"Lady, you must think I'm the poster sim for stupidity," I said with more feeling than originality.
"Not at all, Dr. Carter, not one bit. We simply believe that this is your best option, your only reasonable alternative. Wouldn't passing the Arboli Test be nicer than, say, living behind bars for the next twenty-five to forty years?"
"Passing the test, sure. What are the odds of that happening? So far--let's see ... five? Yeah, five goddamn geniuses have tried for the Reward. Where are they today? As I recall, three are in some new breed of coma; one gibbers and drools. Oh yeah. Number five lucked out: she died."
"According to our information, you're a genius yourself, Doctor."
"If you worship tests. Me, I don't trust tests, IQ or the Arboli version. Even if I did, I don't bat in the same
league as those five brilliant imbeciles who've already flushed their superior brains down the toilet."
Beth Robinson's image on my monitor flickered, an annoying and persistent problem in using secured cybergrid channels. A bloodlink was supposed to guarantee privacy, but what it really guaranteed was aggravation. I snatched a pencil and slid it under the light-cuff on my left wrist. Couldn't reach quite far enough to reach the itch, but I did manage to break off the sharpened lead at the tip. Wonderful. The tiny chunk of graphite was improbably uncomfortable and I couldn't remove it without breaking the connection.
"You're forgetting something, Doctor." For a few disconcerting seconds, I was seeing two Beth Robinson's, two thin women in their late thirties with ebony skin, large brown eyes, carmine lipstick, and auburn business wigs. The pencil lead was screwing with the signal. Some checksum cop kicked in, the images coalesced, and only one Executive Director of HIMSA remained, her face as patient as a meditating cow.
Robinson was following the latest fad in executive offices: nudity. I suppose the idea is to visually demonstrate that Really Important People running major corporations have nothing to hide. Look! Nothing up my sleeve, nothing down my shirt....
I didn't give one damn. She wasn't pretty enough to interest me or ugly enough to scare me. Clothes or not, I wasn't buying what she was selling.
"Just what am I forgetting, Ms. Robinson?" Not that I cared.
"Your Arboli Profile."
"That load of superstitious crap?" The Tree-people look everywhere for portents. Everywhere. I'd heard rumors that they were busy learning such important human sciences as reading tealeaves, interpreting tarot cards, and phrenology.
"You may consider the Profile superstition and perhaps I agree. The point is that the Arboli believe it. Your Profile is among the highest on record. Do you realize how few people are ranked in your category? Not even a handful. As a result, you'll only have to pass two tests to claim the Reward, not five or six like we lesser mortals."
The Tree-people would analyze a photograph of a person's face by making thousands of careful and meaningless measurements of facial features. Supposedly, they created an elaborate graph based on such telling information as nose-size to mouth-width ratio. The bogus graph was the Profile.
The Tree-people had requested and received pictures of practically every living human on our primitive little planet. If the World Census Bureau reported someone's existence and couldn't dig up a current photo, the Arboli would try to find the individual and take their own picture. This lunacy was serious business among the Tree-people. It's sad, but a lot of humans are beginning to take it seriously as well.
"The Profile is a crock."
"But yours is so high--"
"Yeah, I'm the damn clapper at the far end of the bell-curve. So what?"
"Dr. Carter, I'm authorized to offer you a carrot in addition to the stick--I wish I could see you better. Are you aware that your scanner is aimed too high?"
"Sorry about that. Mine's built into my monitor and I'll have to take the monitor apart to realign it." Right now, she should be looking at some un-brushed dark-blond hair and perhaps the very top of my forehead. I hoped my forehead wasn't giving away my grin.
"Well, you should get it fixed. I like to see the person I'm dealing with."
I bet you do.
)
