When I moved to Neyu the actual endeavors of the resident gantzers were still heavily dependent on traditional techniques that Emily Marchant would have regarded as laughably primitive. The basics of island building had not changed in half a millennium: crude bacterial cyborgs that did little more than agglomerate huge towers of cemented sand provided the foundations, and “lightning corals” did the finishing work. Such techniques were perfectly adequate to the task of creating great archipelagos of new islands. The Continental Engineers’s progressives were, however, already thinking at least two steps ahead.
Even the “moderates” based in New Tonga and its sister states saw the ever-increasing network of bridges connecting the new islands as a blueprint for the highways of a new Pacific continent twice the size of Australia. Their extremists were already talking about New Pangaea and New Gondwanaland: rival versions of a grand plan to take technical control over the whole set of Earth’s tectonic plates and institute a new era of macrogeographical design.
The biologists who were now collaborating with the Continental Engineers had already begun planting vast networks of “enhanced seaweeds” in the most suitable enclaves of the blue-sea region. The algae in question were enhanced in the sense that they combined the best features of kelps and wracks with surface features modeled on freshwater-dwelling flowering plants, especially water lilies.
The most obvious result of the Engineers’ hard labor was that Neyu was not surrounded by the blue sea at all but by floral carpets that extended to the horizon and far beyond. These uneven carpets included many “islands” of their own: stable regions that could sustain farms of an entirely new kind.
The initial disappointment caused by the dearth of Tachytelic Perfectionists in my immediate vicinity was soon offset by the discovery of what my nearest neighbors were actually doing. I was delighted to have the opportunity of observing their new and bolder adventures at close range.
SIXTY-ONE
The sight of the Pacific sun setting in its flowery bed beneath a glorious blue sky seemed fabulously luxurious after the silver-ceilinged domes of the moon, and I gladly gave myself over to its governance. I continued to work as hard as I had done in Mare Moscoviense, but I took advantage of the hospitability of my environment to cut back drastically on my VE time.
The experience I had gained in face-to-face interactions stood me in good stead in Neyu as I began to build a richer network of actual acquaintances than I had ever had on Earth, even during the period of my first marriage.
At first, I was regarded as an eccentric newcomer to the island community. Historians were not as rare on Neyu as they had been on the moon, but ex-lunatics were exceedingly uncommon. My own name was by no means as familiar to my new acquaintances as I could have wished, although its unfamiliarity was welcome testimony to the rapidity with which Thanaticism had been put away—but when I happened to mention that I had spent some time with Emily Marchant before returning from the moon thatname triggered an immediate response.
Unlike Julius Ngomi, the Continental Engineers of Neyu were not in the least interested in any plans Emily and her outer-system friends might have for Jupiter, but they were as interested in the new gantzing instruments that were flowing from the outer system as she had been in those which flowed the other way.
“They’re developing some veryuseful deepdown systems,” Mica Pershing told me, enthusiastically. “Titan’s core is very different from Earth’s, of course, but insofar as the techniques address the similarities rather than the differences they’re exactly what we need for our own programs. The Coral Sea Disaster set us back two hundred years, you know, because the bureaucrats down in Antarctica became so absurdly hypersensitive about anything mantle-active. It’s not as if we causedthe disaster, for heaven’s sake! We’re the people trying to make sure that it never happens again. How can we police the mantle-crust boundary properly if they won’t let us send out adequate patrols? The Titan brigade has stolen a long march on us, and the Invisible Hand is taking its usual protectionist stance on licenses in the name of the Balance of Trade or some such sacred cow, but rumor has it that Marchant herself is more than keen to deal. Did she give you that impression when you saw her last?”
I was very interested to hear all this, although I had to confess that I hadn’t taken as much trouble as I might to measure Emily’s exact state of mind on abstruse matters of potential commerce. Mica’s connoisseur interest in Emily’s techniques allowed me to see Julius Ngomi’s anxieties in a new light.
In Mare Moscoviense the balance of trade between Earth and the rest of the Oikumene had not been a frequent topic of conversation, although one might have expected the fabers to take a keen interest in it, but it was something on which the Invisible Hand would want to keep a very tight grip. Perhaps, I thought, his talk of Jupiter had only been a mask to conceal the real nature of his interest in Emily’s agenda.
Even more revealing, in its way, was the way Mica echoed Ngomi’s use of the phrase “rumor has it.” I had grown up in a world whose communication systems were so efficient and whose multitudinous electronic spies had been so assiduous, that “rumor” had lost all authority. What was known was almost invariably know to a high degree of certainty—but the rapid development of the outer system had changed all that. There were now significant regions of the Oikumene where the notion of privacy was making a comeback—and wherever privacy flourishes, so does idle gossip.
When I told Mica that the primary purpose of Emily’s recent visit to the moon had been to shop around for Earth-sourced gantzing techniques she became even more excited.
“I knewit!” she said. “Melt ice caps and you get oceans. She’s thinking ahead, just as we are, and she’s seeing overlapping concerns, synergistic possibilities. She mustbe as keen to deal as we are—or would be if only the diehard Hardinists and the Amundsen City mafia would get off our backs. Whoever thought that it was a good idea to put the UN bureaucracy on ice should have been strangled at birth, and Planned Capitalism is just a fancy name for stopping social evolution in its tracks. Tachytelic Perfectionism might be a contradiction in terms, but at least those crazies understand that there’s some virtue in rapidity of change. We’ve got a hell of a long way to go before we can congratulate ourselves that the Garden’s in good shape, and the powers that be aren’t helping us at all.”
It was rather heartening to hear such sentiments from a 380-year-old earthbound emortal. I’d heard so much faber propaganda on the moon that I’d almost begun to take it for granted that the Earthbound really were terminally decadent, but life on Neyu was the perfect antidote to that suspicion. Some few of my new neighbors did seem in danger of robotization, but that had been true even in Mare Moscoviense—and in Neyu, as on the moon, they were a tiny minority.
In New Tonga, as in the lunar domes, there was a quasi-revolutionary spirit in the air: a lust for change that far transcended the seemingly modest ambitions of the world’s owners and rulers.
I had never expected to be drawn to someone like Mica Pershing, and she had obviously not anticipated that I was the kind of person who might be fruitfully invited into the discussions of her own circle, but we were both surprised. We had more in common than the differences in our vocations suggested, and a spontaneous spark of camaraderie kindled what soon became a warm friendship.