Peace on Earth (24 page)

Russell, the young ethnologist who wanted to write his dissertation about millionaires, came to see me in the evenings. He had most of his material now thanks to his interviews with Kramer, but I couldn’t tell him those interviews were worthless and that Kramer was only playing the role of a Croesus while the true millionaires, especially the ones from Texas, were dull as dishwater. Even in the asylum they had their own secretaries, masseurs, and bodyguards, and each had a pavilion to himself. They were so reclusive, Russell had to set up a special telescope on my roof to observe them through their windows. He was discouraged, because even when they were stark raving mad, what they did was unoriginal. Since nothing was happening, Russell would come down his ladder and drop in on me for some human conversation.

The prosperity that obtained after the weapons were moved to the moon had unfortunate consequences, made worse by automation. Russell called it the electronics Stone Age. Illiteracy increased, particularly since now you didn’t even have to sign a check, only a thumbprint was necessary and a computer scanner did the rest. The American Medical Association finally lost the battle to save their profession, because computers gave better diagnoses and were much more patient with patients. Prosthetic sex was replaced by a simple device called an Orgaz. This was a headset with electrodes and a handgrip that resembled a toy pistol. Pulling the trigger gave you the ultimate pleasure because the appropriate place in your brain was stimulated with no effort, no exertion necessary, plus there were no upkeep expenses for male or female remotes, nor indeed the aggravations of natural courtship and matrimony. Orgazes flooded the market. To be fitted you went to special clinics. Gynandroics and other firms that manufactured synthetic women, angels, nymphs, fauns, etc., went out of business with much gnashing of teeth. As for education, most of the developed countries did away with compulsory school attendance. “Children,” went the new doctrine, “should not be subjected to daily imprisonment and the psychological torture called learning.” Who needs to know how many men’s shirts you can sew out of six yards of Egyptian cotton if one shirt requires seven eighths of a yard, or when two trains will collide if one engineer is eighteen, drunk, and going 100 miles an hour and the other is colorblind and doing 75, if they’re separated by 15 miles of track and 43 pre-automation semaphores? Equally useless are facts about kings, wars, battles, crusades, and all the other rotten behavior of history. Geography is best learned by traveling. All you have to know is the price of the ticket and when the plane takes off. Why learn foreign languages when you can put a translator chip in your ear? The study of biology depresses and depraves young minds, nor is it practical since no one now can become a doctor or dentist (after the appearance of dentautomata, about thirty thousand out-of-work dentists in both the Americas and Eurasia have committed suicide each year). And chemistry is of no more value than a knowledge of hieroglyphics. Meanwhile on traffic signs and street signs words are slowly being replaced with pictures.

Russell saw no point complaining about this state of affairs because nothing could be done. There were still some fifty thousand scientists and scholars left in the world but their average age was now 61.7. Everything had been smothered in the boredom of prosperity, and that was why, said Russell, most people were actually pleased by the prospect of an invasion from the moon, and the panic reported in the papers and on television was only to increase sales.
Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur,
the ethnologist concluded, staring at the now empty bottle of bourbon. His field work was so disappointing that he had stopped aiming his telescope at the windows of the millionaires and turned it instead to the solarium where the nurses and their aides sunbathed in the nude. I thought that odd, since after all he could simply go there and look at them up close, but when I said this, he shrugged, remarking that that was the problem: nowadays one could just do that.

In the rec room of the new pavilion workmen were almost finished setting up the fants. Russell took me there one evening. You put a cassette into a fant and an image appears in front of the machine. More than an image, a whole artificial reality, Mount Olympus, for example, packed with gods and goddesses, or something more from life, a two-wheel tumbrel carrying a bunch of illustrious people through a furious crowd toward the guillotine. Or Hansel and Gretel at the witch’s house stuffing themselves with shingles of gingerbread. Or a convent after Tartars or Martians break in. The idea is that what happens next depends on the viewer, who has a pedal under each foot and a joystick in his hand. You can go from idyll to bloodbath, have the gods depose Zeus, put ear wings on the heads falling into the guillotine basket so they fly away. Anything is possible. The witch wants to make cutlets out of Hansel, but you can have Hansel make cutlets out of her. The Prince of Denmark can steal the royal jewels and run off with Ophelia, or with Rosencrantz, depending on which key you push, because some fants have a keyboard. The instruction manual is a thick book but you can do without it. We tired of the fants after fifteen minutes of playing, even though we were both a little drunk, and went to bed. The asylum bought twenty fants, but they are hardly ever used. Dr. House is not happy about that. He went from patient to patient, trying to persuade them to give it a try because it’s good therapy. But apparently none of the millionaires or billionaires ever heard of Hansel and Gretel or Olympus or Hamlet. Tartars or Martians, it’s all the same to them. The guillotine they consider an oversize cigar cutter and silly. Dr. House worked the fants himself, probably out of a sense of duty, mixing the Middle Ages, Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, and volcanoes, and tried to get me to join him, but I refused. I was still waiting for a sign from Professor Lax-Gugliborc. Kramer too seemed to be waiting for something, and that’s probably why he avoided me. Waiting for new instructions? But I was in a good mood, having reached an understanding with myself.

It was the end of August already, and before turning on my desk lamp in the evening, I had to close the window because of moths. Except for ladybugs I don’t much care for insects. Butterflies I can take or leave but moths for some reason frighten me. That August there were a lot of them and they kept fluttering outside my window. Some were so big I could hear their thuds against the glass. Since even looking at them bothers me, I got up to pull the curtains, when I heard a sound. A clear, sharp sound, as if someone was touching a pane with a metal rod. I approached the window, the lamp in my hand. Among the fluttering moths I saw one that was all black, larger than the others, and it gleamed in the reflected light. It backed away, then came at the window again and hit it with such force that I felt the frame shake. What’s more, the moth had a small beak instead of a head. I stood fascinated because it wasn’t hitting the glass at random but in regular intervals, groups of three; three dots, a pause, three dots, a pause, repeated until I realized it was the letter S in Morse code. I hesitated about opening the window. It wasn’t a live thing but I didn’t want to let real moths into the room either. I finally got up my nerve and I opened the window a crack, and it flew in immediately. I shut the window and looked around. The moth had lit on the papers covering the desk. It had no wings and now didn’t resemble a moth at all or any other bug. It looked most like a black olive. Then it was hovering above the desk and humming. I reached for it, and it let me take it between my fingers. It was hard, made of metal or plastic. Again I heard the humming, three dots, three dashes, three dots. I held it to my ear and heard a weak, distant, but distinct human voice.

“Owl here. Owl here. Do you read me?”

I put the olive in my ear and answered:

“Mouse here. Mouse here. I read you, Owl.”

“Good evening.”

“Greetings.” Expecting a long conversation, I pulled the curtains and double-locked the door. Now I could hear the professor perfectly. I recognized his voice.

“This way we can talk freely,” he said and chuckled. “Don’t worry, I’m using a scrambler of my own invention. No one will understand us. But let’s stay Owl and Mouse to be safe.”

“Fine,” I replied and turned off the lamp.

“It was not that hard,” said Lax-Gugliborc. “You did the right thing. I understood immediately.”

“But how…?”

“Better for the mice not to know. In the vernacular of criminals, the mouse should know that his accomplice is not a double-crosser. We have before us different pieces of a puzzle. The owl will go first. The dust isn’t dust. It’s silicon micropolymers of very curious structure doped with selenium so that they superconduct at room temperature. Some joined with the remains of our poor molecular remote on the moon.”

“What does that mean?”

“Too soon for a definite answer. I have a few ideas. I was able to obtain a pinch of the powder through a friend. We have half an hour before the thing enabling our connection goes behind the mouse’s horizon. I couldn’t get in touch with you during the day. We would have had more time then, but the risk would have been greater.”

I was dying to know how the professor sent me this metal insect, but I realized I shouldn’t ask.

“Continue, Owl, I’m listening.”

“My fears were confirmed, but in an opposite way. I figured that something on the moon would arise out of the chaos, but I never dreamed it would be something able to make use of our messenger.”

“Can’t you be a little more clear?”

“Not without getting very technical. I’ll make it as simple as I can. It was an immune response. Not on the whole surface of the moon, of course. At one location, and from there the antibodies spread. What we’re calling the dust.”

“Where did these antibodies come from and what do they do?”

“From the rubble of bytes and logic circuits. Some draw their energy from the sun. Which is not that surprising because there were plenty of photoelectric materials there to begin with. How should I put it? The moon gradually built up an immunity to any kind of invasion. I’m not talking about intelligence. We conquered gravity, we conquered the atom, but we haven’t conquered the common cold. If self-regulating ecosystems developed on Earth, you could say that one developed on the moon, albeit nonliving, out of that whole tangle of attacks and tunnelings. In other words the strategies of sword and shield indirectly gave rise, in their mutual destruction, and this without the intention or knowledge of the programmers, to these cybernetic antibodies.”

“But what exactly do they do?”

“Well, in the first place I think they acted like the most ancient bacteria on Earth and simply multiplied, and there must have been many varieties of them and the majority perished, as in natural evolution. After a while, symbiotic species emerged. The kind that work together for their mutual benefit. But I repeat: this is not intelligence. They are merely capable of an enormous number of metamorphoses or mutations, like the flu virus, for example. But unlike earthly bacteria, they are not parasites, for they have no host, if you don’t count the computer ruins that first nourished them and let them breed. The situation was complicated by the fact that meanwhile the weapons being produced by the programs still functional underwent a division.”

“Yes, a division into weapons directed against living opponents and weapons directed against nonliving opponents.”

“The mouse is quick. Correct. From the first antibodies that arose many years ago probably nothing remains. They evolved into—let us call them selenocytes. These joined into multicellular forms to survive, to become more versatile, much as ordinary germs increase in virulence by growing resistant to the antibiotics used against them.”

“But what played the role of antibiotics on the moon?”

“An interesting question. The main threat to the selenocytes must have been those products of the military self-evolution which were designed specifically to attack and destroy them.”

“You mean, they treated them as an enemy.”

“Or as good target practice. Think of the artillery with which the pharmaceutical companies bombard bacteria. This accelerated the selenocyte evolution. And the selenocytes won, because they proved to be more viable. A person can have a cold but a cold can’t have a person. Or can it? The persons on the moon were the great, complex systems.”

“And then?”

“A most curious and completely unexpected development. The resistance went from passive to active.”

“I don’t understand.”

“From defense the selenocytes switched to offense. They hastened, and very quickly, the demise of the lunar arms race…”

“That dust?”

“That dust. And when only the expiring remnant of the vaunted Geneva project was left, the selenocytes received an unforeseen reinforcement.”

“Which was?”

“The dispersant. They made use of it. Not destroying it so much as assimilating it. Or, to put it better, an exchange of information took place. Hybridization took place. A crossbreeding.”

“How is that possible?”

“It’s not really all that strange. I too was working with semiconducting silicon polymers. Different, yes, mine were doped with rare-earth elements, but the adaptability of my dust was not unlike the adaptability of the lunar dust. There was an affinity. Similar starting materials, similar results.”

“And now what?”

“That I don’t know. The key could be your landing. Why did you land in the Mare Ignium?”

“The Japanese sector? I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

“Nothing?”

“Not a thing.”

“And your right hemisphere?”

“Also nothing. I can communicate with it now. But please keep that under your hat.”

“I will. I’d love to know
how
you did it but won’t ask. What does it know?”

“That when I returned to the ship I had a pocketful of that dust How it got there is a mystery.”

“You could have scooped it up yourself. The question is why.”

“And the Agency. What does the Agency think?”

“The dust caused quite a sensation, and a panic especially when it followed you. You know about that?”