Bright Segment (26 page)

“Sit down, kids. I want you to hear this, too. Roan, would you do something for me—something hard?”

“What is it?”

“Promise to shut up until I’ve finished, no matter what?”

“That’s not hard.”

“No, huh? All right, Flower, tell us all just exactly what psi powers you have.”

Roan closed his eyes in delight, picturing again Flower’s appearance in his cubicle, her birdlike flitting about the gateway during his dream, the cup she had drawn out of thin air for him. She said, “None that I know of, Granny.”

“What!”
he exploded.

Granny snapped, “You have promised to shut up!” To Flower, she went on, “And who’s got the most psi potential in the place, far as we know?”

“Annie,” said Flower.

“The fifteen-year-old I told you about,” Granny explained to Roan. “The one who can knock over a straight-edge. Shut up! Let me finish!”

With a great effort, he subsided.

“In a way, we’ve lied to you,” said Granny, “and, in a way, we haven’t. I once told you some of what I’ve been thinking of—the new race of people that has to be along some day, if we let it—the next step up. I believe in them, Roan; call that a dream if you like. And when you had your dream those two days, we made the dream come true for a little while. We worked that thing out like a play—I had you in the frame of that new machine of mine all the time.

“It
is
a new machine, Roan, built on a new principle that the transplat boys never thought of. It’s just what I told you it was—a stationless matter transmitter—no central, no depots, no platforms. I used it on every psi incident you witnessed in those two days. Believe me?”

“No!”

“Val?”

“I’d like to,” she said diffidently. “But I’ve always thought—”

“There’s no use being tactful about this,” said Granny. “For the rest of your life, this is going to bother you, Roan, Val—and, later, a lot of other people we’ll bring in. You’ll rationalize it or you won’t, but you’ll never believe I have a new kind of machine. Shut
up
, Roan!

“You two and the rest of your generation are the first group to
get really efficient crèche conditioning. You don’t remember it, but ever since you were suckling babes, you’ve been forced into one or two basic convictions. Maybe we’ll find a way to pry ’em loose from you. One of these convictions is that the transplat is the absolute peak of human technology—that there’s only one way to make ’em and that there are only certain things they can do.

“You got it more than Val did, Roan, because you males in the transplat families were the ones who might be expected to develop such a machine. That’s why, when this new one was built,
women
built it. Don’t fight so, son! We have it, whether you believe it or not. We always will have it from now on. I’m sorry—it hurts you even to hear about it and I know what you went through when you had to sell it to your father. You damn near choked to death!”

Roan breathed heavily, but did not speak. Flower put her arm across his shoulders.

“We had to do it to you, boy, we
had
to—you’ll see why,” said Granny, her old face pinched with worry and tenderness. “I’m coming to that part of it. Like I said, you don’t break up a culture just all at once, boom. I wanted to change it, not wreck it. Stasis is the end product of a lot of history. Human beings had clobbered themselves up so much for so long, they developed what you might call a racial phobia against insecurity. When they finally got the chance—the transplat—they locked themselves up tight with it. That isn’t what the transplat was for, originally. It was supposed to disperse humanity over the globe again, after centuries of huddling.
Hah!

“About the time they started deep conditioning in the crèches, walling each defenseless generation off from new thoughts, new places, new ways of life, a few of us started to fear for humanity. Stasis was the first human culture to try to make new ideas impossible. I think it might have been humanity’s first eternal culture. I really do. But I think it would also have been humanity’s worst one.

“So along came Roan—the first of the deep-conditioned transplat executives, incapable of believing the service could be improved. There were—are—plenty more in other industries and we’re going after ’em now, but transplat is the keystone. Roan, believe it or not,
you were a menace. You had to be stopped. We couldn’t have you heading the firm without introducing the new machine, yet if it weren’t introduced in your generation, it never would be.

“Your father is the last weak link, the last with the kind of imperfect conditioning that would let him even consider an innovation—remember your suggestion for eliminating freight operators? Only he would be unconditioned just enough to put our new machine into Development before realizing that, once in use, every cubicle in the whole human structure will suddenly be open to the sky. And it’s all right—he can be trusted with it, because his ‘decency’ won’t let him abuse privacy.
We’ll
take care of that side of it!”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that about him,” said Roan miserably.

“I’m sorry, boy. Does it do any good to tell you that subservience and blind respect for your father are conditioned, too? I wish I could help you—you’ll have that particular sore toe tramped on all your life. Anyway, enter Roan, just when we’ve perfected the new machine. There would have been no problem if we could have broken your conditioning against it, but the only alternatives seemed to be—either you’d see the machine operate and think you had lost your sanity, or you’d use your position in the firm to eliminate all trace of it.”

He objected, “But you were wrong both ways.”

“That’s because we discovered that the conditioning against any new transplat was against any new
machine
—any new
device
,” Granny replied. “They’d never thought of matter transmission by a method
which was in no way a device!

“Can you see now why your father was so upset when he was faced with you and your pilot model? One of the props of his decent little universe was that the conditioning would stick—that of all people on Earth, you’d be the last to even think of a new machine, let alone build one. And when at last you came out with that gobbledegook about psychic power, he recognized the rationalization for what it was and felt safe again. Stasis was secure.

“I don’t mind telling you that you made us jump the gun a bit. Our initial plan was to recruit carefully, just the way we did you.
Dreams—unexpected and high-powered appeals to everything humanity has that Stasis is crushing. Then when there were enough of us wilderness people, maybe the gates would open. But ultimately we’d win—we have all nature and God Himself on our side.

“But you came along—what a candidate! You responded right down the line—so much that, if we’d given you your head, you’d have dynamited Stasis and probably yourself and us along with it! And you took to that psi idea the way you took to the steak we planted in your nutrient that day, testing for food preference before the dream sequence. All of a sudden, you wanted to plant our machine spang in the middle of Stasis! It was chancy, but—well, you’ve seen what happened.”

“Can I talk now?” Roan asked uncomfortably.

“Sure, boy.”

“I’m not going to argue with you about the new machine—how it works, I mean. All you’ve done is given Stasis a more efficient machine. You can interfere with the new network, but you could do that anyway with the one you already had. So what’s the big advantage?”

Granny chuckled. From a side pocket, she dug a white object and tossed it across the table. It left a powdery spoor as it rolled. “Know what that is?”

“Chalk?” asked Val.

“No, it isn’t,” Roan said. “It’s Lunar pumice. I’ve seen a lot of that stuff.”

“Well, you’ll have to take my word for it,” said Granny, “though I’ll demonstrate any time you say—but I got that at 1430 this very afternoon—off the Moon, using only the machine you saw in the lab.”

“Off the
Moon!
”

“Yup. That’s the advantage of the new machine. The transplat operates inside a spherical gravitic field, canceling matter at certain points and recreating it at others—a closed system. But the new machine operates on para-gravitic lines—straight lines of sub-spatial force which stretch from every mass in the Universe to every other. Mass canceled at one point on the line recurs at another point.
Like the transplat, the new machine takes no time to cross any distance, because it doesn’t actually cover distance.

“The range seems to be infinite—there’s a limitation on range-finding, but it’s a matter only of the distance between the two parts of the machine. I got the Moon easily with a forty-mile baseline. Put me a robot on the Moon and I can reach Mars. Set up a baseline between here and Mars and I can spit on Alpha Centauri. In other words, an open system.”

They were silent as Roan raised his eyes and, for a dazzling moment, visualized the stars supporting a blazing network of lines stretching from each planet, each star, to all the others—a net that pulsed with the presence of a humanity unthinkably vast.

Prester murmured, “Anybody want to buy a good spaceship?”

“Why did you do it?” whispered Val, ever so softly, as if she were in a cathedral.

“You mean why couldn’t I mind my own business and let the world happily dry up and blow away?” Granny chuckled. “I guess because I’ve always been too busy to sit still. No, I take that back. Say I did it because of my conscience.”

“Conscience?”

“It was Granny who built the first transplat,” Flower explained.

“And
you
were telling her what could and couldn’t be done, Roan!” gasped Val.

“I still say—” he objected in irritation, and then he began to laugh. “I once took a politeness-present to Granny. Knitting. Something for the old folk to do while they watch the sun sink.”

They all laughed and Flower said, “Granny won’t knit.”

“Not for a while yet,” Granny said, and grinned up at the sky.

U
P HERE IN THE SALT MINE
I’ve got a log jam to break.

And that about expresses the whole thing. I mix pigments like I mix metaphors; so why not? Who’s a writer?

Trouble is, maybe I’m not a painter. I was a painter, I will be a painter, but I’m not a painter just now. “Jam every other day,” as Alice was told in Wonderland, as through a glass darkly; “Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today.” I know what I’ll do, I’ll paint for calendars; isn’t this the ’54 boom for the 44 bust? I’ll skip the art and do handsprings eternal on the human breast.

So quickly: grab the brush, sling the oils;
en garde!
Easel; you’re nothing but a square white window to
me;
I’ll throw a wad of paint through you so’s we can take a good long look inside. I’ll start just
here
with the magenta, or maybe over
here
, and—

And nothing.

So down I go on the chair, I look at the canvas, it looks back at me, and we’re right where we started. Didn’t start.

Up here in the salt mine, as I began to say, I’ve got a log jam to break. The salt mine is my studio, studio being a name for a furnished room with a palette in it. The log jam is in my head. Why is it I can’t work just because my brains are tied in a knot? “Giles,” the maestro, the old horse’s tail of a maestro used to say to me, “Giles, don’t paint with your brains. Paint with your glands,” he used to say, “your blood. Sweat is a pigment. Dip your brush in—”

Shucks, Maestro! Get me a job in a sign shop. I’ll sell everything else. Ad in the paper: for sale cheap, one set sable-tipped vesicles. One heart: ventricle, sinister; auricle, Delphic. Nine yards plumbing with hot and cold running commentaries, and a bucket of used carmine, suitable for a road-company Bizet-body.

Was a painter, will be a painter, ain’t a painter. Make a song of
that, Giles, and you can die crazy yelling it like Ravel chanting the Bolero. Ravel, unravel. Giles’s last chants.

Ain’t a painta, ain’t a painta, ain’t a painta
pow!
Ain’t a painta, ain’t a painta, ain’t a painta
now!

You better shut up, Giles, you’re going to have another one of those dreams.

Well, I’ll have it anyway, won’t I?… the dreams, that’s what’s the matter with me. My glands I got, but my brains, they keep running off with me, glands and all. No not running off; more like a jail. I used to be a something, but I’m locked up in my own brains till I’m a nothing. All I have to do is figure a way out.

Or maybe somebody’ll come and let me out. Boy, what I wouldn’t do for somebody who’d come let me out. Anything. The way I see it, the other guy, the one in the dream, he’s locked up too. I should figure a way out for him. So maybe he’ll get on the ball and figure a way out for me. He was a knight in shining armor, he will be a knight in shining armor, but he ain’t nothing but a nothing now. There shall be no knight. He got a prison turns night into eternal afternoon, with dancing girls yet.

I should get him out of a spot like that? What’s the matter with a castle on a mountain with dancing girls?

On the other hand a knight who was a knight and who wants to be a knight is just a nothing, for all his dancing girls, if you lock him up in a magic castle on a magic mountain. I wonder if
his
brains are working str—

—aight because mine are sore churned.
Aiee!
And here the echoes roll about amongst the vaults and groinings of this enchanted place. No sword have I, no shield, no horse, nor amulet. He has at least the things he daubs with, ’prisoned with him. And yet if he would paint, and cannot, is he not disarmed? Ay, ay … 
aiee!
we twain are bound, and each of us is enchanted; bound together, too, in some strange way, and bound nowhere. And whose the hardest lot? He has a brush; I have no sword, and so it seems his prisoning is less. Yet I may call my jailer by a name, and see a face, and know the hands which hold the iron key. But he, the ’prisoned painter, languishes
inside himself, his scalp his fetters and his skull his cell. And who’s to name his turnkey?