Mr Kratt’s thick black V of eyebrow came down deeper; he bit through his cheap cigar. ‘Goddamnit, bub,’ he said into the telephone, ‘you sure about this federal court order? Fine damn country if the damn government can send in the FBI to deprive a man of his legitimate property… Well, damn-it, Moonbrand, you and Honcho are supposed to be the damned lawyers, you tell me, can’t we lodge an appeal… Yes well look, I didn’t hire you to just sit in your damn hacienda out there and swill orange juice, I hired you to protect KUR interests, my interests, not to… No okay, no all right, maybe you and your partner have been
The image of his growling voice, turned into numbers, beamed up to a satellite and back down to California, finally emerged from what looked like a gold conch shell held to Wade Moonbrand’s ear. His bare feet rested on the desktop, which had been made from a teak surfboard. He kept his eyes on a meditation symbol on the wall, a nest of concentric rings; when he’d finished talking he pulled a Colt .45 from inside his floral shirt and put three shots into the middle of the symbol.
‘Cass, old buddy, we kind of aced ourselfs, you know? I mean talk about the oneness of everything, we aced our own selfs!’
Cass Honcho, wearing buckskin and sitting at a desk made of a split log, nodded to show he was awake.
‘Talk about conflict of innerest,’ Moonbrand went on. ‘I finally got the story outa the Orinoco gang, and guess who’s behind the FBI move? Leo! Leo Bunsky, our client! Man, if we hadn’t slapped that injunction on them to get the poor bastard’s head straight — I mean wires uncrossed — like he would still be floating on some astral plane with like Madame Blavatsky and James Dean, instead of down here making waves. We aced our own selfs!
‘Like you remember when we took on Leo as a client? And we got that injunction against Orinoco saying they was violating his civil rights? And we wanted our electronics people and neurologists to look him over, remember that?’
Honcho nodded.
‘And man their argument was just that Leo had all his rights because they let him vote with the rest of the committee, only we argued that you couldn’t be sure his vote was real unless we got our experts in there to check his wiring, remember?’
Honcho nodded.
‘And then when our boys did go in there sure enough they found a couple of wires crossed or something, so like his vote was garbled, remember? And after that they voted on something and Leo changed his vote and I guess the bottom line is, they decided to send in the FBI and just grab Roderick; so there we are, aced. I mean we just get one client fixed up so he can think straight, first thing he does is rip off another client. Mr Kratt’s mad as hell and we lose out everywhere. Talk about a conflict of innerest, we just conflicted all over ourselfs there, you know what I wish?’
Honcho nodded.
‘I wish there was some piranha fish in Leo Bunsky’s tank.’
Roderick stared at the brain in the tank, trying to see it as a living person and not as a relic. Leo Bunsky had created him; now he tried to reconstruct Leo Bunsky, as his guide explained and explained:
‘…see one of the key factors in our policy on Entities was always Leo’s vote: no matter how hard he might argue for building Entities, when it came to a vote he always voted for their extermination. You’re probably wondering whether we didn’t think there was something wrong, but, hell, a lot of people here play games like that, arguing intellectually but voting with their true feelings. We thought Leo really was opposed to Entities. His vote influenced other votes, so the Entity extermination policy always had a comfortable plurality. And, well, it was only after Leo’s lawyers made us check the wiring that we realized, Leo’s vote was being misrecorded.
‘But I guess you don’t want to hear all this internal gossip, right? So why don’t we move right along?’
The guide was a younger version of the first pipe-smoker. He had the same brush-cut hair (Roderick could imagine the two of them lying end-to-end, the tops of their heads meshing like a pair of military brushes) and the same tweed jacket.
‘I see you’re looking at my leather elbow patches,’ he said in the elevator.
‘Was I? Yes, I guess I was.’
‘Neat, huh? See this one zips open, it’s a pocket. For my pipe.’
‘Oh.’
‘A lot of the fellas have them, see we get these wholesale prices from this big sporting goods outfit, O’Bride International. We tried some blazers too, real neat with our own crest, only we had to send them back, they screwed up the name. Here we are, Subbasement Eight.’
The doors opened on brilliant green rain-forest, complete with steaming undergrowth, sunlight pouring down through the clerestory of tall trees, snakes lazing among the lianas and pennant-bright birds in the shrubs.
‘This can’t be real.’
‘Good, isn’t it? Mostly mirrors and holograms, with a few plastic bushes. Okay, we just follow this trail here.’
They rounded a tree and the jungle vanished, leaving them in an ordinary, even shabby corridor. ‘Some psychiatrist figured having a little foyer like this on each floor would help everybody concentrate. On other floors they have mountains or desert or quiet smalltown streets. One floor’s got Oxford or is it Cambridge? To help everybody concentrate.’
‘Does it help?’
‘Naw, it’s a lot of hooey.’ The guide rapped at the first door and opened it. An old man wearing a frock coat and a huge panama ‘planter’s’ hat sat hunched over his desk. He was using an abacus with no great speed or skill. On the blackboard behind him was written, THE GREATEST GOOD FOR THE GREATEST
‘Come in, come in,’ he said, not looking up. ‘Have you brought my robot? Just leave it in the corner.’
‘Not this one,’ said the guide, chuckling. ‘I’m showing him around.’
‘Show him around later! This is important!’ Even the beads snapped.
Roderick asked the man what he was calculating.
‘Oh, nothing much! Nothing much! Just setting out a complete moral code for all human conduct, that’s all!’
A complete moral code?’
‘Complete.’ The old man finished a calculation and laid down his abacus. ‘Covering not only every recorded human action, but every possible imaginable human action. Complete, detailed, and mathematically precise. Are you familiar with the principles of Utilitarianism? An act is judged moral if it achieves the greatest possible good for the greatest possible number. But
Roderick tried to look quizzical.
‘The method is really quite simple. Every human action has its own individual number. And every set of circumstances is an equation. We simply plug the numbers into the equations and off we go!’
The guide said, ‘Yeah, well, off
‘Wait a minute, just let me show you.’ The old man leaped to his blackboard and erased it energetically, the motion making his hat-brim quiver. He sketched a diagram. ‘Now here for instance we have the classical nuclear war standoff, East against West. Each side has the same two choices, either strike first or wait. So there are four possible outcomes. Now take West’s options. If he strikes first, West can win (that is + 1) but only if East has waited. But if both try to strike first, the whole world is wiped out (that is definitely –1). On balance, then, West neither gains nor loses from striking first. What if he waits? The best that can happen is nothing (o), and that’s if
