Capped with a ruthless psychohistorical analysis of Pacifican culture itself. Electronic democracy as the result of dispersion and abundance. Female economic power as the consequence of universal distribution of citizens3 stock. Male sexual attraction to older, dominant women as compensation for loss of the genetically mandated male supremacy in economic and political spheres. Female desire for sexually dominant buckos as compensation for lack of socially dominant male figures. The vulnerability of female Pacificans to Femocracy as a function of this peculiarly Pacifican sexual balance. On and on, exposing every nook and cranny of their culture to cold scientific logic, while subtle euphoriants were added to the students’ brain eptifier formulas.
Only after depth analysts had certified that this psychomolding process had been successfully completed were the Pacifican students exposed to the areas of Transcendental Science from which advanced technology flowed. And even then, the curriculum was kept mostly theoretical while more psychomolding went on.
Maria understood all too well the strategic reasons for this perversion of Transcendental Science. But perversion it is, she thought, peering into a classroom as she passed by. The entrance parameters and the lack of female students she could justify to herself on security grounds as the Femocrats continued their campaign against the Institute with the beginnings of a subtle emphasis on female supremacy. Even the heavy psychomolding and manipulations of brain-eptifier formulae might be justified in the name of desperate expediency.
But it seemed to her that this politically motivated sequential teaching of the Transcendental Sciences violated the very essence of Transcendental Science itself, defeated the very purpose for which the Heisenberg had come to Pacifica in the first place. For if one word described the world-view of Transcendental Science, that word was unity. Matter, energy, time, and mind as states of each other, to be understood in terms of each other, to be studied holistically and simultaneously, so that the consciousness of the Institute graduate truly transcended the compartmentalization of traditional science. That was the essence of Transcendental Science, and that was what was being violated here.
Maria reached a viewing balcony at the periphery of the building. Here Pacifican students sat, singly and in small groups, studying or talking. Outside, the shadowy Godzil-laland jungle was ominous and alien under the late afternoon sim. Unseen monstrosities shook the trees with their passage. Now and again a great fanged head or a huge expanse of scaly hide showed itself for a moment. It was an awesome yet repulsive vista—the mindless, savage, uncaring universe incarnate. Yet it was also somehow... Pacifica itself in all its fertile untamed promise.
But the Pacifican students for the most part had learned to ignore it. Bright-eyed, loquacious, flush with the adolescent pride of their new knowledge, they sat around discussing their studies with innocent enthusiasm, obsessed with the brave new universe inside these walls, the world outside no more than a holodiorama at the periphery of their consciousness.
What are we creating here? Maria wondered as she walked among all these enthusiastic innocents. A class of people who are no longer quite Pacificans yet not truly Transcendental Scientists. An elite of clever superficial simulacrums of ourselves, alienated from their own planet, yet not quite sharing in the consciousness that binds together the people of the Arkologies.
She had never thought much about the people of the planetbound Institutes, but now, standing among them, it occurred to her that they must be lonely and alienated folk, neither fish nor fowl, their feet planted in the soil of their own peoples whom they dominated as synthetic outsiders, their minds towering into the stars forever just beyond their reach. Do we give as much as we take away? she dared to ask herself.
One Pacifican student stood apart from the others, hands pressed against the transparent wall, staring out at the jungle under the purpling sky. He was short and wiry, with large nervous eyes, and his slight body seemed to vibrate with an unresolved tension that somehow, in this moment, drew Maria to him.
“What do you see out there?” she asked, approaching him.
He shrank into himself. His expression became guarded. “Jungle,” he said. “What should I see? Am I missing something?” He was making a great effort to sound neutral, but a bitter tension in his voice could not help but filter through.
“I mean as a Pacifican. What does it mean to you?” “You want me to explain what it feels like to be a Pacifican?” he said sharply. “But I thought you understood that. You’ve taught us all about ourselves here.” He started nervously, as if suddenly aware that he had let something dangerous slip. It only made Maria empathize with him all the more. Perhaps she wanted to like him. Perhaps she wanted him to like her.
“Only analytically, from the outside,” she said. “The essence is yours alone, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” he blurted. “Have you left us that much?”
“You know better than I do,” Maria said sympathetically. “What do you mean?”
“Look, we’re Pacificans ” he blurted. “Media psychodynamics may not be psychesomics, but do you think anyone who’s had a smattering of it can’t recognize subliminal mind-molding, even when it’s raised to something quite beyond us, even when we’re—” He cut himself short, terrified by his own words. He turned away from her and stared out into the jungle.
“You were saying... ?”
“Nothing. I’ve said far too much already.” He turned
to look at her, his pleading eyes at war with the belligerent set of his face. “You’re going to report this, aren’t you?” he said. “It’ll be analyzed and evaluated and...
I have to, Maria thought. Somehow this man has escaped full psychomolding undetected. He’s a potential security risk, a random, unpredictable factor. Yet she found herself speaking otherwise. “No,” she said. “I’m not going to report you. This was just an idle conversation.”
“I’m not sure I believe you.”
“We’re not all...” Maria shrugged, her mind unable to form the right word.
But the Pacifican seemed to understand anyway. “I’d like to believe that,’’ he said. “You people really do have something, but.. .”
“But so do you,” Maria said.
“Or so we thought,” the Pacifican muttered, turning his face once more to the jungle world of fang and claw.
“Pretend we never spoke,” Maria said, turning away. A strange sadness came over her, mingled with an ill-defined trepidation, yet also a sense of satisfaction she could not quite define, as if for a fleeting moment the barrier of politics and lies, culture and manipulation, had been transcended. How sad, she thought, that we must both pretend it never happened.
Carlotta Madigan sat in her Parliament office still trying to dig herself out of the mountain of pending business that had accumulated during the time the whole gov had been totally obsessed with the Femocrat-Transcendental Science crisis.
The situation still existed: the Femocrats were flooding the net with anti-institute propaganda, Transcendental Science was still countering with its own media blitz, Pacificans for the Institute and the Femocratic League of Pacifica were still politically active, male-female relationships were still souring, but the passage of the Madigan Plan had at least taken the immediacy out of the crisis. Now at least there was nothing that the administration had to do about it, and she was at last able to find time to deal with the ordinary day-to-day business of her office in some coherent fashion.
And there was plenty that had to be dealt with! The proposal to set up a govcorp to bring down the GothamCords airfares. A precipitous drop in the wheat market. The whole tangled question of—
“Carlotta! Plug into news channel four—right now!** Carlotta swiveled her chair to face the net console. Royce’s face had appeared on the comscreen, and he looked really agitated.
“Can’t it wait?” she said irritably. “I’ve got a—” “Plug in now, talk later!” Royce said sharply. “I’ll keep this circuit open.”
“Shit,”
Carlotta muttered under her breath as she plugged into the news channel, “this had better be effing important ”
On the screen was a nervous wiry man with big feverish eyes, whose face seemed to pulse with an unwholesome tension, speaking in a rapid-fire shrill voice.
“....nd so I managed to stow away on a helicopter taking some Institute staff to the liner port, and from there I caught a liner before they even knew I was missing, I think...
A two-shot, showing Nancy Muldaur, a well-known newshound, interviewing whoever-it-was. “Well, what would have happened if you had just told them you wanted to leave?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” the nervous man said. “I don’t know how far they would go...
“Surely they wouldn’t have tried to keep you at the Institute against your will? That would be kidnapping, wouldn’t it?”
Now just a closeup on the man, more angry than frightened now. “Look, I don’t think you understand what I’ve been telling you,” he said. “They’re brainwashing people. They’ve chosen their students for susceptibility to mind-molding techniques, and that’s what they’re doing! They don’t want the people of Pacifica to know what’s going on, and that’s putting it very mildly! There are no private net consoles. They’ve got an electronic barrier around the Institute, supposedly to keep godzillas out, but it also keeps the so-called students in. How do I know how far they’d really go? You think I wanted to find out the hard way?” Another two-shot including Nancy Muldaur, looking slightly skeptical while asking her next question. “This... ah, so-called brainwashing... what is it, specifically?” “It’s hard to describe unless you’ve gone through it For one thing, all the students are constantly being fed drugs. Brain-eptifiers to enhance the chemical matrix of consciousness, they claim, and it certainly does sharpen your mind—but who knows what else is in the formula? For another thing, it’s what they’re teaching and the way they teach it. For the first two weeks they don’t teach any real science at all. They fill your head full of theories of consciousness that sync into their own mindset, and then they teach you so-called psychohistory which is pure Transcendental Science propaganda dressed up as scientific objectivity. And during the whole process, you have these sessions every day with so-called tutors who are really brainwashing experts evaluating your reaction. I tell you— I tell the people of Pacifica—that’s no school, that’s a brainwashing academy!”
Shrill and unstable as the Institute “escapee” sounded, what he was saying rang true to Carlotta. It was full of emotional conviction, and she could hardly put such tactics past Falkenstein and his crew. A great hollow bubble built up in her gut. There was only one possible question that might defuse this thing before the Madigan Plan blew up in everyone’s face. “Ask him how come it didn’t work on him!” she muttered at the screen.
Nancy Muldaur, pro that she was, obliged her and asked the question that must have been on the minds of the millions of Pacificans plugged into the interview. “No offense, Mr. Carstairs, but what made you so special? If this Institute brainwashing is all you say it is, why didn’t it work on you? Why are you alone sitting here and warning us?”
The camera moved in for a closeup on Carstairs. The look of confusion on his face seemed utterly genuine, utterly ingenuous, even appealing in its lack of guile or facileness. “To tell you the truth, I don’t really know,” he said after a long pause. “I have studied some media psychodynamics, and I kept that off my application because I thought that might disqualify me, so maybe I had more insight into the process than the other students. I don’t have a degree or anything, I just picked it up from a friend I once lived with, so there’s no way they could’ve found out...”
He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was much calmer. “Also, I was curious about those brain-eptifiers... not really suspicious then, just intellectually curious. So as an experiment, I stopped taking them for a few days. My mind seemed to get clearer. Things that they had taught me didn’t seem so self-evident any more...e shrugged. “l’m not saying that’s the reason,” he said appealingly. “Maybe I was just lucky...
“Maybe you’re not the only one,” Nancy Muldaur said as a closeup of her replaced Carstairs on the screen. Carlotta could see the newshunger in her eyes as she spoke directly to the camera. “This clearly calls for a complete investigation. And you can be sure that if one isn’t immediately forthcoming from the government, this news net will—”
“Enough!” Carlotta muttered, unplugging from the news channel. “I get the picture!”
Royce peered at her ruefully from the comscreen. “Well?” he said ironically. “Important?”
“Disasters are always important,” Carlotta sighed. “And this one puts us right back where we started.”
“If we’re very, very lucky,” Royce said. “The Femocrats are going to go utterly berserk over this, and who knows what Falkenstein’s counterblitz is going to be like. I only hope we do end up no worse than we started before we got the Madigan Plan through.” He grimaced. “But I doubt it. This looks like escalation time.”
“We’re going to have to close down the Institute right now,” Carlotta said. “No government can tolerate this kind of shit and still call itself a democracy.”
Royce shook his head firmly. “No way,” he said. “On the basis of unsubstantiated charges? Before we can gauge the political reaction? Do that, and Pacificans for the Institute will be howling for your blood.”
“You think it’s not true, Royce?”
He shrugged. “Who knows?” he said. “All I know is that we’d better not take a stand until we know the truth. I mean, this Carstairs character didn’t sound like the most stable person on the planet to me...
But he is telling the truth, Carlotta thought. I know it in my bones. Nevertheless, Royce’s analysis was correct. We’re back in the shit again, and once more we have to temporize. But not for much longer. Not for bloody much longerl “What do you suggest, O master of the media?” she asked.
Royce frowned. “Announce that the matter is under investigation. Get the facts. Wait for the full political reaction to develop before saying anything.”
“Too weak,” Carlotta said. “We’ve got to make some immediate dramatic gesture.”
Royce shrugged. “Then announce that I’m going to God-zillaland to investigate the situation personally,” he said. “I’ll stay around for a few days to handle the media aspect and then fly down and have it out with Falkenstein.” “Leaving me to sit here as the muck hits the exhaust...”
Royce forced a wan smile. “At least you won’t have godzillas to contend with.”
Carlotta sighed and managed a small grin back. “Just a planetful of people bellowing like them,” she said.
12
A CLOSE UP OF CARSTAIRS, THE INSTITUTE DEFECTOR, taken from the news channel footage; angry, righteous-looking.
Carstairs:...hosen their students for susceptibility to brainwashing techniques, and that’s exactly what they’re doing! They don’t want the people of Pacifica to know what’s going on, and that’s putting it very mildly...
A hard cut to a closeup on Cynda Elizabeth. She is holding a large sheaf of documents and she waves it for emphasis as she speaks.
Cynda Elizabeth: “It certainly is, Mr. Carstairs, and there are a few things even you don’t know either! I have here a list of one hundred and eighty verifiably Pacifican Institute students, and all of them are male. Furthermore, we’ve been able to trace connections between ninety-seven of them and Pacificans for the Institute. And Transcendental Science’s faschochauvinist treachery goes even further than that. There is the matter of the twenty so-called female Institute students. No record of their prior existence on this planet can be found. Only one conclusion can be drawn—they’re not Pacifican sisters at all, but spies off the Heisenberg itself!”
A series of panoramic shots of Pacifican women demonstrating and marching*—in downtown Gotham, the streets of Valhalla, a town on the bank of the Big Blue, a village
in the Island Continent.
Cynda Elizabeth’s voiceover: “So what we have in Godzillaland is exactly what I predicted when I opposed passage of the Madigan Plan—a Transcendental Science brainwashing academy with an all-male student body chosen for their faschochauvinist tendencies to begin with, and infiltrated by secret agents from the Heisenberg. Overt faschochauvinism, drugs, mind-molding, spies, lies, and duplicity! A total effort to subvert Pacifican society through the creation of a brainwashed male faschochauvinist elite!” A closeup on Cynda Elizabeth, oozing an I-told-you-so smugness.
Cynda Elizabeth: “If there was ever any doubt in the minds of the sisters of Pacifica that this so-called Institute should be closed immediately, this certainly removes it. The sisters of Pacifica are demonstrating everywhere today, and their demand is simple and clear: close the Institute now, and banish Transcendental Science from this planet forever!”
A panoramic shot of the public entrance to Parliament, thronged with marching people. The camera moves in closer, revealing that they are all women organized into massive, orderly picket-lines. Their placards repeat the same three phrases over and over again: “Femocratic League of Pacifica,” “Close the Institute Now!” and “Banish Faschochauvinist Fausts!”
Cynda Elizabeth’s voiceover: “The sisters of Pacifica are on the march, and they will not rest until the last faschochauvinist Transcendental Scientist has left this solar system! We call on the government to close the Institute now!”
Chanting pickets: “Carlotta Madigan, close the Institute now! Carlotta Madigan, CLOSE THE INSTITUTE NOWr A closeup of a man’s wong and balls. A huge knife wielded by a female hand slashes across the frame and severs them from his body. Cut to a medium shot on a woman looking very much like Cynda Elizabeth as she waves a bloody knife in one hand and the male organs in the other with a demented look of triumph.
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