Forge of the Elders, page 47
Obtaining a predetermined maximum height of about a kilometer above the impact-cratered surface, the great trees had branched and leaved, spreading luxuriantly, intertwining at the tops with their nearest neighbors. Reacting to ultraviolet and other spaceborne energies as they had been designed to do, their overlapping leaves had fused with one another, finally forming a strong, translucent, air-tight sphere about the entire asteroid, capable of resisting further meteorite damage, absorbing harmful radiation, and retaining warmth, air, and humidity which the trees themselves and other organisms, subsequently planted, had begun generating.
The nautiloid settlement itself consisted of an airy and fanciful cascade of broad, interlocking platforms attached to the great trees and arrayed at various heights, most of them no more than a meter or two above the ground, some soaring into the uppermost branches. They, too, had been cultivated from engineered seeds, drawing nourishment which the trees were equipped to provide during an initial period of growth. Similar seeds had produced buildings of one or two or three stories resting atop these decks, affording ample space for offices, workshops, laboratories, residences, and commercial establishments which served the community of scientific pioneers, consisting of members of more than a hundred individual sapient species.
The resulting ambience was that of a small university town on the Earth where Eichra Oren had grown up. Most of the traffic hurrying past him and his cybernetic companion proceeded on foot or some analogous organ. High on its protectively shod tentacle-tips in the asteroid's low gravity, one of the automobile-sized, squidlike, colorfully snail-shelled molluscs called the "Elders" strode by, looking like one of the asteroid's spiders wrapped in cellophane.
Several genuine spiders of at least three species could be seen as well, along with a member of an insectoid race that strongly resembled large praying mantises, and many insectlike creatures who were actually more closely related to crabs and lobsters.
Here and there, a handful of three- or four-wheeled contraptions provided transportation for environment-suited marine organisms without legs. Overhead streaked an occasional circular aerocraft, miniature sister craft to those which, during the Elders' later surveys of this particular Solar System, had helped inspire "flying saucer" reports on Earth for more than a century.
A handbell rang.
What appeared to be a large, blunt-tailed snake rode by, wrapped about the upright portion of a unicycle. This was no independent organism, but belonged to one of the Elders who had dispatched it on some errand. Watching it turn a corner, and assured that it wasn't a messenger-tentacle sent to fetch him by his erstwhile employer, Mister Thoggosh, Eichra Oren discovered that despite himself he'd been considering the question of the robot's guilt in the back of his mind.
"Model 17," he asked suddenly, "can you say, in all honesty, that you've done your best to accomplish both of the tasks you were programmed by the Predecessors to perform?"
He waited through a long silence before she answered. "Why, I suppose I can. Although, with perhaps one exception so far, I've been unable to persuade any of you to accept what I say about the Eldest with a sufficient degree of seriousness. Eichra Oren, hear me out. In the Cometary Halo, what some of the Americans call the Oort Cloud, far beyond the orbits of the outermost planets—"
He shook his head. "Model 17—"
"—the Proprietor's unrelenting search for the Predecessors' Virtual Drive, or perhaps the recent violent struggle against the Soviet Americans' home planet—and originally yours, if memory serves—as well, both of them involving the modest but easily detectable release of thermonuclear energies—"
"Model 17—"
"—is absolutely certain to have awakened that nemesis which even the mighty Predecessors themselves feared. Unless we rush to meet it on its home ground, before it is prepared, I tell you, Eichra Oren, trillions of hideous, disgusting—"
"Model 17—"
"—indestructible and dismayingly intelligent organisms of the sort you call Precambrian will have begun to writhe and stir for the first time in nearly a billion—"
"Model 17!" He put up a palm. "We'll get back to that, I promise. I, for one, do take you seriously, believe me. But it's not my department, and it's always best to tackle only one thing at a time. You asked me about guilt, which is my department. My point now is to establish that you've done your absolute best to accomplish everything the Predecessors demanded of you."
There was another long pause.
"Gitcha cute, fuzzy, little stuffed toy animals here, while they last!" cried the pushcart vendor. "Gitcha flowers an' balloons! Gitcha cards of sympathy an' condolence!"
Finally: "Yes, Eichra Oren, I have, indeed. But certainly that cannot excuse—"
Satisfied at last, he nodded. "Model 17, an individual simply can't do any better than the best that he or she can do. Please think about it. It's a metaphysical impossibility." Before he'd thought about it himself, he'd reached over and given the unhappy machine a reassuring pat on her broad, metallic carapace. "And sometimes it works out, and sometimes it just doesn't."
Somebody made throat-clearing noises. "That sounds an awful lot like `shit happens,' to me."
The intruding voice belonged to one of the Soviet American group, Second Lieutenant Danny Gutierrez, son of the expedition's commanding general, who had sauntered up quietly without either of them noticing him and stood now, leaning against the wall behind them with his legs crossed casually at the ankles, smoking one of his smuggled cigarettes. His supply of them seemed endless.
"In my experience, shit usually happens because some shit-head makes it happen."
"And I am the, er, shit-head," the trilobitoid robot intoned sadly, turning away again.
Danny drew on his cigarette and exhaled it at her back. "Well, Model 17, if the shit fits—"
Eichra Oren leaped up from the bench, seized the young man by the front of his coverall, and shook him until his arms flailed. "What the hell would you know about it?" For an instant, he loosened his grasp. "For that matter, what would I know about it, even after all these centuries as a moral debt assessor?"
Suddenly, the badly strained fabric bunched under his powerful fingers again and he pulled the lieutenant to him until their noses almost touched. "I'll tell you what I do know: what's left of the best friend I have in all the universes put together is lying in there smashed to a bloody pulp! And I don't give a damn who's responsible! Having someone to blame won't undo what happened!"
"My new friends, please—!"
At some time during his emotional outburst, Model 17 had closed a restraining metal claw around Eichra Oren's thigh. Feeling the pressure, the man froze, then turned slowly, looking down at the trilobitoid machine. The deeply serrated manipulator was obviously capable of shearing his leg through cleanly. Danny froze as well, his eyes bulging and startled, the tattered and ridiculous remnant of his cigarette dribbling its load of unburnt tobacco onto the pavement.
"I plead with you, Eichra Oren," the robot begged. "Do not add moral responsibility for such disharmony among your people to my numerous other shortcomings!"
Eichra Oren released Danny. He stood with both fists clenched and his eyes closed for a long moment, breathing deeply in a complex rhythmic pattern, then opened his hands and eyes. "You're quite correct, Model 17, and I thank you."
He turned to the other man, looking at him directly, and spoke formally. "Danny, I have initiated physical force against you, which happens to be the most serious violation of p'Nan ethical philosophy possible. Happily, I did not injure or kill you, although as you know, I might easily have done so. In any case, I have incurred a moral debt to you. What restitution would you have of me?"
With a wry expression, Danny regarded the ruined cigarette in his hand. Abruptly, he began looking around for the still-burning coal which had fallen off somewhere, finally found it at his feet, and stepped on it. In a high-pitched, silly voice, he said, "You must bring me a shrubbery! No, no, I'll tell you what, Eichra Oren. For starters, you could really listen to the lady here about these Eldest boogie-things. She's giving me the creeps with all that talk."
"Agreed." Eichra Oren nodded gravely. "I accept the commission."
Danny put up a hand. "I'm not done yet. I wish you'd find out exactly what happened to poor old Sam and why—and who, if anybody, was actually responsible. If you were yourself right now, you'd realize that it'll do us both good."
"Very well," Eichra Oren replied.
"And it will do me good, as well," offered Model 17. "Is there some way I can help?"
They both turned to the robot.
Danny grinned lopsidedly, nodding toward the pushcart salesman who'd continued his pitch, uninterrupted. "Do you think that guy might have a souvenir ashtray?"
FIFTY-SEVEN The Great Leap Sideways
"Well, here goes nothing."
C. C. Jones ran a damp palm over his close-cropped, graying beard a final time, gave up any further pointless scrutiny of the glittering golf ball in his other hand, threw a tiny switch concealed in the base of its handle, which was too short for human fingers, and turned his professional attention on his subject.
This odd object he'd been given by that bird-man Aelbraugh Pritsch would either work or it wouldn't. For his purposes, it wasn't important at all that the damned thing didn't bear even the faintest resemblance to a TV camera or a microphone.
He cleared his throat.
The slight slur he spoke with, which had faded over twenty years, and the ropy scar concealed beneath his beard between his lower lip and chin, which hadn't, were both the result of an argument he'd had with Horatio Gutierrez, then a young lieutenant colonel in command of what would someday be the famous Redhawk Squadron.
He cleared his throat.
Four months in a military hospital after having had his teeth dashed out by Gutierrez, wielding a heavy steel fire extinguisher, plus the resulting slur and scar, had cost him his network anchor position, his marriage, and had led him through an endless, nightmarish series of increasingly demeaning and obscure jobs with the wire services, news magazines, and newspapers—to here.
He cleared his throat.
"Lieutenant Colonel `Chuck' Tai Chiao," he intoned, nervousness and preoccupation disguised perfectly by a deep, melodious voice which had once been familiar to the people of an entire planet, "is the commander of the PRC's `Extra-Special Forces' on 5023 Eris, a military arm of the supersecret—and some would say bizarre—`Great Leap Sideways' program cobbled together in the late nineties."
Thinking back now, Gutierrez had been right. Antisocialist guerillas had planted a fuel-air bomb aboard one of his fighter-interceptors being used to suppress resistance to American sovietization. Television lights and cameras had not only made defusing that bomb a great deal more difficult, they'd also made brightly lit targets of the men trying to do a job which was deadly dangerous even under the best of conditions. However, even after all these years, Jones couldn't bring himself to like the officer, now a brigadier general and an exile just like himself, who had ruined his brilliant and promising career.
He probably never would.
He cleared his throat and looked up at the individual he was talking about, hoping that the omnidirectional image recorder was doing its job better than he was doing his own.
"Colonel Tai, since it's no longer much of a secret to anyone on 5023 Eris, at least, could you tell us something about the Great Leap Sideways?"
"Better call me Chuck." Walking beside Jones as they ambled through the woods between the American encampment and the Elders' settlement, Tai nodded and grinned. "Well, at the time it began, Deng Xiao Peng, better known around the world as the `Butcher of Tien Anmen Square,' had just died of natural causes—after all, it's only natural to die when you've been force-fed several dozen grams of arsenic—and two related matters were perplexing our newest leaders in Beijing."
Jones nodded, but his thoughts were still elsewhere. It had been bad enough working for American Truth in the first place, and worse to be given a dead-end assignment like this. But he'd been absolutely horrified to discover that Gutierrez was commanding this expedition to nowhere. The likelihood that the general probably didn't remember him, after two adventure-filled decades, or the violent incident which had so disastrously changed his life, only made things worse.
Tai was going on. "The first was a continuing hostility exhibited by the people of the world, despite a demonstrated willingness on the part of their governments to pretend otherwise, because of what had happened in Tien Anmen Square and afterward. Beijing felt that many modern states had done worse on considerably less provocation, and couldn't figure out why it was being treated differently."
"I see," Jones answered, trying to focus his mind on business. This was the only fresh break he was ever likely to get—even if the whole damned underpopulated planet was only the size of Texas and his employer looked like something on sale at a bait shop—and he'd better not blow it. "And the second?"
"Increasing depletion of technical and economic vitality on the part of the Japanese, whom the PRC had broken its back to emulate over the previous decades. If Japan, Inc. could falter and stagnate, what of Beijing's hopes?"
"And the Great Leap Sideways," Jones asked rhetorically, "was an answer to that question?"
"Well," Tai replied, "an argument was put forth, I believe at Hong Kong University, using Japan as a bad example. Japan had been nominally democratic since World War II, but remained stratified and anti-individualist. It's simply not possible, went the theory, to foster economic and technical progress over the long run without corollary increases in individual political and social freedom."
Jones grinned. "Most of our nonhuman audience would probably agree with that. They might also be interested to know that Hong Kong was a city-sized free market enclave which had just been reabsorbed into the PRC after a long period of relative independence. And what was the reaction to this idea in Beijing?"
"Naturally, it was bitterly denounced by the older politicians who had risen to power under Mao Tse Tung and believed that his methods, by some standards the most vicious the world had ever seen, were fully vindicated by what they viewed as excesses committed by the advocates of democracy in Tien Anmen Square."
"I see." Jones had found the tone that had made him a star. "Make that fifty or sixty million murders on one side of the ledger, as opposed to a few banners and a styrofoam Statue of Liberty. But the younger pols felt there might be something to Hong Kong's theory?"
"Right. So it was decided to be very Western indeed, and conduct a scientific experiment—"
"A scientific experiment in personal freedom?"
"The whole thing could be aborted if it proved a mistake. Even the old guard felt they might learn something—like the parameters involved in extracting maximum effort from individuals while giving minimal freedom in return. To everyone this seemed very American in character, and that became the basis for the experiment."
"Er, um, yes. Please go on."
"Young peasants and workers in their early teens were rounded up from all over and sent to newly built villages in remote locations. Often no two spoke the same dialect. That was remedied by a teaching cadre educated abroad under previous regimes, who introduced their pupils to American English and the American way of life as they understood it, aided by a store of data including novels, old TV shows, and movies."
"What sort of movies?"
"Anything, as long as it showed something of everyday American attitudes. Movies like The Shaggy Dog, American Graffiti, Some Kind of Wonderful, Sixteen Candles, A Christmas Story, Back to the Future, My Best Friend's Wedding, Stand By Me, Beetle Juice, Honey I Shrunk the Kids."
"Beetle Juice? You'd get a pretty distorted view of American life from that, wouldn't you?"
"They were working with what they had. Even a movie like that gives some idea, say, about how American teenagers relate to their parents. Anyway, when some criterion had been met, most of the teachers made an exit, leaving the subjects more or less on their own. A few remained as `village elders' to keep the program on course."
"How did you come into the picture?" Despite a lifetime of professional habit, Jones had begun to be fascinated with this man's story. He was forced to struggle, overcoming a reflex to suppress it and remind himself that Aelbraugh Pritsch had told him this was just what Mister Thoggosh wanted—humanity, enthusiasm, understanding, most of all, intelligence—none of the self-consciously detached, unjustifiably superior attitude which, with its resulting air of slightly bovine stupidity, characterized news reporting back on Earth.
"My four grandfathers and grandmothers," the colonel answered, "were among the young peasants and workers who were expected by Beijing to become Americans overnight. They suffered many hardships, mostly psychological in nature, but their children—my parents' generation—fared better. As a consequence, I grew up in a `village' in eastern Mongolia meticulously patterned after what Beijing believed to be a typical town in the American southwest."
"What was it like?"
"Well, its American twin could have been found anyplace from Laporte, Colorado to Clovis, California—two prototypes that were used. It was code-named `Calumet'—"
"Because of another movie." For this, Jones was prepared. He imagined his former employers keeling over from strokes and aneurisms at what he was about to ask. It was a good thing this interview wouldn't be sent back to Earth. Maybe. "After the little community which resisted Russian invasion in John Milius's Red Dawn?"
