How much will I understand? Your pictures certainly mean nothing to me.
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George Turner
What is the symbolism of a flayed man with a flayed rat in his stomach, and in
its stomach a plucked fowl laying an egg?
N o t symbolism? A clear statement? I shouldn’t have asked. No two of these
pictures seem to be in the same style; there is no theory of art here - that I can
see. Is this why B.Group made such a splash in its first years, then faded out of
sight?
We didn’t fade out of sight; we made our money and withdrew. It
was shameless on our part, but we had done what was asked of us.
That is, we had demonstrated that great artists can be created in the
laboratory, produced our exhibitions of masterpieces on a level slightly
advanced over the contemporary and then got on with our real work.
Which has no acceptance. Much too advanced.
We used hypnotic techniques for quick acceptance. It’s no secret,
though the critics don’t care to labour the point. We used line, form
and colour to lure the brain into looking where we wished, then be led
from point to point of one substantially meaningless area to another,
allowing it to create interpretations. We weren’t fakes; we introduced
new techniques and people did find genuine aesthetic-pleasure in the
works. And we made the money we needed for following our own
bents. Nobody likes what we do now because they can’t see it whole;
they think in terms of historical aesthetics, and appreciations come
only when minds are sufficiently developed to look past their own distractions. Aesthetes aren’t, on the whole, a clever bunch, only a mass of sensitivities.
Group B is superior, but that in itself is nothing to be proud of. The
greatest artists and most of the lesser have created themselves out of
desire and need, but we were created by a computer. Self-expression
is in our genes but we aren’t fools enough to take credit for it.
That? Yes, go and look at it. Tell me if it means anything to you.
It may not, but I must look because — Because for an instant you betrayed
interest in m y interest in that picture. Well, now. . . parallel verticals composed
of jumbled geometric forms —
squares, circles, triangles, rhombs - the space
between the verticals speckled with pastel colours, very pale, so that the
canvas —
no, not canvas, I think it’s glass with a rippled surface —
looks like
bars on a background of tinted snow, very deep, three-dimensional - the hypnotic technique?
I move my head and the thing changes like a kaleidoscope; the bars bend
in a left-handed spiral, the speckles between them fall into patterns linking the
spiralling bars while blotches of colour come forward to impinge on the bars
and to move up and down between them as I look up, look down. I look from
the other side and the spiral becomes right-handed, all the effects reversed.
On the nursery floor
185
S pirals?
I peer more closely and have a sensation of tipping forward into the painted
surface, of being led down a weli of coiour to a particular point where the blazing blotches hover in space, marking off collocations of the tiny geometric figures which form the spiralling bars... in groups of three.
Mayflower shakes my arm, vigorously, while she laughs. Hypnotic, and how!
I have been practically inside the thing. Meaning? Such pure fascination needs
no meaning. But it has one.
I painted that for Young Feller. He told me what would please him
in a picture and I painted it for him. So there was one talent not
programmed into him.
Yes, as you guessed, he sought us out. For practical reasons, not for
friendship. He had no feeling for the A and B Groups. Why should
he? For heaven’s sake, man, we are literally three different species. We
have no thoughts in common, no needs, no perceptions . . .
The A Group physical scientists were to him simply bores, as they
are to me and my sibs — dry people, intent on the struts and gears of
the universe, seeking incontrovertible facts. Oh, we don’t discount
facts but we use them to create the parallel universes of the spirit, while
the As see them only as jigsaw pieces.
Young Feller came to us for convenience. He found us bearable so
long as we didn’t try to discuss with him. To him our discussion was
prattle. So, can you imagine him out there among the street crowds?
Amid the meaningless jabber, the pointless scurry, the inanities of
thought? Hum anity drives us to screaming point with its lack of the
simplest understandings; what do you think it did to him?
Are you insulted? Too bloody bad.
At the Project he had gritted his teeth to deal with people who were
by human standards an intelligent lot, but contact with the raw mass
of humanity shocked his mind. He refused to leave this house after the
first days; he had his course of study and a full range of terminals, so
why go out? W ith the duplicate Library Access Card — which I
forged for him, by the way — he was content.
It had to be biology; surely you see that. In his place what would
your need have been? They couldn’t breed from each other, could
they? They were clones, identical save for the Y chromosomes; in-
breeding could only bring regression; copulation would have been
super-incest with no benefit as random variation regressed the
children to common stock in a couple of generations. The Group’s
existence would have become pointless for lack of perpetuation.
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George Turner
Ay, Lady, gush gush! Al this was plain from the moment we saw why all
biology texts were removed from the Project site before C Group was advanced enough to get at them. No doubt your script tells you to make sure I understand. Which should mean that my progress is no longer under my control.
Some sort of an end is in sight.
So Young Feller had to become the greatest biologist in the world,
for him not so difficult an achievement, and in eight weeks he learned
everything that a global information storage network could provide.
By then he knew precisely how to regulate the guesswork of the Project
scientists, how to create exactly the mental and genetic types required
with no gambling on results. He knew how to create an entire race of
his own kind. Now you know what happened during the two months
for which he was missing.
Finish gush; what happened next is history. He went back to the Project site
and told his siblings what he had seen and done in the world outside. When he
had finished they sat down facing each other and exercised their control of autonomic functions. With the whole day staff looking on and wondering what the hell, they stopped breathing, stopped their hearts, disrupted their synaptic systems, and died.
And that was the end of Project IG.
Why? Young Feller had brought back what he went for, so why?
Because in the city he had learned something of the real nature of
the world, in close-up, and encountered the forces against which
intelligence has no weapon. Having made his plans, he needed a
means of implementing them — resources of
money, manpower and
equipment that only a government could finance.
So he went and asked for them. I mean it. In the innocence of a
logic which dealt only in commonsense he went to the man who,
according to his summation, could and would listen and assist. He
was refused.
The m anner of the refusal opened his eyes to facts. He was asked
what use he thought his kind could be in the world, and could give no
answer. He recognised himself as useless because he could not think
on this world’s level; he needed a world of his own and had reasoned
that the power that created him would help him to get it.
Now he knew that even if he succeeded in creating C Group
children they would be condemned to life as unwanted, resented
inhabitants of a madhouse.
The Group’s life was insupportable, with no escape except death.
So they escaped.
On the nursery floor
187
Whom had he asked? Why, a very powerful man indeed, one who
had survived five governments in and out of power to return to the
position he had held twenty years before as Minister for Science and
Development, the man who should be profoundly interested in the
furtherance of his own dreamchild.
Naturally, this information was withheld at the first interview but
I think he will talk about it now.
Go to him as soon as you leave here; he expects you. Don’t try to get
in touch with your organisation, whatever it is. If you do you will certainly be killed at once and my warning will be the last kindness ever done you.
Good morning. And good luck. One always needs a little luck.
Good woman, wicked woman, and does it matter which? Thank you,
ma’am, for the chill of your send-off. But, please, a last long gaze at the picture
Young Feller described (dictated?) and you painted. Marvellous, marvellous,
and I wish I could carry it in my mind forever. Alas, it was designed for a more
understanding brain than mine; post-internalism is beyond me. But I know a
thing or two about this example.
8
The journalist’s human interest story
W hat The Mob (my term) wanted was Young Feller’s legacy of biological notebooks detailing the genetic manipulation of intellect. They were sure the notebooks existed because they themselves would never
leave work undocumented; their cold-blooded A Group minds could
not envision a super-intelligence operating by a logic different from
their efficient own. That he might have left them in a form unintelligible to them was outside their imaginative scope; that he might make a joke of some sort (his sort) would be unthought of, an intellectual flightiness.
It was in some degree incomprehensible to me also, but I could
make no guesses at the working of Young Feller’s mind; his reasons
were beyond me but I was sure of my flash of intuition in Mayflower’s
house. I had seen the ‘blueprint’, his will and testament, to be read by
whomever could.
A question: Did Mayflower know what she had painted in that
trickery of light, form and illusion?
I thought she did. That final nuance of complicity after the shock
of warning, after frightening the daylight out of me by revealing that
the end of the line was where I had begun . . . with the ancient Arm
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George Turner
strong, once Minister . . . that jokey, coarse survivor.
This time there was no pleasant chat on the balcony overlooking the
ocean. An electronic frisk declared me free of weapons (depending on
what the frisk was programmed to see as a weapon). I was expected;
the door flunkey had his orders and led me into the heart of the house,
to a windowless room.
Building regulations made windowless rooms illegal, for health reasons, a century and a half ago; a windowless room in a modern house is a private place but not therefore a fine one. A step through the door
into Armstrong’s holy of unholies was a step from our world into his
private world. On one side of the door were the small movements and
reverberations of comforting life; on his side of it was a total lack of
sound, a deadness in the atmosphere, a removal from the sense of ambient life.
So Armstrong had a protected room — spyproof. I had heard such
places described in eerie terms but had never been in one. Eerie may
have been the word for it but I was tense and frightened, concerned
with realities before impressions.
It was a council chamber, boardroom, furnished with long table
and sixteen chairs and the usual array of reference terminals. What
vice was bred in this secret womb? I don’t know; I don’t care. I am
alive, which is what I care about.
Armstrong sat alone at the head of the table, old beyond his desert
but looking healthily middle-aged. He smiled agreeably because he
had spent a lifetime smiling agreeably over tiger thoughts, and said,
‘I imagine you are wired for sight and sound, as the phrase goes.’
‘O f course.’ But not really; the circuits were printed on my bones
and the visual segued directly into the optic system, but why alert him
to techniques he knew nothing of?
He said, still agreeable, still with claws sheathed, ‘I shan’t waste my
time or yours. To whom do you report?’
To whom. His native, educated English with no overlay of the common touch he had practised on the hustings. A man of intent, seeking knowledge.
‘I don’t report.’
I took a dozen paces down the length of the room and his hand slid
to the dashboard in the table’s edge. Alarm? A weapon of some sort?
He smiled, very briefly, without humour. (Just a journalist after a human interest story.’
On the nursery floor
189
‘Not at all.’ It was far too late for evasion or delay. ‘I don’t report because I am monitored continuously. I have no storage capacity, so you can’t drain the content.’
‘Who monitors you?’
‘Does it matter? When I entered this room the monitoring was cut
off by your dampers. O ur business is therefore private.’ He became
visibly alert to possible threat, the idea that matters might be less simple than he had assumed. I raked the exposed nerve. ‘My location when communication ceased will have been recorded. You are
pinpointed.’
I think my voice was steady. When there is no way to go but forward
the mind divests itself of waste frights and scurryings.
‘By whom?’ He was conceding nothing.
‘The Mob,’ I said.
Momentarily he was rocked. ‘A criminal gang?’ The association of
ideas was as old as melodrama. An underworld organisation? I don’t
believe you.’
I shrugged. He leaned back in his chair, making a production of
studying me while he groped for decision. ‘I can have information
electro-probed out of you.’ I nodded agreement. ‘O r physical torture.
Quicker but finally less reliable.’
‘Crime then on both sides,’ I suggested, without any specific
intention. ‘These days the gangs don’t battle it out; they make a deal.’
‘Ah!’
.................'
It was such a satisfied sound that 1 could have kicked myself for not
realising that he needed knowledg
e and a deal might be the means of
pursuing it.
‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘I made things easy for you. I monitored your
appointments and had some of your interviewees give you a little confidential information, enough to keep your nose to the trail, to lead you on until your aim became plain.’
A nd did it?’
‘No. That is why you are here. Tell me.’
Why not? The situation needed clearing. ‘I wanted Young Feller’s
notes. We were sure they existed.’
He was most alert. And . . . ?’
‘I found them.’
‘Where?’
‘Hanging on Mayflower’s wall.’
‘Excellent!’ He sounded genuinely appreciative of my perception
— which was in fact intuition of the sort that graces my level of IQ
190
George 'Eirner
once in a lifetime. I had been half hypnotised by the thing when it
declared itself. Armstrong murmured, as though it explained everything, ‘Mayflower is my m istress’
It explained a great deal, but I would not until then have accused
Mayflower of pigsty taste.
‘She and I can’t decipher it, although she painted the thing, and
asking experts to do it would only spread knowledge that is better kept
close. Can your Mob decipher it?’
I had my doubts but I said, ‘They can design and build the computer to do the job. It will require unusual programming.’
‘T hat is my thought. So, a deal.’
‘W hat do you offer?’
He spread his hands. ‘Intangibles. Protection and the path-easing
of wealth, industrial power and contacts in useful areas. Alternatively,
I can have your mind torn open and their identities revealed, after
which I will take over direction of the operation,’
I pretended to think it over. I was about six metres from him and his
hand only inches from a button. I decided that I could get closer
without alarming him, and did so between exchanges, as naturally as
I could manage.
‘W hat puzzles me,’ I said, ‘is what you expect to gain. Do you want
to establish a factory for the production of super-intelligences?’
He snorted a contempt which seemed to me the most natural thing
about him; he became for a moment the larrikin politician ‘Who the
Strange Attractors (1985) Page 26
