The I Inside
Alan Dean Foster
For Sam
I
It is not God, Martin Oristano reminded himself for the thousandth time as he approached the machine. It is only an instrument, a tool designed to serve man.
Yet even though he had been close to the machine for the last forty years of his life, and Chief of Programming and Operations for the past ten, he still could not repress a shiver of awe as he entered his office. The deceptively simple keyboard awaited his input; the aural pickup, his words. Twin video sensors took stereoptic note of his presence. Infrareds saw him as striding heat.
There were other entry consoles scattered throughout the complex, but this was the only one through which a visitor was able to address the logic center directly.
Few human beings knew the code which would access the modest keyboard. Very few had clearance to this room. It was a great privilege. In many ways, it made Martin Oristano more widely known, and feared, than the Presidents and Premiers and Supreme Eternal Rulers who governed the nations.
Of course, Presidents and Premiers had little to do anymore beyond serving as figureheads for their governments, much as the King and Queen of England had done for hundreds of years. That kind of hopelessly overwhelmed administrative talent was no longer required.
The Colligatarch took care of those awkward details. Wholly benign, perfectly indifferent to political considerations, unbribable, even compassionate, it could make major administrative decisions free from contamination by petty hates and old jealousies. It did not rule: it only suggested. Its suggestions did not carry the force of law.
They did not have to.
Society no longer lived in fear of its own leaders. Since its completion, the Colligatarch had freed its builders from that and many other fears. Yet it was perfectly natural that some would fear the power that subsequently accrued to the machine, and to those who saw to its operation.
So Martin Oristano knew why he was feared. It bothered him from time to time because he was among the kindest and gentlest of men.
He had to be. No one else could be entrusted with the position of Chief Programmer, no matter how extensive his technical expertise. The psychological testing he’d undergone eleven years prior to his appointment had been a hundred times more extensive, more rigorous, than any technical exams he'd taken. The Authority took no chances with the most sensitive of all civil service appointments, even though the Colligatarch supposedly had been designed to be fail-safe and unmanipulatable by human beings for evil purposes or personal gain.
So he accepted the stares, the suspicious sidelong glances that always attended his occasional public appearances. They came with the territory. Better people should fear him, a mere man, than the machine.
The Reuss River cooled the Colligatarch and its support facilities. Hydropower from Lake Lucerne helped power it. To the south of the installation rose the vast massif of the Glarus Alps, which culminated in the crag called Todi. To the southwest, the Bernese Oberland crested in the Jungfrau at over four thousand meters above sea level.
The Colligatarch Authority lay buried beneath the solid granite flank of Mount Urirotstock, a more modest but still impressive peak.
He’d shivered earlier, but from something more prosaic than awe, as he’d stood in the fore cabin of the hydrofoil and stared out across the surface of the lake. It was early October. Soon much of Switzerland would be buried beneath alpine snow. Then he would have to move from the large, comfortable house in Lucerne to his winter quarters deep within the mountain.
A few other passengers sneaked quick glances at the striking figure standing near the glass. Most knew who he was. Nearly seventy, angular as in youth, his white hair combed straight back more for convenience than style, he was as recognizable in silhouette as in full face.
The angularity was inherited. Everyone, even his wife Martha, insisted he didn’t eat enough to allow his body to handle the daily stress he lived under. He failed to disillusion them by explaining that he’d adapted to such stresses long ago, and that he found eating a monotonous activity at best. Such adaptations were among the many reasons he’d been selected Chief Programmer.
Actually, his title was something of a misnomer. He did very little actual programming anymore. Chief Nurse is more like it, he thought as he took off his jacket and coat and hung them on the antique oak clothes tree that stood inside the door.
As he considered his office, he thought, as he had previously, that there should be more than this. For the press, if no one else. The Colligatarch and its human attendants always worried about the reaction of the media, even nowadays when general fear of the Colligatarch’s abilities had largely dissipated.
Certainly it wasn’t very impressive. There were a lot of plants. That was Anna’s touch. His secretary had a green thumb and could make a tropical orchid grow in the snow. Then there were all the owls. The big ceramic one with the yellow rhinestone eyes, the stone owl, the paper ones his granddaughter Elsa had made at school. The owls were spillovers from his wife’s collection. Being gifts of love, Oristano could hardly refuse them. Reporters fortunate enough to be granted a visit to this inner sanctum thought them particularly appropriate symbols of Oristano’s position. They would have been disappointed to learn that where birds were concerned, the Chief of Operations was more partial to storks.
There should be more. Something more representative of the electronic miracle that hummed away deep within the mountain. Perhaps a long, glass-lined tunnel dozens of meters high lined with endless rows of bright, winking lights. That would awe interested spectators.
But there was nothing like that. Only the soft carpet underfoot, the subdued lights, and in front of him the terminal with its ranked video screens and keyboard.
There were a hundred similarly furnished rooms spotted throughout the complex, and little to differentiate them from this, the prime access. There was only the sign on the door and the inconspicuous extra guards in the approach corridors. No need for many guards here. The difficult checkpoint to pass lay outside the mountain.
He said guten Tag as he pressed the button that would call up the morning's work. The voice pickup analyzed his speech pattern, recognizing it instantly. It was part of a smaller subunit that nonetheless was hooked up peripherally to the Colligatarch itself, as was even the smallest unit inside the mountain. Such linkages made for some interesting contrasts in scale: the Colligatarch could predict earthquakes in China and the number of meteors that would flash over the Carpathians next week with extraordinary accuracy.
It could also make a good cup of coffee.
“What will you have this morning, sir?” The subunit voice was not as smooth as the sophisticated voice of Colligatarch Logic Central, but it was still a part of the machine.
“Bavarian mocha,” Oristano replied as he sat down. He’d already had breakfast at home.
The machine was perfectly capable of providing him with food. There were those technicians who would have lived all year round within the complex, enjoying the machine’s catering to their every whim, but there were laws against such confinement, no matter how voluntary. People needed exposure to the real world, whether they wanted it or not.
He sighed, leaned back in the chair, and listened to the sound of coffee dripping into the mug set in the right-hand wall recess. As he relaxed he enjoyed the panning holograph that filled the entire left-side wall. It made for some crowding of instrumentation elsewhere, but Oristano had insisted on it.
The perception of depth was beautifully rendered as the scene slowly slid from left to right. In half an hour it would complete the 360-degree spin and begin again. Oristano never tired of it and never bothered to change it, though through his office he had access to thousands of scenes.
The holograph was of a beach called Parea. It fronted a cove on the Polynesian island of Huahine. Palm trees, blue sky, eroded volcanic throats, white sand, and clear shallow water shone in stark contrast to the prewinter scenery outside. An occasional ray or shark slipped quietly through the water.
He turned reluctantly to study the list that appeared on the central monitor. The Soviet government wanted planting parameters for rye in the New Uzbekistan regions. Several different hybrid seed stocks were involved, and the specialists were, as usual, at one another’s collective throats over which one would be the best to plant.
