David's Sling (21 page)
Click. The door sprang open in response to the strength of a forceful man, a determined man. Bill Hardie stared down at her with an astonishing display of teeth, halfway between a smile of greeting and a snap of fangs. Though he spoke softly, his voice blurred with the intensity of his emotion. "You wiped my tape," he said.
"Yes." They stared at each other, fencers seeking an opening. "Let me in," she said.
His eyes widened with amazement, then amusement. His arms spanned the distance from the door to the doorframe, blocking her entry. He crossed his legs into a more casual stance. With this simple motion he declared how little of his power he needed to deny her demand.
Kira stepped forward, crossing the threshold. Now, to close the door, he would have to physically push her away. Her eyes drew down from his half-mocking eyes, across the dark tan of his throat, slightly mottled in color, to his open shirt collar. She could see the lean lines of muscles spreading across the exposed part of his chest; she could sense their extension under the cotton of his shirt, down his arms to the massive strength of his hands. He had large hands—hands meant to lift great weights, to hold and control the flight of a ballerina.
She stepped forward again, a small step. She could feel the slow, steady surge of his breath as he exhaled.
Her smile widened as she reached forward to press her hands against him, to force him to accept her arrival. With his arms spread wide, he was completely vulnerable, even though he stood unyielding before her.
He did not let her touch him. With the snap of an uncoiling spring, Bill whirled away. One hand still held the door. His other hand turned up, offering her the sweep of the living room. "Please, the apartment is yours, he said with a mocking lilt in his voice. "You can go anywhere but the bedroom."
"I'm flattered. I doubt that you make that offer to other women who come here." She flipped her hair behind her head and strode into the living room. He followed at a distance, the hint of a swagger in his step.
She tossed her briefcase on one end of the couch and turned to face him. She caught him watching her legs, the firmness of her calves. For a moment, she allowed him to enjoy the sight of her body. "I came to tell you what a jerk you are."
His eyes flew up to her face in contempt. "What a jerk I am? Should I remind you that you are the one who destroyed
my
property?"
Kira pushed his comment aside with a wave of her hand. "The way I deceived you is nothing compared to the way you've deceived people all over the world."
"Really." He was mocking her again. He crossed his arms. One shoulder dropped as he leaned toward her. He made Kira think of a tree bowing into the wind. "I've given them the truth!"
"You've given them perversions of the truth." Kira warmed with anger at his sarcastic attitude. "You've twisted the language from a means of helping people think, to a weapon to shut the mind off. You've denied them the undistorted facts needed to form intelligent opinions."
"Undistorted facts!" His arms broke apart, then slapped against his legs as he snorted. "A newscast doesn't have the time for undistorted facts, little girl. But that's okay, because I give my audience something better: undistorted truth. I collect all those facts of yours together and distill them to find the truth. And then I select the facts that best present the truth, and give the people
those
facts. That's the problem with you Zetetics—you are Zetetic, right? You have this cockeyed idea that facts are more important than truth."
Unfortunately, there's a massive flaw in your definition of truth. You don't understand that you can only extract the truth from the facts by using an unbiased mind."
"An unbiased mind?" Bill rolled his eyeballs. "Your Zetetics are biased all the time. Every one of your experts wears his biases like a collar on a dog. You can't describe a problem to them without hearing about their lists of starting prejudices."
"But of course. A Zetetic expert is trained to recognize his own biases, and state the assumptions that form the basis of his arguments. And he is trained to know the one form of bias that can be tolerated. It is the one form of bias that must be tolerated—the bias that makes good thinking possible."
Kira watched Bill squeeze his lips together as if he knew that she was waiting for his cue, as if he knew that he should not give it to her, as if he knew that he would give it to her anyway. "And what is this one oh-so-important bias?"
"The bias of extensive knowledge. The man who has detailed knowledge about the ten alternatives under consideration has the right—has the
duty
—to bias his opinion based on that knowledge. The legitimate expert always has a bias based on his information."
"Sure, little girl. Just how do you tell whether he's biased by his information or by his emotion?"
"There are at least two ways." She ticked the alternatives off with her fingers. "The first way is to have him tell you all his information and to make your own decision based on that. The second is to watch him as he gathers new information. If his bias is based on information, it will change as the information arrives. If his bias is based on emotion, it won't change until he's faced with personal destruction."
"And that's how you think I am, right? I won't change my opinion until I'm faced with personal destruction?" Mockingly he held his hands forward, clenched in the fists of a boxer. "Do you plan to destroy me?"
"I don't know." She turned from him to open her briefcase, and riffled through it for papers. The pause gave her a chance to reflect on the meaning of her upcoming actions. Softly, sympathetically, she continued, "I came to tell you that in addition to being a jerk, you're a stupid jerk."
"Oh ho." Bob. Weave. "You almost got me that time. You have a great vocabulary, did you know that?"
"Yes." Her moment of weakness, her sympathy, passed easily. "And you're a dupe as well. A puppet. A puppet of the Wilcox-Morris Corporation—the biggest tobacco company in the world."
Bill stopped waving his hands in the air. "What?"
She turned to the first page of a thick folder and started reading. It was merely a list of undistorted facts; she left the truth to Bill to determine. The facts listed were the names and positions of people who were invited to parties and sporting events and special art exhibitions. People from magazines and advertising agencies and television stations—all the people who had even the least chance of influencing decisions to give a special newscaster a special chance.
The facts included a list of the special-interest groups supported by Wilcox-Morris donations, with their newsletters that suggested which newscasters might be most interesting to listen to. It described pep talks with employees of tobacco companies, in which certain programs and articles received glowing praise, and where the employees heard that writing to the owners of those magazines and TV stations to praise certain editorials might be helpful to the survival of their companies, and the survival, therefore, of their jobs.
The facts included the dates when these campaigns of hidden persuasion peaked: they matched the dates of Bill's strongest attacks against the Zetetic Institute. The correspondence formed a fascinating nonfactual but possibly true study in coincidence.
Bill tore the folder from her hands and stared at the mere facts for himself. His proud face took on the lines of tortured anguish. She knew he wanted to tear the folder to pieces and fling it in her face, but he could not quite do it. His disrespect for facts did not run quite deep enough.
He spoke with the tense strength of a violin string snapping. "None of this could make the difference. I had to be able to make it without them; they didn't force anybody to cover me."
"Yes, you poor fool." Kira shook her head. "You
could
have made it on your own. That's what made you the perfect dupe. They had to find someone with the talent to become a great newscaster. Then all they had to do was give him the chance—and make sure that he learned, indirectly, that his chances came fastest when he did the work
they
wanted done. They needed someone to attack the Zetetic Institute. They found him."
She watched his jaw muscles swell and subside. She softened again. She knew that she herself had played loose with the difference between fact and truth in this encounter. "Let me point out that I have lied several times since I arrived here. " He jumped, as if afraid of the touch of her words. "As a Zetetic scholar, I must point out the inaccuracies of my statements. It is not true that you are a jerk; it is only true that you have acted like a jerk many times. Nor is it true that you are stupid; you have only acted stupid repeatedly. Nor is it true that you are a dupe; you have the power to stop being a dupe, or an idiot, or a jerk, any time you desire. All you have to do is choose to think."
His eyes were upon her face, yet he did not see her. For the first time, she noticed the scars on his knuckles, and wondered what fights he had fought, what walls he had beaten to take such hurts.
When she left, he still stood in the center of the room, a tree that has been cracked in the middle, but that has not quite broken.
December 8
America never remembers the past. The Soviet Union never forgets.
—Industrial Age Societies:
A Historical Perspective
Leslie stood outside the intricately etched doorway, reluctant even to make his presence known. He felt the eyes of the lad behind him, and the eyes of the house in front of him. None of it felt good.
This time the house did not sing to him with Amos Leung's voice. He searched the porch for a doorbell, found none. As he finished searching, the door opened.
Flo—beautiful, graceful Flo—appeared as a wraith. "Colonel Evans. You are quite punctual." She spoke with the same melodious precision as always, but with little animation. "Please come in."
Les stepped to the side, motioning to Ronnie. "Thanks. But first let me introduce Ronnie Dwyer. Ronnie just finished his MS in computer science from RPI. Were hoping he can help you with the comm problems."
Squeezing his hands together nervously, Ronnie stepped forward and shook hands with Flo.
Flo smiled with good grace, saying, "I am pleased to meet you."
Ronnie offered her a smile in return and mumbled hello.
The living room in red and gold had not changed; only the encompassing presence of Amos Leung was absent. Leslie kicked one of the beautiful cushions accidentally. The feeling of goatlike awkwardness that Amos always brought upon him returned. He snorted.
"What did you say, Colonel Evans?" Flo asked.
"Nothing," Les replied. In some sense, Amos Leung's presence remained.
"Would you care for some tea?"
Les nodded, but Ronnie spoke rapidly. "No thanks. I don't drink caffeine."
Les rolled his eyes; Flo just smiled at the boy. "I see. Do you drink water?"
"Uh, yeah."
Flo disappeared into the kitchen.
They sat in the quiet peace of Amos's living room for a while. At length Ronnie whispered, "She's beautiful."
"She certainly is. She's also old enough to be your mother."
"I guess so. Man, I wish I were here for some reason other than because her husband . . ."
The cup of tea appeared beside Leslie's cheek, giving off a warm and luscious aroma. "Because my husband died?" Flo finished the sentence.
Ronnie choked; Flo handed him his water.
"My husband was a wonderful man. It will be a great challenge for us to complete our small project without him." She turned away for a moment, then turned back. "But we shall."
Ronnie jumped into the work at hand. "What exactly was Dr. Leung working on at the end?"
"We had submitted part of the HopperHunter's obstacle- dodging software to Mr. Dante-Cortez for testing."
"Have you gotten the results back?"
"Yes. It worked quite well." Flo did not notice the look of shock on Ronnie's face; that kind of software could not possibly work well on first test. Leslie easily guessed the thoughts behind Ronnie's expression:
No one writes code that good
. Flo continued, "Of course, we had planned to make a few optimizations. The responsiveness of the simulated Hopper lagged when approaching a ridge crest."
Ronnie sipped his water. "What kind of documentation do you have for this stuff?"
"I am the documentation," Flo sang. She pointed at her head. "It is all here. That is why we will work together." She turned to Leslie. "I am sorry I cannot complete this task on my own. I did not . . . quite . . . learn enough to create new software by myself."
Leslie shook his head. "Of all the things to worry about, Flo, that's not one of them. I think Ronnie'll fill the missing part of this team quite effectively."
Leslie listened to the two new partners as they spoke together. The contrast struck him as garish—perhaps similar to the one Amos might have seen when Leslie himself spoke with Florence.
They agreed that they would continue to work there in Flo's home, since the development system Amos had built was unique. Leslie shook his head in amazement. Ronnie didn't belong here, in this house filled with Amos's presence, and surely Flo knew it. Her pain at the thought must be terrific, yet it remained submerged when she spoke. Only her gauntness and a heaviness in her walk that few would notice revealed her sorrow.
Les yearned to take Flo into another room, to talk with her, to reach inside and caress her mind. Her loss in Amos paralleled his own loss in Jan.
He did not attempt to console her. He knew he could not reach behind her smile and her bright eyes, for an unyielding
differentness
sheltered her. Les realized that the house
could
yield to Ronnie's strange presence. Flo might even redecorate, an affirmation of the reality of her loss. She would adapt, brilliantly, outside that inner differentness.
In the meantime, Les saw hope that this unlikely collaboration would work. For the Sling's sake, it had to: on the PERT chart outside his office, a blood-red stream of boxes carved a grim scar across the body of the Sling.
Yurii smiled. Despite the harsh snow outside, despite the gentle crumbling of the General Secretary across the table, he felt at peace with the world. "We've been so successful negotiating with the Americans, I can't think of anything else we would want to take away from them."
Sipyagin wheezed, then commended him. "Yurii, you have outdone yourself this time. I can hardly believe what you've wrought myself, even though I have always firmly believed the Americans had the desire to commit suicide. How did you talk them into this incredible agreement?"
Yurii shrugged; when one's victory was as stupendous as this, one could afford humility. "I confess it hardly took any effort on my part other than the suggestion. They wanted to surrender the one area in which they have always had the ability to overwhelm us."
"Can it be that, deep within their souls, the Americans are afraid of their own technology? They must be, despite their endless parade of shiny new gadgets."
"Perhaps." Yurii frowned. "And yet, I cannot quite believe it. Perhaps the American
politicians
are afraid of technology. In some important sense, American technology does not belong to them. It belongs to the engineers who create it, and the businessmen who sell it." He shook his head. "Or their attitude could simply be pragmatic. For the past several decades, the American power to create technical wonders has not helped their military machine. Why, even in the late 1980s, they were using radios from the Korean war—radios with vacuum tubes in them! I heard reports about American attempts to build computerized command and control systems, while they were depending on those radios for communications. It was laughable."
The General Secretary chuckled deep in his throat.
Yurii shrugged. "Despite their technical wizardry, the Americans make clumsy weapons."
"Except for their airplanes."
Yurii nodded. "Yes, their airplanes and their submarines are very good indeed. But even in those areas they manage to hurt themselves. They build machines so expensive that even the Americans, wealthy as they are, cannot afford many of them." He paused, refocusing on the question of why the Americans had made their latest agreement. "Perhaps this treaty reflects a new American understanding of how poorly their technology has served them. Perhaps they have recognized this ongoing failure, and have resigned themselves to it. Perhaps they would have carried out the terms of the treaty even without our signing it." He smiled. "Well, our signing certainly hastened the process."
"Soon we'll have no strong enemies. It's time for us to start identifying targets of opportunity."
Yurii gestured a warning. "I agree that we should identify some targets. But remember that from this time forward, the longer we wait, the weaker the Americans will become. Why spend blood when patience will achieve the same goals?"
Sipyagin rolled his lips impatiently. "I suppose you're right. And yet it would be beautiful to conclude this struggle in my lifetime." He paused. "And I guess I'm still suspicious. Will the Americans really follow through on this treaty? Even now I can't believe that they could act so foolishly."
"I'd fear they were up to something myself, were it not for the effectiveness of our information-gathering system. We've already received confirmation of massive dismantlings in the American military effort."
"Really? What juicy tidbit has the KGB found for us now?"
Yurii laughed. "The KGB is not our best informationgathering system, my comrade. The American news media have found out for us."
"Ah, of course."
Yurii rose to push the American video cassette home inside a Japanese VCR. How wonderfully thoughtful their enemies were, to supply these delightful machines!
Up came the image of a popular TV newsman. Yurii asked, "How's your English these days? I can play it direct or in translation."
Sipyagin waved a languid hand. "I'll manage," he said.
ZOOM. The camera closes in on Bill Hardie's nut-brown face. This newscaster had amused Yurii a number of times before. This time, however, something seems different; the wild fire in Hardie's wide eyes has cooled. "President Mayfield claims to have pulled off yet another coup in the frenetic realm of global negotiations. Restating his devotion to American-Soviet harmony, today he announced his latest treaty, the Smart Weapons Ban."
"This man is popular in the United States?" the General Secretary asked.
"He was tremendously popular several months ago. He seems to have lost some of his following recently."
"He doesn't quite have the glitter I expected."
Yurii nodded. "Don't worry, I'm sure they'll replace him shortly. They always do."
CUT. The scene shifts to East Berlin. A line of pickets encounters a line of East German soldiers—soldiers who supposedly aren't allowed in East Berlin because of the Allied Accords signed after World War II, but who operate there nonetheless. Bill's voice takes a note of foreboding. "The signing of the Smart Weapons Ban strikes an odd note, considering the accusations streaming between East and West. The clashes between rioters and soldiers in East Germany reached a new height today. In a major demonstration in East Berlin, two people are reported dead and several others wounded. The Soviet Union has denounced West Germany and the United States for supporting the riots. All NATO countries have denied any involvement or assistance to the protesters whatsoever."
The General Secretary grumbled, '"Were going to have to take sterner measures with those Germans."
CUT. "Despite the growing unrest, however, Soviet and American diplomats agreed that smart weapons should be banned from Europe and from other areas of likely American/Soviet conflict. In this context, smart weapons are defined to be weapons that use wholly internal guidance systems to find their targets. Retired Air Force Strategist Leslie Evans noted that this definition lets most of the Soviet smart systems deploy anyway, since their computers are too bulky and expensive to be placed inside the weapons themselves. However, Secretary of State Semmens hailed the treaty as 'an extraordinary victory, which will freeze another expensive and counterproductive arms race in its tracks.' "
Yurii shook his head again in wonder. The only conclusion he could draw was that the United States had given up. Though they retained their ICBMs, their bombers and their subs, they had chosen to give up their superpower status.
ZOOM. "Though the treaty does not explicitly ban the research and development of smart weapons, the Administration sees the treaty as an opportunity to close down numerous military R&D projects. At the top of the hit list is the largest and least productive R&D agency in the country, an agency that has spent over a billion dollars in the past decade without ever bringing a weapon system successfully through an operational test. The F1REF0RS program office, and the twenty major programs controlled by it, will be dismantled as quickly as federal lawyers can cancel the contracts. For various technical and legal reasons, this process will not be completed until mid- January. Economic Advisor Pelino has stated that 'the Smart Weapons Ban has made possible extraordinary savings in the defense budget. These savings significantly improve our chances of seeing our deficit reduced in this decade' " Bill pauses. "There are many ways to view the gains and losses implicit in the Smart Weapons Treaty. A representative of the Zetetic Institute has also pointed out that—"
The stereo speakers hissed with static; the tape contained just a short clip from a longer discussion.
The General Secretary gazed at the monitor with wonder. "They're really doing it, aren't they?"
"Yes, they really are."
Kira stepped to the threshold of Hilan Forstil's office and paused there, reluctant to disturb the senator. Then, annoyed with herself for her timidity, she set her shoulders and crossed the room to stand by Hilan's conference table.
He rose as she entered, nodded abruptly, and stepped around the desk to greet her. "Please come in, Ms. Evans," he offered with a wave of his hand. "I'm pleased to meet you."
"You, too," Kira replied, though she wasn't sure she meant it. As far as Kira was concerned, this man had betrayed them. She had come here only because Uncle Nathan had assured her that Senator Forstil was their key man in Congress, and Kira couldn't deny that they needed congressional help.
As they sat down together at the deeply polished mahogany table, Kira searched for clues to Forstil's makeup. She felt a small shock at the barrenness of the room; it seemed politically unreasonable. No coffee mugs from contractors rested on his desk, no personal mottos adorned the walls. Even the books on the shelves were studiously neutral: encyclopedias, dictionaries, and the works of Greek philosophers gave no clue as to his religious preferences, or his attitude toward technology, or his thoughts on telecommuting. Kira wondered if all senators had offices so carefully devoid of opinion.
Hilan sat patiently while she completed this inspection of his life. When she looked back at him, his expression shifted, as though he feared that she might see him in a moment of vulnerability: he had been looking at her with open wonder, which changed under her gaze to a smile of stiff amusement. Kira could guess the cause of the open wonder: Hilan had been struck by her resemblance to her mother. "Can I get you anything?" he asked.