“Who’s saying that?”
“Not for me to say. In any event, it’s irrelevant. What matters is that.” He pointed at the printout. “I can do nothing but discharge you, though I regret doing so. When you have a high-school degree in your record, I’ll be happy to consider employing you again. The seniority you’ve accumulated during your period of employment will be maintained. If you should return to work here, that is.”
Caird could do nothing except get a budder, an ombudsperson, to present his petition to take the examinations. Though he was not sure that he could pass these, since his memory was so selective, he did file his request. A reply was required by law within four subdays after the filing. Eight days passed, however, the Department of Education saying that unusual circumstances had held up the decision. These were not explained, and the budder said that it would not help to demand explanations. They would be forthcoming, though not necessarily true.
On the twelfth subday, late in the afternoon, the petition was denied. Reason: Caird’s unique case required that the Manhattan lower legislative house, composed of superblock leaders, would have to pass a law giving him permission. That would have to be voted on by the upper house, consisting of five district leaders.
He went to the office of his ombudsperson, Amazing “Maizie” Grace Haydn. She told him that he could petition the lower house to pass such a “personal situation” law.
“But I scent a government plot to keep you down. I could be wrong. Everything that’s happened to you has been legally justified. From what you’ve told me, I think that everything you do to advance yourself is going to find obstacles. For some reason, the government wants you to stay on MWG, wants to keep you down.”
“I can’t hurt it,” Caird said.
“Not in any way you know. They, however, probably have their reasons, which, of course, they won’t tell you.”
“I can’t just sit around and booze it up or watch TV. I’d go crazy.”
“Maybe that’s what they want. My opinion is that they’d like to put you away for good. You’re an enigma, an unknown quantity. They’re just not convinced that you won’t change your persona again. And they believe that that persona might be a danger to them.”
She smiled and said, “After all, they have precedents to justify that belief. I’m sorry, I really am. Do you want me to get together with a public defender and draw up a petition to investigate your case?”
He looked at the wallscreens. Ten calls had been on hold when he had first started talking to her. Now there were thirty. Though she was showing no impatience, she had a lot of work to do.
“Maybe later,” he said. “I have to think about this.”
He stood up and bowed with steepled hands against his chest. “Thank you for what you’ve done for me.”
“My pleasure,” she said. “How about dinner tonight at eight?”
32
She certainly was a looker, middle-sized but slim, curly jet-black hair, big and very lively dark eyes, and a smooth depigmented white-jade skin. She was congenial but ambitious. Studying for an M.A. in erodynamics psychology. Why would she be interested in a weedie who had few prospects for rising to a higher class?
She had said it herself. He was an enigma and, hence, fascinating.
“I don’t have any hard ties just now,” she said. “My roomie moved out at my request.”
“I might be a handicap to your career.”
She laughed, and she said, “I didn’t say I was inviting you to move in with me. Besides, how do you know you’d hobble me?”
“They’ll be watching you, and they won’t like any continued and close contact you might have with me.”
“Let me worry about that.”
Dinner was on Maizie and was at a high-class restaurant on 34th Street. He discovered that she sometimes sang here and thus picked up extra credits. When she was younger, she had been a member of an acrobat team. Did he remember seeing her on TV? He shook his head.
She had taken her first two names on becoming twenty. A person could change his name any time he wished as long as the proper authorities were notified. The ID number remained the same. She had chosen Amazing Grace because it was the title of her favorite song and also attracted attention.
“After you asked me for a conference,” she said, “I checked into your biodata, though, of course, I had seen a lot about you. One of your personae was Wyatt Bumppo Repp, a TV writer and producer. Do you know that writing is one of the very few professions that does not require a high-school education?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I never heard of a writer who didn’t have a college education, but there’s always a first. You see, the arts somehow slipped through those requirements. You can be a singer, a composer, a musician, a painter, a sculptor, a poet, or a writer and not have a high-school degree. I suppose that, originally, the lawmakers thought that these did not need degrees. You can’t teach the arts without a Ph.D., but you can practice them.”
“Yet a bartender has to graduate from high school.”
“That’s the way it is. Unfortunately, you’ll have a hard time trying to get into TV writing. If you apply for a job, you can’t submit your resume for Repp. You’re not Repp. Anyway, you weren’t a writer in Tuesday. If you gave some scripts to the channels for consideration, and the muckamucks liked them, they still wouldn’t hire you. They’d get the word from the government that you are persona non grata. But…are you a good singer? Good enough to get a job?”
“Not near good enough.”
“Any artistic talents in any field?”
“None.”
She sipped her wine, her eyes narrowed. Then she said, “I have an idea. I took the liberty of approaching several channel vice-presidents about it, and they said they’re interested. But they made it plain without actually saying so that they couldn’t hire you. However, they liked the idea of a miniseries based on your life. You’ve had an enormous amount of publicity, and they don’t think the government would put any pressure on them to suppress your story. You’d have no control over it. On the other hand, you’d be paid well for your permission to use it. You might get so much public attention and backing that the legislature would pass the special law you want.”
He felt a mingled anger and admiration for her. She had certainly been busy on his behalf. All this must have happened before he had his first appointment with her.
“If I agreed to do that,” he said, “the channel could portray me in any fashion it wished. I know what’d happen. Everything I did would be dramatized as the acts of a criminal, and they’d undoubtedly have me show the proper socially acceptable regret and repentance at the end. There’d be nothing in the script that could be thought of as anti-government. Nothing of the government’s fraud, corruption, and murder.”
“It would be presented so that the viewer would have sympathy for you, identify in some way with you. You’d be shown as sincere but mistaken. And your final persona-change would be shown as your renunciation of your previous personae. It’d be an act of abnegation, the sacrifice made to cut yourself off from your former acts. You’d end up as Good Citizen Caird.”
“That I am,” he said. “But I don’t like what I did misrepresented as just criminal acts. But the government just won’t stop hounding me. It won’t let me be what it claims it wants me to be and what I want to be.”
“It’s not that bad,” she said. “I mean, the script when it’ll be written. I’ve thought of a great idea. The story will be told from your viewpoint—it’ll say so before every episode and be subtitled so now and then during the action. That way, we can get around any government interference. Of course, we’ll also be showing the viewpoint of the government, too, but that can be minimized. I…”
“You’ve thought of the idea!” he said. “You sound as if you’re already working for the channel.”
“Oh, I am,” she said. “You know how many irons I have in the fire. This is one more. I…didn’t I tell
you? I forgot, so much to say. I’m engaged to work on this project, that’s all it is, a project. And I…”
He stood up, folded his napkin, and put it on the table.
“You’ve been using me! That’s why you’re dining me and and why you practically invited me into your bed. And you an ombudsperson!”
“Hey,” she said, looking angry, “I am doing my very best for you as your budder. I never shirk my job and never let anything interfere with it. Don’t you forget that! But there’s no law says I can’t make extra credits or get ahead on anything I want to try. This TV thing is just too good to pass up. Besides, I think I’d be a natural as a script writer. It doesn’t take any great talent to be one, you know. Also, don’t forget that this will benefit you. It may change your whole life for the better!”
“It certainly will yours,” he said. “Thanks for the dinner.”
He walked out. Not without some regrets. Since she was an erodynamics engineer, she knew all there was to know about the mechanics of coition. His regrets, however, passed quickly. She did not love him, probably was not even fond of him, and so could not give him the one thing that made all the difference to him.
Ninety subdays later, the two-hour pilot of the seven-segment miniseries, THE MAN WHO SHOOK THE WORLD, appeared. Caird was not caught unawares since it had been advertised for a submonth. He learned that the channel had not needed his permission to portray him. The original Caird, and his succeeding personae, Tingle, Dunski, Repp, Ohm, Zurvan, Isharashvili, and Duncan no longer existed. Their agreement to be depicted did not have to be considered. The final part, dealing with the new Caird, was to be nondramatic. It would be composed of tapes made while he was at the rehab institute, shots of him eating, exercising, and talking to inmates and ganks. Voiceovers by various commentators, psychicists, newsheads, and government officials would accompany these. There were also films of him made since he had returned to Manhattan. He had not been aware that these had been taken, but he was not surprised.
Despite telling himself that he would only be angered and deeply disturbed if he watched the series, he was too curious to ignore it. After it ended, he was glad that he had forced himself to view it. In many ways, he was as ignorant of his own personae as the average citizen. The only method he had for determining when the program deviated from the truth was by comparing the suspected sections to the documentary tapes of these events. Since most of these were short news reports, he had little with which to compare.
He did learn more than he had thought he would. Apparently, the channel had gotten access, with government permission, of course, to many of the official reports. Thus, a re-enactment of his breakout from a supposedly escape-proof institution was shown. According to the statement made before that segment, the scenes were one hundred percent realistic.
“So that’s how I did it,” he murmured.
Like other viewers, he was thrilled when he, as William St. George Duncan, rescued Panthea Snick from the New Jersey warehouse. And he marveled at his own cleverness when he had sneaked into a laboratory near the outlaws’ nest and had arranged to make the duplicate of himself in its vat, then had arranged to leave the dead duplicate in the forest to be found by the ganks. The hunt had been called off for a while; the authorities believed that they had proof that he was dead.
There was, however, nothing about fraud, lying, and corruption among the higher-ups in the hierarchy. The villains were all members of various subversive organizations who had infiltrated positions of authority, including the now-dead World Councillor, David Jimson Ananda.
Parts of the show were tapes run during actual organic conferences when the hunt for Caird was in full cry. He found these interesting. It was the first time that such meetings had been publicly shown. They not only gave an insight into the gank methods and their frustrations while looking for him, they added to the suspense even though the viewer knew what the end would be.
The actor playing Caird looked exactly like him. That was because he was no actor but a computerized simulation modeled on the real person. Snick’s role was also played by a simulation.
The final segment did not end as Caird had been told it would. It was a fantasy with eight simulations of himself gathered in one room and talking among themselves. They ended up disagreeing, often quite violently, about what they had started out to do and why their courses had been deflected toward antisocial ends. They finally admitted that they had been deceived. They had thought that they were fighting the government but it had turned out that they were battling other criminals. These were minor officials who wanted higher status and more power and had used illegal ends to attain these.
It was all very convincing, though Caird did not quite believe all of it. He was nagged by the feeling that the original Caird-persona, who supposedly knew what was going on, would have disagreed.
Though the commentators never said anything about the revolutionary end-effects of the acts of Caird and his companions, any intelligent viewer could see the implications. Because of Caird, society would never be the same again. The age-slowing factor, the anti-TM, and the public demand to break up the New Era system of once-a-week living had come about because of Caird. He should be a hero; statues of him should be erected in public places. Or so it seemed.
The series had ended fifteen minutes short of two hours. That that time period had been planned by the producers and the government occurred to Caird after the newsbreak immediately after the final credits.
Szuchen, his old enemy, appeared. She was looking very grave even though it was mandatory that newsheads smile while announcing the worst of catastrophes.
“Citizens, this is a newsflash of the utmost importance! Please stay tuned in! The World Council has just announced that The Changeover will be initiated! It is definitely launched! From this historic moment, Tuesday, at 8:46 D4-W4, Freedom Month, the world has turned about! The Changeover has begun!”
There was much more, including an interview with First Secretary Munyigumba, the man responsible for the idea that had convinced the World Council that Changeover was possible. Caird listened for a minute, then turned the screen off.
As he prepared to get a few hours of sleep before entering the stoner, he thought: Events will reveal if Munyigumba will be, in the end, a hero or a villain. He may be sorry that he stole my idea.
33
The Fifty Subyear Plan came out so quickly from the World Council that Caird knew that the government had considered the Change-over long ago and had drawn up plans for carrying it out. Now that Munyigumba’s brilliant idea seemed to have solved or at least alleviated that problem, the World Council had issued plans that had been stored for a long time as classified material in the data banks.
The plans for cutting down of certain forest areas, the laying out of farmlands, the building of roads, waterways, houses, factories, airports, and the hundreds of other items necessary poured out of the computers. Much of the labor and the operation of machines and robots was going to be done by many of those now stoned in the warehouses. Added to them would be all the nonproductive and semiproductive citizens and those who volunteered for the projects.
As a citizen who had no job, Caird knew that he would one day be drafted into the work force. The notice to report for instructions was displayed on the wall one morning when he went into the kitchen just after getting out of bed. Lotus Hiatt Wang, in whose apartment he was now living, was sitting at the table and drinking coffee. She was a store clerk whom he had met when he was purchasing an umbrella. She was tall and dark-haired and had blue eyes (depigmented) and was very pretty. But she tended at times to brood on the neglect of her by her parents. She also needed constant reassurance by him that he loved her. Despite her sometimes irritating and frustrating moods, he was very fond of her.
She was silent when he entered. He sighed, thinking that she had fallen into one of her black moods. But her sorrowful face was not caused by him or her parents. It was the message on a wallscreen. Though she had
turned off the buzzer alarm, the letters still waxed and waned bright orange.
While he was reading it, she said, “I knew it. Both of us! We’re going to be forced to go into the wilderness! And I don’t want to go!”
“We’ll be together.”
“You and your fucking optimism!” she said. “Pollyanna with a prick!”
“Look at it this way. It’s an adventure. A paid vacation with work to keep you from being bored. Think of all the sights, the new people you’ll meet. You’ve complained about how tedious your clerk’s job is. You may be operating a big bulldozer. Think of all that power in your hands. Imagine you’re flattening out your parents under those big metal treads.”
“Honestly,” she said, glaring, “you make me sick.”
He poured some coffee and sat down at the table. “Only sick people are made sick by other people.”
“That’s a sick proverb.”
He shrugged and patted her hand. He had a lot of compassion to pour out, and Lotus certainly soaked up much of it. Sometimes, though, she shed it like the stoned shed rain. She also resented his staying at home instead of working. He had ceased explaining that it was not his fault. “You can go out and find something to do that’ll pay off,” she always replied.
Nevertheless, on her days off she was usually cheery and fun to be around and as sexy as a Siamese cat in heat—if she did not happen to think of her parents. She liked being the roomie of a famous, if unemployable, man. Even when they went to Central Park for a picnic, he was recognized, and people were always coming up to talk to him. She glowed in the reflected light.
The next Tuesday, he and Wang reported, acknowledging via screen that they had received the notice. They told the screen to make a printout of the acknowledgement in case it should, by a remote chance, not be recorded at the bank of the Department of Extra-Employment. They waited six submonths before they got the notice to report in person at the DEE building on Houston and Womanway. Lotus called her manager at the store to inform him that she would not be able to come into work next morning. He told her that she was supposed to report for instruction at the DEE on her day off. The recently released regulations made that clear. After she transmitted the DEE order, he told her he would call her back. Three hours later, red-faced, he did so. He had been in quite a wrangle with the DEE official. Angrily, he told Lotus that she would have to take time off. Though he had pointed out the regulation to the son of a bitch at DEE, that son of a bitch had calmly said that the department could override regulations if circumstances demanded.