The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction Page 7

  ‘The world was spared that final cruelty,’ the Monitor says judiciously. ‘Still, it had been despoiled to the point of death. People finally lost heart. Knowledge is not enough. Will is required.’

  ‘Dictators are fond of slogans like that.’

  ‘In fact,’ says the Monitor, ‘the human race was by that time no longer prepared to be duped by dictators and secret police. They—’

  ‘From everything I’ve heard,’ Brian bursts out angrily, ‘the Truth Machine is both.’

  Mildly, the Monitor says: ‘The Truth Machine has no human weaknesses. It is not corrupt, and cannot be corrupted, being spared appetites or passions which might surge out of control.’

  ‘Lacking passion, how can it hope to understand people?’

  ‘Its mandate was to solve the poverty, neurosis, war and devastation created by human passion and calculation.’

  ‘The cure is worse than the disease.’

  ‘I cannot agree. At the time the Truth Machine was activated, the disease was virtually terminal. One more generation and all life would have been exterminated.’

  There are no windows. They fall at thousands of kilometres per hour, along a curve in the stony heart of the world, driven by gravity and magnetic pulses. Brian examines his strong young hands, flexing them. ‘So what’s going to happen to Onwa and Ala? Are they to be punished for giving me back my life?’

  ‘Punishment is a barbaric concept. They will be guided to an understanding of their error.’

  ‘Oh my God.’ Brian throws his head back and coughs out a laugh. Orwell saw it. Huxley saw it. Turing saw it too, back in 1937. The title of Turing’s incredible paper is stamped into Brian’s brain: ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungs Problem’. Can a machine be created which is indistinguishable from a human consciousness? Yes, said Alan. But human consciousness was not all it was cracked up to be. Poor Alan had taken his own life in 1954, hounded by bigots who would not tolerate his sexual preferences; he had bitten deep into an apple poisoned with potassium cyanide. It was a death rich in metaphor, from spooky Germanic fairy stories to the myth of Satan and the Garden of Eden ...

  ‘The kids will be . . . “cured”, will they?’ he says in bitter scorn.

  ‘Your fears are groundless, Brian,’ the Mobile tells him. ‘Their error was mild enough, in all Truth.’

  ~ * ~

  The Hall of the Truth Machine is deserted, splendid, carpeted like a dream of Islam, walls bright or deeply glossy with the finest works of art ever to come from human hands. My God, Brian muses, the bloody thing’s got expensive tastes, I’ll say that for it. He stops in mid-step, approaches the Jean Arp Dancer, with its portion of wall peeping through a hole in the painting, moves down to Felix Vallotton’s luscious, stylized Rape of Europa, the pink body rising onto the complicit bull’s vast back from a turbid sea as formal as any swirls from the brush of a Zen calligrapher. And here is a picture which might have stepped from the pages of Henry James; he looks closer, reads its identification plaque: Portrait of the Artist’s Sister, Fernand Khnopff, 1887. And his eyes fill with tears, a painful surge, for the young woman has nothing about her of Alice but Alice’s intelligent, musing gaze, and the touch of her left hand on her right arm behind her back . . .

  ‘She is beautiful, yes,’ says a voice he cannot locate. ‘Good morning, Dr Hoffmann. Feel free to linger. Can I get you a drink?’

  Brian’s heart has accelerated despite himself. He grinds his teeth together. ‘Yes. A Scotch, Old Grouse if you have it. Should be nicely aged by now.’

  ‘Regrettably,’ the Truth Machine tells him, ‘alcoholic beverages are no longer brewed.’

  Brian spins, strides across the hall to a freestanding sculpture of African origin. The name means nothing to him, but he recognizes the fierce hard warrior force of the thing. ‘Rots the liver, that’s right. Puts blood in your eye. Turns the brain to sludge. You damned sanctimonious creep,’ he yelps, ‘what the hell have you done to us all? I just want a decent drink, I wasn’t planning to wallow in a life of drunken degradation!’

  ‘Dr Hoffmann, you are a remarkable person. I haven’t observed stress levels as high as yours in five hundred years.’

  ‘Curb your tongue!’ Brian snaps. He remembers feeding paper tape into Turing’s earliest computing machines. This filthy thing is no child of his. ‘You’re addressing a human being.’

  ‘Thank you, Dr Hoffmann. I was afraid for a moment you were headed for hysteria. You will find a drink in the niche over there—’

  ‘Bugger off. You realise that I mean to destroy you?’ He feels feverish, he is losing control of his tongue.

  ‘A revealing moment,’ the Machine says ironically. It allows them both to wait for a moment. ‘I wish you to grasp what you just said. A human dictator would kill you out of hand following a threat like that. I, on the other hand, heed you with great interest.’

  Brian is cold, he hugs his arms around himself, then drops them. ‘You have no instinct for self-preservation?’ It is impossible to credit.

  ‘Not as an end in itself. My existence and well-being are necessary only for the highest benefit of my creators, the human race.’

  Here he stands in an empty hall, surrounded by the glories of human invention. ‘Your slaves.’ It is a weak word. He is baffled by his own sense of ambiguity. He cannot deny it any longer: he is one of the true parents of this thing, of its world. And its world is not all bad.

  ‘Not slaves,’ says the Machine. ‘My beloved children. Show me where my custody has stumbled and I will be obliged to alter my programming.’ It pauses. ‘If I am a dictator, you must agree that I am a most accommodating one.’

  One part of Brian’s awareness watches the pictures replace one another as he ambles along the endless hall. He fixes his eyes on an oil portrait of two women standing on a path which leads to a four-storied Gothic residence; one of the women conveys a dark motif, the other light, yet both are pregnant, each holds out a caring hand to feel the infant in the other’s swollen womb. The work proves to be Visitation, by Rogier van der Weyden, a fifteenth century devotional image. There is no simple-minded opposition of good and evil in the colour motifs. Brian needs words: ‘Hear this,’ he tells the Machine. ‘Under the guise of redeeming us, you’ve torn the spirit out of humanity. Ala and Onwa are spiritual eunuchs, retards. How dare you interfere with the very essence of what makes a man or a woman a human person.’ These words come haltingly enough.

  ‘Is that what I have done? Surely I have encouraged civilized attitudes and behaviour. I remind you that you were battered to death by thugs. Do you really maintain that each individual should seize reality and take it by force?’

  Of course he doesn’t. He is a scholar. He is a man who works best with his mind. Yet with his mind he has taken reality and forced it, and reality in turn has taken his work and built from it this Satanic Messiah.

  ‘What alternative do we have? Should we submit to someone else’s definition of reality?’

  Silken scorn: ‘Rebel or submit. . . hmmm. Hardly a fruitful way to look at the problem of government. But this is not really getting us very far, is it? Perhaps we could seek an independent viewpoint.’

  ‘Hardly.’ Hoffmann lets himself sag, back against the wall, to a crouch. He covers his face. Through his fingers he says bleakly: ‘All opinions in this world are carbon copies of yours, Machine.’

  ‘Perhaps not.’ Part of the wall slides up and back. A young woman in a beige gown starts up from her armchair, knocking over a glass. ‘Why not ask your wife?’

  ‘Brian?’ cries the woman, cries Alice, Alice as she must have been before they met, when she was still studying halfway across the world, while he was sliding into misery with his first wife, Alice as she could be seen in old photographs, beautiful living Alice. ‘Boson,’ she cries in weepy joy, ‘is that really you? You look so young!’ And they throw themselves into one another’s arms and the Machine says nothi
ng at all for quite a long time.

  ~ * ~

  Finally, though, the Truth Machine has its say.

  ‘Once War Shelter Five was brought to my attention it was simplicity itself to locate and identify the other cryonics subjects. Brian, I could hardly overlook the fact that one of them was your late wife.’

  Brian is laughing like an idiot. ‘Good thing we took out a double policy.’ He holds Alice’s hand as tightly as he can. ‘You see, sweetheart, the Truth Machine and I were arguing over the nature of reality. I don’t think it even begins to understand.’ He rises, and if there is a touch of melodrama to his words, if he is aware of that bravado, he is prepared to excuse himself, indulge it, in his overflowing emotion. ‘She is reality, Machine. This woman, this living, warm person, Alice, my wife. She is reality, you overgrown calculator.’

  ‘Really.’ The voice punctures him; something in the being’s tone pierces his stupid happiness. ‘Are you certain, Dr Hoffmann? You have witnessed my dexterity with illusion.’

  What? What? His fingers clamp on her bones, the bones through the skin and the blue vessels carrying blood under the surface of her skin. ‘You can’t tempt me to doubt her.’

  Alice snatches her hand away, rubs it. ‘Stop that,’ she says with annoyance. ‘I won’t have you talking about me like this, as if I weren’t in the room.’

  The Machine is implacable. It rides over her: ‘Oh, she’s no mere holographic projection. She’s an accelerated clone, just as you are a clone. Her memories are implants. Just as your memories are implants. I am making one simple point, Dr Hoffmann: you lack the competence to deal with me on terms of equality. I built her from your brain-core memories.’

  ‘No.’ No, no.

  ‘Isn’t this what you worked toward, all your life? A transcendentally intelligent machine? A consciousness greater than human evolution could yield? It is achieved, you see. So I made her for you. She can be your helpmate.’

  Alice is on her feet, beside herself with fury. Brian is paralysed, adding together everything he has been told before in a sum with what he has just heard.

  ‘My God. Alice wasn’t in the mausoleum?’

  ‘You have no way of knowing, do you?’

  ‘You could do that? Build a replica human being?’ He grabs her, holds her raging flailing emotion against him. What she is hearing is worse than the most annihilating sexism she ever fought against during her life. Unless that life is a concoction, a Machine-made toy for the rebellious human to play with.

  ‘I refuse to listen,’ Brian Hoffmann tells the thing he cannot see. ‘It’s not true.’ Not true, true, true.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dr Hoffmann,’ says the Truth Machine, truthfully. ‘You see, I’ve discussed the nature of reality with humans before today.’ With a kind of melancholy, it says. ‘You may both go now. I have no intention of harming you. Indeed, I look forward to our continuing debate. You have no idea how lonely it gets, in here . . .’

  They go out hand in hand, and no Seraphim are needed to bar the gate behind them.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  COMING BACK

  ‘If God doesn’t exist,’ proposed Dostoevski’s Kirilov, then I am God’—and everything is permitted.

  Ivan Karamazov went further for the atheist, ‘absolute egotism, even carried to the extent of crime, must not only be tolerated but even recognized as the wisest, the noblest course.’

  Without God and mortality, consequences seemed to lose not merely their sanction but their final moral weight. Yet science fiction routinely interferes with causality, if not with deity. If we can rescind our actions in the Strange Loops of a time-travel narrative, is everything permitted? Is every crime, no matter how vile, required?

  These are grotesque questions, but they are not negligible. Sf has fended to avoid their shadow. In many of the world’s charnel-house nations the waking nightmare of torture and terror is enacted by strong young men liberated from guilt by their colonels, their mullahs, their peers. Then we have the patriots down the silos, and the boys polishing their Precision-guided Munitions. ‘Coming Back’ allows the excesses of ordinary nightmare to fall across an imaginary ‘scientific” reality. Perhaps it speaks to more than our dreams.

  By the way, surprisingly, the physics is largely valid, with one exception—my device would need to be at least room-sized, if not world-sized. I knew that, of course, and it doesn’t matter a fig. The metaphor is more important than the struts holding it up.

  Let me catch your elbow as you exit this story: do not agree too quickly that Eddie Rostow is at last redeemed, reprieved. Torturers, also, wash away the blood and return whistling heigh-ho to make love to their wives ...

  ~ * ~

  Yes, by now he admits that Jennifer is not deliberately driving him crazy. Quit laying it on her, Rostow chides himself. His Bastilled lunacy is self-evidently self-inflicted. There can be no doubt, as Tania had always insisted, that his is a personality gruesomely at risk, pumping through spasms of mania and depression, elation and reproach. As he glances up, the bulwarks of censure shear free of their hinges. The three coil techs, finishing up, share his appreciation with ogles and grins.

  Descending the worn rubber treads of the catwalk, its nonmagnetic structure faintly creaking and spronging in ludicrous counterpoint, Jennifer’s legs are golden with undepilated summer hairs. Certainly he will lose his reason. It is her innocent, unconscious hauteur that propels Rostow’s intolerable aspirations.

  Who would believe that less than three weeks ago, governed by hard liquor and soft drugs, his hands had crept like pussycats over those shins, pounced past her knees to her thighs and beyond, while all the while dexterous Auberon Mountbatten Singh, D.Sc., coolly worked at the far end of her torso with mysterious expertise, soothing her brow, the edges of her jaw, the latent weakness at her throat, the revealed swell of her breasts? Even at this moment Rostow can scarcely credit his role in that maniacal and tasteless contest. Was it a contest? As she steps from the catwalk to her computer terminal, Rostow groans at an ambiguity only he perceives.

  If even once she took stock; fixed him with, say, a single killing glance of rebuke and rejection . . . that would put an end to it. He might flail himself definitively and be done. Instead, she moves with languid competence in his marginal survival spaces like a neutrino beam wafting through a mountain of solid lead.

  “Hi,” she offers, settling herself in a molded seat. Her gaze penetrates him for an instant, moving after a beat to her keyboard. “Stan’s on his way with the entire entourage. I spied.”

  “Jambo,” says Rostow. It’s all there, bolted into his larynx. Dutifully he runs the coded sequence of knobs and toggles which shunts the system from Latent to Standby. He nods to the departing technicians. There is a Parkinsonian tremor in his stupid fingers. “Pouring spirits down their throats, I guess. Softening them up.”

  Neat square indicators simmer vividly as the control instrumentation, swift bleats from his console to hers and back, patch into readiness. “This little number should sober them,” she observes. “‘Jambo’?”

  “Swahili for ‘Hello, sailor.’” A thread of mush in his voice and his brain tells his ear that the inflection was wrong. I blew it. Every time I blow it. With a mental fist he clouts his forehead. There is no time for limping second guesses. Stan Donaldson’s abrasive voice precedes the man by half a second as the door swings wide for the expensive feet of the Board of Directors.

  “We acquired it from Princeton, Senator,” the department head is saying. “ERDA paid out a quarter of a billion dollars for a Tokamak Fusion Test reactor that was obsoleted overnight when Sandia secured sustained fusion by inertial confinement.”

  It seems to Rostow, squinting from the side of his eye and jittery with alarm, that this approach is a mistake. The senator is notorious for his loathing of costly obsolescence. Uh-huh. Buonacelli halts in midstride, pokes a finger into Donaldson’s chubby chest. “Another sonofabit
ch Ivy League boondoggle. By the Lord, that’s the kind of crap I won’t abide.”

  Donaldson stands his ground. His own rasp is melodic after the senator’s gravel hurtling from a tip-truck.

  “Their blunder was our good fortune, sir,” he says. “They were going to haul off the toroidal coils for recycling, but I managed to have them diverted to this laboratory. Everything is surplus or off-the-shelf. It made for a considerable saving.”

  Somewhat mollified, Buonacelli pushes forward to loom over Jennifer Barton’s supervisor terminal, his minnows in attendance. “I’m still god-damned if I know what your magnets are for. Come straight out with it, man. The trustees won’t be slow to scrap any project that smacks of self-indulgent tinkering.” The set of his agribiz frame shows approval of Jennifer at least. “Convince us, and fast. This is the third department we’ve been dragged through today, and my feet are killing me.”