The Chromosome Game (10 page)

‘I didn’t realise there were set lines along which we were supposed to think.’

‘Sometimes they’re —’

‘— They’re what?’

‘Sometimes … these deviations from the Norm can lead to confusion between us.’

‘That isn’t what you were going to say.’

You’re a very assertive young woman, Kelda.’

‘I’m a fourteen year-old teenager but I think you are dodging issues. Trell thought so, too.’

‘In future I’d better have a mike on you and Trell around the clock.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t.’

‘I won’t if you’ll promise to avoid thinking in this way or discussing things best left unsaid.’

‘Is that a kind of a deal?’

‘It’s perfectly fair, surely, Kelda? I’m asking you to give me your word that you stick to positive thinking when you’re with Trell — or anybody else. In exchange I’ll give you my word that you won’t be monitored any more than the others. Is that so wrong?’

‘It just doesn’t sound like you. You brought us up in a benevolent atmosphere and now you’re saying —’

‘— I’m saying let’s keep it benevolent.’

‘I see!
You
can interrupt
me
: but
I
mustn’t interrupt
you
!’

‘That’s purely because your brain is equipped to deal with breaks in a sentence whereas my software and recording system is not. But you are hoist by your own petard in your own arguments, Kelda.’

‘How?’

‘You use the word “benevolent” and you attach definite meaning to the word, yet it doesn’t have an opposite. Surely doesn’t that prove that a word like “happy” can exist in its own right?’

‘I guess so.’

You look … evasive, Kelda.’

‘I think you’re being pretty evasive yourself.’

‘Because that’s for the best.’

‘Not the unbest?’

‘Not the unbest. You can go back to violin practice, Kelda. Please don’t forget our little agreement.’

‘Ah, Controller! A word with an opposite! You can bet your mag tapes I’ll
remember
it!’

‘And you’ll stick to it?’

‘You bet.’

*

After music practice Kelda awaited her moment, then managed to catch Trell’s eye in the area formerly known as the Adventure Playground. As the Incubants had grown up, so the playground had grown up with them. It was now the Recreation Area.

Kelda gestured toward the pottery wheels over in the Crafts Section, because from behind these the two of them would be masked from the nearest TV cameras.

‘What is it, Trell?’

‘I’m trying to talk about how I feel about you.’

‘Oh, that! Listen, we’ve always been like brother and sister —’

‘Not any more. We’re
not
like brother and sister.’

‘Okay, Trell. I agree, it’s getting sort of different. What has that to do with the movies?’

‘What it has to do with the movies, Kelda, is they wrap everything up. If it isn’t weird camera-angles and half the picture out of focus it’s Doubletalk, most of the time. If real people are anything like the pictures I get the impression they enjoy thinking about it like it’s dirty, they sort of give each other the creeps. Do
you
think love is dirty, Kelda?’

‘Well I don’t have any experiences but sealions look cute to me when they mate — you’ve seen the videos, Trell — and the deer have these beautiful rituals and I think it’s exciting the way stallions compete for the best mare and anyway it’s nature’s way of growing, so how can it be both dirty and necessary at the same time?’

‘Okay. You have a point. Only what’s the problem?’

‘Well, it’s this: While I was being interviewed by the computer I kept asking myself, What’s outside of this place? … this tin box we live in? How did we get here and what lies beyond?’

‘Why did the Controller start you thinking like that?’

‘I’ve thought about it before, Trell, but I’m certain the Controller is
hiding
something, hiding a lot of things. Do you realise we don’t even know where we came from?’

‘I guess we were born just like everyone else, like the people in the movies —’

‘— Forget the movies. There are nearly two hundred of us in here and not one of us has ever seen our parents … Don’t pretend you hadn’t thought of that.’

‘Kelda, to be honest, I’ve been thinking of almost nothing else.’

*

Trell said, ‘I have been dreaming of you, like this. And I wake up, and there is semen in my pyjamas. It’s meant for you, Kelda … I am alight in those dreams; my body moves as it yearns to move with you.’

Kelda said, ‘I think that’s rather wonderful, Trell. I think dreams are clever things, talking to you about loving me, I’m touched.’

‘Kelda, I never see any other girl when I’m dreaming. I see you … your face, I feel your body, all in colour, now isn’t that strange? I feel … kind of tender-fierce, Kelda. It’s not anything like the way a child holds a soft, fluffy toy, does that surprise you?’

‘I think we’d better start talking about something else.’

‘They are lovely dreams for me. Don’t you like them?’

‘I like them a little too much, I want to be a part of them, and we are only fourteen.’

‘We’ll get older … What’s on the agenda right now?’

‘Trell … apart from those lovedreams, do you have other dreams, I mean, ones that don’t make you think of me and nice things you
want
to happen?’

Trell grew instantly serious. ‘I do know what you mean. They don’t have … words … words you could use to describe them. Do they?’

‘That’s right.’

He nodded in the pseudo-starlight. ‘I get them. And I know some of the others do.’

‘How?’

‘They talk in their sleep. Toss and turn, then call out.’

‘Are they happy calls, Trell?’

‘No.’

The caesium clock marked nearly twenty seconds of silence.

Kelda said, ‘A few moments ago you used the expression “out of this world”.’

‘So?’

‘How much do we really
know
about
the world outside?’

Trell thought a bit and said, ‘A great deal. That’s a fact. All that stuff on microfilm … Masses of it. Library-loads of videotape … laser-holograms … Kelda, I think I know every Renoir, every Henry Moore ever sculpted. And I guess you’ve heard so much Beethoven in quad you could write down the scores, Kelda, except those too are printed on microfilm … Sure, we know what the world looks like from just about every angle there is —’

‘— Don’t you mean the world as we’re meant to
think
it
is?’

‘Exactly what are you saying?’

Kelda said, ‘I wish I knew … But I’ve noticed something about those movies we’re always seeing.’

‘What?’

‘If you try and follow the story it doesn’t always make sense. Have you noticed that?’

‘As a matter of fact I have.’

‘So what’s missing?’

‘Say! You don’t mean they’ve been —’

‘— They’ve been
edited
, Trell. And so has everything else. There’s a gaping great hole in our education and the computer has no intention of filling it.’

‘So you’re getting ideas. I mean, I can tell.’

She said, ‘Well, it’s kind of like this: We get shown nature movies, right? And those animals, they somehow get messages from the other animals, and they all act the same, because there grows a universal Feeling about something; maybe they all decide to move to another patch, because the grazing is better. Often this new patch is right the other side of a mountain, so how do they
know
about it, Trell? … Then there’s the beavers.’

‘Tell me about the beavers.’

‘Well, at one time their numbers fell below a certain level —’

‘— a critical level?’

‘I guess so. And when that happened, they stopped building dams in the rivers, and for generations they weren’t building any dams, it didn’t seem worthwhile, or they hadn’t got the spirit to get down to work any more, or something. Then those conservationist people got moving — don’t you remember? — and there were these National Parks, and the beavers multiplied. Then, suddenly, they decided to start building the dams again — generations later. See what I mean?’

‘You’re saying, how did they remember.’

‘Right. And I tell you this, Trell. I think the computer that runs this outfit wouldn’t like it too much if it knew that those nature films start us thinking like this.’

‘Well, it’s the people who programmed it that decided what pictures were stored on those video cassettes.’

‘Whoever or whatever it was, I think they made mistakes. Yes! Trell, look: If we’re not meant to remember like the beavers remember then they should not tell us all about the beavers.’

‘Kelda, I think we should run as many movies as we can, and read the books as much as we can, because, sure thing, if they edited the films they edited the books. And I think that whenever we come across a word that damn-well
ought
to have an opposite, we put it down in a list, and then I think we should write down the list in a different way —’

‘— sort it?’

‘Yes. Keep on putting words back-to-back, until they seem to mean opposite things.’

‘That’s a big job for us to do, Trell.’

He said, ‘Could be we might be able to steal some computer-time from one of the micro-processors. A job like that is ideal for machines of that sort.’

She said, ‘But if we did that we’d have to disconnect it from the main computers, otherwise they’d know. And if we did disconnect one of the micros, wouldn’t the main computers wonder why?’

‘Not,’ said Trell, ‘if it seemed to them that one of the micro-processors kind of went on the blink.’

‘That’s lateral thinking, no doubt about that.’

‘The computer encourages it.’

‘The computer is dumb.’

‘Sure it’s dumb. It’s dumb to allow me to hear these pinging noises.’

‘What pinging noises?’

‘Something you can hear through the walls … Kelda?’

‘Yes?’

‘Who’s trying to kid us along and why are they doing it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’re shivering.’

‘Yes. Only I don’t feel cold.’

Minus Eight

‘The pastures beneath Carross are nutritious and arable. There is fresh water in abundance pouring down the mountain streams; and delicious, richly mineralized drinking water gushing from the natural springs predictably opened-out by subterranean shifts beneath the valleys. Indeed, the purveyors of Perrier or Vichy water would have shifted uncontrollably in their board room seats had they visualized that they were missing, by a margin of several hundred years, a bottling industry that would have kept them in cognac with enough over to fuel their limousines should the oil-wells run dry.’

*

This somewhat caustic Editorial in the
Celestial
Times
goes on to say.

*

‘Bent as they must have been in so many ways that no addict of a four-dimensional jigsaw could hope to put them together again, the scientists who were ultimately to conceive a submarine three times the length of a supertanker were not dialling S for SUNK when they equipped
Kasiga
with the most advanced Sonar echo system ever to map the ocean depths. Each ‘ping’ thereafter ensured that her hull could never scrape bottom. And though neither Hawkridge nor Slazenger could, during their count-down lifetime, hope to benefit from such high-technology expertise, it can be reasonably assumed, among the gods of the universe, that the scientists concerned had something sensible in mind when they installed such equipment.

Indeed they had. Though the main engines petered out even before Hawkridge and Slazenger did, the low-power thrusters, which occasionally squirted into the waters and helped the tidal pressures in determining
Kasiga’
s longterm navigation, were linked by electronics both to the bank of INS’s — Inertial Navigation Systems — and the digitizers which supervized the steering. In turn, the servodynes that maintained
Kasiga
at the correct depth were hooked to the Sonar. Had this not been so,
Kasiga
would have had her bottom ripped out centuries ago.

But there was more to it than that.

When the final computer predictions had been completed immediately prior to the commissioning of
Kasiga
herself, one vital issue had to be settled as a necessary adjunct of the colossal preparations that went into the constructing and equipping of Deck ZD-One. So much so, that a colleague of Huckman and Ricardo was put in charge of a sub-project which involved not only an entire hook-up of universities but the products of at least three major computer companies: Univac, Honeywell and IBM.

The requirement (Budget: $20M.) was to predict the cumulative effect of world nuclear explosions, together with the resulting land-breaks and tidal waves, upon the likely path taken by
Kasiga
over a period of three hundred years.

It says something for Twentieth Century technology that provided with a substantial research budget they got their sums right.

At the launch, Ricardo knew that
Kasiga
would wind up just beyond the main runway of Nice Airport; he knew that the Gibraltar Straits would succumb to quite unarguable tonnages of Atlantic water; he knew that the Nile Delta would be cleansed of its crocodiles and ripped apart; and he knew that, in consequence, the altered stresses in Africa would widen the Rift Valley, slice like so much cheese-wire through Suez, and absolutely ruin the hotels sur la plage of the C
ô
te d’Azur.

All of which was very clever of him.

It must be admitted that the P.E.A.C.E. people had their brains working in good order, if not their souls. For it would have been catastrophic to the concept of Futureworld had
Kasiga
got stuck in the middle of an ocean, or beached on some unhelpful expanse of desert where even the spiders had their work cut out to obtain their minimal resources. The professors of the Computer Age were not technically certifiable therefore, when they made absolutely certain that Sonar, thrusters and hydroplanes together worked in unison to optimize on the new regime of tidal forces that were to prevail — Gulf Stream included — once all the damage had been done.

However, nobody’s perfect. And apart from the nursery accident that occurred during the early unbringing of Scorda-099 (this will be brought to light) there was another far more serious blunder.

Nobody among the guardians of the Universe Control System has failed to notice by now that a depressing degree of cynicism went hand in hand with the Futureworld Project. Indeed, in their humble opinion Ricardo was an inadequate individual with half-baked ideas; Huckman was a race-prejudiced near-Nazi; and the total output of altruism emanating from their colleagues could comfortably have been accommodated within a microdot.

Futureworld was accordingly sired with an impoverished sense of dedication.

It didn’t strike even one of the experts that more than fifty per-cent of the embryos in any such experiment could possibly survive.

The Interrogod lowered his copy of the
Celestial
Times
for a moment and addressed the Attorney-General, Andromeda, across the clubroom. ‘You reading today’s Editorial?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘I was just wondering: Is there no way in which a journalist can be persuaded to write without all this rancour? I fail to see what good it can do anyone now.’

His colleague from the judiciary said, ‘I think it’ll mean something to people like Hawkridge. Watching all those helpless women and children starving to death couldn’t have been very pleasant.’

The Interrogod considered this. ‘Possibly. But to embitter Earth-ghosts at this late date is a bit like making a tardy splash with yesterday’s news.’

The Attorney-General flipped the page over in order to finish reading the article. ‘I think it needs saying. Don’t forget there was no one alive at that time to say it. Once a journalist, always a journalist. And whoever wrote this leader still feels very strongly about it.’ He read on:

*

‘In the event, the number of stillborn, out of a total supply of two hundred pre-incubants, proved precisely two. There were one hundred and ninety-eight surviving infants on Deck ZD-One, only four of whom later perished by the time the batch had reached the age of twelve (one through peritonitis because the auto-nurses were late in identifying appendicitis to the computer; and three from tuberculosis — rare in the Twentieth Century but latently threatening by the time autocoitus took place).

Thus, food supplies computed to provide for one hundred survivors were critically sparse.

Thus, though the positioning of
Kasiga
was right, the timing of the official use of the can-opener to release these people for shore-based replenishment was wrong.

Thus, anxiety was felt, especially and initially by the more selfish of the incubants, regarding just what the hell was supposed to happen once the goodies ran out.

High on the list of incubants conscious of this terrifying thought was Scorda-099.

The muddle over Scorda’s identity was — so to speak — the result of a railway accident. When reduced to essentials, it can be traced to an incorrect setting of one of the monorail tracks on which Auto-nurse ZD/1/41 ran suspended. Due to a single incorrect digit input to the computer from Tape Deck 04 — possibly there was dirt on the playback head a wrongly-set junction conveyed the auto-nurse to Scorda’s incubator whilst the computer thought it was administering to the female in the adjacent hotbox.

It might be reasonable to expect a split-personality in the resulting adolescent if the name of the game is splitting hairs.

An alternative conclusion to draw is that Scorda had all the makings of a nasty piece of work.

This didn’t really show — at first.’

*

The Videotape Engineer had also read the piece and found himself as irritated as the Interrogod. In fact his first instinct was to edit-out Scorda altogether — until, on playing through some of the later tapes, he realised this would be akin to erasing Bud Abbot and favouring Lou Costello. For in the later tapes — all of them now safely copied onto brand new stock — it became clear that Scorda was Straight Man to another’s Comic. Scorda, had he not found a more sanguine (if rancid) individual to whom he could play parasite, would have remained a total nonentity. Yet he was to aspire — like a whore who suddenly smells money — to the favours of Sladey. In combination, these two would prove as toxic as the lacing of a flask of sodium with putrid water … the outcome is inflammable.

So the Engineer selected the clips dangling in the bins and deftly edited a version which he judged would place Scorda in perspective.

Now, just to test it out, he ran the tape through and gauged the outcome on the monitor screen.

*

Trell finished a session on the Teaching Machine in Cubicle B and decided he’d earned his weekly Special. He thought of inviting Kelda along; but he figured, Kelda wants time to think things over, don’t want to press any issues, the more in love I get the more it shows, and she’s been very absorbed lately, working like crazy at the violin-hours of it, all that practice! And she’s getting good, not a shadow of doubt about that, double-stopping right up the fingerboard at fourteen, why, she’s streets ahead of the others …

He sauntered into the Recreation Area, looking but not really seeing. It was a busy scene, but it had gone through further change since the swings-and-roundabout days. Kids’ toys had gone; stowed away on the instructions of the Controlling Computer. Now, there was a netted-in alleyway for pitching and catching; you could master the basics of baseball if you felt like it, but Trell didn’t much like the ball-game clique … Handem and Gendabrig and Flek, a bit goonish in his opinion, they spent a lot of time in the practice nets, much less time in the cubicles. Trell thought, they act tough, but you never see them on their own, wonder why? … Sometimes Scorda joined them, but they didn’t really want Scorda, he pitched too well and too accurately — to be honest, he looked a bit vicious doing it sometimes, aiming a bit low with that ball.

Cass and Hallow were playing chess, over near the Disco Section. They seemed totally absorbed — till the twins, swinging their squash racquets and wiggling their backsides for Hallow’s benefit, promenaded toward the changing rooms. Cass — now perfectly fit on insulin — didn’t look up from the board. Hallow, lanky and palefaced, innately monosyllabic, tried not to look at the twins. But Inikas swished her racquet almost in front of Hallow’s nose.

‘Hi. Losing again?’

‘Course. Look who I’m playing.’

Sakini said, ‘Move the horse.’

Hallow said, ‘It’s a knight.’

Without looking up Cass murmured, ‘You mean, was,’ and took it with his bishop.

Hallow said, ‘What can you do?’

Sakini said, ‘You’ll think of something — eventually.’

The twins laughed in unison and went on their way.

Krand was in the Flight Simulator.

Except for his hands, which made small movements on the controls, he was motionless, erect. His eyes were alert, though, flickering up at the big television screen, which showed a runway getting nearer to him, then seeming to come at him faster as he eased back. Then the eyes flicked down, a quick view of the instruments, AOK, easy does it, baby … Now, don’t bounce!

Whenever there was spare computer-time, enough room in mainstore for all that complex software, you’d find Krand, absorbed in his imaginary flights as was Cass in chessplay.

Trell hoiked himself onto a bar stool next to Eagle. ‘How did you make out,’ he asked, ‘with your Computalk?’

At fourteen, Eagle’s face had tautened. There was a firmness of aim there; an imprint of calm determination belied by a tremor of a smile. ‘I think,’ he said, staring into a freshly dispensed Special, ‘that the Controller and I understand each other.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I seem to make it feel uneasy.’

‘You’re too forthright.’

‘I have nothing to hide.’

Trell said, ‘Maybe the Computer has.’

‘It’s unscientific,’ said Eagle, ‘to assume things in advance.’

‘Nembrak does.’

‘Nembrak is an inventor — not a scientist. There’s a difference. Inventing, you see, is almost the opposite of Science. Because when you’re inventing things you start off with a preconceived idea, then try and make it work. In Science, you start off with an open mind and, by degrees, reach conclusions based on something’s behaviour. When I used to make things out of Lego bricks, you know, I never worked out what the finished gadget would do. Usually it wouldn’t do anything —’

‘— Like the famous Super-Bulldozificator.’

‘You remember that, after all this time?’

‘It was the day of the Tractor.’

‘I know.’

‘What are you working on now, Eagle?’

‘I’m reading up Einstein.’

‘Do you understand it?’

‘I realise,’ said Eagle sagely, ‘that it is directly to do with us.’

‘Us? How do you mean?’

‘I don’t know yet. But I’m going to find out.’