A World Between (28 page)

The recruitment procedure had presented the final difficulty with the Pacifican authorities, but now, at last, that too was over. Tens of thousands of applications had poured in—a data-processing nightmare—but it had enabled Falkenstein to turn down the Ministry of Science’s suggestion that
it
select the student body behind an impenetrable smokescreen of the Pacificans’ own democratic rhetoric.

In actuality, the last thing Falkenstein wanted was Pacifican scientists certified by the government. The students finally selected were scientific neophytes with high intelligence, no existing permanent ties to women, a high susceptibility to psychomolding techniques, and records of at least some sympathy for Pacificans for the Institute. A relatively high proportion of them were manos from the Cords, and lower-grade Thule techs were also strongly represented. If some small chance of a security leak yet remained, it had certainly been minimized by the parameters constructed by the Arkmind, and the psychomolding program would reduce even that minimal margin for error to as close to absolute zero as any scientific procedure could approach.

Inside the building, in the large lobby that overlooked the wall of jungle beyond the cryowire barrier, Falkenstein gathered the recruits around him for a brief welcoming speech before turning them over to the waiting staff from psychomolding. The sweat on their faces was rapidly drying in the cool building, and they seemed quite happy to be inside.

“Welcome to the Pacifican Institute of Transcendental Science,” Falkenstein said. “My apologies for this unpleasant location, but believe me, that was the choice of your government, not us! However, I do think you’ll find the isolation conducive to study, and the local environment an inspirational lesson in how what you will learn can transform the brute uncaring universe into a more suitable matrix built by the mind and hand of man.”

Almost as if on cue, two huge godzillas, one bipedal, the other a squat low monstrosity with a great armored head, emerged from the jungle tearing and clawing at each other. They rolled against the invisible electrical barrier, uttered horrendous screams of pain, fear, and outrage, and crashed back into the jungle in panic, their original dispute forgotten.

“So much for the forces of brute nature,” Falkenstein said with a thin smile. “And now I’ll turn you over to our input personnel, who will show you to your quarters and begin your initiation into that great quest for total human mastery over matter, energy, time and mind which we now all share. Welcome to the Institute, and good luck!” Ideal, Falkenstein thought as the psychomolding people divided the recruits up into small groups and led them away to begin their processing. If only I had thought of it, we could’ve wired
up
some godzillas of our own and put on a similar show for
all
the entering students!

Walking down a corridor past classrooms, labs, and tape playback facilities, Maria Falkenstein had a strange sense of split reality. How like the Institute where she had studied this place was, and yet how different!

The curriculum was essentially the same—psychesomics, contextual physics, psychohistory, genetic design, time theory, projection, and so forth—but here they were being taught linearly,
not
holistically. Instead of studying the basic areas simultaneously so as to emphasize the basic unity of all knowledge that was the essence of Transcendental Science, the Pacifican students were being taught sequentially, and the sequence was a major element of the total psychomolding process.

First a solid week of nothing but psychesomics, the science of the mind-matter interface. The electronic and chemical matrix of consciousness itself, psychosensory determinism, evolutionary psychesomics, and all the rest. With their sophistication in the media arts, the Pacifican students were soon experiencing a deeper understanding of their own mental processes, helped along by long sessions in the Think Tanks and continuous doses of brain-eptifiers to maximize the chemical matrices of their minds.

In this heady state, while the cogency of Transcendental Science was self-evident in their own consciousness-fields, they had a week of nothing but psychohistory poured into their minds. The evolution of human cultural matrices as determined by the sensorium-environment interface. The history of human societies as the evolution of environmentally determined self-sustaining shared consciousness-pattems, leading to tribalism, chauvinism, nationalism, and war. The shattering of these fixed patterns in the twentieth century as the result of an exponentially evolving technological environment, leading to a positive feedback between consciousness and the environment, leading to the expansion of man into space. Leading to neonationalistic planetary cultures and social cancers like Femocracy on the one hand, and Transcendental Science on the other, the next evolutionary step toward total human freedom from environmental determinism, human and physical.

Capped with a ruthless psychohistorical analysis of Pacifican culture itself. Electronic democracy as the result of dispersion and abundance. Female economic power as the consequence of universal distribution of citizens
³
stock. Male sexual attraction to older, dominant women as compensation for loss of the genetically mandated male supremacy in economic and political spheres. Female desire for sexually dominant buckos as compensation for lack of socially dominant male figures. The vulnerability of female Pacificans to Femocracy as a function of this peculiarly Pacifican sexual balance. On and on, exposing every nook and cranny of their culture to cold scientific logic, while subtle euphoriants were added to the students’ brain eptifier formulas.

Only after depth analysts had certified that this psychomolding process had been successfully completed were the Pacifican students exposed to the areas of Transcendental Science from which advanced technology flowed. And even then, the curriculum was kept mostly theoretical while
more
psychomolding went on.

Maria understood all too well the strategic reasons for this perversion of Transcendental Science. But
perversion
it is, she thought, peering into a classroom as she passed by. The entrance parameters and the lack of female students she could justify to herself on security grounds as the Femocrats continued their campaign against the Institute with the beginnings of a subtle emphasis on female supremacy. Even the heavy psychomolding and manipulations of brain-eptifier formulae might be justified in the name of desperate expediency.

But it seemed to her that this politically motivated sequential teaching of the Transcendental Sciences violated the very essence of Transcendental Science itself, defeated the very purpose for which the
Heisenberg
had come to Pacifica in the first place. For if one word described the world-view of Transcendental Science, that word was
unity
. Matter, energy, time, and mind as states of each other, to be understood in terms of each other, to be studied holistically and simultaneously, so that the consciousness of the Institute graduate truly transcended the compartmentalization of traditional science. That was the essence of Transcendental Science, and that was what was being violated here.

Maria reached a viewing balcony at the periphery of the building. Here Pacifican students sat, singly and in small groups, studying or talking. Outside, the shadowy Godzil-laland jungle was ominous and alien under the late afternoon sim. Unseen monstrosities shook the trees with their passage. Now and again a great fanged head or a huge expanse of scaly hide showed itself for a moment. It was an awesome yet repulsive vista—the mindless, savage, uncaring universe incarnate. Yet it was also somehow... Pacifica itself in all its fertile untamed promise.

But the Pacifican students for the most part had learned to ignore it. Bright-eyed, loquacious, flush with the adolescent pride of their new knowledge, they sat around discussing their studies with innocent enthusiasm, obsessed with the brave new universe inside these walls, the world outside no more than a holodiorama at the periphery of their consciousness.

What are we creating here? Maria wondered as she walked among all these enthusiastic innocents. A class of people who are no longer quite Pacificans yet not truly Transcendental Scientists.
An
elite of clever superficial simulacrums of ourselves, alienated from their own planet, yet not quite sharing in the consciousness that binds together the people of the Arkologies.

She had never thought much about the people of the planetbound Institutes, but now, standing among them, it occurred to her that they must be lonely and alienated folk, neither fish nor fowl, their feet planted in the soil of their own peoples whom they dominated as synthetic outsiders, their minds towering into the stars forever just beyond their reach. Do we give as much as we take away? she dared to ask herself.

One Pacifican student stood apart from the others, hands pressed against the transparent wall, staring out at the jungle under the purpling sky. He was short and wiry, with large nervous eyes, and his slight body seemed to vibrate with an unresolved tension that somehow, in this moment, drew Maria to him.

“What do you see out there?” she asked, approaching him.

He shrank into himself. His expression became guarded. “Jungle,” he said. “What should I see? Am I missing something?” He was making a great effort to sound neutral, but a bitter tension in his voice could not help but filter through.

“I mean as a Pacifican. What does it mean to you?” “You want me to explain what it feels like to be a Pacifican?” he said sharply. “But I thought you understood that. You’ve taught us all about ourselves here.” He started nervously, as if suddenly aware that he had let something dangerous slip. It only made Maria empathize with him all the more. Perhaps she wanted to like him. Perhaps she wanted him to like her.

“Only analytically, from the outside,” she said. “The essence is yours alone, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”
he blurted. “Have you left us that much?”

“You know better than I do,” Maria said sympathetically. “What do you mean?”

“Look, we’re
Pacificans ”
he blurted. “Media psychodynamics may not be psychesomics, but do you think anyone who’s had a smattering of it can’t recognize subliminal mind-molding, even when it’s raised to something quite beyond us, even when we’re—” He cut himself short, terrified by his own words. He turned away from her and stared out into the jungle.

“You were saying... ?” 

“Nothing. I’ve said far too much already.” He turned

to look at her, his pleading eyes at war with the belligerent set of his face. “You’re going to report this, aren’t you?” he said. “It’ll be analyzed and evaluated and...

I have to, Maria thought. Somehow this man has escaped full psychomolding undetected. He’s a potential security risk, a random, unpredictable factor. Yet she found herself speaking otherwise. “No,” she said. “I’m not going to report you. This was just an idle conversation.”

“I’m not sure I believe you.”

“We’re not all...” Maria shrugged, her mind unable to form the right word.

But the Pacifican seemed to understand anyway. “I’d like to believe that,’’ he said. “You people really do have something, but.. .”

“But so do you,” Maria said.

“Or so we thought,” the Pacifican muttered, turning his face once more to the jungle world of fang and claw.

“Pretend we never spoke,” Maria said, turning away. A strange sadness came over her, mingled with an ill-defined trepidation, yet also a sense of satisfaction she could not quite define, as if for a fleeting moment the barrier of politics and lies, culture and manipulation, had been transcended. How sad, she thought, that we must both pretend it never happened.

Carlotta Madigan sat in her Parliament office still trying to dig herself out of the mountain of pending business that had accumulated during the time the whole gov had been totally obsessed with the Femocrat-Transcendental Science crisis.

The situation still existed: the Femocrats were flooding the net with anti-institute propaganda, Transcendental Science was still countering with its own media blitz, Pacificans for the Institute and the Femocratic League of Pacifica were still politically active, male-female relationships were still souring, but the passage of the Madigan Plan had at least taken the immediacy out of the crisis. Now at least there was nothing that the administration had to
do
about it, and she was at last able to find time to deal with the ordinary day-to-day business of her office in some coherent fashion.

And there was plenty that had to be dealt with! The proposal to set up a govcorp to bring down the GothamCords airfares. A precipitous drop in the wheat market. The whole tangled question of—

“Carlotta! Plug into news channel four—
right now!**
Carlotta swiveled her chair to face the net console. Royce’s face had appeared on the comscreen, and he looked
really
agitated.

“Can’t it wait?” she said irritably. “I’ve got a—” “Plug in now, talk later!” Royce said sharply. “I’ll keep this circuit open.”

“Shit,” Carlotta muttered under her breath as she plugged into the news channel, “this had better be effing
important ”

On the screen was a nervous wiry man with big feverish eyes, whose face seemed to pulse with an unwholesome tension, speaking in a rapid-fire shrill voice.

“....nd so I managed to stow away on a helicopter taking some Institute staff to the liner port, and from there I caught a liner before they even knew I was missing, I think...

A two-shot, showing Nancy Muldaur, a well-known newshound, interviewing whoever-it-was. “Well, what would have happened if you had just told them you wanted to leave?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” the nervous man said. “I don’t know
how
far they would go...

“Surely they wouldn’t have tried to keep you at the Institute against your will? That would be
kidnapping,
wouldn’t it?”