Stand on Zanzibar (43 page)
Authors: John Brunner
When the purser next passed, he said, “Get me something for a headache, will you?”
He knew that was the right medicine to ask for, yet it also seemed he should have asked for a cure for bellyache, because everything was confused: the men in the belly of the wooden horse waiting to be born and wreak destruction, and the pain of parturition, and Athena was born of the head of Zeus, and Time ate his children, as though he were not only in the wooden horse of the express but
was
it about to deliver the city to its enemy and its enemy to the city, a spiralling wild-rose branch of pain with every thorn a spiky image pricking him into other times and other places.
Ahead, the walls. Approaching them, the helpless stupid Odysseus of the twenty-first century, who must also be Odin blind in one eye so as not to let his right hand know what his left was doing. Odinzeus, wielder of thunderbolts, how could he aim correctly without parallax? “No individual has the whole picture, or even enough of it to make trustworthy judgments on his own initiative.”
Shalmaneser, master of infinite knowledge, lead me through the valley of the shadow of death and I shall fear no evil …
The purser brought a white capsule and he gulped it down.
But the headache was only a symptom, and could be fixed.
“Shalmaneser, pizzle-teaser,
Had a wife and couldn’t please her.
Go and tell the big computer
(
Mary’s
) lover doesn’t suit her.”
—
Children’s singing game reported from Syracuse, N.Y., November 2009
“A randy young wench named Teresa
Tried her charms out upon Shalmaneser
For the first time quite frigid
She, not he, grew rigid,
And the scientists couldn’t unfreeze her.”
—
Graffito from University Hall of Residence Auckland, New Zealand; variants common throughout English-speaking world
“They surely are condemned to Hell
Who rule their lives by greed and lust
And Satan waits for those as well
Who in machines repose their trust.”
—
Hymn composed for Tenth International Rally of the Family of Divine Daughters
i wish codders i had cool detachment
like
chilledchild
chilled
how are you feelium
in the liquid helium
HERE WE GO ROUND THE HUNGARY FLUSH
Meg
a brain computer
SHALL MAN EASE HER OR WOULD YOU ADVISE
AGAINST IT
don’t
—From GRAUNCH::prosoversepix
“It is dismaying—one may even say disheartening—to see the degree to which blind faith in the manufactured objects that we dignify by the name of ‘computer’ has replaced trust in prayer and the guidance of God. You will never find anyone to admit that he or she has substituted a machine for the living divine presence, yet that is exactly what has happened to the bulk of our population. They speak of the evaluations which computers print out for them in the hushed, reverent tones which our ancestors reserved for Holy Writ, and now that General Technics has made its arrogant claim about this new piece of hardware, nicknamed ‘Shalmaneser’, we can foresee the day when everyone will have surrendered his responsibility as a thinking being to a machine which he has been deluded into respecting as more intelligent than himself. That is, unless we with God’s help manage to reverse the trend.”
—
From an earlier sermon by the luckless bishop whom Henry Butcher sabotaged
“Okay, Shalmaneser—
you
tell me what I ought to do!”
—
Colloquial usage throughout N. America
(SHALMANESER That real cool piece of hardware up at the GT tower. They say he’s apt to evolve to true consciousness one day. Also they say he’s as intelligent as a thousand of us put together, which isn’t really saying much, because when you put a thousand of us together look how stupidly we behave.
—
The Hipcrime Vocab
by Chad C. Mulligan)
Never in human history did any manufactured object enter so rapidly into the common awareness of mankind as Shalmaneser did when they took the security wraps off. Adaptation of him as a “public image” for prose and verse followed literally within days; a few months saw him apotheosised as a byword, a key figure in dirty jokes, a court of final appeal, and a sort of mechanical Messias. Some of these cross-referred; in particular, there was the story about the same Teresa who cropped up in the New Zealand limerick, which told how they sent for a Jewish telepath to ask what happened, when they discovered that thanks to the liquid helium she was in a state of suspended animation, and he explained with a puzzled look that he could only detect one thought in her head—“Messias has not yet come.”
Also, until GT published a rota and scale of hire-charges, consultant computing firms in twenty countries trembled on the verge of bankruptcy as their clients decided to switch their custom to Shalmaneser.
Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere had been shown visiting Shalmaneser one hundred and thirty-seven times, more than was accorded to any other activity except freefly-suiting.
Orbiting on Triptine, Bennie Noakes was prouder of the fact that his imagination had produced Shalmaneser than he was of any other event he had dreamed up.
Factually: he was a Micryogenic
®
device of the family collectively referred to as the Thecapex group (THEoretical CAPacity EXceeds—human brain, understood) and of that family’s fourth generation, his predecessors having been the pilot model Jeroboam, the commercially available Rehoboam of which over a thousand were in operation, and the breadboard layout Nebuchadnezzar which turned out to have so many bugs in it they discontinued the project and cannibalised the parts.
The number of technical problems which had had to be solved before he could be put into operation beggared description; the final programme for the schematics required fourteen hours’ continuous operation of six Rehoboams linked in series, a capacity which the publicity department calculated would be adequate to provide a thousand-year solution for the orbits of the Solar System correct to twenty decimal places. And at that, using so much capacity for so long on a single task brought the chance of a sixfold simultaneous error to the thirty per cent level, so there was one chance in three that when they built the final version and switched it on something would have gone irremediably wrong.
Indeed, some of the original design team had recently been heard to express the heretical view that something
had
gone wrong with the schematics. By this time, they claimed, it should have been established beyond doubt that Shalmaneser was conscious in the human sense, possessed of an ego, a personality and a will.
Others, more sanguine, declared that proof of such awareness already existed, and evidenced certain quite unforeseen reactions the machine had displayed in solving complex tasks.
The psychologists, called in to settle the argument, left again with headshakes, divided into two equally opposed camps. Some said the problem was insoluble, and referred back to the ancient puzzle: given a room divided in two by an opaque curtain, and a voice coming from the other side, how do you discover whether the voice belongs to a cleverly programmed computer or a human being? Their rivals maintained that in their eagerness to see mechanical consciousness the designers had set up a self-fulfilling prophecy—had, in effect, programmed the schematics so as to give the impression of consciousness when information was processed in the system.
The public at large was quite unconcerned about the debate between the experts. For them, Shalmaneser was a legend, a myth, a folk hero, and a celebrity; with all that, he didn’t need to be conscious as well.
A few days after they rigged up the direct-verbal inputs—Shalmaneser was the first computer ever with sufficient spare capacity to handle normal spoken English regardless of the speaker’s tone of voice—one of the technicians asked him on the spur of the moment, “Shal, what’s your view? Are you or aren’t you a conscious entity?”
The problem took so long to analyse—a record three-quarters of a minute—that the inquirer was growing alarmed when the response emerged.
“It appears impossible for you to determine whether the answer I give to that question is true or false. If I reply affirmatively there does not seem to be any method whereby you can ascertain the accuracy of the statement by referring it to external events.”
Relieved to have had even such a disappointing answer after the worrying delay, the questioner said fliply, “So who do we ask if you can’t tell us—God?”
“If you can contact Him,” Shalmaneser said, “of course.”
“The case of Teresa’s instructive—
It shows how extremely seductive
A shiggy can be
If her an-atom-ee
Is first rendered super-conductive.”
—
Quoted in the General Technics house organ, January 2010
The leisurely niche he had carved out for himself, Norman recognised with dismay, had unfitted him to cope with a storm of information like the one now swamping him. He forced himself to keep going, red-eyed, sometimes hoarse, often suffering violent indigestion, until he was almost ready to welcome his physical discomfort as growing-pains.
If the Beninia project was to become reality, it had to negotiate three major obstacles. First, the early glamour of MAMP was wearing thin and shareholders were beginning to shake off their entitlements—which, while it allowed GT personnel in the know to buy at cut rates, created an unfavourable climate in the market. Second, a two-thirds majority at a general meeting had to be secured. And, third, President Obomi had taken the climactic step of informing his country about his illness, which meant that time was running out. Elihu claimed that he would like the scheme provided it was vouched for by his long-time personal friend, but there was no way of predicting what his successor would agree to.
Urgency drove them to exploit Shalmaneser’s incredible speed to the utmost. Not content with erecting and demolishing half a hundred hypothetical courses a day, they began to clear down on external contract work and make time for direct-voice questioning on aspects not fully clarified in the written programmes.
It was the first occasion Norman had ever worked directly with Shalmaneser. The night before he first spoke to the computer he dreamed of being imprisoned by walls of the pale green “hypothetical” printouts he had grown familiar with; the night after, his dream was of hearing it address him from his phone, his TV set, and the empty air.
There was little opportunity for dreaming, though. At the cost of near-exhaustion he kept abreast of the demands made on him. Half a dozen times a day Old GT called him for information which could have been had more readily from an encyclopedia bank, but he managed to convey acceptable answers. At endless conferences people applied to him for views and guidance and he responded as mechanically as if he were himself a computing engine, reeling off statistics, dates, local customs, snippets of history, even undisguised personal opinions which his listeners took in as uncritically as the rest.
He began to feel a little more pleased with himself. Under the slick professional mask he had adopted in order to make his way to the top in a paleass world, there was some kind of substance after all. He had been half-afraid there was only a hollow, like the candle-lit void of a turnip-ghost.
* * *
Even more than his desire to prove himself to himself, two other motives drove him on. One was admiration for Elihu Masters, who had detected that substance when the mask was still in place and gambled on it the outcome of a successful career. Norman had always cultivated the company grapevine; now it informed him that provided the Beninia project worked out Elihu could almost certainly be the next Ambassador to the UN, thus recouping the cachet lost when he opted for Port Mey instead of Delhi.
If it failed, on the other hand, he was finished.
And the second reason was simple puzzlement. By the end of the first week’s intensive planning, he knew rather more about Beninia than about most of the places he had lived in, without ever setting foot on its soil. Early on, the data he absorbed were simply shovelled in, making a heap in his mind through which he had to rummage to find out what he knew. Gradually they grew more organised, developed relationships, and ultimately took on the pattern of a baffling question.
How in the name of Allah the Merciful did Beninia come to be this way?
But for the mass of historical evidence, he could have suspected a gigantic public-relations confidence trick. “Everyone knew”—this was what it boiled down to—that when the European colonial powers moved in the tribes of equatorial and southern Africa had been in a state of barbarism instanced by a thousand recorded facts from Chaka Zulu’s murderous raiding to the readiness of tribes to sell their own children to the Arab slavers. “Everyone knew” that after the European withdrawal things went back to where they had been, aggravated by bitterness at the long period of foreign rule.
Not in Beninia. As Elihu put it, Zadkiel Obomi had performed the miracle of creating an African counterpart of Switzerland, walking a tightrope of dogged neutrality over a hell of intermittent violence.
But what had he got to—to
power
this achievement? That was where Norman ran into a blank wall. Switzerland’s neutrality was founded on clear advantages: a key location which only Napoleon had had the gall to trespass over among all the would-be modern Attilas—even the Nazis had found it profitable to leave Switzerland alone; a jealously guarded reputation for honesty in commerce that made her an international financial centre; skill in precision manufactures that converted the country’s lack of mineral resources into a positive blessing.