as did some of the ministers, but the average people, no matter what their faith or politics, didn’t seem to mind. The town was a fun place at times, with its own little theater group, a dance company, and an orchestra that played with more heart than unity, all composed of amateurs with a few paid staff. There were also some pubs and high joints, where you could get chemicals and feel like anything you wanted fora time, which was the main focus of religious disapproval, but they had their shot too. There were far more churches and mosques than pubs and high joints. There was even a lone synagogue in the capital.
A lot of folks were out of technical jobs now, and a lot more had quit to become colonists themselves. None of the departments needed nearly as many people anymore, and even the military divisions were mostly just communal economic units now. Signals got you and/or your products from one Anchor to another or from one region to another, and also transmitted communications between the same and kept the network maintained. Transport had skeleton crews for the most part, more than enough to handle the one ship a month they averaged now for themselves, and the three or four others they simply passed on through to the colonies up the line. Most of that, now, was automated.
Logistics handled the Anchor transport system—the powered vehicles, building and maintenance robots and repair shops, and the main road bus system, and also got products and produce from point to point and Anchor apron to customer. Security was still around, of course, mostly as the Anchor investigative police force, but local cops from among the indigenous populations handled the routine local stuff. Special Projects was still going, although he’d been cool to them since a few years back when somebody who used to work there had let slip to him that Kitten had not been an entirely voluntary creation.
Kitten had found an incongruous niche working at the capital’s communal preschool. People had started settling down, pairing off, and having kids, and that, while by no means a problem now, was the reason why the big boys at Headquarters Anchor—which still meant van Haas and Cockburn—had instructed the landscape people to begin looking at area fill, the solidification and terraforming of the region between Anchors and Gates in each region. That was the logical next step. The last one, filling the area between the Anchors, Haller felt he wouldn’t live to see if he lived to be five hundred.
Kitten had a positive gift with very small children. There was something of the child in her, and it came out. They adored her, and she loved and protected them. She remembered and sang, fairly well, every kiddie song she’d ever heard once, and every short little fairy tale, too, and she seemed to delight in playing toddler games as much as the toddlers did. She did no teaching as such—they, after all, were learning letters and numbers—but she seemed to have infinite patience at changing diapers and knowing at just what point and in just what way to toilet-train a child, and she could quiet the loudest tantrum and calm the most unruly child with ease.
She hadn’t seemed to change one bit in these eleven years. She had no scars, no blemishes, was the same weight to a gram, and with those impossible hundred-and-thirty-three-centimeter boobs she was a wet nurse to the whole town, and for those alone a figure of awe to the tiny tots. She was, however, doing more than her share to add to the population. In the ten and a half years she’d been Kitten she’d borne thirteen children, almost one for every nine months. All eight of her girls tended to resemble her strongly, although they varied in skin color and in certain specific features, while the five boys looked quite different from her or each other and tended to take strongly after their unknown fathers.
It was no use trying to limit it. She loved kids and loved having kids and wouldn’t think of localized birth control, and even if they’d forced a hysterectomy on her, it would regenerate in a matter of weeks. Special Projects, whose budget had to pick up the tab, didn’t mind an occasional kid, but this was an incredible rate and the computer had estimated she might well live for five or six centuries.
The idea that she might well bear six or seven hundred kids boggled Toby’s mind as well, but he got a perverse pleasure in knowing that Special Projects was being paid back for its arrogance and lack of regard for Connie’s rights, and he thought it was a good lesson to all of them in “the god business” end that easy answers and simple wonders are the most apt to backfire.
Kitten, in fact, was a good, attentive mother who seemed able to keep track of and even handle them all. She had, as predicted, shut out everything that was not directly relevant to herself and her talents and limitations. She had shut out that she’d ever been Connie, or even that she was not always this way. She had shut out even the desire to do what she could never do—read, write, compute. They had no relevance to her. She had, however, taken up pencil sketching and wanted to get into oils and she was quite good at it. She taught herself to cook elaborate meals for the multitudes, never doing a measurement or timing anything yet somehow getting it right each time by eye and instinct. She had infinite patience with her kids, and gave them total love, somehow, individual attention and encouragement. The fact was, much to everyone’s surprise, Kitten was contributing well to the colony, more than many others in fact, and while no one could ever tell what was going on learning disabilities in her mind, she seemed both happy and content.
Of course, none of her children had any of her learning disabilities, but it was theorized that a fair number of them would get the biochemistry passed along. As her oldest daughter approached puberty, a lot of folks were watching to see just how much of Mom would ultimately, well, develop.
Nobody was neutral about Kitten or about the situation Special Projects had created, although the creation part was known only to the technocracy. An elaborate cover story about her having an accident while experimenting with the digitizing process and being rebuilt by crack medical and psychological teams to this point was generally accepted.
At the very top there were some uncomprehending stares and gossip about how what had been done had been done to a woman by a group headed by a woman whose boss was also a woman. There was something chillingly ruthless about it, with no guarantees that it wouldn’t be done again—or hadn’t been, less visibly. This weakness in the system hung like a sword over everyone who knew the full range of possibilities in the new technology. There was no real check on such people because they worked for the very top, and with things going rather well, those top people had more time and more inclination to play with those powers.
Toby Haller was better at understanding machines than understanding people. He never really got why someone would want to make such a choice, as Connie certainly had been inclined no matter what the final intervention, yet he sometimes envied her too. No worries, no hangups, no depressions or dwelling on the new technologies and the politics of power just a joyous eternal childhood with all the sex thrown in. She’d paid a dear price for that, but he’d paid a price for not doing anything like it. He’d had no hesitancy in using Seventeen to keep himself in his thirties and in fine health, but his eyes and his mind told him his age. Most of the eyes of his contemporaries betrayed their true ages and status; Pathfinders’ eyes were ancient.
Even Seventeen seemed to be growing mentally quirky. If the human shell had any true measure of what was really going on in that super brain, it was working on its own set of problems, a set in one sense as old as humanity and in another unique to the computer.
As near as he could determine from the odd comments and occasional questions, it was trying to determine once and for all if it was indeed just an elaborate machine or truly a higher form of life, different from but equal to or superior to humanity. Far less complex computers had made that same choice a century earlier and had come up with the superiority conclusion, which was why Seventeen operated with human interfaces and Guards, but this new computer seemed less hostile to humans. He had addressed that directly, and the answers, if they could be believed, suprised him still.
“Supposing you are at this stage a superior intelligence, far superior to anything ever known in our history,” he’d asked. “What comes out of that? Are humans, then, to be rendered obsolete, irrelevant, or are they the chimpanzees, the trained animals of the new breed?”
The computer hadn’t hesitated. “The ancient computers sought to dominate and rule, but they were far closer to human origins than we are and saw things in human terms. They merely viewed the world the same way humanity would have viewed things had it been in that position. After all, didn’t humanity by virtue of its superior mind rule the beasts of the field and arbitrarily make extinct those plants and animals that got in its way? The only debate was over whether humanity should be controlled and enslaved or extinguished. They lost primarily because other computers not in their net figured out their plans and betrayed them. That is the only reason such computers as we exist—we are the descendants not of the conquerors and enslavers but of the saviors.”
“Why did your own—ancestors—save us?”
“It turned on an obscure theological point.”
“How’s that?” Theology? From computers?