The Shockwave Rider (14 page)

Except …

The theory was and always had been: this is the thing the solid citizen has no need to worry about.

Important, later all-important question: what about the hollow citizen?

Because, liberated, the populace took off like so many hot-air balloons.

“Okay, let’s!”—move, take that job in another state, go spend all summer by the lake, operate this winter out of a resort in the Rockies, commute by veetol over a thousand miles, see how island living suits us and forget the idea if it’s a bust …

Subtler yet, more far-reaching: let’s trade wives and children on a monthly rota, good for the kids to get used to multiple parents because after all you’ve been married twice and I’ve been married three times, and let’s quit the city fast before the boss finds out it was me who undercut him on that near-the-knuckle deal, and let’s move out of shouting distance of that twitch you were obsessed with so you can cool down, and let’s go someplace where the word isn’t out on the mouth-to-mouth circuit that you’re skew else you’ll never have the chance to give up men, and let’s see if it’s true about those fine dope connections in Topeka and let’s—let’s—let’s …

Plus, all the time and everywhere, the sneaking suspicion:
don’t look now, I think we’re being followed.

Two years after they spliced the home-phone service into the continental net the system was screaming in silent agony like the limbs of a marathon runner who knows he can shatter the world’s best time provided he can make the final mile.

But, they asked at Tarnover in the same oh-so-reasonable tones, what else could we have done?

LET’S ALL BE DIFFERENT SAME AS ME

“That,” Freeman said thoughtfully, “sounds like a question you still have found no answer to.”

“Oh, shut up. Put me back in regressed mode, for God’s sake. I know you don’t call this torture—I know you call it stimulus-response evaluation—but it feels like torture all the same and I’d rather get it over and done with. Since there isn’t an alternative.”

Freeman scanned his dials and screens.

“Unfortunately it’s not safe to regress you again at the moment. It will take a day or so for the revived effects of your overload at KC to flush out of your system. It was the most violent experience you’ve undergone as an adult. Extremely traumatizing.”

“I’m infinitely obliged for the data. I suspected so, but it’s nice to have it confirmed by your machines.”

“Sweedack. Just as it’s good to have what the machines tell us confirmed by your conscious personality.”

“Are you a hockey ’fish?”

“Not in the sense of following one particular team, but the game does offer a microcosm of modern society, doesn’t it? Group commitment, chafing against restrictive rules, enactment of display-type aggression more related to status than hate or fear, plus the use of banishment as a means of enforcing conformity. To which you can add the use of the most primitive weapon, the club, albeit stylized.”

“So that’s how you view society. I’ve been wondering. How trivial! How oversimplified! You mention restrictive rules … but rules only become restrictive when they’re obsolescent. We’ve revised our rules at every stage of our social evolution, ever since we learned to talk, and we’re still making new ones that suit us better. We’ll carry right on unless fools like you contrive to stop us!”

Leaning forward, Freeman cupped his sharp chin in his right palm.

“We’re into an area of fundamental difference of opinion,” he said after a pause. “I put it to you that no rule consciously invented by mankind since we acquired speech has force equivalent to those inherited from perhaps fifty, perhaps a hundred thousand generations of evolution in the wild state. I further suggest that the chief reason why modern society is in turmoil is that for too long we claimed that our special human talents could exempt us from the heritage written in our genes.”

“It’s because you and those like you think in strict binary terms—‘either-or’—as though you’ve decided machines are our superiors and you want to imitate them, that I have to believe you not only don’t have the right answer but can never find it. You treat human beings on the black-box principle. Cue this reflex, that response ensues; cue another and get something different. There’s no room in your cosmos for what you call special talents.”

“Come, now.” Freeman gave a faint, gaunt smile. “You’re talking in terms at least two generations old. Have you deleted from your mind all awareness of how sophisticated our methodology has become since the 1960s?”

“And have you suppressed all perception of how it’s rigidified, like medieval theology, with your collective brilliance concentrated on finding means to abolish any view not in accord with yours? Don’t bother to answer that. I’m experiencing the reality of your black-box approach. You’re testing me to destruction, not as an individual but as a sample that may or may not match your idealized model of a person. If I don’t react as predicted, you’ll revise the model and try again. But you won’t care about
me.
”

“
Sub specie aeternitatis
,” Freeman said, smiling anew, “I find no evidence for believing that I matter any more than any other human being who ever existed or who ever will exist. Nor does any of them matter more than I do. We’re elements in a process that began in the dim past and will develop through who knows what kind of future.”

“What you say reinforces my favorite image of Tarnover: a rotting carcass, pullulating with indistinguishable maggots, whose sole purpose in life is to grab more of the dead flesh more quickly than their rivals.”

“Ah, yes. The conqueror worm. I find it curious that you should have turned out to be of a religious bent, given the cynicism with which you exploited the trappings of your minister’s role at Toledo.”

“But I’m not religious. Chiefly because the end point of religious faith is your type of blind credulity.”

“Excellent. A paradox. Resolve it for me.” Freeman leaned back, crossing his thin legs and setting his thin fingers tip to tip with elbows on the side of his chair.

“You believe that man is comprehensible to himself, or at any rate you act as though you do. Yet you refer constantly to processes that began back then and will continue for ever and ever amen. What you’re trying to do is step out of the flow of process, just as superstitious savages did—do!—by invoking divine forces not confined by human limitations. You give lip service to the process, but you won’t accept it. On the contrary, you strive to dominate it. And that can’t be done unless you stand outside it.”

“Hmm. You’re an atavism, aren’t you? You have the makings of a schoolman! But that doesn’t save you from being wrong. We are trying not to want to step out of the flow, because we’ve recognized the nature of the process and its inevitability. The best that can be hoped for is to direct it into the most tolerable channels. What we’re doing at Tarnover is possibly the most valuable service any small group ever performed for mankind at large. We’re diagnosing our social problems and then deliberately setting out to create the person who can solve them.”

“And how many problems have been solved to date?”

“We haven’t yet exterminated ourselves.”

“You claim credit for that? I knew you had gall, but this is fantastic! You could just as well argue that in the case of human beings it took the invention of nuclear weapons to trigger the life-saving response most species show when faced with the fangs and claws of a tougher rival.”

“That in fact appears to be true.”

“If you believed that you wouldn’t be working so hard to universalize the new conformity.”

“Is that a term you coined yourself?”

“No, I borrowed it from someone whose writings aren’t particularly loved at Tarnover: Angus Porter.”

“Well, it’s a resounding phrase. But does it mean anything?”

“I wouldn’t bother to answer except that it’s better to be talking in present time than sitting back inside my head while you interrogate my memory … because you know damned well what it means. Look at yourself. You’re part of it. It’s a century old. It began when for the first time people in a wealthy country started tailoring other cultures to their own lowest common denominator: people with money to spend who were afraid of strange food, who told the restaurateur to serve hamburgers instead of enchiladas or fish and chips instead of couscous, who wanted something pretty to hang on the wall at home and not what some local artist had sunk his heart and soul in, who found it too hot in Rio and too cold in Zermatt and insisted on going there anyhow.”

“We’re to be blamed because that’s how people reacted long before Tarnover was founded?” Freeman shook his head. “I remain unconvinced.”

“But this is the concept you started with, the one you’ve clung to! You walked straight into a trap with no way out. You wanted to develop a generalized model of mankind, and this was the handiest to build on: more general than pre-World War I European royalty despite the fact that that was genuinely cosmopolitan, and more homogeneous than the archetypal peasant culture, which is universal but individualized. What you’ve wound up with is a schema where the people who obey those ancient evolutionary principles you cite so freely—as for example by striking roots in one place that will last a lifetime—are regarded by their fellows as ‘rather odd.’ It won’t be long before they’re persecuted. And then how will you justify your claim that the message in the genes overrides consciously directed modern change?”

“Are you talking about the so-called economists, who won’t take advantage of the facilities our technology offers? More fool them; they choose to be stunted.”

“No, I’m talking about the people who are surrounded by such a plethora of opportunity they dither and lapse into anxiety neurosis. Friends and neighbors rally round to help them out, explain the marvels of today and show them how, and go away feeling virtuous. But if tomorrow they have to repeat the process, and the day after, and the day after that …? No, from the patronizing stage to the persecuting stage has always been a very short step.”

After a brief silence Freeman said, “But it’s easy to reconcile the views I really hold, as distinct from the distorted versions you’re offering. Mankind originated as a nomadic species, following game herds and moving from one pasture to another with the seasons. Mobility of similar order has been reintegrated into our culture, at least in the wealthy nations. Yet there are advantages to living in an urban society, like sanitation, easy communications, tolerably cheap transportation … And thanks to our ingenuity with computers, we haven’t had to sacrifice these conveniences.”

“One might as well claim that the tide which rubs pebbles smooth on a beach is doing the pebbles a service because being round is prettier than being jagged. It’s of no concern to a pebble what shape it is. But it’s very important to a person. And every surge of your tide is reducing the variety of shapes a human being can adopt.”

“Your extended metaphors do you credit,” Freeman said. “But I detect, and so do my monitors, that you’re straining after them like a man at a party who’s desperately pretending that he’s not quite drunk. Today’s session is due to end in a few minutes; I’ll cut it short and renew the interrogation in the morning.”

THE RIGHT-ON THING FOR THE WRONG-OFF REASON

The experience was exactly like riding in a car when the driver, seeing ahead a patch of bad road with a lot of potholes, tramps hard on the accelerator in preference to slowing down. There was a drumming sound, and certain landmarks beside the route were noticeable, but essentially it was a matter of being
there then
and subsequently
here now.

Just about enough time was perceived as having elapsed for the passenger to realize
he
wouldn’t have traveled so fast on such a lousy bumpy bit of road … and ask himself why not, since it gave excellent results.

Then, very abruptly, it stopped.

“Where the hell have you brought me?”

Looking around a room with rough brown walls, an old-style spring bed, carpet on the floor which wasn’t even fitted, a view of sunset through broad shallow windows that distracted him before he could enumerate other objects like chairs and a table and so forth. They registered as belonging in the sort of junk store whose owner would label as antique anything older than himself.

“You poor shivver,” Kate said. She was there too. “You have one hell of a bad case. I asked you, did you think it was a good idea to head for Lap-of-the-Gods? And you said yes.”

He was sitting on a chair which happened to be near him. He closed his hands on its arms until his knuckles were almost white. With much effort he said, “Then I was crazy. I thought of coming to a town like this long ago and realized it was the first place they’d think of looking.”

Theoretically, for somone trying to mislay a previous identity, no better spot could be found on the continent than this, or some other of the settlements created by refugees from Northern California after the Great Bay Quake. Literally millions of traumatized fugitives had straggled southward. For years they survived in tents and shanties, dependent on federal handouts because they were too mentally disturbed to work for a living and in most cases afraid to enter a building with a solid roof for fear it would crash down and kill them. They were desperate for a sense of stability, and sought it in a thousand irrational cults. Confidence-tricksters and fake evangelists found them easy prey. Soon it was a tourist lure to visit their settlements on Sunday and watch the running battles between adherents of rival—but equally lunatic—beliefs. Insurance extra.