Mind, Machines and Evolution Part 12

"Er . . . we don't say that here," Gabriel reminded him politely.

"Oh, of course." The G.o.d made an apologetic gesture and then cast his eyes around the table. "Does anyone else have any suggestions?" he invited. No one had. He sighed in resignation, then looked at the Chief Design Engineer. "I'm sorry, Chief, but it sounds as if we're stuck. I guess there's no choice but to drop the extras and revert to a standard Mark IV."

"No people?" the CDE sounded disappointed.

"No people," the G.o.d confirmed. "It was a nice thought, but it's out of the question on the timescale of this contract. Keep working on it with Research, and maybe you'll have it all figured out in time for the next bid, huh?" The CDE nodded glumly. The meeting ended shortly thereafter, and the Vice President of Sales went back to his office to begin drafting a revised Appendix section to be delivered to the customer by winged messenger. So the project wasn't going to be so interesting after all, the G.o.d reflected with a pang of regret as he collected his papers. But at least that meant there was less risk of overrunning on time and incurring penance clauses.

The Chief Design Engineer was on the phone shortly after lunch on the following day. "Have you heard?" he asked. He sounded distressed.

"Heard what?" the G.o.d answered.

"Feathers, Aviation, and Aquatics have been onto our legal people. They're trying to tell us that our birds and fish aren't safe."

"That's ridiculous! They're the same ones as we've always used. What's wrong with our birds and fish?"

"According to FAA regulations, all flight-control and navigation systems have to be duplicated," the CDE said. "Our birds only have a single nervous system. Also, we're allowing them to fly over water without inflatable life jackets."

The G.o.d was completely taken aback. "What's gotten into them?" he demanded. "They've never complained about anything like that before."

"They've never really bothered to check the regulations before, but the controversy over the people has attracted their attention to this project," the CDE told him. "Our legal people think they're all at it-all the angelcies are brus.h.i.+ng the dust off manuals they've never looked at before and going through them with magnifying gla.s.ses. We could be in for some real ha.s.sles."

The G.o.d groaned. "But what do they want us to do? We can't go loading the birds up with all kinds of duplicated junk. Their power-weight ratios are critically balanced. They'd never get off the ground."

"I know that. But all the same it's regulations, and the FAA won't budge. They also say we have to fit bad-weather landing aids."

The G.o.d's patience snapped abruptly. "They don't fly in bad weather," he yelled. "They just sit in the trees. If they don't fly, why do they need aids for landing? It'd be like putting life jackets on the camels."

"I know, I know, I know. But that's what the book says, and that's all the FAA's interested in."

"Can we do it?" the G.o.d asked when he had calmed down a little.

"Only with the penguins, the ostriches, and the others that walk. I called the FAA guy a couple of minutes ago and told him that the only way we could equip all the birds for bad-weather landing was by making them all walk. He said that sounded fine."

"I've never heard of anything so stupid! What's the point of having birds at all if they're only allowed to walk? We can't have planets with walking birds all over the place. The compet.i.tion would die laughing."

"I know all that. I'm just telling you what the guy said."

A few seconds of silence went by. Then the G.o.d asked, "What's wrong with the fish?"

"The shallow-water species don't have coastal radar."

Pause.

"Is this some kind of joke?"

"I wish it were. They're serious all right."

The G.o.d shook his head in disbelief and slumped back in his chair. "Maybe we might just have to go along without birds and shallow-water fish this time," he said at last. "Would the rest still work?"

"I'm not so sure it would," the CDE replied. "The birds were supposed to spread seeds around to produce enough vegetation to support the herbivores. If we reduce the quotas of herbivores, we'd have to cut back on the carnivores, too. And without the birds to keep down the insects, we'd have the Forestry Cherubim on our backs for endangering the trees. With the trees in trouble and no shallow-water fish to clean up the garbage from the rivers, the whole ecosystem would break down.

None of the animal species would be able to support themselves."

The G.o.d sighed and wrestled with the problem in his head. The CDE himself had precipitated the current crisis by introducing the idea of the people in the first place, but there would be nothing to be gained by starting rounds of recriminations and accusations at this point, he thought. What was important was to get the proposal into an acceptable form before the closing date for the bid. "The only thing I can think of is that if the animals become unable to support themselves, we'll have to put them all on welfare.

If I call HEW and see if I can fix it, would that solve the problem?"

"Well . . . yeah, I guess it would . . . if you can fix it." The CDE didn't sound too hopeful.

The G.o.d phoned the HEW Director a few minutes later and explained the situation. Would HEW accept a commitment to supplying welfare support for the animals?

"No way!" was the emphatic reply.

"What in he-heaven's name do you expect us to do?" the G.o.d demanded, shouting in exasperation.

"How can we meet anybody's regulations when they always conflict with somebody else's?"

"That's not our problem," the HEW Director stated bluntly. "Sorry."

Another meeting was called early the next morning to discuss the quandary. After all avenues had been explored, there seemed only one solution that would avoid all the conflicts: an azoic universe. All forms of living organisms would have to be deleted from the proposal. The meeting ended on a note of somber resignation.

The Environmental Protection Angel was on the line later that afternoon. Her voice was shrill and piercing, grating on the G.o.d's nerves. "Without any plants at all, the levels of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur compounds from volcanic activity would exceed the permitted limits. The proposal as it stands is quite unacceptable. We would not be able to issue operating licenses for the volcanoes."

"But the limits were set to safeguard only living organisms!" the G.o.d thundered. "We've sc.r.a.pped them-all of them. There aren't any living organisms to be safeguarded."

"There is no clause in the regulations which specifically exempts lifeless planets," the EPA told him primly. It was too much.

"What kind of lunatics are you?" the G.o.d raged into the phone. "You don't need a specific exemption.

What do you need protective regulations for when there isn't anything to be protected? How stupid can you get? Any idiot could see that it doesn't apply here-any of it. You're out of your mind."

"I'm simply doing my job, and I don't expect personal insults," came the reply. "The standards are quite clear, and they must be met. Good day." The line went dead.

The G.o.d conveyed the news to Design Engineering, who discussed it with Research. Without the volcanoes there wouldn't be enough planetary outga.s.sing to form the atmospheres and oceans. Okay, the atmospheres and oceans would have to go. But the volcanoes were also intended to play a role in relieving the structural stresses and thermal buildups in the planetary crusts. How could that be taken care of without any volcanoes? Only by having more earthquakes to make up the difference, the CDE declared. The G.o.d told him to revise the proposal by deleting the volcanoes and making the crustal formations more earthquake-p.r.o.ne. Everybody agreed that the problem appeared at last to have been solved.

The Department of Highlands, Undulations, and Deserts called the G.o.d a day later with an objection.

"I'm dreadfully sorry, old chap, but we seem to have run into a bit of a problem," the man from HUD told him. "You see, the mountain ranges you've proposed don't quite come up to the standards set out in our building codes for the increased level of seismic activity. We'd have no choice but to condemn them as unsafe, I'm afraid."

"What if we do away with the mountains, then?" the G.o.d growled sullenly.

"That would be perfectly satisfactory as far as we're concerned, but I rather suspect that you might still have a problem in getting it pa.s.sed by the Occupational Safety and Health Angelcy. All those fissures opening up and landslides going on all over the place . . . it would be a bit hazardous for the animals, wouldn't it?"

"But we've already gotten rid of the animals," the G.o.d pointed out. "There won't be any."

"I see your point," the man from HUD agreed amiably, "but it is still in the jolly old rules. You know how finicky those OSHA types can be. Just a friendly word in your ear. Frightfully sorry and all that."

The G.o.d was past arguing.

Design Engineering's response was to make the planets completely inactive. There would be no mountains, no fluid interiors, no mobile plates-in fact, no tectonic processes of any kind. The planets would be simply featureless b.a.l.l.s of solid rock that could never by any stretch of the imagination be considered potentially hazardous to any living thing, whether one existed or not.

The Great Accounting Overseer didn't like it. "What do you need them for?" a GAO minion challenged a day later. "They don't serve any useful purpose at all. They're just a needless additional expense on the cost budget. Why not get rid of them completely?"

"They've got a point," the CDE admitted when the G.o.d went over to Engineering to talk about it. "I guess the only reason we put them in is because that's the way we've always done it. Yeah . . . I reckon we should strike them out. No planets."

But the Dispenser of Energy wasn't happy about the idea of a universe consisting of nothing but stars. "It might be budgeted to last for billions of years, but it's still finite nevertheless," an a.s.sistant of the DOE declared in a call to the G.o.d. "We are trying to encourage a policy of conservation, you know. This idea of having billions of stars just pouring out all that energy into empty s.p.a.ce with none of it being used for anything at all . . . well, it would be terribly wasteful and inefficient. I don't think we could possibly approve something like that."

"But it's just as we've always done it," the G.o.d protested. "The planets never used more than a drop in the ocean. The difference isn't worth talking about."

"Quant.i.tatively, yes, but I'm talking about a difference in principle," the DOE a.s.sistant replied. "The waste was high in the earlier projects, but at least there was a reason in principle. This time there isn't any, and that does make a difference. We couldn't give this universe an approval stamp. Sorry."

A day later Design Engineering had come up with a way to conserve the energy: Instead of being concentrated into ma.s.ses sufficiently dense to sustain fusion reactions and form stars, the stellar material would be dispersed evenly throughout s.p.a.ce as clouds of dust and gas in which the small amount of free energy that remained would be conserved through an equilibrium exchange between radiation and matter.

The DOE was satisfied with that. Unfortunately the EPA was not; the clouds of dust and gas would exceed the pollution limits.

With two days to go before the closing date for the bid, the G.o.d called all the department heads and senior technical staff members together to discuss the situation. The ensuing meeting went on all through the night. After running calculations through the computers several times, they at last came up with a solution they were sure had to be acceptable to everybody. Sales forwarded a revised final proposal to the customer, and the company waited nervously for the responses. Miraculously the phone on the G.o.d's desk didn't ring once all through the next day. The proposal was approved, and the final contract was awarded.

Out at the construction site, Gabriel watched despondently as the project at last got under way. All that was left of the original plan was a pinpoint of exotic particles of matter, radiation, s.p.a.ce, and time, all compressed together at a temperature of billions of degrees. The bizarre particles fell apart into protons, neutrons, electrons, muons, neutrinos, and photons, which after a while began cl.u.s.tering together through the radiation fluid as he watched. After the grandeur of the previous projects he had witnessed, the sight was depressing. "I guess we just write this one off, forget all about it, and file it away," he murmured to the G.o.d, who was standing next to him. "It's not much to look at, is it? I can't see this even getting a mention in the report to the stockholders." He turned his head to find that the G.o.d's eyes were twinkling mischievously. "What's funny?" he asked, puzzled.

The G.o.d tipped his yellow hard-hat to the back of his head and grinned in a conspiratorial kind of way as he scratched his forehead. "Don't worry about it," he said quietly. "We've worked out a new method.

It'll all come out just the way we planned . . . everything."

Gabriel blinked at him in astonishment. "What are you talking about? How do you mean, everything?

You don't mean the stars, the planets, the oceans, the mountains . . ." His voice trailed away as he saw the G.o.d nodding.

"And the birds, and the fish, and the animals, all the way through to the people," the G.o.d told him confidently. "It'll turn out just the way we planned it in the original proposal."

Gabriel shook his head, nonplussed. "But . . . how?" He gestured at the expanding fireball, in which traces of helium and a few other light nuclei were beginning to appear. "How could it all come out of that?"

The G.o.d chuckled. "The research people developed some things called 'Laws of Physics' that they buried inside it. The angelcies will never find them. But they're in there, and they'll make it all happen just the way we planned. We ran the numbers through the IBM last night, and they work. You wait and see."

Gabriel looked over his shoulder at the site supervisor's hut and then gazed back at the embryo universe with a new interest and respect. "I was going to go inside for a coffee," he said. "But this sounds interesting. I think I'll hang around a little longer. I don't want to miss this."

The G.o.d smiled. "Oh, that's okay-you go get your coffee," he said. "There's plenty of time yet."

Afterword, 1996 "Making Light" revolves around English-language puns and acronyms. Don't ask me how they did it, but somehow it was translated into j.a.panese. j.a.panese language uses characters from three alphabets: kanji, which are ideographic symbols borrowed from the Chinese; and two phonetic systems: hiragana, a flowing script used along with kanji to conjugate verbs, write conjunctions, and to write j.a.panese words phonetically; and katakana, a more angular (but otherwise identical) script used for writing foreign words phonetically, and also for sound effect words (for instance, in comics). All of these they cheerfully intermingle with our own Western alphanumerics when it suits their purpose. The j.a.panese also love puns. A real expert will come up with one that's a pun at both the kanji and kana levels simultaneously, and also in English.

HOW LONG SHOULD A.

PIECE OF STRING BE?.

Aspiring writers often ask me if they should begin with short stories and work up from there toward full-length novels. I think this is the wrong question to ask. How long a work needs to be depends on what the writer wants to say. Some crus.h.i.+ngly tedious books have resulted from padding out to hundreds of pages the single idea that ought to have been a short story; and many shorter works have suffered from jumbling together too many interesting thoughts which deserved the s.p.a.ce to be developed. Hence I don't care very much what lengths are supposed to const.i.tute a short story, a novella, a short novel, and so on. Whatever best expresses what I have to say is the length it needs to be, and others can worry about what category it belongs to. Writing shouldn't be a Procrustean bed that ideas are cut or stretched to fit.

a.s.sa.s.sin was the first thing I wrote that came out as a short story (or novella, or whatever). That was in late 1977, after I'd written three novels-which answers the question about having to write short fiction first. Judy-Lynn Del Rey called from New York soon after we'd arrived in the U.S. to say that she was putting together the fourth in her Stellar series of anthologies, and had reserved a slot in it for me. "So write something, Hogan," she ordered. Reflecting back, I don't doubt that this was her way of making sure I kept up the writing habit, before excuses about having just arrived in a new country and started a new job had any time to take root. One of the things that made Judy-Lynn such a good editor was that she never allowed authors to get lazy by deciding to take breaks between books-which can easily turn into those "blocks" you hear about that last for years. As soon as she received the ma.n.u.script for that latest novel, she'd be on the phone demanding an outline for the next. It didn't matter if the outline was half-baked and full of unresolved problems, or even if we ended up abandoning it completely-the wheels that would eventually produce the next story had been kept turning.

The problem with a.s.sa.s.sin, though, was that I had just moved to a new country and begun a new and very demanding job with Digital Equipment-and on top of that had blown all my spare time by getting involved in restoring the house. So I wrote it by going to the office three hours early every morning and using my secretary's typewriter. As with many first attempts at shorter fiction, it was too wordy and rambling. The version included here-reread eight years later-has been pruned mercilessly.

I think this tells us something about writing technique. The purpose of a first draft is to capture every thought and get it down on paper before it evaporates. The art of developing it from there is knowing what to cut-and in my opinion, the more ruthless the process, the better the end product tends to be.

"When in doubt, leave it out" is a good maxim to follow.

a.s.sa.s.sIN.

Even before the conscious parts of his mind realized that he was awake, his reflexes had taken control.

The slow and even rhythm of his breathing remained unbroken; not a muscle of his body stirred. To all appearances he was still sound asleep, but already his brain, now fully alert, was sifting the information streaming in through his senses.

There were no alarm bells ringing in his head-no half-remembered echo of perhaps the creak of a shoe, the rustle of a sleeve, or the barely audible catching of breath that would have betrayed the presence of somebody in the room. He could detect no change in the background pattern of sound and smell that he had registered and filed away in his memory before falling asleep.

Nothing abnormal then. Just the routine beginning of another day.

He opened his eyes, allowed them to sweep around the darkness of his hotel room probing for anything irregular, then rolled over and switched on the bedside light. He yawned, drawing the first clean breath of the new day deep into his lungs, and then stretched, long and luxuriously, allowing the energy that acc.u.mulates through eight hours of complete rest to charge every nerve and fiber of his body. After holding the position for perhaps ten seconds, the man who currently called himself Hadley Kra.s.sen relaxed, and returned fully to wakefulness.

His watch told him it was 6:35 A.M. He leaned across to the bedside console and flipped a switch to activate a voice channel to the hotel computer.

"Good morning." A synthetic ba.s.s-baritone voice issued from the grille near the top of the console panel.

"Can I help you?"

"Room service," Kra.s.sen replied.

"Room service." The machine was now speaking in a rich, New England, female voice.