Steel Beach (18 page)

What sort of guests did David spread his filthy welcome mat for? Well, what sort of vermin live in grasslands? I’d never seen a prairie dog peeking from his coiffure, but I wouldn’t have been surprised. He was home to a scamper of mice, a shriek of shrews, a twittering of finches, and a circus of fleas. A trained biologist could easily have counted a dozen species of insects without even getting close. All these creatures were born, reared, courted, mated, nested, ate, defecated, urinated, laid their eggs, fought their battles, stalked their prey, dreamed their dreams and, as must we all, eventually died in the various biomes that were David. Sometimes the carcasses fell out; sometimes they didn’t. All more fertile soil for the next generation.

All Earthists stink; it goes with the territory. They are perennial defendants in civil court for violation of the body odor laws, hauled in when some long-suffering citizen on a crowded elevator finally decides he’s had enough. David Earth was the only man I knew of in Luna who was permanently banished from the public corridors. He made his way from ranch to disneyland to hydroponic farm by way of the air, water, and service ducts.

“My membership is alarmed if that is your best offer,” said David’s companion, a much smaller, much less prepossessing fellow whose only animal attributes I could see were a modest pair of pronghorn antlers and a lion’s tail. “One hundred murders is nothing but wanton slaughter, and we totally reject it. But after careful consultation, we’re prepared to offer eighty. With the greatest reluctance.”

“Eighty
harvested
,” Callie leaned on the word, as she always did. “Eighty is simply ridiculous. I’ll go broke with a quota of eighty. Come on, let’s go up to my office right now, I’ll show you the books, there’s an order of seventy carcasses from McDonald’s alone.”

“That’s your problem; you should never have signed the contract until these negotiations were concluded.”

“Don’t sign the contract, I lose the customer. What do you want to do, ruin me? Ninety-nine, that’s my absolutely no-fooling final offer; take it or leave it. I don’t think I can turn a profit even with a hundred, it’ll be touch and go. But to get this over with…  I’ll tell you what. Ninety-eight. That’s twelve less than what you gave Reilly, just down the road, not three days ago, and his herd’s smaller than mine.”

“We’re not here to discuss Reilly, we’re talking about your contract, and your herd. And your herd is not a happy herd, I’ve heard nothing but grievances from them. I simply can’t allow one more murder than…  ” He glanced at David, who shook his head barely enough to disturb a single amber wave of grain. “Eighty,” pronghornhead concluded.

Callie seethed silently for a while. There was no hope of talking to her just yet, not until the unionists repaired for consultations with their clients, so I moved back from the fire a little. Something about the bargaining process had struck me as relevant to my situation.

“CC,” I whispered. “Are you there?”

“Where else would I be?” the CC murmured softly in my ear. “And you only need to sub-vocalize; I’ll pick up your words easily enough.”

“How would
I
know where you’d be? When I called for you after you rowed away from me, you didn’t answer. I thought you might be sulking.”

“I didn’t think it would be profitable for either of us to discuss what I’d just told you until you’d had time to think it over.”

“I have, and I’ve got a few questions.”

“I’ll do my best to answer them.”

“These union reps. Are they really speaking for the dinosaurs?”

There was a medium-sized pause. I guess the question did seem irrelevant to the issue at hand. But the CC withheld comment on that.

“You grew up on this ranch. I’d have thought you would know the answer to that question.”

“No, that’s just it. I’ve never really thought about it. You know Callie’s feelings about animal rights. She told me the Earthists were nothing but a bunch of mystics who had enough political clout to get their crazy ideas put into law. She said she had never believed they actually communed with the animals. I believed her, and I haven’t thought about it for seventy, eighty years. But after what I’ve just been through, I wonder if she’s right.”

“She’s mostly wrong,” the CC said. “That animals feel things is easily demonstrable, even down at the level of protozoans. That they have what you would recognize as
thoughts
is more debatable. But since I am a party to these negotiations—an indispensable party, I might add—I can tell you that, yes, these creatures are capable of expressing desires and responding to propositions, so long as they are expressed in terms they understand.”

“How?”

“Well…  the contract that will eventually be hammered out here is entirely a human instrument. These beasts will never be aware of its existence. Since their ‘language’ is confined to a few dozen trumpeted calls, it is quite beyond their capacity. But the
provisions
of the contract will be arrived at by a give-and-take process not unlike human collective bargaining. Callie has injected all her stock with a solution of water and some trillions of self-replicating nano-engineered biotropic mechanisms that—”

“Nanobots.”

“Yes, that’s the popular term.”

“You have something against popular terms?”

“Only their imprecision. The term ‘nanobot’ means a very small self-propelled programmed machine, and that includes many other varieties of intracellular devices than the ones currently under discussion. The ones in your bloodstream and within your body cells are quite different—”

“Okay, I see what you mean. But it’s the same principle, right? These little robots, smaller than red blood cells…  ”

“Some are much smaller than that. They are drawn to specific sites within an organism and then they go to work. Some carry raw materials, some carry blueprints, some are the actual construction workers. Working at molecular speeds, they build various larger machines—and by larger, you understand, I still mean microscopic, in most cases—in the interstices between the body cells, or within the cell walls themselves.”

“Which are used for…  ”

“I think I see where you’re going with this. They perform many functions. Some are housekeeping chores that your own body is either not good at, or has lost the capacity to do. Others are monitoring devices that alert a larger, outside system that something is going wrong. In Callie’s herd, that is a Mark III Husbander, a fairly basic computer, not significantly altered in design for well over a century.”

“Which is a part of you, naturally.”

“
All
computers in Luna except abaci and your fingers are a part of me. And in a pinch, I could use your fingers.”

“As you’ve just shown me.”

“Yes. The machine…  or I, if you prefer, listens constantly through a network of receivers placed around the ranch, just as I listen constantly for your calls to me, no matter where you are in Luna. This is all on what you might think of as my subconscious level. I’m never aware of the functioning of your body unless I’m alerted by an alarm, or if you call me on-line.”

“So the network of machines that’s in my body, there’s one like it in each of Callie’s brontosaurs.”

“Related to it, yes. The neural structures are orders of magnitude less evolved than the ones in your brain, just as your organic brain is superior in operation to that of the dinosaur. I don’t run any parasitic programs in the dinosaur brain, if that’s what you mean.”

I didn’t think it was what I meant, but I wasn’t completely sure, since I wasn’t completely sure why I’d asked about this in the first place. But I didn’t tell the CC that. He went on.

“It is as close to mental telepathy as we’re likely to get. The union representatives are tuned into me, and I’m tuned into the dinosaurs. The negotiator poses a question: ‘How do you fellows feel about 120 of your number being harvested/murdered this year?’ I put the question in terms of predators. A picture of an approaching tyrannosaur. I get a fear response: ‘Sorry, we’d rather not, thank you.’ I relay it to the unionist, who tells Callie the figure is not acceptable. The unionist proposes another number, in tonight’s case, sixty. Callie can’t accept that. She’d go broke, there would be no one to feed the stock. I convey this idea to the dinosaurs with feelings of hunger, thirst, sickness. They don’t like this either. Callie proposes 110 creatures taken. I show them a smaller tyrannosaur approaching, with some of the herd escaping. They don’t respond quite so strongly with the fear and flight reflex, which I translate as ‘Well, for the good of the herd, we might see our way clear to losing seventy so the rest can grow fat.’ I put the proposal to Callie, who claims the Earthists are bleeding her white, and so on.”

“Sounds totally useless to me,” I said, with only half my mind on what the CC had been saying. I was seeing a vision of myself living within the planet-girdling machine that the CC had become, and of him living within my body as well. The funny thing was that nothing I’d learned since arriving at Scarpa Island had been exactly new to me. There were new, unheralded capabilities, but looking at them, I could see they were inherent in the technology. I’d had the facts, but not enough of them. I’d spent almost no time thinking about them, any more than I thought about breathing, and even less time considering the implications, most of which I didn’t like. I realized the CC was talking again.

“I don’t see why you should say that. Except that I know your moral stand on the whole issue of animal husbandry, and you have a right to that.”

“No, that whole issue aside, I could have told you how this all would come out, given only the opening bid. David proposed sixty, right?”

“After the opening statement about murdering any of these creatures at all, and his formal demand that all—”

“ ‘—creatures should live a life free from the predation of man, the most voracious and merciless predator of all,’ yeah, I’ve heard the speech, and David and Callie both know it’s just a formality, like singing the planetary anthem. When they got down to cases, he said sixty. Man, he must really be angry about something, sixty is ridiculous. Anyway, when she heard sixty, Callie bid 120 because she knew she had to slaughter ninety this year to make a reasonable profit, and when David heard
that
he knew they’d eventually settle on ninety. So tell me this: why bother to consult the dinosaurs? Who cares what they think?”

The CC was silent, and I laughed.

“Tell the truth.
You
make up the images of meat-eaters and the feelings of starvation. I presume that when the fear of one balances out the fear of the other, when these poor dumb beasts are equally frightened by lousy alternatives—in
your
judgement, let’s remember—well, then we have a contract, right? So where would you conjecture that point will be found?”

“Ninety carcasses,” the CC said.

“I rest my case.”

“You have a point. But I actually
do
transmit the feelings of the animals to the human representatives. They do feel the fear, and can judge as well as I when a balance is reached.”

“Say what you will. Me, I’m convinced the jerk with the horns could have as easily stayed in bed, signed a contract for ninety kills, and saved a lot of effort. Then prong-head could look for useful work. Maybe as a gardener in David’s hairdo.”

There was a long silence from the CC. When he spoke again it was in a different tone of voice from his usual lecturing mode.

“The man with the horns,” he said, quietly, “is actually mentally defective in a way I’ve been powerless to treat. He cannot read or write, and is not really suited for many jobs. And Hildy, we all need something to do in this world. Life can seem pointless without gratifying work.”

That shut me up for a while. I knew only too well how pointless life could seem.

“And he really does love animals,” the CC added. “He hurts when he thinks of one dying. I shouldn’t be telling you any of this, as I’m prohibited from commenting on the qualities, good or bad, of human citizens. But in view of our recent relationship, I thought…  ” He let it trail off, unfinished.

Enough of that.

“What about death?” I asked him. “You mentioned hunger and the image of a predator. I’d think you’d get a stronger reaction if you planted the idea of their actual deaths in their minds.”

“Much more of a reaction than you’d want. Predators and hunger
imply
death, but inspire less fear than the actual event. These negotiations are quite touchy; I’ve tried many times to talk Callie into holding them indoors. But she says that if ‘salad-head’ isn’t afraid to pow-wow in the middle of the herd, she isn’t either. No, the death-image is the nuclear weapon of predator/prey relations. It’s usually a prelude to either an attempt at union-busting, or a boycott.”

“Or something even more serious.”

“So I infer. Of course, I have no proof.”

I wondered about that. Maybe the CC was leveling with me when he said he only spied into private spaces in circumstances as unusual as my own. Or into minds, for that matter. I certainly no longer doubted that he could easily become aware of illegal activities such as sabotage or head-busting by hired goon squads—the time honored last resorts of labor and management, and even more in vogue these days among radical groups like the Earthists who, after all, couldn’t call on their “membership” to go on strike. What would a brontosaur do? Stop eating? The CC could certainly look into the places where the bombs were assembled, or could become aware, if he chose to do so, of the intent of the bomb-thrower through readings from his ubiquitous intercellular machines. Every year there were calls to permit him precisely those powers, by the law-and-order types. After all, the CC is a benevolent watchdog, isn’t he? Who has he ever hurt, except those who deserved it? We could reduce crime to zero overnight if we’d only take the chains off the CC.

I’d even leaned that way myself, in spite of the civil libertarian objections. After my sojourn on Scarpa Island, I found myself heartily on the other side of the question. I suppose I was simply illustrating that old definition of a liberal: a conservative that just got arrested. A conservative, of course, is a liberal who just got mugged.