Reality Matrix Effect (9781310151330) (6 page)

“Listen,” Wraggon resumed fervently, “don’t
you understand?  It all started because of the robots! 
The retraining program, screwing up the natural order of things—all
that stuff!  When you make a robot do what you say, it doesn’t
mean a thing. Robots don’t have a choice. The way they’re made,
they can’t disobey. I know that better than most. I run a plant
that
makes
those damn robbies!  But if you can get
another
man
to do what you say, then you have real power.
That means other people respect you, or they’re afraid of you.

“Can’t you see?  If everybody’s a boss,
then nobody’s really a boss!  The robots have turned us all
into nobodies!”

Barnard stifled a belch. The morning binge
was obviously catching up with him. He looked miserable and
probably felt worse.

“Uh, I don’t feel so good. I think I
better....”

Barnard’s effort to rise from the barstool
and head for the men’s room ended unsuccessfully as he stumbled
against Wraggon and landed hard on the barroom floor.

“Hey!” yelled the bartender. “If your friend
can’t hold his liquor better’n that, he ought to do his drinking at
home!  I want him outta here!”

“He’s not my friend,”  Wraggon responded
in irritation. “You know he was already here when I came in. I
never saw him before today.”

“Fine. Then I’ll just call the cops. They’ll
figure out what to do with him.”

From the floor, a barely conscious Barnard
moaned:  “Please, buddy, help me out. The cops’ll turn me over
ta Fleet...pull my furlough.”

Barnard mumbled a few more unintelligible
syllables before finally passing out.

“Well?” the bartender barked.

Wraggon looked with distaste at the heap on
the floor. That’s all he needed. A drunken spacer to baby-sit. But
at least Barnard was a
man
, not a machine. Besides, he
seemed interested in what Wraggon had to say. It had been a long
time since anyone had paid attention to Charlie Wraggon. No one
since his grandfather died, come to think of it. His parents
certainly didn’t take him seriously. They listened to him with
polite tolerance, the same way they used to listen to his
grandfather. This Barnard, though, might just turn out to be a
pretty good guy once he sobered up. And he was human. It was nice
to be able to talk to a human being for a change.

“Oh, crap. All right. Well, you don’t have a
Trans-Mat pod here, and the nearest public one’s at least a block
away. I can’t drag him clear over there. Better call a taxi. I’ll
take him to my place.” 

Wraggon continued to study Barnard’s inert
form. Now all he had to do was figure out how a 170-pound man could
get a drunken 230-pounder up to a fourth-floor apartment.

 “
All
right, now,” Rayna said, “settle down. The weekend’s
over.”

The subtle changes she’d been noticing in the
classroom continued to trouble her. She’d always related well to
her students. She liked them, and they knew it. Their high spirits
were contagious, investing each day with a magic sense that all
things were possible. If the students got a bit unruly
sometimes....  Well, that went with the adolescent territory.
Lately, however, the character of that unruliness seemed different.
Less benign. Even ominous somehow. She furrowed her brow in
concentration, then gave her head a quick shake.

“Alana,” she said sharply to a student who
was bouncing to a privately heard rhythm, “turn off your M-link.
This is a class in history, not music.”

Gradually, the bustle of activity and the
buzz of youthful voices diminished. An intense-looking 16-year-old
seated before one of the 20 desk-top computer terminals in the
classroom made a special effort to look away from the keyboard as
he began typing stealthily.

“Rick, you can either cancel that note you’re
writing  now or else wait for me to put it on ‘demo’ for
everybody to share.”

“I don’t think Karin would like that much,
Miss Kingman,” one of the other boys yelled.

Red-faced, Karin tried to sink into the floor
as she and Rick exchanged embarrassed glances.

Rayna’s mouth formed the merest hint of a
smile as she waited for the wave of student laughter to
subside.

“Oh, yes. Before we go on, I want to remind
you that you have a homework assignment due tomorrow.”

“We can just submit this one electronically,
can’t we?” someone asked. “We don’t have to print it out like last
time?”

Rayna nodded. “Electronic submission is fine.
Just make sure you do the work. I’m sorry to say, it seems you
people are getting a little forgetful—or is it lazy?  Ten—no,
12—of you are missing at least one assignment in the past three
weeks,” she said, consulting the class records displayed on the
computer terminal adjacent to her desk. “That’s just not like you.
And as for the assignments you are turning in.... 

She removed a sheaf of papers from a desk
drawer and waved it wordlessly before her students, studying their
faces. When the papers were in just the right place, she loosened
her grip, allowing the paper-clipped bundle to land on the desk
with a soft “plop.”

“This,” she gestured at the papers, “was
supposed to be an essay on the Rebirth period. It was supposed to
show some original thinking. It was not supposed to be a printout
of your favorite encyclopedia article on the subject!  Three
of you tried to get away with that. And—let’s see. Umm, five others
used verbatim quotes for part of their essays.”

“But you said we could quote from other
sources,” Linda complained.

“True. But not without acknowledging your
source. It’s all right to say, ‘The Rebirth was the most
significant turning point in the history of human relations,’
according to the Scholar’s World Encyclopedia. It’s not all right
to say the same thing using the encyclopedia’s words but pretending
the words are yours!”

Linda frowned and bowed her head in an
indignant huff. Every few seconds, she would glance up
surreptitiously from beneath long, dark lashes. Rayna could almost
feel the heat of Linda’s gaze boring into her back as she turned
toward the other side of the room.

“Even those of you who weren’t guilty of
plagiarism didn’t seem to take this assignment very seriously.”

The only sound in the room was the uneasy
shifting of 20 student rumps as they moved nervously against their
chairs.

“Emilio, you usually do such good work. Why
just copy?  You know this material.”  Emilio shrugged,
and Rayna’s glance darted from face to face around the hushed
classroom. “You all know the material. I expected more from you
than a summary of the facts and a bunch of old platitudes.”

She waited, hoping for a response—even an
argument—but the students just sat there, looking bored.

“It’s not enough to say that the Rebirth
began after the 1971 riots and changed the way we live today,” she
resumed, suddenly hating the sound of her own voice. “That’s just a
cliché. You have to explain it—show it!”

“And how’re we supposed to do that?”
challenged a slender young man with ebony skin, a strong jaw line
and the faint beginnings of a mustache.

Rayna thought for a moment.

“You live near school, don’t you, Jason?”

“Yeah. Couple of blocks away.”

“Are all your neighbors black?”

“What?  Of course not!  Why should
they be?”

“Fifty years ago, they would have
been.”  Rayna paused to let the point sink in, but she could
see she’d have to say more.

“As you all should know by now, South-Central
Los Angeles was almost all black 50 years ago. There were other
parts of the city that were mostly white. Latinos lived primarily
on the east side. Koreans and Chinese and other groups each had
their own little sections, too....”

Rayna surveyed the faces in the room. The
most positive expression she observed was one of tolerant
politeness. The familiar signposts of active interest—the excited
look of comprehension and the bright-eyed eagerness to learn
more—those were missing. The spark had been dimming steadily over
the past weeks. Now, her students were cast in bronze. The change
was more than disheartening. It sent icy ripples down her
spine.

“Listen, Miss Kingman, we know the story,”
Xian offered. “We know what happened. John Martin Roberts was shot,
and then people rioted all over the country, and then the cities
were rebuilt. How can we not know the story?  Roberts Park is
less than a mile away. We’ve heard about him all our lives. Maybe
we’re just tired of rehashing something that happened 50 years ago.
Why make such a big deal out of it?”

Rayna shook her head sadly.

“The shooting of John Martin Roberts was a
major turning point in American history,” she said with a sigh.
“The Rebirth period that came after the riots made a reality out of
ideals Americans had paid lip service to for almost two centuries.
That’s a pretty big deal, wouldn’t you say, Xian?” 

“We know that, Miss Kingman, but—”

“There’s more,” Rayna continued. “It’s
largely because of John Martin Roberts that we that we no longer
have to live with the constant threat of nuclear war or the
hundreds of ‘little’ wars that were once common all over the world.
I’d say that qualifies as a big deal, too.”

“Yeah, but now you’re talking about the stuff
Roberts did when he was with the United Nations,” said Jason.

Rayna nodded. “Right, but it’s all connected.
As soon as Roberts was well enough, President Muskie named him
United States ambassador to the U.N. As you all should know,
Roberts helped negotiate an end to the Vietnam War. But he did much
more than that. More than any other human being, Roberts was
responsible for turning the World Court into an effective tool for
resolving international disagreements without armed conflict, and
he played a major role in negotiating the big U.S.-Soviet
disarmament treaty of 1983—the one that set up the first joint
Soviet-American space missions.” 

Shafts of yellow light burst through the
classroom windows as the afternoon sun found a clearing in the
cirrus-streaked sky.

“Of course, those early missions eventually
led to development of the Borisov drive and colonization of the
asteroids, and pollution-free energy systems based on Nitinol from
the colonies, and....”

She hesitated, once again conscious of the
sound of her own voice. “Let me remind you, the purpose of this
class is not to memorize facts. A computer can give you facts. Our
purpose here is to understand history and, by understanding the
past, learn more about ourselves today. To do that, you have to
think. That was your assignment.”

There was no sound from the students, but few
of them met Rayna’s gaze.

“Today, you don’t come into the world with
two strikes against you just because of your sex or your religion
or the color of your skin. Your future depends on you, not on how
much money your parents may have. For most of humanity throughout
most of history, that hasn’t been the case. It’s important for you
to understand that. In the past, it always seemed to take a riot to
remind those in power that things weren’t right. And when the riots
were over, all you usually had were dead bodies and burned-out
neighborhoods and a lot of words.”

“Sort of like what we’re getting now,” Rick
muttered to his neighbor.

Rayna glared at Rick.

“The point is that after the 1971 riots,
people made a conscious commitment to rebuild the damaged cities in
a way that would make a lasting difference. Project New Start—the
program that replaced slum buildings with planned integrated
housing and new local businesses—that started right here in Los
Angeles and eventually spread to other cities.”

“Yeah, and the federal government redesigned
the employment service, too,” Rick interrupted. “Like Xian said,
we’ve heard it all before. Why keep going over it?”

Rayna heaved a deep sigh of frustration. “Can
anyone answer Rick’s question?  Did any of you give this
assignment any real thought at all?”

Rayna’s challenge was met by a score of blank
stares. She shut her eyes briefly and massaged the bridge of her
nose. After a moment, she swept the class with a silent, probing
look, shifting her focus from face to face around the room.
Finally, she spoke.

“It’s because of the Rebirth that you can now
take for granted the right to live anywhere you want to live, to
get any job you decide to train for, with no thought about racial,
religious or sexual barriers. Some of your grandparents must be old
enough to remember the bad old days. Ask them about it. Maybe then
you’ll understand.” 

She shook her head distractedly, her thoughts
drifting from the students to a puzzle that had long piqued her
academic curiosity. “Funny thing is, nobody ever could explain why
it all worked out this time when even the best efforts had always
failed before. There are plenty of theories, but nobody seems to
agree on....”  She paused for a deep breath and refocused on
the class. “That’s why I asked you to write an essay on the period.
Your opinion’s as good as the historians’. I wanted you to
question. To wonder. To....”

Rayna stopped, realizing once more that she
wasn’t getting through. She needed to try a new approach.

“Okay. Look, I know talking to you like this
isn’t doing any good. I just seem to be boring you.”  Rick
rolled his eyes in agreement, eliciting a few muffled chuckles.

“I’ve been thinking of trying a little
experiment anyway, and this may be just the right time. It will
give you a chance to learn more about history in a very personal
way. Each of you will be doing something a little bit different.
And it will be nearly impossible for you to simply copy from an
encyclopedia!”

“Uh-oh,” Rick groaned. “Sounds like we’re in
for a lot of work.”