The Shockwave Rider

by John Brunner

  A LOAD OF CRYSTAL BALLS

  In the twentieth century one did not have to be a pontificating pundit to predict that success would breed success and the nations that first were lucky enough to combine massive material resources with advanced knowhow would be those where social change would accelerate until it approximated the limit of what human beings can endure. By 2010, in the wealthiest countries, a classic category of mental patient was composed of boys and girls in their late teens who had come back for a first vacation from college to discover that “home” was unrecognizable, either because the parents had moved into a new framework, changed jobs and cities, or simply because—as they’d done a dozen times before—they had refurnished and redecorated … without realizing they were opening a door to what came to be termed the “final straw syndrome.”

  It was also not difficult to forecast that no matter how well endowed they were with material resources those countries where the Industrial Revolution arrived late would change proportionately more slowly. After all, the rich get richer and the poor get children. Which is okay so long as lots of them starve in infancy.

  What many otherwise well-informed people apparently preferred to overlook was the phenomenon baptized by Angus Porter “the beetle and wedge,” which retained its name long after even the poor nations found it uneconomic to split logs with a hammer and a chunk of steel. Even if your circular saws were pedal-driven, they were much less wasteful. Moreover, you could dictate a neat dividing line.

  Beetling forward at full pelt split society. Some did their utmost to head the other way. A great many more decided to go sideways. And some simply dug in their heels and stayed put. The resultant cracks were unpredictable.

  One and only one thing preserved even the illusion of national integrity. The gossamer strands of the data-net proved amazingly strong.

  Unfortunately nothing came along to reinforce them.

  People drew comfort from knowing there were certain objects near at hand, in the U.S.A. or the Soviet Union or Sweden or New Zealand, of which they could boast, “This is the biggest/longest/fastest frammistan on Earth!” Alas, however, tomorrow it might not be. Paradoxically, therefore, they derived even more emotional sustenance from being able to say, “This is the most primitive potrzebie, you know, still at work in any industrialized country!”

  It was so precious to be able to connect with the calmer, stabler past.

  The cracks spread. From national level they reached provincial level, from provincial they reached municipal, and there they met cracks going the other way, which had begun in the privacy of the family.

  “We sweated blood to put the son-of-a-bitch through college! He ought to be paying us back, not sunning his ass in New Mexico!”

  (For New Mexico read, at will, the Black Sea resort of Varna—or the beaches of Quemoy and Matsu where young Chinese by the thousand were content to pass their time practicing calligraphy, playing fan-tan, and smoking opium—or any of fifty other locations where la dolce-far-niente vita had spilled the contents of its seine-net after trawling through a nation, an ethnic grouping, or in the case of India a subcontinent. Sri Lanka had had no government to speak of for a generation.)

  As much as anything else, it was the sense of exploitable talent going to waste that prompted the establishment of genius centers like Tarnover, funded on the scale previously reserved to weaponry. It was beyond the comprehension of those raised in traditional patterns of thinking that resources of whatever kind should not be channeled and exploited to dynamize ever-faster growth.

  Secret, these centers—like the unseen points claimed in a fencing field—provoked consequences that now and then turned out to be disastrous.

  SCENT REFUGE

  Even after two solid days in his company Ina Grierson couldn’t get over how closely the man from Tarnover resembled Baron Samedi—very dark, very thin, head like a skull overlaid with parchment—so that one constantly expected a black tribe to march in and wreck the place. Some of his time had been devoted to Dolores van Bright, naturally, but she had admitted right away her attempt to help Sandy Locke by warning him there’d be an extra member of the interview board, and after that not even the influence of G2S was going to keep her out of jail.

  But it was Ina the man from Tarnover was chiefly concerned to question. Sandy Locke had been hired on her say-so, whence the rest followed logically.

  She grew terribly tired of saying over and over to the thin black man (whose name was Paul T. Freeman, but maybe only for the purposes of this assignment), “Of course I go to bed with men I know nothing about! If I only went to bed with men I do know about I’d never get any sex, would I? They all turn out to be bastards in the end.”

  Late on the afternoon of the second day of questioning the subject of Kate arose. Ina claimed to be unaware that her daughter had left the city, and the skull-faced man was obliged to believe her, since she had had no chance to go home and check her mail-store reel. Moreover, the girls in the apartment below Kate’s, currently looking after Bagheera, insisted she had given no least hint in advance of her intention to travel.

  Still, she’d done so. Gone west, and what was more with a companion. Very likely one of her fellow students, of course; many of her friends hailed from California. Besides, she’d talked freely about “Sandy Locke” to her downstairs neighbors, and called him plastic, artificial, and other derogatory terms. Her mother confirmed that she had said the same on various occasions both public and private.

  There being no trace of Haflinger, however, and no other potential clue to his whereabouts, and no recent record of Kate’s code being used—which meant she must have gone to a paid-avoidance area—Freeman, who was a thorough person, set the wheels in motion, and was rewarded by being able to advise the FBI that lodging for two people had been debbed against Kate Lilleberg in Lap-of-the-Gods.

  Very interesting. Very interesting indeed.

  TODAY’S SPECIAL

  He woke to alarm, recalling his gaffe of yesterday and along with that a great many details he’d have preferred to remain ignorant of concerning the habits of people in paid-avoidance areas. Their federal grants meant that few of them had to work at full-time jobs; they supplemented their frugal allowance by providing services—he thought of the restaurants where there were manual chefs and the food was brought by waiters and waitresses—or making handicrafts. Tourism in towns like this, however, was on the decline, as though people no longer cared to recall that this, the richest nation in history, had been unable to transcend a mere earthquake, so they spent much of their time in gossip. And what right now would offer a more interesting subject than the poker who blew out of nowhere and beat the local fencing champion?

  “Sooner or later you’re going to have to learn to live with one inescapable fact about yourself,” Kate said over her shoulder as she sat brushing her hair before the room’s one lighted mirror. Listening, he curled his fingers. The color of that hair might be nothing out of the ordinary, but its texture was superb. His fingertips remembered it, independently of his mind.

  “What?”

  “You’re a very special person. Why else would they have recruited you to Tarnover? Wherever you go you’re bound to attract attention.”

  “I daren’t!”

  “You can’t help it.” She laid aside her brush and swiveled to face him; he was sitting glum on the edge of the bed.

  “Consider,” she went on. “Would the people at G2S have offered to perm you if they didn’t think you were special even disguised as Sandy Locke? And—and I realized you were special, too.”

  “You,” he grunted, “just have more insight than is good for you.”

  “You mean: more than is good for you.”

  “I guess so.” Now at last he rose to his feet, imagining he could hear his joints creak. To be this frustrated must, he thought, resemble the plight of being old: clearly recalling what it was like to act voluntarily and enjoy life as it came, now trapped in a frame that forbade anything e
xcept slow cautious movements and a diet prescribed by doctors.

  “I don’t want to go through life wearing fetters,” he said abruptly.

  “Tarnover talking!” she snapped.

  “What?”

  “Wear fetters? Wear fetters? I never heard such garbage. Has there ever been a time in the whole of history when someone with amazing exceptional gifts could be deluded into thinking they’re a handicap?”

  “Sure,” he said at once. “How about conscripts who would rather maim themselves than obey a government order to go fight somebody they never met? Their gifts may have been no more than youth and health, but they were gifts.”

  “That’s not being deluded. That’s being compelled. A recruiting sergeant with a gun on his hip—”

  “Same thing! They’ve merely brought it into finer focus!”

  There was a brief electric silence. At length she sighed.

  “I give in. I have no right to argue with you about Tarnover—you’ve been there and I haven’t. And in any case it’s too early for a row. Go get showered and shaved, and then we’ll find some breakfast and talk about where we’re going next.”

  IS THIS YOU?

  Did you have trouble last night in dropping off to sleep?

  Even though you were tired in spite of doing nothing to exhaust yourself?

  Did you hear your heart? Did it break its normal rhythm?

  Do you suffer with digestive upsets? Get a feeling that your gullet has been tied in a knot behind your ribs?

  Are you already angry because this advertisement hits the nail on your head?

  Then come to Calm Springs before you kill somebody or go insane!

  COUNT A BLAST

  “You’re beginning to be disturbed by me,” the dry hoarse voice announced.

  Elbows on chair arms as usual, Freeman set his fingertips together. “How so?” he parried.

  “For one thing, you’ve taken to talking to me in present-time mode for the last three-hour session every day.”

  “You should be grateful for small mercies. Our prognostications show it would be risky to maintain you in regressed mode.”

  “Half the truth. The rest can be found in your omission to use that expensive three-vee setup you had installed. You realized that I thrive on high levels of stimulus. But you’re groping your way toward my lower threshold. You don’t want me to start functioning at peak efficiency. You think that even pinned down like a butterfly on a board I may still be dangerous.”

  “I don’t think of my fellow men as dangerous. I think of them as capable of occasional dangerous mistakes.”

  “You include yourself?”

  “I remain constantly alert for the possibility.”

  “Being on guard like that itself constitutes aberrant behavior.”

  “How can you say that? So long as you were fully on guard we failed to catch you. In terms of your purposes that wasn’t aberrant; it was functional. In the end, however … Well, here you are.”

  “Yes, here I am. Having learned a lesson you’re incapable of learning.”

  “Much good may it bring you.” Freeman leaned back. “You know, last night I was thinking over a new approach—a new argument which may penetrate your obstinacy. Consider this. You speak of us at Tarnover as though we’re engaged in a brutal arbitrary attempt to ensure that the best minds of the current generation get inducted into government service. Not at all. We are simply the top end of a series of cultural subgroupings that evolved of their own accord during the second half of last century. Few of us are equipped to cope with the complexity and dazzling variety of twenty-first-century existence. We prefer to identify with small, easily isolable fractions of the total culture. But just as some people can handle only a restricted range of stimuli, and prefer to head for a mountain commune or a paid-avoidance area or even emigrate to an underdeveloped country, so some correspondingly not only cope well but actually require immensely strong stimuli to provoke them into functioning at optimum. We have a wider range of life-style choices today than ever before. The question of administration has been rendered infinitely more difficult precisely because we have such breadth of choice. Who’s to manage this multiplex society? Must the lot not fall to those who flourish when dealing with complicated situations? Would you rather that people who demonstrably can’t organize their own lives were permitted to run those of their fellow citizens?”

  “A conventional elitist argument. From you I’d have expected better.”

  “Elitist? Nonsense. I’d expected better from you. The word you’re looking for is ‘aesthetic.’ An oligarchy devoted by simple personal preference to the search for artistic gratification in government—that’s what we’re after. And it would be rather a good system, don’t you think?”

  “Provided you were in the top group. Can you visualize yourself in the lower echelons, a person who obeys instead of issuing orders?”

  ‘Oh, yes. That’s why I work at Tarnover. I hope that perhaps within my lifetime there will appear people so skilled in dealing with modern society that I and others like me can step out of their way with a clear conscience. In a sense I want to work myself out of a job as fast as possible.”

  “Resigning control to crippled kids?”

  Freeman sighed. “Oh, you’re obsessed with those laboratory-gestated children! Maybe it will relieve your mind to hear that the latest batch—six of them—are all physically whole and run and jump and feed and dress themselves! If you met them by chance you couldn’t tell them from ordinary kids.”

  “So why bother to tell me about them? All that’s registered in my mind is that they may look like ordinary kids … but they never will be ordinary kids.”

  “You have a positive gift for twisting things. No matter what I say to you—”

  “I find a means of casting a different light on it. Let me do just that to what you’ve been saying. You, and the others you mentioned, acknowledge you’re imperfect. So you’re looking for superior successors. Very well: give me grounds for believing that they won’t just be projections on a larger scale of your admittedly imperfect vision.”

  “I can’t. Only results that speak for themselves can do that.”

  “What results do you have to date? You’ve sunk a lot of time and money in the scheme.”

  “Oh, several. One or two may impress even a skeptic.”

  “The kids that look like any other kids?”

  “No, no. Healthy adults like yourself capable of doing things that have never been done before, such as writing a complete new identity into the data-net over a regular veephone. Bear in mind that before trying to invent new talents we decided to look for those that had been undervalued. The odds there were in our favor. We have records from the past—descriptions of lightning calculators, musicians capable of improvising without a wrong note for hours on end, mnemonists who commited whole books to memory by reading them through once … Oh, there are examples in every field of human endeavor from strategy to scrimshaw. With these for guidelines, we’re trying to generate conditions in which corresponding modern talents can flourish.”

  He shifted casually in his chair; he sounded more confident by the minute.

  “Our commonest current form of mental disorder is personality shock. We have an efficient way to treat it without machinery or drugs. We allow the sufferer to do something he long ago wanted to do and lacked either the courage or the opportunity to fit into his life. Do you deny the claim?”

  “Of course not. This continent is littered coast to coast with people who were compelled to study business administration when they should have been painting murals or practicing the fiddle or digging a truck garden, and finally got their chance when it was twenty years too late to lead them anywhere.”

  “Except back to a sense of solid identity,” Freeman murmured.

  “In the case of the lucky few. But yes, okay.”

  “Then let me lay this on you. If you hadn’t met Miranda—if you hadn’t found out that our suspici
ons concerning the genetic component of personality were being verified by experiment—would you have deserted from Tarnover?”

  “I think sooner or later I’d have quit anyhow. The attitude that can lead to using crippled children as experimental material would have disconnected me.”

  “You spin like a weather vane. You’ve said, or implied, repeatedly that at Tarnover we’re conditioning people not to rebel. You can’t maintain at the same time that what we’re doing would have encouraged you to rebel.”

  Freeman gave his skull-like grin and rose, stretching his cramped limbs.

  “Our methods are being tested in the only available lab: society at large. So far they show excellent results. Instead of condemning them out of hand you should reflect on how much worse the alternatives are. After what you underwent last summer, you of all people should appreciate what I mean. In the morning we’ll rerun the relevant memories and see if they help to straighten you.”

  CLIFFHANGER

  They had to continue in a paid-avoidance zone. So, to supplement recollection, they bought a four-year-old tourist guide alleged to contain full details of all the post-quake settlements. Most rated four or even six pages of text, plus as many color pictures. Precipice was dismissed in half a page. On the fold-out map included with the booklet only one road—and that a poor one—was shown passing through it, from Quemadura in the south to Protempore thirty miles northwest, plus tracks for an electric railcar service whose schedule was described as irregular. The towns were graded according to what modern facilities could be found there; Precipice came bottom of the list. Among the things Precipicians didn’t like might be cited the data-net, veephones, surface vehicles not running on tracks, heavier-than-air craft (though they tolerated helium and hot-air dirigibles), modern merchandising methods and the federal government. This last could be deduced from the datum that they had compounded to pay a flat-rate tax per year instead of income tax, though the sum appeared absurdly high considering there was no industry bar handicrafts (not available to wholesalers).