I sighed. “You’ve read Mindkiller.”
He nodded.
It ’s one of my scarier books. One or two critics, after having had someone literate summarize it for them, have declared that it says the end justifies the means. Beginning for the first time to be a little scared myself, I said, “And have you got the secrets of mindwipe and mindwrite?”
“Oh, no,” he said convincingly enough to make me relax again.
“What’s holding things up?” I asked. “I expected that stuff to come along well before 2040.”
“You vastly underestimate the complexity of modeling the brain.”
I nodded philosophically. “It’s going around these days. Well, I’m relieved, I guess. I had to force that happy ending. That happens to me a lot in the serious books.”
He nodded again. “But you keep doing it. Splendid.”
“Thank you.” The better the flattery, the warier I become. Back to business. “Then I am to assume that you have another moral dilemma, as sharp as the one faced by Jacques in Mindkiller?”
“It is to me. I want you to tell me if I am a monster... or simply a victim of my inability not to ask the next question.”
“Or both,” I pointed out.
“Or both,” he agreed.
I took another long gulp of Irish coffee. I’ve long since worked out to my own satisfaction the one about a writer’s responsibility… but I’d always known that book would come back to haunt me one day. “Let me get this straight. You have already done… whatever this thing is. Some would call it monstrous. And now you want my opinion on whether or not you were right to do it. Why? Since it’s too late.”
“I need to know if I dare go public—in my own ficton, my own space/time. If I can’t persuade you, I can’t persuade anybody.”
I always had the sneaking idea I’d make a good judge, if only there weren’t so damned many laws. Time to find out if I was right. “First tell me your ends. Then your means. If you can do it that way.”
“I can approach it that way,” he said, “but the ends imply the means. I can put it in a nutshell. I wanted to do meaningful sociological experiments.”
I understood him at once, because he was speaking to the heart of the science fiction story I’d intended to write. But in case I only thought I understood him, I dragged the exposition out of him like a good character should. “What do you mean?”
“I think you suspect,” he said. “Most of the really important questions about human societies are unanswerable because you can’t contain the size of the question. You can’t understand the ancient Romans if you don’t know about all their neighbors and trading partners and subject peoples, and you can’t really grasp any of them any better because they all influence each other helter skelter—and you can’t even get a start on any one of them until you know their whole history back to their year one. It’s the history that’s even worse than the local complexity: so much of any society is vestigial, the original reasons for its fundamental assumptions forgotten.
“And it’s the history that always gets in the way of trying to make things better. Look at your own contemporary ficton. (in you imagine any solution to the Irish problem or the Serbo-Croatian problem or the Palestinian-Jewish problem or any one of a hundred others like them that does not involve giving everyone involved mass amnesia and erasing all the history books?”
“Well, yes,” I said. “But it won’t come soon. Now that you tell me telepathy isn’t even going to be as easy as time travel.”
“For all I know telepathy could come along before 2300,” he said. “I left in 2292,” (I calculated without much surprise that he was at least a hundred and forty-four subjective years old) “and one of the limitations of time travel—a blessed one in my opinion—is that you cannot go further forward in time than you have already been. The only way to see the future is to live it. But I’m not expecting telepathy soon—then/soon—either.”
I finished my coffee. “I’m sorry to hear that. Still, there’s no real hurry. Once we have telepathy and time travel, we can build heaven or a reasonable facsimile retroactively.”
“As in your book Time Pressure,” he agreed. “But since I don’t expect that soon and can’t depend on it ever, I’m trying to save the human race in a different way. There is some urgency about the matter. When I come from, we have come very dose to destroying ourselves in catastrophic warfare.”
“Nanotechnological?”
“Worse. I strongly advise you to leave it at that.”
I could not suppress the shudder... or the squirm that followed it. I had been wondering if he was too evolved to have immunities for primitive local germs—just wondering, not worrying, as I believe a man’s health is his business. Now I was reminded that there are circumstances under which a man’s health is your business. Was Daniel carrying anything?
Too late to worry now. “What kind of a ficton is it?”
He hesitated. “It’s hard to give you a meaningful answer. Imagine I’m a Cro-Magnon. Tell me: what’s your world like?”
“Giddy, with fear and pride and guilt and shame, but trying to be as decent as it can.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “OK. In those terms, the 2290s are sullen, scared and preoccupied with the present. In the immediate past is horror, and just beyond that are the things that inexorably brought it on us, and still we prefer not to think overmuch of the future. We see what went wrong, and don’t know how to fix it. As near as we can see, all the future holds is another slow painful climb to the pinnacle which blasts all who stand on it, and those of us who think about that wonder what’s the point. So not many of us think about it.”
I was more grateful than ever to have lived my life in the twentieth century. But I was also puzzled. “It’s hard to square that with your clothes. That kind of outfit in that kind of world doesn’t ring true. People like that would cover up.”
He smiled sadly. “These clothes were designed else when.”
Skip irrelevancies. The night was old! “OK. So what do you figure to do about your situation?”
He clasped his fingers together before him on the table. With his spine so straight, it made him look as if he were praying. “It’s all the history, you see. The weight of all that history, all those mistakes we can’t ever undo or forget.”
“I can understand that.”
“Probably you can; the problem is just now beginning to become apparent. Time was when the maximum length of history was the number of stories an old man could tell before he died. Then we got too damned good at recording and preserving the stories. At about the same time there began to be too many stories, and they all interacted. And then came the Information Explosion. Human beings are only built to tolerate the knowledge of so much failure and tragedy. All the things we’ve ever done to warp the human spirit, from making wars to making gods, are there in us, at the root of anything we plant, at the base of anything we build. When you try to start all over again from scratch, you find out you can’t. Your definition of scratch’ merely defines the direction history has warped you in, and condemns you to tug in the other direction. But the weave is too complex to straighten.
“It’s too late for us to start over. It’s too late to try and create a society without taboos: the people who would try it are warped by the knowledge of what a taboo is. It ’s too late to try and create a society without sexual repression: the parents inevitably pass along to their children at least warped shadows of the repressions they inherited themselves. It’s too late to make a society without racism… and so on. Every attempt at an experimental Utopian community has failed, no matter how hard they tried to keep themselves isolated from the surrounding world. Sealing yourself up in a self-sustaining space colony and smashing all your comm gear doesn’t help. It’s just too late to experiment with a society that has no possessions, or conformity, or tribalism, or irrational religions—all possible experimental subjects are compromised by their knowledge of human history. What’s needed is some way to put an ‘Undo’ key on history.”