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“Then what’s holding you back, for Christ’s sake?”
Bickel swallowed. He found it required increasing effort to hold his attention on an unbroken thread of reasoning where it concerned bringing the Ox to consciousness. There was a sensation of swimming against a stiff current.
With what kind of a mirror can consciousness look at itself? he wondered. How can the Ox say: “This is myself?” What will it see?
“Human nervous systems have the same kinds of irregularities and imperfections,” Timberlake said. “Their properties vary statistically.”
Bickel nodded agreement. Timberlake was right. That was the reason they had introduced random error into the Ox—statistical imperfection.
“You worrying about pulse regulation?” Timberlake asked.
Bickel shook his head. “No.” He put his palm against a plastic-encased neuron block protruding from the Ox. “We’ve got a homeostat whose main function is dealing with errors—with negative reality. Consciousness is always looking at the back side of whatever confronts us, always staring back at us.”
“You’ve left the gaps in it so it’ll need us,” Timberlake said. “You’re fussed about threshold regulation.”
Bickel looked at Timberlake, thinking: Threshold? Yes, that was part of it. The brain cells and peripheral neurons in a human tied together so that their differences averaged out. You got the effect of smooth gradation. The effect. Illusion.
“We’re missing something,” Bickel muttered.
Timberlake wondered at the fear in Bickel’s voice, the way the man’s head turned from side to side like a caged animal.
“If this thing takes off on its own, we have no control over it,” Bickel said. “Raj is right.”
“Raj’s Golem stories!” Timberlake sneered.
“No,” Bickel was fearfully serious. “This thing has new kinds of memories. They have only the vaguest relationship to human memories. But memories Tim—the nerve gets stacked in psychospaces—they’re the patterns that create behavior. What’s this thing going to do when we turn it on … if we don’t give it experiences of the kind the human race has survived?”
“You don’t know what the racial traumas are and that’s where you’re hung up.”
The voice was Flattery’s, and they looked up to the overhead screen to see him sitting still half-cocooned in his action couch and rubbing sleep from his eyes. Beyond him, Prudence maintained her vigil at the big board as though that were the only thing concerning her.
Bickel suppressed a feeling of irritation with Flattery. “You’re the psychiatrist. Isn’t knowledge of trauma supposed to be one of your tools?”
“You’re asking about racial trauma,” Flattery said. “We can only guess at racial trauma.”
Flattery stared out of the screen at Bickel, thinking: John’s panicky. Why? Because the Ox suddenly started acting on its own?
“We have to bring this thing into being,” Bickel said, looking at the Ox. “But we can’t be sure what it is. This is the ultimate stranger. It can’t be like one of us. And if it’s different … yet alive and aware of its aliveness …”
“So you start casting around in your mind for ways to make it more like us,” Flattery said.
Bickel nodded.
“And you think we’re the products of our racial and personal trauma?” Flattery asked. “You don’t think consciousness is the apparent effect of a receptor?”
“Dammit, Raj!” Bickel snapped. “We’re within a short leap of solving this thing! Can’t you feel that?”
“But you wonder,” Flattery said, “are we making a creature that’ll be invulnerable … at least invulnerable to us?”
Bickel swallowed.
“You think,” Flattery went steadily on, “this beast we’re creating has no sexual function; it can’t possibly be like us. It has no flesh; it can’t possibly know what flesh fears and loves. So now you’re asking: How do we simulate flesh and sex and the racial sufferings through which humans have blundered? The answer’s obvious: We can’t do this. We don’t know all our own instincts. We can’t sort the shadows and reflections out of our history.”
“We can sort out some of them,” Bickel insisted. “We have an instinct to … win … to survive for …” He wet his lips with his tongue, looked around at the computer wall.
“Perhaps that’s only hubris,” Flattery said. “Maybe this is just monkey curiosity and we won’t be satisfied until we’ve been creators the way God’s a creator. But then it may be too late to turn back.”
As though he hadn’t heard, Bickel said. “And there’s the killer instinct. That one goes right down into the slime where it was kill or be killed. You can see the other side of it all the time in our instinct to play it safe … to be practical’.”
He has done something secret, Flattery thought. What has Bickel done? He has done something he’s afraid of.
“And guilt feelings are grafted right onto that killer instinct,” Bickel said. “That’s the buffer … the way we keep human behavior within limits. If we implant …”
“Guilt involves sin,” Flattery said. “Where do you find in either religion or psychiatry a need for sin?’
“Instinct’s just a word,” Bickel said. “And we’re a long way from the word’s source. What is it? We can raise fifty generations of chickens from embryo to chick in test tubes. They never see a shell. But the fifty-first generation, raised normally under a hen, still knows to peck its way out.”
“Genetic imprint,” Flattery said.
“Imprint.” Bickel nodded. “Something stamped on us. Stamped hard. Oh, we know. We know these instincts without ever bringing them to consciousness. They’re what lower our awareness, make us angry, violent, passionate …” Again, he nodded.
What has he done? Flattery asked himself. He’s panicky because of it. I have to find out!
“The Cain-and-Abel syndrome,” Bickel said. “Murder and guilt. It’s back there someplace … stamped inside us. The cells remember.”
“You haven’t the vaguest idea what you’re saying,” Flattery accused. “You’re separating positive and negative pairs, confusing moral judgments with reasoning, reversing the normal course of—”
“Reversing!” Bickel pounded. “That’s what I was trying to think of—reversing. The ability to turn pleasure into pain or pain into pleasure … that’s a part of consciousness we haven’t—”
“That’s sickness,” Flattery said.
“The power to be sane is also the power to go mad,” Bickel said. “Your own words!”
Flattery stared out of the screen at him, caught up short by this turn of the argument … and a sudden suspicion about what Bickel could have done.
“You know,” Timberlake said, speaking in a low, reasonable tone, “if an instinct is something to which the whole system must refer in a moment of stress, that’s something like a computer’s trapping function mated to a supervisory program.”
“We’re beyond the point of engineering and have been for some time,” Flattery said.
“Right back where we started from,” Bickel agreed. “We can duplicate synapses with unijunction transistors; juggle conduction rate and absolute refractory periods by choice of pseudoneuron fibers, fit our neural networks with multiplying and inhibitory endbulbs at will … but, in the end, we always come up against that inescapable question …”
“How do you control what must remain beyond control? I’ve already told you. Love.”
“You don’t control it,” Bickel declared. “You merely aim it … and the aiming device has to be instincts. As you say, Raj, it must love us, be loyal to us. But does that mean it will worship us? Are we to be its gods? And if it’s to be loyal, does that mean it has to have a conscience? Can there be loyalty without a conscience? And can it have a conscience without experiencing guilt?”
“Guilt’s a prison!” Flattery protested. “You can’t imprison a free—”
“Who says it has to be free?” Bickel demanded. “You’re arguing
against yourself! That’s the whole damned idea: How do we control it? When you come right down to it: Am I free? Are you?”
Flattery glared at him.
“We’re instinct-ridden, conscience-ridden bits of protoplasm,” Bickel said.
“What instincts?” Flattery asked.
“You sound like a damn broken record!” Bickel snapped. “What instincts? You can’t trace the instincts! Well, for one thing, we’ve an instinct to kill—to kill and eat. We don’t really give one particle of a damn where we get our energy—not down there in the psychic basement we don’t.”
“If it were only that simple,” Flattery said.
“When you get below stairs it is,” Bickel said. “I don’t need a doctorate in psychiatry to tell me what I’d do if the veneer were stripped off.”
“You’d revert to the savage, eh? To the animal!”
“To find out what’s engineered into the system, you’re damn right I would! What the hell have you head doctors been studying all these years with your dreams and your complexes and your Christ? You’ve trapped yourselves into an endless formal dance with fixed postures and … Christ! You remind me of a pack of fops doing the minuet!”
“We’ve employed reverence and caution to approach God in Man,” Flattery said. “You don’t gouge into the human psyche with an egg beater and stir up all the—”
