Manshape (7 page)

“Hmm! A risky act, wouldn’t you say? What about your staff pantologist? Every scoutship has one, right?”

“He failed to complete a social match-programme, which would have enabled us to create a compatible interface Earth-to-Azrael. On the grounds that he wished to improve his cross-cultural competence he applied for and was granted sabbatical leave, to be spent travelling on all the inhabited planets. When I filed a request for a replacement, I did not specify Chen by name, and I was amazed when he arrived.”

“Was it you who approved this arrangement, Moses?” Shrigg demanded.

“Chen was in need of a challenge,” van Heemskirk
replied. “It was his decision, not mine. I merely drew the problem to his attention. You know what pantologists are like. I was naturally glad when he consented.”

Shrigg gnawed his lower lip thoughtfully for a while. So far everything appeared to have been done in strict accordance with protocol. He said at length, “But we have representatives from Azrael right here on Earth, don’t we? Negotiating the regular Bridge System contract?”

“Of course!” van Heemskirk said promptly.

“And we dare not enter into such a contract without a total comprehension of their way of life. I put it to you that the first priority is to create our interface. But which if any of our
surviving
pantologists would accept the assignment? Laverne?”

The psychologist appeared to have anticipated the inquiry. With all the confidence he could draw from his computers by subvocal communication, he said, “Ask Hans Demetrios. He’s very young, but he’s shown exceptional promise. Currently he’s at Ipewell, and I’m informed that he grew so bored after the preliminary contact stages that he wrote a programme for the Ipewell Bridge just to keep himself amused. It checked out flawlessly. What do you think?”

“Well, I guess it makes good sense not to risk another of our
advanced
pantologists,” Shrigg said, and in his ironical acceptance could be heard all the cynicism of the billions whom he represented, who had to take their experience of interstellar travel at second hand not because their government had decreed it but because there wasn’t time to let everybody visit every human world, or even spend a vacation at Bridge City.

Relieved that the argument had not been more protracted, Alida was able to pick up the point which interested her most.

“Did you say Jorgen had a breakdown? When? And why?”

“It appeared as though,” said van Heemskirk deliberately, “it was triggered off by the delegate from Azrael, Lancaster Long.”

“Where are you going, Hans?”

As soon as he had time, Hans Demetrios looked up. The sliding panel which closed the doorway of his cabin had crept ajar, and there was only one member of the ship’s crew to whom he had accorded authority to intrude on his privacy: Fay Logan. Her face appeared in the opening, lips parted and shiny-moist, eyes narrowed but very bright.

“Come in!” he invited, and added: “Back to Earth. They sent for me.”

“Earth!” She was taken aback. Her eyes darted over the disarray as she entered the room; the cabinets were emptying themselves according to programme, clothing this way, tools that, microbooks into tidy cartons. Even the ship’s library, designed to cope with the needs of over a hundred crewfolk, could not satisfy the information-hunger of a pantologist, so Hans travelled with his own. It was cheaper than Ireactivating a Bridge whenever he grew bored.

But she knew all about his capacity for boredom.

She closed the panel and leaned against it.

“You didn’t tell me you were leaving I pewell!”

“It only just happened. I’m sorry.”

Staring at him as he folded his favourite microbook reader and tucked it into the appropriate package, Fay-thought: yes, he is sorry. He means it. But that doesn’t mean he’s sorry for not telling me-rather, he’s sorry it didn’t occur to him to tell me. He never gives enough weight to the possibility that other people’s lives might be as important as his own.

“How long ago?” she challenged.

“Oh—not more than an hour, I guess.”

“And you’re set to leave already. It must be very urgent!” She could not prevent her tone from sounding sarcastic.

“Well, kind of urgent, I guess. But after all I am finished on Ipewell. The culture-interface is ready; the Bridge programme is ready; what else is there? It was all rather easy because the population is small and homogeneous.”

Small? There are scores of millions of people here! Even if the people aren’t counted by the billions, as Earth’s are, surely—

But a pantologist’s universe could not be the same as hers—or she would be one!

For the first time it crossed her mind how terrible it might be to inhabit a cosmos where people were as anonymous, interchangeable, and ultimately dull as the computers must find them when wrapping and packaging them for interstellar transit. Hans had been tender to her, affectionate, physically attentive; there had remained a barrier on the mental level which in this moment she knew she was destined never to breach.

She said dully, “I see. So what are you going to do next?”

“They killed Jacob Chen on Azrael when he was trying to get to grips with the dynamic of the local culture. They’re sending me to finish his work. It’s a great honour.” He finished storing the microbooks
and began double-checking what the machinery had done with his recording crystals.

Fay closed her eyes for a moment. On the interior of her eyelids she seemed to see herself reflected as others would see her: indisputably lovely, with flawlessly tanned skin, an excellently proportioned figure, violet eyes that contrasted admirably with her curly fair hair… Hans had said what other men had said, in his own detached weighing-the-evidence fashion which somehow made the statement that much more sincere and precious. He had said, “You are beautiful, you know.” And so, she had thought, was he!

But now when she looked at him again she realised he was according her no attention beyond the minimum that anyone deserved.

She tried one last time to engage his full attention. Touching his arm, she said, “Hans—look at me!”

Before he smiled his answer, though, he had to prepare himself as she had often seen him do before when arguing with the computers: it is necessary for me to be distracted, and therefore I will do it, but out
of
duty, not from choice…

It had been in her mind to kiss him, cheeks and eyelids first, then fiercely on the mouth with the intention of reawakening what they had shared. She abandoned the idea, and contented herself with a mere peck.

He… tasted wrong.

“That,” she improvised, “was sort of to say good-bye.”

“Maybe it won’t be goodbye.” He gave her hand a comforting squeeze. “Don’t assume they’re going to kill me, too!”

The implied reproach recalled her to the real world. Like everyone else she knew, she was aware of Chen’s status as a pantologist He had been a pupil of the
very first, a link with the original conception of the idea which had been elevated into an article of faith, the belief that there would always be humans who could out-argue their machines.

She ought to be told what had happened to draw Hans away.

“What went wrong?” she said at last, letting go his hand.

All the means which would have enabled him to project the details to her, using the ship’s resources, had by now been stored in six neat cases. Rather than unpack them again, he recounted the story in bald words.

“I see,” Fay said at last. “What appeals to you is being sent for to cope with a problem that killed Chen. All that matters in your life is another challenge, and preferably one that someone else has been defeated by.”

“Oh, no!” was his immediate response. And then, as his permament curiosity set in again: “What makes you say so?”

“Oh, I worked it out the night we met the two boys, Lork and Jeckin,” she said with a sigh. “You made it clearer to them what had happened to this culture than the rest of us had managed in a year when talking with the people in charge!”

“I can’t help it!” Hans retorted in an injured tone. And then, as by way of extenuation: “I look at things differently, I’m afraid.”

It was the most personal comment she had ever provoked from him. She smiled and gestured for him to continue.

“I can’t help it!” he repeated, starring to pace up and down in the narrow confines of the room. “I don’t know how true it is, the idea that the existence of computers has forced us into evolutionary hyper-drive, but it does fit, doesn’t it? Someone has to stay
in charge! I don’t want to be overtaken by machinery!”

He drove fist into palm.

“It makes me terrified, you know—what I do, what I’m compelled to do! I have to argue with the medical computers whenever they run a check on the ship’s personnel, because they don’t understand what’s driving me! My job engages everything, every single faculty, like clinging with fingers and toes to a sheer rock wall. You inch up, and every inch is an achievement, and one little slip is the end. Do you believe it’s terrifying? Anyone else can fail and start over. A pantologist has to assume he got it right the first time. If it happened to me I’d stop being what I am, and that would be infinitely worse than—oh—being crippled in a wheelchair! Maybe Chen preferred death to failure;
I
don’t know! All I
do
know is that
I
would!”

“So—” Fay ventured. He cut her short.

“Why should I do what I do? Oh, because I’m selfish, of course! Once you’ve succeeded for a while, you don’t want to do anything that entails the risk of defeat. The strain itself becomes attractive. Nothing else uses so much of you! And it earns you admiration, and that’s not enough to repay your efforts, and then sometimes you get a bonus. And you saw me get one. That is enough.”

Confused, she said, “Are you still talking about Lork and Jeckin?”

“What else? They’re going to be liberated. I know! I analysed this culture, broke it down into symbols, weighted them, stored them in the memory-banks, told the computers where they were misunderstanding me, ran tests for interaction with Earth and the other planets in the Bridge System… This culture is sterile. It’s going to collapse. I’ve fed the hunger in those kids’ eyes! Didn’t you
see
it?”

“Yes”—barely breathing the word.

“When they build the Ipewell Bridge, the engineers will be instructed by the computers. But I taught the computers what to say. I set those boys free.”

Seeming suddenly embarrassed at having talked so openly, Hans ceased his pacing. “I guess I have to make a move. They have to fire up an Earthside Bridge for me specially, and I don’t want them to waste any power. I’m sorry, Fay.”

“For what?” she riposted, and then, not giving him time to answer, continued: “Tell me something before you go. Jacob Chen must have been sixty-plus, right?”

“Sixty-two.”

“And he’d been a pantologist all his life?”

Hans blinked. “Well, I guess so. We tend to be infant prodigies as often as not.”

“When did you find out you were going to be one?”

“I didn’t. Other people found out for me. I was just about learning to read when they latched on.”

“And you were how old then?”

“Oh!” He gave a boyish and self-conscious grin. “Not quite past my third birthday.”

“So I’m half a century too late to try and catch up,” she said, and gave a bitter smile. “Never mind. I’ll console myself with the certainty that I shan’t be the last person to break her heart by setting it on you. I just hope there will go on being enough to save you from…”

The words died away, and there he was blinking at her, genuinely not understanding: this man who understood almost literally everything else.

To have achieved this petty triumph against a pantologist’s universal brilliance did not strike Fay as any sort of fair compensation for her distress. But it was what she was going to have to make do with.

“Plugging in for Earth in one minute,” said the unemotional voice of a recording filtered by the PA system. “Wait for the green light, please.”

When it showed, Hans gave his baggage the necessary tap to align it on its nulgrav carrier and followed it across the painted line on the floor which defined the transit zone.

During the seconds which remained before his own journey, he thought about how this modern miracle must have affected Mother Uskia and her companions when they went to Mars. A Bridge was simple enough in principle. It relied on the fact that any given volume of space differed from any other only to the extent that it was distorted by the presence of nearby matter and a flow of energy passing through it. Cancel those differences, and anywhere might as well be anywhere else. Because all humanly habitable planets were about the same size and orbited roughly the same kind of sun, it wasn’t hard to reduce the distinctions to an effective null state. Then, to specify a particular destination, it was enough to introduce another, planned, difference.

At the mark, obedient machines did precisely that, and the recorded voice invited Hans to walk into a volume of space identical with one on Earth. It
was
on Earth. It had cost a hundred gigawatts of power per kilogram of transferred mass to maintain the identity of the two spaces during transmission, and the computers keeping unbroken watch over that identity would have noted, reacted to and cancelled out about ten to the eighth information-bits corresponding to incipient discrepancies.

And he, Hans Demetrios, had taught the computers what discrepancies to look out for.

He was very sorry for Fay. He wished with all his heart she could be more than just a charming, attractive, highly intelligent person.

But she wasn’t.

It had been courteous of him to comply with her desires. Refusing her would have caused hurt. But in the long run she had been hurt anyway. The fact preyed on his mind. A pantologist wanted to know that people had benefited by his existence, not suffered by it. It was an article of faith to him that causing pain was inherently wrong, though naturally there were no more rational reasons for such a conclusion than there had been in the old days when people believed in religions, with a god or gods all set to punish them for misbehaviour. Those beliefs hadn’t saved the ancients from untold centuries of misery-war, slavery, villeinage, epidemics, droughts and famines… And no more could his creed prevent Hans from unintentionally making somebody like Fay unhappy.