“The Type-2 people seem to be getting their act together at last,” he observed. “Maybe they’re right to reckon that we’ve been fully fledged Type-1 for a couple of centuries and that it’s high time we started stocking Earth’s orbit with a string of protoworlds. I suspect that’s what the new generation of smart multifunctional spaceships is really designed for, although all the talk is of atmosphere diving in the gas giants and ice breaking on Titan and Europa. Transmutation makes far more sense than that old second star nonsense—and a Type-2 progression is the rational response to the news that Earthlike planets are fewer, farther between, and far less useful than we dared to hope.”
Jodocus seemed to know more about such matters than I did, or was at least prepared to pretend that he did, but I was content to let him think that I knew far more than I was prepared to make public, and I returned our conversation to the safer ground of twenty-sixth-century Africa.
Minna seemed to have her feet more firmly planted on terra firma than any of the others. After dutifully chiding me for letting things slide so far for so long she was the one who filled me in on recent family history.
“Camilla’s on Europa now,” she told me, “investigating the possibility of making an ecosphere for the core ocean that can accommodate modified humans—the ultimate merpeople. It wouldn’t be a sealed ecosphere. It would be fully connected to the rest of the Oikumene by continuous traffic through the ice shell, using the new smart spaceships. Keir’s still working in harness with silvers, but spaceship AIs are the ones he’s involved with now He’s here, there, and everywhere—the satellites of all the outer planets—but he’s still active in the Rad Libs. He’s too far out right now to communicate regularly. Eve’s still in the Well, though. She was in the Arctic last time I heard from her. She’s like you—always liked things a few degrees colder than the rest of us. Ocean currents are her thing now, but it’s such a political minefield that she never seems to be able to get anything done.Couldn’t stand it myself. Give me fresh water any day—it was a political hot potato in Africa back in the twenty-sixth but nowadays putting lakes and rivers in place is all plain sailing, if you’ll forgive the pun.”
I forgave her the pun.
Having spent some time with my first marriage partners it seemed only appropriate to spend a little with Sharane Fereday. She had been through a dozen more marriages since ours, but she was temporarily unattached. Unlike the Rainmakers, she could see only similarities between my new and old selves, but her comparisons were not as uncomplimentary as they would once have been.
“I often think that people like you are better fitted to emortality than people like me,” she confided. “You need a steady pace to stay long distances, and I’ve always been an existential sprinter. I feel as if I’ve lived my life in fits and starts. It’s had its rewards, of course, but I think I can see the advantages of the steady slog far better now than I could when we were married. I admire you, Morty, I really do. I admire the way you stuck to that history of yours until it was finished. Tenacity is an underrated virtue.”
“It’s not quitefinished,” I pointed out. “The donkey work’s done and dusted, but I’m still pondering and polishing the final commentary. To tell you the truth, I feel that some of my critics are right about my procrastinating slightly more than is necessary or reasonable. Sometimes, I wonder if I can actually bear to put the last full stop in place—but I’ve sworn to finish it by the end of the millennium, and I will. It’ll be launched long before the end of December 3000.”
“And what will you do then?” she wanted to know.
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “Perhaps I’ll write something else—something very different. I had wondered about becoming some sort of Gardener, but having spent so much time with the Rainmakers in the last couple of years I’ve recovered all my old doubts about my suitability for that kind of work. I’ve been wondering incessantly about off-planet possibilities, of course. My daughter’s become almost as clamorous as Emily Marchant in her insistence that spacefaring is the only way to make proper use of indefinite longevity, but I’m not sure about my suitability for that either. I’ve seen a lot of Garden Earth these last few years, and I feel at homehere in a way that I wouldn’t like to lose. I’m glad I’ve lived on the moon, and I’d certainly like to visitthe outer system some day, but I’m not sure that I’d ever want to go into space to live—even to one of these new Earths that Type-2 people want to build in Earth orbit.”
“I know what you mean,” Sharane agreed. “If what the casters say about these smart spaceships is true, it will soon become as easy to take tourist trips round the system as it is to tour Earth. When the day comes, I’ll be glad to see the sights. The VE reproductions are great, but they’re not the real thing. I don’t want to become a citizen of the outer darkness, though. I’m Earthbound through and through. All my husbands criticize me for living in the past, but the past is what made us—what we areis the sum of the past, and if we want to extrapolate ourselves in order to live in the future we have to keep our consciousness of the past up to scratch. Youunderstand that, don’t you Morty? You’re only one who ever got close to figuring out that part of me.”
Most of it was mere flattery, of course—the polite conversation of old acquaintances who no longer had anything left to forgive—but it was good to hear that I had a special place in her memory.
SEVENTY-THREE
Emily confirmed what Jodocus Danette had inferred about the crucial importance of the impending conference at which the leading lights of the Oikumene’s many factions would come together face-to-face. Everyone, it seemed, accepted the necessity of some such encounter in the flesh. VE conferencing apparently made it too easy for representatives of the various factions in the dispute to retreat to entrenched positions. Nothing less than a physical gathering could carry sufficient symbolic weight to engender the spirit of give-and-take that would be necessary if the Earthbound and the highkickers were to sort out their rapidly multiplying differences—and even that might not be enough.
Despite the widespread agreement as to its urgent necessity, Emily told me not to expect the conference to happen any time soon. Such elementary matters as finding a venue, setting the agenda, and deciding on the terms of discussion were proving frustratingly difficult, involving a great deal of time-delayed diplomatic wrangling.
“There’s no way we’rtgoing to agree to come down to Earth,” she told me, defiantly. “That would be symbolically loaded to an unacceptable degree. On the other hand, we can understand why Ngomi doesn’t want to bring his people all the way out here, even as far as Jupiter—and there are symbolic reasons why neither side would be entirely happy about conducting discussions in old Jove’s shadow. If we meet on Mars the Martians will insist that their so-called problems are far more important than they really are, and the asteroids are faberweb territory. Even the moon is an unsuitable compromise because of the faber majority on the far side. It looks as if we might have to settle for empty space, but even the location of the empty space in question is a hot issue—and in the meantime, the unanswered questions are festering away. I wish that you Wellworms hadn’t so completely lost your sense of urgency. The situation’s becoming absurd.”
I wished that I could cut in with a few helpful suggestions, but I couldn’t. Her message had been hours in transit and my reply would double the interval.