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Authors: John Brunner
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such delicate touches and so keen an insight that he never needed to explain or justify his decisions. They simply worked.
He might have been trained to display such powers of judgment; he might have been specially bred to possess them. One thing was sure: he hadn’t lived long enough to grow into them.
Not if he started from where most people had to.
Also in Brazil there had been no religious warfare since Lourenço Pereira seized power—whoever he might be—and that was a welcome contrast to the turn-of-the-century period when Catholics and Macumbans had fought pitched battles in the streets of São Paulo. And in the Philippines the reforms introduced by their first-ever woman president, Sara Castaldo, had slashed their dreadful annual murder rate by half, and in Ghana when Premier Akim Gomba said to clean house they started cleaning house and laughed and cheered, and in Korea since the coup by Inn Lim Pak there had been a remarkable fall-off in the crap-and-screw charter flights which formerly had come in from Sydney, Melbourne and Honolulu at the rate of three or four a day, and … and generally speaking in the most unlikely places wisdom appeared to be on the increase.
“So you’re impressed by what’s been happening in other countries. Why don’t you want your own homeland to benefit from—shall we call it a shot in the arm of wisdom?”
“My homeland? I was born here, sure, but … Never mind; that’s a stale argument these days, I guess. The point is that what’s being peddled here as wisdom isn’t.”
“I sense a long debate ahead. Perhaps we should start again tomorrow.”
“Which mode are you going to put me in?”
“The same as today. We’re drawing closer to the point at which you ultimately overloaded. I want to compare your conscious and unconscious recollections of the events leading up to the climax.”
“Don’t try and bleat me. You mean you’re bored with talking to an automaton. I’m more interesting when I’m fully awake.”
“On the contrary. Your past is far more intriguing than either your present or your future. Both of those are completely programed. Good night. There’s no point in my saying ‘sleep well’—that’s programed too.”
KNOWN FACTORS CONTRIBUTING TO HAFLINGER’S DESERTION
The shy, quiet, reserved boy who came to Tarnover had spent so much of his childhood being traded from one set of “parents” to the next that he had developed a chameleon-like adaptability. He had liked almost all his “fathers” and “mothers”—small wonder, given the computerized care with which child was matched to adult—and he had been, briefly, exposed to an enormous range of interests. If his current “dad” enjoyed sports, he spent hours with a baseball or a football; if his “mom” was musical he sang to her accompaniment, or picked his way up and down a keyboard … and so on.
But he had never let himself become deeply engaged in anything. It would have been dangerous, as dangerous as coming to love somebody. At his next home it might not have been possible to continue.
At first, therefore, he was unsure of himself: diffident with his fellow students, among whom he was one of the youngest—most were in their mid-teens—and excessively formal when talking to members of the staff. He had a vague mental picture of government establishments, which was based on three-vee and movie portrayals of cadet schools and army bases. But there was nothing in the least military about Tarnover. There were rules, naturally, and among the students some customary traditions had already grown up although the place had been founded a mere decade earlier, but they were casually observed, and the atmosphere was—not friendly, but comradely. There was a sense of people banded together for a common purpose, undertaking a shared quest; in sum, there was a feeling of solidarity.
It was so novel to Nickie that he took months to realize how much he liked it.
Above all,
He might have been trained to display such powers of judgment; he might have been specially bred to possess them. One thing was sure: he hadn’t lived long enough to grow into them.
Not if he started from where most people had to.
Also in Brazil there had been no religious warfare since Lourenço Pereira seized power—whoever he might be—and that was a welcome contrast to the turn-of-the-century period when Catholics and Macumbans had fought pitched battles in the streets of São Paulo. And in the Philippines the reforms introduced by their first-ever woman president, Sara Castaldo, had slashed their dreadful annual murder rate by half, and in Ghana when Premier Akim Gomba said to clean house they started cleaning house and laughed and cheered, and in Korea since the coup by Inn Lim Pak there had been a remarkable fall-off in the crap-and-screw charter flights which formerly had come in from Sydney, Melbourne and Honolulu at the rate of three or four a day, and … and generally speaking in the most unlikely places wisdom appeared to be on the increase.
“So you’re impressed by what’s been happening in other countries. Why don’t you want your own homeland to benefit from—shall we call it a shot in the arm of wisdom?”
“My homeland? I was born here, sure, but … Never mind; that’s a stale argument these days, I guess. The point is that what’s being peddled here as wisdom isn’t.”
“I sense a long debate ahead. Perhaps we should start again tomorrow.”
“Which mode are you going to put me in?”
“The same as today. We’re drawing closer to the point at which you ultimately overloaded. I want to compare your conscious and unconscious recollections of the events leading up to the climax.”
“Don’t try and bleat me. You mean you’re bored with talking to an automaton. I’m more interesting when I’m fully awake.”
“On the contrary. Your past is far more intriguing than either your present or your future. Both of those are completely programed. Good night. There’s no point in my saying ‘sleep well’—that’s programed too.”
KNOWN FACTORS CONTRIBUTING TO HAFLINGER’S DESERTION
The shy, quiet, reserved boy who came to Tarnover had spent so much of his childhood being traded from one set of “parents” to the next that he had developed a chameleon-like adaptability. He had liked almost all his “fathers” and “mothers”—small wonder, given the computerized care with which child was matched to adult—and he had been, briefly, exposed to an enormous range of interests. If his current “dad” enjoyed sports, he spent hours with a baseball or a football; if his “mom” was musical he sang to her accompaniment, or picked his way up and down a keyboard … and so on.
But he had never let himself become deeply engaged in anything. It would have been dangerous, as dangerous as coming to love somebody. At his next home it might not have been possible to continue.
At first, therefore, he was unsure of himself: diffident with his fellow students, among whom he was one of the youngest—most were in their mid-teens—and excessively formal when talking to members of the staff. He had a vague mental picture of government establishments, which was based on three-vee and movie portrayals of cadet schools and army bases. But there was nothing in the least military about Tarnover. There were rules, naturally, and among the students some customary traditions had already grown up although the place had been founded a mere decade earlier, but they were casually observed, and the atmosphere was—not friendly, but comradely. There was a sense of people banded together for a common purpose, undertaking a shared quest; in sum, there was a feeling of solidarity.
It was so novel to Nickie that he took months to realize how much he liked it.
Above all,
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