“There isn’t a great deal of information. They’ve been pretty secretive. They seem to have originated right here on Earth, a thousand or so years ago, but the history is obscure.”
“It shouldn’t be,” said Langley. “Isn’t the Technon supposed to keep complete records of everything important? And surely the Society is important—anyone could have foreseen they’d become a major factor.”
“Go ahead,” shrugged Mardos. “You can use the library as much as will amuse you.”
Langley found himself a desk and asked for a bibliography. It was surprisingly small. By way of comparison, he got a reference list for Tau Ceti IV, a dreary little planet of no special value—it was several times as long as the first.
He sat for some minutes meditating on the effects of a static culture. To him, the paucity of information fairly screamed Cover-up. But these so-called savants around him merely noted that few books and articles were available, and proceeded to forget all about the subject.
He plunged doggedly into the task of reading everything he could find on the topic. Economic statistics; cases where the Society had interfered in local politics on one or another planet, to protect itself; discourses on the psychology produced by a lifetime aboard ship—and an item dated one thousand, ninety-seven years ago, to the effect that one Hardis Sanj, representing a group of interstellar traders—list of names attached—had applied for a special charter and that this had been granted. Langley read the charter; it was a sweeping document, its innocuous language gave powers which a Minister might envy. Three hundred years later, the Technon entered a recognition of the Society as an independent state; other planets had already done so, the rest soon followed suit. Since then there had been treaties and—
Langley sat very still, four days after his research had begun. It added up.
Item: The Technon had let the Society go without any argument, though otherwise its basic policy was frankly aimed at the gradual re-unification of the accessible galaxy.
Item: The Society had several hundred million members by now, including personnel from many nonhuman races. No one member of it knew more than a fraction of the others.
Item: The rank and file of the Society, up through ships” officers, did not know who their ultimate rulers were, but had been conditioned to obedience and a strange lack of curiosity about them.
Item: the Technon itself had ordered Chanthavar to release Valti without prejudice.
Item: The economic data showed that over long periods of time, more and more planets were becoming dependent on the Society for one or another vital element of their industry. It was easier and cheaper to trade with the nomads than to go out and get it for yourself: and the Society was, after all, quite neutral—
Like hell!
Langley wondered why no one else seemed to suspect the truth. Chanthavar, now—But Chanthavar, however intelligent, was conditioned too; his job was merely to carry out policy set by the machine, not to inquire deeply. Of course no Minister could be permitted to know—such as did, from time to time, stumble on the facts, would disappear. Because if any unauthorized person found out, the secret could not be kept, it would soon be spread between the stars and the Society’s usefulness would end.
Its usefulness to the Technon.
Of course! The Society was founded soon after the colonies had broken away. There was no hope of taking them over again in the foreseeable future. But a power which went everywhere and filed reports for an unknown central office —a power which everybody, including its own membership, believed to be disinterested and unaggressive—there was the perfect agent for watching and gradually dominating the other planets.
What a machine the Technon must be! What a magnificent monument, supreme final achievement of an aging science! Its creators had wrought better than they knew; their child grew up, became capable of thinking millennia ahead, until at last it was civilization. Langley had a sudden, irrational wish to see that enormous engine; but it could never be.
Was that thing of metal and energy really a conscious brain? No... Valti had said, and the library confirmed, that the living mind in all its near-infinite capacities had never been artificially duplicated. That the Technon thought, reasoned, within the limits of its own function, could not be doubted. Some equivalent of creative imagination was needed to run whole planets and to devise schemes like the Society. But it was still a robot, a super-computer; its decisions were still made strictly on the basis of data given it, and would be erroneous to the same degree that the data were.
A child—a great, nearly omnipotent, humorless child, fixing the destiny of a race which had abdicated its own responsibilities. The thought was not cheerful.
Langley struck a cigarette and leaned back. All right. He’d made a discovery which could shake an empire. That was because he came from an altogether different age, with a different way of living and thinking. He had the unsubmissive intellect of the free-born without their mental blinkers; his world had a history of steady, often violent evolution behind it, had made an idol of ‘progress’, so he could observe today with more detachment than people who for the past two millennia had striven only for stasis.
But what to do with his facts?
He had a nihilistic desire to call up Valti and Chanthavar and tell them. Blow the whole works apart. But no—who was he to upset an apple cart holding billions of lives, and probably get himself killed in the process? He didn’t have the judgment, he wasn’t God—his wish was merely a reflex of impotent rage.
So I’d better just keep my mouth shut. If there was ever any suspicion of what I’ve learned, I wouldn’t last a minute. I was important for a while, and look what happened.
Alone in his apartment that night, he regarded himself in a mirror. The face had grown thin and lost most of its tan. The gray streaks in his hair had spread. He felt very old and tired.
Regret nagged him. Why had he shot that man in the African compound? It had been a futile gesture, as futile as everything he tried in this foreign world. It had snuffed out a life—or, at least, given pain—for no purpose at all.
He simply didn’t belong here.
She! What was Marin doing? Was she even alive? Or could you call it life, down there on low-level? He didn’t think she would sell herself, she’d starve to death first with the angry pride he knew, but anything could happen in the Old City.
Remorse clawed at him. He shouldn’t have sent her away. He shouldn’t have taken out his own failure on her, who had only wanted to share his burden. His present salary was small, hardly enough to support two, but they could have worked something out.
Blindly, he dialed the city’s main police office. The courteous slave face told him that the law did not permit free tracing of a Commoner who was not wanted for some crime. A special service was available at a price of—more money than he had. Very sorry, sir.
Borrow the money. Steal it. Go down to low-level himself, offer rewards, anything, but find her!
And would she even want to come back?
Langley found himself trembling. “This won’t do, son,” he said aloud, into the emptiness of the room. “You’re going loco fast. Sit down and do some thinking for a change.”
But all his thoughts scurried through the same rat race. He was the outsider, the misfit, the square peg, existing only on charity and a mild intellectual interest. There was nothing he could do, he had no training, no background; if it hadn’t been for the university, itself an anachronism, he would be down in the slums.
Some deep stubbornness in him forbade suicide. But its other aspect, insanity, was creeping after him. This sniveling self-pity was the first sign of his own disintegration.