What has he done? Flattery asked himself. He's panicky because of it. I have to find out!
"The Cain-and-Abel syndrome," Bickel said. "Murder and guilt. It's back there someplace... stamped inside us. The cells remember."
"You haven't the vaguest idea what you're saying," Flattery accused. "You're separating positive and negative pairs, confusing moral judgments with reasoning, reversing the normal course of -"
"Reversing!" Bickel pounded. "That's what I was trying to think of - reversing. The ability to turn pleasure into pain or pain into pleasure... that's a part of consciousness we haven't -"
"That's sickness," Flattery said.
"The power to be sane is also the power to go mad," Bickel said. "Your own words!"
Flattery stared out of the screen at him, caught up short by this turn of the argument... and a sudden suspicion about what Bickel could have done.
"You know," Timberlake said, speaking in a low, reasonable tone, "if an instinct is something to which the whole system must refer in a moment of stress, that's something like a computer's trapping function mated to a supervisory program."
"We're beyond the point of engineering and have been for some time," Flattery said.
"Right back where we started from," Bickel agreed. "We can duplicate synapses with unijunction transistors; juggle conduction rate and absolute refractory periods by choice of pseudoneuron fibers, fit our neural networks with multiplying and inhibitory endbulbs at will... but, in the end, we always come up against that inescapable question..."
"How do you control what must remain beyond control? I've already told you. Love."
"You don't control it," Bickel declared. "You merely aim it... and the aiming device has to be instincts. As you say, Raj, it must love us, be loyal to us. But does that mean it will worship us? Are we to be its gods? And if it's to be loyal, does that mean it has to have a conscience? Can there be loyalty without a conscience? And can it have a conscience without experiencing guilt?"
"Guilt's a prison!" Flattery protested. "You can't imprison a free -"
"Who says it has to be free?" Bickel demanded. "You're arguing against yourself! That's the whole damned idea: How do we control it? When you come right down to it: Am I free? Are you?"
Flattery glared at him.
"We're instinct-ridden, conscience-ridden bits of protoplasm," Bickel said:
"What instincts?" Flattery asked.
"You sound like a damn broken record!" Bickel snapped. "What instincts? You can't trace the instincts! Well, for one thing, we've an instinct to kill - to kill and eat. We don't really give one particle of a damn where we get our energy - not down there in the psychic basement we don't."
"If it were only that simple," Flattery said.
"When you get below stairs it is," Bickel said. "I don't need a doctorate in psychiatry to tell me what I'd do if the veneer were stripped off."
"You'd revert to the savage, eh? To the animal!"
"To find out what's engineered into the system, you're damn right I would ! What the hell have you head doctors been studying all these years with your dreams and your complexes and your Christ? You've trapped yourselves into an endless formal dance with fixed postures and... Christ! You remind me of a pack of fops doing the minuet!"
"We've employed reverence and caution to approach God in Man," Flattery said. "You don't gouge into the human psyche with an egg beater and stir up all the -"
"The hell you don't!"
They glared at each other, Bickel desperate with indecision, and Flattery's suspicions verging on certainty.
He has given the Ox the means to kill, Flattery thought. His argument and his anger betray it. But kill what? Not one of us, certainly. A colonist in the hyb tanks? No. One of the stock animals! He'd dip his toe into violence first, see if the Ox could really do it.
But he cannot have already made the black box - white box transfer.
Prudence, dividing her attention between the control console and the clash of wills, felt herself shift further and further into a state of heightened awareness. She sensed Com-central's minute temperature variations, heard the constant metallic creakings of deck and bulkheads around her, saw Flattery's growing suspicions and Bickel's desperate defensiveness, knew her own heartbeats and tiny variations in her body chemistry.
It was the chemistry that fascinated her: the thought that all through this subtle play of organic and inorganic matter which she called "myself," messages of which she was only dimly aware (if at all) were being transmitted and acted upon.
The computer with its enormous library of data culled from millions of minds had offered her a way to explore the issue Bickel had raised, and she could not resist this.
Where and how are the instincts carried?
While the argument between Flattery and Bickel raged, she had translated the question onto an edge-coded tape, shifted it into the computer section of her board, tripped the action switch.
This went beyond chemical-base sequence, she knew, and into the area where knowledge of protein structure itself was only theoretical code. But if the computer gave her an answer that could be translated into a physical function, she knew she could explore the answer through experiments on her own body.
"Bickel, what've you done?" Flattery demanded.
Prudence looked up from her console, saw Flattery, his shoulders tensed as though about to leap, staring into the screen. The screen revealed Bickel and Timberlake, their backs turned, staring at the computer wall and the blocks-and-angles contortion that was the Ox.
The hum of the computer could be felt throughout the shop and Com-central. The play of sensor and telltale lights across the big board and the shop's panels had reached a glittering tempo. Drain gauges showed energy consumption almost at the limits the system could tolerate.
CHAPTER 25
There must be a threshold of consciousness such that when you pass it you acquire godlike attributes.
As THOUGH THE computer display were a hypnotic trigger, all four of them waited it out with minimal reaction. Both Bickel and Flattery shared the same reason for inaction - fear that anything they did might be enough to destroy the entire system. Timberlake sat in sweating fear that his charges in hybernation were threatened by this computer display. Only Prudence was frozen by guilt.
She found herself breathing in shallow gasps, acutely aware of every mechanical sound from the flashing display - every click and hum and buzz, every hissing tape - as though she had a direct sensory connection to the system.
Abruptly, she put the back of her left hand over her mouth, horrified realization flooding her: The whole computer's routed through the Ox now!
"What've you done?" Flattery demanded.
"Nothing!" Bickel said without turning.
Timberlake said, "Shouldn't we..."
"Leave it alone!" Bickel snapped.
In a low voice, Prudence said, "I did it. I fed a question into the computer."
"What question?" Bickel demanded. He pointed to a large meter above him. "Look at that current drain! I've never seen anything like it."
"I traced out sixty-eight sequential steps of fourth-order biochemical configuration. I programmed it as a comparator of optical isomers for a first step in trying to detect where and how our instincts are imprinted on us."
"It's gone into the monitor banks," Bickel said, nodding at a new play of lights on the wall. "We're getting multitrack reinforcement..."