The Complete Karma Trilogy (25 page)

They started walking again, and made their way up the stairs. On the first growing floor, the auditor inspected the plants, and took into his hand every budding fruit and vegetable that he could find, to gauge their weight. “Not bad,” he said slowly, as if it was a difficult admission to make. He walked down all the rows of tables, counting green beans, lettuce, peppers. He even took the time to count all of the flower buds on a young tomato plant, which he had to climb onto the table to accomplish. After he made it through the whole floor, he said to Percy, “I think I’ve seen enough. Find me a small room where I can set up shop. I’ll meet with everyone one-on-one, to disburse their stipends.”

“Right this way,” Percy said.

Several hours later, Hardin was alone with the auditor in a closet of cleaning supplies. The smell of bleach was heavy in the air, and he was forced to sit on an upturned bucket. The auditor sat at a throne of brooms. Because he had to deal with over three hundred people in their commune, he wasted no time on formalities. He said, while looking at his tablet, “Salvor Hardin? How much food have you produced, within the last month? Rounded to the nearest half kilogram.”

“Nothing.” Hardin easily made an admission that a conscientious person would have had difficulty saying.

The auditor expressed his professional distaste with a frown and an admonition. “I was told by your leader that everyone here contributed equally. And everyone else that I’ve spoken with has made the same claim, they say, ‘we produced two hundred and fifty kilograms of food this month, together. Whatever that is divided equally, that’s what I made.’ And even though I have my doubts about this whole affair, that’s what I’ve been writing down. But you say you’ve grown nothing. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t tell you that you have to do better than that, much better.”

He took out a small card reader from the briefcase he carried. “But at the same time, it’s good to finally hear some honesty. Like I said, this whole place just smells wrong.” All Hardin could smell was bleach. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do—give me your Card.” Hardin took out his Card—not the electronic ones that had become useless after Karma was destroyed, but rather the plastic card with a magnetic strip that had replaced it in function—and handed it over. The auditor swiped it on his card reader. “Because I appreciate a little honesty every now and then, I’m going to enter that you produced two kilograms last month. That will be enough to put you in the third tier, so you’ll have plenty to eat for this next month. Think of it as a reward.” He returned Hardin’s Card, and pushed a few buttons on his tablet.

Hardin felt no joy in being arbitrarily rewarded for his honesty. For one thing, the auditor didn’t seem to understand that his government stipend would be shared with the rest of the commune, and so it wasn’t really a reward at all. But also it reminded Hardin of everything that was wrong with Darcy’s system. The people that needed food the least, the people that were competent gardeners, were given the most by the government. The unfortunate or the unlucky were given the least. Or at least that was the perverse way the system was supposed to function—in reality, it was the people that lied best that were given the most. The government auditors, like the one Hardin was speaking with, had no way of actually knowing how much any given person produced. They merely looked around, asked questions, and made arbitrary judgments. If a person could appease a random auditor every month, that was enough to make a decent living.

As a symbol of how unfair the system was, the auditor had an Evaporation Pen in the lapel pocket of his suit. It looked like a normal pen, and was just as inconspicuous, but Hardin could tell the difference. The old regime was posthumously condemned as immoral and replaced, but the new regime used the same exact weapons. When someone disagreed with the auditor’s evaluation and became angry, became violent, the auditor would simply kill them. The auditor didn’t have much of a choice—since he was the only person standing between starving people and a large supply of food, his life was always in jeopardy. So he showed up at unannounced times, and only met people one-on-one in small rooms where he could put his back against a wall.

“Thank you,” Hardin said, because it was appropriate.

“Send the next person in,” the auditor replied.

Mars 6

Coffee and Other Miracles

Darcy and his
biographer spent their first night discussing the trivial kinds of things that were necessary for any biography—when he was born, where he went to school, what his parents did for a living, and other questions about his childhood. Because Darcy didn’t really care how his childhood was represented, he painted the writer vague pictures of what amounted to a typical upbringing.

On the second night, they reached the topics that Darcy really wanted to expand on, the first of which was the Folgers Revolt.

“You said your parents died when you were in middle school?” the writer asked.

“That’s right. In the Folgers Revolt.”

“Forgive me, but I don’t know much about the Folgers Revolt. I feel like I’ve heard of it, but it was just a little before my time. Could you tell me a little bit about that?”

“Of course. First of all, the fact that it’s called the Folgers Revolt is sort of a disservice to the memory of the people that died there. But by popular decry, that’s what it’s called. And I understand why it’s called that—in a superficial way, the revolt was caused by a large shortage of coffee. But three thousand people didn’t give their lives for coffee. It was much more than that.

“What those people had a problem with was how the shortage was handled—instead of increasing the price of coffee, like standard laissez faire economics would recommend, the coffee was seized by the Government and distributed evenly amongst its members. It might seem laughable in a certain light, but that’s a very clear case of class division. And even though there are so many more examples of class division in everyday life, all of which would seem more serious, for whatever reason that one struck a chord.

“As I said before, my parents were very politically active. They were always participating in public demonstrations, organizing events, things like that. Very passionate people. So they participated. And the Folgers Revolt started out as a peaceful demonstration, just a crowd of people displaying their frustration with the Government. But then a few people got violent, the police were called in, the violence escalated, and soon enough they felt compelled to take drastic measures. Everyone in the crowd was killed.”

“That’s terrible,” the biographer replied, not neglecting to jot a few things down first. “You’d think something like that would be talked about more in the media.”

“Not when the Government controls the media.”

“You seem to harbor a lot of resentment towards the Government. Would you say that it was this incident that caused you to turn down the position they offered you, right before Karma was destroyed?”

“Back up,” Darcy replied. “I never said I resented the Government. The Folgers Revolt wasn’t entirely the Government’s fault—I did some research, and as it turns out Karma only wanted a few of the people there punished. People that had actually committed crimes, and so were in fact deserving of punishment. My parents, if the records are true, actually assaulted a police officer. I don’t know why they did it, but in a sense they brought what happened to them on themselves.

“But many other people died, people that did nothing wrong. And in that respect it was the police officers that made a mistake, even though their mistake was entirely forgivable—they were afraid, they resorted to violence. The real problem was the system. We’d deviated too far from proper human interactions. That’s one of the things I’m trying to correct, as Rex.”

“My mistake. I didn’t mean to misrepresent you,” the writer responded. “It would probably be best if you carefully read this biography over, before it’s published.”

“I have every intention,” Darcy said.

“So, forgetting the resentment, this incident could have caused your anxiety about joining the Government, and contributing to a system that you had fundamental objections to?”

“That sounds reasonable,” Darcy replied. “I’m not a psychologist or anything, and my thinking was never that deliberate, but at the very least that seems to make sense.”

“Very good. What about your motivation for doing Good Works? Did this incident, and losing your parents, contribute to that in any way? I know you’ve said before that it’s pure altruism that inspires you—sorry, paraphrasing—but perhaps an incident like this…”

“No. It got me thinking, but I was only in middle school, after all. If you’re looking for what caused me to focus so much on Good Works, then that would be an incident I was involved in when I was in college.”

“Please, continue,” he said, his pen at the ready.

“So I was sitting in a park, because that’s something I did a lot of back on Earth, where you had to strive to find a reasonably pleasant atmosphere, and this scene developed around me while I was reading a textbook. I probably would have missed the whole thing if amplifiers had been more exciting, but I put it down for a moment’s respite and suddenly it was all happening around me.

“It was City Park, which you might know was the largest Privacy Room in the Americas. You seem pretty young, I don’t mean to offend you by telling you things you already know. Anyway, it’s necessary to the episode that you realize that Karma had nothing to do with it—no one was watching except for people. No one was making decisions, except for people.

“A citizen had somehow gotten a knife to the throat of a police officer. The police officer was defenseless, because somehow he had dropped his Evaporation Pen—perhaps because the man had disarmed him, perhaps because the officer lost his coordination in the excitement, I don’t know. Anyway, one of the bystanders, of which there were many, picked up the Evaporation Pen, had it in his hands.

“I was later to learn that the police officer had been sent to the Park specifically to watch over the man that now threatened to kill him, because the Government had a very good idea that he was a man on the edge, about to perform some drastic act. They had hours of recordings of him telling people about his intentions, making preparations, making threats. But, in the spirit of civic liberty, he was not detained, warned, or anything, until he committed something that was actually a crime. That’s a choice that a society which knows everything must make—whether it is enough to be certain that an outcome will happen to take action against it, or if it must be allowed to happen first.

“And here it was unfolding. The man with the knife had already drawn blood, and the more time went by, the deeper into the police officer’s neck it crept, millimeter by lethal millimeter. Everyone knew that the officer would die if nothing was done.

“And that other man in the crowd, his name was Scott, had his own choice to make—what he would do with the weapon he had in his hands. I watched him fiddle with the range selector, I watched him put his finger on the button that, in small print, says ‘fire.’ And eventually he did. With deliberation he chose three meters, and shot the crazed man in the face with a beam of light. What Scott might not have known is that any skin-to-skin contact would have caused both people to be incinerated, because of the nature of the reaction, but that’s the kind of thing they don’t teach in public school. Anyway, all that was left when the smoke cleared was a police officer with a knife embedded in his neck. Scott was lucky.

“For a time. Scott technically killed a person. And as wonderful as it is to live in a society with a system of law that is both clear and strict, every now and then the law has to make bold, controversial statements about morality. The specific law in question says that killing is only excusable if done in self-defense, and as it happened Scott’s life was in no way threatened. And for whatever reason no provision was made for saving another person’s life, most likely because that becomes too abstract to be tenable.

“A jury of his peers probably wouldn’t have convicted Scott, but Scott didn’t have a jury of his peers. He had Karma, a computer, to decide the consequence of his actions. And yet Karma didn’t see it happen, so there was still a way out for him.

“Do you know who convicted him of murder?” Darcy asked.

“No,” the biographer answered, politely.

“The police officer. And I only know all of this because it was one of those rare cases where witnesses had to be asked questions, and in the end, after Scott was Evaporated, we got to look over all of the files. The man that Scott saved gave him his death sentence. Because the penalty for murder is death.

“One of the things I still find exceptional about all of this is that Scott knew exactly what the consequence was going to be. He said so, right after he Evaporated the man. He said, ‘And now it will have to be me too.’ But he did it anyway. He found a purpose, saving a life, that he valued over his own life.

“In fact I have respect for everyone involved. The police officer did what was his duty. He was prepared to die, knowing his assailant would be accordingly punished after his death, if his death were to come—but it might not have. The crime was never committed. By pulling the trigger, Scott precluded the miraculous possibility that the man with the knife would have repented, and let the police officer go. The police officer had the strength of principle to condemn the man he owed his life to, because he had the strength of character to set his personal attachments aside.

“And the would-be-killer himself. His name was Sean, I remember now. One of the other things I had the pleasure of discovering, reviewing the case, was why he was so intent on killing the police officer. His own wife and child had been killed in a violent police raid that had destroyed their apartment building while he was off doing something else. A wall had fallen on them, and so they died. But no recompense was given to him, since such casualties are the occasional price of maintaining peace. Even if the officers could have perhaps been less destructive, were they obligated to? Sean believed so. So he took his revenge the only way he knew how, a man of his obscurity—a police force with less people in it is, by rational argument, capable of less destruction, as long as it is assumed that each person has a maximum capacity for destruction. I might have disagreed with him on that point, but it’s rational nevertheless.

“Those three men met, by random chance, five meters away from me, in a Privacy Room intended to preserve human dignity. It was a miracle of sorts, their meeting—a higher truth disclosed to us lesser mortals. All three people wanted what was best for the world, in a way—they just all saw it differently. And I realized then that I wanted the same thing, I wanted what was best for everyone. It was then that I quit college, to devote my life to the pursuit of doing Good Works, wherever and however I could. It was also around then that I started losing all of my sleep, because I couldn’t get those few seconds of human interaction out of my head. I was haunted. I am haunted.

“The cause of the strength of my conviction? I wanted to make a change. I realized, with absolute clarity, that I could only make a change if I rose above the obscurity that had made Sean’s sacrifice so wasted. To be famous, really famous, I had to possess some sort of skill beyond the average human’s. And not just any skill would do—a man that can hold his breath longer than everyone may get his name in a paper, but it will never be the case that the whole world would want to listen to what he had to say about life—I had to be the best at something everyone was doing, an almost impossible feat. I had to be the best at doing good.

“The Karma way. I went through somewhat of an identity crisis when I had to unidentify science with the ultimate good. But I made it.

“What I wanted to say, from the top of my mountain of fame, is what I’m saying now—that I don’t think Karma was wrong. I owe him everything. And the system wasn’t broken—I just had to improve it. So now, as I sit here on Mars, that is what I do—I think of ways to improve the plight of humanity. I continue to do what I did for so many years on Earth, one Good Work after another. The only thing that’s changed is the scale.”

The writer replied, after catching up, “It’s a wonder that you think you need a biographer at all. I think a tape recorder would have sufficed you just fine.”