Interference & Other Stories by Richard Hoffman

life. Where did he fit? What was he supposed to do with a PhD in ethics?
    He continued to scan the page. What the hell was an Assembler? What did an Assembler assemble? What did an Auditor listen to? An Estimator estimate? An Expediter expedite? And what in the name of God was an Oracle Developer?
    Guy felt misunderstood. Well, not misunderstood, exactly, so much as not understood at all. As he went about his day, busy with first this and then that, so he went about his trackless life. On a good day he felt the equanimity of the disinterested spectator, bemused by the looks on peoples’ faces, the intensity of their exertions, the occasional grace and justice of their actions. On bad days it was as if he were trapped in a meandering joke.
    â€œQuit staring!” said Guys wife.
    Gazing into the middle distance, Guy was out of it again, as ifhed passed through a cognitive one-way door and couldn’t get back in. His wife, Wanda, was at the table making a list on a special pad of paper with “TO DO” across the top and a vertical row of boxes inviting emphatic checkmarks. Guy understood that her list-making was a kind of prayer, an alignment of her intentions with her energy. One day he spent about half an hour looking at one of her checkmarks: it was, up close, a gorgeous bit of thoughtless grace. In the way it began, downward, hard, and then changed direction, gaining lift and velocity until it vanished, implying itself into the invisible, it was as perfect as any Zen masters brushwork O. Guy’s heart swelled with love and appreciation.
    â€œOh, for Pete’s sake,” said Wanda when he tried to tell her, but he could see she was pleased. Wanda had half a dozen items on her list. She paused the slightest moment, never looking up from her paper, then wrote down half a dozen more to fill the sheet. “I’ll be gone at least three hours,” she said to Guy as she paused in the doorway. “You have any interviews today?”
    Guy looked at her.
    â€œAny prospects?”
    â€œWe’ll see,” he said.
    Prospects, prospects. Anything was possible. Maybe a new species, the next evolutionary tsunami, was swelling in his consciousness even then; maybe there, in the middle distance, the utterly transforming notion of the next, the new, the unforeseen (though perfectly foreseeable in retrospect) Homo contemplatus would come to birth among the dust motes glittering in the sun: the pollen, the cat dander, bird down, occasional mosquito, and airborne viral life, all charged with the same command to mutate toward perfection that had long ago inspired that first ancestral ape who, sucking on his fingers and scratching his ass, first glimpsed there, three or four feet from his nose, the irresistible idea of the human. Who could say?
    â€œOh, for Pete’s sake,” Wanda finally said. She turned and harrumphed down the walk, her high heels clicking on the pavement.
    Guy watched her behind and thought how lucky he was. He’d had the best education other peoples’ money could buy, and he felt some responsibility to all the people who had contributed to his development as a thinker. That responsibility included the commitment to use his gifts responsibly, to “first, do no harm,” and to exercise restraint. To Guy this clearly meant not doing anything at all when he was unsure what to do; not making things worse was, after all, as important as making them better. If he was patient, what he should do would come to him. He felt sure of that. He had determined a long time ago that no matter how many opinions there were about any course of action, no matter how many schools of thought, there was always another, not under discussion, that involved going back to bed.
    He went back to bed.

HOW THE DEVIL GOT HIS HORNS
    A jackass, his long ears lying back flat and his big teeth clacking with every word, was preaching a sermon to the assembled creatures. His post as preacher had