Gray Matters (4 page)

ATTENTION … ATTENTION …

The mood shifts. The mechanical voice has the moronic robot enthusiasm of an AM radio disk jockey from another age.

CENTER CONTROL IS TEMPORARILY INTERRUPTING YOUR THOUGHTS TO COMMUNICATE AN AWARENESS REMINDER FROM THE AUDITING COMMISSION … STAND BY …

B-0486 … IT HAS NOW BEEN THREE DAYS SINCE YOU LAST PARTICIPATED IN THE MORNING MEDITATION EXERCISE OR FILED AN AUDITING REPORT. THIS IS A VIOLATION OF SECTIONS A15, A16, AND C9 OF REGULATION NUMBER 35-095. IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE MANDATE OF CENTER CONTROL, WE ARE DISCONNECTING YOUR MEMORY-BANK HOOK-UP UNTIL SUCH TIME AS YOU ARE WILLING TO FULFILL THE OBLIGATIONS OF YOUR CATEGORY. BE AWARE OF YOUR DUTIES.

END TRANSMISSION.

Vera Mitlovic is furious. Another move in the game, the obvious machine-tooled move. She remembers tick-tack-toe. Twentieth-century scientists taught their primitive Univacs to play this kindergarten game years before they were able to program complex chess gambits. And how those old machines loved it! Vacuum tubes aglow, rectifiers humming, they paraded their invincible Xs out across the graph, winning all encounters if given the first move, tying the rest. It pleases Vera to think of the proud Univac, defeating the best scientific minds of the age at a child’s game, victorious until the mathematicians pulled the plug and went home for lunch.

But this time the plug has been pulled on Vera. She is tempted to try the telescript console one more time but resists, not wanting to give those transistorized swine in the Auditing Commission the pleasure of knowing her desperation. Vera still has her fierce pride. She didn’t leave that on the operating table.

Skeets Kalbfleischer’s Auditor is a cerebromorph of some celebrity, a pioneer astronaut, the surviving member of the melancholy Aldebaran Expedition and the only resident of Level II born in the twentieth century.

Philip Quarrels was flying a carrier-based F4 Phantom over the Mekong Delta at the time of the great Chicago disaster. The name Denton Kalbfleischer meant nothing to him; his interest in the accident was purely aeronautical. When Skeets’ brain made the cover of
Life
two years later, Quarrels was training for a future Apollo shot and read the article only because a former NASA member had been involved. Cerebrectomy was for crackpots, not the Space Program.

The Space Program was Philip Quarrels’ life work. He was lunar module pilot on the final Apollo flight. Later he worked on the space-platform project and, because he was unmarried, Quarrels was chosen as the first long-term skipper on the U.S. Orbital Station
Endeavor.
He spent the next fifteen years in space, shuttling between platform assignments and desk jobs in the moon base at Clavius.

Because he was largely indifferent to happenings on earth, Quarrels knew nothing of the worldwide public indifference to the Mars landing of 1985. People were bored with television coverage of the moon and pictures from yet another dead planet didn’t satisfy. Oceanography had replaced ecology as a trendsetter; films of undersea exploration earned an average twenty percentage points higher in the ratings than any broadcast from space. The following year, when the Venus Expedition was lost, Congress voted to cut the space budget in half.

In 1990, the year Philip Quarrels was due to retire, Skeets Kalbfleischer made the headlines for a second time when Dr. Tibor deHartzman perfected the first neural communicator. NASA soon took another look at the work of Frank E. Sayre, Jr. A daring new mission to the Aldebaran binary system was announced. The voyage would take three hundred years, round trip. Cerebromorphs would compose the crew. The call went out for volunteers, men with long space experience and without families. Age was no handicap. Even retired astronauts were encouraged to apply. Eventually a crew of five was selected. Captain Philip Quarrels was named Executive Officer.

A twentieth-century astronaut is a hero Skeets Kalbfleischer can admire and he is very impressed with his Auditor. Skeets means a lot to Quarrels as well. Fifty years of hard work. Each Auditor carries a caseload of ten lower-level residents and is in turn audited by a resident of the level above. Elevation comes with Awareness and Understanding. One Auditor audits another; reports are made to the Commission; Center Control sets the standards.

Quarrels’ career in the navy has accustomed him to moving through the ranks. He is anxious for elevation, which he still unconsciously refers to as promotion. His Auditor is working hard on the problem. By bringing others to Understanding, one’s own Awareness grows.

Skeets Kalbfleischer prepares an auditing report. He replays the memo file of his dream twice, editing those portions which appear to have no significance. As much as he enjoys the long blimp ride with a gondola full of starlets or his own erotic version of
Sleeping Beauty,
where he awakens the princess with something more emphatic than a kiss, he erases these reveries from the file without hesitation. Skeets is only interested in his nightmares.

This particular nocturnal horror is nothing new. Skeets has suffered through it many times in the past, but because of its brevity he has never before attempted an analysis for the Auditing Commission. Not that it is very difficult to trace the origins of the dream; even after a fifty-year lapse, Skeets is able to list the memory-files which are the source material for his terror.

He viewed them originally during his studies of Eastern art. The first he programmed by mistake, thinking he was to see a Cambodian temple dance. Its title, “Monkey-Moon Ceremony,” was misleading. The file actually deals with a ceremonial banquet peculiar to the highland regions of Laos and Cambodia. For the first course, a smooth stone table, several inches thick, with a perfect round aperture cut through the center, is brought into the banquet hall. The guests seat themselves, arranging their robes and bowing with mannered formality. Soon a bronze gong sounds and the servants bring a live monkey, limbs trussed in an attitude of prayer. The monkey is placed under the stone table with the top of his head protruding through the opening in the center. The servants complete their arrangements, providing each guest with a long silver spoon. When all is ready, the host gives a curt nod and his chief retainer unsheathes a short gleaming double-edged sword and, leaning forward, slices off the top of the monkey’s skull as easily as he would uncap a soft-boiled egg. A chattering gibberish continues underneath the table as the dinner guests, each in his turn, sample the monkey’s brain. There is just enough for everyone to have a taste. Happy smiles all around attest to the excellence of the dish. The host claps his hands and calls loudly for the soup.

The second file Skeets programmed deliberately, after searching through the Index for the correct code key, his curiosity inflamed. He found a Chinese variation of the same culinary eccentricity. A different place-setting is used: along with each set of chopsticks, a small golden mallet is provided. The monkey is brought to the table confined in a cage and passes among the guests, who reach between the bars and give the cowering animal a discreet tap with the mallet. The cage is circulated many times and, as the blows are never strong enough to stun, the monkey continues to voice his complaints in a high-pitched wail which greatly amuses the worthy Oriental gentlemen.

At last it is over. The dazed monkey is removed from the cage, a sharp knife skins away his scalp, and the shattered skull is picked apart piece by piece in a manner which reminds Skeets of the way he used to deal with hard-boiled eggs.

It is this similarity to eating eggs that bothers Skeets. He remembers his mother serving them to him at breakfast, standing upright in little painted cups. He dipped fingers of buttered toast into the yolk and ate the whites with his baby spoon. When he finished, the hollow shell looked clean and bleached, like a skull. He mentions this on the auditing report as a prelude to his dream.

The dream itself is quite simple. Skeets is looking through the scanner. He sees an Amco-pak maintenance van approaching down the aisle, silently gliding past the anonymous pale-blue façade of the Depository. The machine stops in front of his deposit drawer and removes his cranial container without a word. Somehow, Skeets is able to watch through the scanner as the Amco-pak carries him out of the Sector into a region which is totally unfamiliar.

A set of stainless-steel doors slide open and Skeets is brought into a large chamber and set on a feast table in front of twelve jolly diners, all of whom look like Humpty Dumpty. They are talking Chinese! The Amco-pak opens the lid of the cranial container and, without further ceremony, the bizarre Mother Goose figures proceed to dip slices of buttered toast into poor Skeets’ frontal lobe. “Yum-yum,” they cry, in Nanking dialect. Skeets watches it all until there is nothing left of him but a few stray crumbs of gray matter floating on the oily surface of the electrolyte solution. He has had this dream at least once a week for the last fifty years.

T
HE AISLES ARE QUIET
. Only the most determined residents still tune to their scanners, waiting patiently for something to happen. It is rumored that certain of the Advanced Sectors use neither scanners nor communicators (blinded by their own
satori,
as the saying goes). In the subdistrict such total isolation would be unthinkable. Most residents are satisfied with the empty aisles. They would be lost without the squat lead-covered power units and accompanying trio of deHartzman Communicators, radar domes aglow and multi-frequency channel finders blinking like beacons.

In Aisle B, Obu Itubi consults the memory-file Index, looking for a recent program on spiders. He is interested in the dynamics of web construction and anticipates the pleasures of spinning silk and weaving intricate patterns. The warning tone of a deHartzman Communicator interrupts his quiet study.

ATTENTION … THERE IS A TOP-PRIORITY INCOMING COMMUNICATION ORIGINATING FROM CENTER CONTROL … ALL CIRCUTS WILL OPEN AUTOMATICALLY IN TEN SECONDS … STAND BY …

Itubi thinks of herald trumpets; ten seconds for proper spiritual attitudes, the attentive acolyte awaits the go-ahead signal.
BEEP
…

Hello.

GOOD MORNING, B-0489, WE TRUST THAT YOU SPENT A PEACEFUL NIGHT AND HAVE ALL YOUR THOUGHTS IN HARMONY.

Everything is as I would wish it.

GOOD. WE ARE COMMUNICATING WITH YOU, B-0489, TO ANNOUNCE THAT YOUR PRESENT AUDITO HAS BEEN ELEVATED TO 64 DEGREES OF UNDERSTANDING AND TRANSFERRED TO LEVEL III. WE ARE SURE YOU WILL CELEBRATE HIS SUCCESS JOYFULLY.

The Wise Man learns the Way by following the path of those who have gone before.

YES, BUT THE WISE MAN MUST ALSO REMEMBER THAT THERE EXISTS FOR HIM BUT ONE PATH WHICH IS TRUE. ADMIRATION FOR OTHERS NEVER MISLEADS THE WISE MAN INTO TAKING A WRONG TURN. B-0489, YOU HAVE BEEN ASSIGNED A NEW AUDITOR. HE HAS SPENT SEVERAL WEEKS STUDYING YOUR FILES, AND RATHER THAN WASTE TIME WITH FURTHER FORMALITIES LET US CONNECT YOU WITH HIM IMMEDIATELY.

All greetings, B-0489, before we begin, are there any questions you would like to ask?

It is the fool who speaks; the Wise Man listens.

Very true, B-0489, so if you’ll listen now, I’ll simplify the introductions. My files are on record in the memory bank, code key Y41-AK9(397-00-55).I invite your investigation of them at any time. That should satisfy all social obligations.

Yes.

Then let’s get down to business. If it agrees with you, we’ll maintain the same auditing schedule you had in the past. My predecessor made a practice of infrequent communication
—

To permit independent study and encourage—

We shall abandon that practice. The auditing schedule will be followed exactly. Sessions begin promptly. Any time lapse will result in additional assignments. Do you understand?

Yes.

Good. Before we end transmission, I’d like to clear up a few points with you. First, I notice you’ve been programming memory-bank files almost at random. There is no logic to your selections. You don’t seem to follow any regular pattern of study. Six months ago you spent your time listening to music; recently you only screen files dealing with insect behavior. Is there a reason for this?

The Wise Man strives to keep an open mind, and—

You can save the doubletalk! I don’t care to hear your clever explanations. I want you to know that further erratic behavior will not be tolerated. The memory bank is not a frivolous plaything designed for your personal amusement. You forget, B-0489, you’re no longer a famous artist. All that is gone forever. You are simply a resident cerebromorph on file in the lowest level of the Depository System. Learn to function within the System. One of the obligations of your category is to obey all social regulations faithfully. One cannot possibly hope to shed the illusions of identity without first accepting the responsibility of society.

Thank you for reminding me. The Voyager into the Unknown frequently loses his way.

B-0489, I compliment you on your flattery. It undoubtedly impresses Center Control and puts you in good favor with the authorities. But let me remind you that I am familiar with your files. So, don’t waste the honeyed words. Our first appointment is scheduled for tomorrow at 0019. I trust that will give you sufficient time to get your thoughts in order. Remember to be prompt.

End transmission.

CLICK
.

Vera Mitlovic hates being alone. Even as a young girl many centuries ago, she detested aimless walks in the rain, or afternoons in quiet museums, or any of the other solitary pleasures to which romantic youth is traditionally disposed. She craved a continual audience. Surrounded by constant admirers, Vera was splendid, she dazzled and charmed; without her makeup, alone, she felt lost and afraid, like a confused chameleon unable to revert to its original hue. She faced a stranger in the wardrobe mirror, the eyes that stared back provided no clue, they were bright with the sham glitter of costume jewelry.