Carbide Tipped Pens Part 18

"So you don't know why me."

"It must have been her anger. I was merely the agent."

"I had konn with her and I have not felt any such effect."

"You had one konn. I had five."

"I didn't know."

"There are others who had long exposures. They had outbursts, too."

"Fights?"

"A few. Some extreme sports, too. All men. With women they would get drunk in bars and take men home. This among calm ordinary women who had never done any such thing. It caused a lot of damage."

"There is a cure?"

"There may be. I am under therapy but it is entirely experimental and ad hoc."

He did not seem like the old SanJi. He seldom smiled and when he did his mouth turned down, not up. Something had been taken out of him.

I did not want to ask him how it had been to be in that state. Maybe the nose was enough.

He looked at me a long time as we said nothing. He took a long breath of the warm air and said, "I used to agree with the great Minsky that it was degrading or insulting to say that somebody is a good person or has a soul. I felt that each person has built this incredibly complex structure, spent a lifetime doing it. We try to map and understand that. If you attribute such majestic structure to a magical pearl in the middle of an oyster that makes you good, that is trivializing a person. That keeps you from thinking of what's really happening."

"Um, yes."

"Now I am not so sure. There can be a pearl or a cinder of coal at the center. Which it is, that emerges from the whole elaborate structure around it."

"So it makes sense to say a person is evil. Maybe like Aliim."

"She is the cinder, yes."

I never saw her again.

But I did get a request for information on konn experiences. I wrote a description and was astonished to see them appear, not in a technical paper, but on Net sites where people went for advice and to consult on the burgeoning phenomenon of konn. I protested but my comments remained there and reportedly many read them.

I spent several years constructing my model. I specialized it to the neural anatomy of human emotion and got some success in predicting behaviors. It even held up well in a two-hundred-person clinical trial in Singapore.

I heard, about that time, what happened to Aliim. She had gone to Hong Kong to be a konn subject and had prospered until the neuvir effect turned up again. One of her subjects with the same k-fiber a.s.sociation transfer. The patient was a woman with considerable martial arts skills. She had gone to the sites where my comments appeared. I had made the mistake of naming Aliim there. She went to see Aliim, hired her, did considerable konn.

Just like SanJi the woman turned on Aliim. She came into Aliim's home and without a word began to beat her. Aliim did not know any fighting skills so the woman worked her over for hours. The Hong Kong police showed the in-home video. Aliim could not defend against the kicks, chops, neck blows, and head-b.u.t.ts. She died.

Had I known of such an effect? The Hong Kong police wanted to know. I related the SanJi incident. They knew it already because I had included it in my Net comments.

The police went away finally. After all I had done nothing beyond publishing comments, as requested.

There was no word about the foxy thing. I never saw another like it either.

I thought about her a lot then. There were other rumors about her but the big fact was the death. It always will be the big fact, now. Experimenting at the edge of knowledge can be wondrous but also fatal. Knowing that is our unique human condition. We know we will die and evolution gives us countless ways that make it happen.

Desires can kill you, too. When she came to my home and tried in her awkward way to seduce me I had not let desire rule me. So she had lost her edge that had come from the konn.

Desire can kill the very good and very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure they can bring you down as well, but there will be no special hurry. So in our pursuit of knowledge we scamper after those desires, much like her fox.

HABILIS.

Howard Hendrix

Is the universe left-handed? If so, why?

Hold up your hands before you and take a good look at them. What you are staring at is the most wonderful piece of biological engineering on Earth.

The human hand is the only one (on Earth) in which the thumb can touch the tips of each of the other four fingers. Only human hands can play the violin. Or throw a curveball.

Our hands developed before our brains did, as far as paleoanthropologists can determine. Did our supple hands lead to the development of our complex brains? And intelligence?

Howard Hendrix's tale of right-handedness and left-handedness is a complex, subtle examination of these questions. But what are the answers? Read on.

Driving my used but newly purchased Montjoy LoCat onto the fish hatchery grounds, I can hear the spatter of gravel, despite The Pharaoh and Denile's "Pi-Rat Love" blasting from the vehicle's Airpush speakers. The dusting of new snow on the road doesn't damp down the road noise much-just makes the gravel slicker, easier for me to fishtail sideways, a wannabe big fish in the small pond of Planet Dolores.

Ahead, beside the hatchery's ancient Sun Dog pickup, my boss Mark Kemper is standing, a wiry man with wiry hair. The s.p.a.ce around his head is wreathed in the steam of his breath hitting cold air and the smoke of the s.k.a.n.kweed stick he's huffing. Chill morning notwithstanding, he's wearing the same old two-pocket, lightweight ASGuard jacket he wore off world during the Knot War. He doesn't like wearing heavy coats, even in cold weather. The pockets bother him. Mark says a man with too many pockets soon finds he has too few hands.

The first time Mark told me the story of his lost and found hand, we were dressed in chest-high waders, sludging out Pond 7, removing the thick, foul-smelling organic muck we'd pressure-hosed from the bottom of the drained pond into the concrete-lined, boxlike depression-the "kettle"-at the pond's deepest point. The stinking stuff-a mix of mud, fish dung, debris, and detritus Mark called "c.r.a.pioca pudding"-was too thick for the pump to suction up, so we were shoveling the mucky dregs of it by hand from the kettle's bottom.

"I should have died when the Bots turned our own war AIs against us and drove us from Citadel Moon," Mark said. "My left hand was blown away, but that was among the least of my worries. I lay there, bleeding out from half a dozen wounds, among the dead and dying bodies of my comrades, in a dying s.p.a.ceship, with the Bots breaking through our last bulkhead."

I power the LoCat's pa.s.senger window down. Hearing the courtship ballad of Pi-rat Susie and Pi-rat Sam blaring from my speakers, Mark shakes his head. From beneath a mustache smoke-stained the color of rusted barbed wire, he flashes me a lopsided smile.

"A ground effector is not the kind of tuna boat I'd have chosen to drive," he says, thumping the Montjoy, "but that song reminds me of something-beyond the fact that it's ripped off from a two-hundred-year-old pop hit."

He elaborates no further, just opens the battered blue Sun Dog's driver-side door and gets in. I kill the LoCat's engine and the music and exit my vehicle.

"I think that's why I'm still alive," Mark said, glancing down at his complex prosthetic hand, then gazing at the s.p.a.ce above the message board in the office where we were taking our lunch break. "That there is why I'm still looking on the sunlight, instead of eternal night. Despite being captured by the Bots."

His gaze, I saw, had come to rest on the banner above the board. The banner was labeled with the digits 0 through 9. Next to them stood the twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet, capitals and smalls both, from Aa to Zz. The previous fish-hatchery manager had homeschooled her kids here, and the office retained something of the air of a cla.s.sroom about it.

"What? The numbers and letters?"

"Not just in themselves. The handedness of them, the chirality. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, recapitulates chirogeny, recapitulates cosmogeny. Or maybe cosmogony. The Bots seem to think it's the key to human difference, however you spell it."

"I don't follow you."

"Look at the ten numbers there, and hold out your right hand, palm facing away from you. Sixty percent of them-1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9-are right-handed, opening outward in the same direction your thumb and forefinger do from your right hand. Now hold out your left hand, palm away again. Twenty percent of the numbers-5 and 6-are left-handed. The remaining twenty percent-8 and 0-express mirror symmetry. You might call those numbers ambidextrous, since they face both directions and neither. See that?"

"I think so."

Opening the creaking door on the truck's pa.s.senger side and climbing in, I note the truck cab smells of beer and s.k.a.n.kweed again this morning, as it has every morning since Mark and his wife split up, six Doloresian months back.

The tale of the wreck of his marriage is Mark's second most oft-repeated story, and he keeps telling it, though by now he knows I know it by heart: Jinny was the high school sweetheart he married before he caught a NAFAL troopship to the up and out. Quirks of near-light-speed travel and time dilation being what they are, he aged only the two years of his tour fighting the Bots, while Jinny, planetside, aged the twelve years he was gone in her reference frame. She stayed with him five years after he came home, too. She'd long since grown up and grown away from him, though, even before she left, taking their little girl-the save-the-marriage baby that didn't-with her.

"Jinny treated every b.u.mp in the road as if it were a cliff," Mark says, always coming to the same point in his sifting of the wreckage. "I treated every cliff as if it were a b.u.mp in the road. We just couldn't make that work together, in the long run."

"I pa.s.sed out from blood loss, certain I would die," Mark said, standing knee-deep in kettle muck. He heaved a great shovelful of sludge into the wheelbarrow on the bank beside him. "Yet against all expectation I woke up again. Unsure how much time had pa.s.sed, with no memory of my Bot captivity, I found myself dumped out into s.p.a.ce, in an environment suit that couldn't sustain me for much longer. I wouldn't have bet on my chances just then, but against the odds I was spotted and picked up by a pa.s.sing cruiser-one of ours as luck or fate would have it. To this day I don't know whether the intent of my abandonment by the Bots was to be lost to my enemies, or to be found by my friends."

As we b.u.mp along toward the double sunrise, the Sun Dog's solar-electric motor is inaudible over the squeaking of the truck's bad shocks. We stop at the south end of the hatchery's easternmost pond-the coldest, Pond 1. Both it and Pond 2 have spotted graithlings in them. The other twenty ponds grow a few goldengills, but mostly they're full of slant-head minnows. All three species are sacrifice fish for the EnviroLab on the hill and its LC50 tests, which designate a heavy metal, a prionoid seed protein, or other water pollutant "toxic" when a given concentration of the substance proves lethal (within four hours) to fifty percent or more of the fish in the test population. Such tests were long ago banned as inhumane on Old Earth, but they're expedient on a frontier world like ours.

"Now look at the letters," Mark said, pointing at the banner at the back of the office. "Handedness is a bit more complicated for letters than for numbers. Hold out your left hand in front of you again, palm away, so you're looking at the back of the hand. Thumb spread away from the rest of the hand at about a ninety-degree angle. See what direction the thumb points? Capitals B, C, D, E, F, G, K, L, P, R, S-11 out of 26, or 42.3 percent of the alphabet-are left-handed, while only capitals J and Z-2 out of 26, or 7.7 percent of the alphabet-are right-handed. A, H, I, M, N, O, Q, T, U, V, W, X, Y-13 out of 26, or 50 percent-are ambidextrous, although I suppose you could argue Q trends left, and N is some kind of mirror-inverted. Got it?"

"OK..." I said, continuing to stare hard at the banner with its basic numbers and letters on the office wall, trying to puzzle through what he was saying.

"Good. Now, of the small letters, b, c, e, f, h, k, p, r, s-9 out of 26, or 34.6 percent-are left-handed, while a, d, g, j, q, y, z-7 out of 26, or 27 percent-are right-handed. The remaining small letters-10 out of 26, or 38 percent-are best described as ambidextrous."

I shook my head and whistled softly.

"You've obviously thought and calculated about this a lot, Mark-and those are interesting statistics-but, well, so what?"

"See, the Bots have never figured out what hand allows the Raveleras to weave and unweave s.p.a.ce-time around them," Mark said, moving the wheelbarrow for me to shovel muck into it, "because it's not something you can do by figuring. Not calculable. But that didn't stop my captors from giving me this hand."

"Any idea why they did that?"

"Many ideas-even if I don't remember when this alien hand joined the rest of my body. Maybe I've kept learning so much about all this, beyond my debriefing, because-despite the memory wipe-some faint trace of my time in Bot custody still persists in my head unconsciously, still keeps prodding me to try to puzzle it out. I don't know for certain, though. I can't explain, for instance, why I absolutely will not allow my faceless 'friends' in our merc-corp government to remove this hand from my body-for their 'research.' Not only because it's interwoven into me deep enough I might die in the process of that removal. I just refuse. That's annoyed the powers-that-be enough that I'm lucky even to have this s.h.i.t-shoveling fish hatchery job."

Mark shook his head and exhaled.

"So they think me a spy, and spy on me. Maybe they're not the only ones, either. Maybe Hivist turncoats are reporting on me back to their Bot masters, too. Who knows? Maybe you, too, without even knowing it, might be some kind of android designed by the Bots to be indistinguishable from a human being-and you're recording all this for some unseen audience."

He gave me a sly, sideways look. We laughed, but even in my own ears the laughter sounded forced.

At the northern end of each pond stands a spring box. We check the boxes all summer long for any cruncher turtles that, blundering onto the gapped planking atop the sunken concrete boxes and falling between the planks, might have gotten trapped down in the boxes themselves. This morning I doubt we'll find any of those nasty-tempered little dinosaurs. They don't move as much from pond to pond once the weather gets cool.

"'So what?'" Mark laughed and took a bite of his luncherito. "That's what I thought when I was debriefed, too. It took me a while to see it. But try to think like a curious kid for a minute. Notice that the right-handed forms are the most common forms for numbers, but the least common form for letters-both capitals and smalls."

"I see that, Mark. So maybe the differences in spatial orientation of numbers and letters are statistically significant. But are they truly significant? I don't see the context."

"Neither did I, at first. Maybe that's because the context is so big."

"In what way?"

He stared off into a s.p.a.ce I couldn't see into.

"People have probably realized that the brain is in two major parts-that it's in two chambers, or bicameral-for as long as they've been looking at the brains of their usually deceased fellow humans. A couple hundred years ago researchers started doing split-brain work with living epilepsy patients. They had the connections between the right and left hemispheres of their brains cut, in order to reduce their seizure symptoms. That research led to work on hemispheric dominance, cerebral lateralization-on the 'handedness' of human minds, if you like."

"And numbers and letters say something about that?" I asked, gesturing at the banner with my sandwich.

We decide not to check the spring boxes for wayward turtles after all, and focus instead on looking for the bank pi-rats. It's cold, but the ponds haven't iced over yet. We walk toward the north end of the first pond, each of us pacing a sh.o.r.eline. As we go along we check the long-spring leg hold traps we've staked into the bank and set for the 'rats, near their burrow entrances. We look for traps whose chains have been run out from the bank, to the deeper water, indicating that a foot-clamped ratty, big as a midsize dog, has most likely dragged the device and itself into that depth and drowned.

Together Mark and I pushed the wheelbarrow up the bank, toward the lowered bed of the Sun Dog. It took everything we had to lever up the handles on the barrow and tilt its load of sludge into the truck.

"This hand is a souvenir," Mark said, as we took a breather. "A scar I can't hide but don't want to lose. A reminder of the Bots' investigation into the interweaving of hands and minds-a crude experiment, for all the magnificent crafting that went into this. No prosthetic that humans have developed can match the nanomechanics of it. I think that's one reason why the military bra.s.s still want this hand-so they can reverse-engineer it. I've let them examine its workings, again and again, but I draw the line at letting them try to sever it from my body. They'd love to disconnect it from me the same way the Bots connected it to me: without my permission."