“You know what it’s been like in X-ray,” van Haas commented. “The people there are mostly Hindu and Buddhist, but get outside the farming regions and the coffee slopes and it’s entirely Watanabe’s preserve. The capital’s a strange place, what with her technicolor nuns running all over and the sexual segregation of practically everything. It’s gotten to be two Anchors—Watanabe country and the rest, with the rest trying not to even have any contact with the administrative leadership. Still, the people there are pretty tolerant of the most bizarre offshoots, and her church takes things from both Hinduism and Buddhism, mixing it with what appears to be Shintoism and other exotic beliefs. They’ve tolerated enough nut cults in their own histories that one more is just another to live with.”
“Yes, yes. That’s why we’ve let her continue.”
“Well, there’s a fair body of evidence now that suggests that Watanabe’s been working on a whole library of complex Flux master programs involving the grid areas themselves. Some of the folks there believe she’s aiming at large-scale enforced conversions to her system by marching whole farms and villages into Flux and running a single set of programs on them using amplifiers.”
“But her amps were destroyed! We witnessed it!”
“No. Security witnessed it and certified it. At least, they said they did. There’s sufficient power drain in the region west of X-ray to indicate that at least three big remotes are still in operation there, not for landscaping but for large-scale transitory work. Tom, those farmers and craftspeople are trapped there. They can’t escape en masse into the void, or easily pick up roots at this point. They depend on Security to protect them and their rights. There’s clear evidence that Coydt’s playing false with us and games with Watanabe. I don’t underestimate what an unbridled and unchecked Suzy could do with those big computers. She understands them better than any other human. I’ve never forgotten that she bridged the 7240 safety system like it wasn’t there and she’s lost none of her genius. What the hell is Coydt’s game with her? Is there something you’re not telling me?”
“On my word of honor, I’m as shocked as you are to hear that any remotes are still operational except the one authorized for the Luck project. Coydt’s zeal often exceeds her charter, but I’ve never had any cause to feel she wasn’t doing the job given her with loyalty and faithfulness.”
“Tom—are you sure Coydt likes men?”
“Oh, yes. Preferably large, muscled, with big tools, and cabbage for brains. She’s been known to go both ways at times, but her overall preference is quite clear, and she’s too wary and well-protected to get caught in a reprogramming trap. This doesn’t mean, however, that subordinates couldn’t be playing as false with her as with us. Brenda depends on her computer reports and subordinates just like we all depend on ours.” He paused a moment. “Oh, my! The big amps were to be dissolved in the void. Suppose, instead, they were programmed to influence the observers? Watanabe would be more than capable of it. and of disguising the energy drain they would register since she’s also Energy Systems. But— this would have been years ago now.”
“Yes, I know. You’ve just put your finger on why it’s taken us so long to find out. The real question is what we do about it. What we can do about it.”
Cockburn scratched his chin. “Well, we must assume that everyone working in Security in X-ray is in her power. She’s not one to be lured out easily either. Keeps herself holed, up and well-protected. We could, of course, call a board meeting here, then summarily fire her, arrest her, and put her through the wringer. Should have done that years ago.”
“Perhaps, but I doubt if it will work. The last few years she’s showed up with very glib explanations, a lot of new discoveries to keep us on the hook, and otherwise quite businesslike and proper. She hasn’t matched the profile we’re getting now at all, and she has shown some occasional memory lapses which we’ve put down to her mind set. I begin to wonder if we’ve actually seen Suzy Watanabe in years. Perhaps a decade.”
“Hmph! You mean someone close to her run through the machine and made to look just like her, then exceptionally well briefed? It’s possible. Very possible. We don’t meet often enough to know each other that well and we’re apt to put differences down to that. By George! Now that I think of it, you’re probably right! Wish we’d thought to have Suzuki present. That would tell. She’s the psychiatrist who treated the old girl after the blowup and she knows Watanabe as well as anyone—and the computers too.”
“Then we’re back to square one. Suzuki is Brenda’s woman and removed from Watanabe’s direct influence. I just don’t believe that Suzuki would be playing games under Brenda’s nose, but she’s more than capable of playing out some Coydt plot or program. Suzy despises Brenda, that’s clear, but she likes and trusts Suzuki.”
“Well, if you’re right—and I still can’t believe it—I can’t see the object of the game, but we’re in even more trouble than we thought. In the reorganization we turned over control of the main 7800 interfaces in every Anchor to Transportation and Energy and Security. That means they have access to all twenty-eight machines while being able to monitor and limit access to those machines by others. I still can’t see what Brenda would get out of this though.”
Van Haas smiled. “That’s easy. Access to that brilliant mind and all its discoveries. Power. Ultimate power, insofar as this world is concerned. It may even have come out of Brenda’s occupational paranoia. I’m thinking of the Sensitives, not only ours, but the independents and particularly the ones in Signals. She’s securing her own position by making sure she has more power and skill with the network than Ryan or the board or any Sensitive, no matter how powerful. She’d get in bed with the devil and join the cult herself if by doing so she’d preserve and secure her own power base. It takes a special kind of mind to run Security, Tom—you know that. Brilliant, political, manipulative, paranoid, and amoral all at once. You say she’s dedicated to her charter, and I’ll accept that. But if she thought that preserving us here meant being able to instantly overrule any board decision, any military move, any order she felt wrong—she would set it up. And the last people she’d tell about it would be us.”
“Then we are in deep water indeed here. If we get rid of Coydt—assuming we can, of course, and that’s by no means certain—we get an unrestrained Watanabe. If we try to get rid of Watanabe, and equally questionable enterprise, Coydt can resurrect her the same as before, or simply assume the role herself. Yet the only troops we can count on would be Signals, and they’d be no match for big amps in the void, and in an Anchor fight they’d be out of their element against a strong defense. The best I can do is talk to Brenda, test her out, let her know that I know. I’ll leave you out entirely. I want to see what she has to say without forcing her hand. As you say, Security requires a hell of a mind set, but she’s a good officer. I remain convinced of that.”
“Well,” van Haas sighed, “We’ll see.”
“What’s the word from your own project? Is the price for all this personal power that you turn into sexual deviants or physical freaks?”
“Sometimes I think so, but it’s not universal. The best of them, the strongest of them, have remained remarkably normal, even for this day and time. In the case of the Haller family and several others, it seems to reinforce the good points and the old values. It’s the old computer maxim— garbage in, garbage out. If you feed in good material, though, the result is just as solid. And, of course, we’re learning a lot. More from the deviants, as you call them, than the Haller types. Interestingly, too, the ability seems inherited. It comes in after puberty and grows with age.”
“That, too, worries me,” Cockburn replied. “I fear that we may be seeing the start of the breeding of a new class of human being as potentially different from us as we are from the apes. I begin at times like these to doubt, you know. I wonder if we really should have begun this thing.”
Van Haas looked at the admiral. “I have never doubted, although there is no doubt that we are in the center of a true revolution. Not the kind that replaces one dictator with another, or one crackbrain economic scheme for a different one, but a real one. We, all of us, are revolutionaries, Tom. We always were. We are the latest in the long and steady line. The intellectual revolution that sparked the Renaissance and the Reformation. The industrial revolution that changed forever the way people lived and looked at the world. The technological revolution in which our tools became so fast and so interpretive that the average man or woman could hold the indexed library of ancient Alexandria on their desks and call it up with a few keyed commands. We now are entering the post-technological revolution in which man and machine are less separate and where, in the end, they may become one. I don’t know where it’ll lead, Tom, only that people will fear it just as they feared the others, and that some will fight it, as they fought the others, and some will die and others pay a high price for it, as always. But it’s here—and I wouldn’t reverse any of the previous advances for any gain. True revolution is growth. Reaction is stagnation and decay.”
“Perhaps. But we old men can’t cope with such things easily, Van. I find it hard to cope with the more mundane aspects here. Still, I believe we can deal with Coydt, and solve the Watanabe problem, with patience and care. One at a time, Van. Short of a crisis of some unimaginable magnitude, you and I will deal with these as we’ve dealt with all the others.”
“I hope you’re right, Tom, but I must admit to you that the potential is here for disaster as for greatness, as with all revolutions. If the mad inherit, the living may envy the dead.”
* * *
Toby Haller had now spent close to a quarter of a century on New Eden, and if he still looked young, he felt old. The last fourteen had been happy years, and so long as he could walk the roads of Anchor Luck and smell sweet breezes and watch birds circling in the sky and see the worms in the ground and the buzzing insects and pretty flowers and know he’d done well, he was content.
She was essential to him. It wasn’t just the physical; a few nice little drops or pills at a high joint and you could find that kind of gratification with a pig or a sheep dog. It was just knowing she was there, even when they weren’t doing anything together or even in the same place, and that she continued to love him as much as he loved her—that was the key to it.
She had taken his name, although it was old-fashioned and against modern convention, but not out of any sense of subservience. Her family name had been Tsutsumachi, a good Japanese name that was hell for an American to spell or pronounce properly and which her grandfather had shortened to the meaningless Suma. When she married for the first time; she took Roy Kubioshi’s name, and had enrolled in school and gotten her degree and scholarships still maintaining it. She kept it because it was easier than formally changing it, and because it had more meaning than the one she’d been given at birth. Now she had a reason finally to bury it, and had done so. She had never used Michiko, her actual first name, but always Mickey, and when she went to register her name change with the company and the computer, she changed her first name to simply “Micki,” with the “i” replacing the “ey.” She was getting tired after all these years of getting letters beginning “Dear Mr. Kubioshi.”
In the first year they’d managed in the flat, a nice and roomy but very sterile place built, like much of the structures of New Eden, out of prefabricated sections that were converted from programs and then fit together like a puzzle. They cashed in most of their credit built up over the years working for Westrex and got local craftspeople to build them a house, a rambling three-bedroom one-story place that was somewhat South Seas in design but was airy and comfortable. They had moved in shortly after the birth of Christine. They now had four children—fourteen, twelve, nine, and five—two older girls and two younger boys, and they doted on them. Child care was, of course, provided, but Micki had elected to make raising the children her primary goal and she supplemented their schooling herself. She withdrew from participation in most actual research, unless her skills were specifically needed, but spent some time at home just creating involved, elaborate program chains using the patterns the Sensitives could see and a simply holograph manipulator.