by John Brunner
“It sounds like some sort of Amish setup,” Kate commented, frowning over the brief entry in the guide.
“No, it can’t be. They won’t allow churches or other religious buildings.” He was gazing into nowhere, focusing on facts casually encountered long ago. “I borrowed some ideas from the paid-avoidance zones while I was a utopia designer. I needed to figure a way of editing dogmatic religion into a community without the risk of breeding intolerance. I checked out several of these towns, and I distinctly remember ignoring Precipice because in any case I couldn’t spare the time to dig right down deep for more data. Almost nothing about the place, bar its location, was in store. Oh, yes: and a population limit of three thousand.”
“Huh? A legally imposed limit, you mean?” On his nod: “Imposed by whom—the citizens or the state government?”
“The citizens.”
“Compulsory birth control?”
“I don’t know. I told you: when I found how little I could fish from the banks, I didn’t bother to pursue the matter.”
“Do they ride visitors out again on a rail?”
He gave a half-smile. “No, that’s one other fact I remember. It’s an open community, administered by some sort of town meeting, I think, and you may indeed go there to look it over or even to stay indefinitely. They just don’t care for advertising, and apparently they regard noising their existence abroad as the same thing in principle.”
“We go there, then,” Kate said decisively, slapping shut the booklet.
“My choice would be the opposite. To be trapped in a backwater … But tell me why.”
“Precisely because there’s so little information in the banks. It’s beyond belief that the government won’t have tried—probably tried extremely hard—to tie Precipice into the net at least to the same extent as Protempore and Lap-of-the-Gods. If the citizens are dogged enough to stand out against such pressure, they might sympathize with your plight the way I do.”
Appalled, he blurted out, “You mean you want me to march in and announce it?”
“Will you stop that?” Kate stamped her foot, eyes flashing. “Grow out of your megalomania, for pity’s sake! Quit thinking in terms of ‘Sandy Locke versus the world’ and start believing that there are other people dissatisfied with the state of things, anxious to set it right. You know”—a level, caustic glare—“I’m beginning to think you’ve never sought help from others for fear you might wind up being the one who does the helping. You always like to be in charge, don’t you? Particularly of yourself!”
He drew a deep breath and let it out very slowly, forcing his embryonic annoyance to go with it. He said at length, “I knew what they offered me under the guise of ‘wisdom’ at Tarnover wasn’t the genuine article. It was so totally wrong it’s taken me until now to realize I finally ran across it. Kate, you’re a wise person. The first one I ever met.”
“Don’t encourage me to think so. If I ever come to believe it, I shall fall flat on my face.”
OUBLIETTE
By about then the lean black man from Tarnover was through with Ina Grierson and let her go home, stumbling with weariness. Before she fell asleep, however, she had to know one thing that Freeman had declined to tell her:
What the hell was so earthmoving about Sandy Locke?
She was not the most expert of data-mice; however, her position as head-of-dept for transient execs gave her access to the files of G2S employees. Trembling, she punched the code that started with 4GH.
The screen stayed blank.
She tried every route she could think of to gain access to the data, including some that were within the ace of being illegal … though they bent, rather than broke, the regulations laid down by the Bureau of Data Processing, and a blind eye was generally turned.
The result was invariably the same blank screen.
At first she only nibbled her nails; later, she started to gnaw them; finally, she had to cram her fingers into her mouth to stop herself whimpering in mingled terror and exhaustion.
If all her best attempts had failed, there was just one conclusion to be drawn. Sandy Locke, so far as the data-net was concerned, had been deleted from the human race.
For the first time since she broke her heart at seventeen, Ina Grierson cried herself to sleep.
A SHOULDER TO BE WEPT ON BY THE WORLD
So they went to Precipice, where there wasn’t one. The town had been founded on the levelest ground for miles, a patch of soft but stable silt due to some long-ago river which still had a few creeks meandering across it. Though hills could be seen on three sides, their slopes were gentle and any earthquake that shifted them in their eon-long slumber would be violent enough to cast loose California entire.
They rode toward it in the electric railcar with the irregular schedule, which they boarded at Transience. Small wonder the car didn’t stick to a fixed timetable. As they were informed by the driver—a burly smiling man wearing shorts, sunglasses and sandals—a local ordinance obliged it to give precedence at all crossings to anyone on foot, cycle or horseback, as well as to farm animals and agricultural vehicles. Moreover, when making its final loop around Precipice proper it had to let passengers on or off at any point. Taking full advantage of this facility, local people boarded and descended every few hundred meters. All of them gazed with unashamed curiosity at the strangers.
Who became uncomfortable. Both of them had overlooked one problem involved in traveling around the paid-avoidance zones, being so used to the devices that in theory could eliminate the need for baggage from the plug-in life-style. At all modern hotels could be found ultrasonic clothing cleansers capable of ridding even the bulkiest garment of its accumulated dust and grime in five minutes, and when the cloth began to give way under repeated applications of this violent treatment, there were other machines that would credit you for the fiber, tease it apart, store it for eventual re-use, and issue another garment the same size but a different style and/or color, debbing the customer for the additional fiber and the work involved. Nothing like that was to be found at Lap-of-the-Gods.
Kate had snatched up toilet gear for them before departure, including an old-fashioned reciprocating-head razor left behind by one of her boyfriends, but neither had thought to bring spare clothing. Consequently they were by now looking, and even more feeling, dirty … and those strange eyes constantly scanning them made them fidget.
But things could have been a great deal worse. In many places people would have felt it their duty to put hostile questions to wanderers whose clothes looked as though they had been slept in and who carried almost no other possessions. Luggage might have dwindled; the list of what people felt to be indispensable had long ago reached the stage where both sexes customarily carried bulky purses when bound for any but their most regular destinations.
Yet until they were almost at the end of their journey no one in the railcar, except the informative driver, addressed anything but a greeting to them.
By then they had been able to look over the neighborhood, which they found impressive. The rich alluvial soil was being efficiently farmed; watered by irrigation channels topped up by wind-driven pumps, orchards and cornfields and half-hectare plots of both leaf and root vegetables shimmered in the sun. That much one could have seen anywhere. Far more remarkable were the buildings. They were virtually invisible. Like partridges hiding among rough grass, some of them eluded the eye altogether until a change of angle revealed a line too straight to be other than artificial, or a flash of sunlight on the black glass of a solar energy collector. The contrast with a typical modern farm, a factory-like place where standard barns and silos prefabricated out of concrete and aluminum were dumped all anyhow, was astonishing.
In a low voice he said to Kate, “I’d like to know who designed these farms. This isn’t junk cobbled together by refugees in panic. This is the sort of landscaping a misanthropic millionaire might crave but not afford! Seen anything as good anywhere else?”
She shook her head.
“Not even at Protempore, much as I liked it. I guess maybe what the refugees originally botched up didn’t last. When it fell to bits they were calm enough to get it right on the second try.”
“But this is more than just right. This is magnificent. The town itself can’t possibly live up to the same standard. Are we in sight of it yet, by the way?”
Kate craned to look past the driver. Noticing, a middle-aged woman in blue seated on the opposite side of the car inquired, “You haven’t been to Precipice before?”
“Ah … No, we haven’t.”
“Thought I didn’t recognize you. Planning to stay, or just passing through?”
“Can people stay? I thought you had a population limit.”
“Oh, sure, but we’re two hundred under at the moment. And in spite of anything you may have heard”—a broad grin accompanied the remark—“we like to have company drop in. Tolerable company, that is. My name’s Polly, by the way.”
“I’m Kate, and—”
Swiftly inserted: “I’m Alexander—Sandy! Say, I was just wondering who laid out these farms. I never saw buildings that fit so beautifully into a landscape.”
“Ah! Matter of fact, I was about to tell you, go see the man who does almost all our building. That’s Ted Horovitz. He’s the sheriff, too. You get off at Mean Free Path and walk south until you hit Root Mean Square and then just ask for Ted. If he’s not around, talk to the mayor—that’s Suzy Dellinger. Got that? Fine. Well, nice to have met you, hope to see you around, this is where I get off.”
She headed for the door.
Involuntarily Kate said, “Mean Free Path? Root Mean Square? Is that some kind of joke?”
There were four other passengers at this stage of the journey. All of them chuckled. The driver said over his shoulder, “Sure, the place is littered with jokes. Didn’t you know?”
“Kind of rarefied jokes, aren’t they?”
“I guess maybe. But they’re a monument to how Precipice got started. Of all the people who got drove south by the Bay Quake, the ones who came here were the luckiest. Ever hear mention of Claes College?”
Kate exploded just as he began to say he hadn’t.
“You mean this was ‘Disasterville U.S.A.’?” She was half out of her seat with excitement, peering eagerly along the curved track toward the town that was now coming into view. Even at first glance, it promised that indeed it did maintain the standard set by the outlying farms; at any rate, there was none of the halfhearted disorganization found at the edge of so many modern communities, but a real sense of border: here, rural; there, urban. No, not after all a sharp division. A—a—
An ancient phrase came to mind: dissolving view.
But there was no chance to sort out his confused initial impressions; Kate was saying urgently, “Sandy, you must have heard of Claes, surely … ? No? Oh, that’s terrible!”
She dropped back into her seat and gave him a rapid-fire lecture.
“Claes College was founded about 1981 to revive the medieval sense of the name, a community of scholars sharing knowledge regardless of arbitrary boundaries between disciplines. It didn’t last; it faded away after only a few years. But the people involved left one important memorial. When the Bay Quake let go, they dropped everything and moved en masse to help with relief work, and someone hit on the idea of undertaking a study of the social forces at work in the post-catastrophe period so that if it ever happened again the worst tragedies could be avoided. The result was a series of monographs under the title ‘Disaster ville U.S.A.’ I’m amazed you never heard of it.”
She rounded on the driver. “Practically nobody has heard of it! I must have mentioned it a hundred times and always drawn a blank. But it’s not only important—it’s unique.”
Dryly the driver said, “You didn’t mention it at Precipice, that’s for sure. We grow up on it in school. Ask Brad Compton the librarian to show you our first edition.”
He applied the brakes. “Coming up to Mean Free now!”
Mean Free Path was indeed a path, winding among shrubs, trees and—houses? They had to be. But they were something else, too. Yes, they had roofs (although the roofs were never four-square) and walls (what one could see of them through masses of creeper) and doubtless doors, none of which happened to be visible from where they had left the railcar … already out of sight and sound despite its leisurely pace, lost in a tunnel of greenery.
“They are like the farms,” Kate breathed.
“No.” He snapped his fingers. “There’s a difference, and I just figured out what it is. The farms—they’re factors in landscape. But these houses are landscape.”
“That’s right,” Kate said. Her voice was tinged with awe. “I have the most ridiculous feeling. I’m instantly ready to believe that an architect who could do this …” The words trailed away.
“An architect who could do this could design a planet,” he said briefly, and took her arm to urge her onward.
Though the path wound, it was level enough to ride a cycle or draw a cart along, paved with slabs of rock conformable to the contour of the land. Shortly they passed a green lawn tinted gold by slanting sunshine. She pointed at it.
“Not a garden,” she said. “But a glade.”
“Exactly!” He put his hand to his forehead, seeming dizzy. Alarmed, she clutched at him.
“Sandy, is something the matter?”
“No—yes—no … I don’t know. But I’m okay.” Dropping his arm, he blinked this way, then that. “It just hit me. This is town—yes? But it doesn’t feel like it. I simply know it must be, because …” He swallowed hard. “Seeing it from the railcar, could you have mistaken this place for anything else?”
“Never in a million years. Hmm!” Her eyes rounded in wonder. “That’s a hell of a trick, isn’t it?”
“Yes, and if I didn’t realize it was therapeutic I could well be angry. People don’t enjoy being fooled, do they?”
“Therapeutic?” She frowned. “I don’t follow you.”
“Set-destruction. We use sets constantly instead of seeing what’s there—or feeling or tasting it, come to that. We have a set ‘town,’ another ‘city,’ another ‘village’ … and we often forget there’s a reality the sets were originally based on. We’re in too much of a hurry. If this effect is typical of Precipice, I’m not surprised it gets so little space in the guidebook. Tourists would find a massive dose of double-take indigestible. I look forward to meeting this poker Horovitz. As well as being a builder and a sheriff I think he must be a …”
“A what?”
“A something else. Maybe something I don’t know a word for.”
The path had been a path. The square proved not to be a square, more a deformed cyclic quadrilateral, but it implied all the necessary elements of a public urban space. It was a great deal bigger than one might have guessed. They found this out by crossing it. Part of it, currently deserted, was paved and ornamented with flower-filled urns; part was park-like, though miniaturized, a severe formal garden; part sloped down to a body of water, less a lake than a pond, some three or four meters below the general level of the land, from whose banks steps rose in elegant curves. Here there were people: old folk on benches in the sun, two games of fencing in progress amid the inevitable cluster of kibitzers, while down by the water—under the indulgent but watchful eyes of a couple of teeners—some naked children were splashing merrily about in pursuit of a huge light ball bigger than any two of their heads.
And enclosing this square were buildings of various heights linked together by slanting roofs and pierced by alleyways but for which they would have composed a solid terrace. As it was, every alley was bridged at first-story level and every bridge was ornamented with delicate carvings in wood or stone.
“My God,” Kate said under her breath. “It’s incredible. Not town. Not here. This is village.”
“And yet it’s got the city implicit in it—the Grand’ Place, the Plaza Mayor, Old London Bridge … Oh, it’s fantastic! An
d look a bit more closely at the houses. They’re ecofast, aren’t they? Every last one of them! I wouldn’t be surprised to find they’re running off ground heat!”
She paled a little. “You’re right! I hadn’t noticed. One thinks of an ecofast house as being—well, kind of one cell for a honeycomb, factory-made. There are ecofast communities around KC, you know, and they have no more character than an anthill!”
“Let’s track down the sheriff at once. I can stand just so many unanswered questions at one go. Excuse me!” He approached the group around the fencing tables.
“Where do we find Ted Horovitz?”
“Through that alley,” one of the watchers said, pointing. “First door on your right. If he’s not there, try the mayor’s office. I think he has business with Suzy today.”
Again, as they moved away, they felt many curious eyes on them. As though visitors were a rarity at Precipice. But why weren’t there thousands of them, millions? Why wasn’t this little town famous the world around?
“Though of course if it were famous—”
“Did you say something?”
“Not exactly. This must be the door. Mr. Horovitz?”
“Come right in!”
They entered, and found themselves in an extraordinary room at least ten meters long. Conventionally enough furnished, with chairs and a desk and sundry cases crammed with books and cassettes, it was more like a forest clearing bright with ferns or a cave behind a waterfall hung with strands of glistening vegetation than anybody’s office. Greenish light, reflected from wind-wavered panels outside irregular windows, flickered on flock-sprayed surfaces as soft as moss.
Turning to greet them from a carpenter’s bench that had seen long service was a stocky man in canvas pants with big pockets full of tools, laying aside a wooden object whose outline was at first elusive, then suddenly familiar: a dulcimer.
