Pongpianskul opened one of the drawers in his cavernous desk and tossed in his sheaf of clipped papers. He pulled out a crumbling wad of graphs and started. “What’s this? Should have been done weeks ago. No matter. Where were we? Oh, yes, wives. I married Alexandrina, by the way. Alexa’s a fine Preservationist. Couldn’t risk her slipping away.”
“You did well,” Lindsay said. His marriage contract had expired; her new marriage was a sound political move. It did not occur to him to feel jealousy; that had not been in the contract. He was glad that she had secured her position.
“Can’t have too many wives, it’s what life’s all about. Take Georgiana for instance, Constantine’s first wife. Talked her into a trace of Shatter, no more than twenty mikes, I swear, and it improved her disposition no end. Now she’s as sweet as the day is long.” He looked at Lindsay seriously. “Can’t have too many oldsters around, though. Disturbs the ideology. Bad enough with those pesky Cataclysts and their posthuman schemes. Keep ’em behind wire, in quarantine. Even then kids keep sneaking in.”
“It’s kind of you to allow them here.”
“I need the foreign exchange. C-K finances their research. But they won’t amount to much. Those Superbrights can’t concentrate on anything for long.” He snorted, then snatched up a bill of lading. “I need the money. Look at these carbon-dioxide imports. It’s the damn trees, gobbling it up.” He sighed. “I need those trees, though. Their mass helps with the orbital dynamics. These circumlunar orbits are hell.”
“I’m glad matters are in good hands.”
Pongpianskul smiled sadly. “I suppose. Things never work out the way you plan them. Good thing, though, or the Mechs would have taken over long ago.” The cat jumped into Pongpianskul’s lap, and he scratched its chin. The animal emitted a rumbling sound that Lindsay found oddly soothing. “This is my cat, Saturn,” the old Shaper said. “Say hello to Lindsay, Saturn.” The cat ignored him.
“I had no idea you liked animals.”
“Couldn’t stand him at first. Hair just pours off the little beast. Gets into everything. Dirty as a hog, too. Ever seen a hog, by the way? I had a few imported. Incredible creatures, the tourists just marvel.”
“I must have a look before I leave.”
“Animals in the air these days. Not literally, I mean, though we did have some trouble with loose hogs running off to the free-fall zone. No, I mean this biomorality from Czarina-Kluster. Another Cataclyst fad.”
“You think so?”
“Well,” the Warden mused, “maybe not. You start trifling with ecology and it’s hard to find a place to stop. I’ve had a slip of this cat’s skin shipped off to the Ring Council. Have to clone off a whole gene-line of them. Because of the mice, you know. Little vermin are overrunning everything.”
“A planet might be better,” Lindsay said. “More space.”
“I don’t hold with messing with gravity wells,” Pongpianskul said. “It’s just more room for error. Don’t tell me you’ve fallen for that, Mavrides.”
“The world needs dreams,” Lindsay said.
“You’re not going to start on about levels of complexity, I hope.”
Lindsay smiled. “No.”
“Good. When you came in here unwashed and with no shoes on, I concluded the worst.”
“They say the hogs and I had a lot in common,” Lindsay said.
Pongpianskul stared, then laughed. “Haw. Haw. Glad to see you’re not standing on your dignity. Too much dignity cripples a man. Fanatics never laugh. I hope you can still laugh when you’re breaking worlds to the leash.”
“Surely someone will get a good chuckle out of it.”
“Well, you’ll need your humor, friend. Because these things never work out as you plan. Reality’s a horde of mice, nibbling away in the basement of your dreams…You know what I wanted here, don’t you? A preserve for humanity and the human way of life, that’s what. Instead I’ve ended up with a huge stage set full of tourist shills and Cataclyst fry-brains.”
“It was worth a try,” Lindsay said.
“That’s it, break an old man’s heart,” Pongpianskul said. “A consoling lie wouldn’t have hurt.”
“Sorry,” Lindsay said. “I’ve lost the skill.”
“Better get it back in a hurry, then. It’s still a wide wicked Schismatrix out there, détente or no détente.” Pongpianskul brooded. “Those fools in Czarina-Kluster. Selling out to aliens. What’s to become of the world? I hear some idiot wants to sell Jupiter.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Yes, sell it off to some group of intelligent gasbags. A scandal, isn’t it? Some people will do anything to suck up to aliens. Oh, sorry, no offense.” He Looked at Lindsay and saw that he was not insulted. “It won’t come to anything. Alien embassies never do. Luckily, aliens all seem to have a lot more sense than we do, with the possible exception of the Investors. Investors, indeed. Just a bunch of interstellar pests and nosey-parkers…If aliens show up in force I swear I’ll put the whole Republic under the tightest quarantine this side of a Ring Council session. I’ll wait till society disintegrates totally. I’ll be faded by then, but the locals can move out to pick up the pieces. They’ll see then that there was sense in my little game preserve after all.”
“I see. Hedging humanity’s bets. You were always a clever gambler, Neville.”
The Shaper was pleased. He sneezed loudly, and the startled cat leaped from his lap across the desk, clawing papers. “Sorry,” he said. “Bacteria and cat hairs, never got used to them.”
“I have a favor to ask,” Lindsay said. “I’m leaving for Czarina-Kluster and would like to take one of the locals with me.”
“Someone ‘dying into the world?’ You always handled that well in Dembowska. Certainly.”
“No, a youngster.”
“Out of the question. A terrible precedent. Wait a moment. Is it Abelard Gomez?”
“The very same.”
“I see. That boy troubles me. He has Constantine blood, did you know? I’ve been watching the local genetics. Genius turns up in that line like a bad roll of the dice.”
“I’m doing you a favor, then.”
“I suppose so. Sorry to see you go, Abelard, but with your current ideological cast you’re a bad influence. You’re a culture hero here, you know.”
“I’m through with the old dreams. My energy’s back, and there’s a new dream loose in Czarina-Kluster. Even if I can’t believe it, at least I can help those who do.” He stood up, stepping back prudently as the cat inspected his ankles. “Good luck with the mice, Neville.”
“You too, Abelard.”
Chapter 9
CZARINA-KLUSTER PEOPLE’S CORPORATE REPUBLIC: 15-12-’91
The engines of wealth were at full throttle. A torrent of riches was drowning the world. The exponential curves of growth hit with their always deceptive speed, a counterintuitive quickness that stunned the unwary and dazzled the alert.
The circumsolar population stood at 3.2 billion. It had doubled every twenty years and would double again. The four hundred major Mechanist asteroids roiled in a tidal wave of production from an estimated 8 billion self-replicating mining robots and forty thousand full-scale automated factories. The Shaper worlds measured wealth differently, dwarfed by a staggering 20 billion tons of productive biomass.
The primal measurement of Circumsolar Kilobytes soared to an astronomical figure best estimated as 9.45 x 1018. World information, estimating only that available in fully open databanks and not counting the huge empires of restricted data, totalled 2.3 x 1027 bits, the equivalent of 150 full-length books for every star in every galaxy in the visible universe.
Stern social measures had to be adopted to keep entire populations from disintegrating in an orgy of plenty.
Megawatts of energy sufficient to run entire Council States were joyfully squandered on high-speed transorbital liners. These spacecraft, large enough to provide every comfort to hundreds of passengers, assumed the dignity of nati
on-states and suffered their own population booms.
None of these material advances matched the social impact of the progress of the sciences. Breakthroughs in statistical physics proved the objective existence of the four Prigoginic Levels of Complexity and postulated the existence of a fifth. The age of the cosmos was calculated to an accuracy value of plus or minus four years, and rarefied attempts were under way to estimate the “quasitime” consumed by the precontinuum ur-space.
Slower-than-light interstellar travel became physically possible, and five expeditions were launched, manned by star-peering low-mass wireheads. Ultra-long baseline interferometry, beamed from radiotelescopes aboard the wirehead starships, established hard parallaxes for most stars in the Orion Arm of the Galaxy. Examinations of the Perseus and Centaurus Arms showed troubling patches where patterns of stars appeared to have an ominous regularity.
New studies of the galaxies of the Local Supercluster led to refinements in the Hubble Constant. Minor discrepancies caused some visionaries to conclude that the expansion of the universe had been subjected to crude tampering.
Knowledge was power. And in seizing knowledge, humanity had gripped a power as bright and angry as a live wire. At stake were issues vaster than any before: the prospects were more dazzling, the potentials sharper, and the implications more staggering than anything ever faced by humanity or its successors.
Yet the human mind still had its own resources. The gifts for survival were not found only in the sharp perceptions of the Shapers, with their arsenals of brain-stretching biochemicals, or the cybernetic advances of the Mechanists and the relentless logic of their artificial intelligences. The world was kept intact by the fantastic predilection of the human mind for boredom.
Mankind had always been surrounded by the miraculous. Nothing much had ever come of it. Under the shadow of cosmic revelations, life still swathed itself in comforting routine. The breakaway factions were much more bizarre than ever before, but people had grown used to this, and their horror had lessened. Frankly antihuman clades like the Spectral Intelligents, the Lobsters, and the Blood Bathers were somehow incorporated into the repertoire of possibility and even made into jokes.
And yet the strain was everywhere. The new multiple humanities hurtled blindly toward their unknown destinations, and the vertigo of acceleration struck deep. Old preconceptions were in tatters, old loyalties were obsolete. Whole societies were paralyzed by the mind-blasting vistas of absolute possibility.
The strain took different forms. For the Cataclysts, those Superbrights who had been the first to feel it, it was a frenzied embrace of the Infinite, careless of consequences. Even self-destruction eased the unspoken pain. The Zen Serotonists abandoned the potential for the pale bliss of calm and quiet. For others the strain was never explicit: just a tingling of unease at the borders of sleep, or sudden frantic tears when the mind’s inhibitions crumbled from drink or drugs.
For Abelard Lindsay the current manifestation involved sitting strapped to a table in the Bistro Marineris, a Czarina-Kluster bar. The Bistro Marineris was a free-fall inflatable sphere at the junction of four long tubeways, a way station amid the sprawling nexus of habitats that made up the campus of Czarina-Kluster Kosmosity-Metasystems.
Lindsay was waiting for Wellspring. He leaned on the dome-shaped table, pressing the sticktite elbow patches of his academic jacket against its velcro top.
Lindsay was a hundred and six years old. His latest rejuvenation had not erased all outward signs of age. Crow’s feet webbed his gray eyes, and creases drooped from his nose to the corners of his mouth. Overdeveloped facial muscle ridged his dark, mobile eyebrows. He had a short beard, and jewel-headed pins held his long hair, streaked with white. One hand was heavily wrinkled, its pale skin like waxed parchment. The metal hand was honeycombed with sensor grids.
He watched the walls. The owner of the Marineris had opaqued the inner surface of the Bistro and turned it into a planetarium. All around Lindsay and the dozen other customers spread the racked and desolate landscape of Mars, relayed live from the Martian surface in painfully vivid 360-degree color.
For months the sturdy robot surveyor had been picking its way along the rim of the Valles Marineris, sending its broadcasts. Lindsay sat with his back to the mighty chasm: its titanic scale and air of desolate, lifeless age had painful associations for him. The rubble and foothills projected on the rounded wall before him, huge upthrust blocks and wind-carved yardangs, struck him as an implied reproach. It was new to him to have a sense of responsibility for a planet. After three months in C-K, he was still trying the dream on for size.
Three Kosmosity academics unbuckled themselves and kicked off from a nearby table. As they left, one noticed Lindsay, started, and came his way. “Pardon me, sir. I believe I know you. Professor Bela Milosz, am I right?”
The stranger had that vaguely supercilious air common to many Shaper defectors, a sense of misplaced fanaticism spinning its wheels. “I’ve gone by that name, yes.”
“I’m Yevgeny Navarre.”
The name struck a distant echo. “The membrane chemistry specialist? This is an unexpected pleasure.” Lindsay had known Navarre in Dembowska, but only through video correspondence. In person, Navarre seemed arid and colorless. As an annoying corollary, Lindsay realized that he himself had been arid and colorless during those years. “Please join me, Professor Navarre.”
Navarre strapped in. “Kind of you to remember my article for your Journal,” he said. “‘Surfactant Vesicles in Exoarchosaurian Colloidal Catalysis.’ One of my first.”
Navarre exuded well-bred satisfaction and signaled the bistro’s servo, which ambled up on multiple plastic legs. The trendy servo was a faithful miniature of the Mars surveyor. Lindsay ordered a liqueur for politeness’ sake.
“How long have you been in C-K, Professor Milosz? Your musculature tells me that you’ve been in heavy gravity. Investor business?”
The heavy spin of the Republic had marked Lindsay. He smiled cryptically. “I’m not free to speak.”
“I see.” Navarre offered him the grave, confidential look of a fellow man-of-the-world. “I’m pleased to find you here in the Kosmosity’s neighborhood. Are you planning to join our faculty?”
“Yes.”
“A stellar addition to our Investor researchers.”
“Frankly, Professor Navarre, Investor studies have lost their novelty for me. I plan to specialize in terraforming studies.”
Navarre smiled incredulously. “Oh dear. I’m sure you can do much better than that.”
“Oh?” Lindsay leaned forward in a brief burst of crudely imitative kinesics. His whole facility was gone. The reflex embarrassed him, and he resolved for the hundredth time to give it up.
Navarre said, “The terraforming section’s crawling with post-Cataclyst lunatics. You were always a very sound man. Thorough. A good organizer. I’d hate to see you drift into the wrong circles.”
“I see. What brought you to C-Kluster, Professor?”
“Well,” said Navarre, “the Jastrow Station labs and I had some differences about patenting. Membrane technology, you see. A technique for producing artificial Investor hide, a very fashionable item here; you’ll notice for instance that young lady’s boots?” A Cicada student in a beaded skirt and bright face paint was sipping a frappé against the desolate backdrop of shattered red terrain. Her boots were miniature Investor feet, toes, claws, and all. Behind her the landscape lurched suddenly as the surveyor moved on. Lindsay grasped the table in vertigo.
Navarre swayed slightly and said, “Czarina-Kluster is more friendly to the entrepreneur. I was taken off the dogs after only eight months.”
“Congratulations,” Lindsay said.
The Queen’s Advisors kept most immigrants under the surveillance dogs for a full two years. Out in the fringe dogtowns there were whole environments where reality was nailed down by camera and everyone was tagged ceaselessly by videodogs. Widespread taps and monitors were part of public lif
e in Czarina-Kluster. But full citizens could escape surveillance in the discreets, C-K’s lush citadels of privacy.
Lindsay sipped his drink. “To prevent confusion, I should tell you that these days I use the name Lindsay.”
“What? Like Wellspring?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You weren’t aware of Wellspring’s true identity?”
“Why, no,” Lindsay said. “I understood the records were lost on Earth, where he was born.”
Navarre laughed delightedly. “The truth is an open secret among Cicada inner circles. It’s the talk of the discreets. Wellspring is a Concatenate. His true name is Abelard Malcolm Tyler Lindsay.”
“You astonish me.”
“Wellspring plays a very deep game. The Terran business is only a camouflage.”
“How odd.”
“Speak of the devil,” Navarre said. A noisy crowd burst from the tubeway entrance to Lindsay’s left. Wellspring had arrived with a claque of Cicada disciples, a dozen students fresh from some party, flush-faced and shouting with laughter. The young Cicadas were a bustle of blues and greens in long, flowing overcoats, slash-cuffed trousers, and glimmering reptile-scaled waistcoats.
Wellspring spotted Lindsay and approached in free-fall. His mane of matted black hair was held by a copper-and-platinum coronet. Over his foliage-printed green coat he wore a tape-deck armband, which emitted a loud quasi-music of rustling boughs and the cries of animals.
“Lindsay!” he shouted. “Lindsay! Good to have you back.” He embraced Lindsay roughly and strapped himself to a chair. Wellspring looked drunk. His face was flushed, he had pulled his collar open, and something was crawling in his beard, a small population of what appeared to be iron fleas.
“How was your trip?” Lindsay said.
“The Ring Council is dull! Sorry I wasn’t here to meet you.” He signaled the servo. “What are you drinking? Fantastic chasm, the Marineris, isn’t it? Even the tributaries are the size of the Grand Canyon in Arizona.” He pointed past Lindsay’s shoulder at a gap between towering canyon walls, where icy winds kicked up thin puffs of ocher dust. “Imagine a cataract there, pealing out in a thunderband of rainbows! A sight to stir the soul to the roots of its complexity.”
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