Free Manshape by John Brunner Page A

almost see, a thing like a monstrous hoof crushing down: as against a rainbow, the fog-brown drabness of a real Bridge.
    Thorkild had suffered a breakdown. She did not like him very much, but she was obliged to respect him, and in a sense whoever held the Directorship of the Bridge System symbolised Earth’s grandest achievement. Was it to crumble because no one could be found to cope with an impossible task?
    Thorkild had suffered a breakdown. Although he had well concealed it until the final moment, so had Saxena. And his predecessor had retired owing to the unbearable strain and died over-young, and the person before her, and before him again, back to when there were only a dozen worlds in the System.
    To relate even that many planets in any constructive way was a task for the gods, or for heroes, and the gods were dead and the heroes all gone across the rainbow, and that left men and women. There were the handful (out of the whole species, how many thousand?) who could out-reason a computer over the span of a million-word program; of them, there were a few score who could define a planetary culture so that mindless machines could understand it. And then there were the people—nearly as few—who could use the tools the computers thereupon gave them. She was one. Jorgen was another. So was Laverne. Moses, too, for all his politician’s mannerisms: he was of the clan, whereas Shrigg was not, and made it plain that he resented the fact.
    Must everything ultimately devolve on a single person? Sometimes she suspected that might be so. She felt so lonely since losing Saxena…
    But, as she realised with a start, she actually wasn’t The group she was absently following had swollen toa horde, thousands strong, converging on Riger’s, where some of the plants had pink leaves and all the buildings were faced with a reddish resilient wood. She recognised how dense the throng must be because it was so rare for the computers to activate the crowd-control mechanisms which were among the few non-authentic aspects of these outworld-replica zones. The Earthsiders reacted automatically to the signal-lamps and the polite automatic requests which burred through the air; now and then she caught a snatch of conversation as someone explained to an off-world visitor what he or she was supposed to do in response.
    One ought probably to be proud of the fact that Earthsiders could now be in a crowd and not turn into a mob, thought Alida. But what else would one expect of those who bothered to come here? They, if anyone, must be admirers of the Bridge System. They must comprehend the problems that it posed…
    Did they? Did they realise how it had avalanched into existence the people who though they had incredible power were no longer as free as those beneath them—who did the work because the job was there, who had to undertake it because there was no one else who could?
    If so, why were so many of them gathering together to watch a preacher being bitten by a snake?
    The most discomfortable word in any language, Alida said to herself, must be
conscience
. It had pursued Jacob Chen beyond the gates of death; she was still inclined to shiver when she remembered the intensity with which he had declared his last will to the camera. Shrigg might hold all the inquiries he liked, as a man turns up wet stones to watch grubs writhe in the unfamiliar light of day. None, though they were to last a million years, could expose and define the soul of somebody like Chen.
    By now the crowd she was pressed among was overflowing the rim of the artificial amphitheatre at the heart of the Riger’s World section of the city. On every side people were laughing and joking, passing polychrome containers of liquor, offering other more exotic drugs from a dozen worlds to be swallowed or inhaled or rubbed into the mucous membranes. In the jostling melee she felt a man come close, and a hand inquired under her cloak. It would be meant as flattery, and had she stayed at