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.

Determining this required detailed comparison of the latest regional soil analysis, insect populations, and possible infestations; weather predictions six months ahead; the psychological profiles of every agricultural worker in all involved communes as well as those working private plots; the condition of farm machinery in the area and the availability of spare parts for same; plus several thousand additional factors, including a great many at first glance unrelated to the question under discussion.

Oristano filed the query with routine approval. It would take the Colligatarch less than five minutes to generate a summation. It could not order the Soviet government to abide by that decision, of course. It would merely make a suggestion.

There was a long harangue from the Defense Department of the United States. Some busy generals had come up with new statistics showing the Soviets with a gain in nuclear capability. The Colligatarch would dutifully check on it, and likely produce a thousand graphs proving the accusation false. It kept careful watch on the arsenals of the five superpowers.

Suspicion of one another kept the generals of the United States, the Soviet Union, the EEC, the Latin American Union, and the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere employed. Humans still felt the need to maintain standing armies to keep watch on each other. The Colligatarch had managed to eliminate paranoia from such confrontations.

His coffee was ready, perfect as always. The microprocessor knew his wants intimately. He sipped at it slowly as he ran down the seemingly endless list.

The Republic of South Africa and the East African Federation were squabbling again, this time over the new borders that divided what had once been the Portugese colony of Mozambique. In past decades such a dispute might have been adjudicated by the World Court, sitting at The Hague. Nowadays, along with planting requests and information on Polar bear takes in Alaska, such problems were handled by the Colligatarch. It would render a decision which would be accepted by both sides in the dispute … for this week, anyway.

Then a new claim or challenge would be made and the Colligatarch would have to review every claim extending back to the Zulu conquests and render an entirely new decision, as often and as politely as the argument demanded. The game kept many politicians in business.

There was also a message from his wife, reminding him that they were scheduled to have dinner with that nice young couple from Turin next week. Oristano frowned as he tried to picture the face of the new Italian ambassador to the EEC. The face escaped his memory, but he did remember the wife, who had been attired rather more seductively than a diplomat’s wife ought to be.

Oristano thoroughly enjoyed such outings. Not for him the image of the surly, mumbling technician who’d sacrificed his humanity to the demands of the machine. He enjoyed conversation, good food, and wine. Nor would he fail to glance admiringly at the diplomat’s young wife while Martha looked on and smiled at her husband’s mental presumption.

The most popular joke in the complex recently had to do with the fact that in his first six weeks on the job the new Italian ambassador had managed to pay homage to not one but two popes—the one in Rome and the one in Lucerne. Didn’t Oristano receive the word straight from the electronic deity?