The Shockwave Rider (21 page)

“Do you feel up to it?”

“I think so. Whether or not Precipice will work for everybody, it worked for me. And it’s high time I faced the reason why my stay there ended in a disaster, when if I hadn’t been a fool it need have been no worse than a minor setback.”

THE MESH OF A RIDDLE

“This is the most incredible place. I never dreamed—”

Walking uphill on the aptly named Drunkard’s Walk, Kate interrupted him.

“Sandy, that dog. Natty Bumppo.”

“He gave you quite a fright, didn’t he? I’m sorry.”

“No!”

“But you—”

“I know, I know. I was startled. But I wasn’t scared. I simply didn’t believe it. I thought none of Dad’s dogs was left.”

“What?” He almost stumbled, turning to stare at her. “What on earth could he have to do with your father?”

“Well, I never heard of anybody else who did such marvelous things with animals. Bagheera was one of Dad’s too, you know. Almost the last.”

He drew a deep breath. “Kate dear, would you please begin at the beginning?”

Eyes troubled and full of sadness, she said, “I guess I ought to. I remember asking if you knew about my father, and you said sure, he was Henry Lilleberg the neurophysiologist, and I left it at that. But it was a prime example of what you said only an hour ago Precipice is designed to cure. Slap a label on and forget about it. Say ‘neurophysiologist’ and you conjure up a stock picture of the sort of person who will dissect out a nervous system, analyze it
in vitro,
publish the findings and go away content, forgetting that the rest of the animal ever existed. That isn’t a definition of my father! When I was a little girl he used to bring me amazing pets, which never lasted long because they were already old. But they’d been of service at his labs, and as a result he couldn’t bear to throw them down the incinerator chute. He used to say he owed them a bit of fun because he’d cheated them of it when they were young.”

“What kind of animals?”

“Oh, little ones at first, when I was five or six—rats, hamsters, gerbils. Later on there were squirrels and gophers, cats and raccoons. Remember I mentioned he had a license to move protected species interstate? And finally, in the last couple of years before he was taken so ill he had to retire, he was working with some real big ones: dogs like Natty Bumppo and mountain lions like Bagheera.”

“Did he do any research with aquatic mammals—dolphins, porpoises?”

“I don’t believe so. At any rate he couldn’t have brought those home for me.” A touch of her normal wry humor returned with the words. “We lived in an apt. We didn’t have a pool to keep them in. Why do you ask?”

“I was wondering whether he might have been involved with—hell, I don’t know which of several names you might recognize. They kept changing designations as they ran into one dead end after another. But it was a project based in Georgia intended to device animals capable of defeating an invasion. Originally they thought of small creatures as disease-vectors and saboteurs, like they conditioned rats to gnaw compulsively on tire rubber and electrical insulation. Later there was all this hot air generated about surrogate armies, with animals substituted for infantry. Wars would still be fought, with lots of blood and noise, but no soldiers would be killed—not permanently.”

“I knew the project under the name of Parsimony. But Dad never worked on it. They kept asking him to join, and he kept declining because they’d never tell him all the details of what he’d have to do. It wasn’t until he’d contracted his terminal myelitis that he was able to find out how right he’d been.”

“The project was discontinued, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, and I know why. They’d been living off Dad’s back for years. He was the only man in the country, maybe the world, who was consistently successful in making superintelligent animals breed true.”

“Literally the only one?”

“Oh, even he scarcely believed it. He published his data and always swore he wasn’t holding anything back, but other researchers found they couldn’t get the same results. In the end it became a joke for him. He used to say, ‘I just have red fingers.’ ”

“I see. Like a gardener has green ones.”

“Exactly.”

“What were his methods?” The question was more rhetorical than literal. But she answered anyway.

“Don’t ask me, go punch a code. All the data are on open reels. Seemingly the government must hope another red-fingered genius will chance on them some day.”

Eyes fixed on nowhere, he said in a musing tone, “I got disenchanted with biology, but I do recall something about the Lilleberg Hypothesis. An ultrarefined subcategory of natural selection involving hormonal influence not only on the embryo but on the gonads of the parents, which was supposed to determine the crossover points on the chromosomes.”

“Mm-hm. He was ridiculed for proposing it. He was slandered by all his colleagues, accused of trying to show that Lysenko was right after all. Which,” she added hotly, “was a transparent lie! What he actually did was advance an explanation why in spite of being wrong the Lysenkoists could have fooled themselves. Sandy, why does an establishment always fossilize so quickly? It may be my imagination, but I have this paranoid notion that people in authority today make a policy of seizing on any really original idea and either distorting it or suppressing it. Ted Horovitz was saying something about people being discouraged from digging into the Disasterville studies, for example.”

“Do you really have to ask about government?” he countered grayly. “I’d have thought the reason was plain. It’s the social counterpart of natural selection. Those groups within society that craved power at the expense of everything else—morality, self-respect, honest friendship—they achieved dominance long ago. The mass of the public no longer has any contact with government; all they know is that if they step out of line they’ll be trodden on. And the means exist to make the statement literal. … Oh, they must hate Precipice, over there in Washington! A tiny community, and its citizens can thumb their noses at any federal diktat!”

She shuddered visibly. “But the scientists … ?” she said.

“Their reaction is a different matter. The explosion of human knowledge has accelerated to the point where even the most brilliant can’t cope with it any more. Theories have rigidified into dogma just as they did in the Middle Ages. The leading experts feel obligated to protect their creed against the heretics. Right?”

“That certainly fits in Dad’s case,” Kate said, nodding and biting her lip. “But—well, he proved his point! Bagheera’s evidence, if nothing else.”

“He wasn’t an isolated success, was he?”

“Hell, no. But the only one Dad was able to save from being sold to the big circus at Quemadura. It was just getting started then, and people were investing a lot of money in it and—Say, look there!”

They were passing a patch of level grass where two young children were lying asleep on a blanket. Beside them was a dog the same type and color as Natty Bumppo but smaller, a bitch. She was gazing levelly at the strangers; one corner of her upper lip was curled to show sharp white teeth, and she was uttering a faint—as it were a questioning—growl.

Now she rose, the hair on her spine erect, and approached them. They stopped dead.

“Hello,” Kate said, with a hint of nervousness. “We’re new here. But we’ve just been to call on Ted, and he and Suzy say we can live in the old Thorgrim house.”

“Kate, you can’t seriously expect a dog to understand a complex—”

He broke off, dumbfounded. For the bitch had promptly wagged her tail. Smiling, Kate held out her hand to be smelt. After a moment he copied her.

The dog pondered a while, then nodded in an entirely human fashion, and turned her head to show that on the collar she wore there was a plaque with a few words stamped on it.

“Brynhilde,” Kate read aloud. “And you belong to some people called Josh and Lorna Treves. Well, how do you do, Brynhilde?”

Solemn, the dog offered each of them her right paw, then returned to her guard duty. They walked on.

“Now do you believe me?” Kate murmured.

“Yes, damn it, I have to. But how on earth could a bunch of your father’s dogs have found their way here?”

“Like the mayor said, they probably escaped from a research station and went looking for a good home. Several centers had dogs bred by Dad. Say, I wonder how much further it is to Great Circle Course. Can we have come too far? No street names are marked up anywhere.”

“I noticed. That’s of a piece with everything else. Helps to force you back from the abstract set to the reality. Of course it’s something that can only work in a small community, but—well, how many thousands of streets have you passed along without registering anything but the name? I think that’s one of the forces driving people to distraction. One needs solid perceptual food same as one needs solid nutriment; without it, you die of bulk-hunger. There’s an intersection, see?”

They hurried the last few paces, and—

“Oh,
Sandy!
” Kate’s voice was a gusty sigh. “Sandy, can this possibly be right? It’s not a house, it’s a piece of sculpture! And it’s beautiful!”

After a long and astonished silence he said to the air, “Well, thank
you!
”

And in a fit of exuberance swept her off her feet and carried her over the not-exactly-a-threshold.

THE LOGICALITY OF LIKING

“I wonder what made you like Precipice so much,” Freeman muttered.

“I’d have thought it was obvious. The people there have got right what those at Tarnover got completely wrong.”

“To me it sounds like the regular plug-in life-style. You arrive, you take on a house that’s spare and waiting, you—”

“No, no,
no!
” In a crescendo. “The first thing we found when we walked in was a note from the former occupier, Lars Thorgrim, explaining that he and his family had had to move away because his wife had developed a disease needing regular radiation therapy so they had to live closer to a big hospital. Otherwise they’d never have moved because they’d been so happy in the house, and they hoped that the next people to use it would feel the same. And both their children sent love and kisses. That’s not the plug-in life-style, whose basis consists in leaving behind nothing of yourself when you move on.”

“But just as when you joined G2S you were immediately whisked away to a welcome party—”

“For pity’s
sake!
At places like G2S you need the excuse of a new arrival to hold a party; it’s a business undertaking, designed to let him and his new colleagues snuff around each other’s assholes like wary dogs! At Precipice the concept of the party is built into the social structure; those parties were going to be held anyhow, because of a birthday or an anniversary or just because it was a fine warm evening and a batch of homemade wine was shaping well enough to share. I’m disappointed in you. I’d imagined that you would have seen through the government’s attempt to deevee Precipice and gone back to the source material.”

For the first time Freeman seemed to be visibly on the defensive. He said in a guarded tone, “Well, naturally I—”

“Save the excuses. If you had dug deep, I wouldn’t be giving you this as news. Oh, think, man, think! The Disasterville U.S.A. study constitutes literally the only first-rank analysis of how the faults inherent in our society are revealed in a post-catastrophe context. Work done at other refugee settlements was trivial and superficial, full of learned clichés. But after saying straight out that the victims of the Bay Quake couldn’t cope because they’d quit trying to fend for themselves—having long ago discovered that the reins of power had been gathered into the hands of a corrupt and jealous in-group—the people from Claes College topped it off with what Washington felt to be the ultimate insult. They said, ‘And this is how to put it right!’ ”

A dry chuckle.

“Worse still, they proceeded to demonstrate it, and worst of all, they stopped the government from interfering.”

“How long after your arrival were you told about that?”

“I wasn’t told. I figured it out myself that same evening. It was a classic example of the kind of thing that’s so obvious you ignore it. In my case specifically, after my last contact with Hearing Aid I’d unconsciously blanked off all further consideration of the problem. Otherwise I’d have spotted the solution at once.”

Freeman sighed. “I thought you were going to defend your obsession with Precipice, not excuse your own shortcomings.”

“I enjoy it when you needle me. It shows that your control is getting ragged. Let me tatter it a bit more. I warn you, I intend to make you lose your temper eventually, and never mind how many tranquilizers you take per day. Excuse me; a joke in poor taste. But—oh, please be candid. Has it never surprised you that so few solid data emerged from the aftermath of the Bay Quake, the greatest single calamity in the country’s history?”

Freeman’s answer was harsh. “It was also the most completely documented event in our history!”

“Which implies that a lot of lessons should have been learned, doesn’t it? Name a few.”

Freeman sat silent. Once again his face gleamed with sweat. He interlocked his fingers as though to prevent them trembling visibly.