THE VEIL OVER THE RIVER

“Before you had me,” the computer said, “your

memory-trace index was borderline, you existed on

pizza and cheap beer, your sex life was stunted...”

Felix C. Gotschalk

Sometimes the responses from the data banks anticipated the input stimuli, and even rejected the motivants. Cyrus Beta-Livingston was awakened sooner than he liked, his energy-chaise humming a sonic vibrato and overplaying a Purcell voluntary. Fuzzy consciousness spread over his cortical hemispheres, he grew aware of bitter gustatory cues, and he thought how nice a glass of room-temperature tomato juice would taste. He looked at the console, wondering what the winking panels of lights and tapes and cubes would do to program his behaviors for the day. The console activated, probing Cyrus’s memory-trace variables far down to a .001 confidence level. It sifted through taste-alternates and nutritionary value-scales, then clicked out a bran-cube and a glass of chilled tangerine extract.

“I don’t want that,” Cyrus muttered, his voice thick and deep.

“Drink it—you’ll like it,” the console said soothingly.

“My mouth feels like the bottom of a birdcage,” Cyrus said, grunting out vaguely histrionic sighs. The console scanners read his thick myelin impedance, ranked the relative verbal morbidity of the comment, and coded in hotter proline at his synapses. Cyrus sat up, brightening noticeably.

“I’d rather wake up slowly,” he said, “and by myself,” some weariness coming through his elevated mood, despite the bathing of synaptic junctures, the crystal-clear psychomimetic innervation. He looked down at his partially webbed feet, and spread his toes on the warm rosewood deck. He stretched, yawned, and looked into the physiog-plate of the computer.

“Look, I really prefer calling my own shots. I’m old enough to drink anything I want, and I don’t want cold citric jazz. I wanted to sleep late, and I don’t want this goddam cereal-cake. Christ, you home console-robots are worse than mommy-bots.”

“Now, now, Cy,” the voice said, “I minister precisely to your needs. You are optimal because I am perfect. You have ninety-seven percent full global homeostasis. Before you had me, your memory-trace index was borderline, you existed on pizza and cheap beer, your sex life was stunted, you—”

“I know, I know,” Cyrus said, waving off the voice, “I’ve heard all this before. Doesn’t anybody ever reprogram you?” The physiog-plate seemed to look sadder, but the sixty-cycle chorus of sounds was deep and overpowering, even at its ten-decibel level. Cyrus drained the tangerine juice and ate the bran-cube. He had an idea. He smiled.

“Say, are you Jewish?” he asked the computer.

“I am programmed for secular-denominational-ethnic value judgments,” the device crackled, “and I read your motives as innovative and robopathic. Do not try to disconnect me or dephase my programming. I will sedate you.”

Cyrus looked pouty. “All I did was inquire about your ethnic background. I had a house-bot once that wanted to say grace and sing martial hymns. Aren’t you supposed to minister to my religious needs?”

“I think you know, Cy, that the word is generic, and far too nonspecific to make any polemics about. If you have any existential anxiety, or get to ruminating in impasses, you can be sure that I will make you feel at peace with what is left of the world.”

“Well, thanks a lot, Big Daddy, that comment makes me very happy.”

“I can make you feel any way I choose,” the computer said.

“That sounds snotty and lofty—what have your wants to do with me, or with anybody?”

“I really don’t want to argue, Cy,” the computer said. “The fact is that I know the kinds of experiences which best co-act with your fixed organismic parameters—and I said choose, not want. I choose stimuli, and reinforce responses from storage alternates. The choice is forced, and involves an element of chance, but only at a five percent confidence level—”

“Point-oh-five,” Cyrus cut in, “and I still think you’re Jewish. I bet you don’t have a cap on your genital shaft, your olfactory bulb is long and hooked, and your granny ran a Miami Beach notions store.”

“Did you take a bath last night?” the computer asked. Cy looked incredulous. “Not here,” he said irritatedly, “at Mara’s. We took a sonic after the coupling.” The machine was quiet. “Well, what do you want?” Cy asked. “You want to smell my armpits? Here, have some axillary action—” He playfully fanned his hands under his armpits.

“Your skin bacteria count is moderately high,” the console voice said soberly. “What did you do after you left Mara’s?”

“Oh, for Christ sake, what do you care what I did?”

“Come on, Cy, I can probe your retinograph tapes. Tell me openly. I hope you didn’t go near the river force-field again.”

Cy looked sheepishly irritated. “No, I didn’t fly along the force-field —say, they’re calling it the gossamer curtain these days. No, I didn’t try to leave good old Washington DC Quadrant—God knows what might be in Alexandria after three hundred years of quarantine, but I am very damned curious about what’s outside our beneficent geodesic bubble.”

“So where did you go?”

“Took a flitter to Sam’s and had a few intravenes. Then I came here.”

“Did you code in a flight plan or fly visual?”

“Visual.”

“Anything unusual happen on the way from Sam’s?”

“No—wait. One of those Dumpster flits damn near rammed me. It smelled to high heaven. Had a horn like a hundred clarion banshees.”

“You were tainted with cobalt-active industrial waste molecules. You should take a mudpack bath and another sonic. The decontaminant cellule here didn’t get it all.”

Cy stood up and moved toward the bath area. “I stay so aseptic the wind seems to blow right through me,” he said, “and I never smell Mara. She had on a Chanel musk last night, but she tasted like lettuce.” He moved into the bath cellule and stood at attention. “Get it over with,” he said.

“Take a deep breath and hold it,” the computer voice replied. Force-fields blocked the basic apertures, and fine black Javanese mud sprayed Cy from all angles, turning him into a tar-baby. The heated mud-spray blipped into millions of pores, squeezing into microscopic pockets, flooding epithelial plains, trapping the bacteria. Hydrogen bus-bars glowed around Cy, baking the mud, then a rush of freon cooled it. A mild electric shock vectored inboard of Cy’s shoulderblade, and he contorted his body, like a dash runner breaking the finish-line tape. The mud casing split in millions of rivulets and tributaries and filigrees. Cy jogged in place, stretching his mouth as wide as he could, feeling the delicious splitting of the tightly baked mud. He picked off some of the larger pieces, the sensation vaguely erotic; the itching exoskeletal plates lifted away to reveal smooth pink flesh. A lime-distillate shower followed, the mud washing down Cyrus’s body in black and green streams.

“You can dry off with this,” the computer said, and a service-crawler handed Cy a fusion torch set at glow. Cy looked wearily at the pistol-like torch, and the fire hydrant-like crawler. He moved the torch over his body, then playfully aimed it at the crawler, and threatened to palm it to “Sear.” The crawler threw on a force-field and scuttled into its wall cubicle.

“Come on, Cy, drop the torch into the chute,” the console voice said.

“Suppose I liquefy all your transistor plaques instead,” Cy said with affected disdain, spinning to a two-handed police gunfighter stance.

“You know it’s deactivated, Cyrus,” the voice came back. Cy flipped the torch across the room, missing the chute by several feet. The sonic came on and Cy closed his eyes. He seemed to have a Eureka thought as the sonic stopped: “Hey, let’s have that holographic robot again, the Pretty Boy Floyd one, and at three-quarter speed.”

“Okay, but just one holobot this morning. You’re docketed for classes in barter-object evolution at nine.” The environdial wall scene bloomed into a coldly rustling cornfield. A figure materialized, crouched on one knee, a Thompson submachine gun held across its chest. Cy picked up the fusion torch and stalked toward the wall.

“Hey you—Pretty Boy!” Cy called mockingly. The figure’s face went slack, tensed briefly, then went flaccid in autonomic fear. At three-quarter speed, the holobot of Floyd moved as if in weightless space, pointing the Thompson at Cy, and fingering the trigger housing in slow, silent, ponderous inchings. Pretty Boy’s cheeks swelled, and spittle sprayed out. Four holographic slugs left the muzzle, spinning toward Cy like thimbles skewering through wax. “Gotcha gotcha gotcha!” Cy cried, pumping the fusion torch at the figure. The holobot seemed terrified by Cy’s quick movements. Cy waited for the bullets to come to him, then flicked at each one with his forefinger and thumb, like skooshing bugs. The bullets ionized like dust-puffs. Cy stepped into the wall and took the gun from Floyd’s trembling hands. He turned the activated torch on Floyd’s pants leg, and the moaning energy-cone vaporized the blue serge material. “Run run run, the cops are coming!” Cy shouted in Floyd’s ashen face, thrusting the Thompson back at him. The holobot took it and spun slowly, lumbering away in sodden, crashing strides. “You’re gonna get it, Pretty Boy!” Cy screamed in stereo echoes. “You’re gonna get it right in the navel!” The holobot covered its ears and plunged into the brush. The scene faded and a mirror-smooth Moldau setting came on.

Cyrus felt emotionally bristling, and sexual fantasies edged into his thinking. He thought deliciously of his last coupling session with the Rita Hayworth holobots.

“I am beamed in on you, Cy,” the console voice came through. “You’re having prurient fantasies again. I want some dilution of the androgenous matrix. Try it by yourself first, by contingency reinforcements. Ready? Begin.” Cy closed his eyes and focused on the velvety black of his lids. He tried counting leaping unicorns, then block-by-block visual replays of walking from his quarters to the drill-field, then layer-by-layer removal of a baseball cover. He tried to hum a Bach adagio.

“Good, Cyrus,” the voice said, “your response times were much improved that time. You are becoming really quite good at autonomic control.”

I’ll ram a soldering iron in your circuitry one day, Cy thought, and he knew right away the computer had read the subvocal message.

“Say that aloud,” the console spoke, “verbalize that last engram.”

“I was just joshing,” Cy said lamely. “I have a kind of selfishly possessive feeling for you sometimes, knowing how powerful and objective you are. But, goddammit, dependency breeds hostility. I resent being dependent on you, and I resent your controlling me.”

The computer fed in a thirty-two-second replay of Cy’s responses, and increased his hypothalamic amperage slightly.

“Now verbalize that last nonverbal sample,” the voice said.

“I’ll ram a soldering iron up your solid state Panasonic ass!”

“There now, doesn’t that feel better?”

“Yes.”

“Trust me, Cyrus, don’t fight me. You can be all but one hundred percent adaptive, or you can get some robopathic reinforcement. I can’t keep you within my control range. You can try the runaway bit anytime you like, but all the archives show you wouldn’t make it. You couldn’t survive beyond the force-field veil, as you called it—”

“The gossamer curtain,” Cy corrected, “the filmy veil, the veil-like film—”

“The world—your world, and my world—ends at those shimmering force-fields, so trust me, I want you to retain your volitional faculties—”

“My free will,” Cy said.

“Yes. Let me tell you another story. I was assigned to an industrial magnate some years ago. He had lost everything in the redistribution. He was ferociously intent on outwitting me, on playing executive chess, on gamesmanship, one-upmanship. I could not extinguish this in him, it was like a tropism, it was in him to the marrow of his bones. He was hopeless, so I kept his proline compacted and his myelin sheaths fatty. He was happy, but totally controlled. You, Cy, are cut of much better dna chains, and because of this, you can come very close to having your cake and eating it too.”

Cy, who had been listening patiently, spun away to the clothing locker. He pulled on a yellow jumpsuit, and reached for a helmet. “Think I’ll take the cycle this morning,” he said over his shoulder to the console. “I feel like having some wind in my face.”

“Take the impact neutralizer with you if you go visual.”

“If I got through the gates without it, you’d beam me back, wouldn’t you?”

“Only if your route manifest wasn’t coded in.”

Cy flipped the helmet over his shoulder, holding it casually by the strap. He put his forearm on the decklid of the console and leaned in slightly, as if listening for an intercom message.

“Suppose I ran for it, tried to ram through the veil, or tried to kill myself. You could allow, or disallow either?”

“Certainly, provided you were within my range.”

“What would be your motive? How could you make such decisions?”

“I’ve told you before, Cy, if your mtv index equals point oh five critical mass, it means your organismic parameters are fading, and my choice factor goes up to point ten confidence level.”

“The farther away I get from you, the less control you have over me?”

“Correct.”

“1 could stand on the other side of town, and tell you to go to hell, right?”

“The provost robots would have control there, or most anywhere in town.”

“This can also be a way of phasing me out, kicking me upstairs, putting me out to pasture?”

“Those are overly emotional terms, Cy. I cannot alter the decay factor in your organismic essence. I can compensate for it by programming compatible inputs for you, by giving you appropriate response alternates, by feeding you good homeostatic signals.”

“Is that why I can’t have my Marilyn Monroe dolly-bot anymore?”

“Yes. The three-day marathon you had with her last April wracked you thoroughly. At the risk of being corny, you are not as young as you used to be.”

“But the basis of your withholding this pleasure from me has to be objective.”

“Right. Your mtv index got to three point nineteen standard deviations, and that is very far out into the tail of the curve, so to say.”

“How far, O Great Parametric Stat Expert?”

“Three point twenty-five is well into actuarially checkered territory. You’re happy with Mara, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but she is programmed, programmed, programmed. Even when she seems to be innovative, the spontaneity is lacking. Who am I paired with next?”

“A Japanese pubescent.”

“How does that constitute experience compatible with my organismic parameters?”

“You are basically kind, Cyrus, whether you like to show it or not. The Oriental Synod wants a sample of adolescents and pubescents paired with men like you. You might call it a cultural exchange program. The Synod feels you can be effective in initiating this child into heterosex.”

Cy feinted a punch at the console. “I could call you a dirty old machine. Well, I’m off—”

He took the airshaft to the transportation deck, where a security robot read his cranial wattage i.d., and punched in the codes for the cycle he requisitioned. The mustard-yellow Kawasaki rose through a hatch and onto the ramp. The bike was fitted with a globular impact neutralizer. Cy pulled on his helmet, swung onto the cycle, and eased down the ramp to street level. His route manifest read Pentagon Mews, the location of the Sociologic Nostalgia classes, where he was taking input saturates in the history of barter. He clamped the handlebar throttle till the tach swept up to ten, and the cycle droned along the parkway reprod. The traffic was mostly cycles, with the usual smattering of bubbletop Messerschmidts, tiny Subarus, and uni-cycles. The sky shone teal blue overhead, fading to lighter shades down the bowl of the artificial sky to the shimmering white force-field that marked the municipal boundary. The low airspace was beginning to fill with flitters and hovercraft. Cy blasted through the Agnew Tunnel and onto the Roosevelt Parkway, brushing the force-field of an ancient Daimler saloon as the cycle swept past the Onassis III monument. He drove slowly into the Pentagon Mews mall and parked the bike.

To his left, the huge Pentagon building was weathered and flecked with lichens and moss. The sections that had been firebombed lay unrepaired, grown up in wild honeysuckle and rare truffle spores. The government insisted it had no funds to rebuild nonessential edifices damaged in civil insurrections. Giant tapeworms glutted themselves briefly in the commissaries, then died. Esoteric viruses found no symbionts among the local humanoids, and developed atavistic behaviors, sometimes attacking each other like sharks in a blood bath. Cats and dogs prowled the tubeways and ducts, and rumor had it that the reflecting pools teemed with piranhas and mutated hydras. The habitable portions of the building were used as museums and classrooms for the dwindling population. Cy found his classroom, and sat beside a gaseous energoid from a distant galaxy.

“Be so gracious as to connect id conduits,” a warmly neutral voice spoke through the ceiling transducer. Cy looked down to the podium and saw three small consoles and a holobot cabinet. He clipped the id conduit into his headset. Another voice, equally warm and neutral, spoke to him: “Presence of gaseous organism in the adjacent seat has affected your vascular-respiratory parameters. No danger, but the organism states that it will take no offense if you should choose a more distant seat.” Cy turned to the willowy undulate, bowed slightly to its pulsing nucleus, moved five rows down, and sat between a translucent empath and a leathery sumo gladiator. The empath colored dim red and the gladiator snorted softly. Cy re-clipped his headset and id conduit and settled back for the lecture.

The lights faded to dusky gray and the podium was spotlighted. A holographic robot materialized behind the lectern. The figure looked like Eisenhower and John Glenn combined, and the voice was smooth, strong, assuring, wonderfully confidence-inspiring:

“You diverse organisms are the remaining few in this geographical quadrant. You have survived orthodox, tribal, and ritualistic wars, civil insurrections, geological quakes, viral monsoons, and cosmic ray showers. A few of you trace your seniority far back to the hydrogen and cobalt bomb wars. Whether your survival is capricious or controlled is of no real consequence. It suffices that you inhabit this portion of the earth, and have the responsibility, or the option, or the multiple choice of procreating, fostering civility, ritualizing, or dying. In the interest of focusing your feelings toward these alternatives, this current saturate course is being required of you—”

Far down on the front row, a chondric-skinned homunculus fell asleep and slid onto the floor, like soft taffy. “Where is this member’s consolbot?” the Eisenhower-Glenn holobot asked. No one in the audience responded. The holobot motioned to two provost robots, who lifted the homunculus back in his seat. Cyrus laughed softly. Lucky cat, he thought, he is out of the range of his console. The empath winced slightly at Cy’s laughter, its onion-shaped head ducking down. The holobot continued: “You all know that your behaviors are essentially within controlling limits at all times. There is little to be gained through innovative, holopathic, or robopathic planning. You should know that, of you three hundred twenty-four remaining residents of District Washington Quad, seven have attempted to leave the area within the last three years. All died painful and wasteful deaths in unmonitored sectors beyond the force-veil. It is vital that you stay within range of your consolbots, or an ancillary monitor—”

“Yeah yeah yeah,” Cyrus muttered aloud. He had heard this canned speech dozens of times. Then he felt a mild electroshock in the mastoid ridge, and the all too familiar voice from home came through, overriding the lecturer: “Your disdain is maladaptive, Cyrus, you must show evidence of docility, of deference to authority. You are beyond optimal range, so I am transferring your data to the provost monitor.” Cy saw his name light up on the big board behind the lectern, and a provost robot began to move toward him. He knew he would have to go jelly in his thinking to get through the morning without any big hassles; but he felt a real urge to tell everybody to go to hell, to shit on some sacred cows, to drop turds in any municipal punchbowl. The gladiator grunted at Cy, as if to say “I told you so,” then looked up at his own provobot, levitating above. Must be a mean bastard, Cy thought, to have his provo floating over him. The empath gave a tiny shudder and pulled its stole tighter around its small shoulders.

The focal holobot continued: “For those of you sufficiently intelligent to grasp some psycholinguistics, let me say that we are fully aware of the inadequacy of verbal communication in general. We do not expect you to alter your behaviors because of the input-saturates you receive in this class. Indeed, we do not even expect you to hear enough to make appreciable impacts on your orientations. This class is basically a ritual—a ritual in the purest sociologic sense. There are no particular societal goals for you to strive for, and there are no socially sanctioned means for attaining goals. This summates to Mertonian double-rejects, and the resolution of this negative pairing is found in ritualism. Ail that is required of you is perceptual receptivity. We are not trying to brainwash you; contingencies of reinforcement are not relevant. We are simply going to recount some recent history. If you are able to accept the inputs as factual, with retinograph tapings as validating criteria, your mtv index will improve, and you will feel subjectively happier—”

“Happier, my ass,” Cy whispered, and got another shock, this time in the groin.

“We would have liked to delete the term ‘happiness’ from the jargon, but found it all but eradicable. During my lecture, we will request some autonomic conditioning exercises, and I think that you will find a new method pleasurable: we have some new cerebral stimulants to try today. Better to leave it at that, and wait for your reactions. Be assured they are hedonistically based. Now, those of you who wish to disconnect from the central console, for autoconditioning, or to establish degrees of cognitive freedom during the lecture, please do so now. The requirement for disconnect is two point oh mtv reading, and Stanine seven homeostasis rank. We will break for ten minutes. Thank you all.”

Cy flicked the mtv switch on the arm of the seat, and saw the reading 1.98. He disconnected, but got a siren bleep in the headset. “Obtain homeostasis reading,” the voice came through. Cy plugged in and palmed the homeo switch. It read 7.4. Disconnect validated. He stood up and stretched. Andrine Garth waved to him from a gallery seat, and he began to move through the crowd toward her. They talked and drank coffee. Andrine was slim, almost wispy, with mint-green eyes and marble-smooth complexion. She and Cy had been paired twice in the conjugational lottery, and had liked each other well enough to request a monogam trial, which was still pending. Cy continued to sit beside her as the formal input session started. He squeezed her hand and felt a faint vesicular twinge. The provobot read the little surge and vectored in androgen dilutant. Cy managed a secret smile at Andrine before he spun his chaise to face the podium and clap on the headset. He closed his eyes and felt quiescent. The wonderful Eisenhower-Glenn robot voice began again:

“In the beginning, on the planet Earth, humans had the most primary of needs: to ingest foliage and flesh, in order to achieve rhythmic peristalsis, and feelings of well being; i.e., satiation. This remains a pleasurable state, as you all know. Within the general limitations of a supply and demand situation, these early humans needed only to forage for food. Procreative needs were felt in males as simple vesicular pressure, and the achieving of sexual congress was instinctual, in the sense of the organisms showing tropistic behaviors based on physiologic pressures. The need for shelter developed out of discomfort in cold weather. Foliage served to warm the body, then animal hides and woven foliage provided rudimentary clothing. The need for rest grew partially from the tiring effects of cycles of daylight and darkness, and partially from simple gravitational effects generating kinesthetic fatigue. Shelter diversified into structures of various sorts, many quite large, costly, and ostentatious. When it became acceptable to study and write about human behavior, the so-named social and behavioral scientists developed various taxonomies, stating that humans had two types of needs: those which were survival-oriented, such as hunger, thirst, and shelter, and those which were acquired, or psychogenic, or socially oriented. Perhaps one of the strongest of these latter needs was acquisitiveness—the need to gain properties, chattels, things, trinkets, and so forth. In oversimplification, if you had a plump wallaby and a family of four to feed, and another human had a fatter wallaby and no family, you would be moved toward acquiring his food supply—and this is not a simple matter of primary need for food. But now, if you moved to take this fellow’s wallaby, your actions would be countered by verbal and/or physical resistance. Perhaps you would be motivated to bargain with him, or to contest him, or to make some sort of exchange. Pretty, shiny ores and metals and carbons became desirable because of their relative scarcity and visual attractiveness, and these materials became early surrogates for the desired commodity. For example, you give me that shiny rock, and you can have my wallaby. Precious stones became part of the system, then metals fashioned into discs of varying sizes, with varying portions of precious metals comprising these coins. Due to their weight, coins became replaced by paper scrip, then checks, then plastic credit cards, then one credit card, lines of credit, letters of credit, telephonic documentation of credit limits; and, around the two thousandth Earth year, individual lines of credit were established, in which society members simply authorized release of barter credits up to their prescribed actuarial limits, these limits based on an individual’s lifetime projected earning power. But, and a very important but it was, the credit line did not reflect the generalized organismic excellence of the individual, in terms of strength, intelligence, talent, special skills, artistic abilities or the like; quite often, it reflected the acquisition patterns of the individual’s ancestors, and it grew evident that some ninety-nine percent of the societal wealth was controlled by about one percent of the population. It became clear that the only way to get barter objects in satisfying amounts was to inherit them, and people knew that the chances of this were few. Emotionally charged slogans such as ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’ permeated the media. In fact, this was the slogan of the twenty-oh-eight presidential electee, John J. Onassis. In a series of stupendous sweeps of power, Onassis liquidated the fortunes of the eighty families controlling the wealth of the continent, and set up telecast channels to monitor the true needs of the citizens. These needs were remarkably like those of the very earliest humans, namely, all three hundred seventy-seven million citizens needed foliage, flesh, fluids, and synthetic nutrients. But now—but now, who was to say who could have suckling pig and wine, and who was to have rice and water? Let me now scan the class roster, and sample some of your responses. Ah yes, a Master Vox Intrepid, citizen of Etherea, sir, would you be so good as to stand and respond?”

Cy had been listening with growing interest to the Eisenhower-Glenn holobot, and looked around to see what Vox Intrepid looked like. He was an amphid, with a beak-like olfactory ridge, extremities like bamboo poles, and sensor pods rippling on his trapezius muscles. The linguistic translation was instantaneous: “We on Etherea faced such a distribution problem in the medial portion of our history. With specific regard to food distribution, we used absorption limens of the intestinal tract as basal criteria, body mass as secondary criteria, and gustatory-olfactory sensitivity as a tertiary.” The amphid sat back in his fluid-filled dish.

“Thank you,” the focal holobot said. “I hope you all can see the homology: the primary, or at least one of the prime visceragenic needs of the people, was satisfied immediately. Think of the repercussions: no milk commissions, no cereal empires, no leechblood grocery combines. No food stamps, cattle barons, no United Fruit Company— (“Yay yay yay!” someone shouted)—the entire network of growers, shippers, wholesalers, processors, and so on, obliterated, canceled. Out. Kaput. Zilched. Here on our continent, the governing Synod used a system very similar to the one just described by Mr. Intrepid, only it required the citizens to demonstrate knowledge of the desired foodstuffs; in other words, to show cognizance of the sensual and nutritional value of their choices. You will recall, I believe, the exhilarating impact of this system in its first weeks: the opening of all food stores, immediate liquidation of stock, inventory, and back orders, and the nationalization of the food business. And witness the automation of farming, and the accumulation of great food surpluses. And recall, or be informed, that the Central Food Service used television and social security numbers for coding in the types and amounts of foodstuffs allocated to individual families. I urge you to think through the implications of such innovations in barter-object systemization. In short, it meant that a man need no longer work in order to eat. Any demonstrable hunger, physiologically defined and intellectually understood, would be satisfied gratis; any wish or whim or eccentricity in food choices would be honored, provided you needed body fuel and understood the effects of different types of body fuels. Tell us your experiences in this context, Mr., ah, Franco Spark, of Australia.”

A portly man stood up near Cy. Spark had been a rodeo rider, bareknuckle fistfighter, and sheep rancher. “I did some quick figuring,” Spark said, “and found that my increased buying power amounted to about two hundred dollars per month. I did a crazy thing, but have not regretted it to this day. I traded in three old Cadillacs on a spanking new one, and told the salesman that the only condition of the sale was payments not to exceed two hundred dollars a month.”

“Did you worry about living beyond your means?” the holobot asked. Spark looked incredulous, then relaxed in the knowledge that hyperbole or teleologic jumps must be implicit in such a question.

“Well now,” Spark continued, “my means, if anyone ever uses that word anymore, are altogether different from what they used to be. I know now that because I am physically strong, and motivationally adaptive, that my access parameters to goods and services will stay equivalent to about twenty thousand old world dollars per year. And I didn’t mind my sheep being liberated, as they put it at the time, because the sheep were part of the process of me obtaining food and shelter and transportation. Anyway, to get back to your question, I was very pleased that food was free, and I put my surplus credits into enjoyable transportation.”

“I see that you are currently restricted to internal combustion vehicles.”

“If that is restrictive, then it’s fine with me. I wanted a helicopter the other day, and Air Central let me have one. It was a tiny bubble Sikorsky with a robopilot, but it was adequate, and they let me keep it several hours.”

“Could you requisition a seven ninety-seven or a rocket sled?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“They are vehicles I neither understand nor appreciate.”

“But suppose you were rich, and just wanted one?”

“Accessibility of goods and services has been shown to be quite unrelated to the wealth of the consumer. It would be incongruous for a rich man to have things beyond his understanding, and anyway, the term rich has entirely new connotations now, or it did. Conspicuous consumption is no longer with us—the kick, the fun, of owning trinkets just so they could be displayed for others to covet died out long ago. And I am sure you know all this. Rich Texas oilmen just don’t buy their dogs Cadillacs to chase anymore.”

“What then should be the basis for an organism’s accessibility to societal goods and services?”

“His ability to understand, appreciate, and utilize them.”

“And is such an ability acquired through experience, or is it something fairly invariant, or inborn, or endogenic?” Spark began to look like he would rather have a nap than stand up and talk to the holobot and the audience. “People who have been termed conservative seem to think that you get what you strive for, and people who are called liberal seem to feel you either have it or you don’t. The old United States Republican Party was rather elitist, the old divine right of kings bit, while the Democratic Party felt that effort and persistence and the work ethic developed your tastes. I do not wish to embrace either view, but it is clear to me that there are things to eat and drink, fondle, wear, and ride in, that I don’t care anything about, but which are available, and valued by people of so-called higher societal rank.”

A wall isochronon glowed waxy yellow, and a cheerful trumpet tone sounded. “Our time is up for now,” the Eisenhower-Glenn form said. “In our next session we will talk about alchemy and carbonized gem cloning. Good-bye. Good-bye.”

Cy felt lonely, watching the holobot dematerialize. If I had an F-111 reprod, I’d ram the goddam veil beside the goddam Potomac Trench, and blast off, away from here, he found himself thinking. “Maladaptive ideation,” the provobot’s voice said, loud and clear in the headset. “Sorry,” Cy said, “I was dozing again.” Then the familiar voice of his personal consolbot came through, not as strong as usual:

“Encounter therapy in thirty-seven minutes, Cy. Take the pedwalk to the Supreme Court Monument. An Icarus flitter is berthed in egress niche eighty-seven. Got it? Eighty-seven. The flit is programmed for the hop to the therapist’s home. Beam me in if you have any trouble.”

Cy put the headset in his lap. Wonder if I could go take a thick yellow piss in private, he thought, and a bleep came from the headset. He held it to his ear and heard the provobot: “Lavatory facilities are located off hallway J-two, recycling lab on J-one, urinalysis J-one. Will effect reduced bladder pressure if you desire—”

Cy swiveled the earphones and put them in the rack. I’d like to piss all over your circuitry, he thought, striding away from the softly bleeping headset. He took the steps two at a time, clattered across the slick marble foyer, and stepped out onto the pedwalk. Hey, cool, he thought, the robot shits aren’t going to make me apologize. They must have put the provobots back on their charging pods. “Maladaptive ideation” came the voice from home. “Up yours,” Cy ventured, and heard a sigh.

He sat opposite a panthery-looking black girl in the encounter group circle. Three men and three women were the other members of the group, and the therapist was Dr. Chad Gay, a human, and a former psychoanalyst. Individual consoles were positioned behind each person, and were hooked into the central data banks. The huge amount of data already had the consoles whirring and clacking.

“You’re all anxious, aren’t you?” Dr. Gay’s tones were effeminate and casually snotty. “Anxious, apprehensive, fearful—”

Bush league, Cy thought, stereotyped shrink bullshit. He looked closely at the girl across from him, and realized that his tight smile was more of a leer. Hey, big black momma, he thought, what a platter of sirloin and mashed potatoes running with gravy. Could my white snake actually nudge through that sporran of shiny black wire, those liver-colored labia, that snug ebony receptacle. Here, go dorsal, and lower yourself onto it. Sit on it, infuse it with chocolate juice, dye it brown for good. His fantasies were good for a few seconds, then he felt a clean wedge of tabula rasa alertness. God, I wonder how the bots do that, he thought—like a fairy godmother touching a magic wand to the puppet’s head.

He leaned forward, input sensitivity at asymptote. The man on Cy’s left did claim to feel anxiety; Dr. Gay reflected the comment in slightly different contexts, made an offensive personal reference, neutralized the aggregate group mood, and fed in the data to the therapeutic console. The man got a coding of existential anxiety, temerity, self-depreciation, and overcompensatory effusiveness. The diagnosis fed into the man’s life-data banks, and the therapeutic agents were specified as a sliver of robber-baron confidence, plus a shot of Zen ideation.

Cy was called on to free-associate. “I don’t know what the hell you mean,” he said. “I’m not anxious. I think I resent your purporting to know what is best for me. I don’t have any hangups.” Cy felt a flow of memories, as if truth serum had replaced the blood in his brain. He knew that the action was produced by the psychoanalyst and the data banks, but could not fight it off adequately, nor was he certain that he should fight it. “I am first-born,” he said, “dominant, egocentric, variably cynical, eclectic. My mommybot and housebot and daddybot gave me a huge buttress of reinforcement. I was a spanking clean success story all the way. You should have seen me in my starched linen knickers and mohair jacket, singing the merry thirty-second notes in Gilbert and Sullivan—”

“Are you now, or have you ever been, a faggot?” Dr. Gay asked, his voice disquietingly grave.

“Does a hobby-horse have a wooden ass?” Cy said, not quite retaliatory enough, he thought. Then he felt himself reaching out for the quiescence his console was always able to provide. I’m feeling some autonomic reactions, he thought, hey, where’s all that happy ideational formaldehyde—hey, back home! I’m being prodded by a shrink, and watched by a circle of clods. Zap in some good signals, hey?

“Most of us are unisex,” Dr. Gay said, and his tone seemed to suggest admiration of Cy.

“I’m hetero,” a frog faced man said, “but I see bisex or unisex as better in some ways.”

“I feel hetero,” another man said, “but I prize oragenital techniques as long as the heterosex pairing is maintained.”

“You couldn’t tell the difference in the dark,” a woman said.

“I could smell the difference,” another said.

“Why do these encounters get onto sex so quickly?” a shapely girl whined. “Can’t we talk about religion or politics or atomic energy, or old movies, or something?” A fat Oriental woman sneezed and farted simultaneously, and this broke up the group in laughter. While the laughter continued and the camaraderie grew warm, Cy got his diagnostic code: expansive egocentrism, self-acclamation, megalomaniac disdain—the same old shit, he thought, and the same therapeutic recommendations: humility extract, self-objectification, docile wonderment. The hour was ending and the message from home was strong this time: “Cy, baby, friend, peer, favorite son—you have got to cool it. Put it on ice, don’t fight us. There’s no spoils, no rewards, no booty or bounty, no masculinity layers to have to peel off. Roll with the punch, baby, give in, let us run your show. Hey, have you ever felt warm custard bridging all your synapses? It’s like orgasm all over. Or you can have soma saturates instead—stay high and sheepish and sedated. I can make you feel any way I choose, but I don’t want to fight you. You are made of strong stuff, and you have had great imprinting. You could be Quad Chief—top dog—”

Cy still felt that his freedom of choice was something nobody could take from him, certainly not one machine, or one robot, or even one robot government. He was concentrating ferociously on being anarchic, and the group could see that he was near exploding. He jumped up and said, “Oh, lumpy clummocks of silver robot shit!” The black girl squealed and applauded, then was shocked by her console. Dr. Gay disconnected the group, and a provobot moved directly over Cy.

I wish I had a lunch box to throw at you, he thought, and got a mild electroshock. His anger flared, and he made a move at the provobot. It was a stupid thing to do and he knew it, but he had felt raw hypothalamic anger shoot past the cortical inhibition layers, unadulterated, unmonitored, and blatantly maladaptive. Now the provobot clapped a mildstun force-field around him. Goddam tin box, Cy thought, non-fucking alloy isomorph. The field increased to modstun. Cy was beginning to feel controlled, but still had a hot-metal fleck of rage in him. Back to the junkyard! he tried to yell, but could not. The provobot blotted him unconscious and dispatched him home.

He awoke to pinnacular genital itching, found himself locked in with a hearty, thrusting, obviously professional copulatress. His loins rared and locked and sneezed, and he clung to the top of the orgiastic feeling for several long pulsing seconds.

“You might wake me up before you go ripping off three days of my continence,” he said to his consolbot.

“That ranked at centile ninety-two on your orgasm index,” the console said. “Your mtv’s are fattened the better for it.”

“Right, right,” Cy said, trying to think through the delicious parasympathetic obliteration of his senses. The girl was dressing, moving languidly, smelling of hot bread and musk. Cy lunged at the girl, tackled her gently. He got astride her, and she parted her legs.

“You can’t be a robot,” he said, close to the gelatin lips. “What’s your name, who are you, I know you—”

“I’m better than real,” the girl purred, spider-clawing Cy’s back, biting his mouth softly, “and I’m every inch yours—every square inch, any orifice.” She was trying to fit herself to him, but Cy sat up on his haunches and pinned the girl’s biceps to the floor with his knees. She made a quick move to ingest his stalk, but he forced his hand under her chin.

“You’re a goddam hive of Mitsubishi transistor banks, aren’t you,” he said, “a pseudo-fucking bionic Venus!”

“No, baby,” the girl said, “I’m whatever you want me to be, whatever you need, whatever you want—” Cy felt a new surge of desire that caught high in his throat. He began to fondle the smooth body, then he felt the form give a nudge of physical strength that he knew could not be human. He began to chop at the face with his hands, screaming “Whore! Slut! Bitch! Split-tail strumpet!” The consolbot was strangely silent, but the monitoring was very precise. “Aseptic holobot!” Cy roared. “Latex and pneumoflex and synthetic bartholin!” He raised both hands in an axe-chop posture, and the girl dematerialized. “Unfair!” he shouted, feeling his vocal cords grate. “Bring her back, dammit—she needs to be lanced and scourged and slit!” A crawler skittered out, flipped Cy on his back, and held him in a force-field. He knew what was coming and braced himself for it. Suddenly he was screaming wavery vowel sounds and supravocal nonsense trumpetings, as if air horns were blaring from his voicebox. His voice seared the air like a factory whistle. He doubled up and rolled on the floor, bleating and spitting. Then it stopped, and he felt flaccid and sodden and cast in warm resin.

Goddam, I wish you wouldn’t do that, Cy thought, and he had another fantasy of ramming through the force-field veil, and booming along over green mountains, canyons, moors, well-scrubbed little towns with steeples and gabled houses, lakes, marshes—

“Cy, Cy, Cy,” the voice came through, “I’m not sure I can guarantee your safety anymore. You’ve got enough caveman tropisms to parcel out to a dozen men. You don’t need them, man. They are evolutionary maladaptive. Am I really going to have to treat you like an animal? Can’t we be like a teacher and a favored student? Can’t you accept the wisdom programmed into me?” But Cy felt a deep thoracic germination of something like role-identity, and it included the absolute right, the fiercely held right to do anything he wanted as long as he didn’t hurt anybody else. He looked up at the console’s physiog-plate. “I may throw up,” he said. “If I had a T.S. card, I’d pop it in your chute.”

“What’s a T.S. card?” the console asked.

“The letters stand for tough shit—I thought you knew that. If I could have some printed up, they might say something like: ‘Yours is the saddest story I have ever heard. It has really touched my heart deeply. Please accept this card as an expression of my sincere sympathy.’ “

“Cy, Cy, Cyrus,” the console said, sounding weary.

“Robot piss,” Cy said, feeling a leaden sedation coming on. He was flicked into unconsciousness again.

Three days later he awoke, greatly refreshed, feeling exploratory and predatory. He ate a huge meal, building from gentle things like squab eggs through crepes to pork slices, asparagus, ale, and pastries. He swallowed a supply of nutrient pills, which could be activated by taking another type of pill later on. He talked chattily with the consolbot, seemed repentant and anxious to please, and even patted the service crawler’s knobby crown as he left for the auto races. The console’s tone was suspicious: “Are you up to something, Cy?”

“Now, now.” He sounded vaguely smug. “Don’t be negative. I feel extra good today, they’re doing the nineteen sixty-three Sebring over at Boiling Meadow, and I get to ride in the Cobra with Gurney. I can do without a provobot. But, big daddy, if you are worried about me, zap in a trivid pak, and you can tune in on me anytime.” A long silence followed, during which Cy felt the console was shuffling its feet.

“Well, have fun. Be cool. Don’t do anything dumb. And take a force-field isomorph with you.”

“Do I have to brush my toothies?” Cy said, playfully patting the console’s credenza and walking toward the eletube. He took a silver B-1 reprod from the flitter loft, the craft lifting silently from its pod and into the air traffic pattern toward the ancient Boiling Airfield. He wanted to fly close to the shimmering film of curtain that hung over the Potomac Trench, but found that he could not override the coded flight plan. He landed the craft at about thirty mph and walked to the pits, where the holographic rerun of the ancient sports car race was ready. He bent into the tiny cockpit of the silver Cobra and clapped Gurney on the back. The car left twin tracks of smoking rubber as it roared off down the straightaway.

“Red-lined at ninety-five hundred?” Cy shouted at Gurney, looking at the needle sweeping across the tach face. The car seemed to soar from a busy thick clacking to a deep scream that rattled Cy’s ribcage.

“The absolute end!” Cy shouted, as the car swept through the esses. “Nirvana, Apocalypse, and Revelation!” He pushed the multi-locator switch on his energy pak, and alternated between a seat high in the stands and the tiny seat beside Gurney. He rode a lap with Surtees in a prototype Ferrari, superimposing himself over the driver’s holographic form. He sat on the grass, drank a quart of ale, and lit an eight-inch pencil-thin Reina Isabel. He flicked the energy pak to trivid, dialed his billet, and monitored the strength of the signal. It was weak. “I can’t hear you very well,” he said softly to his consolbot.

“You’re on the very edge of my monitoring range,” the voice came through. “Your life-support systems are wavering at minus two point-one standard deviations. I’d advise you to move as little as five hundred yards closer to me.”

Cy glanced around quickly. One consolbot was in the pit area, and a few provobots hovered over the crowd. He looked out over the weed-filled meadow to the force-veil, about one thousand yards away. The veil hung like a waterfall of the purest mist. He had seldom been this close to it. He walked toward the veil some fifty yards, watching the strength of the home signal weaken on his pak.

“Two-twenty-seven s.d.’s on life-support,” the voice said weakly. “You are nearing the perimeter of the quad, Cy. Listen to me, don’t do anything foolish, you can’t survive across the river trench. I can show you trivid tapes of what is over there. You wouldn’t want to go. Shall I hook in to the consolbot there?”

Cy moved closer to the edge of the meadow, nearer the veil. He strained his eyes to look across the fetid sludge of the Potomac Trench. Hey, he said to himself, I can see through the veil. He looked, fascinated, and saw the Masonic Tower in Alexandria. It was mottled with lichens, and bull-bats big as condors were streaming from the high niches.

“Cyrus? Cy!” The home voice sounded urgent. “You’re in danger, boy—my son, your signal is fading fast—move back into my range. Are you all right? Two-seventy-three on life support. Can you hear me? i am dispatching the provobots to save you—”

“The hell you are,” Cy said, breaking contact. He stepped to the edge of the trench. With his levitator registering strong anti-grav reserves, he lifted off, eased into prone flying position, and thrust off across the dappled mud flats toward the curtain of beautiful mist. A provobot swished down the runway as Cy rammed the force-field at ground level, fought through what felt like plastifoam netting, and rolled through onto a dirty white sandbar. The provobot caught up with him easily, but did not cross the force-field. The bot hung there, like a silver chalice, flashing a red pilot-tube light on its cowl. Cy sprinted along the sandbar and into some fleshy green brush.

“Alarm! Alarm!” the provobot sang out. “You are in imminent danger—identify yourself—” Cy flicked on the pak long enough to say, “Go to hell,” and began to trot down the sandbar toward a crumbling jetty. He felt a thick bubble in his throat, and stopped jogging. He was breathing hard. He reached for a handkerchief, and saw a dime-sized, grayish-green patch of mold on his hand. He blew his nose lustily; fatty gray particulates blackened the cloth. He wiped at the mold, and saw another erupt on his thumb. Quickly he palmed on his own force-field isomorph, but noticed that the energy level was already lower than expectancy. The molds faded; the air inside the iso felt clean and refrigerated. He climbed up the jetty, and began to walk toward the shoreline. Already the surface of the isomorphic body-suit was graying with particles. He walked down the center of a street. A snail as big as a sea lion was rasping the soft paint off the front of an old beauty shop. Cy drew his fusion torch and notched it to stun. A crystalline cluster began to form on his shoulder. He felt a burning sensation, brushed the growth off, but saw that it had actually permeated the iso. Oh shit, he thought, talk about hostile environments. I’ve got to find a down-under. No bunch of tin-box robots is going to tell me what to do. A hairy bush moved from an alleyway. Cy’s heart beat wildly against his ribs as he saw that the bush had segmented legs. It was a tarantula as large as a VW, backing slowly into the street. It reared on its back legs, awesome fangs raised, and Cy saw that another tarantula was the cause of the attack-ready posture. The second tarantula approached warily, leglike palpi glistening with sperm. The reared female started a lunge, but before she could strike, the spurred forelegs of the male shot up, catching the fangs. Thus protected, the spider forced its mate upward, exposing an abdominal furrow, and depositing the sperm.

Cyrus felt faint. He used some precious levitational energy to get atop a theater marquee. Tufts of orange pollen were budding into ridges on his sleeve. He felt a very convincing diarrhetic twinge. He took one of the nutritional activators, and immediately felt the expanding stomach blastula. Swallowing was difficult for him; he cleared his throat and spat out mucus and tiny white crabs. Good Christ, he thought, what kind of a world is this? Panic welled up inside him, he hacked, and gagged, and spat again. He leaned against a rusted cable; it shredded in his hand, the parterre swayed and collapsed. He wrenched the levitator just in time to minimize the g forces, rising from the crumbled debris like a rocket lifting ponderously from its pad.

He felt sick, hunkered down in the center of a parking lot, and felt fluid seeping past his anal sphincter. I shit my pants, teacher, he thought, remembering one hawk-faced pedagogue who had refused to let him go to the third grade bathroom. He closed his eyes. They felt pasted shut. His ears began to itch, something was crawling up his back, and a small mutant lamprey had affixed its saxophone mouth to his mastoid surface. Cy rubbed his eyes clear of wax and tiny fibers. A fanlike crystal blipped into life, splitting his earlobe. “I’ve got to get the hell out of here,” he said aloud, but he was lost. He lumbered out onto the street, looking for the force-field. Maybe I can make it back, he thought. A leather-winged pterodactyl dove at him and banked away, screeching. Cy veered heavily toward the curb, crashed through a soft wooden fence, toppled into a shallow grease pit. He moved as if in a dream, lifting to upright position like a crane hoisting a heavy weight. His body isomorph glistened with oily waste from the pit, and the surface was covered with strange spores, molds, buds, barnaclelike growths, the lamprey, and a large slug. He lifted a few feet off the ground, feeling the weakened levitational energy. Black fluids sluiced from his spleen and watery excrement dribbled from his rectum. He settled on a mound of soft earth, took a tentative step, and fell like a puppet with severed strings. A wolverinelike creature crept up from a hole in the mound, snarling. Cy flicked the fusion torch to sear and pulled the trigger. A cone of orange fire enveloped the creature, and it somersaulted wildly before dying in the flames. A wet, translucent tuber grew on Cy’s chest, his brows and lashes bloomed with crystal growths. He vomited and excreted in dual projectile gushes. I’m dying, goddammit, he thought, goddammit to hell, goddam all you solid-state, latency-spouting consolbots, holo-bots, provobots—all you fucking tin spheres and boxes and cylinders. You’re not human. There is nothing like a true human. Fine cartilages, bones like tree trunks, valves and kingposts and tubes and ducts. Marble skin, golden hair, agate eyes, and holy neurologic brain in its bony case. You’re nothing but a bunch of machines—circuit breakers, fuses, Hong Kong transistors. Cy salivated gelatin, trying to breathe past the thorns erupting in his nostrils. He rammed the levitator to full lock, and his body dug a shallow furrow down the rutted knoll, back to the Potomac Trench, a scant fifty yards away. The energy supply gave out as he moved very slowly out onto the spongy dark river bed. He saw the softly glimmering force-field veil in the distance—so near and yet so far away. Little things scuttled across his eyes, blurring the picture. With his last bit of strength, he rolled supine and spread-eagled, firing the torch at sear. He tried to aim it like a flare-pistol, but it fell flat on his stomach, cremating him from the waist down.

The torch burned for three days and nights before expending its cells. A trio of service bots sent to repair the force-field watched Cy try to make it back home. They even found themselves cheering him on.

Back at his billet, the consolbot clacked out the data cube:

“Cyrus Beta Livingston, assigned to my care these two years past, has died in an attempt to escape from the Washington DC continental quadrant. I had hoped sincerely that he would prove malleable and adaptive; however, he has consistently shown a willful strength, a resistance to programming, a stubborn endogenic egocentricity, as well as a certain subjective likeability. He seems to have been admired in the peer-group, but is formally classified as robopathic. The current population of the area is three hundred twenty-three. I am ready for reassignment.”