Harvest of Stars (7 page)

“They could,” Lee told her. “The theory of it touches my field, so I can imagine the methods.” Briefly, his hand touched hers. “I would rather not describe them.”

T
HE CONTROL PROVIDED
by the World Federation Meteorological Service was limited, and over weather, not climate. Northwest Integrate would always have more rain and clouds than clear skies, until Earth as a whole had profoundly changed. However, the previous week a lengthy wet spell had yielded for a while to dazzling sunshine. On the first day of this, Enrique Sayre took a moment to admire it.

The local Security Police building was broad and deep rather than high, a fortress. Still, the view from the roof bore comparison with what he saw from his flitter before he landed; and after he stepped out, a boisterous cool wind laved his face and yodeled in his ears. It smelled of salt water, with the slight tang of chemicals and ozone that bespoke energies at work. Traffic sounds rose through it, an oceanic murmur, up toward soaring gulls and glinting aircraft. The city climbed likewise, from streets, bridgeways, monorails, dymaxions and other lesser edifices, to prideful tower heights. Biospaces glowed intensely green; although they were negligently maintained of late, nature was moving in, grass, weeds, saplings. Some distance off, Elliott Bay shone argent, less troubled than formerly by shipping and sailboats. Beyond the structures on the farther side, Cascade snowpeaks raised white against blue.

Sayre could understand why Anson Guthrie located his North American headquarters here. The man had been born and raised in Port Angeles, on the Strait and not far
from the Olympic Peninsula’s mountains and forests. The disembodied program must have yearned back. Sayre threw a glance at the Fireball building. It reared on Queen Anne Hill, its lines suggestive of a spacecraft at launch, arrogantly higher than his. But now the infinity flag flew on its pole too.

Guards saluted as Sayre walked from his flitter. He returned the gestures. The men were mainly ceremonial, an adjunct to robotic monitors and guns, but ceremony was important. Xuan himself had admitted that human-kind remained largely a creature of instinct and emotion. Taming the brain stem and limbic system to the service of the cerebrum would be the work of lifetimes.

Sayre had progressed sufficiently in the disciplines to recognize, and not to care, that he was physically unimpressive—a short, slight man, sharp-featured but with a receding chin and blond hair plastered in thin strands to a round head. He had refrained from getting any makeover except correction of myopia and of a liability to stomach ulcers. His uniform was plain, hardly distinguishable from a common officer’s. It was what he did that rated salutes.

Entering a fahrweg turret, he descended to the office he had commandeered. Personnel sprang to their feet with more salutes. Impatient, he brushed past them and sequestered himself in the room beyond. From his desk he phoned the laboratory. The line switched him immediately to Clarice Yoshikawa.

“Sir!”

“Is the new program ready?” Sayre asked.

“Yes, sir,” replied the chief of the technicians whom he had summoned from Central Command back east in Futuro. “We were testing all night.” More than that showed in her haggardness. Stim and supp would keep a person going only up to a point, and Sayre had driven the team pitilessly since they arrived.

“Have you gotten it right at last?”

Exasperation, close to anger, spoke, however levelly: “Sir, you know we have just the single piece of Guthrie
hardware. All we can do is make copies of the software, revise them, and check them out in limited ways, till we put them in that one computer and they become conscious.”

“While you’re at it,” Sayre replied, “tell me what month this is.”

Fear stirred behind the firm visage. “I’m … very sorry, sir. Wasn’t thinking. Dead tired.”

Sayre smiled. “I know. You people have worked like engines. Never fear, the files will record your loyalty. I may be overstrained myself. This is so important, so urgent.”

He heard the quiver of relief. “Gracias, sir. I hope this time we’ve succeeded, not produced something that raves or gibbers.”

“We’ll find out.”

Yoshikawa ran tongue over dry lips. “You realize, sir, even if it seems right, we won’t know for sure. Excuse me for repeating what’s elementary, but psychomedicine isn’t an exact science yet. A live person given ideational reconditioning can still surprise us occasionally. Here we’re trying it for a download. There’s scarcely any experience with them.”

Sayre clicked his own tongue. “You
are
exhausted, aren’t you? Talking like that. However things develop today, you and your team shall have, m-m, twenty-four hours of deep sleep and twenty-four of recuperative treatment. Keep going for another two or three hours first. Can you do that?”

“Of course, sir,” Yoshikawa said, instantly livening. “We’re anxious to know the results too. It’s for the Transfiguration.”

Sayre’s finger drew the infinity sign. “It is.” He leaned forward. “As for the uncertainty, yes, I’m well aware of it, not merely because you warned me at the outset. If the new Guthrie appears satisfactory, the government will go ahead with him. My duty will be to keep close watch, as one does over any important person whose loyalty isn’t unquestionable. If he seems to deviate, we have punishments to bring him back in line, and rewards to offer for
good behavior. With luck, given computer speed, we’ll soon condition any remaining intransigence out of him.”

His statement was so obvious that he wasn’t revealing any secrets, although Yoshikawa and her people had not been told explicitly what the authorities planned. To give a self-aware program a virtual hell or a virtual heaven should be technically simpler than to do it for flesh and blood. The trick was to discover what were horror and ecstasy in this particular case. Sayre’s career had made him skilled in finding such things out.

“Eventually,” he added, “we’ll have to let him go forth on his own, but by then we ought to be sure of him.”

“Muy bien, sir,” Yoshikawa said. “Shall we make the change immediately?”

“Stand by,” Sayre ordered. “I want a preliminary private session with him as he is. I’ll call you when I’m ready.”

He left the office and proceeded to the laboratory level. At first, as he strode down those corridors, activity buzzed and clicked. For the most part it was machines at work. Reports flowed in, this suspicious activity, that incorrect idea expressed, such and such a citizen who had dropped out of registry, now and then an outright crime that the civil police thought might be politically motivated, inquiries from other command posts throughout the Union, intelligence from abroad that had relevance to the tasks of Security. The computers assimilated, scanned, retrieved, made correlations, determined who should have what information. Nevertheless plenty of personnel sat at the consoles or went from room to room, carrying materials. Humans still had to make the final judgments.

Soon that should not be the case. Sayre often regretted that none of the current progress in artificial intelligence was North American. But when government insisted that the mind was algorithmic, because this was what Xuan had said, and scientists who suggested otherwise got into trouble—

Sayre had argued on their behalf. In his position he could dare do so. The quantum-mechanical, nonalgorithmic
approach was not necessarily subversive, he maintained whenever circumstances allowed. It simply required careful handling. Were it true, Xuan’s great insights would stand basically unchallenged.

Within his own mind, Sayre shrugged. The work going on in Europe and on the Moon was bearing him out. Doctrine would have to adapt itself to reality. And consider what power would soon be available, to revitalize Xuanism by striding light-years toward the Transfiguration. Not the obsolescence and extinction of humankind, but its apotheosis in union with the thinking machine—for thought had proved to be of a subtler nature than cyberneticists foresaw, yet it was a set of physical processes.

As witness Anson Guthrie. Sayre quickened his steps.

Halfway down a certain hall, two guards ported their shock guns when he appeared. Pistols were holstered at their sides. Beyond them reached empty rooms and quietness. His team had taken over the psych lab. That handicapped the Northwest cadre, but they could refer any problems elsewhere. As imperative as secrecy was, Sayre had instructed that Guthrie be moved no farther than from the Fireball building to here. A closed door showed where Yoshikawa and her subordinates waited. Sayre went on. Near the end of the passage, he signalled another door to retract and entered a small, viewless, sparsely furnished chamber.

The box on the table turned its eyestalks to look at him. “Alpha,” Sayre greeted with Avantist formality.

Predictably, Guthrie did not respond, “Omega,” but formed a grunt.

Sayre kept his tone mild. “Surliness is stupid, you know. I hoped that sheer boredom, if nothing else, would have made you ready to communicate.”

“I’ve got my thoughts and memories for company,” said the download. “When I’m not subactive.”

“That state interests me,” Sayre remarked. “Equivalent of sleep, but none of your kind has ever made quite clear what it … feels like.”

“I couldn’t make clear what any part of being a download feels like,” Guthrie answered. “Not that I’d try for you.”

“Do you enjoy your condition, or dislike it?”

Guthrie sat mute. For a moment, irrationally, chill went along Sayre’s backbone as he wondered what this truly was before him. Humans and their machines had made it. Did they afterward understand it? Would they, ever?

The whole thing had seemed so cleanly scientific. Given the theoretical knowledge and the technological capability, you could download a personality, map it into the software of a neural network which itself mapped the unique brain that bore the personality. True, the process was slow, complex, expensive, imperfect. It performed no clean, swift scan, but instead a pervasion, the special molecules in their legions, brought by bloodstream and cerebrospinal fluid to conduct their cell-by-cell examinations while the subject lay half-conscious under electrophasing. Then came resonances with external fields, to recover the data. Then a battery of hypercomputers to interpret and order the findings. Meanwhile, treatment to rid the subject of his tiny inquisitors and bring him back to normal. Design, test, redesign, retest. Eventually, the program, the download—approximation, sketch, ghost of his mind. It had his memories, with the inclinations, beliefs, prejudices, hopes, outlook, style of thinking, entire awareness. But it was not the flesh-and-blood person. It ought to be as comprehensible as any other artifact. It ought to be as controllable.

The stories of all downloads declared that it wasn’t.

How controllable, ultimately, was anything?

Sayre quelled a shudder. He told himself he was over-tired, overwrought. Discipline returned, and he spoke levelly. “See here, I’m making one final effort to be friendly. Have you enough knowledge to appreciate that? You were oblivious a long time, and the updates you have since received were audiovisual only. I wonder if you realize what a concession this visit of mine is.”

“I know you’re the head of the Security Police, and therefore
ex officio
a member of the Advisory Synod, which quietly tells the legislature what laws to pass, the judiciary what decisions to reach, and the executive what to do.” Guthrie sounded unimpressed. “I also know you’re nothing special in history. It’s had your sort again and again, like outbreaks of acne.”

Sayre couldn’t hold down a flick of anger. He flushed. “You betray your ignorance,” he snapped. “Unique, decisive, irreversible events do happen. Fire. Agriculture. The scientific method. Xuan Zhing and his system.”

“I’ve heard that one before, too.”

“You have not! Who else properly analyzed the dynamics of social action? Science, not witch doctors or folk remedies, science put an end to smallpox, AIDS, heart disease, cancer. Do you imagine anything but science can put an end to injustice, wastefulness, alienation, violence, all the horrors humans make for themselves? If you had troubled to study Xuan’s mathematics—”

Sayre broke off. It was ridiculous, preaching like this at a program in a box. Yes, he certainly needed some rest and recreation.

Yet the concept caught him as often before, uplifted him, refreshed and recharged his spirit. Not that he claimed personally to have seen or grasped every facet of the vast achievement. Few intellects reached that high. Even Xuan, throughout the decades of his labors, had drawn heavily on the computer resources of the Academic Internet, as well as acknowledging his debt to earlier thinkers. The likes of Sayre must depend on what they were taught in school, with lectures and semipopular writings to deepen it somewhat afterward. Nevertheless he could appreciate the
fittingness
of it all—the same processes shown to have been at work in Han Dynasty China and Imperial Rome, in Islam and Cao-Dai, in chronometry and calculus. He could be convinced by its arguments that, given modern information processing, the market economy was obsolete, with its inefficiencies and inequities. He could be inspired by the prospect of establishing
and maintaining conditions so well planned that society must evolve toward a sane order of things, as a spacecraft launched on the right trajectory must pass among the multitudinously changeable forces upon it to the desired destination.

Fleetingly, not for the first time, he knew that what made and kept him a dedicated Avantist was none of these proven propositions, not really. It was a logical
non sequitur
—a vision, if you will—and therefore nonrational. But Xuan’s scheme allowed for nonrationality, irrationality, and the chaos of nonlinear systems. They were powerful elements in the course of events; his reasoning took them fully into account. What had captured Sayre’s imagination was Xuan’s afterword. The thinker was at last simply speculating, the prophet was no longer prophesying but imagining. He agreed that nobody alive in an imperfect and limited present can foresee what will happen in a future that has approached perfection and abolished limitations. Still, one dared look ahead, and in fact there had been those already in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who did. They saw dimly, Xuan more clearly, the Transfiguration—a thousand years hence, a million?—and it in its turn might be only a beginning—the whole cosmos evolving from blind matter to pure intelligence—