Hogan, James - Giant Series 04 - Entoverse (v1.1)

by Entoverse [lit]

  “The Ganymean computer aboard the Shapieron,,” Baumer re­plied. “It doesn’t play straight into your head like the Thurien com­puters do.” He waved a hand. “Oh, I’m not really conversant with these technical matters. It needs microphones, screens, and things. You’ll find out about it when you meet some of the people in PAC.”

  “That’s Planetary Administration Center, right?”

  “Yes. Perhaps you should try and get to see some of the Gany­means on Garuth’s staff—theoretically he is in charge of everything.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Baumer frowned down at the desk and shook his head in thinly disguised irritation. “You really should have got more of an agenda arranged before you came He reached for a pad and picked up a pen. “Anyway, his chief scientist is a woman called Shiohin—”

  “A Ganymean, you mean?”

  “Yes. She should be of some help. She’s involved with a number of Jevlenese and Terrans who are investigating alleged agents on Earth.” He scribbled a few lines. “Those are a couple of other names that work under her. And here are a few of the Jevlenese that it might

  be worth your while approaching. This last one, Reskedrom, was quite high up in the Federation while it lasted, and should be useful— but he’s not easy to get to. Your best bet would be to start at COJA:

  Coordinating Office for Jevlenese Affairs—that’s a department inside PAC. They keep lists and charts of who’s what and where, and everything that’s going on.” Baumer finished writing, tore off the top sheet of the pad, and pushed it across. “That should help. But other­wise, I don’t think I have very much to offer, I’m afraid.”

  Gina took the slip and put it in a pocket. “Thanks anyway. I did meet a bunch of UNSA people on the ship, but they’re really only coming here to look into Ganymean science. They’re tied up setting up their labs, anyhow, so I don’t have anyone to show me around.” She paused to give Baumer time to react if he chose. He didn’t. Still reluctant to let it go at that, Gina waited a few seconds longer, and then inquired, “What do you do here that keeps you so busy?”

  “I am a sociologist. I have a whole new society to work with.”

  Baumer’s choice of phrasing suggested an approach. Gina had read all of the reports he had written, which Hunt had run off for her from PAC’s files. “Control” seemed to be the dominant word in Baumer’s vocabulary. In his eyes, Earth had gone too far down the path of degeneracy as represented by the insanity of the free market and the corrosion of liberal morality for there to be any hope left of saving it. But the situation on Jevlen, if only those with the power could be made to see, offered a clean slate on which to begin anew and engineer the model society. And Baumer knew just how it should be done.

  “That’s interesting,” she said. “Which way could Jevlen’s society be heading, do you think, after it gets straightened out?”

  Baumer sat back in his chair and looked at the far wall. The indifference that had hung in his eyes until then changed to a hint of a gleam. “There’s an opportunity here,” he replied. “An opportunity to build the society that could have existed on Earth, and now never will—without all the greed and arrogance that doesn’t care what it destroys; one based on true equality and values that count.”

  Gina looked at him as if he had just said something that she didn’t hear very often. “I’ve often thought the same thing myself,” she said. Inside, she felt a twinge of disgust at her own hypocrisy; but she had known what the job would entail when she agreed to do it. “Is that why you came here from Earth?” she asked him.

  Baumer sighed. “I came here to get away from a world that has

  been left spiritually devastated by its infatuation with bourgeois trivia and mindless distractions. The banks and the corporations own ev­erybody now, and the qualities that they reward are the ones that suit their needs: loyalty and obedience. And the cattle are content, grazing in the field. Nobody wants to think about what it’s doing to them, or where it’s all leading. They don’t want to think at all. It’s gone too far now for anything to change. But here, on Jevien, there’s been a forced stop to the lunacy, a reexamination of everything. With the right people of vision in control, it could turn out different.”

  “You really think so?” Gina’s tone suggested that it all sounded too good to be true.

  “Why not? The Jevlenese are human, too, made of the same clay. They can he molded.”

  “How would you make it different, if you could?” Gina asked.

  That got him talking.

  What Jevlen needed was for the anarchy that was the cause of all its problems to be replaced by centralized direction of the planet’s affairs, with tighter control over all aspects of existence. The way to achieve that was through a dizzying system of government programs and agencies. And the chance was there now, because the first step to putting the machinery in place had already been achieved with the setting up of the Ganymean planetary administration.

  “But that’s not the way Ganymeans seem to think,~’ Gina pointed out.

  “And look at the mess they’ve made. They don’t understand human needs. They must be made to understand.”

  Approved goods and services, along with desirable levels for their consumption, should be determined by regional planning boards, and industry limited to the minimum necessary to provide them—thus eliminating any need for a wasteful competitive business sector. Oc­cupations should be assigned on the basis of society’s needs, balanced against aptitude scores accumulated during “social conditioning’ ‘—the term that Baumer used for education—although he was prepared to concede that due consideration could be given to individual pref­erence if circumstances permitted. Access to entertainment and lei­sure activities should be rationed into a reward system to facilitate the achievement of quotas.

  However, although she stayed for another forty minutes, it was all pretty much in keeping with the picture that Gina had already formed, and she learned little that was new.

  Baumer saw himself as one of those outcasts from the herd, set apart in the company of those such as van Gogh, Nietzsche, Law­rence, and Nijinsky, by the sensitivity of seeing too much and too deep. Everybody was born with the mystical spark dormant within them, but its potential was quenched by the modern world’s delu­sions of objectivity and rationality. Preoccupation with the external, and the false elevation of science as the way to find knowledge and salvation, had diverted humanity from the inner paths that mattered. He particularly detested the general adulation accorded to the “prac­tical.” Aristophanes had ridiculed Socrates, and Blake had hated Newton for the same reason.

  Nevertheless, despite Gina’s hope that she might have made some indent, he sidestepped another attempt by her to extend their rela­tionship socially. She eventually left without obtaining any commit­ment for them to talk again, or any feeling that she had achieved very much.

  Thinking through the discussion on her way back to PAC, she felt grubby at the deception that she had lent herself to. Behind its facade of indignation and righteousness, the line she had forced herself to listen to was, like so many philosophies that she had heard from other misfits and self—styled iconoclasts, really nothing more than a massive exercise in self-justification. Because they didn’t fit, the world would have to be changed.

  In contrast, there were people—Hunt, for instance-whom she classed as shapers of the world. They didn’t pass judgments on it, but found niches that fitted them because they could come to terms with the reality they saw and make the best of the chances it offered. They could look the inevitability of death in the face, accept their own insignificance, and gain satisfaction from finding something useful to do in spite of it. The Baumers of life couldn’t, and that was what they resented. Unable to achieve anything meaningful themselves, they gained satisfaction from showing that nothing anyone else achieved could have meaning.

  The difference was, however, that the Hunts were happy to get on with their own lives and let the vision
aries enjoy their agonizings if that was what they wanted. But the converse wasn’t true. If the world didn’t want to change, then give the Baumers access to the power and they would make it change—because they saw more, and deeper. And the rack, the stake, the Gulag, and the concentration camp showed what could happen when they succeeded.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Hunt lit a cigarette and, easing himself back in the chair at the, desk built into a corner of his personal quarters, contemplated the screen showing the notes he had compiled thus far, along with a list of questions that just seemed to keep growing longer.

  Why was Baumer, a Terran, spying for aliens that he had known less than six months, against an administration that had shown noth­ing but goodwill toward Earth? Because the Jevlenese were at least human, and Ganymeans weren’t? Hunt doubted it. Nothing that hinted of an anti-Ganymean bias had come across in anything Baumer had written or said, or anything he had told Gina. Surely an ideologue of his nature, who saw Jevlen as the potential utopia and its population as putty to be molded, would have sought to work as part of the potential government, not against it—unless he had reason to believe that the Ganymeans wouldn’t be running things for very much longer. That was a thought.

  In that case, who was he helping, that he thought might be taking over? Not anybody who wanted the Ganymeans replaced by an occupation force from Earth; that would only be inviting in all the things that Baumer said he had come to Jevlen to get away from. Eubeleus and the Axis? That would have been Hunt’s first guess, but the latest business of wanting to move his whole operation to Uttan, right at the crucial time, flew in the face of it.

  Which left the criminal underworld that Cullen had talked about—a conjecture that certainly gained further strength if Obayin’s death had been arranged, as Cullen suspected. But what kind of connection would somebody like Baumer have with a criminal orga­nization? There would hardly be any shared ground in areas of ideology, morality, politics, social goals, or any of the other things

  that concerned Baumer. The only alternative that Hunt could see was that they had to have some kind of hold over him. It was hard to imagine any grounds for blackmail: Baumer seemed to have kept his nose clean, and he was here in an official capacity, not a fugitive like Murray. His life style was free of any obvious complications. What, then?

  And finally there were the fundamental issues that had brought Hunt to Jevlen, which were still unscratched: What was the source of the “plague” that the Ganymeans believed was making the Jev­lenese impervious to reason? Did the ayatollahs represent simply an extreme of a general human trait in the way that Danchekker main­tained, or were they a case of something completely different? What was the significance of Uttan?

  Lots of questions; not many answers. Gina had come away from her meeting with Baumer depressed by a feeling of failure. But he was still the only obvious lead; how to find out more about him wasn’t so obvious. Hunt reached out to the touchpad and called the tran­script of Gina’s talk with Baumer onto a screen to study it again. Two Jevlenese had been leaving just as she arrived. From Gina’s descrip­tion they sounded like thugs, which strengthened the suspicion that Baumer was connected with the underworld. What kind of business did Baumer conduct with them in his office outside, which he didn’t want brought into PAC?

  Hunt read again what Baumer had said to Gina about the transla­tion service wired across the city. Since Thuriens and Jevlenese had been dealing with each other for millennia, small, wearable translator chips to convert between their languages—similar in appearance to the stick-on interfaces to VISAR—had long ago been developed as standard. But Terran dialects—and the Shapieron brand of Ganymean, as well—were new, and the chips couldn’t handle them. So the conversation between Baumer and the Jevlenese had been translated by ZORAC.

  Hunt stubbed his cigarette in an ashtray on the console and scratched an ear. “ZORAC?” he said aloud after studying the display for a few moments longer—ZORAC didn’t pick up subvocalized patterns.

  ‘‘Yes, Vic?’’

  “What’s this thing that you’ve got going around the city on chan­nel fifty-six? Something to do with a translation facility.”

  “There’s still a general-purpose communications net running that

  wasn’t specifically a part of JevEX,” ZORAC replied. “One of the channels is reserved for translating between the Jevlenese dialects and most Terran languages. So you and they can talk to each other just about anywhere.”

  “It’s a service that you support?”

  “Yes. I suppose you could call it people-interfacing.”

  “Hmm.. .“ Hunt rubbed his chin. “I was thinking about that visit that Gina made to Baumer’s office in the city.”

  “Yes?’’

  “There were a couple of Jevlenese leaving just as she got there. You must have done the translating for them. I, ah, I wonder if there might still be a record of it in your system somewhere that we might be able to get at?” Hunt knew that VISAR, programmed with its Thurien hangups, would never have done it. But ZORAC wasn’t VISAR. It seemed worth a try.

  “It’s just a translation service,” ZORAC replied. “I don’t store any of it. I don’t even have a record that they were there.”

  Hunt sighed resignedly—but it did open up the thought of further possibilities.

  “So, when Terrans and Jevlenese talk to each other, you, from inside the Shapieron, have an ear into all their conversations, as it were, everywhere,” he said.

  The implication was plain enough, and ZORAC was too logical not to see it. “Why not spell out what you’re asking?” the machine suggested.

  “Hell, you know what I’m asking. Something’s going on. We need to find out what Baumer and these Jevlenese are up to before we have another war on our hands—maybe a real one this time. Gina got nowhere, and right now we don’t have another line.”

  There was a short pause.

  “I presume that your ultimate objective would be to frustrate any intended action on the part of a suspected political group, that might be directed at increasing their power over other people’s affairs,” ZORAC said finally.

  Hunt turned his eyes upward briefly. “Well, if we always insisted on analyzing everything through to its final aims like that, we’d be lucky if we ever got around to actually doing anything—but yes, I suppose you could say it was that.”

  “The argument being,” ZORAC persisted, “that you see their

  methods as a violation of certain rights and freedoms which you, from certain a priori moral principles that are nondeducible but taken as self-evident, consider it desirable for a society to guarantee?”

  “Yes.” Hunt groaned beneath his breath as he saw where they were heading.

  “So the goal would be to protect people from the violations of their rights that an intrusive and coercive governing system would subject them to?”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Hunt agreed impatiently.

  “One of them being the right to the enjoyment of noninterference and privacy. But if it is to be a genuine guarantee, with nobody having a privilege to decide whom it shall or shall not be granted to, then—”

  Hunt’s patience snapped. He knew that when ZORAC went off into one of these excursions, it could create knots that would have taken Aristotle volumes to untangle. “Look, they cremated Ayultha prematurely, and probably took care of Obayin, too. And if what we’re up against is what I’m beginning to think it might be, they’re the same forces that burned the libraries of Alexandria and Constanti­nople, brought on the Dark Ages, operated the Inquisition, and for all I know engineered the Black Death. We didn’t.”

  “Algorithmically, it reduces to an interesting circumvolution of the logical calculus,” ZORAC commented. “Using the same struc­ture, you could argue that early suicide is the best preventative of cancer, or that the most effective way of protecting people against slavery is extermination.”

  “Forget it, then, and think of the question this way,”
Hunt sug­gested. “You’re a ship’s computer, right? Not a huge, interstellar regulator of social affairs like VISAR. Moralizing isn’t your business. Your primary, overriding concern is the safety of the Shapieron and its occupants. You’ve told me as much yourself.”

  “I only said it was an interesting question logically,” ZORAC interjected.

  “All the better. I said a minute ago that from the way things are going we could end up with a shooting war. That means that Garuth, Shilohin, Monchar, Rodgar, and all the other Ganymeans from the ship would be caught here in the middle of it. Your best way of safeguarding them is to help prevent it from happening. So circum­volute that.”

  “Agreed. But Garuth, as the ship’s commander, is the final author­ity. He’d have to approve.”

  “Then let’s find Garuth and talk about it,” Hunt said.