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Then a battery of hypercomputers to interpret and order the findings. Meanwhile, treatment to rid the subject of his tiny inquisitors and bring him back to normal. Design, test, redesign, retest. Eventually, the program, the download—approximation, sketch, ghost of his mind. It had his memories, with the inclinations, beliefs, prejudices, hopes, outlook, style of thinking, entire awareness. But it was not the flesh-and-blood person. It ought to be as comprehensible as any other artifact. It ought to be as controllable.
    The stories of all downloads declared that it wasn’t.
    How controllable, ultimately, was anything?
    Sayre quelled a shudder. He told himself he was over-tired, overwrought. Discipline returned, and he spoke levelly. “See here, I’m making one final effort to be friendly. Have you enough knowledge to appreciate that? You were oblivious a long time, and the updates you have since received were audiovisual only. I wonder if you realize what a concession this visit of mine is.”
    “I know you’re the head of the Security Police, and therefore
ex officio
a member of the Advisory Synod, which quietly tells the legislature what laws to pass, the judiciary what decisions to reach, and the executive what to do.” Guthrie sounded unimpressed. “I also know you’re nothing special in history. It’s had your sort again and again, like outbreaks of acne.”
    Sayre couldn’t hold down a flick of anger. He flushed. “You betray your ignorance,” he snapped. “Unique, decisive, irreversible events do happen. Fire. Agriculture. The scientific method. Xuan Zhing and his system.”
    “I’ve heard that one before, too.”
    “You have not! Who else properly analyzed the dynamics of social action? Science, not witch doctors or folk remedies, science put an end to smallpox, AIDS, heart disease, cancer. Do you imagine anything but science can put an end to injustice, wastefulness, alienation, violence, all the horrors humans make for themselves? If you had troubled to study Xuan’s mathematics—”
    Sayre broke off. It was ridiculous, preaching like this at a program in a box. Yes, he certainly needed some rest and recreation.
    Yet the concept caught him as often before, uplifted him, refreshed and recharged his spirit. Not that he claimed personally to have seen or grasped every facet of the vast achievement. Few intellects reached that high. Even Xuan, throughout the decades of his labors, had drawn heavily on the computer resources of the Academic Internet, as well as acknowledging his debt to earlier thinkers. The likes of Sayre must depend on what they were taught in school, with lectures and semipopular writings to deepen it somewhat afterward. Nevertheless he could appreciate the
fittingness
of it all—the same processes shown to have been at work in Han Dynasty China and Imperial Rome, in Islam and Cao-Dai, in chronometry and calculus. He could be convinced by its arguments that, given modern information processing, the market economy was obsolete, with its inefficiencies and inequities. He could be inspired by the prospect of establishingand maintaining conditions so well planned that society must evolve toward a sane order of things, as a spacecraft launched on the right trajectory must pass among the multitudinously changeable forces upon it to the desired destination.
    Fleetingly, not for the first time, he knew that what made and kept him a dedicated Avantist was none of these proven propositions, not really. It was a logical
non sequitur
—a vision, if you will—and therefore nonrational. But Xuan’s scheme allowed for nonrationality, irrationality, and the chaos of nonlinear systems. They were powerful elements in the course of events; his reasoning took them fully into account. What had captured Sayre’s imagination was Xuan’s afterword. The thinker was at last simply speculating, the prophet was no longer prophesying but imagining. He agreed that nobody alive in an imperfect and limited