—From an earlier sermon by the luckless bishop whom Henry Butcher sabotaged
“Okay, Shalmaneser—you tell me what I ought to do!”
—Colloquial usage throughout N. America
(SHALMANESER That real cool piece of hardware up at the GT tower. They say he’s apt to evolve to true consciousness one day. Also they say he’s as intelligent as a thousand of us put together, which isn’t really saying much, because when you put a thousand of us together look how stupidly we behave.
—The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)
Never in human history did any manufactured object enter so rapidly into the common awareness of mankind as Shalmaneser did when they took the security wraps off. Adaptation of him as a “public image” for prose and verse followed literally within days; a few months saw him apotheosised as a byword, a key figure in dirty jokes, a court of final appeal, and a sort of mechanical Messias. Some of these cross-referred; in particular, there was the story about the same Teresa who cropped up in the New Zealand limerick, which told how they sent for a Jewish telepath to ask what happened, when they discovered that thanks to the liquid helium she was in a state of suspended animation, and he explained with a puzzled look that he could only detect one thought in her head—“Messias has not yet come.”
Also, until GT published a rota and scale of hire-charges, consultant computing firms in twenty countries trembled on the verge of bankruptcy as their clients decided to switch their custom to Shalmaneser.
Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere had been shown visiting Shalmaneser one hundred and thirty-seven times, more than was accorded to any other activity except freefly-suiting.
Orbiting on Triptine, Bennie Noakes was prouder of the fact that his imagination had produced Shalmaneser than he was of any other event he had dreamed up.
Factually: he was a Micryogenic® device of the family collectively referred to as the Thecapex group (THEoretical CAPacity EXceeds—human brain, understood) and of that family’s fourth generation, his predecessors having been the pilot model Jeroboam, the commercially available Rehoboam of which over a thousand were in operation, and the breadboard layout Nebuchadnezzar which turned out to have so many bugs in it they discontinued the project and cannibalised the parts.
The number of technical problems which had had to be solved before he could be put into operation beggared description; the final programme for the schematics required fourteen hours’ continuous operation of six Rehoboams linked in series, a capacity which the publicity department calculated would be adequate to provide a thousand-year solution for the orbits of the Solar System correct to twenty decimal places. And at that, using so much capacity for so long on a single task brought the chance of a sixfold simultaneous error to the thirty per cent level, so there was one chance in three that when they built the final version and switched it on something would have gone irremediably wrong.
Indeed, some of the original design team had recently been heard to express the heretical view that something had gone wrong with the schematics. By this time, they claimed, it should have been established beyond doubt that Shalmaneser was conscious in the human sense, possessed of an ego, a personality and a will.
Others, more sanguine, declared that proof of such awareness already existed, and evidenced certain quite unforeseen reactions the machine had displayed in solving complex tasks.
The psychologists, called in to settle the argument, left again with headshakes, divided into two equally opposed camps. Some said the problem was insoluble, and referred back to the ancient puzzle: given a room divided in two by an opaque curtain, and a voice coming from the other side, how do you discover whether the voice belongs to a cleverly programmed computer or a human being? Their rivals maintained that in their eagerness to see mechanical consciousness the designers had set up a self-fulfilling prophecy—had, in effect, programmed the schematics so as to give the impression of consciousness when information was processed in the system.
The public at large was quite unconcerned about the debate between the experts. For them, Shalmaneser was a legend, a myth, a folk hero, and a celebrity; with all that, he didn’t need to be conscious as well.
A few days after they rigged up the direct-verbal inputs—Shalmaneser was the first computer ever with sufficient spare capacity to handle normal spoken English regardless of the speaker’s tone of voice—one of the technicians asked him on the spur of the moment, “Shal, what’s your view? Are you or aren’t you a conscious entity?”
The problem took so long to analyse—a record three-quarters of a minute—that the inquirer was growing alarmed when the response emerged.
“It appears impossible for you to determine whether the answer I give to that question is true or false. If I reply affirmatively there does not seem to be any method whereby you can ascertain the accuracy of the statement by referring it to external events.”
Relieved to have had even such a disappointing answer after the worrying delay, the questioner said fliply, “So who do we ask if you can’t tell us—God?”
“If you can contact Him,” Shalmaneser said, “of course.”
“The case of Teresa’s instructive—
It shows how extremely seductive
A shiggy can be
If her an-atom-ee
Is first rendered super-conductive.”
—Quoted in the General Technics house organ, January 2010
continuity (19)
SEMPER ALIQUID NOVI
The leisurely niche he had carved out for himself, Norman recognised with dismay, had unfitted him to cope with a storm of information like the one now swamping him. He forced himself to keep going, red-eyed, sometimes hoarse, often suffering violent indigestion, until he was almost ready to welcome his physical discomfort as growing-pains.
If the Beninia project was to become reality, it had to negotiate three major obstacles. First, the early glamour of MAMP was wearing thin and shareholders were beginning to shake off their entitlements—which, while it allowed GT personnel in the know to buy at cut rates, created an unfavourable climate in the market. Second, a two-thirds majority at a general meeting had to be secured. And, third, President Obomi had taken the climactic step of informing his country about his illness, which meant that time was running out. Elihu claimed that he would like the scheme provided it was vouched for by his long-time personal friend, but there was no way of predicting what his successor would agree to.
Urgency drove them to exploit Shalmaneser’s incredible speed to the utmost. Not content with erecting and demolishing half a hundred hypothetical courses a day, they began to clear down on external contract work and make time for direct-voice questioning on aspects not fully clarified in the written programmes.
It was the first occasion Norman had ever worked directly with Shalmaneser. The night before he first spoke to the computer he dreamed of being imprisoned by walls of the pale green “hypothetical” printouts he had grown familiar with; the night after, his dream was of hearing it address him from his phone, his TV set, and the empty air.
There was little opportunity for dreaming, though. At the cost of near-exhaustion he kept abreast of the demands made on him. Half a dozen times a day Old GT called him for information which could have been had more readily from an encyclopedia bank, but he managed to convey acceptable answers. At endless conferences people applied to him for views and guidance and he responded as mechanically as if he were himself a computing engine, reeling off statistics, dates, local customs, snippets of history, even undisguised personal opinions which his listeners took in as uncritically as the rest.
He began to feel a little more pleased with himself. Under the slick professional mask he had adopted in order to make his way to the top in a paleass world, there was some kind of substance after all. He had been half-afraid there was only a hollow, like the candle-lit void of a turnip-ghost.
* * *
Even more than his desire to prove himself to himself, two other motives drove him o
n. One was admiration for Elihu Masters, who had detected that substance when the mask was still in place and gambled on it the outcome of a successful career. Norman had always cultivated the company grapevine; now it informed him that provided the Beninia project worked out Elihu could almost certainly be the next Ambassador to the UN, thus recouping the cachet lost when he opted for Port Mey instead of Delhi.
If it failed, on the other hand, he was finished.
And the second reason was simple puzzlement. By the end of the first week’s intensive planning, he knew rather more about Beninia than about most of the places he had lived in, without ever setting foot on its soil. Early on, the data he absorbed were simply shovelled in, making a heap in his mind through which he had to rummage to find out what he knew. Gradually they grew more organised, developed relationships, and ultimately took on the pattern of a baffling question.
How in the name of Allah the Merciful did Beninia come to be this way?
But for the mass of historical evidence, he could have suspected a gigantic public-relations confidence trick. “Everyone knew”—this was what it boiled down to—that when the European colonial powers moved in the tribes of equatorial and southern Africa had been in a state of barbarism instanced by a thousand recorded facts from Chaka Zulu’s murderous raiding to the readiness of tribes to sell their own children to the Arab slavers. “Everyone knew” that after the European withdrawal things went back to where they had been, aggravated by bitterness at the long period of foreign rule.
Not in Beninia. As Elihu put it, Zadkiel Obomi had performed the miracle of creating an African counterpart of Switzerland, walking a tightrope of dogged neutrality over a hell of intermittent violence.
But what had he got to—to power this achievement? That was where Norman ran into a blank wall. Switzerland’s neutrality was founded on clear advantages: a key location which only Napoleon had had the gall to trespass over among all the would-be modern Attilas—even the Nazis had found it profitable to leave Switzerland alone; a jealously guarded reputation for honesty in commerce that made her an international financial centre; skill in precision manufactures that converted the country’s lack of mineral resources into a positive blessing.
Contrast Beninia: located between powerful rivals either of which would cheerfully have sacrificed an army or two of burdensome unskilled labourers for the sake of annexing its fine main port and its river-routes through the Mondo Hills; economically non-viable, kept going only by constant foreign aid; and far from being industrialised, backward to a degree exceptional even in Africa.
Thinking of the anomalies gave Norman a headache, but he ploughed on, extending the area of his inquiries until the research department sent back a furious memo demanding whatinole connection events in the first year of the Muslim calendar could have with a twenty-first-century business venture.
Norman felt obscurely that if he could answer that he wouldn’t be so baffled by this hole-in-corner country.
However, the Research Dept was quite right—it was pointless to dig that far back because the records didn’t exist. There were hardly even any archaeological remains. Digging up the past was an expensive luxury in Beninian terms.
Norman sighed, and went back for yet another review of what he had learned.
* * *
“Happy is the country that has no history”—and for a long time the area later called Beninia qualified. Its first impact on the world scene occurred during the heyday of internal African slave-trading, when Arab pressure from the north drove the Holaini—a sub-branch of the Berbers, of Muslim faith and Hamitic race—past Timbuktu toward the Bight of Benin. There they came across an enclave of Shinka, hemmed in on one side by Mandingo and on the other by Yoruba.
These neighbours were accustomed to leaving the Shinka strictly alone, claiming that they were powerful magicians and could steal the heart out of a valiant fighting man. The Holaini scoffed; as good Muslims they discounted the idea of witchcraft, and certainly the unaggressive, welcoming Shinka—whom even the idea of slavery did not seem to arouse to anger—offered no obvious threat.
With the full intention of ranching the Shinka, cattle-fashion, as a constant source of slaves, the Holaini installed themselves as the new masters of the area. But, as though by the magic neighbouring tribes had described, the venture crumbled. After twenty years, no more slave-caravans were formed. The Holaini gradually became absorbed into the base population, leading a quiet rural existence, until by the twentieth century only their dialect and such physical traces as the “northern nose” and breadth of forehead remained to testify to their independent identity.
Superstition—perhaps—accounted for the subsequent unwillingness of the dealers who supplied the European slave-ship captains to tangle with the Shinka. They excused themselves on the specious ground that Shinkas made bad slaves, or that they were sickly, or that they were under the special protection of Shaitan. One or two European-led raids apart, they remained largely unmolested until the age of colonial exploitation.
When the carving was well under way, the British kicked out the Spanish, who had been maintaining a trading-station near the site of the modern Port Mey as an adjunct to their larger settlement on the nearby island of Fernando Po, and let the French in neighbouring Togo understand that Beninia was henceforth shadowed by the Union Jack.
And that, by and large, was that, apart from the legalistic regularisation of the situation into one analogous with Nigeria, the setting up of a “British Crown Colony and Protectorate”.
Until 1971, when the Colonial Office in London was seeking ways of disposing of its last few embarrassing overseas charges. Some, like the smallest Pacific islands, were pretty well hopeless cases, and the best that could be managed was to shuffle them off into someone else’s lap—the Australians’, for example. Beninia did not look at first as though it would pose the least difficulty, however. After all, Gambia, which was about the same size, had been independent for a few years already.
The trouble arose when they tried to find someone to hand over the government to.
There were a good few competent officials in Beninia, but owing to the fact that the Muslim pattern of paternalism conformed to the masculinist prejudices of nineteenth-century English public-school boys, most of them had been recruited among the northern minority, the Holaini. Exactly the same thing had happened in Nigeria. There, following independence, the majority group had revolted against this legacy of Victorian prejudice. The Colonial Office had no wish to repeat that mistake, even though the Shinka seemed to be peculiarly unpolitical. In fact, if they’d had the kindness to organise a proper political party to agitate for independence, the problem would never have arisen.
Casting around, the London bureaucrats hit on a young Beninian who, if he didn’t have a popular following, at least enjoyed popular esteem. Zadkiel Frederick Obomi had been educated in Britain and the United States. He came from a respectable, moderately well-to-do family. His ambition was to become an educational broadcaster, and he was doing jack-of-all-trades work at the only TV station serving the Bight area—lecturing, reading news bulletins, and commenting on current affairs in Shinka and Holaini. He had been seconded to supervise the news coverage of the last meeting of the Organisation for African Unity, and the delegates from Ethiopia and South Africa had both singled him out for praise, so there was no question of his acceptability outside Beninia.
Inside the country it was a different matter, chiefly because he himself had never thought of being president. Eventually, however, he was persuaded that no one else was qualified, and when his name was put to a plebiscite both Shinka and Holaini voters approved him by a thumping majority over a candidate backed largely by Egyptian funds.
Thankfully the British re-named Governor’s House, calling it the Presidential Palace, and went home.
At first, owing to inexperience, the new president seemed to be bumbling along. His first cabinet, chosen in ratio to the population of Holaini versus Shinka
with a slight bias towards the former because of their administrative background, accomplished practically nothing. Bit by bit, however, he replaced the British-trained ministers with people of his own choosing, some of whom volunteered to come home from comfortable foreign posts, like the incumbent minister of finance, Ram Ibusa, who had been teaching economics in Accra.
To everyone’s surprise, he coped well with a crisis that threatened him at the very end of his first term.
In former British and French colonies adjacent to Beninia, a commonplace feature of late twentieth-century Africa broke out—tribal quarrels flared up into rioting and sometimes a week or two of actual civil war. Large movements of Inoko and Kpala took place. Since Beninia was handy, and since it wasn’t in turmoil, both tribes’ refugees headed for there.
The people who had kicked them out weren’t interested in what had become of them. It was only later, after the economic facts of life had forced several ex-colonial countries to federate into groups sharing a common European language—such as Mali, Dahomey and Upper Volta into Dahomalia, and Ghana and Nigeria into RUNG—that they became aware of a curious phenomenon.
The Shinka were even poorer than the Inoko and the Kpala, and might have been expected to resent the extra burden the refugees placed on the country’s strained resources. But they had demonstrated no hostility. On the contrary, a generation of foreigners had been raised in Beninia who seemed perfectly contented and immune to all suggestions about insisting that their lands be incorporated with their original home nations.
Almost as though they regarded Obomi with the traditional awe accorded to his “magician” ancestors, the neighbouring giants seesawed back and forth between placation and aggression. The latter usually set in when some internal disorder made the invocation of an outside enemy desirable; the former was rarer, and only followed the intrusion of a common rival from elsewhere. Allegedly the German soldier of fortune whose bungled assassination attempt cost Obomi his eye had been hired and paid in Cairo. The resultant hostility among the Holaini against the notion of Pan-Islam decided the Arab world to return to its accustomed railing about Israel.