The Mind Like A Strange Balloon | Page 7

orgasms. Can I
tell you that? Do you think I'm a monster?"

"No," I said. "No."
"Sometimes I do. But you have to understand, I have no choice, no
choice at all."
She reached to the console beside us, took the two cables lying there,
and snapped them to her neck. She dropped her glasses to the floor, and
in that first instant I could see her eyes come to life--quick contraction
of the irises, sudden clutch of muscles as they tried to focus--before she
shut her eyes against the harsh light. "Oh, oh God," she said, and
moved beneath me, hips slapping harshly, bucking uncontrolled. I held
to her, in her. She thrust my head back, nails again sunk into the base of
my brain, and opened her eyes. Her gaze was clear and focused straight
ahead.
Before we left her office she showed me what Aleph was doing. On
one data window, the lie--an orderly flow of decisions, the careful,
complex structures I had seen in holographic splendor in the Ops
Room--the three-dimensional mandalas upon which the KEs meditated.
On another window, the actuality--stupid subroutines forced to
masquerade as IA systems, queues building until Aleph could return to
them; meanwhile, the greater part of the system was engaged in
processing Diana's sight.
The longer this went on, the more difficult it was for Aleph to
handle--the end result was the slowdown.
Sitting in her quarters, we drank hot tea, something that smelled of
jasmine and spice. "It's quite a juggling act," I said. "But I don't know
how long Aleph can keep it up. Besides, what does that matter? Take
this to Toshi and Alice, to the ICOG Board. You shouldn't be hiding
this. Tell them it needs to be pursued in the right way--not with you
working in isolation, stealing their system, but with all the resources
you want. They'll have to buy it."
"Will they?"
"Don't you think they'll have to? They'll see the importance."

"Why? What's in it for Siemens or Bechtel or Nippon Electric? Think
about it, Jerry. I've jeopardized all their projects, the orbital energy grid,
maybe ICOG itself. God knows what I've done to Aleph."
She may have been right. Epochal discovery is a fine thing, especially
in retrospect and when you don't have to pay for it. But right now
ICOG was playing animal trainer to a bunch of mean and various
beasts, and they had to be fed.
If she told them, would they allow her to pursue her research, or would
they just fire her? Who, if anyone, would be willing to pay the tab on a
new Aleph system? And would they welcome her as director of the
new project? And there was Aleph itself. What did it, in whatever
peculiar fashion, want? Imponderables.
But for the present she was riding the storm, going . . . I don't know
where . . . her own will and intelligence guiding, small enough comfort
in a large gale, but perhaps enough to steer by, enough to work the
force of the dense-vectored wind.
From that point on I stayed away from Biops/I-Sight. "Nothing there," I
told Alice and Toshi. "I don't think there's anything happening with the
subsystems. If you want, I'll help you work with the logistics
programs." Laying a trail away.
But after walking like automatons through the empty working days,
Diana and I would meet in her rooms to sail the currents of our own
storm. There was no steerage there, just a careening trip across the
landscape that hung far below.
Finally I could avoid it no longer I called a meeting with Toshi and
Alice. We used a small, plain conference room that featured a viewport
on one side. Close in, a tug glided by, a snarl of crates, pallets, and rude
assemblages, the pilot's head clearly visible, upside down, as he passed
by.
"I believe my work is finished," I said. "Unfortunately I am unable to
specify the exact nature of the problems affecting performance of the

Aleph-Nought system. It remains unclear that such problems in fact
exist. The periodic slowdowns may be a result of inherent systems vice,
artifacts of the systems architecture" Set speeches for the memo tape. "I
have prepared a menu of recommended changes in subsystems logic.
They may effect optimum decision capacity in the total operational
domain." Good, bureaucratic, hand-washing gibberish, to be supported
by a set of plausible fictions, cosmetic subtleties that Alice and the KEs
would have to institute to find out whether they had any effect at all.
Alice was puzzled. "Is that it, Jerry? It's not much."
"I'm sorry, Alice. I've done what I could. If you're not satisfied, you
ought to get someone else."
The rest of the meeting was brief. Toshi stopped me in the