The mayor continued: "We have agreed that the first thing to do is form a group of interlocking committees to formulate aspects of policy. Recommendations will be implemented by an executive committee composed of representatives of the Nineteen Families, the existing exco including special interest nominees, and the City Council."
"Point of order, Madam Mayor!" It was one of the politicians. "Giving executive powers to such a committee without the normal procedures is simply unconstitutional!"
"Yes!" From another part of the hall, "With due respect, Madam Mayor, what you are proposing sounds like a simple exercise in administrative lawlessness!"
"We have both a Constitution and a Constitutional Court. Any proposals of this nature should go to that court for a ruling. To side-step Constitutional procedures for administrative convenience is simply the way to chaos!" That another dark-haired, professional-looking man. "I've never heard anything like it."
None of us have heard anything like this!"
"That's just the point!"
There were voices rising all over the room. The mayor banged her gavel. I saw her ears were flat and wondered if that was an uncontrollable sign of anger or a deliberate reminder to us that she too was a Herrenfrau of the Nineteen Families. Yet she was speaking in broad hints of the Platt dialect-was that to remind us she also had a foot in the Democrat camp?
"I note your objections. But the point is, I think, that putting some administrative structures into place to deal with this matter may be urgent! The best I can do to reassure you is to suggest that we entrench a provision that the situation be reviewed-radically reviewed if necessary-after one month. By that time we should have more information from Sol and know a bit more about what we are trying to do to solve this tanj snafu."
That last was Tommie slang. Was she putting that in deliberately also? There was a lot of muttering. Then Grotius played a trump card.
"Before the resolution foreshadowed by Madam Mayor is put to the meeting," he said, "I should point out that it is envisaged that all invited to be present here tonight will have positions on at least one of the committees. Therefore if anyone is unhappy about policy he or she will be in a position to make a direct input in policy direction."
That quieted a lot of objections. Most of the people at the gathering were not going to do anything to compromise prospects of their own power, I thought. No politician or Constitutional expert myself, I found I was on something called the Biology Committee and something else called the Defense Committee. Peter Brennan had us set up a Friendship Committee.
It went on a long time. At length I got home for a few hours' sleep.
Chapter 4
"No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear."
I found Dimity Carmody at the Lindenbaum Kafe, sitting at her usual table between the chess players and coffee addicts. With her better-than-fashion-model looks and quietly correct if obviously Tommie clothes among the eternally scruffy students, she was always easy to find, even, or especially, hiding behind those sunglasses she generally wore. I hoped I could talk to her now.
I hadn't always been able to. We had almost been lovers once, and would have been if it had not been for the difference in our intelligences. It was not a good idea to have a gap of more than 40 IQ points between oneself and one's partner. A few halting conversations between us had made that difference painfully clear. She enjoyed coming on field trips with me occasionally, but interaction in the deeper aspects of life was a different matter. I was a professor of biology with some chemistry and physics, and she was… what she was. Well, to use an old phrase, she wasn't exactly a rocket scientist.
Born with an abnormal brainwave, thought to be something in the Asperger's syndrome family, she had now learned to adopt a protective social coloration. It hadn't always been that way. Her father told me she had hardly spoken till she was seven years old. He was an outstanding mathematician and physicist-late in life he had worked on Carmody's Transform-and to have such a child had hurt him badly then, though things improved eventually. Now she could just about cope with normal people. Among her more normal socialization activities, she loved music boxes and had a little collection of them.
She was sitting drinking coffee, something she did a lot of. She didn't play chess, though, and I remembered the embarrassment when the president of the University club, an Aspirant Master, misled by her appearance of normality, had offered her a game here. He thought someone had set him up. She was doodling on some paper, one of her music boxes tinkling quietly on the table beside her. She signed for me to sit down, and stretched absentmindedly, staring at what she was doing. There was an ordinary notebook in front of her on the table, with many Brahmabytes of capacity available and connection to a really big brain if needed, but she was using pen and paper.
As she stretched I was reminded again that, despite the tricks Wunderland's gravity can play on the bones and tissue of the lazy and careless, she was near the epitome of human standards of beauty. Her body was a living version of the marble Venus of Cyrene, loveliest of all the statues of antiquity, who makes the Venus de Milo look heavy and clumsy by comparison, but as she stretched her attention remained fixed on the paper. Behind the sunglasses her face looked vacant. "Big tits and little wits/Do often go together" a rude old poet had once written. But it was not as simple as that. She had a pink hibiscus flower in her hair which, I thought, really made me understand what was meant by that term overkill. It seemed to attract the flutterbys, and there was a small cloud of them round the table, their delicate multicolored wings brushing the gold bell of her hair with its pink headband.
I broke an awkward silence. "What's this?"
Dimity had an almost squeaky voice. A Dimity voice, I called it privately.
"Sums. Difficult sums."
I was sorry I had asked. Her idea and mine of difficult sums reflected our respective intelligences: embarrassingly different. She went on, with that inevitable tone of patience:
"You know the theories that have been explored here and in Sol System about the ancient stasis fields? That they are somehow uncoupled from the entropy gradient of the Universe?"
"They haven't got anywhere, have they? It's all still just speculation."
"No. Not unless there's been anything new done in Sol System. But it gave me a notion. It's… difficult to explain… but it's to do with gravity as a function of time…"
"N-space?" I hesitated.
"No. But as you know they learned to open a stasis field long ago on Earth with relatively primitive timeretarding technology."
"Yes. But the result was a disaster. I'm told there were a lot of casualties. And apparently it was nearly worse."
"That wasn't the fault of the technology. It was because there was something dangerous inside the field that got out. If we can make time precess at a different rates… well, my theory is that within a gravity field we can't, or not at the scale I'm talking about. But outside a gravity field-I mean a gravity field like the singularity associated with a star… The singularity acts as a massive governor… Look, does this explain what I mean?"
I recognized some conventional mathematical symbols on her paper along with others that appeared to be her creation. Her father had told me once of how, one day at the end of a childhood that had been near-silent near-inactivity, he had found her playing with the keyboard of his computer, and of his flash of hope that she might grow into a normal child after all ("Who's a clever little girl, then?") which had died as he raised his eyes to the screen. They had published her first paper jointly. After that she had been on her own. His work on Carmody's Transform had brought him praise and when she was given her own department he had helped set it up but he had been little more than her assistant. "What's that?" I asked, stabbing at random at one esoteric symbol to cover my embarrassment. "It stands for the occurrence of Miss Bright's Paradox."