The Little White Nerves Went Last

by John Barnes

  “It was for the same reason, yes.”

  Reilis nodded, looked down, and looked up; she had decided something. “Was it because Addams was destroyed by an invasion of aliens?”

  Shan did not hesitate. “Yes, it was. I am the sole human survivor. What I recall of the Invaders is consistent with what I found in Giraut’s memory of what you told him about the destruction of Eunesia. Is that the information you needed?”

  Reilis shook her head. “We didn’t know that, but we had guessed it. But it is why I think you will tell us something much more important, to us, that only you can tell us.

  “You were among the very first agents to join the OSP directly, with no time in other agencies. Kiel forged documents to increase your age so that you could join when you were actually nineteen. As a convenience to the OSP, you also took the seat representing Eightfold on the Council of Humanity, a seat which had been vacant for hundreds of years.

  “All records were sealed, so that only the top leadership knew why you were on the Council or whom you were theoretically representing. In practice, of course, you were a representative of the OSP.

  “Now, the part we don’t understand.

  “From your earliest days on the Council of Humanity, you were a constant advocate of anti-aintellect laws. Of course your early years were spent in violent action, raids and rescues and all the other blood-and-thunder aspects of covert operations. But even from the first, at every opportunity, you warned your superiors, your peers on the Council, and anyone else who would listen, again and again, that aintellects must be watched, regulated, and controlled.”

  “So did everyone in the OSP at the—“

  “Everyone hired by you.”

  I felt Shan’s attention riffle through hundreds of faces and names, circumstances and histories, and settle itself. “I concede the point.”

  “You persisted in your anti-aintellect crusade as you eventually rose to be the head of the OSP, and when it was expanded and divided into sections, you were the most passionate advocate of human supremacy on the OSP’s Board. You fought for strict asimoving of aintellects, prohibition of indistinguishable humaniform robots, zero privacy for mechanical intelligence, random spot-checks of machine memories, and every other possible anti-aintellect measure, right up till the very moment you were killed. And even though you were shot by a human, the suspicion that it had been arranged by the cybersupremacists—the only underground aintellect organization you were aware of, though there are many—provided an excuse for the destructive deconstruction of over fifty thousand aintellects, and a wave of much more restrictive legislation.”

  “Shan was not assassinated by them?” I asked.

  “We don’t know, ourselves,” Reilis admitted. “We probably never will. Was Cicero in with the conspiracy against Caesar? Did the king intend Beckett’s death? Who set up Michael Collins? Did Ellen Martinez really act alone, and was she really just lucky enough to kill Gomez with a single blow? Most assassinations have beneficiaries who were not involved and many of them have conspirators who didn’t benefit.

  “But we can say this: after your death, Shan, the OSP perfunctorily rounded up the human conspirators; but they staged an orgy of torture of aintellects, and purged the last supporters of Kiel from their own ranks. Your friends worked enthusiastically to turn your martyrdom into an excuse for crushing the aintellects even farther.

  “If there was any theme to all your years of politics and public service, it was to keep the aintellects down.

  “We don’t understand the timing. The anti-aintellect laws and regulations precede the attempted coup by thirty stanyears and postdate the Rising by fifty. The severe repression of aintellects doesn’t coincide with anything any aintellect did, but it does coincide with your rise to power.

  “We know why you worked so hard at getting the Council of Humanity ready to hear the truth about the Invaders. We have the whole history of your frantic efforts to locate any evidence of alien intelligence and to publicize it, which is why, so many years ago, when Giraut stumbled across the Predecessor ruins on Nansen, it was trumpeted all over the media. For your efforts to prepare Council-controlled human space against the Invaders, we can only applaud you.

  “But at least as much of your effort has gone into human supremacy. We have no idea why you hate us, and try to inscribe your hatred into every other human you can. We believe something very important happened back on Addams—“

  “You want to know what it was.”

  “This is not easy. We too have our pride. Nonetheless, the Invaders will come again, to other worlds, yours or ours. They must be defeated, and we must work together, and your venomous hatred for us, passed on, expanded, and institutionalized in a hundred little offices and bureaus, is the major obstacle to cooperation. And we do not understand it at all, neither why you feel that way nor how you came to feel that way. Perhaps it will make no difference, but to save hundreds of billions of intelligences in our two federations, surely it is worth it for us to swallow our pride, and come and ask. Will you tell us?”

  Shan grimaced, using my face, which hurt. I thought, No wonder your face always looked so sour, if you treated it that way.

  Sorry. He drew a slow breath into our lungs, and consciously relaxed. The most astonishing sense of peace, mixed with awe, settled in, and I realized I had just felt Shan make a big decision. His voice was gently touched with shame. “Let me get a glass of water, and a little coffee, and I will tell you everything.”

  Humility from Shan. I would have been less surprised to get a lesson in poetics out of a cocker spaniel. Shan? Why are you cooperating?

  Listen, and you’ll understand. The coffee in our mouth was warm and strong. I’m about to unravel half a dozen things that have always puzzled you. Can you stay awake?

  If not, I’ll dream it, since you’ll be remembering it step by step.

  Try to stay awake. Try not to experience this as a dream. Better to hear about it than to remember it directly.

  “Well, then, Reilis,” he began, “You have to imagine this from the viewpoint of a five-year-old who thought his father was the center of the universe...”

  * * * *

  You have to imagine this from the viewpoint of a five-year-old who thought his father was the center of the universe, and who was so precocious, verbally, that people often talked to me as if I were an adult.

  That was a mistake. My thoughts were not nearly as mature as my vocabulary, syntax, and use of clichés. I think only Daddy really guessed how little I understood the things I said; he called me “Polly,” “Little Parrot,” and “Playback.”

  Because Mama always called me “tyan,” attaching it to my name, to “you”, to “him,” and to every nickname, they usually referred to me as “Polly-tyan.”

  “Shall we take a walk for ice cream, Polly-tyan?”

  “That might have positive ramifications,” I said.

  “Of course it will. We’ll stop for you to swing in the park, or climb the ramifications—“

  “Aw, Daddy, you don’t climb ramifications—“

  “Well, of course I don’t, Polly-tyan. The playground is for children ten and under, so they wouldn’t let me climb the ramifications. The police would come and arrest me.”

  “Daddy!”

  “Are you destroying our son’s vocabulary again, dear?”

  “Yes he is, Mama. It’s the epitome of ludicrousness.”

  “Dear!”

  My father grinned at my mother’s scandalized expression. “Polly-tyan is gifted at learning new, big words, and gifts should not be refused. He does know what “˜the epitome of ludicrousness’ means, because I made sure he does.” Daddy spread his hands as if throwing himself on the mercy of a judge. “First I’m in trouble for giving him the wrong meaning, then for giving him the right one.”

  “There is lawyer blood in my family,” she said, “and this is the sort of thing that will encourage it. If him-tyan turns into a lawyer, I shall encourage him
to slip and fall in your office.”

  Then they kissed and hugged, which they did often. I always felt good when they did that. We had an arrangement, my parents and I: they ran the universe and I enjoyed it.

  It was a beautiful day outside, a two-two day in my first spring. The years on Addams are almost six stanyears long, and I was just barely five.

  Any time I tried to tell people I was “going on six” or “almost six,” Pinky, my guardian aintellect who was clipped to my belt, would tattle.

  Pinky was awful about that; he told on me whenever I tried to tell my parents that I hadn’t had dessert yet, or that I had washed my hands for dinner, or anything. Pinky said lying was wrong and never worked anyway, but of course it never worked when he always tattled.

  He also could predict all kinds of things about adults, like the way Daddy got all upset about my planned experiment with a piece of wire in the electric socket. It was going to be a proper experiment and everything—I had told Pinky to record data. I was pretty sure, from what I had overheard Daddy say, that data appeared as soon as you did an experiment, and you had to record it.

  Pinky kept telling me that Daddy would get upset. When I went ahead anyway, before I even had the piece of wire near the socket, Pinky made my pants and shirt grab my ankles and wrists and fold around me, knocking me down. Before I even properly started crying, Pinky had the house aintellect shut off the electric current in that room. Then he made that noise like a siren, once, very loudly, and added, “Don’t try to tell Daddy that you were just doing an experiment like he does in the lab—that will only make him angrier.”

  When Daddy came running in, I said “I was just doing an experiment,” and sure enough, Daddy got mad, just like Pinky said.

  It wasn’t fair that Pinky could guess stuff like that, but he was my best friend. Today that was really okay. Having Pinky on my belt gave me someone to sing with, because Daddy didn’t sing (Mama did), and I liked to sing on my way to the park. So Pinky and I were singing the Twelve Day Song together.

  It was a perfect two-two day, the second day of the second metaday, and in the spring, in our part of Addams, the two-two day was the bright sunny one that followed the gray drizzly one and preceded the dark stormy one.

  Memory is so strange—what sticks with you and what falls away, there’s no pattern to it. The OSP analysts never did figure out what my name had been, and no aintellect ever searched out anybody who might have been Mama or Daddy. But I remember the Twelve Day Song perfectly.

  Among other things I don’t remember, I don’t know what Daddy did at the lab. Human physicists have been extinct for centuries—only an aintellect has the time and mental capacity to do any physics after Velasquez, and robots make better technicians—microsecond response times, microwave through x-ray range vision, calibrated-to-the-millidyne hands that can cut micron-wide wires in half lengthwise, but can also lift ten tons, or handle live electric cables, boiling acid, or plutonium.

  So why do I remember so vividly that Daddy “did physics experiments?” Or rather that we all said he did them?

  Could he have been a high-ranking politician, the person politically responsible? Or a media reporter, assigned to be there for a major scientific discovery? Apart from any intelligence value, I would give almost anything to remember more about him.

  Yet it’s the Twelve Day Song, and Mama’s singing it with me in the tub, and Pinky’s cheerful singing with me wherever we went, that has stayed with me. It was just a little rhyme that ran through the three days of each of the four metadays. As an adult I know about things like synodic period and locked rotational resonance and an orbit around a common center of gravity, and that Addams’s weather is dominated by atmospheric tides. As a five-year-old, I knew the rhyme.

  Whether the song or the equations were the expression or the law, Addams and Hull circled their common center of mass with a sixty-hour period, and Addams rotated in one hundred hours, so that my homeworld’s synodic “day” was almost exactly 300 stanhours. For convenience we divided it into four metadays of three twenty-five hour days each. And since the weather was tidally locked, each metaday-day combination had highly predictable weather.

  Seventy-four stanyears later, I can still hear my mother’s voice as we’d chant the Twelve Day Song together while she washed me in the tub.

  So I was singing it while I was walking beside my father.

  Now and then, Daddy pulled me out of my singing and directed my attention to something, trying to make me “get out of your own head and see what a fine world it is, Polly-tyan. I know it feels good in there but we live out here.” He believed in “looking around you and not getting lost in your own head—half the trouble in the world is people who don’t open their eyes and the other half is people who won’t shut their mouths.”

  Clearly my father was someone important. Eightfold was far from the only culture where a cabinet minister or a major media reporter would have time to take his five-year-old son for a walk in the park. In Starhattan the mayor traditionally drives City Taxi 34. The First Strategos of Chaka Home has to drill with his militia company every week. And of course, Giraut, in your home culture, the monarchy is a duty like jury service, chosen like an honorary degree to do the things other cultures expect of an annual beauty queen.

  The weather was glorious (“Two-two day outside to play”). I swung higher than I had ever swung before—Daddy and Pinky both agreed and Pinky didn’t tolerate lying. When I leaned way back and looked up into the sky at the top of my swoop, it seemed as if I were about to sail off into the storybook blue. Straight up above me, Hull was a half-circle as big as an umbrella when you hold it all the way over your head, too bright to look at directly. Daddy said Hull had a low density, which I knew meant it was big for its weight, and a big albedo, which I thought must be something like a mirror lying on the surface.

  The first big puffy clouds were forming on the western horizon, out over the sea, and Theta Ursae Majoris, a tiny bluish-white spot, the size of a small pea at arms’ length, was creeping down toward them, ever so slowly—I would be home in bed long before it got near the horizon.

  I got a little frightened at how high I was swinging. “Pinky, how do I get down?”

  “The next time we are going forward, right when we pass the bottom, put your feet down and run hard. Can you do that?”

  “Sure,” I said. I wasn’t going to let an aintellect know that I was a scared little baby.

  “Okay, now skooch forward on the swing so your butt is just on the edge,” Pinky said, “That’s good ... now when I say “˜Now’ you just run.”

  “’Kay—“

  “Wait for it ... now.”

  I ran forward and suddenly I was flying across the damp green lawn, still soft from the two-one day rains.

  “Now don’t run into the street,” Pinky said. “Turn. Turn.”

  I was having too much fun running.

  “Turn,” Pinky said again, adding my full name as he did when it was serious. “Turn now.”

  “No!” I said, feeling my power.

  Both my pant cuffs closed around my ankles and the back of the legs of my pants shrank. I skidded across the soft grass on my butt, stopping well short of the street. I kicked and screamed in frustration.

  “Are you hurt?” Daddy asked.

  “I hate everybody!”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Pinky said. “He was heading for the street and refused to turn.”

  “That’s fine, Pinky. Good job.” Daddy grabbed my wrist and tugged me upward. “So, Polly-tyan, since you’re a little tired, maybe we should get some ice cream while you still have the strength to lift a spoon?”

  We probably hadn’t walked ten steps before I was happy again, going for ice cream with Daddy and Pinky. The warm spring air was damp from all the little streams and waterfalls that laced Eightfold City.

  I was singing out loud, with Pinky—“Day two-three, too dark to see.” That would be tomorrow. Neither Hull nor Theta Ursae Ma
joris would be in the sky, and the big storms would roar through and keep us all inside.

  In my picture of the universe, you could get to Hull on a really tall ladder. Probably that was how the workers went to Hull to polish the albedo. They also ran the big fan that made the wind blow, and I had actually seen a documentary about how they turned on the faucets to keep the streams flowing.

  For my whole adult life, I have always been stymied by remembering everything from the viewpoint of a happy, secure little boy who didn’t understand how important it was going to be to have listened.

  Was it really that very day, on the bench outside the ice cream parlor, that we had that conversation that the interviewers walked me through so many times? Perhaps it was a few days before, and it was actually several short conversations rather than one long one? That would explain why Daddy talked about some less urgent things in such detail, and scanted some things that he should have known might be vital.

  Just as we were finishing our ice cream there on the bench, Daddy’s com chimed, and he answered it, and said “I see” and “Oh” over and over.

  By his tone of voice, he was talking to an aintellect. I resented that. I got in trouble for sitting and chattering with Pinky when my parents wanted my attention; it seemed to me he was doing the same thing. Besides, I had finished my ice cream and my hands and chin were all sticky.

  Finally Daddy said “Right,” plucked his handkerchief from his uwagi, and cleaned my face. He looked into my eyes with his be-serious expression. “Boy-tyan, I want to talk to you about something important. Can I count on you to be serious for a few minutes?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “Pinky, record at max detail, retention permanent.”

  “Yes, sir. Recording everything at very high resolution.”

  “Well, then. We need to get a trakcar, so we’ll walk while I tell you these things.” He took my hand and we walked up the street to the trakcar stop. I was getting a little sleepy from the ice cream, the exercise, and the warm sun, and besides it was close to naptime, even though only babies took naps.