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say,  I can t vote and I can t own property and if I m too old or ugly I m
doomed to be a nurse or a schoolteacher for the rest of my life. And here you
are, a man, telling me I m supposed to be self-reliant and independent, that
we ve got this brave new South here, but even you have to treat me like a
little girl. Then she gently closed the door, a gesture which startled Gene
because it was not the slam one expected from a child, or from a Confederate
princess.
He was still wondering what he should do about Shelby when the contract girl
out front asked permission to go home for the evening, adding that a Mr.
Charleston Holder was here.
 I feel as though I m here to sell you something, Holder said, removing a
folder from his briefcase and passing it to Gene. Night had fallen; the quad
outside the office window was dark and quiet, as was the rest of the building,
save for the lone contract janitor swishing his mop in the hall.
 Is there a problem with that?
Holder shrugged.  I was raised to believe that a gentleman didn t solicit
business. It would come to him in the natural order of things. He smiled
again, all charm.  Yet your father is a salesman, and a very successful one,
too, from what Shelby says 
 But he s no gentleman, Gene said, irritated again at Holder s
immersion there was no other word in Tyler family matters.  We shouldn t
pursue that subject or I ll have to call you out whether I love my father or
not.
 I meant no offense. I m unused to working outside normal channels. Gene
doubted that this was even remotely true, but chose not to argue the point.
The best parts of his own life were outside normal channels.  What I ve given
you, Holder said, getting back to business,  is a
report on what is, forgive me, D.C.D. s most closely held and radical
research: the creation of life itself.
For a man unused to the crass protocols of business, Holder knew just how
obtrusive he could be and still allow Gene to understand what he was reading.
The only words he honestly heard were  radical and  creation. What he saw
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before him was a memorandum describing the design and construction of
microscopic creatures called, in what must have been some lab technician s
idea of a joke,  federals.
Federals were originally cousins to planaria and other relatively simple
organisms whose genetic material had been altered to give them greater
 intelligence and, more interestingly, mobility, thus removing them from the
kingdom of the protozoans, making them animals.
 This sounds like a fascinating discovery. I would have thought it would take
millions of federal  years to accomplish that sort of evolution.
 I believe that it did, Holder said, reaching for the memo and flipping ahead
several pages.
 A generation of federals is born, grows up, and dies in only a few minutes.
And though there s no indication in this document, the project has been going
on since 1939.
Fifty years ago the United States had been involved in the disastrous World
Wide War against the German States and their allies. Although the Confederacy
had maintained a public neutrality, Southern sympathies were clearly with
their Northern brothers, and many Confederate companies supplied arms and
materials to U.S. armies. Gene knew that D.C.D. s first differential
calculators had been employed to that end. And the McCarran Pharmaceutical
Company, later acquired by D.C.D. to become its bio division, was rumored to
have been involved in the search for chemical weapons.  These things aren t
dangerous, are they?
 Well, they have been kept under wraps for a long time, Holder said, as if
that were sufficient answer.
 This is fascinating information, Gene said,  but I m afraid I don t know
what I can do with it. He slid the memo back to Holder, who pinned it in
place with his hand.
 Please correct me if I m wrong, but didn t you say that the problem with the
Deconstruction process is that it lacks a means of testing?
 Yes. Gene was vaguely irritated now. For a moment he had been able to think
of Holder as just another suit; now he was remembering that he would soon be
his brother-in-law. Before the irritation could surface, however, another
thought did: the missing link. Means of testing.  Oh,
was all he could say.
Holder was smiling.  How big is this federal population? Gene said, reaching
for the memo with a bit more vigor.
 There are several discrete populations, Holder said,  but I don t think
you d have any trouble putting together a single group numbering, say, a
hundred million individuals.
 Which is a number far greater than the population of the United States and
Confederacy in
1863 . . . dear God.
 I don t ordinarily approve of blasphemy, Holder said,  but in this case,
it s highly appropriate, don t you agree?
To be the Almighty Himself ruling a microcosmic world!  Don t say another
word.
Project Deconstruction was relatively small as D.C.D. enterprises went. At its
peak no more than three dozen employees were charged to its budget. With the
cutback in funding and other
reductions due to staff vacations, there were only about fifteen people who
would have the faintest interest in what Gene was doing. And of those fifteen,
only three had authority over him.
Four of those who did not gathered in Gene s office the next morning as he
explained what he wanted them to do. They were all graduate students in
differential sciences and largely true to the stereotype: extraordinarily
pale, uniformly bespectacled, deliberately ill-fed, and unusually intelligent.
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The only one who deviated was Stashower, a red-haired farmboy from Nashville
whose utter and complete self-absorption was the only thing that kept Gene s
more predatory instincts in check. That and his resolve never to fish off the
company pier.
Stashower was the first to see the possibilities.  Jesus, Gene, we ve been
beating our heads against this
how-do-we-simulate-organic-life-in-a-differential? shit for two years! If we
can record the growth, death, and migration patterns of a hundred million
federals, we ll increase the memes in our own model by a factor of ten
thousand.
One of the others, a bearded boy from the red clay country, joined in. He was
eager to get to work on the transition models.  We can start out just
arbitrarily assigning certain values to federal activities, then keep
crunching them over and over again until we match Real Life.
They were all out of their chairs now, sketching systems on the board.
 Gentlemen, gentlemen! Gene said.  I hate to interrupt, but permit me a
boring management kind of query:
When can it be ready and how much will it cost?
 Two months, Stashower said, with his charming Yankee naiveté,  and you re
going to spend twice as much in differential time charges. Gene nodded,
mentally doubling the estimates again. He didn t need a Deconstruction program
to tell him that Stashower tended to underestimate such matters.
The meeting broke up. Gene was proud of them, but his pride was tempered by
annoyance at the speed with which they absorbed the new idea. Their new energy
and their prior lack of protest made it clear that at the age of twenty-five
he was already too old for creative work.
II
On the Fourth of July, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln made a surprise visit [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]