Mind, Machines and Evolution Part 4

"I'll be very special, won't I?" she mused, half to herself.

"Very special," Kort agreed.

"Do we have a word for a Taya that's special?"

"No. We've never needed one before because there's only ever been one of you. Maybe we should have."

"How about 'queen'?" Taya suggested. "That's a nice word. Could a queen be a Taya that's eight years older than anyone else, and who knows more things and has to teach the others?"

"I don't see why not," Kort said.

"So does that make me a queen?"

"Well, not really, because there aren't really any others yet. But you will be in five days' time."

"I want to be special now. Can't we have another word that means somebody who isn't a queen yet, but who will be in five days' time?"

"Sure we can. Let's say that somebody like that is a . . . 'princess.'"

"That's a nice word, too. So am I a princess right now?"

"Right now," Kort confirmed. "I've already written it into the dictionary."

Taya looked down at herself, and after a few seconds raised a disappointed face toward the watching robot. "I still don't feel special," she said in a thin voice.

"How did you expect to feel?"

"I'm not sure. But there should be something different about being a princess. I still feel like a Taya."

"I'll tell you what we'll do," Kort said. "We'll make a rule that says the princess must look different from everybody else. Then everyone will know who she is, even if they're still small and not very good at remembering things yet."

"How will we do that?"

Kort unfolded her red cloak, draped it around her shoulders, and fastened the clasp at her throat.

"There," he announced. "Only the princess will wear a red cloak."

Taya stepped back and looked happily down at herself as she spread the cloak wide with her arms.

Then she twirled round and around, causing it to billow out in the air. "I feel like a princess!" she laughed.

"I'm really special already, aren't I?"

The robot bowed low and offered his arm. "Come, little princess, we must go now. Scientist has work to do here."

Taya climbed onto Kort's arm and clung to his head as he straightened up and turned toward the door.

"Will you make me some shoes that are silver, like yours?" she asked. "I think a princess should wear silver shoes, too, don't you?"

"A princess should have anything she wants," Kort replied.

The door closed behind them, cutting off the yellow glow. The robot and the princess moved away along the gla.s.s-walled tunnel, toward where the capsule was waiting to carry them home.

Afterword, May, 1999 The original version of this story appeared in Destinies, (Vol. 1, No. 5), published by Ace Books, in late 1979. Jim Baen was the editor at Ace at that time, and our intention was to follow up further with two or three stories of similar length, set at ten-year intervals, telling of Merkon's arrival at whatever destination it is heading for, and the culture that eventually emerged from these strange beginnings. Perhaps, we thought, they could all be packaged together as a series of stories linked by the common theme of whatever longer-term picture unfolds. Jim left Ace to form his own company, however, and the idea went into cryogenic storage.

It's strange how these things come around a full circle. With this reissue of Minds, Machines, & Evolution, here we are, publis.h.i.+ng the original story together again. It generated some appreciative mail in its previous appearances, so Jim and I thought we'd thaw out the expanded project too while we were at it. The volume, ent.i.tled Star Child, published in June, 1998, comprised four stories set at intervals through Taya's life, "Silver Shoes for a Princess" being the first.

INSIDE STORY.

It was like something out of one of those old-time spy thrillers or private-eye movies. I waited on one side of the parking area near the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument, wearing a light-colored raincoat and holding a folded copy of Time magazine as "George" had instructed. He arrived to pick me up in an aircab at exactly seven o'clock. It was a drizzly December night, and the parking lot wasn't well lit. All I could see was a dim figure in an overcoat, sitting hunched back in the shadows with a hat pulled low over its face.

He murmured for some identification, and I showed him a press card that stated I was Lou Chernik, senior reporter with the Was.h.i.+ngton Post. George used a penlight to examine the photograph, shone the light up at my face, then opened the door for me to get in. We flew over the Potomac and landed at the rear of a motel in Crystal City. George paid the cabbie, then led me up some outside stairs and along a balcony to one of the suites. I'd come across this kind of thing in stories, but nothing like it had ever actually happened to me before. I guess George and I must have read the same books.

I'd a.s.sumed there would be just the two of us, since George hadn't mentioned anyone else when he called Melvin Pearce, the Post's editor-in-chief, a day earlier to set up the meeting. I was wrong. The woman waiting for us in the motel suite was an eye-opener, with a satiny, lilac-colored, body-clinging dress, jet-black hair falling halfway down her back, and the sultry-eyed, full-lipped kind of face they always pick for the lead role in Cleopatra movies. Straightaway, something about her set little warning bells ringing inside my head. It was the kind of feeling you get when a girl with that certain aura slides onto the empty seat next to you at the bar and sends your hormones into a head-on collision with your brains: you know that one way or another, an arm and a leg would be just a down payment on the price of getting too closely acquainted.

George introduced her as Vicki. He didn't say if she was his wife, girlfriend, mistress, or what, and I didn't ask. When he took off his hat and overcoat and hung them in the closet along with my raincoat, I saw that he was in his late forties, a little on the heavy side, and had one of those pink, fleshy faces that look as if they ought to be wheezing for breath all the time. His hair was beginning to thin, and his eyes had that distant but intense fixation that you see a split second before you walk into a biblical harangue from a sidewalk evangelist, or on the faces of you-name-it nuts wherever you go. His necktie, s.h.i.+rt, and cuff links were pricey and stylish, but they didn't go with the suit he was wearing, which had gone out of fas.h.i.+on and was showing signs of combat fatigue. His general appearance suggested a pretty recent attempt at a remodeling job carried out on an inadequate second mortgage. George was just beginning to find out about that down payment, I decided.

The suite had a lounge area between the door and the bedroom, and George and I sat down at the table by the window while Vicki fixed some drinks. Preliminaries weren't necessary. An allegation of a top-down government conspiracy aimed at destroying the nation's technological development-and perhaps that of the entire Western world-wasn't something that a senior reporter would forget in a hurry.

George was nervous but trying not to show it. He took a quick gulp from his gla.s.s and looked across at me. "What do you know about the DOB?" he asked. He'd told Pearce that the Directorate of Bureaus was where the supposed conspiracy was being masterminded.

I shrugged and gave the answer that anyone would have given. "It's a federal government department.

Isn't it supposed to 'coordinate' a whole bunch of other departments, whatever that means? I'm not sure. Probably it's just a dump for deadwood bureaucrats that n.o.body wants but n.o.body can fire."

George nodded. "That's what most people think." His voice dropped ominously as he leaned across the table. "That's what they're meant to think. But that's a cover. In reality, the DOB is the nerve-center of a carefully orchestrated operation aimed at undermining the social structure of the United States and reducing it to a neo-feudal order run by a privileged elite. It's happening right now, under our noses, and some of the most powerful people in the country are involved." George looked at me expectantly while Vicki sat down and watched over her gla.s.s.

Reporters hear something like that at least once a week. "That's an interesting suggestion," I said. "If it's true, it's not the kind of thing they'd want many people to know about. How come you know?"

"I work there-at DOB," George answered. "I've been there for over six months now. I've seen what goes on. I can name all the names and substantiate everything with doc.u.mented facts. You want a story that'll blow the roofs off half of Was.h.i.+ngton, Mr. Chernik? I've got it."

That was enough to raise anybody's eyebrows. "Okay, I'm interested," I told him. "Shoot."

Vicki held up a hand before George could answer. "Just a minute," she said. "What kind of a deal might we be talking about? If this turns out to be the way George says, how much would it be worth to your paper?" At least she believed in coming straight to the point. I told her I couldn't answer that. It would depend on how big the management thought the story was. "George has given you an idea of how big it could be," she said. "Maybe you should get some kind of ballpark figure before we go any further. I mean, how do we know you won't steal it if we give you more without any kind of an understanding at all?"

She was trying to sound hard-nosed, but it wasn't quite working. Instead it told me that she was as new to this game as George was. Now I could see the pieces beginning to fit. George had stumbled on something that Vicki thought might be worth money, and she had latched onto a possible ticket toward life's better things. I had the feeling that she wouldn't be staying around for very long after the ticket was either cashed or proved a dud. . . . But that was George's problem.

"Look," I told her, "any newspaper that worked like that would have gone out of business long ago.

There has to be some trust in any deal, never mind what the lawyers tell you. n.o.body can start talking prices until they know what they're being asked to buy. Now whatever this story is, you'll get what it's worth. Okay?"

Vicki sipped her drink and fell quiet. George s.h.i.+fted his eyes back to me. "Do you want to know the truth about Climaticon?" he asked.

"Who wouldn't?" I answered.

You remember the Climaticon project, of course-the plan to control the world's climate with ionizing radiation beamed down from projectors constructed in orbit. A very controversial subject. One side was eulogizing about the benefits of being able to increase food production by tailoring rainfall to order anywhere, snuffing out hurricanes at birth, and stopping half the cities from being snowed under every winter, while the other side was protesting about the unknown effects of the beams on ecology, and the risks of fooling with the weather system of a whole planet. There were demonstrations and rallies everywhere, it took state troopers to evict protestors from the site of a prototype ground station in Arkansas, and the same kinds of thing were happening abroad. In the end the opposition won and the idea was sc.r.a.pped. But at the time I'm describing, the outcome was still uncertain.

"The truth is that it would be quite safe," George said. "I've seen the official reports. The government knows there'd be no problem. But the government isn't saying so." He gave me a moment to think about that. "Can you see what that means? Something that could be of inestimable benefit to civilization is in jeopardy because of lies, and the people who possess the information to refute those lies are allowing the public to be deceived. What's more, certain organizations controlled covertly through DOB are circulating falsified information to perpetuate those lies. What do you say to that, Mr. Chernik?"

I didn't make a big pretense of being surprised. Claims like that appear from time to time. "A pretty stiff accusation," I said. "What's it based on?"

"Take the business about radiation," George replied. "The high-intensity zones would only exist for short periods of time, and they'd be localized over the oceans. The effects everywhere else would be way below the natural background level that exists anyway. That has been proved, but n.o.body gets to hear about it. And the chances of a triple-redundant computer system with automatically switched-in backup failing and just happening to direct one of the primary beams at a population center are so remote that you can forget abut it happening in the lifetime of the solar system." He snorted beneath his breath. "But all you get from the media are scare-stories touted by paid celebrities and other scientific illiterates."

"Now wait a minute, George," I said. "Not everyone would agree. Independent studies have been carried out, both here and in other countries, which say there are some real dangers. You can't simply dismiss them like that."

George smiled humorlessly. "They say those studies were independent. But I know differently. The decision to kill Climaticon was taken two years ago, at a meeting that took place in Brussels between members of the U.N. Council on Policy Development, the International Studies Inst.i.tute, and the Euro-American Committee. Some very wealthy and powerful interests are represented in those organizations. At that same meeting, a directive was drafted for secretly initiating a study to identify issues of potential negative impact, specifically to generate public concern. At the same time, a network of activist groups would be set up to target university campuses and citizens' action alliances." George met my doubtful look and nodded. "The studies that you referred to were based on faked data," he said.

"Through DOB, falsified figures were circulated to opposition movements that had been set up overseas, to give a consistent story worldwide. I know-I saw it being done. The whole thing's a fraud, with no scientific validity whatsoever." He sat back and looked at me challengingly. "Now tell me again that those studies were 'independent.'"

Well, that sounded pretty clear. "And you say you can substantiate these claims?" I reminded him.

George looked at Vicki. She hesitated for a moment, then got up and went into the bedroom.

"The same thing happened with the ocean mining fight," George went on. "That was before my time at DOB, but I've been doing some checking into the records. There never were any hazards to marine ecology. That scheme could have produced abundant cheap metals, but it was sabotaged in the same way as Climaticon is being sabotaged now. And a lot of the same names were involved."

I nodded but said nothing. The proposals for exploiting the ocean-ridge deposits had produced a big outcry that the environmental disturbances and discarded wastes would threaten the entire balance of marine life and hence the global food chain. Proponents of the idea had argued that the areas affected would be negligible, and the disturbances would be well within the capacity of the ocean's biochemical mechanisms to handle. But it was all over: the death sentence on the project was pa.s.sed by a U.N.

Special Commission on Oceanic Minerals in 1998.

Vicki came back into the room and placed a leather briefcase on the table. She unscrambled the combination and opened the lid to reveal the case crammed with hard copy databank retrievals. I ruffled through the contents and found reports, memoranda, minutes, and other doc.u.ments, many with DOB letterhead, most of them cla.s.sified. It was as George had said all right-enough to blow half the roofs off Was.h.i.+ngton. "That'll give you an idea of what you've being asked to buy," Vicki said, sounding sarcastic.

"The full reading comes after you've talked to your management."

There was lots more, George told me. That scare about a plot to lace the atmosphere with a euphoric drug, for instance, was a put-up job. n.o.body'd ever had any such intention.

That was something that had happened a couple of years previously. The New York Times reported than an anonymous senior government scientist had leaked the details of an experiment that was being contemplated to reduce urban violence and aggressive tensions among the populace in general by releasing trace amounts of a psychotropic substance into the atmosphere at places along the West Coast.

The whole thing went away after strenuous government denials, a spate of official and unofficial investigations, and a public hearing that found the whole thing to be a fabrication of somebody's overactive imagination.

George told me that the leak was a certain professor of biochemistry, who at that time was also deputy chairman of a presidential advisory committee on chemotherapeutic social programs. He had been paid to make the alleged leak, and the subsequent publicity was stage-managed from within DOB and oiled with DOB-arranged financing. The whole thing was a contrived fiction from beginning to end, dreamed up for the sole purpose of scaring the public.

Then George asked me what I thought the next thing might be. I invited him to tell me. "Back there in DOB, they're already a.n.a.lyzing the proposals for building skyhooks up to synchronous satellites," he said. "They're working out the brainwas.h.i.+ng and sabotage campaign that we'll all be hearing if the plans ever get serious. It'll be Climaticon all over again."

I went back in my mind over the things he'd said since we sat down. "So how does it add up to a conspiracy to undermine the Western world?" I asked him. "What are you saying is behind it?"

George let Vicki take that question. It seemed he had provided the evidence, and she had made the interpretation. I presumed the idea that it might be worth money came with the interpretation. That fitted.

"Look at it this way," Vicki said. "The main concern of the ruling cla.s.s of any society has always been to preserve its power and privilege, right?"

I shrugged. "So what else is new?"

"And the way to do that is by restricting the amount of wealth available."

"Maybe. . . . I guess I've never really thought about it," I replied.

Vicki went on, "But advanced technology opens up the prospect of unlimited wealth-more than could ever be restricted. How could anybody hope to control a population of millionaires who don't need protecting? They couldn't. So you can see the threat that unrestricted, uncontrolled science would pose to the people behind the power structure. They'd look for ways to contain it."

"So what are you saying?" I asked her. "That the things George was talking about are part of something bigger-a scheme to undermine confidence in science and scare people away from it?"

Vicki nodded. "Exactly-to slow down technological progress, and eventually reverse it. And more-to manufacture a fear of government and steer people into a back-to-the-village mentality, with the population broken up into small, harmless units who'll do as they're told. That way people on top of the heap get to stay on top."

"n.o.body could seriously hope to get rid of science," I objected. "It's obviously here to stay."

"But not for the ma.s.ses," Vicki said. "It's fine as long as it's controlled by the right people and not allowed to generate wealth on a scale that would get out of hand. See the logic? That's what the arms race of the last century was all about. It consumed billions of surplus dollars, and it kept everybody working hard, paying their taxes, obedient, and willing to make sacrifices. But now that's all over, and science is threatening global ma.s.s-prosperity-a hundred more j.a.pans in the world. The elites are panicking. It's time to put a leash on the world and bring it to heel again. . . ."

And certainly there was no denying that it all dovetailed together in a way that couldn't have been accidental, and which pointed inarguably to some high-level orchestrating behind the scenes . . . but that was how we'd meant it to look. And I have to say that it was gratifying to hear all the pieces being connected together in just the way we'd hoped they would be.

George's real name was Marty Felborn. I'd recognized him the moment he took off his hat and coat.

The reason he didn't know me was that you have to work downstairs for quite a while at DOB before you're allowed to even know about the section on the upper levels and the Directorate's true function.

I'd joined DOB ten years before-long before George had any reason to take much notice of it. Melvin Pearce knew whom to contact if he ever got a call like the one George made-all the senior editors of the big newspapers had the number. The activities of the DOB are probably one of the most closely guarded secrets of all time, both here and in the countries whose governments we collaborate with.

You see, everything that Marty discovered was true. It's just that he never gave himself a chance to find out why. I'm fairly certain he would have eventually if he hadn't let his hormones get the better of his brains, because before he b.u.mped into Vicki and went clattering off the rails, he'd been doing a pretty good job.

Climaticon could have brought all the benefits that people said it could-if it had been feasible.

Unfortunately, it wasn't. Enough computer simulations had been run to show beyond doubt that the dynamics of a planetary weather system were too complicated to manage. And in any case, the beams wouldn't have worked. The dummy ground station in Arkansas cost a few million to build, which was peanuts, and it provided some jobs. Truth was the project was never a viable possibility. The figures that we fed to the supporters of the project had been faked, as well as the ones that its opponents were waving around. Marty only got half the story.

Ocean-ridge mining would have worked without fouling up the world, but the fact was we didn't need it.

We knew by that time that controlled fusion plasmas would give us all the metals and minerals we needed from desert sands and seawater at far lower cost. There was no point in trying to adapt conventional extraction technologies to underwater environments when they were about to be obsoleted. Marty was dead right about the scheme to squirt chemicals into the air on the West Coast to make us all nice people-nothing of the kind was ever contemplated. And as you know, no elevators up to satellites are being built. I doubt very much if any ever will be. Their appeal lay in the energy that could be saved by dropping one payload down as a counterweight while another was being hoisted up. But with the energy abundance we've got these days, there wouldn't be any point.

So Marty was right as far as he went. The DOB hides behind a cloak of obscurity to conceal its real function, which is dreaming up elaborate nonsense-stories and coordinating a network of support operations to keep them alive. The insiders call it the "Department of Baloney." We spend a lot of taxpayers' dollars every year manufacturing baloney stories, and believe me they're worth every cent.

It all started back in the eighties, when some of the unexpected consequences of a free democracy started becoming apparent. The fact of life is that when everyone has the right to say no and veto what someone else wants to do, you can bet your last dime that somebody will. No matter what a person sets out to do, there'll always be somebody else who'll make it his business to shout loud enough and long enough to block it. For whatever reason, some people simply aren't happy unless they're stopping other people from doing what they want. Well, very soon somebody or other was making everybody's business their business, and by the end of the last century nothing was happening any more. The whole country was grinding to a halt. And other countries were starting to have the same problem.

So these days we invent causes for them to fight-causes to keep the fanatics, the activists, and the rest of them occupied and out of everyone else's hair. They seem pretty happy with it, too. Why shouldn't they? They stopped Climaticon, with its risks and callous disregard for human lives; they forced the UN to retract an irresponsible charter of ocean-mining rights, which put profits before the risk of a global catastrophe; they uncovered a sinister plot for ma.s.s-drugging the population; and more recently they've sprung into action to protect us all from a reckless idea to put up twenty-two-thousand-mile-high vertical railroads that could wipe out whole cities if they fell down. Yessir, with their record of successes as self-appointed protectors of the public, they must feel pretty good inside. The public is also happy, knowing that it can sleep easy at night with its interests in capable hands.

And we at the Department of Baloney are happy, too.

Have you noticed that in the last couple of decades we've been bringing nuclear plants on-line as fast as we can build them and n.o.body hears about energy shortages any more? No, I thought not. Not many people have. Have you noticed that the breeder program is up and running again? That the first commercial fusion reactor is exceeding all performance expectations? That the s.p.a.ce program is back in business and making up for lost time with n.o.body protesting the cost? Or that recombinant DNA engineering has been yielding stupendous breakthroughs in agriculture, manufacturing, and medicine, and is already eradicating whole categories of crippling genetic disease?

Amazing, isn't it? The things that really matter are all moving again, and n.o.body even notices.

What happened to Marty? Well, we had to let him go, naturally, after the FBI recovered the doc.u.ments.