Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection Read online

  “But think a bit,” said Mansa. “With so much energy suddenly gone, the world will be too busy trying to save itself from disaster to engage in crusades. There will be disruption of industry, the danger of starvation, the gathering of mobs of the distressed, the fighting over what energy can be obtained-total chaos.”

  “All the worse for Saronin-”

  “But the chaos will come to Gladovia, too. Our glorious nation depends on the solar energy supply just as Saronin does, just as the whole world does. There will be a world of catastrophe from which-who can tell-Gladovia may suffer far worse than Saronin. Who can tell?”

  Brigon’s mouth fell open and he looked disturbed. “Do you really think so?”

  “Of course. You must go to the one whose name is like a sneeze, and ask him to recheck his work. You needn’t say you know something is wrong. It’s simply that you were there, and you suddenly have this strange feeling that all is not well. Say you have a presentiment. And if he finds the miscue and corrects it, do not taunt him. It would not be safe to do so. And do it quickly! For the glorious nation of Gladovia! And for the world, of course.”

  Brigon had no choice. He did so, and the peril was averted.

  Moral:

  People always love themselves best. But in a world so interconnected that harm to one is harm to all, the best way of loving one’s self, is to love everyone else, too.

  The Smile Of The Chipper

  Johnson was reminiscing in the way old men do and I had been warned he would talk about chippers-those peculiar people who flashed across the business scene for a generation at the beginning of this twenty-first century of ours. Still, I had had a good meal at his expense and I was ready to listen.

  And, as it happened, it was the first word out of his mouth. “Chippers,” he said, “were just about unregulated in those days. Nowadays, their use is so controlled no one can get any good out of them, but back a ways-One of them made this company the ten-billion-dollar concern it now is. I picked him, you know.”

  I said, “They didn’t last long, I’m told.”

  “Not in those days. They burned out. When you add microchips at key points in the nervous system, then in ten years at the most, the wiring burns out, so to speak. Then they retired-a little vacant- minded, you know.”

  “I wonder anyone submitted to it.”

  “Well, all the idealists were horrified, of course, and that’s why the regulating came in, but it wasn’t that bad for the chippers. Only certain people could make use of the microchips-about eighty percent of them males, for some reason-and, for the time they were active, they lived the lives of shipping magnates. Afterward, they always received the best of care. It was no different from top-ranking athletes, after all; ten years of active early life, and then retirement.”

  Johnson sipped at his drink. “ An unregulated chipper could influence other people’s emotions, you know, if they were chipped just right and had talent. They could make judgments on the basis of what they sensed in other minds and they could strengthen some of the judgments competitors were making, or weaken them-for the good of the home company. It wasn’t unfair. Other companies had their own chippers doing the same thing. “ He sighed. “Now that sort of thing is illegal. Too bad.”

  I said, diffidently, “I’ve heard that illegal chipping is still done.” Johnson grunted and said, “No comment.”

  I let that go, and he went on. “But even thirty years ago, things were still wide open. Our company was just an insignificant item in the global economy, but we had located two chippers who were willing to work for us.”

  “Two?” I had never heard that before.

  Johnson looked at me slyly. “Yes, we managed that. It’s not widely known in the outside world, but it came down to clever recruiting and it was slightly-just a touch-illegal, even then. Of course, we couldn’t hire them both. Getting two chippers to work together is impossible. They’re like chess grandmasters, I suppose. Put them in the same room and they would automatically challenge each other. They would compete continually, each trying to influence and confute the other. They wouldn’t stop- couldn’t, actually-and they would burn each other out in six months. Several companies found that out, to their great cost, when chippers first came into use.”

  “I can imagine,” I murmured.

  “So since we couldn’t have both, and could only take one, we wanted the more powerful one, obviously, and that could only be determined by pitting them against each other, without letting them ruin each other. I was given the job, and it was made quite clear that if I picked the one who, in the end, turned out to be inadequate, that would be my end, too.”

  “How did you go about it, sir?” I knew he had succeeded, of course. A person can’t become chairman of the board of a worldclass firm for nothing.

  Johnson said, “I had to improvise. I investigated each separately first. The two were known by their code-letters, by the way. In those days, their true identities had to be hidden. A chipper known to be a chipper was half-useless. They were C-12 and F-71 in our records. Both were in their late twenties. C-12 was unattached; F-71 was engaged to be married.” “Married?” I said, a little surprised.

  “Certainly. Chippers are human, and male chippers are much sought after by women. They’re sure to be rich and, when they retire, their fortunes are usually under the control of their wives. It’s a good deal for a young woman.-So I brought them together, with F-71 ‘s fiancée. I hoped earnestly she would be good-looking, and she was. Meeting her was almost like a physical blow to me. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, tall, dark-eyed, a marvelous figure and rather more than a hint of smoldering sexuality.”

  Johnson seemed lost in thought for a moment, then he continued. “I tell you I had a strong urge to try to win the woman for myself but it was not likely that anyone who had a chipper would transfer herself to a mere junior executive, which is what I was in those days. To transfer herself to another chipper would be something else-and I could see that C-12 was as affected as I was. He could not keep his eyes off her.

  So I just let things develop to see who ended with the young woman.” “And who did, sir?“ I asked.

  “It took two days of intense mental conflict. They must each have peeled a month off their working lives, but the young lady walked off with C-12 as her new fiancée.”

  “Ah, so you chose C-12 as the firm chipper.”

  Johnson stared at me with disdain. “ Are you mad? I did no such thing. I chose F-71, of course.

  We placed C-12 with a small subsidiary of ours. He’d be no good to anyone else, since we knew him, you see.”

  “But did I miss something? F-71 lost his fiancée and C-12 gained her. Surely C-12 was the superior.”

  “Was he? Chippers show no emotion in a case like this; no obvious emotion. It is necessary for business purposes for chippers to hide their powers so that the pokerface is a professional necessity for them. But I was watching closely-my own job was at stake-and, as C-12 walked off with the woman, I noticed a small smile on F71 ‘s lips and it seemed to me there was the glitter of victory in his eyes.” “But he lost his fiancée.”

  “Doesn’t it occur to you he wanted to lose her and it would not be easy to pry her loose? He had to work on C-12 to want her and on the woman to want to be wanted-and he did it. He won.”

  I thought about that. “But how could you have been sure? If the woman was as good-looking as you say she was-if she was smoldering so with sexuality, surely F71 would have wanted to keep her.”

  “But F-71 was making her seem desirable,” said Johnson, grimly. “He aimed at C-12, of course, but with such power that the overflow was sufficient to affect me drastically. After it was allover and C-12 was walking away with her, I was no longer under the influence and I could see there was something hard and overblown about her-a kind of unlovely and predatory gleam in her eye.

  “So I chose F-71 at once and he was all we could want. The firm is now where you see it is, and I am chair
man of the board.”

  Gold

  Jonas Willard looked from side to side and tapped his baton on the stand before him.

  He said, “Understood now? This is just a practice scene, designed to find out if we know what we’re doing. We’ve gone through this enough times so that I expect a professional performance now. Get ready. All of you get ready.”

  He looked again from side to side. There was a person at each of the voice-recorders, and there were three others working the image projection. A seventh was for the music and an eighth for the all- important background. Others waited to one side for their turn.

  Willard said, “ All right now. Remember this old man has spent his entire adult life as a tyrant. He is accustomed to having everyone jump at his slightest word, to having everyone tremble at his frown. That is all gone now but he doesn’t know it. He faces his daughter whom he thinks of only as a bent-headed obsequious girl who will do anything he says, and he cannot believe that it is an imperious queen that he now faces. So let’s have the King.”

  Lear appeared. Tall, white hair and beard, somewhat disheveled, eyes sharp and piercing.

  Willard said, “Not bent. Not bent. He's eighty years old but he doesn't think of himself as old. Not now. Straight. Every inch a king.” The image was adjusted. “That's right. And the voice has to be strong.

  No quavering. Not now. Right?”

  “Right, chief,” said the Lear voice-recorder, nodding. “All right. The Queen.”

  And there she was, almost as tall as Lear, standing straight and rigid as a statue, her draped clothing in fine array, nothing out of place. Her beauty was as cold and unforgiving as ice.

  “And the Fool.“

  A little fellow, thin and fragile, like a frightened teenager but with a face too old for a teenager and with a sharp look in eyes that seemed so large that they threatened to devour his face.

  “Good,” said Willard. “Be ready for Albany. He comes in pretty soon. Begin the scene. “ He tapped the podium again, took a quick glance at the marked-up play before him and said, “Lear! “ and his baton pointed to the Lear voice-recorder, moving gently to mark the speech cadence that he wanted created.

  Lear says, “How now, daughter? What makes that frontlet on? Methinks you are too much o' late i' th' frown.”

  The Fool's thin voice, fifelike, piping, interrupts, “Thou wast a pretty fellow when thou hadst no need to care for her frowning-”

  Goneril, the Queen, turns slowly to face the Clown as he speaks, her eyes turning momentarily into balls of lurid light-doing it so momentarily that those watching caught the impression rather than viewed the fact. The Fool completes his speech in gathering fright and backs his way behind Lear in a blind search for protection against the searing glance.

  Goneril proceeds to tell Lear the facts of life and there is the faint crackling of thin ice as she speaks, while the music plays in soft discords, barely heard.

  Nor are Goneril's demands so out of line, for she wants an orderly court and there couldn't be one as long as Lear still thought of himself as tyrant. But Lear is in no mood to recognize reason. He breaks into a passion and begins railing.

  Albany enters. He is Goneril's consort-round-faced, innocent, eyes looking about in wonder.

  What is happening? He is completely drowned out by his dominating wife and by his raging father-in-law.

  It is at this point that Lear breaks into one of the great piercing denunciations in all of literature. He is overreacting. Goneril has not as yet done anything to deserve this, but Lear knows no restraint. He says:

  “Hear, Nature, hear! dear goddess, hear!

  Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend

  To make this creature fruitful.

  Into her womb convey sterility;

  Dry up in her the organs of increase;

  And from her derogate body never spring

  A babe to honour her! If she must teem,

  Create her child of spleen, that it may live

  And be a thwart disnatur’d torment to her.

  Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth,

  With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks,

  Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits

  To laughter and contempt, that she may feel

  How sharper than a serpent’s tooth, it is

  To have a thankless child! “

  The voice-recorder strengthened Lear’s voice for this speech, gave it a distant hiss, his body became taller and somehow less substantial as though it had been converted into a vengeful Fury.

  As for Goneril, she remained untouched throughout, never flinching, never receding, but her beautiful face, without any change that could be described, seemed to accumulate evil so that by the end of Lear’s curse, she had the appearance of an archangel still, but an archangel ruined. All possible pity had been wiped out of the countenance, leaving behind only a devil’s dangerous magnificence.

  The Fool remained behind Lear throughout, shuddering. Albany was the very epitome of confusion, asking useless questions, seeming to want to step between the two antagonists and clearly afraid to do so.

  Willard tapped his baton and said, “ All right. It’s been recorded and I want you all to watch the scene.” He lifted his baton high and the synthesizer at the rear of the set began what could only be called the instant replay.

  It was watched in silence, and Willard said, “It was good, but I think you’ll grant it was not good enough. I’m going to ask you all to listen to me, so that I can explain what we’re trying to do.

  Computerized theater is not new, as you all know. Voices and images have been built up to beyond what human beings can do. You don’t have to break your speechifying in order to breathe; the range and quality of the voices are almost limitless; and the images can change to suit the words and action. Still, the technique has only been used, so far, for childish purposes. What we intend now is to make the first serious compu-drama the world has ever seen, and nothing will do-for me, at any rate-but to start at the top. I want to do the greatest play written by the greatest playwright in history: King Lear by William Shakespeare.

  “I want not a word changed. I want not a word left out. I don’t want to modernize the play. I don’t want to remove the archaisms, because the play, as written, has its glorious music and any change will diminish it. But in that case, how do we have it reach the general public? I don’t mean the students, I don’t mean the intellectuals, I mean everybody. I mean people who’ve never watched Shakespeare before and whose idea of a good play is a slapstick musical. This play is archaic in spots, and people don’t talk in iambic pentameter. They are not even accustomed to hearing it on the stage.

  “So we’re going to have to translate the archaic and the unusual. The voices, more than human, will, just by their timbre and changes, interpret the words. The images will shift to reinforce the words.

  “Now Goneril’s change in appearance as Lear’s curse proceeded was good. The viewer will gauge the devastating effect it has on her even though her iron will won’t let it show in words. The viewer will therefore feel the devastating effect upon himself, too, even if some of the words Lear uses are strange to him.

  “In that connection, we must remember to make the Fool look older with everyone of his appearances. He’s a weak, sickly fellow to begin with, broken-hearted over the loss of Cordelia, frightened to death of Goneril and Regan, destroyed by the storm from which Lear, his only protector, can’t protect him-and I mean by that the storm of Lear’s daughter’s as well as of the raging weather. When he slips out of the play in Act III. Scene VI, it must be made plain that he is about to die. Shakespeare doesn’t say so, so the Fool’s face must say so.

  “However, we’ve got to do something about Lear. The voicerecorder was on the right track by having a hissing sound in the voice-track. Lear is spewing venom; he is a man who, having lost power, has no recourse but vile and extreme words. He is a cobra who cannot strike. But I don’t want the hiss
noticeable until the right time. What I am more interested in is the background.”

  The woman in charge of background was Meg Cathcart. She had been creating backgrounds for as long as the compu-drama technique had existed.

  “What do you want in background? “ Cathcart asked, coolly.

  “The snake motif,” said Willard. “Give me some of that and there can be less hiss in Lear’s voice.

  Of course, I don’t want you to show a snake. The too obvious doesn’t work. I want a snake there that people can’t see but that they can feel without quite noting why they feel. I want them to know a snake is there without really knowing it is there, so that it will chill them to the bone, as Lear’s speech should. So when we do it over, Meg, give us a snake that is not a snake.”

  “And how do I do that, Jonas?” said Cathcart, making free with his first name. She knew her worth and how essential she was.

  He said, “I don’t know. If I did I’d be a backgrounder instead of a lousy director. I only know what I want. You‘ve got to supply it. You’ve got to supply sinuosity, the impression of scales. Until we get to one point. Notice when Lear says, ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.’ That is power. The whole speech leads up to that and it is one of the most famous quotes in Shakespeare.

  And it is sibilant. There is the ‘sh,’ the three s’s in ‘serpent’s’ and in ‘thankless,’ and the two unvoiced ‘th’s in ‘tooth’ and ‘thankless.’ That can be hissed. If you keep down the hiss as much as possible in the rest of the speech, you can hiss here, and you should zero in to his face and make it venomous. And for background, the serpent-which, after all, is now referred to in the words-can make its appearance in background. A flash of an open mouth and fangs, fangs-We must have the momentary appearance of fangs as Lear says, ‘a serpent’s tooth.”‘

  Willard felt very tired suddenly. “ All right. We’ll try again tomorrow. I want each one of you to go over the entire scene and try to work out the strategy you intend to use. Only please remember that you are not the only ones involved. What you do must match the others, so I’ll encourage you to talk to each other about this-and, most of all, to listen to me because I have no instrument to handle and I alone can see the playas a whole. And if I seem as tyrannical as Lear at his worst in spots, well, that’s my job.”