A Reasonable World
Damon Knight
A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK
NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
A REASONABLE WORLD
Copyright © 1991 by Damon Knight
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Passages from Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler on pages 150 and 151 are reprinted by permission of Sterling Lord Literistic,.Inc., and are copyright © 1941 by Arthur Koestler.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
49 West 24th Street
New York, N.Y. 10010
Cover art by Martin Andrews
ISBN: 0-812-50978-1
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 90-48783
First edition: February 1991
First mass market printing: November 1991
Printed in the United States of America
In loving memory of ERIC FRANK RUSSELL a friend I never knew
The twentieth century was one of great change and turmoil. The First and Second World Wars claimed 87 million lives, both military and civilian; in the Spanish Civil War and in the Second World War, for the first time in the century, civilian populations were strategically targeted. One hundred, thirty-five thousand perished in the fire-bombing of Dresden, 110,000 more in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mortalities in the nuclear destruction of Tel Aviv-Jaffa totaled 500,000. Counting lesser conflicts in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, the death toll was 92 million.
During the same period, the population of the world rose from 1.5 billion to 5 billion. It had been projected to reach 6 billion by the year 2000, but fell short of that mark by reason of the famines, pandemics, and world-wide economic collapse of the late nineties.
Nevertheless, extensive ecological damage had already been done. Acid rain from industrial and automobile emissions had destroyed many of the forests of Europe and North America. The deliberate deforestation of the Mato Grosso had turned that area into a desert; together with acid rain and other deforestation around the globe, this led to extensive changes in global temperature, weather patterns and the oxygen content of the ocean and atmosphere. Many perished in floods, typhoons and hurricanes, or starved as a consequence of flood and drought in unexpected places.
In the last year of the century a new challenge confronted the world: McNulty’s Symbiont, named for the physician who discovered it aboard the ocean habitat Sea Venture. It was later determined that MS was a coherent energy system, possibly of extraterrestrial origin, capable of intelligent action and of taking human beings and other animals as hosts. Its influence on human beings was alarming: former hosts exhibited a strong tendency to break their vocational and emotional ties, leading to a crisis for industry and government. As they proliferated through the population, using rats and other small mammals as intermediate hosts, the symbionts began to interdict most acts of violence on the part of human beings.
By the year 2005 the world was in the grip of sweeping change. For the first time in centuries, there was no war or threat of war anywhere in the world. Other changes, at first imperceptible, were altering human society in unprecedented ways.
The Twenty-first Century
by A. R. Howarth and Lynette Ford
1
Stanley Bliss, Ex-Chief of Operations of the ocean habitat Sea Venture, had been for some years living the life of a semi-retired hotelier at his inn on the Costa del Sol near Malaga. Royalties from his book about CV, not to mention the holo rights and consulting fees and so on, had made him financially independent even of the inn, which was very profitable and had been for years. Local government, on the whole, was unobtrusive; the separatist problems in the north were agreeably remote.
Decent food and few worries had combined to increase Bliss’s contentment as well as his girth, and so had the permanent absence of his wife, whom he had divorced in 2000, and his ne’er-do-well son, who had finally gotten some sort of job in The Gambia in 2001 and not been heard of since.
Into this little paradise a serpent came in the spring of 2005, in the form of a letter handed to him by Senorita Cortazar with his morning tea. It was from somebody named Roland Casewit III, Undersecretary of Peace in the U.S. government; it began with some complimentary phrases, then went on: “The Government of the United States would greatly value your cooperation in establishing an Expert System aboard Sea Venture in order to give the present staff the benefit of your knowledge and expertise. If it is convenient to you, we would like you to visit Sea Venture for this purpose, as the guest of the United States Government, during the last two weeks of June. Please signify your acceptance to this office as soon as possible.”
“Oh, damn,” said Bliss.
He couldn’t turn them down, and it wouldn’t be any good putting them off. “Actually, you’d like to see the old girl again, wouldn’t you?” asked his friend Captain Hartman, when Bliss rang him up to complain.
“Out of curiosity, perhaps. I understand they’ve turned CV into a sort of prison hulk. I’d just as soon not see that, but I can’t get out of it. What are you doing in June?”
“Nothing in particular. Why, would you like me to come along?”
Bliss and Hartman arrived blear-eyed in Seattle on June 15; it was eight o’clock in the evening when it ought to have been four in the morning. They were met by a cheerful young man named Corcoran, Dr. Owen’s assistant, who took them in a chauffeured limousine to their hotel and showed them a few of the sights along the way. Hartman had been rather hoping to see the view from the Space Needle, but Corcoran informed him that it had been heavily damaged in a terrorist attack two years ago and had not yet been rebuilt. Feeling disoriented, the two visitors had a drink in the bar and went to bed.
In the morning after breakfast they were picked up again by Corcoran for the drive out to Sea Venture. CV, large and white as ever but looking a bit the worse for wear, was moored at the U.S. Coast Guard base in Salmon Bay. Some refitting was being done, Corcoran told them, and there were also a few bureaucratic hurdles to be dealt with before CV would cruise again.
“Is it true that you’ve got a prison population here?” Hartman asked.
“Oh, I wouldn’t put it that way, sir. CV is a research installation now. There is a resident population of compulsory volunteers—we’re studying them for the effects of McNulty’s Disease.”
They showed their boarding passes and rode up to the forward lobby, where they received temporary ID cards to be pinned on the left lapel. Then they took the elevator up to the Signal Deck, where Dr. Harriet Owen was waiting for them. She was a bit grayer than Bliss remembered her, but also more confident somehow, more in command.
“Chief Bliss and Captain Hartman, welcome,” she said. “Did you have a good trip?”
“Very nice,” said Bliss politely, and Hartman nodded. In fact, they were both suffering from jet lag, or jet advance you might call it, and Hartman had been barely civil at breakfast.