The Intruder (4 page)

Both as follows. Zinfandel. Whole wheat bread. Salad with vinegar and oil. Baked red snapper and mixed vegetables. Carrot cake and Coffee. End.

Jeremy looked at the doctor and she nodded. He sent the command 'break,' and she nodded again. The connection was severed.

"And no, Jeremy, I couldn't read your thoughts while the command mode was on," Dr.
Berry
said.

But then how did you know I was ...

She began to laugh. "Everyone wonders that, and it's an old joke," she said.

Jeremy shook his head. "One thing I was wondering. Why do I hear messages from you in your voice? Shouldn't it be in the computer's voice?"

"You can set up your mail routine to send messages with your own voice characteristics. All you have to do is talk into an audio-equipped workstation. Of course you can set your implant to read messages anyway you like. But I like to send personal messages in my own voice and business messages in a simulated 'computer' voice."

"Will the workstation you loaned me do that?"

She nodded.

"Can I buy one of those workstations to use until I get the visual functions turned on? I'd like to start thinking about a job."

She shook her head. "Don't worry about returning the workstation. You can hold on to that until we get you set up with your implant. But about a job, I have another option for you."

She explained that a local university had a grant program that would pay him a modest salary on a short-term basis if he agreed to discuss his experiences in the Community with the students and faculty in its sociology and psychology departments. The grant was enough to provide for his needs, with a little to spare, and it would give him the time he needed to get accustomed to the implant.

"Am I under any obligations to them?" he asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Do I have to tell them whatever they want to know?"

"Heavens no," she said. "If you're uncooperative, they might cancel the agreement, but it's not that big a deal. And if you find that you don't like it, you can back out any time you like."

Jeremy agreed to give it a try, and Dr.
Berry
said she would set it up for him. 

The food arrived a minute later and conversation turned to lighter matters. The red snapper was the best fish Jeremy had ever eaten. The land-locked Community in which he had spent his entire life had to content itself with stream and pond fish. Jeremy had always thought a fresh trout was the best thing in the world until he tasted the snapper. The waiter noticed how much he enjoyed the fish and brought him a second helping.

Dr.
Berry
seemed to walk a tightrope in her comments about Society and the Community. On the one hand, she clearly had a message she wanted to get across, but she also seemed hesitant, as if she feared how Jeremy would react to the information. What she had to say certainly took Jeremy by surprise, since it was contrary to everything he'd learned about Society in the Community. But after all, Jeremy reasoned, the two cultures had diverged about 50 years ago, with little or no exchange of information, so there were bound to be differences.

The speculation in the Community was that Society had continued to follow the same trend it had been on when the Community separated itself -- a trend toward government control and a lack of personal privacy. 

"This is incredible," Jeremy said after a few minutes of Dr.
Berry
's discourse. "Do you mean that Society hasn't been trying to get the Communities back into the fold all this time?"

"No, of course not. The Communities have the right to do as they please," Dr.
Berry
said with conviction in her voice.

Jeremy shook his head, either in disbelief or amazement. He had learned a very different history. When the Communities separated themselves from Society shortly after the turn of the last century, they were sure it was only a matter of time before a conflict developed. The communities had always assumed that after the government assumed complete control of Society, they would turn their eyes toward the communities. Some law would be passed –- probably in the name of public security -- that would make the communities illegal, and they would be forcibly disbanded. It was the inevitable consequence of their different ideologies, and the Community would have no ability to fight back. It had a limited police force and no military.

"That may have been true of the old government, back before the riots," Dr.
Berry
explained, "but Society is completely non-interventionist now. If people want to live in their own world, with their own rules, they're welcome to it. Why should anybody else care?" She shrugged for emphasis, but Jeremy was still trying to take it all in.

"Then why did the Advocate tell us those things?" he said. "That virtually every session of the legislature had a new, threatening bill, and that the few representatives who were sympathetic to the Communities continued to block passage. Did he lie to us?"

Dr.
Berry
looked troubled. "I don't know why he would say that, but I do know that some sociologists have argued that the Communities require a belief in an external threat to retain their cohesion. I'm just guessing here, but perhaps he thought it was a lie told for your own good."

Jeremy expected surprises in Society. He knew the adjustment wasn't going to be easy. But this turned his whole world upside down. Was everything he'd learned as a boy a lie?

Or ... no. After all, Dr.
Berry
grew up in Society. She was, in fact, part of its machinery. Didn't Society depend on the implants, and wasn't she the leading specialist in that field? The government had to have its line – it's story. After all, they weren't going to tell their people that they were oppressive dictators.

So maybe this was all just a part of the Big Lie. Dr.
Berry
was feeding him Society propaganda -- and maybe she even believed it.

How could he know? He'd been raised to believe that the Advocate was a good and honest man who worked tirelessly for the interests of the Community. He'd always been told that the Society government was itching to make a complete takeover, once they had everything under control.

But for now, he'd play along and take Dr.
Berry
's story at face value. He could think it all through later.

He shook his head in disgust and said, "The Advocate is an official of both our governments. Are people allowed to lie like that in Society?" 

"What's to prevent them?" she replied with a grin.

If he was lying, then I guess he fooled our government as well,
he thought. 

"I had always thought the government in Society watched everything you did. We have old records of how the government would take away people's land, or fine them heavily just because they cut down a tree, or dumped sand in a ditch. Is that all wrong too?"

"No, those things really happened, and that's part of the reason there were riots. But things have changed since then. Maybe you need to read up on your history."

Society history,
he thought with disgust.
Why should I believe it?

He sat still for a moment, lost in thought, and somewhat troubled. The next thing he knew he heard a sound beside him and noticed that the waiter had arrived with a second bottle of wine, which reminded him of a lesson from school. They were studying ancient wisdom literature, and the professor was discussing Solomon's quest to understand how and why the world worked the way it did, and how the effort ended in futility. We can't understand the ways of God, but we can't allow that to ruin life. Instead, men should rejoice in the good they have, enjoy what they can out of life, and leave the rest to God.

Let your garments be white, and let your goblet be filled with wine,
he remembered.

He wasn't going to solve this right here, over dinner, so he might as well enjoy himself. He forced a smile and shrugged.

"I've got a lot to learn, I guess."

Dr.
Berry
sensed his change in mood and seemed more than willing to change the topic, so she asked him about the small things of life in the Community. Jeremy spent the next hour amusing her with stories about the constant presence of livestock, and the trouble the animals caused, the fascination with games of skill, and the tournaments that lasted much of the summer, the agricultural cycle, and the feasts and merry-making in Spring and Fall.

As the waiter cleared away the desert dishes, Dr.
Berry
brought them back to the issue of the implant. "Where did you leave the terminal I loaned you?"

"Oh, it's in my room. Was I supposed to bring it?"

"It's okay. We can go get it. I need to show you a thing or two."

On the elevator ride to Jeremy's room Dr.
Berry
questioned him about his implant operations -- how the implant voice sounded, whether there was any ringing, or pain, or other difficulties, and how he had done with the training exercises.

"No trouble," he said as he opened his hotel-room door by pressing his thumb against the security lock. "It was very easy."

Isn't it designed for children, after all?

The workstation lay where he'd left it on the desk in the sitting room that adjoined his bedroom. There was only one chair, so he stood while Dr.
Berry
called up several libraries he could use to study recent world history. She placed electronic markers in each location and explained the search functions, and then entered a series of questions about the political fall-out of the riots. She fed all the relevant information into a self-generating documentary program.

"This will make a useful little history lesson for you, so you can see what's been happening in Society since your Community broke away. You can watch this, or even read the files yourself if you like."

"Great," he said with a smile, but he still wondered how much of it was just Society propaganda.

Chapter 3

Jeremy intended to take a brief look at the documentary and then head to sleep. He was always an early riser. But four hours past his usual bed-time he was still reading, watching video coverage of key events, and submitting new questions to the history library. The
sheer
magnitude of information overwhelmed him. Either Dr. Berry had told him the truth, or someone had invested a lot of time and effort in an incredible piece of propaganda.

In addition to the much-needed history lesson, Jeremy came away from his evening's study with an intense desire to get his visual implant activated. The terminal was amazing, and the idea that he could have all the same functions just a glance away was overpoweringly desirable.

As he thought about the appeal of the implant, Jeremy thought back on his simple life in the Community, where the most technology he'd see on an average day was a tractor. Back then he couldn't have long for what he didn't know about, but he wondered how he would have reacted if the Jeremy back then -- in the technologically unsophisticated Community -- had learned about the implants. He suspected the knowledge would have gnawed at him, making simple farm life very difficult. 

Suddenly he remembered an incident from his youth. He was laying in bed, not quite asleep, when he heard his parents bustle around the house. His father was packing a few essentials and hurrying off to the north of the Community's territory. Jeremy listened to their hushed conversations -- he knew something important was happening -- but he couldn't make any of it out. Something inside of him longed to be in on the secret. He assumed that his father and mother were planning something important, or getting ready for something exciting, and he didn't want to be left out.

Later he discovered that an aircraft had crashed into the mountains. It was winter, and there was snow and high winds. His father and several other men found the survivors and kept them alive until a rescue team from Society arrived. When he heard what had happened, he ached for the missed opportunity.

Things like that were bound to happen, Jeremy knew, and sooner or later he might have found out about the implants, and maybe even the truth about Society. In fact, he began to wonder how much his father knew, or others in the Community. Might they have known, or suspected the truth?

Solomon's wisdom came back to mind. That was all water under the bridge now. His life in the Community was behind him, for good or ill, and he needed to get started on his new life. That meant moving forward with the implant and getting the visual functions turned on. Everything in Society assumed you had an implant, and the sooner he got his up and running, the sooner he would be able to get on with things.

And besides,
he thought,
doctors always exaggerate risks.

Dr.
Berry
had warned him that a small percentage of newbies develop a very dangerous illness called implant psychosis. Their brains aren't able to adjust to the implant and they become delusional and paranoid. The safest course was to introduce the implant slowly, under constant supervision.