Выбрать главу

I do not know how the Agency exerts its authority, or even on what its authority rests, or what instruments of persuasion it may use; but the Great Joy Corporation no longer exists. It has ceased to be, as mysteriously as it came to be, still without a history, or a face, or a shred of accountability.

Sita sent me the new literature from Musu Sum. The island resorts are now being operated by the islanders themselves as a cooperative venture, supervised for the first year by expert advisers from the Agency.

This makes sense, in that the modest subsistence economy of the region was completely destroyed by the Great Joy Corporation and cannot be restored overnight, while all the hotels and restaurants and roller coasters are in place, and people who have been trained to serve and entertain the tourists might as well use and profit by their training. On the other hand, it boggles the mind a bit. Especially Fourth Island. An orgiastic monument of American sentimental nationalism operated entirely by people who know nothing about the United States except that they were ruthlessly used by Americans for years? Well, I suppose it is not wholly improbable even on this plane. Exploitation can cut two ways.

I have met a native of Musu Sum, one of the first to take advantage of his people’s newly regained freedom to travel; Sita asked him to come by and see me. He thanked me most graciously for my part in the liberation of his people. That it was a totally accidental and tangential part made no difference to Esmo So Mu. He gave me as a “gift of the gratitude of my people” a little wickerwork ball, a child’s toy, rather crudely made. “We don’t make such beautiful things like Americans,” he said apologetically, but I think he saw that I was touched by the gift.

His English was quite fluent. He had been one of Santa’s elves as a boy and then was transferred to New Year’s Island as a waiter and part-time gigolo. “It was not so bad,” he said, then, “It was bad,” and then, his high-cheek-boned, expressive face crinkling into a laugh, “but not very-very bad. Only the food was very-very bad.”

Esmo So Mu described his world: hundreds of islands, many with a population of only a family or two, scattered out over the ocean “forever.” People traveled from island to island in catamarans. “Everybody go visit all the time,” he said.

The Great Joy Corporation had concentrated population in one archipelago and forbidden sailing in or out of that area. “Burn boats,” Esmo So Mu said briefly.

He had been born on an island south of the Holiday Islands and was now living there again. “Lots more money if I stay to work at the hotel,” he said, “but I don’t care.” I asked him to tell me about his home. “Oh,” he said, and laughed again. “You know what? In my home there’s no holidays! Because we are so lazy! We work one, two hours, in the gardens, then we don’t work. We play, we play with the children. We go sail. We fish. We swim. We sleep. We cook. We eat. We sleep. Why do we want a holiday?”

But Cousin Sulie was disappointed to find that the management has changed. “I don’t expect I’ll go back this August,” she told me rather sadly, when I called to wish her a happy birthday. “It just doesn’t seem like it would be like Christmas if it was a different nationality. Do you think?”

WAKE ISLAND

PEOPLE WHO SLEEP ONLY two or three hours in the twenty-four are always geniuses. The ones you hear about, anyway. Never mind if the ones you don’t hear about are dolts. Insomnia is genius. It must be. Think of all the work you could do the thoughts you could think, the books you could read, the love you could make, while the dull clods lie snoring.

On the plane of the Orichi, which is in many ways very similar to ours, there are people who don’t sleep at all.

A group of scientists in the Orichi nation of Hy Brisal became convinced that sleep was a vestigial behavior pattern appropriate to lower mammals but not to sapient humans. Sleep might serve to keep vulnerable simians quiet and out of harm’s way at night, but is as irrelevant to civilised life as hibernation would be. Worse, it is an impediment to intelligence—a recurrent damper on the brain. By interrupting the brain’s ongoing functions every night, by grossly interfering with coherent thought, sleep prevents the human mind from attaining its maximum potential. Sleep makes us stupid, was the motto of the Orichi scientists.

Their government, fearing invasion from the rival nation of Nuum, encouraged any experimentation that might give Hy Brisal the edge in weaponry or brainpower. So, well funded, working with brilliant genetic engineers, and provided with ten patriotic pairs of fertile volunteers, all housed in a closed-gate compound, these scientists began a program, nicknamed Su-persmarts by the national news net, which eagerly supported it. And in four years the first entirely sleepless babies were born. (Millions of bleary-eyed young parents might dispute that statement; but the usual baby does go to sleep, after all, just about the time its parents have to get up.)

The first Supersmart babies, however, died. Some died in their first weeks, some after several months. They cried day and night until they wasted away into silence and death.

The scientists decided that infant sleep is an extension of the fetal development process that cannot safely be bypassed.

Hy Brisal and Nuum were in a particularly confrontational phase. Rumor had it that Nuum was working on an airborne germ that would sterilise all Hy Brisalian males. Popular support for the Supersmarts program had been shaken by the loss of the infants, but the government did not waver; they sent the genetic engineers back to the drawing board and asked for a new set of volunteers. Twenty-two patriotic couples signed up on the first day. In less than two years they began to produce the new generation of Supersmarts.

The programming was delicate and accurate. The new-borns would sleep as much as ordinary infants to begin with, but would gradually begin to stay awake for longer and longer periods, until by the age of four they were expected to do without sleep altogether.

And so they did. They did not waste away; they thrived. They were fine, healthy babies, all twenty-two of them. They stared up at their mothers and smiled. They kicked and cooed and sucked and crawled and did what babies do, including sleep. They were bright, because much attention was paid to them and their learning environment was rich, but they were not geniuses, yet. They learned what babies learn, including googoo and gaga, and then mama and papa, and NO, and the rest of the toddler vocabulary, at only slightly better than the average rate. Radical acceleration of learning and increase in active intelligence would come as they began staying awake.

By the time they were two, most of them were sleeping less than six hours a night. There was some natural variation in what the directors of the program called their asomnic development. The prizewinner was Baby Ha Dab, who gave up naps at ten months, and at twenty-six months was sleeping only two or three hours a night.

For several months Ha Dab, a pretty little fellow with big eyes and silvery, curly hair, was the darling of the Hy Brisalian media. He was on everybody’s homescreen—”Smartsyboy.” Here was Ha Dab lurching cheerily across a room to greet the Scientist General, Doctor Master Professor Uy Tug, author of Asomnia: The Answer, who stooped with a pinched though genuine smile to shake his tiny hand. Here was Ha Dab rolling in the grass with the blapdog puppy presented to him by the Supreme Pinnacular of Hy Brisal. Here was Ha Dab cuddling down in his little bed as if to sleep, thumb in mouth, but popping up again bright-eyed to mug at the cam man. Then Smartsyboy faded from the net, as all fads fade. For over a year little was heard about the Supersmarts program.