Read Savant for Free Online Page B

including Service Central, and proved impossible to solve. The situation at the College became progressively worse, and culminated in a stand-off between East and West. Sensibilities and prejudices through centuries of back-biting and in-fighting had caused a rift that could not be solved by shared education alone.
    Ironically, the College did not have an Active in residence at the time of the collapse, and, for the most part, the Masters, who had very little interest in political and cultural differences, were oblivious to what was going on.
    There would never be another Meltdown, but, to prevent it, the College was dismantled, wholesale. The oldest of the Masters were retired, with their Companions and Assistants, and, those that could be, were re-assigned. Some took years to settle in their new positions, and others never managed it, and were, eventually, put out to pasture. The Service team was broken up, and all members re-assigned to Colleges close to their birthplaces, some returning to the Colleges where they had been to School.
    At that point, it was decided that, as far as possible, all College inhabitants should be local, and any new Colleges should be populated slowly, over a number of years. It also became clear that trying to move Masters from one College to another was all but impossible, and the rules were changed so that Masters could not be moved without their express permission; it was understood that the very nature of Masters meant that this was extremely unlikely ever to happen.
    There was always a free-flow of ideas across the World, especially where education was concerned. Masters, and particularly Actives, did not understand prejudice, and connected only at a cerebral level. They might not be able to make eye-contact, or answer a combination question, but they could share ideas and information at an incredibly esoteric level with complete strangers, without any thought of prejudice.
    Their social currency was ideas, not religion, routine, habit, custom, dress, or basic education, and, as such, their prejudices were limited. They felt nothing for those who did not communicate ideas back and forth with them, neither good nor bad.

 

    Chapter Eight
     
     
    P ITU 3 WAS still pressing his Service button between his thumb and forefinger when Metoo arrived six minutes after he had first taken hold of it. She would have been quicker, but Named Operator Strazinsky had no precedent for making his next decision; his adrenalin was flowing, and he had almost no concrete information. It took him four minutes to make his move.
    His station was reading Code Green, unverified by any tangible threat, and Strazinsky had used his seventeen years of experience in Service, including five as a Named Operator, to conclude that, not only was he working a Master’s station, but that his subject was ‘away with the fairies’: a not terribly kind, but essentially benign phrase that Service used, informally, to describe the many and varied occasions when a Master, or an Active, veered harmlessly from the norms ascertained for his particular character.
    Strazinsky was under a certain amount of pressure, not least because he had been in a Code Green situation for more than thirty-six hours, and he knew that his subject was a Master, which meant that he could also be Active. It was the general consensus among Named Service, worldwide, that there was very little to choose between a high-grade Master and an Active, beyond the very specific brainwave pattern that was critical to the safety of the planet. Nothing had been proved, and scientists had been working on the syndrome for more than two hundred years, but it was generally thought that one gene here or there, or one childhood trauma, more or less, could mean the difference between an inert, but useful, beard, and a fully fledged, dyed in the wool, unalterable, unfathomable Active.
    Diagnoses were being made increasingly early in the lives of potential Actives, but tests