Their efforts mattered to Jen, of course. It was just that no one seemed to need her at the moment. And anyway, something even more important had to be attended to.
Her train of thought. It was precious, tenuous. A thread of concentration that absolutely had to be preserved … not for the world, but for its own sake. It was a self-involved, even selfish attitude, but Jen had long known she was a solipsist. Except during the years when her children had been growing, what had always mattered to her most was the trail of the idea. And this was a very big idea.
From the Net she drew references stretching back to Minsky and Ornstein, Pastor and Jaynes—and even poor old Jung—examining how each thinker had dealt with this peculiar notion … that one could somehow be many, or many combine to make one.
Her young student Nelson Grayson had really hit on it with his fixation on “cooperation versus competition.” The dichotomy underlay every human moral system, every ideology and economic theory, from socialism to free-market libertarianism. Each tried to resolve it in different ways. And every attempt only dredged up more inconsistencies.
But what if it’s a false dichotomy, after all? What if we’ve been seduced by those deducers, Plato and Kant and Hegel? By the if-and-therefore of linear logic? Perhaps life itself sees less contradiction than we do.
The motto on the old American coin haunted her. “From many, one.”
Our subselves usually aren’t distinct, except in multiple personality disorder. Rather, a normal person’s drives and impulses merge and cleave, marry and sunder, forming temporary alliances to make us feel and act in certain ways.
So far so good. The evidence for some form of multimind model was overwhelming. But then came the rub.
If I consist of many, why do I persist in perceiving a central me at all! What is this consciousness that even now, as I think these thoughts, contemplates its own existence?
Jen remembered back when Thomas had tried to interest her in reading novels. He had promised that the best ones would prove enlightening. That their characters would “seem to come alive.” But the protagonists were never realistic to Jen. Even when portrayed as confused or introspective, their thought processes seemed too straightforward. Too decisive. Only Joyce ever came close to depicting the real hurricane of internal conflict and negotiation, those vast, turbid seascapes surrounding an island of semi-calm that named itself “me.”
Is that why I must imagine a unitary self? To give the storm a center? An “eye” to revolve around? An illusion of serenity, so the storm might be ignored most of the time?
Or is it a way to rationalize a semblance of consistency? To present a coherent face to the outside world?
Of one thing fen felt certain. The universe inside a human mind was only vaguely like the physical one outside, with its discrete entities, its species, cells, organs, and individuals. And yet, the mind used those external entities as metaphors in the very models it used to define itself!
Today, Nelson had gotten worked up about one such model. Government, he said, consists of a nation’s effort to settle the differences amongst its component parts—its citizens. In olden times, the resolution was a simple matter of the imposition of fiat by a king or ruling class.
Later still, majority rule improved matters a little. But today even small minorities could make bombs and death bugs, if they got angry enough! (The blueprints were all there in the net, and who dared claim the role of censor?)
So compromise and consensus were absolutely essential, and governments could only tread carefully, never imposing solutions. Serving instead as forums for careful rapprochement.
In other words, the ideal government should be like a sane person’s conscious mind! It was a fascinating comparison. Almost as interesting as the next one Nelson spun out.
The World Data Net, he said, was the ultimate analog. Like a person, it too consisted of a myriad of tiny subselves (the eight billion subscribers), all bickering and negotiating and cooperating semi-randomly. Subscriber cliques and alliances merged and separated … sometimes by nationality or religion, but more often nowadays by special interest groups that leaped all the old borderlines … all waging minuscule campaigns to sway the world’s agenda and to affect their lives in the physical world.
Astonishing, Jen thought. The boy had made a major metaphorical leap.
Of course, the government analogy was a little overextended. But the notion that consciousness is our way of getting all our secret selves out into the daylight, so they’ll either cooperate or compete fairly—that’s the important part It explains why a neurosis loses most of its power once it’s known … as soon as all the mind gets to see those dark secrets one isolated part had kept hiden from the rest.
Walking past the busy technicians, Jen sat down at her display and resumed working on her model, modifying it along lines inspired by Nelson’s insight. The subvocal was the only input device fast enough to follow her driving pace. Her teeth clicked and her larynx bobbed as she almost spoke words aloud. The machine skimmed those phrases Jaster than she could have pronounced them, and it extrapolated, drawing from its capacious memory bits of this and that to fit into a growing whole.
Those bits were mostly object blocks taken from the very best intelligence-modeling programs around. That cost money, of course, and over in one corner Jen saw her personal account dip alarmingly. But each of the programs had something to recommend it. Each had been slaved over by teams of talented researchers with private theories they wanted to prove—each ostensibly contradictory, incompatible with the others.
At that moment, however, it had ceased mattering to Jen whose doctrine was closer to correct. Suddenly, it made perfect sense to merge them, combine them—to try to make a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
By the Mother … what if they’re all right? What if self-similarity and recursion can’t typify a living system without yet a third attribute—inclusion?
There was certainly a precedent for such a mélange … the human brain, the physical organ itself, was built in layers. Its newest evolutionary innovations hadn’t replaced earlier sections. Rather, each in turn was laid over older parts, joining and modifying them, not canceling or superseding.
Most recent were the prefrontal lobes, tiny nubs above the eyes which some called the seat of human personality … the latest floor of rooms added to a skyscraper of mind. Underneath lay the mammalian cortex, shared with man’s closest cousins. Lower then, but still useful and functional, the brain portions appropriate to reptiles still performed useful chores, while under those pulsed a basic reflex system remarkably like that found in primitive chordates.
So it would be with her model. Gradually pieces of the puzzle fell into place. The Berkeley Cognition Scheme, for instance, mated astonishingly well with the “emotional momentum” models of the Beijing University behaviorists. At least it did if you twisted each of them a bit first, in just the right way.
Of course, whenever she ventured into the net to seek these and other programs, she had to experience firsthand what was going on out there. It was utter chaos! Her early ferrets got completely lost in the maelstrom. She had to write better ones just to reach the big psychology library clearinghouse, in Chicago. And even then it took several tries before the emissaries came back with what she needed. The latest retrieval had taken seven whole seconds, causing her to smack the console in irritation.
By now Jen realized—with perhaps a pang of jealousy—that her own grandson had achieved unrivaled heights in the art of stirring people up, far exceeding her own modest accomplishments. The Net spumed with ferment over events Alex Lustig had set off. Somewhere, sometime soon, Jen figured the whole Rube Goldberg contraption had to blow a fuse.
Watch it, old girl. Your own metaphors give away your age.
Okay then, let’s try a few similes.
The chaos in the Net was like spray blowing over a small boat. All sorts of unwanted material accompanied the subroutines her ferrets brought back. Jen w
as both alarmed and amused when some bits of software dross actually fought not to be tossed out! They clung to existence in her computer like scrabbling little life-forms and had to be tracked down lest they scurry into some corner and use up scarce memory, or maybe even breed.
On impulse she looked to the small screen where she’d exiled the cartoon creatures called up by her own free associations. In the foreground, for instance, shimmered a teetering house of cards and spent, smoking electrical fuses, clearly extrapolated from recent surface mumblings.
Then there was the tiger symbol, which had lain in that same spot all these weeks. The simulacrum purred lowly, lounging on a nest of what looked like shredded paper.
She told the snippet of herself. If you insist on hanging around, then it’s time I put you to work.
The tiger yawned, but responded when she tapped two teeth together decisively—asserting the dominance of her central self over its parts. Subvocally she gave it instructions, to go hunt those spurious flurries of unwanted software—all the scampering, chittering irrelevancies that kept swarming into her work space from the Net’s chaos, disturbing her work.
The weathers high, she realized. At times like these, any mobile thing will seek shelter, anywhere it can.
With that thought, flecks of rain seemed to dampen the tiger’s fur, but not its mood. With another yawn and then a savage grin, the cat set forth to clear away all interlopers, to give her model room to settle and grow.
On other Polynesian islands, the people lived lives much the same as ours. Their chiefs, too, were beings of great mana. Our cousins, too, believed the course of the warrior was just below that of the gods.
But in other ways we differed. For when his canoes arrived from ancient Hiva, our forefather, Hotu Matu’a, knew at once where he had come. This is Te Pito o Te Henua—the island at the center of the world.
We had chickens and taro and bananas and yams. There was obsidian and hard black stone, but no harbor, and our canoes were lost.
What need had we of canoes? What hope to depart? For we believed the closest land to Rapa Nui was the bright moon itself, who passed low over our three cratered peaks—paradise overhead, barely out of reach. Believing we could get there with mana, we built the ahu and carved the moai.,
But we had slain great Tangaroa and were cursed to fail, to suffer, to live off the flesh of our brethren and see our children inherit emptiness.
It is hard, living at the navel of the world.
• CORE
He was shaving when the telephone rang.
Alex wasn’t happy with the new razor he’d bought after the escape from New Zealand. Its diamond blade was far too sharp, unlike his old one, which had worn down nicely over the years since his sixteenth birthday. That wasn’t the only thing he missed. Stan and George also—their steadiness and calm advice. Communications were supposed to be safe from the rising noisiness on the Net, but despite military assurances, they had worsened for days.
Were Spivey’s peepers conspiring to keep them apart? Or might George and Stan be snubbing him because of his growing campaign against the colonel’s control?
Alex prepared to run the blade over his face again, wondering if maybe it was time to quit being so old-fashioned and get his face depilated, like most other men.
A shrill chirping made his hand jerk. “Bloody hell!”
Alex tore off a sheet of toilet paper to stanch the wound. He recalled seeing a can of coagulant enzyme in the medicine cabinet and pulled aside the mirror to start rummaging for it.
The phone chirruped again, insistently. “Oh … all right.” He slammed the mirror shut. Applying pressure to stop the bleeding, he stepped into the tiny bedroom, sifted through the clutter on the nightstand for his wristwatch, and pressed the ACCEPT CALL button. “Yes?”
The person on the other end paused and then realized there would be no picture. “Tohunga? Is that you?”
From the Maori honorific, it had to have been one of the newcomers Auntie Kapur had sent to watch over Alex and his team. “Lustig here,” he affirmed. “What is it?”
“Better come quick, Tohunga. We caught a saboteur trying to blow up the lab.” The voice cut off with a click. Alex stared at the watch. “Cripes,” he said concisely. Grabbing a shirt off the dresser, he dashed out the door trailing shaving cream and tiny specks of blood.
“I guess we’re not needed anymore.”
“Come on, Eddie. We don’t know the bomb was sent by Spivey. What about a hundred other countries, alliances, agitation groups.… Hell, even the boy scouts must have some idea where the focal resonators are by now.”
His chief engineer grimaced. “I served in the ANZAC Special Forces, Alex. I know standard issue demolition charges when I see them.” The big, red-headed Kiwi hefted a tennis-ball-sized contraption. “The casing’s been altered to make it look like Nihon manufacture, but I just did a neutron activation scan, and I can tell you exactly which factory in Sydney made it. Even the lot number.
“Bloody sloppy of the bastards, if you ask me. They must have been confident we couldn’t stop ’em.”
Alex glanced over at the would-be saboteur, a nondescript Polynesian. Possibly a Samoan, whose appearance would presumably blend in with the natives of Easter Island. Except that the Pasquans of Rapa Nui were a breed apart and proud of it.
What kind of man takes a Jive bomb across the seas in order to blow up other people? People who have mothers and lovers and children, just like him?
Probably either a professional or a patriot, Alex thought. Or, worse, both.
The bomber smiled nervously at Alex.
He knows the way things ought to go now. According to the rules, we’d have to hand him over to Chilean authorities. Then, in the fullness of time, his masters will cut a deal for him.
Only what rules apply when everyone’s talking about the end of the world? Alex’s hands balled into fists. The saboteur seemed to read something in his eyes and swallowed hard.
Across the room, Alex saw Teresa watching him, arms folded in front of her. So what do we do now? he wondered. More than ever, he wished he could gather old friends and tap their wisdom.
“I agree. I’d lay odds it was Colonel Spivey who sent the bomb.”
Everybody turned to see who had spoken with such authority, in a rich, confident basso. “Manella!” Alex cried out. Teresa gasped.
Standing in the doorway, the Aztlan reporter smiled and carried his bulk gracefully into the chamber. Resting one arm on the guardrail of the gravity resonator, he smiled all around. “It’s good to see you remember me, Lustig. Hello, everybody. Captain Tikhana. Sorry to abandon you back in Waitomo. But I really was indisposed.”
“You choose convenient moments to come and go,” Teresa said bitterly. “What makes you think we’ll have any interest in what you have to say now, Pedro?”
Manella smiled. “Come come. I’m sure Colonel Spivey’s told you how much he respected whoever ran interference for our project, before he finally found us. Didn’t he admit that? Doesn’t that imply whose side I was on … am on?”
Alex frowned. Pedro was implying that even now he had his own tap into the Waitomo complex. Which was plausible enough. He’d had plenty of time to plant bugs. One fiber, as thin as silk, was all you needed.
“All good things come to an end, though. Eventually it was some hacker out on the Net who tracked us down. I got the warning only an instant before those peepers arrived.” Manella tapped the heavy-duty data watch on his left wrist. “No time to warn anybody, and I knew if I took Teresa along, the manhunt would sweep us both up in a trice anyway. But I bet Spivey wouldn’t think me worth the bother.”
“He hardly mentioned your name,” Teresa said, both confirming Manella’s split-second decision and emphasizing how little anybody cared about him.
He took the mixed insult with good grace. “Anyway, I’ve been keeping tabs on things, while maintaining a thin profile—”
Teresa interrupted. “Hah!”
&
nbsp; “—but I had a feeling something like this was in the works. That’s why I called your security chief this morning with a little tip.”
Alex swiveled to look at Auntie Kapur’s man. The big Maori shrugged. “Must’ve been him, tohunga.”
Teresa objected. “How do we know he didn’t send the saboteur, just so he could tip us off and win back our trust?”
“Oh, Captain.” Manella sighed. “Don’t you think I’m persuasive enough on my own account, without having to use tricks and legerdemain? Besides, I have no access to bombs and such. You just heard this wise man say the thing was ANZAC military issue.
“No, I just used this.” He tapped the side of his ample nose. “Lustig can tell you it never fails. I knew something was up. Had to be. Spivey can’t afford to leave you in operation any longer.”
“But … why?” one of the woman techs complained. “Just because we’ve been nudging Beta a little higher, so it evaporates a bit?”
Another engineer agreed. “It can’t be to keep things secret any longer, either. Private SIGs are correlating data from nearly every gazer beam, tossing out bad theories and zeroing in on the truth. Anyway, last night the NATO president said he’ll be making a big statement Tuesday. It’ll all go to the tribunals …”
“Which makes time all the more crucial to Spivey,” Pedro answered. “Tell me something, Alex. Are there signs of other resonators coming on line? Other than your original four?”
Oh, he’s good all right, Alex admitted in his thoughts, whether Manella had guessed this or discovered it by spying on them.