Cherryh, C J - Alliance-Union 08 (43 page)

She would find Valery and tell him come back. And sera Schwartz too.

They would all be happy.

Q: Dr. Emory, we have time perhaps for a few more questions, if you wouldn't mind.

A: Go ahead.

Q: You're one of the Specials. Some people say that you may be one of the greatest minds that's ever lived, in the class of da Vinci, Einstein, and Bok. How do you feel about that comparison?

A: I would like to have known any one of them. I think it would be interesting. I think I can guess your next question, by the way.

Q: Oh?

A: Ask it.

Q: How do you compare yourself to other people?

A: Mmmn. That's not the one. Other people. I'm not sure I know. I live a very cloistered life. I have great respect for anyone who can drive a truck in the outback or pilot a starship. Or negotiate the Novgorod subway, [laughter] I suppose that I could. I've never tried. But life is always complex. I'm not sure whether it takes more for me to plot a genotype than for someone of requisite ability to do any of those things I find quite daunting.

Q: That's an interesting point. But do you think driving a truck is equally valuable? Should we appoint Specials for that ability? What makes you important?

A: Because I have a unique
set
of abilities. No one else can do what I do. That's what a Special is.

Q: How does it
feel
to be a Special?

A: That's very close to the question I thought you'd ask. I can tell you being a Special is a lot like being a Councillor or holding any office: very little privacy, very high security, more attention than seems to make sense.

Q: Can you explain that last—than seems to make sense?

A: [laughter] A certain publication asked me to detail a menu of my favorite foods. A reporter once asked me whether I believed in reincarnation. Do these things make sense? I'm a psychsurgeon and a geneticist and occasionally a philosopher, in which consideration the latter question actually makes more sense to me than the first, but what in hell does either one matter to the general public? More than my science, you say? No. What the reporters are looking for is an equation that finds some balance between my psyche and their demographically ideal viewer—who is a myth and a reality: what they ask may bore everyone equally by pleasing no one exactly, but never mind: which brings us finally to the question I expect you're going to ask.

Q: That's very disconcerting.

A: Ask it. I'll tell you if we've found it yet.

Q: All right. I think we've gotten there. Is this it? What do you know that no one else does?

A: Oh, I like that better. What do I know? That's interesting. No one's ever put it that way before. Shall I tell you the question they always ask? What it
feels
like to have a Special's ability. What do I know is a much wiser question. What I feel, I'll answer that quite briefly: the same as anyone—who is isolate, different, and capable of understanding the reason for the isolation and the difference.

What do I know? I know that I am relatively unimportant and my work is vastly important. That's the thing the interviewer missed, who asked me what I eat. My preference in wines is utter trivia, unless you're interested in my personal biochemistry, which
does
interest me, and does matter, but certainly that has very little to do with an article on famous people and food, whatever that means. If that writer discovered a true connection between genius and cheeses, I am interested, and I want to interview him.

Fortunately my staff protects me against the idly curious. The state set me apart because in the aggregate the state, the
people,
if you will, know that given the freedom to work, I will work, and work for the sake of my work, because I am a monomaniac. Because I do have that emotional dimension the other reporters were trying to reach, I do have an aesthetic sense about what I do, and it applies to what one very ancient Special called the pursuit of Beauty— I think everyone can understand that, on some level. On whatever level. That ancient equated it with Truth. I call it Balance. I equate it with Symmetry. That's the nature of a Special, that's what you're really looking for: a Special's mind works in abstracts that transcend the limitations of any existing language. A Special has the Long View, and equally well the Wide View, that embraces more than any single human word will embrace, simply because communicative language is the property of the masses. And the Word, the Word with a capital W, that the Special sees, understands, comprehends in the root sense of the term, is a Word outside the experience of anyone previous. So he calls it Beauty. Or Truth. Or Balance or Symmetry. Frequently he expresses himself through the highly flexible language of mathematics; or if his discipline does not express itself readily in that mode, he has to create a special meaning for certain words within the context of his work and attempt to communicate in the semantic freight his language has accumulated for centuries. My language is partly mathematical, partly biochemical, partly semantics: I study biochemical systems—human beings—which react predictably on a biochemical level to stimuli passing through a system of receptors—hardware—of biochemically determined sensitivity; through a biochemical processor of biochemically determined efficiency—hardware again—dependent on a self-programming system which is also biochemical, which produces a uniquely tailored software capable of receiving information from another human being with a degree of specificity limited principally by its own hardware, its own software, and semantics. We haven't begun to speak of the hardware and software of the second human being. Nor have we addressed the complex dimension of culture or the possibility of devising a mathematics for social systems, the games statisticians and demographers play on their level and I play on mine. I will tell you that I leave much of the work with microstructures to researchers under my direction and I have spent more of my time in thinking than I have in the laboratory. I am approaching a degree of order in that thought that I can only describe as a state of simplicity. A very wide simplicity. Things which did not seem to be related, are related. The settling of these things into order is a pleasurable sensation that increasingly lures the thinker into dimensions that have nothing to do with the senses. Attaching myself to daily life is increasingly difficult and I sometimes find myself needing that, the flesh needs affirmation, needs sensation—because otherwise I do not, personally, exist. And I exist everywhere.

At the end I will speak one Word, and it will concern humanity. I don't know if anyone will understand it. I have a very specific hope that someone will. This is the emotional dimension. But if I succeed, my successor will do something I can only see in the distance: in a sense, I
am
doing it, because getting this far is part of it. But the flesh needs rest from visions. Lives are short-term, even one extended by rejuv. I give you Truth. Someone, someday, will understand my notes.

That is myself, speaking the language not even another Special can understand, because his Beauty is different, and proceeds along another course. If you're religious you may think we have seen the same thing. Or that we must lead to the same thing. I am not, myself, certain. We are God's dice. To answer still another Special.

Now I've given you more than I've given any other interviewer, because you asked the best question. I'm sorry I can't answer in plain words. By now, the average citizen is capable of understanding Plato and some may know Einstein. The majority of scientists have yet to grasp Bok. You will know, in a few centuries, what I know right now. But humanity in the macrocosm is quite wise: because in the mass you are as visionary as any Special, you give me my freedom, and I prove the validity of your judgment.

Q: You can't interpret this thing you see.

A: If I could, I would. If words existed to describe it, I would not be what I am.

Q: You've served for decades in the legislature. Isn't that a waste? Isn't that a job someone else could do?

A: Good question. No. Not in this time. Not in this place. The decisions we make are very important. The events of the last five decades prove that. And I need contact with reality. I benefit in—a spiritual way, if you like. In a way that affects my personal biochemical systems and keeps them in healthy balance. It's not good for the organism, to let the abstract grow without checking the perceptions. In simpler terms, it's a remedy against intellectual isolation and a service I do my neighbors. An abstract mathematician probably doesn't have anywhere near our most junior councillor's understanding of the interstellar futures market or the pros and cons of a medical care system for merchanters on Union stations. By the very nature of my work, I do have that understanding; and I have a concern for human society. I know people criticize the Council system as wasting the time of experts. If providing expert opinion to the society in which we all live is a waste of time, then what good are we? Of course certain theorists can't communicate out-field. But certain ones can, and should. You've seen the experts disagree. Sometimes
it's
because one of us fails to understand something in another field. Very often it's because the best thinking in two fields fails to reconcile a question of practical effects, and that is precisely the point in which the people doing the arguing had better be experts: some very useful interdisciplinary understandings are hammered out in Council and in the private meetings, a fusion of separate bodies of knowledge that actually sustains this unique social experiment we call Union.

That's one aspect of the simplicity I
can
explain simply: the interests of all humans are interlocked, my own included, and politics is no more than a temporal expression of social mathematics.

"This bell has to ring once when you push the left-hand button and twice when you push the right-hand button," the Super said, and Florian listened as the problem clicked off against the things he knew. So far it was easy to wire. "But—" Here came the real problem, Florian knew. "But you have to fix it so that if you push the left-hand button first it won't work at all and if you push the right-hand button twice it won't work until you push the left-hand button. Speed does matter. So does neatness. Go."

Parts and tools were all over the table. Florian collected what he needed. It was not particularly hard.

The next job was somebody else's project. And you had to look at the board and tell the instructor what it would do.

His fingers were very fast. He could beat the clock. Easy. The next thing was harder. The third thing was always to make up one for somebody else. He had fifteen minutes to do that.

He told the Instructor what it was.

"Show me how you'd build that," the Instructor said. So he did.

And the Instructor looked very serious and nodded finally and said: "Florian, you're going to double up on tape."

He was disappointed. "I'm sorry. It won't work?"

"Of course it'll work," the Instructor said, and smiled at him. "But I can't give that to anybody on this level. You'll do double-study on the basics and we'll see how you do with the next. All right?"

"Yes," he said. Of course it was yes. But he was worried. He was working with Olders a lot. It was hard, and took a lot of time, and they kept insisting he take his Rec time, when he had rather be at his job.

He was already late a lot, and Andy frowned at him, and helped him more than he wanted.

He thought he ought to talk to the Super about all of it. But he made them happy when he worked hard. He could still do it, even if he was tired, even if he fell into his bunk at night and couldn't even remember doing it.

The Instructor said he could go and he was late again. Andy told him the pigs didn't understand his schedule and Andy had had to feed them.

"I'll do the water," he said, and did it for Andy's too. That was fair. It made Andy happy.

It made Andy so happy Andy let him curry the Horse with him, and go with him to the special barn where they had the baby, which was a she, protected against everything and fed with a bucket you had to hold. He wasn't big enough to do that yet. You had to shower and change your clothes and be very careful, because they were giving the baby treatments they got from the Horse. But she wasn't sick. She played dodge with them and then she would smell of their fingers and play dodge again.

He had been terribly relieved when Andy told him that the horses were not for food. "What
are
they for?" he had asked then, afraid that there might be other bad answers.

"They're Experimentals," Andy had said. "I'm not sure. But they say they're working animals."

Pigs were sometimes working animals. Pigs were so good at smelling out native weeds that drifted in and rooted and they were so smart at not eating the stuff that there were azi who did nothing but walk them around, every day going over the pens and the fields with the pigs that nobody would ever make into bacon, and zapping whatever had sneaked inside the fences. The machine-sniffers were good, but Andy said the pigs were better in some ways.

That was what they meant in the tapes, Florian thought, when they said one of the first Rules of all Rules was to find ways to be useful.

Ari read the problem, thought into her tape-knowing, and asked maman: "Does it matter how many are boys and how many are girls?"

Maman thought a moment. "Actually it does. But you can work it as if it doesn't."

"Why?"

"Because, and this is important to know, certain things are less important in certain problems; and when you're just learning how to work the problem, leaving out the things that don't matter as much helps you to remember what things are the most important in figuring it. Everything in the world is important in that problem—boys and girls, the weather, whether or not they can get enough food, whether there are things that eat them—but right now just tile genes are going to matter. When you can work all those problems, then they'll tell you how to work in all the other things. One other thing. They'd hate to tell you you knew everything. There might be something else no one thought of. And if you
thought
they'd told you everything, that could trick you. So they start out simple and then start adding in whether they're boys and girls. All right?"