Part 18 (1/2)

”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 publis.h.i.+ng 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.ces.h.i.+p, with the Bots breaking through our last bulkhead.”