Lovelock (20 page)

And it worked. I calmed down. But I also surrendered, partly. I went back to the computer and began searching methodically for the hacker. If I brought her the specific result she asked for, I would not have to tell her the route I followed to find it out. I could keep it a secret, because I wouldn’t have to lie.

In the end, it wasn’t hard. I thought again about those original programmers. They were real live people, who lived in a less complicated age, a more trusting time. In the dawn of the computer age, hacking was a lark, and often the very people who wrote programs would get a great deal of pleasure out of hacking somebody else’s. Also, there was an ideal then that information should be free, that everyone should be able to know everything. Wouldn’t one of those programmers have shared this back door with somebody else, a hacker friend? Wouldn’t this back door have been known, somewhere, by someone? Or maybe it was just a matter of age. The programmer got old. He wrote a memoir. It didn’t occur to him that his software was still in use anywhere in the world. It had been so long ago.

I set one of the main network computers to work searching the library for the sequence {[<^. I was careful—I set it to use only ten percent of its processing time for the search, so that no one would notice a sudden degradation of computer performance that wasn’t matched by a corresponding entry in the computer’s automatic log. Even invisible men can leave footprints if they’re not careful. But I was careful.

It didn’t take long. It was a book on hacking written long ago, which included many anecdotes about particularly clever hacks. The author used the sequence
CONTROL
-A {[<^
SHIFT-BACKSPACE
as a hypothetical example of a back door that would be relatively hard to come up with randomly. At no time did he imply that this particular sequence had ever been used.

But the author of the book had dedicated it to his dear friend Aaron Blessing, and it was a simple matter to verify that Aaron Blessing was one of the programmers who had created the networking software used on the Ark. Blessing must have told the author of the book, who then used the back door as a hypothetical example. It was an in-joke, just between the two of them.

Only three people had downloaded that book in the past year. Only one of them was from Mayflower village—the other two would almost certainly not have known or cared that Mamie and Stef were drones.

Peter Klarner. That nasty little sneak. I could just imagine him overhearing his mother, Dolores, complaining about the
drones
in Carol Jeanne’s family and how awful it was and how somebody ought to do something only there was nothing that you could do or say because Carol Jeanne was so important. But Peter knew how to say something. He created his little animation and attached it as a rider to the system circular and sent it on its way.

How long ago had he found the back door? What had he done with it? Did he know that it was soon going to be useless? I found myself wishing I could talk to him—bragging, perhaps, because I had found out who he was. But also learning from him, sharing with him. As his equal. As another person who seemed powerless to others, but who had found a secret source of power that no one guessed.

Peter must have been reading the book, came across the hypothetical example, and just as a joke typed it into the household computer. And it worked. It must have seemed to him like a miracle. A cosmic joke. Like reaching puberty all of a sudden, without warning. Look what I can
do!

He had the wit not to tell anyone. And yet he couldn’t bear not to let somebody know. So he had sent that animation as much to demonstrate his power as to discomfit drones. What did
he
care whether Mamie or Stef had jobs or not? They were just the excuse for him to show off that he had access to the network that even the sysops didn’t have.

Maybe he knew already—of
course
he knew—that the new software was coming online. So it didn’t matter now if he let people know he was there. It would be kind of fun to strut a little, to show off, because in a week or two he wouldn’t have the chance anymore.

Carol Jeanne had already gone to the office. When she gave me an assignment she didn’t wait around for me to finish it—unlike Red, she didn’t actually believe that every single breath she took should be watched by her witness. It was part of Carol Jeanne’s fundamental humility. Her work was vital, so she accepted a witness in order to help preserve it. But her life was just a life, and she didn’t mind if her witness, busy on some assigned task, happened not to record a conversation or two.

Of course I didn’t knock on her door. I was her witness, wasn’t I? I simply jumped up, palmed the
I.D.
panel, and the door slid open. How was I to know that she would be sitting on the edge of her desk, tears streaming down her face, with Neeraj sitting beside her, his right arm around her, his left hand gently stroking the tears from her cheeks?

Apparently the foolishness with the coconut had been forgiven. Apparently Carol Jeanne no longer thought of Neeraj as an obnoxious little man. I will never cease to be amazed at the ability of human females to overlook their first, negative, and frequently correct impressions of human males. In this case, though, Neeraj was definitely an improvement over her husband. I was not surprised that he had won this much trust from her so quickly.

When the door opened, of course, they looked up, startled, alarmed. But then she saw it was me. “Oh, Lovelock,” she said. “Did you find out?”

If I had been a person, if she had thought of me as a friend, she would have explained what she was doing there with a man’s arm around her. She would have said something about how her quarrel with Red had made her cry and how Neeraj was just comforting her. She would have been aware of the awkward appearances and done something to dispel the gossipy conclusion that another
human
would certainly reach.

But I was just a slave, and so nothing had to be explained to
me
.

Instead, she explained
me
to
him
.

“That vicious little message I told you about, Neeraj. Lovelock must have found out who sent it.”

Neeraj didn’t take his arm from around her. But he winked at me and gave a little half-smile. I wasn’t sure what he meant to convey by this. One male letting another know that this female was well in hand? Or perhaps one friend of Carol Jeanne’s letting another friend know that she was all right? Either way, Neeraj was treating me as more of a person than Carol Jeanne ever did.

“Who was it, Lovelock?” she asked.

I clambered up to her computer. “Confidential,” I typed.

“Oh,” said Neeraj, “I understand.” He finally unwound himself from her and stood. “My own guess, you know, is that your father-in-law sent it himself.”

Carol Jeanne laughed and covered her mouth like a schoolgirl. “I didn’t even—of course, how delicious! How right that would be!”

Totally wrong, of course. But in her eyes, apparently, Neeraj was very very clever.

I knew Carol Jeanne better than any other living soul. Better than she knew herself. So I knew right then, long before she understood it herself, that she was in love with Neeraj.

And why not? He was everything that Red was not. He was tender with her and cared about her and understood her work. He did not place his mother ahead of her. He did not make her feel like an inadequate mother as Red so often—and so deliberately—did. He was also vaguely exotic, which would add to the adolescent excitement of an affair. Carol Jeanne was already showing him emotions that until now she had shown only in front of me—or, in her own mind, had never shown to any
person
at all. Her private barriers were falling.

She’s just like Stef, I realized. Here in a new world, where the old social role that she had grown used to on Earth could be challenged, could be changed, she was beginning to be restless under the burdens of life with Red. She was tired of the way Mamie used her, tired of the way Red criticized her. His little game this morning with the children must have sickened her—but it also frightened her, too, to realize that her children were so utterly under Red’s control that he could flip a switch on their affection for her. If he could switch it on, as he had that morning, then he could switch it off. It meant he had power over her life, and that’s one thing Carol Jeanne couldn’t abide, letting someone else control her. She had stayed with Red all these years because she fancied that she was still freely choosing to be with him, despite all the problems with his mother. But now it seemed possible that he could take her children away from her if he wanted to. And so her role in the family was no longer secure. She was under his control.

How long had it taken her? A few hours, and she had another man’s arm around her. Did Red think he could rule her? Think again, Red.

Humans are just as obvious and just as transparent as any of the other primates. It’s all about sex and power, and power is all about sex—access to sex, control of sex. It’s all about genes determined to reproduce themselves, and half of human behavior is nothing but those genes acting out their will to survive. How long before Neeraj would mate with Carol Jeanne? Days? Weeks? She would change mates and by doing so would bestow enormous prestige upon her new partner and deprive and punish her old one. She had the power, and Red would know it. This affair would not be secret for long. She would think it was an accident, but she would let something slip. She would find a way to flaunt this in front of Red. It was all explainable as basic primate behavior.

Behavior that I had been forbidden to engage in. She could do whatever she wanted to do with sex, but because I was needed as her slave, I was barred from ever, ever taking part in the great ballet of life. My genes were being murdered.

Neeraj left the room. I typed: “The hacker was Peter Klarner. Dolores’s son. He probably thought he was doing his mother a favor, and she probably has no idea of what he did. If you want, I’ll send him a message that will make sure he never does it again. I’m betting he only did it because he thought he could get away with it.”

“Fine,” she said. “Just so it stops. I don’t want anyone to get in trouble over this. The last thing we need is to have the whole administration aware that Mamie’s unwillingness to work is causing this level of resentment in Mayflower.”

“Good,” I said. “I’ll send him the message right away.”

“Use your clipboard, Lovelock, I need the big computer.”

So I got out of her way as she sat down in front of the large screen and began calling up reports from the teams working on various aspects of ocean transformation and atmosphere maintenance.

My notebook was on a corner of her desk, but it was hooked into the network with a thin cable. She generally left it here these days, because she only used it for talking with me. Back on Earth she had taken it with her in her purse wherever she went, because she didn’t always have access to other computers and didn’t want to have our private conversations take place on other people’s machines, anyway. But here on the Ark, she was either at home or at the office, and either way she had complete access to computers that she could use with privacy. The clipboard was now for me alone. If only I were strong enough to lift it and carry it along with me. I could slide it along the desk, but that was all.

Because she was engrossed with her work and couldn’t see my clipboard’s screen anyway, I felt free to access the back door to the network right there in the office with her. I wrote a simple message to Peter, created a new user named God, had that new identity send the message through regular mail, and then deleted God from the system and removed every trace that he had ever existed as a network identity. Peter would know, when he tried to trace the sender of the message, that it was somebody with as much power on the system as he had—and, I was fairly certain, with a good deal more knowledge of how to use that power than Peter would ever have.

After Stef drew the battle lines, there was nothing left to do but fight the war. But just as a skirmish couldn’t be fought behind closed doors, Stef’s battle for independence would also be waged in the open. As soon as Stef walked out the door, the breach became a matter for public speculation.

Normally Mamie would have been delighted to find herself in the public eye, but Stef had committed the unpardonable sin of being the one who did the abandoning rather than the other way around. People would talk about that.

As for the drone message that triggered the whole thing, any one of Mayflower’s citizens could have put it on our household computer. Obviously someone already felt some hostility. How many someones, she couldn’t guess. For all she knew, the whole town could be laughing at her behind her back.

Mamie was accustomed to being a gossip, although she would have used Red’s euphemistic phrase: “other-centered individual.” It was the role of gossipee that was new for her. Avoiding shame had been the great motivating force of her life, and the idea of people sneering at her behind her back was a greater torment for her than the loss of a husband who had never been, as far as I could see, much more than a fashion accessory. Imagining the lash of a thousand tongues, she sequestered herself inside the house for several days. She didn’t even sleep for the first two nights, and because she roamed the house like a wraith I was denied my nightly excursion up the wall of the Ark. On the third day she got a prescription for sleeping pills; after that, I was able to resume my normal routine.

Her emergence came on Sunday, though she tormented the household for days in her back-and-forth should-I-go-should-I-hide debate. Finally she decided that staying home from church would make other people think she had something to be ashamed of, whereas if she strutted to church as usual, head held high, people would admire her courage and might even assume that she’d given Stef the boot rather than him discarding her. So on Sunday, she dressed in her finest clothing and jewelry, as if it were a day of celebration. Mayflower’s peacock had unfurled its plumage for all to see. I wrote a quick fashion critique and showed it to Carol Jeanne. She called me a bad boy but I could tell she loved it.

Mamie and Red took the girls and walked ahead of Carol Jeanne and me on the way to church, widening the psychological distance between us. Pink trotted behind Red and left a few well-placed farts in our path. I was disgusted, not by the bodily functions, but by her egregious partisanship when her master was so clearly in the wrong. True, Pink’s loyalty had been programmed into her; but I had also been programmed to love only Carol Jeanne, and that hadn’t stopped me from seeing the truth about her. Having been enlightened, I was naively impatient with others of my kind who were still deluded. I felt that Pink and I should have been allies; instead we were strangers to one another. She was a sentient being; how could she be so content in her servitude? I could only conclude that pigs were innately inferior to primates, so that even when enhanced they remained a lesser order of being.

I watched her little piggy butt jiggle as she trotted complacently after Red, and I was disgusted by her obsequiousness. It never occurred to me then that my own scampering, my begging for treats, my infernal
cuteness
telegraphed the same contentment to others that I found so distasteful in her. I knew by then that when I did those things, I was merely pretending to be a happy slave. It did not occur to me that perhaps
all
happy slaves are pretending, some perhaps doing it so well that they deceive even themselves.

Mamie preceded the rest of us into the chapel, leading the procession with her adoring family in her wake. She pushed herself into a partially occupied pew instead of an empty one, so that once she had spread herself out on the bench with her dear boy at her side and her loving grandchildren vying for her lap, there was no room for Carol Jeanne and me. For the benefit of those who watched, Mamie raised her hands in dismay as though it were all an oversight. She clucked for Carol Jeanne to sit in the row behind them, and Carol Jeanne was too surprised to do anything else. It was a nasty thing to do. Even in her time of trouble, Mamie could find time to vent her malice. Perhaps she was thinking that if she couldn’t have a husband beside her, nobody should. Or perhaps she thought that if Carol Jeanne and Red were together, Mamie would look like the lonely extra person. Even though it was Mamie who had lost her husband, she apparently felt it more appropriate for Carol Jeanne to look the part of the single woman.

Finally, though, I realized that Mamie was fighting for survival in the little community of Mayflower, and her analysis of what would help her achieve that goal was excellent. Carol Jeanne was famous, but it was Red who was well liked and personally admired by the people of Mayflower. On the Ark as a whole, Carol Jeanne was a far greater asset than Red; in Mayflower, the situation was reversed. Mamie was determined that people picture her in Red’s company.

I understood this, but of course Carol Jeanne was oblivious. She was annoyed at having been shunted off, but she had no idea of what it really meant. And even if I had explained, it was quite likely that she would have shrugged. What did she care, then, how the meaningless little community of Mayflower felt about her? Unlike Red, Carol Jeanne hadn’t grasped the fact that life in the Ark was a significant change from life in America. There, your professional community was your neighborhood, and you hardly cared where your house was. In the Ark, the professional community was far smaller and the physical neighborhood mattered far more. It had been planned this way, so that during the hard early years of colonization, people would be able to work together smoothly in creating many small, agriculturally self-sufficient communities. On the new planet, there would be no cheap, fast transportation to link the towns. If you didn’t have friends in your own community, you wouldn’t have friends at all.

Carol Jeanne, if asked, probably would have said that she didn’t
need
friends, that her work was her life. But it would have been a lie. Even the most profound introverts need somebody. What else would explain her bizarre friendship with Neeraj? Carol Jeanne was desperate for a friend—but only on her own terms, which meant that she could only be close with someone who understood and valued her work.

That could have been me, and if it had been, I would be writing a very different account, if I were writing one at all. But Carol Jeanne, who had once seemed to be the beginning and the end of the world to me, was clearly not the sort of person who can perceive hidden value in others. In her own way, she was as much of a user as Mamie. She was merely less conscious of what she was doing as she ignored the love of her best, most loyal friends and bestowed what love she offered on the undeserving.

Maybe that’s the only kind of human being there is. Certainly the people at church valued Red even though he was a parasite. Why? Because Red went through the motions of assuring others that he valued them and their community and its stupid little rituals and rules. Men nodded and women waved at him from across the church, and although there may have been one or two knowing glances, Mamie could easily fool herself into thinking that the affection Red had won belonged as much to her.

Carol Jeanne, not Mamie, was the pariah. Nobody waved or even smiled at her. They snubbed her, just as she had snubbed them from the beginning. She and I were alone.

For most of my life, being alone with Carol Jeanne had been my fondest dream. But she had made it plain that I was no more to her than a sentient toaster, and I was bitterly aware that when she was with me, she thought of herself as being utterly alone. While the prelude music was being played I groomed her hair to distract her attention from the Mayflowerites who preferred her husband to herself, but I did this more out of habit than affection. She detected no difference. Why should she? The toaster was popping out toast just as it had been programmed to do.

Once the services began, I allowed myself to relax. I have never had much use for human religions—I knew who
my
maker was, and it was not an omniscient being. Lately I’d been discovering that my maker might not have been omnipotent, either. But there was no religion in it.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed the weekly Presbyterian services as much as Carol Jeanne loathed them. She needed the solemn rituals of mass, but I preferred the greater casualness of Protestant worship. Would old Mrs. Burke drop her hymnal on the organ keyboard during prayers? Would Mr. Watters snore through the sermon again? These were variables that were sorely lacking in the Catholic religion.

The music director was a treat to watch. She was a large woman, not as tightly built as Penelope or Mamie, and her fat billowed underneath her clothes. She favored pastel linen suits that were more transparent than she realized, and the torso that peeked through the fabric resembled the face of a surprised man. When she waved her arms to lead the music, the eyes rolled around and scrutinized the congregation. Apparently no one else had thought to inform her of the need to change her wardrobe; or perhaps they had, and she was a closet exhibitionist.

What I liked best about the service was the spying—no, data-gathering—I got to do when the plate was passed. Money wasn’t a big commodity on the Ark, so instead of putting coins in the plate, churchgoers dropped promises there instead. There were pads of paper and blunt-tipped writing implements behind every pew, and while the offertory was sung people wrote their offerings down. The idea was to volunteer service to the church or the community, or to make a promise of some kind to God.

Whenever the plate was passed on Sunday, I took advantage of my monkeyhood and my rights as a witness, and moved around, ostensibly stretching one last time before the sermon. Nobody seemed conscious of how good my eyesight was, and therefore how far away I could be and still read what people wrote. Usually the offerings were as pedestrian as the people who made them. A woman would promise not to speak sharply to her husband, or a man would vow to spend more time with his children. These offerings held little interest for me except that they confirmed the dullness of the offerers’ lives.

Sometimes, however, my observations yielded more interesting results. I once saw a man write an anonymous note promising God to give up his mistress. He was a little gnome of a human, and the thought that he had two women on a string was both surprising and appealing. Another man vowed to do a better job pleasing his wife sexually, even though, as he added nastily, she made no effort to please
him
. Thus was an intimate complaint cleverly disguised as a loving promise. I stored these nuggets away as part of my ongoing effort to understand human behavior. Once I had told myself—and believed—that I studied humans in order to be better able to serve Carol Jeanne. By then, however, I knew better. I studied them to try to understand what it meant to be a person. If Carol Jeanne had ever asked me what kinds of things people wrote in their offerings, I would have told her—my conditioning was too strong for me to do otherwise. But she was not other-centered enough to ask. And I was not so stupid as to volunteer what I knew; if she had known how much I learned about Mayflower from spying on their offerings, she probably would have told me to stop.

Some offerings were signed and some were not. Promises made to God were always anonymous because they were nobody’s business but the worshipper’s and his maker’s. But community commitments were signed with the name of the person making the offering. When a member of the congregation vowed to weed the nasturtium patch in front of the chapel, the minister needed to know who it was who had signed up.

Mamie’s favorite offering was to invite Pastor Barton’s family to dinner on Freeday—a safe proposition to make because there were five hundred eager villagers and only one minister. On almost every occasion Mamie made this particular offer, Pastor Barton called with the sad news that his time was already taken by another member of the congregation. Thus Mamie got credit for asking without having to take the trouble of fulfilling the offer.

Carol Jeanne’s notes almost invariably said nothing. She merely scribbled on the paper, shielding her meaningless doodles from prying eyes before folding the slip neatly in quarters as ritual demanded and dropping it into the plate. She was not the only one to do this; few had the cheek to openly write nothing. Today, though, she sighed as she reached for her pad of paper, a sure sign to me that she was going to write something real. I craned my neck to read the words.

“I miss You,” she wrote, and the capitalization told me, to my surprise, who it was she missed. Perhaps sitting there alone on the bench had reminded her that along with Earth, she had also abandoned the God of her youth. As much as I loved Carol Jeanne, I had long been aware that at an unconscious level she was deeply superstitious, despite her achievements as a scientist. Naturally she was uncomfortable attending Presbyterian services instead of the Catholic ones of her childhood. But this was hardly the true cause of her unhappiness in everyday life. It never would have occurred to her that if she wanted to know the source of her unhappiness, she should look, not to God, but to herself, for having made a bad marriage and not having had the wisdom to end it before leaving on this voyage.

Unlike the others, of course, Carol Jeanne knew
exactly
how well I could see, and when she noticed me looking at her note, she shielded it from my eyes. That stung. I was her witness, after all; I was
supposed
to look. But I feigned indifference by jumping off her shoulder and landing on the back of Red’s pew. I loped to the end of the pew and jumped to the one in front, and then the one in front of that. Few people even noticed me anymore, because I always gamboled this way when the organ played. Those who had complained at first that it was disrespectful to have “pets” playing around in church had long since become resigned to the fact that the witness laws took precedence over decorum in the sanctuary. And some even looked my way and smiled. Even the toaster knew how to make himself more likable than Carol Jeanne.