Prisoners of Tomorrow (86 page)

“Very probably it was,” Kath replied. “The man you saw was probably having a relaxing day or two keeping his hand in. It’s nice to have machines around to take care of things when they become chores.”

“People don’t worry about being replaced by a chip?”

“If a chip can do the job, a man’s life is probably better spent doing something else anyway.”

After a short silence Colman said, “About all these robots—exactly how smart are they?”

“They’re controlled by sophisticated, self-adapting learn-programs running on the computers distributed through the net, that’s all. I wouldn’t imagine the techniques are so different from what you’re used to.”

“So they’re not anywhere near intelligent. . . self-aware, anything like that?”

Kath gave a short laugh. “Of course not . . . but they’re deceptive, aren’t they. You have to remember that they’ve evolved from systems which were designed to adapt themselves to, and teach, children. You project a lot of yourself into what you think they’re saying.”

“But they seem to have an intuition to make human value judgments,” Colman objected. “They know too much about how people think.”

Kath laughed again. “Do they? They don’t really, you know. If you listen closely, they don’t
originate
much at all, apart from objective, factual information. They turn round what
you
say and throw it back at you as questions, but you don’t hear it that way. You think they’re telling you something that they’re not.”

“Catalysts,” Colman said after a few seconds of reflection. “You know, you’re right, now that I think about it. All they do is make you exercise the brains you never knew you had.”

“You’ve got it,” Kath said lightly. “Isn’t that what teaching children is all about?”

* * *

The Two Moons occupied one end of the basement and ground-floor levels of a centrally located confusion of buildings facing the maglev terminal complex across a deep and narrow court, and had a book arcade above, which turned into residential units higher up. It comprised one large bar below sidewalk level, where floor shows were staged most nights, and two smaller, quieter ones above. Kath suggested one of the smaller bars and Colman agreed, permitting himself for the first time the thought that a pleasantly romantic interlude might develop, though why he should be so lucky was something he was far from comprehending. If it happened, he wasn’t going to argue about it.

Of course, Swyley, Stanislau, Driscoll, and Carson had to be there. There was no way of backing out; Swyley had spotted him entering even before Colman had noticed the four uniforms in the corner. “Small world, chief,” Driscoll remarked with a delighted leer on his face.

“It is, isn’t it,” Colman agreed dismally.

Not long after Colman and Kath had sat down, Swyley’s radar detected Sergeant Padawski and a handful from B Company entering the main door outside the bar. They were talking loudly and seemed to be a little the worse for drink. Colman noticed Anita and another girl from Brigade with them, clinging to the soldiers and acting brashly. He shook his head despairingly, but it wasn’t really his business. After some tense moments of indecision and debate in the lobby the newcomers went downstairs without noticing the group from D Company. Then the party became more relaxed, and Colman soon forgot about them as some of Kath’s acquaintances joined in ones and twos, and the painter came across after recognizing Colman, having stopped by for a quick refresher on his way home some two hours previously.

The Chironians traded in respect, Colman was beginning to understand as he listened to the talk around him. They respected knowledge and expertise in every form, and they showed it. Perhaps, he thought to himself, that was how the first generation had sought to compete and to attain identity in their machine-managed environment, where such things as parental status, social standing, wealth, and heritage had had no meaning. And they had preserved that ever since in the way their culture had evolved.

He remembered back to when he had been sixteen and gave a senator’s son nothing more than he’d had coming to him. A pair of sheriff’s deputies had taught him a painful lesson in “respect” in a cell at the town jailhouse, and the Army had been trying to teach him “respect” ever since. But that had been Earth-style respect. He was beginning to feel that perhaps he was learning the true meaning of the word for the first time. True respect could only be earned; it couldn’t be extorted. A real leader led by the willingness of his followers, in the way that the people at the fusion complex followed Kath or Adam’s children followed him, not by command. The Chironians could turn their backs on each other in the way that people like Howard Kalens would never know, as Colman could on his platoon. These were his kind of people. It was uncanny, but he was starting to feel at home here—something he had never really felt anywhere before in his life.

Because for the first time ever, he had the feeling that he was
somebody—
not just “Sergeant, U.S. Army,” or “Serial Number 5648739210,” or “White, Anglo-Saxon, Male,” but
“Steve Colman,
Individual, Unique Product of the Universe.”

It was a nice feeling.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Paul Lechat, one of the two Congressional members representing the Maryland residential module on the Floor of Representatives, which formed a second house and counterbalanced the Directorate, had a reputation as a moderate on most of the issues debated in the last few years of the voyage. Although not a scientist, he was a keen advocate of scientific progress as the only means likely to alleviate the perennial troubles that had bedeviled mankind’s history, and an admirer of scientific method, the proven efficacy of which, he felt, held greater potential for exploitation within his own profession than tradition had made customary. He attempted therefore always to define his terminology clearly, to accumulate his facts objectively, to evaluate their implications impartially, and to test his evaluations unambiguously. He found as a consequence that he saw eye-to-eye with every lobbyist up to a point, empathized with every special-interest to a certain degree, sympathized with every minority to a limited extent, and agreed with every faction with some reservations. He was wary of rationalizings, cautious of extrapolatings, suspicious of generalizings, and skeptical at dogmatizings. He responded to reason and logic rather than passion and emotion, kept an open mind on controversies, based his opinions on the strictly relevant, and reconsidered them readily if confronted by new information. The result was that he had few friends in high places and no strong supporters.

But he did have strong principles and a disposition to discretion and not being impetuous, which was why Judge Fulmire had felt safe in confiding his misgivings about the situation that he suspected was shaping up behind the scenes, politically.

Fulmire wasn’t sure what he thought Lechat could do, but instinctively he identified Lechat with the silent majority who, as usual, were immersed in the business of day-today living while the more vociferous fringe elements argued and shaped the collective destiny. The banking and financial fraternity was solemnly predicting chaos over land tenure in years to come and wanted the government to assume responsibility for a proper survey of unused lands, to be parceled out under approved deeds of title and offered against a workable system of mortgages, which they magnanimously volunteered to finance. The manufacturing and materials-industry lobbies agreed with the bankers that a monetary system would have to be imposed to check the “reckless profligacy of inefficiency and waste” and to promote “fair and honest” competition; they disagreed with bankers over the mortgage issue, however, claiming that development land on Chiron had already been deemed up for grabs “by virtue of natural precedent”; they disagreed with each other about prices and tariffs, the manufacturers pushing for deregulation of cheap (i.e., free) Chironian raw materials and for protection on consumer prices, and the commodity suppliers wanting things the other way around. The educational and medical professions were anxious to discharge their obligations to teach the Chironians when they were well and treat them when they were not, but were more anxious for a mechanism to raise the taxes for funding them, while the legal profession pressed for a properly constituted judicial system as a first move, ostensibly to facilitate collecting the taxes. The other groups went along with the taxes as long as each secured better breaks than the others, except the religious leaders, who didn’t care since they would be exempt anyway. But
they
clashed with the teachers over a move to place ministers in the schools in order to “strangle at its roots the evil and decay which is loose upon this planet,” with the doctors over whether the causes were cultural or spiritual, with the lawyers over the issue of making the Chironian practice of serial, and at times parallel, polygamy and polyandry illegal, and with everybody over the question of “emergency” subsidies for erecting churches. And so it went.

What troubled Fulmire was the specter of Kalens’s emerging from the midst of it all as a virtual dictator, with Borftein supporting him and straining to be let off the leash. Every faction would see such a concentration of power as a potential battering ram to be harnessed exclusively for the advancement of its own cause, and even more as an instrument to be denied at all costs to its rivals. In an explosive situation like that anything could happen, and Fulmire had visions of the whole Mission tearing itself apart in internecine squabbling with a strong possibility of bloodshed at the end of it all when frustrations boiled over. The only force that he could see with any potential for exerting a stabilizing influence was the more moderate consensus as represented by the
Mayflower II
’s
population as a whole; and Lechat, possibly, could provide a means of mobilizing it before things got out of hand.

Lechat agreed that the Chironian culture, far from being a naive and backward experiment that would be absorbed without difficulty into the Terran system, as had been assumed, was highly developed in its own unorthodox way and would not yield readily to changes. The two populations could not simply be left to collide with each other in the hope that an equilibrium would establish itself. Something, somewhere, would blow up before that happened.

The Chironians had both complied with the
Mayflower II
’s advance request for surface accommodation and anticipated their own future needs at the same time by developing Canaveral City and its environs in the direction of Franklin to a greater degree than their own situation then required. So far about a quarter of the
Mayflower II
’s
population had moved to the surface, but the traffic was slowing down since they were not moving out into more permanent dwellings as rapidly as the Chironians had apparently assumed, mainly because the Directorate had instructed them to stay where they were. Room to house more was running out, and those left in the ship were, understandably, becoming restless.

Lechat told Fulmire that he no longer thought it advisable to attempt setting up a Terran community alongside the totally unfamiliar experience of Franklin—at least, not immediately. The Terrans would need time to readjust, and in the meantime they would cling to their own familiar ways and customs. The proximity of Franklin would only cause tensions. Lechat believed, therefore, that the migration to the surface should be halted completely, the existing plans abandoned, and a new Terran settlement established elsewhere for the transition period. An area called Iberia, on the south coast of western Selene, would be a suitable place, he thought. Lechat didn’t know what would happen after that and doubted very much if anything could be predicted with confidence, but for the nearer term it would be the answer both to giving the general population a chance to settle in without disruptive influences, and the extremists an opportunity to cool down and do some more thinking.

Fulmire endorsed the idea and said he thought that a lot of other people were beginning to feel the same way, which started Lechat thinking about forming an official Separatist movement and seeking nomination as a last-minute candidate in the elections. Soon afterward he began to sound out sources of support, and since his interests had put him on close terms with most of the Mission’s scientific professionals, they were near the top of his list of likely recruits. Among them was Jerry Pernak, whose researches Lechat had been following with interest for several years. Accordingly, Lechat invited Pernak and Eve Verritty to dinner with him one evening in the Franchise, a restaurant in the Columbia District frequented mainly by political and media people, and explained his situation.

“I don’t think it could work,” Pernak said, shaking his head after Lechat had finished. “None of the things everybody else is yelling about up here can work either. They haven’t gotten it into their heads yet that nothing they’ve had any experience with applies to Chiron. This is a whole new phenomenon with its own new rules.”

“How do you mean, Jerry?” Lechat asked across the table. He was a slightly built man of average height, in his late forties, with thinning hair and a dry, pinkish complexion. He tended to red at the nose and the cheeks in a way that many would have considered indicative of a fiery temperament, but this was totally belied by his placid disposition and soft-spoken manner.

Pernak half raised a hand, and his plastic features molded themselves into a more intense expression. “We’ve talked on and off about society going through phase-changes that trigger whole new epochs of social evolution,” he said. “Well, that’s exactly what’s happened down there. You can’t extrapolate any of our rules into this culture. They don’t apply. They don’t work on Chiron.”

Lechat didn’t respond immediately. Eve Verritty elaborated. “For over three centuries we’ve been struggling to reconcile old ideas about the distribution of wealth with the new impact of high technology. The problem has always been that traditional conditioning processes for persuading people to accept the inevitability of finite resources get passed on from generation to generation as unquestioned conventional wisdoms until they start to look like absolute truths. Wealth was always something that had to be competed and fought for. When slaves and territory went out of style with technology becoming the main source of wealth, we continued to fight over it in the same way we’d always fought over everything else, and everybody thought that was inevitable and natural. They couldn’t separate the old theories from the new facts.” Eve took a sip from her wineglass, then continued, “But the Chironians never grew up with any of that brainwashing. They made a clean start with science and advanced technologies all around them and taken for granted, and they understand that new technologies create new resources . . . without limit.”