The Shockwave Rider (22 page)

“I think I’m making my point. Fine. Consider. Vast hordes of people had to start from scratch after the quake, and the public at large felt obliged to help them. It was a perfect opportunity to allot priorities: to stand back and assess what was and was not worth having among the countless choices offered by our modern ingenuity. Years, in some cases as much as a decade, elapsed before the economy was strong enough to finance the conversion of the original shantytowns into something permanent. Granted that the refugees themselves were disadvantaged: what about the specialists from outside, the federal planners?”

“They consulted with the settlers, as you well know.”

“But did they help them to make value judgments? Not on your life. They counted the cost in purely financial terms. If it was cheaper to pay this or that community to go without something, that’s what the community wound up lacking. Under the confident misapprehension that they were serving the needs of the nation by acting as indispensable guinea pigs. Where was the follow-up? How much money was allocated to finding out whether a community without veephones, or without automatic instant credit-transfer facilities, or without home encyclopedia service, was in any sense better or worse than the rest of the continent? None—
none!
What halfhearted projects were allowed to show their heads were axed in the next session of Congress. Not profitable. The only place where constructive work was done was Precipice, and that was thanks to amateur volunteers.”

“It’s easy to prophesy after the event!”

“But Precipice did succeed. The founders knew what they wanted to do, and had valid arguments to support their ideas. The principle of changing one factor and seeing what happens may be fine in the lab. In the larger world, especially when you’re dealing with human beings who are badly disturbed following a traumatic experience and have been forcibly returned to basics—hunger, thirst, epidemics—you aren’t compelled to be so simplistic. Evidence exists from the historical record that certain social structures are viable and others aren’t. The people from Claes recognized that, and did their best to assemble a solid foundation for a new community without bothering to forecast what would evolve from it.”

“Evolution … or devolution?”

“An attempt to backtrack to that fork in our social development where we apparently took a wrong turning.”

“Invoking all kinds of undocumented half-mystical garbage!”

“Such as—?”

“Oh, this ridiculous notion that we’re imprinted before birth with the structure of the aboriginal family, the hunter-and-gatherer tribe and the initial version of the village.”

“Have you ever tried to silence a baby?”

“What?”

“You heard me. Humans make mouth noises with the intention of provoking a change in the outside world. Nobody denies any longer that even a dumb baby is printed in advance for language. Damn it, enough of our simian cousins have shown they can use a sound-to-symbol relationship! And equally nobody denies that habit patterns involving status, pack leadership—Whoops, hold everything. I just realized I’ve been manipulated into defending your viewpoint against myself.”

Freeman, relaxing, allowed himself a faint smile.

“And if you continue, you’ll expose a basic fallacy in your argument, won’t you?” he murmured. “Precipice may indeed function, after a fashion. But it does so in isolation. Having worked for a Utopia consultancy, you must realize that if they’re efficiently shielded from the rest of humanity the craziest societies can work … for a while.”

“But Precipice is not isolated. Every day between five hundred and two thousand people punch the ten nines and—well, make confession.”

“Thereby painting a picture of the state of things outside which can be relied on to make Precipicians shudder and feel thankful. True or false, the impression is no doubt comforting.”

Freeman leaned back, conscious of having scored. His voice was almost a purr as he continued, “You spent time actually listening to some of the calls, I presume?”

“Yes, and at her own insistence so did Kate, though since she wasn’t planning to stay she wasn’t obliged. They’re quite literal about their service. From the central, they route calls to private homes where one adult is always on duty. And someone literally sits and listens.”

“How about the people who can talk for hours nonstop?”

“There aren’t many of them, and the computers almost always spot them before they’re well under way.”

“For a community so proud of having evaded the data-net, they rely a great deal on computers, don’t they?”

“Mm-hm. Must be the only place on Earth where they’ve made a cottage industry out of the things. It’s amazing how useful they are when you don’t burden them with irrelevancies, like recording a transaction worth fifty cents.”

“I must find out some time where you draw your dividing line: fifty cents, fifty dollars, fifty thousand dollars … But go on. What were the calls like?”

“I was astonished at how few cranks there were. I was told that cranks get disheartened when they find they can’t provoke an argument. Someone who’s convinced all human faults are due to wearing shoes, or who just found evidence to impeach the president scrawled on the wall of a public toilet, wants to be met with open disagreement; there’s an element of masochism there which isn’t satisfied by punching pillows. But people with genuine problems—they’re a different matter.”

“Give some examples.”

“Okay. It’s a platitude you yourself have used to me to say that the commonest mental disorder now is personality shock. But I never realized before how many people are aware they’re lapsing into its subclinical penumbra. I recall one poker who confessed he’d tried the White House Trick, and it had worked.”

“What sort of trick?”

“Sometimes it’s known as going to the Mexican laundry.”

“Ah. You route a credit allotment—to avoid either tax or recriminations—into and out of a section of the net where nobody can follow it without special permission.”

“That’s it. When income-tax time rolls around, you always hear people mentioning it with an envious chuckle, because it’s part of modern folklore. That’s how politicians and hypercorp execs get away with a tenth of the tax you and I cough up. Well, this shivver I was listening to had vaulted half a million. And he was beside himself with horror. Not terror—he knew he couldn’t be caught—but horror. He said it was his first-ever lapse from rectitude, and if his wife hadn’t left him for a richer man he’d never have been tempted. Once having done it and found how easy it was, though … how could he ever trust anyone again?”

“But he was trusting Hearing Aid, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, and that’s one of the miracles performed by the service. While I was a minister I was resigned to having the croakers monitor the link to my confessional, even though what was said face-to-face in the actual booth was adequately private. And there was nothing to stop them noticing that a suspect had called on me, ambushing him as he left, and beating a repeat performance out of him. That type of dishonesty is at the root of our worst problem.”

“I didn’t know you acknowledged a ‘worst’—you seem to find new problems daily. But go on.”

“With pleasure. I’m sure that if I start to foam at the mouth there’s a machine standing by to wipe my chin. … Oh, hell! It’s hypocritical hair-splitting that makes me boil! Theoretically any one of us has access to more information than ever in history, and any phone booth is a gate to it. But suppose you live next door to a poker who’s suddenly elected to the state congress, and six weeks later he’s had a hundred-thousand-dollar face-lift for his house. Try to find out how he came by the money; you get nowhere. Or try confirming that the company you work for is going to be sold and you’re apt to be tossed on the street with no job, three kids and a mortgage. Other people seem to have the information. What about the shivver in the next office who’s suddenly laughing when he used to mope? Has he borrowed to buy the firm’s stock, knowing he can sell for double and retire?”

“Are you quoting calls to Hearing Aid?”

“Yes, both are actual cases. I bend the rules because I know that if I don’t you’ll break me.”

“Are you claiming those are typical?”

“Sure they are. Out of all the calls taken, nearly half—I think they say forty-five percent—are from people who are afraid someone else knows data that they don’t and is gaining an unfair advantage by it. For all the claims one hears about the liberating impact of the data-net, the truth is that it’s wished on most of us a brand-new reason for paranoia.”

“Considering how short a time you spent at Precipice, your identification with it is amazing.”

“Not at all. It’s a phenomenon known as ‘falling in love’ and it happens with places as well as people.”

“Then your first lover’s tiff happened rather quickly, too.”

“Needle, needle! Jab away. I’d done something to make amends in advance. A small but genuine consolation, that.”

Freeman tensed. “So you were the one responsible!”

“For frustrating the latest official assault on Hearing Aid? Yes indeed. I’m proud of it. Apart from marking the first occasion when I used my talent on behalf of other people without being asked and without caring whether I was rewarded—which was a major breakthrough in itself—the job was a pure masterpiece. Working on it, I realized in my guts how an artist or an author can get high on the creative act. The poker who wrote Precipice’s original tapeworm was pretty good, but you could theoretically have killed it without shutting down the net—that is, at the cost of losing thirty or forty billion bits of data. Which I gather they were just about prepared to do when I showed up. But mine … Ho, no! That, I cross my heart, cannot be killed without
dismantling
the net.”

THE BREAKDOWN OF REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT

SUBJECT HAFLINGER NICHOLAS KENTON SELECTED

PROPOSE FACTORS TO ACCOUNT FOR SUBJECTS INFATUATION WITH P A COMMUNITY PRECIPICE CA

(A) FUNCTIONALITY (B) OBJECTIVITY (C) STABILITY AMPLIFY RESPONSE (A)

(A) IN MOST TOWNS OF SIMILAR SIZE ON THIS CONTINENT DECISIONS CONCERNING COMMUNAL SERVICES CAN NO LONGER BE TAKEN BY POPULAR VOTE OWING TO EXTREME MOBILITY OF POPULATION AND UNWILLINGNESS OF VOTERS TO PAY FOR FACILITIES THAT WILL BE ENJOYED ONLY BY THE SUCCEDENT GROUP E G BOND LEVIES TO FINANCE SCHOOLS SEWAGE SYSTEMS AND HIGHWAY MAINTENANCE HAVE BEEN REPLACED IN 93% OF CASES BY PATERNALIST LEVIES ON THE DOMINANT EMPLOYER ***REFERENCE BARKER PAVLOVSKI & QUAINT THE RESURRECTION OF FEUDAL OBLIGATIONS J ANTHROPOL SOC VOL XXXIX PP 2267–2274

AMPLIFY RESPONSE (B)

(B) INTENSIVE INTERACTION BETWEEN CITIZENS DEEVEES INCIDENTAL ATTRIBUTES E G STATUS TYPE OF JOB RELATIVE WEALTH/POVERTY EMPHASIZES CHARACTER SOCIABILITY TRUSTWORTHINESS ***REFERENCE ANON NEW ROLES FOR OLD AN ANALYSIS OF STATUS CHANGES AMONG A GROUP OF VICTIMS OF THE GREAT BAY QUAKE MONOGRAPH #14 DISASTERVILLE USA SERIES

AMPLIFY RESPONSE (C)

(C) POPULATION TURNOVER IN PRECIPICE DESPITE NEAR AVERAGE VACATION TIME MOBILITY IS LOWEST ON THE CONTINENT AND HAS NEVER EXCEEDED 1 % PER ANNUM ***REFERENCE U S CONTINUOUS SAMPLE CENSUS

THANK YOU

YOU ARE WELCOME

–AND THE LIKABILITY OF LODGING

The place took possession of them both so rapidly he could only just believe it. Tongue-tangled, he—and Kate, who was equally affected—strove to identify the reasons.

Perhaps most important, there was more going on here than in other places. There was a sense of time being filled, used, taken advantage of. At G2S, at UMKC, it was more a matter of time being divided up for you; if the ordained segments were too short, you got little done, while if they were too long, you got less done than you could have. Not here. And yet the Precipicians knew how to idle.

Paradox.

There were so many people to meet, not in the way one met them when taking on a new job or joining a new class, but by being passed on, as it were, from one to another. From Josh and Lorna (he, power engineer and sculptor; she, one of Precipice’s two medical doctors, organist and notary public) to Doc Squibbs (veterinarian and glass-blower) on to Ferdie Squibbs, his son (electronics maintenance and amateur plant genetics), and his girlfriend Patricia Kallikian (computer programing and anything to do with textiles) on again to …

It was giddying. And the most spectacular possible proof of how genuinely economical it was to run on a maximum-utilization basis. Everyone they met seemed to be pursuing at least two occupations, not moonlighting, not scuffling to make ends meet, but because here they had the chance to indulge more than one preference without worrying about the next hike in utilities charges. Accustomed to a routine five percent increase in the cost of electricity, and ten or twelve in any year when a nuclear reactor melted down—because such installations had long ago ceased to be insurable and the cost of failure could only be recouped from the consumer—the strangers were astonished at the cheapness of energy in this self-reliant community.

Wandering about, they discovered how ingeniously the town had been structured, right from the beginning: its main nucleus at Root Mean Square being echoed by subnuclei that acted as a focus for between three and four hundred people, but neither isolated nor inward-looking, and each with some unique attraction designed to draw occasional visitors from other parts of the town. One had a games area., another a swimming pool, another a constantly changing art exhibition, another a children’s zoo with scores of tame, cuddly animals, another a view down a vista flanked by unbelievably gorgeous flowering trees … and so forth. All, Suzy Dellinger admitted cheerfully, “of malice aforethought”—the founders of the town had tabulated what was known to help a community run pleasantly, then allotted elements of it to suitable sectors of what had then been a settlement of rickety hovels, battered trailer homes and many tents.