Killing Time (7 page)

I pushed my plate aside and
leaned forward. "You referred to his work earlier as a 'sin'—why?"

"Come now, Doctor,"
Tressalian answered, toying with a slender silver knife. "I think you know
exactly why. And what's more, I suspect that you agree with the
assessment."

"I may share some of your
opinions," I said, weighing the statement. "But I also may have
arrived at them through entirely different reasoning."

He smiled again. "Oh, I
doubt that. But let's investigate, shall we?" He struggled to his feet,
having eaten only half his food, and began to slowly circle the table.
"Yes, Doctor, my father and his colleagues made certain that most of the
world was given access to the modern Internet. To what was marketed—quite
seductively and, of course, successfully—as 'unrestricted information.' And in
an era when capitalism and global free trade had triumphed and were running
rampant, such men had little trouble further promoting the belief that by
logging on to that Internet, one was tapping in to a vast system of freedom,
truth—and power. The mass of mankind withdrew to its terminals and clicked
away, and those afflicted with philosophical scruples allowed themselves to be
cajoled into believing that they were promoting the democratic cause of a free
exchange not only of goods and information but of ideas as well. Convinced, in
other words, that they were changing the world, and for the better."

His face turned toward the ocean
again, and his manner softened once more. "Yet in the meantime, inexplicably
but undeniably, the water and the air grew dirtier than they had ever been. New
pandemics appeared, with no medicines to treat them. Poverty, anarchy, and
conflict ravaged more and more parts of the world." He sighed once, his
brow arching. "And the fish—disappeared ..." When he turned to me
again, his face radiated a paradoxical and disquieting calm. "How did it
happen, Dr. Wolfe? How, in an age when the free flow of information and trade
was supposedly creating a benevolent global order, did all this happen?"

Just then the shipwide address
system issued another gently throbbing alarm, at which Colonel Slayton
announced that there was to be another "system transfer" in two
minutes. "We're heading into the stratosphere for a few hours, Dr.
Wolfe," Tressalian said. "How would you feel about coffee and dessert
at seventy thousand feet?"

I hadn't noticed, but during
dinner the ship had inclined its angle of progress, and in just a few seconds
the rippling image of the nearly full moon became visible through the surface
of the ocean. Maintaining its speed, the vessel rushed up out of the water and
into the open air, its superconductive electromagnetic generators propelling it
into the heavens at a fantastic rate that did not even rattle the china on the
table.

Colonel Slayton moved quietly
toward the stairs and headed up to the control level with calm purpose.
"There's no need to contact the island, Colonel," Tressalian called
after him. "I've already double-checked the apparatus. We're set for
dawn."

"Sorry, Malcolm,"
Slayton answered, continuing his climb. "The military penchant for
redundancy dies hard."

Tressalian laughed quietly in my
direction. "The Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan," he explained,
"have refused to heed our warnings about the American strike, so we'll
have to force them to leave. They've got their women and children down in those
tunnels with them, and that's not blood I particularly want on my hands."

"But how can
you force
them
to go?" I asked.

"Well—I
could
tell
you, Doctor," Tressalian said as he began to drag his body away from the
transparent hull. "But I think it'll be far more effective if you
observe."

Once we'd leveled off in the
thin, cold stratospheric air, Tressalian led a slow procession up to the
observation dome atop the nose of the ship. As we stopped by the guidance
center on the middle level to pick up his wheelchair, I saw and heard the
consoles of monitors blinking and humming under Colonel Slayton's direction,
and noted that my earlier amazement at the fantastic advances embodied in the
ship was beginning to fade. I found myself marveling at how quickly the human
mind can accept and become adjusted to technological leaps—although of course,
Tarbell's vodka and Larissa's continued and ever-more-pointed physical
overtures were going a long way, on this particular night, toward assisting my
own acclimation. But ultimately it was a testament to the seductive power of
technology, a power that my host—who refused to explain any further about the
Afghanistan business until we got there—expounded on as he sat in his
wheelchair in the observation dome:

"While the average citizen,
Doctor, was engaged in this mass love affair with information technology—and
while the companies that produced that technology happily painted themselves as
the democratizing agents of a new order—real economic and informational power,
far from being decentralized, became concentrated in an ever-decreasing number
of megacorporations, companies that determined not only what information was purveyed
but which technologies were developed to receive and monitor it. And while in
your own country there was at least a struggle early on for control over this
mightiest and most pervasive public influence in history, the crash of '07 put
an end to the fight. In a collapsing world, Washington had no one to turn to
for help except my father and his ilk. And they offered it, to be sure—but only
for a price."

"To put it simply,"
Colonel Slayton said as he rejoined us from the control level, "they
purchased
the government."

Tressalian smiled at him, then
turned back to me. "The colonel has a gift for brevity that is sometimes
mistaken for detachment. But remember that no one experienced the practical
effects of what we're talking about more than the soldiers of the Taiwan
campaign, who— as you yourself have pointed out, Doctor—unknowingly sacrificed
themselves for a bigger share of the Chinese market. Yes, the information
technocrats, my father among them, purchased the government, and after that
all legislative initiatives and material resources were diverted from
regulatory programs, from environmental and medical research, from education
and foreign aid, even from weapons development—diverted from
everything,
that
is, save the opening of new markets and the expansion of old ones."

"All right," I agreed,
Larissa's ever-closer presence making me feel steadily more at ease. "I'll
admit I agree with you, but so what? You've said yourself that this sort of
thing has happened before in human history."

"Non,
Gideon,"
Julien Fouché said as he wrapped one meaty hand around a small espresso cup.
"That is most distinctly
not what
Malcolm has said. The beginning
of the story may have precedents, but this last chapter? There has never been
anything like it. The floodgates were thrown open, and human society, already
saturated with information, began to
drown
in it. Tell me—you are
familiar, I suppose, with the concept of the 'threshold moment'? When a process
increases so drastically in rate and severity—"

"That a quantitative change
actually becomes a qualitative one," I finished for him. "Yes,
Professor, I know."

"Well, then," Fouché
went on, "let us put it to you that world civilization has itself reached
just such a moment."

I sat back for a moment. Extreme
as his words might have sounded, they could not be dismissed, given their
source. "You're saying," I eventually answered, "that the growth
of these latest technologies has been so quantitatively different from other
informational developments—from, say, the invention of the printing press—that
the effect has been a qualitative shift in the nature of society itself?"

"Précisément,"
Fouché
answered with a nod. "But don't look so amazed, Doctor. The people behind
these technologies have themselves been claiming for years that they were
bringing about enormous changes. It is simply that we who are assembled here
view those changes as"—he took a sip of espresso as he struggled to find a
word—
"ominous. "

Then it was Leon Tarbell's turn:
"The 'information age' has not created any free exchange of knowledge,
Gideon. All we have is a free exchange of whatever the sexless custodians of
information technology consider acceptable."

"And the very nature of that
technology means that there
is
no real knowledge anymore," Eli
Kuperman piled on, "because what those custodians
do
allow to slip
through their delivery systems is utterly unregulated and unverifiable.
Mistaken facts—or, worse yet, deceptions on a simple or a grand scale, supported
by doctored evidence and digitally manipulated images—become commonly accepted
wisdom before there's even been a chance to determine the validity of their
bases."

"And remember," Jonah
Kuperman added, "that we've now raised not one but
several
generations
of children who have been exposed
only
to that kind of questionable
data—"

"Whoa, whoa, slow
down!" I finally called out, holding up my hands. During the brief respite
that followed, I let out a deep, troubled breath. "This is starting to
sound like some kind of runaway conspiracy theory—technoparanoia of the worst
kind. What in the world makes you think that people can pull off deceptions on
a level that will change the fundamental underpinnings of entire societies, for
God's sake?"

Everyone around me suddenly grew
strangely silent; then, one by one, they turned to Tressalian, who was staring
at his fingertips as he slowly bounced them together. After a few seconds he
looked up at me, the smile on his face more charming and yet more devious than
it had been at any point in the evening. "We know, Doctor," he said
quietly, "because we've done it."

"
You?
"

Tressalian nodded. "Quite a
few times, actually. And the best, I dare say, is yet to come—if you'll help
us."

"But—" I tried to grasp
it. "But I mean—I thought you were
against
all that."

"Oh, make no mistake, we
are." Tressalian struggled to turn his chair and then rolled to the
forwardmost area of the dome, real disgust and even anger coming into his
voice. "Human society is diseased, Doctor—this fatuous, trivial,
information-plagued society. And our work?" He stared at the eerie,
half-lit sky outside, growing calmer. "With luck, our work will be the
antibiotic that spurs society to fight the infection." A nagging doubt
seemed to tighten his features. "Assuming, of course, that we don't kill
the patient ..."

I was about to ask for
clarification of this apparently unbalanced statement when the ship's alert
system suddenly sounded again. Slay-ton informed us that we were descending to
"cruising altitude," an innocuous expression that I soon learned had
to do not with any kind of pleasure traveling but with flying some hundred feet
above the landscape as we had done when I'd first boarded the ship in Florida.
Everyone stood, the general level of excitement growing, and gathered around
Tressalian; and while I tried to follow as best I could, my movements were
slowed by the mental need to wrestle with everything I'd just heard. Could they
be serious, these people? Could they really mean that they believed it was
possible to manipulate the dissemination of important information to the
public as a way of alerting that same public to just how easy—and therefore
dangerous—such manipulation had, in our time, become? It was absurd,
impossible—

And then, with a shudder that had
nothing to do with Larissa's close presence, I remembered the scenes of
President Forrester's assassination on the disc that Max and I had been given.
For a year the world had accepted as true a version of those momentous events
that was not even remotely factual. And now the strongest power in the world
was about to engage in a military strike that was based on that same
misapprehension—a misapprehension manufactured by Tressalian and his team, who
were currently on their way to the scene of that strike to—what? Observe?
Participate, with their amazing ship? Or manipulate the proceedings with still
more manufactured information? Almost afraid to know the answers, I silently
turned to watch the darkness ahead of us with the others.

Even through my renewed
bewilderment, I realized that the ship had once more shifted altitude
dramatically without so much as a bump or a perceptible change in cabin
pressure. We were flying low over the ocean again, although I was shocked to
learn that
this
ocean was the Arabian Sea, which meant that our
high-altitude speed had been considerably in excess of anything achieved by the
most advanced supersonic airplanes currently in use. As I watched the moonlit
waters speed by under us, Larissa turned to murmur into my ear:

"Not that I don't agree with
everything the others have been saying, Doctor—I assure you I do—but try to
put it aside for a moment and experience this ride. Can any philosophical
discussion really make your blood race like this ship? I doubt it. So when you
think about joining us, think about this, too—" I turned to face her.
"You and I could travel to literally every corner of the world, just the
way we are now—with no restrictions and no laws but our own. Are you
game?"

I looked back outside.
"Jesus—I'd like to say that I am," I told her uncertainly. "But
it's all so—" I tried to get a grip. "Impulsiveness has never been
the most comfortable mode of behavior for me."

She let me have the coy smile.
"I know."

"That doesn't bother
you?"

She made a judicious little
humming sound. "Not
entirely.
It's part of the reason we wanted
you, after all." She put a hand lightly to my cheek. "Part of the
reason ..."