“I’m concerned that we don’t have enough of a range of inhibited actions at the upper end of the spectrum, here. Why haven’t we gone to cannibalism of live subjects? Subjects of personal interest? AID, flag this as important,” the mentat inclined his head towards the black box in his shirt pocket. Other than color and cardboard, it could have been a pack of cigarettes.
“Live subjects won’t be a problem, but personal interest subjects could be. As you know, they’re a limited resource and if we use them up on one test, we don’t have them available for the next. Virtual reality biometric measurement suggests that they’d be much more effectively utilized in the interpersonal aggression series.” Her eyes sparkled with a dark excitement, leavened with apparent bewilderment at his blind dispassion. She showed no surprise, of course, for nothing about his reaction was new to her.
“Are you going to have our data with the cross-series shifting ready for my conference in Cleveland next week? Remember that the public interfaces department will have to translate the experimental design and data to refer to the green monkey and prepare a junior researcher to present the paper.” He bent to feed a small orange wafer to fat, spotted fish.
“It’s not nearly where we want it to be, I’m afraid… Still, the results are adequate for a preliminary paper. I don’t understand why you even go to these things when you have to disguise your real work so much. The projected results for the monkeys, well, interfaces will do their best, but the work won’t be even remotely replicable after their translation.”
“That is the point, is it not? If they could replicate the work, what would Epetar’s leadership need us for?” He smiled serenely. “I can at least tell others in the field something of the important work we are doing, even if they can neither appreciate it nor repeat it. Even if they do not know it is my work.” His last comment was a telling slip from Erick Winchon’s habitual rhetoric of we.
“How many more trips are you making before year end?” she asked.
“Only three. It’s the busy season, you know. Everyone wants an excuse to go someplace warm. Cleveland. Bah!” he grimaced. “The next is in Jamaica. Stimulating conversation and some of the best coffee on Earth. What more could one want? Although it is beyond me why they call it blue. The beans are as brown as any others. I checked. I have been meaning to fix some seed stock for them, but our other work is needed so much more.”
Prida Felini, his assistant in the garden, was the mentat’s favorite Earth-raised human. Barbaric, of course, but weren’t they all? At least she was honest about it. She could intellectually understand the need for civilizing humanity and had chosen to help. At the lowest level, their work set one barbarian against another. A rather regrettable zero sum play, but necessary for the welfare of the species as a whole. Somebody had to look out for them. With no clan system to care for humans in manageable chunks, the mentat had selflessly shouldered the task. At least it was interesting work, which was some compensation.
Erick Winchon had learned from hard experience that no matter how thoroughly he surrounded himself with competent people, any time he had to interact with Earther humans outside his own control, he had to check, check, and check again. There was no task so simple that it could not fail because of at least one incompetent Earther somewhere along the chain from instruction to delivery. His species was manifestly capable of ordinary, proper work habits. Humans could perfom quality work. There was something simply wrong about Earther upbringing and cultures that generated incompetent, spoiled adults. It was a source of great vexation to him. The goal of his research was nothing more nor less than the deliverance of his species from its endless loop of primitive incompetence. Only then could the human race become an optimal tank for growing wisdom and advancement along the Path. Earthers would continue to be resistant to becoming civilized and moving beyond their primitive habits. The lack of progress in curtailing the black market for meat in the Sub-Urbs proved that point. Enforcement was especially difficult when the Galactics could not admit the goal of the measures to the Earther government or the internal police of the Sub-Urbs. Frustrating. It was all very frustrating.
That resistance problem was the whole reason testing of the behavioral remediation technology had to be so aversive. Only complete success would allow civilization of those who would, inevitably, resort to primitive force in resistance. Winchon knew enough of human history to be fully aware that he would never be appreciated by humanity in his own lifetime, even with that life extended to the full range possible through rejuvenation. His estimates for the time necessary to civilize Earth varied. The longest was one-thousand three hundred years. The range became considerably shorter the greater the percentage of human population could be shipped to planets already run by Galactics, and the more Earther humans could be induced to restrain their reproduction and repopulation efforts. The Darhel were helping with both problems as much as possible, but progress had been disappointing.
They paced by a miniature apple tree, talking softly.
The Darhel Pardal had dismissed his body servants and sat behind his desk, turned to look out the large porthole into the black of space. In his mind, he compared motives, positions, attributes, and interests. He had narrowed the list of possible thieves to three rival groups, any of which could have used the extra currency to knock loose a lucrative expansion of their mining concessions from the Darhel Tir Dol Ron, whose job included the administration of Earth. Not that the humans understood the explicit nature of the position.
The Gistar Group’s operation mining niobium and tantalum in Africa had capital equipment that was reaching the end of exploitable resources on site. The Cnothgar Group’s extraction facility for monazite sands in Brazil could refurbish equipment the Tir had mothballed and open at least three other sites with that kind of financing. Adenar Group’s molybdenum mining in Chile couldn’t be overlooked, not because he could see specific scope for expansion, but because they had succeeded so well in being cagey about their project.
Which one? That was the hard question. It would be the height of stupidity to compound Epetar’s current troubles by starting a trade war with an innocent party. However, the frontal assault on the group’s currency reserves simply could not go unanswered. It would be Adenar. They weren’t happy about a certain defection, but it had followed long-established rules. It would be out of character for them to react this emphatically, but certainly possible. He couldn’t be sure enough to act.
He heard a reedy sound like a dying voorcn — a flying animal hunted by… predators… on his homeworld. The thought, “other predators,” did not quite make it to the surface of his mind. The tiniest hint of the sweet, deadly pleasure of the Tal hormone provoked a shudder, warning him of ultimate bliss and death. He ruthlessly suppressed the forbidden thought. He became aware that the offending sound was coming from the whistling of his own breathing through his teeth.
He stopped the noise at once, instead instructing his AID to replay a holo file he had received that morning detailing the progress on an interesting project his group was undertaking. It showed tremendous promise towards solving the previously intractable problem of human behavior control, as well as eliminating the most dangerous of the three existing human mentats as a side bonus. It was possible that the Darhel manager who owned the commercial territory rights to Earth, the ultimate end user for a market-ready product, could be induced to cut loose an advance on the basis of the progress shown in this report.