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Show Acting Alone Page 37g boy because this particular probe suggested an undercover junket to a university; and Elder Cicerone had always found the infiltration of the university environment exciting, an almost titillating risk. The only major type of American social environment, really, where he'd had no personal aboveground experience in his long and variegated life, universities were a challenge to Elder Cicerone's esoteric skills. A pure autodidact himself, he had always been fascinated and slightly repelled by the idea of the institutionalization of learning, the deliberate, codified dissemination of information, the mass nurturing of intelligence and even creativity, if that be possible. He'd always considered education properly the solitary business of the loner, the esoteric milieu of the free-running agent. Such was the world he hailed from. Knowledge, in the Elder's experience, was not something to be cheapened by profligate sharing, but hoarded in secret, for practical application in advancing one's causes and the causes of one's associates and superiors. With these preconceptions he'd felt an exciting sensation, as though he were about to enter a perfectly alien universe where his assumptions were nobody else's, when he first hesitantly mounted the steps of the tiny Humanities Building at the sixth-rate Kansan college. But his misgivings were all soon, almost disappointingly, cleared away: for all its pretenses, the university, or at least this segment of it, was just as full, if not fuller, of disinformation and obscurantism and revisionism as any savagely rising or falling government or corporation in the real world. That is why Elder Cicerone had wound up feeling so at home there, and why he'd been able to carry out his infiltration with such dispatch |