Universe 11 - [Anthology] Read online

  Still, Greta is supposed to be really good. We only had it for the last, twenty-fifth taping; Johannsen must have been running out of money, to come to us at all. Garber burst into my office, all excited, because he heard that someone on the Times might review it.

  “What do you think, Mary? Jameson? Maybe Jameson might review it? Jameson would do it a lot of good. I have a feeling about this one, Mary!”

  “Jameson isn’t going to review it.”

  He glared at me from under lowered eyebrows. They’re nearly white now, and in his rumpled jumpsuit, Garber looks like a seedy Santa Claus reduced to dealing in hot toys. God, I love him. If I ever forgive that bitch Mummy-sweet at all, it will be because she somehow tangled Garber in her long string of husbands.

  “He might review it!”

  “He won’t. You know that. Think. It’s a book for children.”

  “Young adults!”

  “All right, young adults. But he’s not going to review it in the Times. We’ll probably do all right on it financially— although that was a pretty selective c-aud index Johannsen showed me. At least we shouldn’t lose money on it. Settle for that.”

  “You haven’t even read it!”

  I hadn’t, although I’d had the manuscript for nearly a month. Press of work, busy time of year, I just hadn’t had the time. Oh, hell, yes I’d had. That wasn’t the reason.

  “I know I haven’t read it. Maybe it’s terrific. Maybe it’s an instant classic. Maybe it’s Hamlet for the acne set. But Jameson won’t review it. Let it go, Garber.”

  “I think you’re wrong.”

  I sighed. Garber was a walking lesson on how to achieve business failure: enthusiasm without judgment. That we had gotten even this far was due only to the hefty alimony Garber had pried out of Mummy-sweet, and that he had gotten so much alimony in a retroactive settlement was due only to the lawyer I’d hired for him. She isn’t ever going to forgive me, either.

  “You’re wrong, Mary. This time I know it.”

  “Garber, if you were a critic, and in the exact same week publishers brought out the original appearances of Hamlet, Don Quixote, Anna Karenina, Song of Myself, and The Little Engine that Could, what would you not review?”

  “Greta isn’t ...”

  “I have to go. McGratty’s waiting for me in the studio.”

  “To compare it to The Little.. . .”

  “Garber, he’s waiting with forty-seven kids. I have to go.” I put my arms around him and kissed him on the top of his head. It was going bald; in another year he would have a tonsure. I found that I liked the idea. When I was eleven years old, Garber found out from the upstairs maid that I vomited uncontrollably after each visit from Mummy-sweet, and he took me himself to boarding school, holding my hand on the train and talking in a low, confidential voice about baseball, and caterpillars, and the marvelous way really high-quality peppermints melted first around the edges of one’s mouth.

  “Mary,” he said, his arms still around me, “do me a favor?”

  “Of course.”

  “Promise?”

  “Of course, Garber. Anything. You know that. Just ask.”

  “When you’re home tonight, read Greta.”

  “Oh, Garber, I’m really sorry but tonight I have to . . .”

  “No. You don’t.”

  I didn’t. He tilted back his head and looked at me steadily out of blue eyes that look a little more sunken every month. Five years more, the doctors say Even virotherapy doesn’t arrest it forever, any of it . . . not the cancer, and not the pain. It had been Garber who’d brought me my first copy of Alice in Wonderland.”

  “Read it, Mary.”

  My daughter, Susan, calls Garber “Grandpa.” I’ve never let her meet a single other one of her relations. Or even told her about them. When that fool of a teacher Susan is so stuck on gave them the assignment to trace their family trees, I lied and gave her Garber’s.

  “I’ll read it, Garber.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise. But, look, McGratty’s waiting.”

  He unwrapped his arms and winked. “Have fun!” His point won, Jameson and the nonexistent review forgotten, equanimity restored. Garber is a big child. I hurried out of the office; he stayed to study the cover painting for a preschool picture book on space, smiling at the teddy bear in the cockpit and whistling to himself. Both hands rubbed his plump belly: a right jolly old elf. And now I was committed to reading Greta.

  Hell.

  ~ * ~

  McGratty had lined the kids up against the studio wall, three deep, well away from the computer and the aud-units. He was talking to them in that charming drawl that convinced each and every little heart that she was an utterly fascinating almost-woman, and the whole gaggle of ten- and eleven-year olds was giggling and twitching and popping moonies. The popping punctuated languishing sidelong glances at McGratty that ended in even louder explosions of moonies. He gestured with one hand, and forty-seven pairs of eyes followed the hand’s arc through the air. Under all this attention, McGratty expanded, the girls expanded. The studio threatened to explode outward from all the hot air.

  “All right, kids, line up over here. Tallest first. Let’s go!”

  They stared at me like poison. A few scowled.

  “Come on, let’s get started here. You, with the red pigtails . . . come here, honey, and we’ll get you strapped into a unit.”

  She came forward slowly, standing in front of me with scrawny feet planted apart, arms akimbo.

  “Not pigtails.”

  “What?”

  “They’re not pigtails. They’re called ‘fashion braids.’ That’s what they’re called.”

  I couldn’t suppress my smile in time. “Sorry. ‘Fashion braids.’”

  She looked me up and down. “And I’m not ‘honey.’”

  My smile vanished. There’s always one. Behind the pigtailed redhead, someone tittered.

  “My name is Nellie Kay Armbruster, not ‘honey’!” I caught the quaver in her voice under the skinny bravado, but it only increased my irritation. Ms. Nellie Kay Armbruster didn’t know what it meant to have something for her voice to quaver over. Looking at her bleakly, I saw another eleven-year-old, howling and thrashing in a room with walls padded in a fashionable pale yellow. Mummy-sweet had excellent taste, don’t you know.

  “All right, then, Ms. Armbruster, if you’ll just consent to step this way ...” The child flushed, and I knew I’d missed it again, the tone of companionable bantering that was supposed to make it all right. Girls this age . . . McGratty was looking at me with narrowed eyes. He didn’t want me upsetting his c-aud, and I didn’t blame him. Well, if he were good enough, it wouldn’t matter.

  I strapped Nellie Kay Armbruster into her unit. She winced a little when I fitted on the scalp wires and then clamped her head immobile, but she didn’t even deign to notice when I pricked the needle into her arm or adjusted the screen the right distance from her pupils. Our units are about five years old, and we’ve missed out on some of the new, subtle indices, but those are more useful for adult c-auds anyway. We only do children and young adults, so only the frontal lobe cortex and amino acid indices really count, although we monitor the rest of the basic stuff, too: pupil dilation, thoracic respiration, blood flow, galvanic skin response.

  When all the kids had been strapped in—the others wouldn’t look directly at me, either—I took my place at the computer and McGratty, at the author’s console, began typing.

  SUDDENLY. THAT WAS HOW THE WILD PALOMINO CAME BACK INTO CARIANNA’S LIFE, LEAPING OVER THE WHITE PICKET FENCE INTO HER AUNT’S VEGETABLE GARDEN, TOSSING HIS MAGNIFICENT WHITE MANE. HE MUST HAVE COME FROM THE DESERT, CARIANNA THOUGHT IN CONFUSION—BUT SHE DIDN’T CARE WHERE HE HAD COME FROM; SHE WAS TRANSFIXED WITH DELIGHT, JUST WATCHING HIM.

  Rapid, low-voltage, irregular waves appeared on my synthesis screen: McGratty’s narrative hook had engaged their attention. I scanned the individuals. Only two showed latencies. One was so uninvolve
d she was practically in alpha waves, and I pressed for an IQ: 72. McGratty wasn’t aiming at that audience; how the hell had her card slipped in? I punched the keys that canceled her responses from the synthesis, though I kept her individuals.

  The word-by-word looked good, except for a slight flag on “transfixed.” McGratty might consider changing it; it was possible some of them didn’t know what it meant. High response to the name “Carianna.” A few subliminal-stimulus lights even flickered, and I wondered yet again why little girls always went for such flashy names. The emotional-involvement index wasn’t pronounced, but that didn’t matter much at the beginning. The attention patterns were the important thing.

  THE PALOMINO SNORTED, THEN ARCHED HIS LONG NECK FORWARD TO PULL AT AUNT MAUD’S CARROT TOPS. SUNLIGHT POURED OVER HIS GOLDEN COAT. THEN, ALL AT ONCE, CARIANNA SAW THE NOTCH ON THE HORSE’S EAR. “ROCKET,” SHE WHISPERED, STUNNED. “IT’S ROCKET!”

  The attention curves were still rising, with a slight dip at the sentence about the sunlight. But that’s inevitable with description, even when you keep it short. The individuals showed the beginning of emotional involvement in four girls. I checked the running evals to see if there was a conscious critical reaction to that awkward “all at once, Carianna saw” (how else would she see except all at once?) but the evals were all flat. Preadolescent girls are not a very critical audience. I’ve never monitored an adult-level composing session, although I’ve seen tapes with myself as subject. Even interpreting those made me dizzy. How complex are your reactions when you read Macbeth?

  SLOWLY, TRYING NOT TO STARTLE THE BEAUTIFUL PALOMINO, CARIANNA MOVED SIDEWAYS TOWARD THE FENCE, WHERE HER LARIAT HUNG. SHE STILL COULDN’T BELIEVE IT WAS ROCKET. SHE HAD BEEN SO SURE HE WAS LOST TO HER FOREVER, THAT TERRIBLE DAY TWO YEARS AGO WHEN HE TOOK TO THE DESERT. TWO STEPS MORE, ONE MORE, AND HER FINGERS CLOSED ON THE LARIAT.

  I would bet my job that not one of these New York kids has ever seen a lariat, except on video. Nor a desert, nor a wild horse, nor a carrot still in the ground!—probably not even a goddam picket fence. And as a work of art, McGratty’s story was . . . straight from the horse. But engagement derives from subjective significance, the unconscious effect of personal, social, and subliminal factors. It looked like McGratty was in.

  CARIANNA RAISED THE LARIAT, AS UNCLE BOB HAD TAUGHT HER. ROCKET LOOKED UP, HIS NOSTRILS FLARING, OUTLINED BY THE BLAZING SUN, HE WAS SO BEAUTIFUL THAT CARIANNA FELT HER THROAT TIGHTEN. BUT HER HAND WAS STEADY AS SHE TWIRLED THE ROPE AND SENT IT FLYING TOWARD THE PALOMINO’S NECK. ROCKET REARED AND PLUNGED, TEARING UP THE CARROTS. CARIANNA CRIED OUT, DESPITE HERSELF. HAD SHE MISSED? OR DID SHE—COULD SHE—HAVE ROCKET AGAIN FOR HERSELF?

  The synthesis of evoked potentials was so thick it looked like a Rorschach smear. Good readings on the glutanic and aspartic acids that go with prolonged attentiveness, nice curves on emotional engagement and subliminal stimuli, even the start of a negative cortical variation, and it was early for that. I glanced at the evals: flat. But, then, McGratty’s preselects had included no IQ’s over sigma one. He knew his limits. Within those limits, it looked promising, unless he stumbled badly later in the story, and even if he did, we could probably fix it. Three or four more c-auds, and the story would evoke exactly the response patterns that sold the best. Another triumph for American fiction.

  No, that wasn’t fair. After all, Nellie Kay Armbruster had as much right to have her cortical attention engaged by whatever happened to engage it as did the readers of Shakespeare or Joyce. And McGratty’s opus might even make us a little money, while the preselects for something like Greta were always incredibly restricted: bright, intense “young adults” with a lit-passion of 11 or better.

  I didn’t want to read Greta.

  Rocket plunged over the edge of a convenient mesa, and one of the girls gasped loudly. Quickly I checked the distraction-wave index: nothing. The others were so absorbed they hadn’t heard her.

  McGratty was in.

  ~ * ~

  “Look at this, Mary,” Garber said. The printouts from McGratty’s c-aud spread over his desk, looping in tangled coils and trailing gracefully to the floor. A coffee mug sat on top, spreading a leisurely brown stain over an aspartic acid curve. Garber ignored all of it, squinting through his sunken blue eyes at a piece of green paper.

  “Look at what?” I said, removing the coffee mug.

  “That’s the third one this week. I think they’re growing.”

  He handed me the paper. It was a leaflet printed in blurry block letters on cheap poison-green newsprint.

  THE UNSUSPECTED DANGER

  What is the most dangerous enemy presently in the United States? What force poses the most long-term threat to you, your children, and their children? Do YOU know?

  It’s not what you may think! This is a hidden danger, a danger to the MIND. It’s the so-called “composing-audience” writing of the books you read, the books your children read, and YES! even the textbooks they use in their schools! Do you want your children guided by teachings and so-called “art” composed by machines? Haven’t we lost enough of our humanity to the computer? Aren’t enough of our decisions already removed from our own human hands to cold and inhuman machines? How brainwashed and helpless do YOU want to be before the all-powerful computer?

  YOU CAN HELP! Just detach and return the attached coupon with a 50¢ donation to help the crusade against dehumanization and brainwashing!

  ………………………………………………………………………………………………………

  □ YES! I want to cry out against control of my mind by a machine! Enlist me as a crusader! 50¢ donation enclosed.

  □ Send me more information on computer control of school textbooks!

  I laughed. “It’s nothing but a con for suckers, Garber.”

  “With what fifty cents buys now? I doubt they’re even covering their printing costs.”

  “A bunch of splitbrains, then.”

  “Maybe.” He drummed his fingers on McGratty’s printout, a muffled noise like the falling of fat, cushiony rocks. A loop of the printout creased in erratic folds. “But there’s a lot of them out there, then. Practically every time I leave the building I get one of these shoved at me.”

  “Garber, why are you even concerned? Of course there’s a lot of splitbrains out there. There’s supposed to be a lot of them; the tourists wouldn’t feel they were getting their money’s worth out of New York if it weren’t swarming with splitbrains. And you know what this garbage is as well as I do—it’s just the inevitable fussing about any move to automation. People fussed when babies were conceived in tubes. People fussed when electric looms wrecked handweaving. People even fussed when eating with forks replaced fingers, for chrissake—did you know that?” Garber didn’t answer. One of his most endearing traits is his acceptance of other people’s melodrama. Specifically mine.

  “It’s true. Forks. They yelled ‘lifeless’ and ‘inhuman’ and ‘foul’ until, after a while, they saw that it was just another tool, and the yelling died down and everybody went home. This is just the same. Another tool. So why are you upset?”

  “I don’t know.” He gave me a little, indulgent half smile for my performance, but kept on drumming his fingers. I slid McGratty’s now-wrinkled printout from under them and began rolling it up.

  “Mary, I talked to Jameson today.”

  “He’s not going to review Greta?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I expected that.”

  “He sounded . . . strange. Evasive. Something had upset him. A lot.”

  I shrugged and kept on rolling. “So he’s being sued for libel. Or divorce. Or bankruptcy.”

  “No, it didn’t . . . feel like anything personal. Just something big.”

  I stopped rolling and looked at Garber. He may have no business judgment whatever, but he can have a shrewdness, an intuition, about people that I’ve learned to think twice about. Even if it did fail him spectacularly in the case of M
ummy-sweet.

  “What sort of a something big?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t think it’s connected with that nonsense?” I nodded toward the poison-green leaflet.

  Garber frowned, Santa Clause with a wayward reindeer. “No. Not directly, anyway. But something’s up, somewhere. And of all the big-league critics, Jameson’s been the one singing loudest hosannas for c-auds.”

  This wasn’t strictly accurate, but I allowed Garber his hyperbole, although the picture of a wizened little Times literary critic as a hosanna-singing archangel was pretty funny. “New Century renaissance”—Jameson had been the first to come up with the term, but now they all used it, all sounded equally enthusiastic hosannas. And why not? Critics may distrust authors, but they love and delight in truly good writing. “Renaissance” is even too pale a word for the works that have come out of the last twenty years, since c-auds. To know for sure when your vision as a writer has gone beyond the peculiarities of the singular. “I.” To be able to hammer at that vision until it reaches and moves readers at the subliminal, universal level of involuntary body responses, not merely the tangled and ego-guarded one of verbalized “criticism.” To move that hammering from a lonely, locked-room struggle to a shared struggle, a cooperative act between creator and a selected, involved audience who also became creators, participatory gods. Is it any wonder that the New Century Renaissance has given us The Golden Grasses, Cranston’s Mountain, All the Winning Numbers, A Sheep of Mantua? Critics like Jameson don’t care if Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays or c-aud “wrote” The Golden Grasses. The play’s the thing. So what was wrong?