“But he was trusting Hearing Aid, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, and that’s one of the miracles performed by the service. While I was a minister I was resigned to having the croakers monitor the link to my confessional, even though what was said face-to-face in the actual booth was adequately private. And there was nothing to stop them noticing that a suspect had called on me, ambushing him as he left, and beating a repeat performance out of him. That type of dishonesty is at the root of our worst problem.”
“I didn’t know you acknowledged a ‘worst’—you seem to find new problems daily. But go on.”
“With pleasure. I’m sure that if I start to foam at the mouth there’s a machine standing by to wipe my chin. … Oh, hell! It’s hypocritical hair-splitting that makes me boil! Theoretically any one of us has access to more information than ever in history, and any phone booth is a gate to it. But suppose you live next door to a poker who’s suddenly elected to the state congress, and six weeks later he’s had a hundred-thousand-dollar face-lift for his house. Try to find out how he came by the money; you get nowhere. Or try confirming that the company you work for is going to be sold and you’re apt to be tossed on the street with no job, three kids and a mortgage. Other people seem to have the information. What about the shivver in the next office who’s suddenly laughing when he used to mope? Has he borrowed to buy the firm’s stock, knowing he can sell for double and retire?”
“Are you quoting calls to Hearing Aid?”
“Yes, both are actual cases. I bend the rules because I know that if I don’t you’ll break me.”
“Are you claiming those are typical?”
“Sure they are. Out of all the calls taken, nearly half—I think they say forty-five percent—are from people who are afraid someone else knows data that they don’t and is gaining an unfair advantage by it. For all the claims one hears about the liberating impact of the data-net, the truth is that it’s wished on most of us a brand-new reason for paranoia.”
“Considering how short a time you spent at Precipice, your identification with it is amazing.”
“Not at all. It’s a phenomenon known as ‘falling in love’ and it happens with places as well as people.”
“Then your first lover’s tiff happened rather quickly, too.”
“Needle, needle! Jab away. I’d done something to make amends in advance. A small but genuine consolation, that.”
Freeman tensed. “So you were the one responsible!”
“For frustrating the latest official assault on Hearing Aid? Yes indeed. I’m proud of it. Apart from marking the first occasion when I used my talent on behalf of other people without being asked and without caring whether I was rewarded—which was a major breakthrough in itself—the job was a pure masterpiece. Working on it, I realized in my guts how an artist or an author can get high on the creative act. The poker who wrote Precipice’s original tapeworm was pretty good, but you could theoretically have killed it without shutting down the net—that is, at the cost of losing thirty or forty billion bits of data. Which I gather they were just about prepared to do when I showed up. But mine … Ho, no! That, I cross my heart, cannot be killed without dismantling the net.”
THE BREAKDOWN OF REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT
SUBJECT HAFLINGER NICHOLAS KENTON SELECTED
PROPOSE FACTORS TO ACCOUNT FOR SUBJECTS INFATUATION WITH P A COMMUNITY PRECIPICE CA
(A) FUNCTIONALITY (B) OBJECTIVITY (C) STABILITY AMPLIFY RESPONSE (A)
(A) IN MOST TOWNS OF SIMILAR SIZE ON THIS CONTINENT DECISIONS CONCERNING COMMUNAL SERVICES CAN NO LONGER BE TAKEN BY POPULAR VOTE OWING TO EXTREME MOBILITY OF POPULATION AND UNWILLINGNESS OF VOTERS TO PAY FOR FACILITIES THAT WILL BE ENJOYED ONLY BY THE SUCCEDENT GROUP E G BOND LEVIES TO FINANCE SCHOOLS SEWAGE SYSTEMS AND HIGHWAY MAINTENANCE HAVE BEEN REPLACED IN 93% OF CASES BY PATERNALIST LEVIES ON THE DOMINANT EMPLOYER ***REFERENCE BARKER PAVLOVSKI & QUAINT THE RESURRECTION OF FEUDAL OBLIGATIONS J ANTHROPOL SOC VOL XXXIX PP 2267–2274
AMPLIFY RESPONSE (B)
(B) INTENSIVE INTERACTION BETWEEN CITIZENS DEEVEES INCIDENTAL ATTRIBUTES E G STATUS TYPE OF JOB RELATIVE WEALTH/POVERTY EMPHASIZES CHARACTER SOCIABILITY TRUSTWORTHINESS ***REFERENCE ANON NEW ROLES FOR OLD AN ANALYSIS OF STATUS CHANGES AMONG A GROUP OF VICTIMS OF THE GREAT BAY QUAKE MONOGRAPH #14 DISASTERVILLE USA SERIES
AMPLIFY RESPONSE (C)
(C) POPULATION TURNOVER IN PRECIPICE DESPITE NEAR AVERAGE VACATION TIME MOBILITY IS LOWEST ON THE CONTINENT AND HAS NEVER EXCEEDED 1 % PER ANNUM ***REFERENCE U S CONTINUOUS SAMPLE CENSUS
THANK YOU
YOU ARE WELCOME
–AND THE LIKABILITY OF LODGING
The place took possession of them both so rapidly he could only just believe it. Tongue-tangled, he—and Kate, who was equally affected—strove to identify the reasons.
Perhaps most important, there was more going on here than in other places. There was a sense of time being filled, used, taken advantage of. At G2S, at UMKC, it was more a matter of time being divided up for you; if the ordained segments were too short, you got little done, while if they were too long, you got less done than you could have. Not here. And yet the Precipicians knew how to idle.
Paradox.
There were so many people to meet, not in the way one met them when taking on a new job or joining a new class, but by being passed on, as it were, from one to another. From Josh and Lorna (he, power engineer and sculptor; she, one of Precipice’s two medical doctors, organist and notary public) to Doc Squibbs (veterinarian and glass-blower) on to Ferdie Squibbs, his son (electronics maintenance and amateur plant genetics), and his girlfriend Patricia Kallikian (computer programing and anything to do with textiles) on again to …
It was giddying. And the most spectacular possible proof of how genuinely economical it was to run on a maximum-utilization basis. Everyone they met seemed to be pursuing at least two occupations, not moonlighting, not scuffling to make ends meet, but because here they had the chance to indulge more than one preference without worrying about the next hike in utilities charges. Accustomed to a routine five percent increase in the cost of electricity, and ten or twelve in any year when a nuclear reactor melted down—because such installations had long ago ceased to be insurable and the cost of failure could only be recouped from the consumer—the strangers were astonished at the cheapness of energy in this self-reliant community.
Wandering about, they discovered how ingeniously the town had been structured, right from the beginning: its main nucleus at Root Mean Square being echoed by subnuclei that acted as a focus for between three and four hundred people, but neither isolated nor inward-looking, and each with some unique attraction designed to draw occasional visitors from other parts of the town. One had a games area., another a swimming pool, another a constantly changing art exhibition, another a children’s zoo with scores of tame, cuddly animals, another a view down a vista flanked by unbelievably gorgeous flowering trees … and so forth. All, Suzy Dellinger admitted cheerfully, “of malice aforethought”—the founders of the town had tabulated what was known to help a community run pleasantly, then allotted elements of it to suitable sectors of what had then been a settlement of rickety hovels, battered trailer homes and many tents.
For the first year and a half, they were informed, the builders used nothing but scrap. Plus a great deal of imagination, to compensate for a near-total absence of money.
Additionally, the newcomers were immediately involved. Pausing to chat to a big husky man repairing an electrical connector, they were casually requested to help him lever the covering flagstone back into place; on being introduced to one Eustace Fenelli, who ran a popular bar and restaurant, they found themselves carrying a vast pot of minestrone out of the delectably aromatic kitchen—“since you happen to be going that way!” Strolling toward the main square with Lorna Treves, and passing a house from which a white-faced man emerged at a run, overjoyed to find Lorna because—as he said—he’d just called and heard she wasn’t home, they wound up standing by with sterile dressings and a bowlful of blood while she delicately removed a huge splinter of glass from the leg of a screaming child.