“You believe there is an answer—one, and only one?”
“Hell, no. More likely there are thousands. But I do know this: as long as you’re determined to be the first to reach the—or a—solution, just so long will you fail to find it. In the meantime, other people with other problems will be humbly pleased because things aren’t so bad this year as they were last.”
In China … One always began with China. It was the most populous country on the planet, hence the logical starting point.
Once there had been Mao. Then followed The Consortium, which was more like an interregnum, the Cultural Revolution redoubled in no trumps (except that the stock translation “Cultural Revolution” was ludicrously wrong and the people involved understood by the term something more like “agonizing reappraisal”), and then there was Feng Soo Yat … very suddenly, and with so little warning that on foreign-affairs Delphi boards high odds in favor of China crumbling into anarchy and violence swung to three hundred against in three days. He was the epitome of the Oriental wise man: young, reputedly still in his thirties, yet capable of running his goverment with such delicate touches and so keen an insight that he never needed to explain or justify his decisions. They simply worked.
He might have been trained to display such powers of judgment; he might have been specially bred to possess them. One thing was sure: he hadn’t lived long enough to grow into them.
Not if he started from where most people had to.
Also in Brazil there had been no religious warfare since Lourenço Pereira seized power—whoever he might be—and that was a welcome contrast to the turn-of-the-century period when Catholics and Macumbans had fought pitched battles in the streets of São Paulo. And in the Philippines the reforms introduced by their first-ever woman president, Sara Castaldo, had slashed their dreadful annual murder rate by half, and in Ghana when Premier Akim Gomba said to clean house they started cleaning house and laughed and cheered, and in Korea since the coup by Inn Lim Pak there had been a remarkable fall-off in the crap-and-screw charter flights which formerly had come in from Sydney, Melbourne and Honolulu at the rate of three or four a day, and … and generally speaking in the most unlikely places wisdom appeared to be on the increase.
“So you’re impressed by what’s been happening in other countries. Why don’t you want your own homeland to benefit from—shall we call it a shot in the arm of wisdom?”
“My homeland? I was born here, sure, but … Never mind; that’s a stale argument these days, I guess. The point is that what’s being peddled here as wisdom isn’t.”
“I sense a long debate ahead. Perhaps we should start again tomorrow.”
“Which mode are you going to put me in?”
“The same as today. We’re drawing closer to the point at which you ultimately overloaded. I want to compare your conscious and unconscious recollections of the events leading up to the climax.”
“Don’t try and bleat me. You mean you’re bored with talking to an automaton. I’m more interesting when I’m fully awake.”
“On the contrary. Your past is far more intriguing than either your present or your future. Both of those are completely programed. Good night. There’s no point in my saying ‘sleep well’—that’s programed too.”
KNOWN FACTORS CONTRIBUTING TO HAFLINGER’S DESERTION
The shy, quiet, reserved boy who came to Tarnover had spent so much of his childhood being traded from one set of “parents” to the next that he had developed a chameleon-like adaptability. He had liked almost all his “fathers” and “mothers”—small wonder, given the computerized care with which child was matched to adult—and he had been, briefly, exposed to an enormous range of interests. If his current “dad” enjoyed sports, he spent hours with a baseball or a football; if his “mom” was musical he sang to her accompaniment, or picked his way up and down a keyboard … and so on.
But he had never let himself become deeply engaged in anything. It would have been dangerous, as dangerous as coming to love somebody. At his next home it might not have been possible to continue.
At first, therefore, he was unsure of himself: diffident with his fellow students, among whom he was one of the youngest—most were in their mid-teens—and excessively formal when talking to members of the staff. He had a vague mental picture of government establishments, which was based on three-vee and movie portrayals of cadet schools and army bases. But there was nothing in the least military about Tarnover. There were rules, naturally, and among the students some customary traditions had already grown up although the place had been founded a mere decade earlier, but they were casually observed, and the atmosphere was—not friendly, but comradely. There was a sense of people banded together for a common purpose, undertaking a shared quest; in sum, there was a feeling of solidarity.
It was so novel to Nickie that he took months to realize how much he liked it.
Above all, he relished meeting people, not only adults but kids too, who obviously enjoyed knowing things. Accustomed to keeping his mouth shut in class, to imitating the sullen obstinacy of his fellow pupils because he had seen what happened to those who showed off their knowledge, he was astonished and for a while badly disturbed by this. Nobody tried to push him. He knew he was being watched, but that was all. He was told what was available for him to do, and his instructions stopped there. Provided he did one of the dozen or twenty choices, that was enough. Later he wouldn’t even be obliged to choose from a list. He could make his own.
Suddenly he clicked on. His mind buzzed like a hive of bees with new and fascinating concepts: minus one has a square root, there are nearly a billion Chinese, a Shannon tree compresses written English by fifteen percent, so that’s how a tranquilizer works, the word “okay” comes from the Wolof wawkay meaning “by all means” or “certainly” …
His comfortable private room was equipped with a computer remote; there were hundreds of them around , the campus, more than one for each person living there. He used it voraciously, absorbing encyclopedias of data.
Very quickly he became convinced how necessary it was for his country and no other to be the first to apply wisdom to the running of the world. With change so radical and swift, what else would serve? And if a repressive, unfree culture got there ahead …
Shuddering when he recalled what life under a non-wise system had done to him, Nickie was ripe to be persuaded.
He didn’t even mind the twice-yearly sampling of his cerebellar tissue which he and all the students had to undergo. (Only later did he start putting quote marks around “student” and thinking of himself and the others more as “inmates.”) It was done with a microprobe and the loss was a negligible fifty cells.
And he was impressed to the point of awe by the single-mindedness of the biologists who worked in the anonymous-looking group of buildings on the east side of the campus. Their detachment was incredible and a little alarming, but their purpose seemed admirable. Organ grafts were routine to them—heart, kidney, lung, they made the transplant as impersonally as a mechanic would fit a spare part. Now they were after more ambitious goals: limb replacement complete with sensor and motor functions, restoration of vision to the blind, external gestation of the embryo … Now and then, without realizing what the slogans implied, Nickie had read advertisements in bold type headed buy baby bunting and if you abort then we’ll support! But not until he arrived at Tarnover did he actually see one of the government fetus-trucks making its delivery of unwanted incomplete babies.
That troubled him a little, but it wasn’t hard for him to decide that it was better for the not-yet-children to come here and be useful in research than for them to burn in a hospital incinerator.