The Complete Roderick (81 page)

‘I think we ought to introduce you around, eh?’

‘Look, what’s the point? If you’re just going to trash me, why not get it over with?’

‘Trash you?’ The man was so startled he forgot to tap his glasses. ‘Good grief, didn’t I make that clear? Our entire policy on Entities has been
reversed.
We’re
not
stopping them any more.’

‘No? But then –’

‘We didn’t bring you here to trash you, Roderick. On the contrary: we want you to join our team.’

‘Is this a trick?’

‘Ha ha, no trick. We really are inviting you to dive into our tank for a good think, ha ha.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ said Roderick seriously.

‘Ha ha, great. Come on in, the water’s fine.’

‘I wonder if it is,’ said Roderick seriously.

‘Ha ha.’

At the hour of anguish and vague light

He would rest his eyes on his Golem.

Who can tell us what God felt,

As he gazed on his rabbi in Prague?

Jorge Luis Borges,
The Golem

Mr Kratt’s thick black V of eyebrow came down deeper; he bit through his cheap cigar. ‘Goddamnit, bub,’ he said into the telephone, ‘you sure about this federal court order? Fine damn country if the damn government can send in the FBI to deprive a man of his legitimate property … Well, damn-it, Moonbrand, you and Honcho are supposed to be the damned lawyers, you tell me, can’t we lodge an appeal … Yes well look, I didn’t hire you to just sit in your damn hacienda out there and swill orange juice, I hired you to protect KUR interests, my interests, not to … No okay, no all right, maybe you and your partner have been
zapped by this Uncle Sam authority trip,
but now listen bub, can the California crap and listen, I want that damn robot! You’re the one said I got a legal claim in the first place, now you just go and get the damn thing. Or at least tell me how I can get it … Yeah well, forget your damn karma for a minute, I got a corporation ready to fall apart if I don’t get some good gimmick, I got Moxon breathing down my neck, I got a bank about to fold if that asshole Fleischman doesn’t remember where he parked that sixty million dollars, frankly I don’t need your damn karma.’

The image of his growling voice, turned into numbers, beamed up to a satellite and back down to California, finally emerged from what looked like a gold conch shell held to Wade Moonbrand’s ear. His bare feet rested on the desktop, which had been made from a teak surfboard. He kept his eyes on a meditation symbol on the wall, a nest of concentric rings; when
he’d finished talking he pulled a Colt .45 from inside his floral shirt and put three shots into the middle of the symbol.

‘Cass, old buddy, we kind of aced ourselfs, you know? I mean talk about the oneness of everything, we aced our own selfs!’

Cass Honcho, wearing buckskin and sitting at a desk made of a split log, nodded to show he was awake.

‘Talk about conflict of innerest,’ Moonbrand went on. ‘I finally got the story outa the Orinoco gang, and guess who’s behind the FBI move? Leo! Leo Bunsky, our client! Man, if we hadn’t slapped that injunction on them to get the poor bastard’s head straight – I mean wires uncrossed – like he would still be floating on some astral plane with like Madame Blavatsky and James Dean, instead of down here making waves. We aced our own selfs!

‘Like you remember when we took on Leo as a client? And we got that injunction against Orinoco saying they was violating his civil rights? And we wanted our electronics people and neurologists to look him over, remember that?’

Honcho nodded.

‘And man their argument was just that Leo had all his rights because they let him vote with the rest of the committee, only we argued that you couldn’t be sure his vote was real unless we got our experts in there to check his wiring, remember?’

Honcho nodded.

‘And then when our boys did go in there sure enough they found a couple of wires crossed or something, so like his vote was garbled, remember? And after that they voted on something and Leo changed his vote and I guess the bottom line is, they decided to send in the FBI and just grab Roderick; so there we are, aced. I mean we just get one client fixed up so he can think straight, first thing he does is rip off another client. Mr Kratt’s mad as hell and we lose out everywhere. Talk about a conflict of innerest, we just conflicted all over ourselfs there, you know what I wish?’

Honcho nodded.

‘I wish there was some piranha fish in Leo Bunsky’s tank.’

Roderick stared at the brain in the tank, trying to see it as a living person and not as a relic. Leo Bunsky had created him; now he
tried to reconstruct Leo Bunsky, as his guide explained and explained:

‘… see one of the key factors in our policy on Entities was always Leo’s vote: no matter how hard he might argue for building Entities, when it came to a vote he always voted for their extermination. You’re probably wondering whether we didn’t think there was something wrong, but, hell, a lot of people here play games like that, arguing intellectually but voting with their true feelings. We thought Leo really was opposed to Entities. His vote influenced other votes, so the Entity extermination policy always had a comfortable plurality. And, well, it was only after Leo’s lawyers made us check the wiring that we realized, Leo’s vote was being misrecorded.
He
thought he was voting “Nay”,
we
thought he was voting “Aye”. For poor Leo, Yes meant No.

‘But I guess you don’t want to hear all this internal gossip, right? So why don’t we move right along?’

The guide was a younger version of the first pipe-smoker. He had the same brush-cut hair (Roderick could imagine the two of them lying end-to-end, the tops of their heads meshing like a pair of military brushes) and the same tweed jacket.

‘I see you’re looking at my leather elbow patches,’ he said in the elevator.

‘Was I? Yes, I guess I was.’

‘Neat, huh? See this one zips open, it’s a pocket. For my pipe.’

‘Oh.’

‘A lot of the fellas have them, see we get these wholesale prices from this big sporting goods outfit, O’Bride International. We tried some blazers too, real neat with our own crest, only we had to send them back, they screwed up the name. Here we are, Subbasement Eight.’

The doors opened on brilliant green rain-forest, complete with steaming undergrowth, sunlight pouring down through the clerestory of tall trees, snakes lazing among the lianas and pennant-bright birds in the shrubs.

‘This can’t be real.’

‘Good, isn’t it? Mostly mirrors and holograms, with a few plastic bushes. Okay, we just follow this trail here.’

They rounded a tree and the jungle vanished, leaving them in an ordinary, even shabby corridor. ‘Some psychiatrist figured
having a little foyer like this on each floor would help everybody concentrate. On other floors they have mountains or desert or quiet smalltown streets. One floor’s got Oxford or is it Cambridge? To help everybody concentrate.’

‘Does it help?’

‘Naw, it’s a lot of hooey.’ The guide rapped at the first door and opened it. An old man wearing a frock coat and a huge panama ‘planter’s’ hat sat hunched over his desk. He was using an abacus with no great speed or skill. On the blackboard behind him was written, THE GREATEST GOOD FOR THE GREATEST
NUMBER.

‘Come in, come in,’ he said, not looking up. ‘Have you brought my robot? Just leave it in the corner.’

‘Not this one,’ said the guide, chuckling. ‘I’m showing him around.’

‘Show him around later! This is important!’ Even the beads snapped.

Roderick asked the man what he was calculating.

‘Oh, nothing much! Nothing much! Just setting out a complete moral code for all human conduct, that’s all!’

A complete moral code?’

‘Complete.’ The old man finished a calculation and laid down his abacus. ‘Covering not only every recorded human action, but every possible imaginable human action. Complete, detailed, and mathematically precise. Are you familiar with the principles of Utilitarianism? An act is judged moral if it achieves the greatest possible good for the greatest possible number. But
what
number? that is the question.
Which
number?’

Roderick tried to look quizzical.

‘The method is really quite simple. Every human action has its own individual number. And every set of circumstances is an equation. We simply plug the numbers into the equations and off we go!’

The guide said, ‘Yeah, well, off
we
go, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover –’

‘Wait a minute, just let me show you.’ The old man leaped to his blackboard and erased it energetically, the motion making his hat-brim quiver. He sketched a diagram. ‘Now here for instance we have the classical nuclear war standoff, East against West.
Each side has the same two choices, either strike first or wait. So there are four possible outcomes. Now take West’s options. If he strikes first, West can win (that is + 1) but only if East has waited. But if both try to strike first, the whole world is wiped out (that is definitely –1). On balance, then, West neither gains nor loses from striking first. What if he waits? The best that can happen is nothing (o), and that’s if East waits too. The worst that can happen is if East: strikes first and West is destroyed (–1). So on balance, West loses by waiting. Now what is West’s best strategy?’

Roderick looked at the diagram. ‘Striking first?’

‘Exactly. And of course it is also East’s best strategy. Without doubt, both sides ought to strike first. But if they both do that, we get–’

‘The worst of all possible worlds?’

‘Precisely. It’s a dilemma
^*
all right: if both sides make their best play, everybody loses. Utilitarianism has to clean up dilemmas like this before it can come to a complete calculus of morality.’ The panama hat-brim vibrated with feeling. ‘Sometimes I’d like to get the real East and West here in my office and give them real buttons to push. Then, by thunder, we’d see!’

When Roderick and his guide were leaving, the old man added, ‘Come back soon. I’ll show you what we’re doing with catastrophe theory …’

They moved on to the next office, where with the aid of more
diagrams, a man explained his speculations about solar energy: He was working out ways of storing it in common plants, especially cucumbers.

Next, Roderick met a team planning to recycle sewage to provide not only methane and fertilizers, but intriguing new foods. One of them said:

‘Sure, it must sound crazy, but the fact is. the demand for junk foods and fast foods is rising exponentially. In a few years, the public will demand the right to eat pretty much anything. My only worry is, can we meet the challenge fast enough?’

In the next office a large group were contemplating possible wars, and no combination was too unlikely to be considered: a clash between the navies of Luxembourg and Paraguay, a parachute invasion of Finland by the Boobies of Fernando Po, Las Vegas bombed by Lapps.

Another office was concerned with future possible natural disasters and their implications. Suppose for example California suddenly sank into the waters of the Pacific – how would the national economy be affected by the loss of so many millionaires? With Hollywood gone, where would the Mafia next invest its money? What would be the cultural effect of TV drama without car chases?

Other offices were devoted to monitoring various ‘fringe’ sciences that ‘just might’ turn into worthwhile lines of enquiry: parapsychology, for example. A pipe-smoking parapsychologist explained.

‘The whole field is bursting with new ideas, new research projects. Professor Fether in Chicago has been testing precognition in hippos. The Russians have had a breakthrough on the ouija board to Lenin. The ghost labs of California seem to be doing some solid research … Others are breaking new ground too, testing the hypothesis that hypnagogic visions are real … a new thought-gun that shoots down UFOs, a Dutch psychic who produces rabbits out of a hat … Seems to be a new theory that if you stare at the back of someone’s neck, they’ll turn around and look at you, even in a crowd …’

While in the next office, astrologers were checking a British theory that all black persons were born under Libra, all subversives under Scorpio, all women under Capricorn.

Next came a conference room where a dozen persons smoked pipes or filed nails as they listened to a lecture on Jungian economics. The lecturer broke off to define a few basic principles for Roderick’s benefit:

‘Take market forces, for example: are they real? We see that, just as people’s belief in flying, saucers, so-called, made them really appear in the sky, so too people’s belief in a rising or falling stock market made it really rise or fall. Could “bear” and “bull” be ancient fertility and virility archetypes – Ursa Major and Taurus?’

Though Roderick was to visit only a handful of the five hundred offices at the Orinoco Institute, he met enough people to give him some grasp of the breadth and scope of this mighty academy. There were statisticians and climatologists, news reporters and military historians, oceanographers and Esperanto speakers, bioengineers and anthropologists, a mad gypsy fortune teller and a moping science-fiction writer, and even a psychologist who specialized in probing the minds of infants. All bets seemed to be covered.