Orbit 16 - [Anthology]

by Ed By Damon Knight

  Vision blurred and eyes burning, she got in line at an oxygen booth. Nearby, a Ransomite rally was underway. Ona Ransome herself was speaking, a tough, intransigent knot of a woman, locked behind a gold-plated gas mask engraved with the sign of the dollar. She harangued the crowd in husky, accented tones: the threat of the neomystics . . . the threat of an unconquered nature . . . the threat, always the threat. Gudrun’s head pounded agonizedly. She felt as if someone were driving an icepick into her brain.

  “They do not stop at cleaning up the air and water, they demand a stop to shopping centers, expressways, transportation! In short, these Dionysian brutes are screaming for an end to America, a stop to civilization!”

  Her audience was an undulating mass, responsive to her every cue. And why not? Wasn’t she right, after all? Why carry an onerous burden of guilt when Ona Ransome clearly placed the blame?

  A commotion was starting at the oxygen booth; a man refused to relinquish his place after the allotted thirty seconds. Gudrun took a handkerchief from her purse and covered her face.

  Who are these people? she asked herself. Gaunt faces; brown-yellow skin stretched hot and tight across the bone. Hollow-chested women with cracked lips, the skin showing through their hair in leprous patches, their flesh seared and burnished by the air itself! Bandanas and scraps of cloth pulled across their mouths like gags. A few Ransomites shouted insults; the man in the oxygen booth stubbornly held his ground.

  “The Dionysian motivation is clear—a return to nature in all its ugliness, a mode of life best described by three adjectives: harsh, brutal, and short!”

  Men from the oxygen line itself—businessmen, public servants —joined the Ransomites in removing the protester; he twitched and shuddered like a weasel being extruded from the womb. He was stomped to the ground. There was blood. His attackers were met by a dozen ascetic-looking men and women brandishing signs and placards as well as their bony fists: air now! pollution is genocide!

  Ona Ransome could not be heard. The sirens of riot police sounded monotonously in the distance. Gudrun felt herself crowded in from all sides, so tightly she could barely move, could only sag and sway with the movement of the mob. Screams. Rushes. Beggarly men falling of their own exertion, trampled.

  All at once the crowd parted and Gudrun stared directly into the ratlike face of the man in the air chamber. His face was torn, his eyes maddened with blood and pain. Gudrun’s head spun. She was about to faint. She extended one hand toward him in a meaningless gesture.

  The man took something from a package at his side and hurled it with all his strength. Like a tough pink fish encrusted with tar, stinking of some foul preservative, it fell at Gudrun’s feet.

  A human lung.

  * * * *

  She entered the bar quickly amid sounds of natural ambience; fluttering birds, tumbling water. She saw him almost immediately —the barrel chest heaving beneath a mesh shirt of photosynthetic weave. The stale emblem on the sleeve.

  She took a place at a corner table and cleared her throat once, self-consciously. The airbrain yawned.

  Her pulse quickened. Again the signal, as delicate and tempting as the crumpling of sheets . . .

  He set his milk down on the bar and rose to face her, deltoids flexing, his chest a muscle playground. “You have doubts?” he asked. A standard question, to which she nodded sheepishly. The airbrain had no doubts.

  “It is important to have faith. . . .”

  The oxygen made her dizzy. She inhaled deeply, relaxed. In and out. The world melted away. The airbrain smiled.

  She did not breathe as he laid his hands upon her in a lingering benediction.

  <>

  * * * *

  BINARY JUSTICE

  Richard Bireley

  To paraphrase Thoreau: Beware of any enterprise that requires you to buy new skirts.

  The water on the freeway canal didn’t show a ripple. I eased my skimmer down the ramp and watched the flashes from the fish darling for the bottom. The new skirts of the aircar made it ride a good twelve centimeters higher, and it was smooth, really smooth. I sort of had to grin when I shoved the vanes to full forward and cut in the afterfan. When I hit the speed channel, I was already up to an even hundred kilos. Those fish were in for a bad time later—on a day like this, everybody with a cool skimmer that could lift off the water would be pulling revs. But right then it was quiet. I had to laugh when an old clunker with leaky skirts lost power and plunked down right in front of me. I gave him a blast with the afterfan, just to watch him bob, then scurried in to work. I breezed into the parking marina with plenty of time to spare and strolled into the shop. By the time I got to my bench, I didn’t feel so good.

  Somehow a transfer day always does that to me. I don’t owe too much. The usual. Rent to the city for my pad at the collective. A meal tab for two intervals. Payments on the skimmer. Except that I had gotten a bit carried away with those new skirts. My credit was down to the edge of my C5 credit limit. It really wasn’t fair. The more you made, the more you could owe. I had heard the C12 limit was a thousand credits. And here I was stuck at a miserable hundred and fifty. So I shot my balance, and then some. And today Trim Skimmers, Inc., was due for another transfer. I hoped Karl would bail me out. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  I dropped into my seat at the bench and picked up the first visiphone. The tag read “Broken View Switch.” Well, that computed. No one would believe how many came in like that. The view switch “somehow” jams on. Then when the user answers the call straight from the shower, they are terribly surprised and flustered when somebody sees them. I remember one time . . . Well, anyway, I was fixing the switch when Karl arrived. He worked at the bench next to me.

  “Unity, Len.”

  “Unity, Karl. Hey, Karl, how about transferring a hundred credits until tomorrow?”

  “Sorry, Len. I’m into my limit now. What’s the trouble this time?”

  Then I really didn’t feel so good. I gave him the whole story, complete with dulcimers and moogs. He nodded.

  “Bad break.”

  That didn’t help much. I had a date tonight, too. Free-fall games. Then he got my attention.

  “Look, you can take care of the credit problem real easy.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll break into the Center with a magnet and wipe them out.”

  “Naw. That doesn’t work, anyway. But I can show you how to get a start on the next interval.”

  “Watch your program, fella. You know that new credits are entered for everybody at the start of an interval. No sooner.”

  Karl laughed and sat down on my bench. “Yeah, I know. What time is your payment due?”

  “No later than nineteen hundred hours.”

  “And what time does the credit center shut down for the day?”

  “At seventeen hundred.”

  “Correct. Are you getting the program?”

  “No.” I could see that Karl had something interesting going, so I shoved back my chair.

  “Retrieve, man. Retrieve,” he said. “What says you got no credits? A little strip of plastic on your ID card. Just a few little magnetic spots. Now! What is that interesting piece of machinery next to us? A coder for the key strips in the phones. A coder for little magnetic spots.”

  I put the visiphone down with a thump.

  “Run complete, Karl. Just add enough to keep the smiling dealer smiling. By the time my transfers hit Central tomorrow, my credits for the next interval are already in. That’s the first run of the day. Then I go to an update booth, get my new balance recorded, and everything is square. Could work.”

  “Does work. Do it myself sometimes. Here, I’ll show you.”

  Well, it probably would have worked, too, except that I went out at noon for a quick hairstyling. I wanted something short for free-fall. I was cruising into town when this water beetle pulled me over. They hate that name, but what else can you call those little pill-shaped black-and-whites with side jets that look like leg
s? So the monitor herded me into a control slip and looked me up and down.

  “Unity, citizen. Ridin’ kind of high, aren’t you, son?”

  I sort of thought I knew what he was getting at.

  “Uh, what do you mean, Monitor?”

  “Looks to me like you’re a bit over the legal maximum on skirt length,” he said.

  “I don’t think so. I always heard if you didn’t go any higher than the long side of a credit report form, you were okay.”

  “Sorry, son. Eight centimeters. No more. Anything over that and things begin to get unstable. I’m going to have to punch this up.” He pulled the report box from his belt.

  I knew what was coming, and thought of gunning out of there, but that’s why they have control slips. His bug blocked the way.

  “Citizen’s ID,” he said, holding out his hand.

  There was no choice. I gave it to him.

  He scanned my number and added it to his list. Then he checked his sheet of violation codes and entered a number on the keyboard. My card went into a slot at the end. A second later, his readout glowed. He scanned it briefly.

  “No previous violations,” he said. “They’ll probably take it easy on you.” As he spoke, he punched another button and checked again. “You got off easy. Only thirty credits.” His voice became formal.

  “The law states that you may post bail immediately, or you may appear in court at seventeen hundred hours on the day of the alleged violation. Objections may be registered at the time of transfer.”

  Oh, wow! Seventeen hundred hours on a date night? No way. Besides, that traffic computer probably didn’t update more than once every twenty-four hours anyway.

  The officer extended the box with my card still in the slot. I took a deep breath and thumbed the transfer button. The readout changed to an angry red.

  * * * *

  “All rise.”

  I jumped to my feet nervously. The court calendar was crowded, so it was two very long hours before my case was called. My attorneys rose casually with me. One on each side. The older one winked at the prosecutor. Then a side door opened, and the judge in his symbolic white lab robes appeared. He stepped to the bench and sat down.

  “Be seated.” The clerk advanced, rustling a stack of papers. “Court is now in session, Judge Frederick Dove presiding.”

  The judge banged his gavel once, activating the large control panel mounted in the face of his bench. Some lights flashed, and the tape units started to twitch as the system was initialized.

  The clerk faced the audience and intoned, “Now for computation, the People versus Leonard Verst.”

  More lights flashed, and across the top of the bench appeared pictures of the faces of the six jurors. A green light flashed on at the prosecutor’s panel. The senior attorney, I think I heard someone call him Pike, began a series of pigtails in the corner of his printout.

  “What happens now?” I whispered.

  The number-two man flapped his hand in a hushing motion without looking at me. Nervously I ran my thumbnail along the lines in the molded-plastic tabletop. Deep grooves showed that a few other jokers hadn’t felt too good about filling this chair either.

  There seemed to be a pause while everybody took a last-minute look at their printouts. I didn’t have a printout, so I leaned back and stared around. It was nice enough, for a courtlab, though the thick green carpet didn’t seem to go too well with the white tile walls. Each wall had a large mural set into the tile.

  On the right side they had a statue of Justice, extending from floor to ceiling. That was fine with me, but she was wearing a blindfold. And her right hand was holding a sword. Not so good. The left hand was a little better. In it was a punched computer card. I could understand that part. A scroll across the top had a motto printed on it in Old English letters: “Equal Justice Under Electronic Law.” I got to thinking, when you’re really guilty, equal justice doesn’t seem all that good.

  On the other wall there was a picture of a big building, shaped like a computer, with citizens going in the front door. They left on opposite sides, smiling on one side, heads bowed on the other. I scratched at the tabletop again, and wondered if a computer had ever missed a date because it was low on credits.

  The prosecutor pushed back his chair and stood up, clearing his throat. Consulting a sheaf of printouts, he moved to the terminal in front of his table.

  “Your Honor, members of the jury,” he began. “I intend to show that the defendant, Leonard Verst, is guilty of the crime of Alteration, as defined in Program Fifty-three, Subroutine Alter, of the State Master Penal File.” As he spoke, his fingers moved over the keyboard. The recorders began to whisper, and lights started a march across the big panel. The prosecutor continued in a matter-of-fact tone.

  “I shall prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant did willfully, and with intent to defraud, alter the record on his Citizen’s Credit Card to indicate credits that did not exist.”

  I started to jump up. “Wait a minute. That’s not right. I just . . .” A hand on my shoulder forced me down, hard. No one seemed to notice. More squiggles appeared on the sheet next to me. The prosecutor turned and smiled toward our table. I didn’t feel included.

  “The attorney for the defense will present the position of his client.” He stabbed a button with his thumb, and the green light shifted to our terminal. The attorney for the defense doodled a last pigtail and eyed the results. Then he nodded and got to his feet. As he approached the panel, I glanced at the pictures of the jurors across the top of the judge’s bench. The one on the left seemed to be smiling, but that didn’t help much either. I wondered what he was thinking about when they made that picture.

  I tried again. “Where are the jurors?” I whispered to the assistant. He gave me an irritated look and pawed through a stack of papers. Finding a small pamphlet, he checked a page and pushed it toward me. My lawyer was making his opening remarks, but it didn’t make much sense to me, so I glanced at the book. It was titled “Facts for the Defendant—A Citizen’s Guide.” The figure of Justice with her punched card appeared just below.

  Most of the stuff I already knew. Like how all the laws and decisions are stored on computer tapes, and each court computer is updated daily. The jurors report each day and are put in little rooms, where they are wired into the computer. A plastic band goes around your head that holds the pickups for your brainwaves. Then they fasten a bunch of little sensors all over you that beam data to the master receiver. You lie on a couch like a big damp sponge and watch the proceedings on a full-sized visiwall. As the trial progresses, the computer monitors the jurors’ emotional responses and stores them. When the presentations are complete, the computer evaluates all the responses and weighs them, along with the points of law programmed by the attorneys, to arrive at an absolutely unbiased verdict.

  My attorney cleared his throat and raised his voice. “It is clear that one essential element of this crime is not present. That element is intent. My client had credits legally due him which he expected would more than cover the amount drawn.”

  Now that sounded better. More lights flashed, and the tapes mined jerkily. One clicked and began to race ahead. The judge’s eyes were closed.

  The defense moved on. “I would like to introduce a statement from my client’s employer attesting to his reliability and work habits.” The green light went out, and a big red flashing job appeared on the main panel.

  “What’s that? What happened?” I said.

  “It’s an objection,” muttered the assistant.

  The prosecutor stood up. “Objection, File OBJ327, your Honor.”

  My side was not to be outdone. “File DEM828,” replied the defense.

  There were lights all over the panel, and the tapes got busy for sure. A printer clattered briefly on the judge’s bench. He reached out and tore off a strip.

  “Sustained,” he announced. Then he checked the timer on the far wall. “This hearing has now reached the twenty-minute fir
st-period maximum. Court will recess for ten minutes.”

  We all rose, and I went along with my defenders to a room next-door. They told me to sit while they analyzed the first session. I couldn’t follow much of it. There was nothing about me, or what I did. Just subroutines, jumps, and things like that. Now and then one of them would go to a small keyboard and punch up something. Then they would both mutter over the resulting printout. Finally one of them kicked back his chair and began to pace the room.

  “I see how we might be able to pull this off.”