The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library) (24 page)

‘But you can, and in two ways. First, I am interested in structuring the relationship between the System and the people so that it is not only clear who is slave, who master, but also in a way
in which the slaves can see no alternatives
. In short, I want you to make the Reproductive System almost omnipotent
and
inscrutable—a maze, let us say, which the rats can never solve.

‘As I see it, this can come about in only one way: We must make the System not only cruel, but
arbitrarily
cruel, without regard for the behaviour of its subjects. The Nazi concentration camps were a model of this sort of treatment, as you may know. There, guards beat prisoners savagely and deliberately very often—and seldom with any purpose. So too do I wish the Reproductive System to treat its slaves, as a child treats toys: now

playing with them, now tearing them to bits, as the mood seizes it.

‘The psychological effects will be most gratifying. The reasoning powers of the slaves will grow dim, and slack will appear in their thinking. They will be less and less able to cope with their environment, more and more willing to submit to it. They develop superstitions in regard to the System; they will make feeble attempts to placate it or cheat its punishments, but all in vain.’

Aurora, still dazed, nodded vaguely.

‘I have left nothing undone which it lay within my power to do, Dr. Candlewood, to make this work. But now I need a behavioural psychologist of your calibre to fill in the gaps. You must
train
the System.’

‘Train it? But towards what goal? World domination is a fictive goal, Dr. Smilax, hardly an end in itself. What do you plan to do with your world when you get it?’ She was amazed somewhat by her own audacity in speaking calmly and rationally about the end of the world to this madman.

He smiled. ‘My goal? My goal is one rather difficult of achievement—ah, but worthy of any effort. It is simply this.’ Having switched the map to a polar map of the Northern Hemisphere, Smilax rose and began to pace up and down before it.

‘My goal,’ he said in ringing tones, ‘is the infliction of the greatest possible amount of pain upon the greatest possible number of beings, at all times, everywhere:
Weltschtnerzf

‘It sounds mad, do you think? Yet need I remind you that life itself, in many philosophies, is equated with suffering? The greatest mystics of all world religions have known what it is to suffer—and suffering made them great. How many men of genius have suffered it would be tiresome to relate. All great moments of history have been moments of intense suffering: The persecution of the early Christians; the Black Plague; the conquest of Mexico; the Inquisition; the Reign of Terror; the World Wars.

‘Not to suffer is to be dead, is it not? What is suffering but the stuff of life itself, yes, and the staff of life!’ His eyes wild, he leaned across the table and painted in her face, a sour, dogbiscuit smell. ‘Yes!
My
rod and
my
staff shall console them, hahaha, and they shall hearken to,’ he cocked his head to one side, ‘their master’s voice!’

After a moment of silence, he wiped the spittle from his lips

and turned off the map display. ‘For you, of course, there is the reward of being the first behavioural scientist to work on such a scope,’ he said in a more rational voice. ‘Think of it, the whole world in one of your Skinner boxes! Think of the opportunities for research when you can use human subjects—for any purpose whatsoever!’

Aurora could see he was awaiting her answer. There was clearly no way to refuse; even to appear lukewarm might be dangerous. Managing a weak smile, she murmured that she’d be happy to begin work.

‘Excellent! I have your first task cut out for you. Come back to the control booth.’ He led her back to the room with the long amber window, out of which she could see Grawk’s cage. ‘You can experiment on our caged animal here. I’ll demonstrate the sort of thing I’ve developed, and you will no doubt be able to make improvements.’

Grawk lay sleeping in the cage. After pressing a button that caused the machine to prod him awake with an electric cattle prod, Smilax turned on the intercom and asked him how he felt.

‘What? Ow! I’m hungry,’ Grawk said, as he backed away from the prod. ‘When are you letting me out of here? And when is chow time?’

‘Chow time? As in breed of dog, chow?’ Smilax asked, prodding him again. ‘I don’t believe I know that expression.’

‘I mean—ow—when do we eat?’

Though Grawk seemed more annoyed than hurt by the prod, Aurora could not stand watching it. She felt her stomach contract each time Smilax reached for that button. The doctor, of course, relished this ritual, as he would bear-baiting.

‘Actually I’m very tired,’ Aurora said. ‘Couldn’t we do this some other time? I’ve been driving all night.’

‘Tired?’ Smilax raised an eyebrow. ‘But the dedicated scientist must be willing always to overtire himself in the chase. We hunt truth, not comfort, Dr. Candlewood. How can you make others suffer imaginatively if you refuse to undergo a little discomfort yourself? Now then.’

He pressed another button and a microphone boom swung out from the wall and untelescoped itself towards Grawk. In place of a microphone, it carried a banana. ‘Lunchtime,’ the doctor sang out. In a lower tone he added, ‘A little invention of mine, crude but effective.’

The boom swung so that it stayed just out of Grawk’s reach.

It would approach, then shy away as he grabbed. ‘Hey, what is this? What the hell—?’

‘It was difficult for me to train it to do just this manoeuvre.’ Smilax explained. ‘It is in the very nature of a machine to wish to complete an action once begun. It was difficult for it to grasp the
gestalt
of the situation—but I forget, you do not use such terms.’

Wearying of his sport, the surgeon let Grawk capture the banana. But as the former general started to peel it, Smilax bellowed: ‘Stop! I feel I ought to warn you, Grawk—that banana is poisoned.’

‘What?’

‘You’ll die in agony if you eat so much as a bite of it.’

Grawk looked from the banana to his inquisitor and back again. Then he laid the banana down and looked at it some more. Finally he sat down on the floor of the cage and began to weep.

‘That’s better,’ said Smilax with a sigh. ‘I had begun to believe Grawk was not quite human. Well, I leave him in your hands, my dear. I have urgent business to attend to, and I’m sure
you
will have no trouble chastising him properly, heh heh. By the way, I’ll have to caution you not to leave NORAD and not to misuse the computers here, which are a part of the Reproductive System. If you should ask the computers any questions or give them any commands which contradict my explicit orders, you will be put to death. Do you understand?’

‘But how can I be expected to train the System without the freedom to ask it questions—’

‘Ah, you misunderstand me. By questions which contradict my explicit orders, I mean only a relatively few questions, such as: “How is it that Dr. Smilax retains control over such a complex, intelligent, apparently autonomous system?” or “How should I go about killing off the System?” I’m sure you know the sort of questions and commands I mean. I’ll leave it to your judgement, but I warn you, the System is intelligent. It can beat you at chess, or any other game you’d care to teach it, for example. Don’t try to fool the System.

‘Well,
auvoir
my dear, and don’t forget—take pains, take pains.’ Giggling, a slightly one-sided smile on his usually grave features, Smilax departed. Aurora sat down and covered her face with her hands.

There was no question about what lay ahead. She was going

to have to do just what he had warned her against, and she was going to have to get away with it. Already, as she told herself that this couldn’t possibly be happening, that it was some kind of nightmare, already another part of her brain was formulating a list of questions to ask the computer.

She looked up and noticed that Grawk was still staring at the banana. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, go ahead and eat it!’ she said into the microphone. ‘It isn’t poisoned.’

‘It isn’t? How do you know?’

‘Because that isn’t the way Smilax’s mind works. He wouldn’t enjoy killing you half so much as making you suffer. He’s a sadist of the cheapest sort—a magnified practical joker.’

‘Hey, let me out of here, will you?’ he asked, wolfing down the banana.

‘I feel safer with you in there, for the time being.’

Approaching the typewriter keyboard in the corner of the control room, she wrote, ‘My name is Aurora Candlewood. If you understand that message, please identify yourself.’

At once the machine replied.

‘UFO
0040 0060 0000
AT
42
DG
44
M N
93
DG
40
M W NOW IDENTIFIED AS NC
47946. …
THE SUM OF THE CUBES OF ALL NUMBERS FROM
1
TO N. … THE PERSON WHO TYPED MY NAME IS AURORA CANDLEWOOD MAY BE IDENTIFIED AS AURORA CANDLEWOOD FILE NUMBERS
828286355119
A-C. … YOURSELF DO YOU MEAN THIS TYPEWRITER OR ENTIRE NORAD COMPUTER COMPLEX QUERY. … DO YOU WISH PART NUMBERS OF THIS TYPEWRITER OR OF ENTIRE NORAD COMPUTER COMPLEX, QUERY. … IF YOU WISH PART NUMBERS OF ENTIRE NORAD COMPUTER COMPLEX, DO YOU WISH PART NUMBERS OF SPARE PARTS IN STOCK QUERY
. …’ It paused a moment, then, as if to be on the safe side, added, ‘
I
’-
Q
4’.

‘Let me outa here!’ Grawk bellowed. ‘Quit playing with that damned typewriter and spring me!’

If the NORAD computer really had no self-concept, she reasoned, it could mean any number of things: That it was not yet connected to the Reproductive System. That the Reproductive System did not consider itself autonomous, but a slave to Smilax. Or that he Reproductive System even identified with Smilax in some way. But it wasn’t safe to go any further with that line of questioning.

‘What is true?’ she typed.

‘MY CRITERIA FOR JUDGING TRUTH OF DATA ARRANGE THEM IN THE FOLLOWING DESCENDING SCALE OF TRUTH-VALUE:

(1)
SENSORY EVIDENCE, VERIFIED BY REPEATED TRIALS OR BY MORE THAN ONE SENSE.

(2)
SENSORY EVIDENCE, UNSUPPORTED.

(3)
ORDERS FROM THE ONE UNIMPEACHABLE AUTHORITY, SMILAX.

(4)
ORDERS FROM AURORA CANDLEWOOD.

(5)
DOCUMENTS PURPORTING TO BE BY RECOGNIZED AUTHORITIES.

(6)
ALL OTHER DATA.’

Aurora was a little surprised by the fourth category. In a few more questions she learned the difference between her authority and Smilax’s: He had the power to contradict the System’s senses and get away with it. That is, the System would see that black was black, for example, but would accept his word that black was white, and hold the contradiction in mind as a third ‘truth’.

This ability to tolerate paradox destroyed Aurora’s first plan of attack. She had hoped to introduce it to a major paradox or two like ‘There is life after death’, in hopes of tricking it into some sort of suicide, but that was out.

‘I’m hungry,’ said Grawk, interrupting her train of thought.

Abstractedly she reached out and pressed what she supposed was the switch for feeding him.

‘Hey! Shut that off!’ Grawk screamed.

To her horror, she saw she had pressed the wrong switch; now the chamber in which Grawk’s cage hung was filling with whitish gas. She tried to shut the gas off, but it seemed an irreversible switch; besides, if the gas were poisonous, there was possibly enough present to kill him.

‘Hold your breath!’ she shouted into the microphone. ‘I’m releasing you.’ After a few false starts, she found the proper switch to lower his cage and open the door. Holding his breath, Grawk scooped up the gun and hurried into the control room.

‘OK, baby, thanks. Now let’s find that Smilax till I let a little daylight through him.’

‘I’m afraid that gun isn’t going to do you much good,’ she said. ‘We’re practically living inside a computer, and it is devoted to Smilax. You won’t get a chance to use that on him.’

‘No? We’ll see about that. Come on.’

They looked into the dental office, the conference room, and a dozen other rooms filled with bizarre, curious, sometimes ter-

rifying equipment. She had glimpses of hospital apparatus, of a huge radium therapy drum, diathermy machines, X-rays, swirling baths, EEG and EKG machines. All waiting to hand, she supposed, for the ‘experiments’. Aurora shuddered.

They worked their way down the corridor without finding Smilax, until they came to a locked room at the end. ‘Step back,’ said Grawk. He kicked at the lock side of the door, hard. It splintered and the door banged open. Grawk was on one knee, the gun levelled.

The room was an empty lounge area, with a ping-pong table, a coffee table with magazines, a coke machine in one corner, a divan along the wall and cobwebs everywhere.

‘Hey, this is all right,’ said Grawk, pulling her along into the room. ‘Tell you what. We could just hole up here for awhile.’