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?
Not true, Oristano patiently corrected the joke-tellers. God decreed, whereas the Colligatarch merely suggested.
He finished scrolling the monitor and saw nothing else requiring his immediate attention. Oh, there was that business about fishing rights in the Aegean again. Those crazy Albanians! He supposed there had to be some people somewhere who wouldn’t have a thing to do with the Colligatarch.
No doubt the Albanians’ argument would be rejected once again, but its presence in his file irritated Oristano. Someone should have intercepted it at a lower level. He rerouted it to Burgess.
He brushed at the plain gray long-sleeved shirt he wore. There were four pockets in the shirt and six in the matching cotton slacks, and all of them were full. Oristano was a note-taker. Paper notes were an anachronism in an electronic world, but he cherished his few eccentricities.
He also wore two watches, one on each wrist. Except the one on his left arm was not a watch but a remote terminal tying him to his office and through it to Logic Central. The wisdom of the ages on one’s wrist, he mused, noting that the sharkskin band was in need of replacement. Wouldn’t it be amusing, he thought, if it broke as he was crossing the lake and it fell into the water, and some cruising fish swallowed the wisdom of the ages?
For forty-five more minutes life and the world proceeded normally. Then things began to go mad.
A faint buzz caught his attention as a red light winked to life above the keyboard. Oristano was standing across the room, as close to the holograph as he could get, luxuriating in the warm, simulated South Pacific sun. Muttering, he walked back to his chair and thumbed a button. The intricate keyboard served largely to accept lists and figures awkward to enter by chip or verbal command.
For now he would use the synthesizer. He always enjoyed talking to the Colligatarch. He’d programmed the current voice himself, taking into account millions of choices before settling on a polite male tenor. It was lightly accented, soothing, utterly unbelligerent. A visitor from France who was something of a cinema buff once told Oristano the voice reminded him of a long-dead English actor named Ronald Colman. Curious. Oristano had pulled one of the actor’s films and run it on an office monitor.
Yes, that was much like what the Colligatarch sounded like, except for a certain coldness no mechanically generated voice could completely eliminate.
“Good day, Colligatarch.”
“Good morning, Martin,” answered the machine.
“I saw the light on the console and heard your call. It's unusual for you to call me. Something wrong?”
“Yes, there is, Martin. I would have alerted you immediately on arriving, but I thought you would be more relaxed if you first had time to take care of the morning’s business. To take care of the routine before dealing with the out-of-the-ordinary.”
How like the machine, Oristano mused, to put whatever concerned it on hold so that a single human being could enjoy his morning coffee.
“Then there’s something out of the ordinary?”
“Yes. Sit down if you want to, Martin.”
Oristano didn’t really want to sit down. If it was possible that the trouble was minor, he would have liked to go and stand in front of the soothing holograph. But the machine’s message alarmed him. He took his seat and gazed expectantly into the twin video pickups.
“There is a danger,” the Colligatarch told him. Oristano was now confused as well as concerned. After all, the world was full of dangers. Earthquakes in China, volcanoes erupting in the highly active North American Pacific range, airplanes crashing in Brazil, and that interisland ferry capsizing off Hokkaido. Catastrophe was a daily occurrence, though there was less of it since the advent of the Colligatarch. There were no more famines, for example, and the incidence of death by automobile had fallen sharply on the autobahns of the world. But this sounded different.
“The danger,” said the Colligatarch, “is to myself.”
That made Oristano sit up and take notice. There was no change of inflection in the mechanical voice, nothing else to emphasize the graveness inherent in those few words. Such articifical verbal enhancements were not necessary. Oristano was instantly on alert.
It wasn’t the first time, of course. There were precedents—Phenaklions, flat-earthers, religious nuts, all anxious to substitute their personal superstitions for rule by knowledge. None had come any closer to the Authority complex than the top of the mountain, not even the African fanatics with their stolen plutonium bomb. Ironic, that incident. After somehow managing to slip by dozens of checkpoints and defense sensors, they’d all perished in a simple avalanche.
It took such an extraordinary threat to make the Colligatarch interrupt its regular schedule and that of the Chief Programmer. Oristano listened intently.
“The threat involves not only myself, but the future of the human race.” Such facility for understatement, Oristano mused. How calm and quiet it is. Just like me. But is it also equally uneasy in its guts?
“Details,” Oristano demanded. “Where does the threat come from?”
“I don’t know,” said the machine.
The initial pronouncement had Oristano upset. Now he was more than upset, he was shaken. In forty years of close association with the Colligatarch, from junior chipshifter to Chief of Operations, he couldn’t recall a single previous instance of the machine’s replying to a simple question with “I don’t know.”
He considered calling in a witness to confirm that he was actually hearing it. Had some prevarication programming somehow been slipped into his junction? If this was some kind of elaborate joke by one of his subordinates …
The machine could not read minds, but it could collate such factors as visual appearance, blood pressure, pupil dilation, and more and render a guess.
“This is not a practical joke, Martin. The threat I refer to is very real.”
“I accept that. All right, if you don’t know where the threat originates, then tell me the nature of the threat."
