More Futures Than One

He was born in 1970, to an upper-middle-class white American family that thought of itself as beleaguered.

Not that his parents were unenlightened or fanatical. On the contrary, both were college graduates, enjoyed foreign travel, left good impressions wherever they went and had friends in more than one circle. Political independents, they split their ballots as often as not. He, a rising young corporation lawyer, was a bit more conservative than she, who had flirted with radicalism in her student days. But their arguments only added liveliness to a loving relationship. At root they wanted the same things for themselves, their children and the world.

They were both afraid.

Their nightmares were shared, but certain ones came most sharply to each. He saw crime and hatred tearing his country apart and, waiting behind them, insurrection. He feared these things less in themselves than he feared the reaction they could provoke--the end of Jefferson's dreams in tyranny and genocide. Abroad, he saw spreading chaos, implacable enmity and weapons that could lay waste the earth. She saw barrenness: of the soil, the flesh and the spirit. Wasn't the start of the great famines predicted for about 1980? North America and Europe might survive a while longer; but at what cost? Faceless mobs packed elbow to elbow in rotting cities and junk-yard countryside, the almighty state equipped with snooper systems and data banks to control every action, on a planet so gutted and poisoned that the very possibility of life seemed to be going down the same drain that was about to swallow the last vestiges of beauty and serenity. Was that any future to offer your children?

They had two, John and Jane. They said those names were a declaration of independence from the neonyms--Jax and Jeri and Lord knew what else--that had become the real mark of conformity. Maybe they meant it, though they said it with a laugh. In spite of their fears, they laughed quite a bit--though the children's first two decades were, in fact, hard. History would look back on them and shudder. But John and Jane remembered that time in much the way their grandparents remembered the Great Depression, their parents the Korean War or anyone who is not too cruelly unfortunate remembers growing up. In the background was trouble; sometimes it struck close, as when a cousin came home dead from Burma, or the streets of their suburb resounded to the boots of the National Guard, or inflation wrecked their father's business. But mostly they were busy exploring their existence.

And somehow existence continued. Somehow the ultimate catastrophes never quite came. Enough people never quit working for reform and public compassion on the one hand, for order and public decency on the other. No matter the scale on which madness ran loose, no matter the face it wore, they resisted it. Disagreeing among themselves, often profoundly, they nonetheless made common cause against the real enemy and worked together to achieve the traditional, sane equality of dissatisfaction.

It turned out that lawlessness could be curbed without extreme measures. When investments in education and opportunity began to pay off, the younger generation simply grew bored by talk of revolt. A high-level industrial economy proved to have remarkable powers of recuperation even from funny money. The first tactical nuclear weapon fired in anger did not automatically trigger the detonation of everything. A peace of exhaustion was not a hopelessly bad foundation on which to start building enforceable international agreements. Population patterns generally followed that of Japan as soon as the means were commonly available. The environment could be cleaned up and rehabilitated. Pollution-free machines were feasible to make and sell. A massive American reaction set in against bureaucratic interference in private affairs. None of this was perfect, none was clear-cut nor had any definite beginning or cause. But once more--as after the fall of Rome or the wars of religion--man was groping his way back toward the light.

And the most savage of those years witnessed some of the most superb achievements the race had yet reached. They were in science and technology--the arts would not regain any important creativity for a while--but they were not on that account any less Bach fugues of theory, Parthenons of mechanism. John had been begotten on the joyful night man first spent on the moon. He was still in grade school when permanent bases were established there; and by then, visits to Earth-orbital stations were routine. Between lunar resources and free-space assembly, the construction of interplanetary craft had become almost cheap. This was good, because the demand for them waxed as knowledge led to spatial industries. John was in high school at the time of the Mars and Venus landings. Radiation screens and thermal conversion were then about to open up innermost Mercury and really efficient nuclear engines were being developed for expeditions to the remote outer worlds. Speculation about reaching the stars became official.

On Earth, the changes were more obviously fundamental, and many of them were disturbing. Few denied that the controlled thermonuclear reaction--clean power, its source literally inexhaustible--was a good thing. Nor was there any serious argument against progress in fuel cells, energy storage units and other devices that, together, would push the combustion engine into well-deserved extinction. True, while alarmists predicted that such techniques as desalinization and food synthesis would merely fill the planet with more starvelings, those landmarks of engineering forestalled world-wide famine until such other techniques as the one-year contraceptive pill could show results.

But controversy went on over the effects of biology, medicine, psychology. The cracking of the genetic code made prostheses and organ transplants obsolete after the organs could be regrown. More importantly, DNA modification brought an end to diseases such as diabetes and, indirectly, to cancer. But would man now start tinkering with his own evolution? What ghastliness might his unwisdom bring on? The dangers in the growing variety of psycho-drugs and brain stimulators were not reduced by becoming a trite topic at (continued on page 108)More Futures Than One(continued from page 98) cocktail parties. New methods of education helped ram enough poor people into the 20th Century that the threatened uprisings faded away. But since these methods involved conditioning, right down to the neural level, did they not invite any dictator to produce a nation of willing slaves? Man-computer linkages (temporary ones using electro-magnetic induction, not wires into anybody's skull) had vastly extended the range of human control, experience and thinking capability. But were they not potentially dehumanizing? And what of the machines themselves, the robots, the enormous automatic systems, the ubiquitous and ever more eerily gifted computers? What would they do to us?

Thus, as mankind staggered toward a degree of tranquillity and common sense, John and Jane's father wondered how relevant politics had been in the first place. It seemed to him that the future belonged to those blind, impersonal, unpredictable and uncontrollable forces associated with pure and applied science. He was an intelligent man and a concerned one. He was right about an ongoing revolution that was to alter the world. But he was looking in the wrong direction. The real cataclysm was happening elsewhere. His mistake was scarcely his fault. The revolutionaries didn't know either.

They were running secondhand-book stores that tended to specialize, and head shops of a thousand different kinds, and artists' cooperatives, and schools teaching assorted Japanese athletics, and home workshops, and small-circulation magazines, and their own movie companies, and subsistence farms with up-to-date equipment that took advantage of cheap power, and tiny laboratories that drew on public data-retrieval and computer systems, and consultation services that did likewise, and on and on. By these means they became independent.

They weren't beat, hippie, conservative, utopian; they weren't activists nor disciples. They weren't artsy-craftsy. They weren't do-it-yourselfers. They weren't the rich kids who followed sun and surf around the planet nor those who opted out to groove on rock and pot. They weren't the middle-class middle-aged men who, in real or fancied desperation, carried for a while those anesthetic guns that became the compromise between lethal weapons and none. They weren't those young men who, understanding the transfigured technology as their elders never would, used it to make themselves millionaires before the age of 30 and then used the money for their pet causes. They weren't the American blacks, chicanos, Indians, Orientals who decided--usually in a quiet fashion--that the culture of their liberal white friends wasn't for them after all. They weren't the medievalists who, a few years before John was born, brought back the tournaments, costumes, food and manners of a bygone era, raised banners and pavilions and generally spent a large part of their time playing an elaborate game. They weren't the many who discovered that, in a world of machines, personal service--anything human, from gardening to carpentry to counseling--is in such demand that those who render it can work when and where they choose. The revolutionaries were none of these, because they were all of them and more. They fitted into no category whatsoever.

Has the point been made? In an ultraproductive, largely automated economy, which has rationalized its distribution system so that everyone can have the necessities of life, labor becomes voluntary. Some kinds of it are rewarded with a high material standard of living; but if you prefer different activities, you can trade that standard off to whatever extent you wish. The way out of the rat-race is to renounce cheese and go after flowers, which are free. Enough will always want cheese to keep the wheel turning.

Many of the revolutionaries had at various times described themselves as radical, hippie, Afro or what have you. Many still did when John reached his maturity. Others had invented new labels, were prophesying new salvations and trying out new life styles. But none of that was important. The revolution had already taken place. Every way of living that was not a direct threat to someone else's had become possible. Naturally, John didn't notice the change. So many other events were so much more conspicuous and sudden. He took the results for granted, as his father had taken antibiotics and atomic energy, his grand father the automobile and the airplane, his distant ancestors gunpowder, iron, fire--and all the human consequences.

• • •

On the morning of his 30th birthday, John's bed woke him at the hour he had set with the music he had chosen, converted itself into a chaise longue and offered him coffee. After he got up, the housekeeping robot tidied the bedcovers and cleaned up the dishes. The robot, which vaguely resembled a vacuum cleaner with extensions, was connected to a central computer beneath the building, along with many others thus, these machines could discriminate and make logical judgments, if not precisely think.

John told the kitchen what he wanted for breakfast and, while it was being prepared, did his exercises. They included a session with a screen that flashed text and abstract symbols at him, for speed and fullness of comprehension.

The whole-organism training that modern psychophysiology had developed gave him more assorted abilities than would once have been thought possible in any single human being. The discipline, however, had to be maintained.

Afterward, he showered but didn't shave. His last application of depilatory was good for several days yet. Rather than disposable clothes, he picked a suit in the timeless style made with top-grade synthetic fabrics that lasted for decades. Today he wanted to look completely self-motivated. An important potential client would be calling.

At his reading speed, he got through his newspaper, which the fax had printed for him off the public-data lines, before finishing breakfast. It wasn't that he didn't appreciate marinated reindeer; it was just that he could be aware of several things at once. So he went on with War and Peace, in the Russian he had lately found convenient to acquire. Because he wanted a permanent copy, he had ordered a full-scan repro of a special edition in the central library of Moscow. Usually he dialed for a standard print-out--which was cheap and could be dropped down the reclamation chute when he was through with it--or for a simple screening.

After eating, John strolled onto the balcony of his apartment. It was high in a gigantic complex, a virtual city that you need never leave except for tourism. Other buildings reached inland father than he could see, even in Los Angeles' crystalline air. Their variegated shapes and colors made a pattern that never appeared the same twice. He was sufficiently high up that in the other direction he could glimpse the ocean and, he thought, several floating homes whose stabilized barges were currently in port.

But he had business to take care of. He'd planned on taking this day off, until he was contacted about discussing a possible job. It sounded fascinating, not to mention being valuable to a cause he believed in. Those two considerations weighed a good deal more than the money. Besides, John's generation drew no clear boundary between work and play. His parents said, in their quaint old-time idiom, that he always did his thing.

Reentering his living room, he activated a full-wall viewer and tuned in a scene he especially liked--Mount Rainier. But it was raining there today. Rather than settle for a canned animation, he dialed Angel Falls in Venezuela. Relaxed, he contemplated the view until his phone chimed and told him that the person he expected was on the line. The holographic image might almost have been the real man sitting opposite him. Little disturbed the illusion except the fade-out of background at the edges. But he spoke from Boston.

(continued on page 242)More Futures than one(continued from page 108)

The problem he raised was vital. Fifteen years before, the pressure on nature along the Eastern Seaboard had suddenly passed a threshold. The network of life had been snapped in too many places--by pollution, pesticides, overbuilding, extermination of entire species--and it came apart. Rivers and lakes filled with stinking sludge; trees withered; the very grass died over hundreds of square kilometers; dust made the heavens gray; the air grew foul, even outside the cities. Parts of earth had long been in trouble and restoration programs had been started. But it took the death of half of New England to make mankind understand how late the hour had grown.

Ecological management became the most urgent business in the world. It continued to be among the most valued professions. And, with the help of knowledge gained from research, it was succeeding. Desolation was being made to bloom again. Yet sections of the American Northeast Coast were proving intractable. Undesired forms had moved in after the collapse--microbes, algae, scrub plants, insects, rodents. Better adapted to gaunt soil and choked waters, they crowded out the types that man was trying to introduce. They could in time be overcome. But labor and resources were in limited supply, with other regions demanding a share. And there was need for haste, lest erosion do further harm. In short, the Government must rethink its program for this area and find one that optimized the future course of events. As was its habit these days, it turned to independent consultants.

John was among them. He had gone into cybernetics; but that word had come to include a Renaissance range of expertise and abilities. He was not a free-lance computer programmer, though they were common. He dealt with total systems. Given a large and ramified problem, what was the best approach to solving it? What priorities should be assigned to collecting what sorts of facts? Along what lines should the computers later be employed? What kinds of machinery, especially self-operating machinery, were likeliest to be needed after a course of action had been determined? Should research and development on wholly new apparatus, wholly new substances with special properties, be instigated? What was the most probable balance of the cost of innovation against the chance of success?

Think of John as a man who programmed the programmers.

He spent the rest of the morning on a guided tour. The projection was well arranged; he didn't expect he'd need to take a hypersonic flight across the continent for a physical look around. Newscasts had often shown him stony land, skeletal trees, slimy pools, insect clouds, crumbling ghost towns. Today he peered through microscopes, talked to specialists, absorbed a sketchy but coherent education in half a dozen branches of science. His training equipped him to ask the right questions, remember the answers and relate them to the awesome background of organized knowledge that he already possessed. Of course, he didn't try to carry everything in his head; data banks did that. But he had to know what data to call for.

He made a point of interviewing supervisors in the field. No briefing could give him those subtle insights that we get from direct confrontation with a man; only those insights let us foresee what he can and will do. John had been aware that reclamation was more than a job to these people--the hard cadre of them, that is, the careerists. It was like a religion. They passed their working lives in the barren places or on the seas, where the effort went on to restock with plankton, fish, seal, walrus, whale. They saw themselves as the saviors of the planet. They were doubtless right.

John was relieved to confirm that they weren't fanatics, like those true believers who had found in a thousand different cults a refuge from the fact that they had nothing to give that society wanted. The reclaimers were generally relaxed, pragmatic, uncommonly cheerful. Though their dirigible homes had less space and luxury than his apartment, there was more intimacy and color. Also distinctive were their clothes, manners and ceremonies. Quite a few reclaimers were of gypsy descent, and something akin to the old close-knit Romany culture was developing among all of them. Their children attended public schools via projection but afterward played among themselves.

The cadre knew better, however, than to snub the floating laborers--if laborers can include skilled workmen and engineers--who made up the bulk of their forces. Such persons came for limited times to earn some money before returning to their own widely diverse private lives. Perhaps the picturesqueness and hospitality of the cadre bands, the merriment of their men and the sultry glamor of their women had evolved as methods of attracting help and keeping it awhile.

Having learned how many hands of how many different capabilities could be counted on, John told the official from Ecological Management that he felt able to undertake the assignment. A standard contract was signed, via fax, immediately. No physical document ever existed; the record was in the molecular patterns of data-storage cells, instantly retrievable as a projection onto a screen anywhere in the world. Naturally, the system would have to have thumbprint identification before releasing something that wasn't everybody's affair.

John's parents hadn't been able to get through to him on the phone until his conference was finished. They lived in Wisconsin, in an exurban settlement typical of the many scattered across the nation. It wasn't like the dismal tracts of their youth. Their house, built cheaply by machines out of largely mass-produced parts, was nevertheless as adjustable to individual desires as a Meccano set. And few of their neighbors were stagnating. That was hard to do when whole planets were available to them in their homes, or in direct contact if they cared for travel, and when they could expect to live a vigorous century or so.

John's father ran a law practice and conciliation service. He specialized in settling conflicts that arose from differences between subcultures. An interesting case had just been given him, he said in the course of wishing his son a happy birthday. A young fellow from Milwaukee, wandering around, taking odd jobs whenever he needed a little credit, had come on an Arizona pueblo where the Indians were reviving certain ancient ways. Modern dry-farming techniques, including the genetic tailoring of plants and livestock, let them do this in reasonable comfort. They made the white lad welcome and he stayed for a while, sharing their lives. Social itinerants were not uncommon. John himself spent his spare time most years in a back-country Thai village, and had experimented with other milieus. They refreshed him; they enlarged his horizons; they were fun.

This lad, though, had gotten a local girl into bed with him. No state or Federal laws had been broken; she was of age. But this particular neo-Pueblo society had its own value system and was shocked when it learned of the affair. The girl, disgraced among her people yet unwilling to leave them, finding that the boy had no intention of marrying her and settling down, was claiming psychological damage. He was replying that a romp in the sack was no cause for scorn and Arizona was positively not his territory. John's father was trying to get both parties to accept reconditioning. Let the treatments put them in love with each other and they'd marry, thus reconciling her with her tribe. Let suitable habits and attitudes be modified and they'd find a place to live that was mutually satisfactory. They were hesitant--he probably because he didn't want to be tied down, she frankly because conscious regulation of emotions looked too unromantic.

John reminded his father that the kids could be right. A lot of people were worried about tranquilizers, stimulators, enhancers, mood machines, the whole paraphernalia that let you decide how you were going to feel at any moment. Might it lead to shallowness, weakness, dependence--at last to breakdown, when instinct rebelled against that tight a harnessing? Many people refused any reconditioning, even when medically advised. Why not propose, John said, that the girl put aside her insularity, the boy his selfishness and that they simply travel around for a year together? They'd learn more than any planned program could teach them. They might well end by sharing their whole lives. Certain spots to visit could be suggested, such as a small Mexican town that John knew. . . . Well, maybe, maybe. No harm in laying the idea before them.

John's mother asked when he was coming to see them in the flesh. Projections were OK, but you couldn't hug them nor feed them a birthday cake. He explained how busy he was going to be, then agreed that he'd at least drop in soon. And, after all, a family reunion was planned for August--a week in the great Himalayan playground.

After his parents had broken circuit, John glanced at his watch. Damn, it was too late to call the moon today. All the bases there ran on G.M.T. and Randall of Hightower Chemicals was doubtless out on the town. He loved low-gravity dancing. Well, be sure to catch him tomorrow. Certain of those giant molecules that could only be made under lunar conditions might be useful for killing algae. Ask his opinion, query him on price and delivery date. And Astrid Hawkridge could enlighten John on some aspects of marine ecology, but she'd be alseep now, in Krishnamurti City beneath the Indian Ocean.

Lunchtime. John decided to eat out. The delivery tubes would oblige him with practically anything that wasn't in his kitchen lockers, but he wanted to roam around a bit and let his mind relax.

He seldom used his car in town. Dense high-speed traffic wasn't the reason. Autopilots were required to be in contact with and guided by the machines of Regional Control. As a rule, however, you had to park so far from your destination that you needed the excellent public lines anyway. John caught an express outside his building, transferred to a shuttle and in ten minutes had reached Afroville.

Stepping out of the station was like entering a foreign country. The rehabilitation of Watts in the Seventies and Eighties went deeper than rebuilding and renaming. Those were only the out-ward sings of a spiritual rebirth. The black man found that he, too, could create his own free society within the larger commonwealth. He needed only to reject the level of consumption associated with a civilization he felt was cold and greedy. No further penalties were attached. High production and efficient distribution guaranteed a reasonable minimum income. (No, it certainly wasn't that simple. Many black people had wanted no part of a special black culture, only a fair share in the white one. This goal was delayed by brothers who too frequently--if understandably--spent more energy in giving the ancient oppressor a hard time than in constructing a solid base for their own liberation. Yet slowly, confusedly, by fits and starts, the thing happened.)

John sauntered between low, gaily tinted houses among folk whose garb and manner were just as sprightly. Most streets were reserved for pedestrians, bicycles and children's wagons. Music filled the air. He went by a people's park where a group was building an elaborate gazebo. The restaurant he sought stood in a flower garden. He dreaded the day when it would be discovered and go tourist; meanwhile, he enjoyed excellent food and live service at modest prices. (Cash remained in colorful use here: a matter of custom, not of the lack of bank-card scanners.) His favorite waitress was back from vacation. Like most employees, she worked a 30-hour week. Anything less and the proportion of time lost in getting organized was too great. But she had three months off per year and unlimited sick leave. She told John she'd spent this past holiday in Yugoslavia with a little-theater group .... After lunch, he browsed through a couple of the area's innumerable shops and found a handmade belt that would be a good present for his current girl.

On the way home, he realized how uncritically he'd accepted every cliché about the district. The die-hard Whitey haters were few and senescent; but some younger leaders were protesting Afroville's evolution into "another Chinatown." They had a point, though John didn't think it was major. The bulk of the community was doing serious things. Small businesses flourished, and so did cultural activities. The university's department of ethnology had long been famous. Lately, a team of its sociologists and economists had startled the world by its demonstration of how rich and octo-puslike an industry the international-arms-control complex had become.

Back in his apartment, John found that his phone had recorded a message from his sister. Jane was sorry she'd missed him and wouldn't be able to call again today. The mahi-mahi were running and she must shortly take her boat out after them. She looked good in the image, her nude body tanned and full of health. Both her kids were with her to congratulate John on his birthday. In the background was a glimpse of dazzling beach and long blue combers.

Jane had joined a utopian colony--group living, no marriage--in Hawaii. The idea was to re-create tribalism in a natural setting and thus satisfy the instincts that cities frustrated. The members weren't cranks or faddists. They made full use of appropriate technology, including that which gave their children a modern education. They earned the wherewithal by occasionally hiring out as workers or entertainers and by selling the produce of their lands and waters. They experimented carefully and thoughtfully, searching for improvements in their customs. In fact, John considered them a shade too earnest. But since Jane was happy, what the hell? He left her an answer at the village's single phone.

The greeting had given him a notion. Hawaii didn't hold the sole version of the simple life. He had a friend in Northern California. The friend was at home and John spent an hour talking with him. He was mayor of a settlement of yeomen. These were not idealists but individualists, each farming his private land or operating his private service enterprise on lonely Cape Mendocino. Their origin had had its unpleasant aspects. Breakdown of public safety in too many areas, during the difficult years, had convinced too many families that they must be ready to defend themselves. Nonlethal weapons encouraged the trend. It proved to be symbolic more often than practical; but man lives by symbols.

Meanwhile, the concentration of agriculture in mechanized latifundia--the competition of synthetic foods, fibers and lumber substitutes--threw a vast acreage in the remoter parts of the country onto a pitiless market. Inflation favored the shrewd buyer. Then, when inflation had run its course, mass unemployment triggered the Freeman movement. Chip-on-the-shoulder self-reliance; the wish to escape from turbulence and taxes; available land; cheap, sophisticated means of living off it, without the toil and isolation of old-fashioned husbandry: These things brought forth the modern homesteaders.

By now, resentments had faded. The Freemen were merely another subculture. John and the mayor talked amicably. The mayor said yes, he'd ask around and try to estimate how many younger sons might be interested in working in New England for the reward of a spread there when farming became possible again. But would the Government agree? Wasn't the intention to create a set of national parks? John told him that wasn't incompatible with limited agriculture, which actually could help conservation. He'd propose the idea to the authorities, and if study showed that it had merit, Congress would consider revising the present master plan. The mayor invited John to visit. Hunting was good these days; the elk were coming back. John said he'd take a rain check and broke circuit.

He left the room for his adjoining office. He called it that from habit; it was really an information laboratory. The machines within it connected him to more than the public data-retrieval system. They gave him access to almost every memory bank and every type of computer in the world. He didn't own the facilities here; he rented them from IBM under a special license. Big business, big labor, Big Government had not vanished. The difference from the past was that no one was forced to depend on them.

What John did for the remainder of the afternoon can only be described in the paramathematical language of his specialty. In effect, he set the great interwoven system to retrieving and collating facts about his latest endeavor.

Around five, he knocked off. No matter how well trained, you grew fatigued from that intensity of concentration. Besides, scanning would proceed automatically for hours. Ironically, most of that period would be idle time. There were many programs as crucial as his. An inquiry must wait its turn in the crowded communication channels. Tomorrow he'd ride herd on the machines while they selected what was pertinent from the information they would have assembled for him. Thus, he would get a précis, not too enormous for him to study and comprehend. This would give him the basis for framing specific questions. His task would not be completed soon, nor would it be easy. But he felt pleased. A good start had been made. Because of him, forests would one day stand green again.

After a quick, refreshing round of tumbles, calisthenics and meditation, he called his girl. They got along wonderfully; of late, he'd considered proposing a formal one-year trial liaison. Tonight, though, he simply wanted some fun. She accepted his invitation to a smorgasbord and an evening of Chinese opera. She honestly enjoyed the luxuries he could buy, but with equal honesty wasn't interested in anything beyond basic credit for herself. Her poetry kept her too busy.

When he brought her home, landing his flitter in front of her prefab cabin on the cliffs above a moonlit Pacific, she suggested he spend the night. In the morning, on the cabin's deck, they watched the fading contrail of a rocket tender that had lifted from Armstrong Spacedrome out at sea and was climbing with supplies to the orbiting ship that would carry the first manned expedition to Saturn. They paid even closer attention to a troupe of wandering dancers, jugglers and minstrels strolling past on their way to a fiesta. And then John headed back to work.