Schismatrix plus (36 page)

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 nation-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 "quasi-time" 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 Seroton-ists 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-Metasy stems.

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 6n 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 frappe 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 life 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."

"Surely," Navarre said, smiling slightly.

Wellspring turned to Lindsay. "I have a little spiritual drill for doubters like Yevgeny. Every day he should recite to himself, 'Centuries . . . centuries .. . centuries.' "

"I'm a pragmatic man," Navarre said, catching Lindsay's eye and lifting one eyebrow significantly. "Life is lived day to day, not in centuries. Enthusiasms don't last that long. Flesh and blood can't bear it." He addressed Well-spring. "Your ambitions are bigger than life."

"Of course. They must be. They encompass it."

"The Queen's Advisors are more practical." Navarre watched Wellspring with half-contemptuous suspicion.

The Queen's Advisors had risen to authority since the early days of C-K. Rather than fighting them for power, Wellspring had stepped aside. Now, while the Queen's Advisors struggled with day-to-day rule in the Czarina's Palace, Wellspring chose to frequent the dogtowns and discreets. Often he vanished for months, to reappear with shadowy posthumans and bizarre recruits from the fringes of society. These actions clearly baffled Navarre.

"I want tenure," Lindsay told Wellspring. "Nothing political."

"I'm sure we could see to that."

Lindsay glanced about him. It came to him in a burst of conviction. "I don't like Mars."

Wellspring looked grave. "You realize that an entire future destiny might accrete around this momentary utterance? It's from just such nuclei of free will that the future grows, in smooth determinism." Lindsay smiled. "It's too dry," he said. The crowd gasped and shouted as the surveyor scuttled rapidly down a treacherous slope, sending the world reeling. "And it moves too much."

Wellspring was troubled. As he adjusted his collar, Lindsay noted the faint bruise of teethmarks on the skin of his neck. He turned down the forest soundtrack on his armband. "One world at a time seems wisest, don't you think?"

Navarre laughed incredulously.

Lindsay ignored him, gazing over Wellspring's shoulder at his claque of followers. A young Shaper in a fuzz-elbowed academic jacket was burying his elegant face in the floating red-blonde curls of a tigerish young woman. She tilted her head back, laughing in delight, and Lindsay saw, half eclipsed behind her, the stricken face of Abelard Gomez. There were two surveillance dogs with Gomez, crouched on the wall behind him, their metal ribs gleaming, their glassy camera faces taping up his life. Pity struck Lindsay, and a sadness for the transient nature of eternal human verities. Wellspring plunged into impassioned argument, sweeping aside Navarre's wry comments in a torrent of rhetoric. Wellspring waxed eloquent about asteroids; chunks of ice the size of cities, to be dropped in searing arcs onto the surface of Mars, blasting out damp oases in a crust-ripping megatonnage. Creeks would appear at first, then lakes, as steam and volatiles peeled into the starved air and the polar ice caps dissolved into vaporized carbon dioxide. Crater oases would be manned by teams of scientists, biosculpting whole ecosystems into being. For the first time, humanity would be bigger than life: a living world would owe its existence to humankind, and not vice versa. Wellspring saw it as a moral obligation, a repayment of debt. The cost was irrelevant. Money was symbolic. Life was the real. Navarre broke in. "But it's the human element that must defeat you. Where's the appeal to greed? That's where you erred before. You could have run Czarina-Kluster. Instead you let your control slip, and now the Queen's Advisors, those Mechanist"—Navarre stopped short, noticing the dogs accompanying Gomez—"gentlemen, are running things with their customary efficiency. But politics aside, this nonsense is ruining C-K's ability to do decent science! Real research, that is; the kind that brings new patents to armor C-K against its enemies. Terraforming squanders our resources, while Mech and Shaper militants scheme relentlessly against us. Yes, I admit your dreams are pretty. Yes, they even serve a social use as a relatively harmless state ideology. But in the end they'll collapse and take C-K with them." Wellspring's eyes glittered. "You're overworked, Yevgeny. You need a new perspective. Take ten years off, and see if time won't change your mind." Navarre flushed angrily. He turned to Lindsay. "You see? Cataclysm! That remark meant ice assassination, you heard him allude to it! Come, Milosz, surely you can't hold with these boondoggles!"