Brian Aldiss - Enemies of the System

As she watched and listened to him speaking, Sygiek thought that she and Dulcifer could never be compatible. He was as small and dark as she was tall and pale. He was thickset, with massive shoulders; his every movement expressed energy. The irises of his eyes were a dark sea-blue, rolling between black fringes of eyelash. His dark hair was sparse, and clung close to his square skull. She was aware as she watched the movements of his clearly defined lips of a disturbance within her, a disturbance chased by the reflection, ‘He regards Kordan and me merely as two standard products of the System, without minds of our own…’

‘To speak of idleness as a reward can lead swiftly to incorrect thinking, isn’t that so, Jerezy? Idleness can be no different on this planet from what it is anywhere in the System: a trap, a bait for deviationist ideas. How can those properties change? Creative idleness is a different matter.’

A hostess, rosy of cheek, with long legs and a warm smile, came down the aisle of the bus, pausing to exchange a word with everyone. She was trim in her red uniform; most of the tourists wore sloppy-maos.

‘Are you enjoying the primitive landscape?’ she asked. ‘Isn’t it charmingly undeveloped? What an inspiring symbol of potential.’

‘Yes,’ said Dulcifer. ‘And at the same time we’re exercising our minds like good utopianists with an argument about the nature of idleness.’

Takeido and Regentop had been listening from the seat in front. The former turned and said to Dulcifer, ‘You seem to lack a little data, utopianist. You see, idleness is a physiological malfunction. It’s mistaken to treat it as a quality of mind, when injections can cure it as soon as it manifests itself.’

As he spoke, he kept glancing at Kordan to see how he was taking this speech.

A bureaucrat by the name of Georg Morits leant across the aisle and said vehemently, ‘You’re right there, but let me remind you that idleness is still sometimes manifested as a mental quality in unfortunate throw-backs to homo sapiens . I know. I have to deal with quite a few committals of that sort of person, in my line of business. I’m in an office in Moscow, you know. The city of cities.’ They did know. This dull person had been boasting during the banquet of how beautiful it was in Moscow, an old city which had been the capital of the first communist state and many times rebuilt. ‘You can be legally charged with being a homo sapiens , you know. It’s in the statute banks now.’

‘Not on Venus, it isn’t,’ said Dulcifer, sturdily. ‘That’s like charging an animal with the offence of being an animal.’

They made no response to that. They knew all about Venus, and the devolutionary tendencies of Iridium City.

‘We are straying from the point. If I could remind you of the historical background to this argument –’ Kordan began; but Sygiek cut him off, saying, ‘Shall we just forget this silly discussion?’

Kordan looked hurt, but Dulcifer said, smiling to remove the sting from his remark, ‘You are too repressive for vacation-time, Utopianist Millia Sygiek! I’d like to hear what your companion was going to say. Frankly, scenery bores me – but I’ve never lost interest in my fellow human beings.’

Warmth rose in Sygiek’s cheeks. She turned a gaze on him which would have melted iridium but she said nothing.

‘I was merely going to say – for the sake of the historical record – that those early genetic engineers who established homo uniformis , Man Alike Throughout, were the –’

‘Forgive me, Academician Kordan, but I am in technoeugenics, working on the Central Council,’ said Jaini Regentop, giving him her polite smile, ‘and you are not correct in your phraseology. Those genetic engineers were merely instruments of change in the great progression from homo sapiens to homo uniformis ; they took orders. First had to come the immortal work of physiologists and the great endotomists – ’

‘Jaini, you should not interrupt Jerezy Kordan,’ said Takeido. ‘He is an Academician.’

‘Then he will understand. Between them,’ said Regentop, adopting something of Kordan’s lecturing manner, and addressing her remarks mainly to him, ‘the endotomists established the fact that man’s physiological structure comprised three governance systems which were in conflict. Owing to the rapid evolutionary development of man from animal, those governance systems were not entirely compatible. We might in the same way complain of a machine that it was faulty because it contained too much wiring. The problem was one of efficiency.’

Kordan nodded and looked bored, but Regentop pressed on.

‘The great endotomists and physiologists developed a method whereby those governance systems could be developed into one harmonious super-system. The three governance systems I refer to, by the way, were known as Central Nervous System, primarily a motor system, Autonomic Nervous System, primarily a sensual system, and Neocortex, primarily a thought system.

‘To develop this more reliable super-system, the bio-shunt was introduced. As you probably know, the bio-shunt – there’s been a lot of talk about it in this anniversary year – is an in-built processor which phases out much of the activity of the old autonomic nervous system or renders it subject to the direct control of the thought system. An obvious example is the penile erection, once an involuntary act.

‘I frequently impress on my classes that the bio-shunt is the very basis of our great utopia. It has banished the emotional problems which always plagued homo sapiens . Wars, religions, romantic love, mental illness – all manifestations of outmoded physiological systems.’

‘This is what I mentioned earlier, Millia,’ Kordan said heavily to Sygiek. ‘Please continue, Jaini Regentop, if you so wish. You express yourself well.’

She nodded in humility. ‘It is my duty to express myself well when speaking of so supreme an achievement. Rationality was something poor homo sapiens could never achieve. He was divided against himself physiologically. Therefore he was also divided against himself mentally and socially and politically and – well, in every way conceivable. He could not devise a stable society as we have done. Division was his lot.’

Her voice took on a quieter note. ‘Division was his lot. Yet sapiens had vision, too. Yes, he even visualised Utopia, the perfect place.

‘And, in an ironic way, he achieved Utopia in the end, though it meant his extinction. When his physiotechnicians and early endotomists invented the whole principle of Biological Communism – the theory behind the bio-shunt itself – then it became possible to rationalise the inharmonious governance systems genetically, passing on the improvement to succeeding generations. Through chromosome microsurgery, sapiens did away with all manner of systemic weakness – thus eliminating himself and ushering in a virtual new race. A race without absurd evolutionary flaws. A race truly capable of establishing Utopia. In a word, us. Homo uniformis , Man Alike Throughout.’

They regarded each other’s faces, smiling reflectively.

‘And what has this ancient tale to do with idleness, except that it is itself an idle tale by now?’ asked Dulcifer.

‘It’s the birth tale of the World State, no less,’ said Sygiek, frowning.

‘Jaini Regentop has just explained,’ Takeido said to Dulcifer. ‘Idleness was an old sapiens weakness. It sprang from a lack of purpose, no doubt – from internal confusion. There’s no physiological reason for idleness in these enlightened days, utopianist. We’ve conquered it.’