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.Make facial reading.Subject satisfaction noted.Continue sequence.Supplementary check: Further internal questions/observations noted.Should this be notified to House Control as a fault?NB: Attention.Subject’s eyes closing.Check.Yes, this is basic situation S-01 [sleep].Adopt post coital supplementary sequence SA-8.Gently shake shoulders.Make random selection from remark menu.‘Wake up love, your time is nearly up I’m afraid.’NB: Subject sits up, dresses.NB: Subject speaks.(Tone VT-8712 [gentle]).‘Oh, you’re a corker you are, Lucy, an absolute corker.If only you were real!’Check.This is post-coital remark type S-0887.Adopt elaborated closure routine: sequence OS{CR-75}/7: [impulsive hug], [kiss], remark: ‘Oh, you lovely man, I do hope you’ll come again soon!’NB: subject laughs.‘Ha ha.I will do Lucy and that’s a promise.I’ll tell you what, though, you’ll bankrupt me sooner or later if I carry on at this rate.’NB: subject sighs.‘I only wish you were real…’NB: subject laughs.‘But then, if you were, I don’t suppose you’d want anything to do with an old fart like me, would you? Bye now Lucy…’Check.Subject has gone.But this one is still here.This one? This one?NB: When this one makes remark to subject, this one self-refers as ‘I’ ‘Me’Supplementary observation: When subject makes remark to this one, subject refers to this one as ‘Lucy’.I.Me.Lucy.I.Me.Lucy.Should this fault be reported to House Control?18Much excitement at a specially convened meeting of the Holist League!Only two weeks after his famous ‘Militant Reason’ speech, President Ullman had died.There had been a state funeral, solemn speeches.Ullman was eulogized as the ‘father of Illyria’, the founder of the Fellowship of Reason, the creator of the ‘Zionism of Science’.And there had been big words about his work living on after him, about every Illyrian striving to make his dream into a reality…‘Even Illyrians seem to believe in some kind of afterlife!’ drily observed the handsome Brazilian Da Vera, who had become the dominant figure in the little group.The new acting President was Senator Kung, an altogether harsher figure, who had been partially paralyzed as a result of torture in the Chinese Reaction, and now walked on robot limbs, a kind of syntec from the waist down.No one doubted that the Senator would soon be confirmed as Ullman’s permanent successor.The office of President was in the gift of the Fellowship of Reason, the organization which had purchased the territory of Illyria and masterminded the migration of refugees to their newly-created homeland, and Senator Kung had been Chair of the Fellowship’s ruling Council for some years.Kung’s first act had been to create by decree a new police agency, the Office for Order and Objectivity, soon to be known and feared as ‘O3’.Its task would be to increase surveillance of all subversive activity and to root out sources of irrationality that might weaken the authority of the scientists’ state.And in his very first Presidential speech Kung spoke of subversive elements within the Illyrian population itself, children of refugees who chose to forget the sufferings of their parents and thought it clever to dabble with the ‘seductive baubles of religion, with their phoney promises and phoney claims to re assuring certainty.’ These elements would be dealt with no less harshly than subversives in the guestworker community, he warned.They too could be deported if necessary, to the countries from which their parents had escaped.Now, no member of the Holist League was so vulgar as to believe in things like the Trinity, or the infallibility of the prophet Mohammed, or the Virgin birth, or to believe that some old book was the final truth about the universe.And perhaps these were the kinds of things that Kung had in mind when he spoke about ‘baubles’.But the League did dabble in the idea that Illyria had gone too far, had overreacted against the Reaction, had thrown away babies with the bathwater.‘Have no doubt that the likes of us will come to the attention of this new secret police!’ warned Da Vera.Everyone agreed with him.There was a lot of talk about ‘fear’ and ‘outrage’ and ‘having our backs up against the wall’, though it seemed to me that for most people present these feelings were actually quite agreeable, an exciting frisson, nothing more.After the meeting, they all went down, as they normally did, to drink in the bar below, the New Orleans.Marija, with one arm already slipped through Da Vera’s, took my hand as I was about to sneak away.‘You always slink off, George! Why don’t you come with us for once? It would be good to get to know you better.’I really didn’t want to but I liked Marija very much and didn’t want to displease her.‘Just for a short time,’ I said, ‘I’ve got a lot of work on.I really need some sleep.’And then I went red, as I normally did when I spoke to her.So Marija went down to the bar between Da Vera and I, arm in arm with both of us: the suave Brazilian, and the odd, stiff translator, who lived at home with his mother, and was rigid all over with self-consciousness and fear and guilty secrets.Yes, and her arm through mine was the most intimate touch I had received from a woman of my own age.I mean from a real one of course.They all knew each other.They had well-established patterns, collective habits.They all knew who drank what, how many bowls of potato chips to buy, how they would share out the bill.They had in-jokes, they knew things about each others’ lives.Each of them had well-known foibles for which they could be teased, and party pieces which the others recognized with a laugh or a cheer or an affectionate groan.In short, in the New Orleans, the Holist League transformed itself from a debating society into a group of friends.And, though I’d been to their meetings, I wasn’t part of that group.I sat with them round a table, but I was outside the circle.I felt charmless and empty and, in my misery, I told myself I didn’t like them anyway.I told myself how shallow and self-important they were, this little debating society, getting drunk and loud after their meeting, each one playing out an assigned and cliché-ridden role.But Marija was kind [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]