"Old Cornish," said T'ai Cho, half turning in his seat, but still watching the screen. "It's a bastardized, pidgin version, almost devoid of tenses. Its grammatical structure is copycat English."
He knew much more but held his tongue, knowing his superior's habitual impatience. They had been brave men, those few thousand who had formed the kingdom of Kernow back in the first years of the City. Brave, intelligent men. But they had not known how awful life would be in the Clay. They had not conceived what vast transforming pressures would be brought to bear on them. Intelligence had knelt before necessity and the weight of all that life stacked up above them, out of reach. They had reverted. Regressed ten thousand years in as many days. Back to the days of flint and bone. Back to the age of stone. Now only the ragged tatters of their chosen language remained, its sounds as twisted as the bodies of their children's children's children.
Andersen leaned forward and tapped the screen with his long fingernails. "I want something conclusive. Something I can show to our sponsors. Something we can sell."
T'ai Cho's eyes left the screen a moment, meeting Andersen's eyes. He had a gut instinct about this one. Something told him that this one was different from the rest: was, perhaps, what the Project had been set up to find. But "something conclusive"— could he get that? The Director's eyes were inexpressive.
"I'll try," T'ai Cho said after a moment. "Tomorrow, first thing."
Andersen nodded curtly and turned away. "Tomorrow, then."
TOMORROW BEGAN early. T'ai Cho was up at fifth bell and at his post, watching the sleeping boy. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he increased the lighting in the cell. It was the boys fourth day here, but, like all those brought up from the Clay, he had no real conception of time. Day and night were as one down there, equally dark.
Slowly he would be taught otherwise. Would learn the patterns of the world above.
When he had first arrived they had placed food and drink in his cell. On waking he had seen it at once, but had merely sniffed then left the two bowls untouched. On the second day, however, hunger and thirst had overcome his fear and he had eaten wolfishly.
T'ai Cho had seen this many times before. He had logged eight years in Recruitment and seen more than a dozen of his candidates through Assessment into Socialization. But never, until now, had he felt such conviction about a candidate. There was something about this one. A charisma, if that were possible in such a scraggy, scrawny creature. A powerful, almost tangible sense of potentiality.
They were pitiful to watch in the first few days. Most were like trapped animals gnawing at their bonds. Some went mad and tried to kill themselves. Some went into coma. In either case there was a simple procedure to be followed. A matter of policy. At the touch of a button on the control desk the cell would be filled with a deadly, fast-acting gas. It would be over in seconds.
Kim, however, had quickly overcome his initial fear. When nothing had happened to him, he had begun to explore his cell methodically, growing in confidence as each hour passed and he remained unharmed. Curiosity had begun to have the upper hand in his nature. The material of the walls, the watching camera, the waste vent, the manufacture of the bowls—each had been subjected to an intense scrutiny; to an investigation that was, T'ai Cho thought, almost scientific in its thorough' ness. Yet when T'ai Cho spoke to the boy he saw at once just how fragile that confidence was. The boy froze in midaction, the hair rising from his flesh, then scurried back to his comer and crouched there, shaking, his big, round eyes wide with terror.
T'ai Cho had seen cleverness before, and cunning was second nature to these children from the Clay, but there was something more than cleverness or cunning here. It was not simply that the boy was bright, numerate, and curious—there were clear signs of something more.
Many factors seemed to militate against the development of real intelligence in the Clay, malnutrition chief among them. When existence was stripped down to its bare bones, the first thing lost was the civilizing aspect of abstract thought. And yet in some it surfaced even so.
In the last year, however, the Project had been under scrutiny from factions in the House who wanted to close it down. Their arguments were familiar ones. The Project was expensive. Twice in the last five years it had failed to show a profit. Nor did the fact that they had extended their network beneath the whole of City Europe mollify their critics. Why did they need the Project in the first place? At most it had produced five thousand useful men in twenty years, and what was that in the context of the greater scientific community? Nothing. Or as good as nothing.
In his darker moments T'ai Cho had to agree with them. After a day in which he had had to flood the cell with gas, he would return uplevel to his apartment and wonder why they bothered. There was so much inbreeding, so much physical suffering, such a vast break in the chain of knowledge down there. At times these seemed insurmountable barriers to the development of intelligence. The Clay was a nightmare made real. Was ti yu, the "earth-prison"—the world beneath the earth; the place of demons. Down there intelligence had devolved into a killer's cunning, blunted by a barbarous language that had no room for broader concepts. If he thought of it in those terms, what he did seemed little more than a game. A salving of conscience, maybe, but no more than that.
So they all felt, at times. But that feeling didn't last. T'ai Cho had killed maybe a hundred boys like Kim, knowing it was best—pitying them for the poor trapped creatures they were; knowing they had no future, above or below. And yet he had seen the light of intelligence flash in their eyes: eyes that, by rights, should have been simply dull or feral. And each time it had seemed a miracle of sorts, beyond simple understanding. Each time it gave lie to those who said the Clay bred true: that environment and genetics were olf there was. No, there was more than that.
It was a thing none of them mentioned; almost a kind of heresy. Yet there was not one of them who didn't feel it. Not one who didn't know exactly what it was that informed and inspired their work here.
Man was more than the plastic of his flesh and the keyboard of his senses. More than a carrier of genetic codes. To mankind alone was the diffuse and evasive spark of individuality given. It seemed a paradox, yet it was so. Each time they "saved" one from the Clay it reaffirmed their faith in this. Man was more thanpo; more than the animal soul, the flesh that rotted in the ground at death. There was a spirit soul, a /urn.
There, that was it. The unuttered thought they shared. A him.
And so they did their work, trawling the dark depths for those special souls whose eyes flashed with the spark of life itself. Each one miraculous. Each one an-affirmation. "We make a profit; provide a service for the companies," they would argue, when put to it. But the real reason they hid from others. It was their dark vocational secret.
He began. At his order a uniformed mech entered the room and set a tray down on the floor beside the sleeping boy. On the tray were a number of different objects, covered by a thin black cloth.
The room was sealed again. T'ai Cho waited. An hour passed.
When Kim woke he saw the tray at once. He paused, abruptly alert, fully awake, the hairs on his neck bristling. He lifted his head, sniffing the air, then circled the tray slowly. With his back against the wall he stopped and looked up at the camera, a definite question in his dark eyes.
"Pyn an jawl us wharfedhys?" What now?
T'ai Cho, watching, smiled, then leaned forward and tapped out a code on the intercom in front of him.