Free The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner Page B

almost innocent of muscle, and no legs. It rested in a system of supports that held its overlarge head upright, and it looked at him with an expression of indescribable jealousy. It was like a thalidomide parody of a little girl.
    Portly, affable, Bosch chuckled at his visitor’s reaction. “That’s Miranda,” he explained, dropping into his own chair. “Go ahead, stare all you like. She’s used to it—or if she isn’t by now, then she’s damned well going to have to get used to it.”
    “What. …?” Words failed him.
    “Our pride and joy. Our greatest achievement. And you’re accidentally privileged to be among the first to know about it. We’ve kept her very quiet because we didn’t know how much input she could stand, and if we’d let even the faintest hint leak out people would have been standing on line from here to the Pacific, demanding a chance to meet her. Which they will, but in due time. We’re adjusting her to “the world by slow degrees, now we know she really is a conscious being. Matter of fact, she probably has at least an average IQ, but it took us a while to figure out a way of letting her talk.”
    Staring, hypnotized, Nickie saw that a sort of bellows mechanism was pumping slowly in and out alongside her shrunken body, and a connection ran from it to her throat.
    “Of course even if she hadn’t survived this long she would still have been a milestone on the road,” Bosch pursued. “Hence her name—Miranda, ‘to be wondered at.’ ” He gave a broad grin. “We built her! That’s to say, we combined the gametes under controlled conditions, we selected the genes we wanted and shoved them to the right side during crossover, we brought her to term in an artificial womb—yes, we literally built her. And we’ve learned countless lessons from her already. Next time the result should be independently viable instead of relying on all that gadgetry.” An airy wave.
    “Right, to business. I’m sure you don’t mind her listening in. She won’t understand what we’re talking about, but she’s here, as I said, to accustom her to the idea that there are lots of people in the world instead of just three or four attendants taking care of her. According to the computers you want a fast rundown on …”
    Mechanically Nickie explained the reason for his visit, and Bosch obliged him with the titles of a dozen useful recent papers on relevant subjects. He barely heard what was said. When he left the office he stumbled rather than walked back to his room.
    Alone that night, and sleepless, he asked himself a question that was not on the program, and agonized his way to its answer.
    Consciously he was aware that not everyone would have displayed the same reaction. Most of his friends would have been as delighted as Bosch, stared at Miranda with interest instead of dismay, asked scores of informed questions and complimented the team responsible for her.
    But for half his life before the age of twelve, for six of his most formative years, Nickie Haflinger had been more furniture than person and willy-nilly had been forced to like it.
    As though he had come upon the problem in a random test of the type that formed a standard element in his education—training people to be taken by surprise and still get it right was an integral part of Tarnover thinking—he saw it, literally saw it, in his mind’s eye. It was spelled out on the buff paper they used for “this section to be answered in terms of the calculus of morality,” marking it off from the green used for administration and politics, the pink for social prognostication, and so on.
    He could even imagine the style of type it was printed in. And it ran:
    Distinguish between (a) the smelting of ore which could have become a tool in order to make a weapon and (b) the modification of germ plasm which might have been a person in order to make a tool. Do not continue your answer below the thick black line.
    And the answer, the hateful horrible