Текст книги "2312"

Автор книги: Kim Stanley Robinson

Соавторы: Kim Stanley Robinson
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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

Extracts (11)

Mistakes made in the rush of the Accelerando left their mark on later periods. As in island biogeography, where widely dispersed enclaves and refugia always experience rapid change, and even speciation, we see

one mistake was that no generally agreed-upon system of governance in space was ever established. That repeated the situation on Earth, where no world government ever emerged. Balkanization became universal; and one aspect of balkanization was a reversion to tribalism, notorious for defining those not in the tribe as not human, sometimes with terrible results. It was not a good structure of feeling for a civilization spanning the solar system and wielding ever-greater

another mistake was simply haste. The rapid terraformation of Mars left 8 percent of that surface burned. Venus, Titan, and the Jovian moons were all occupied before terraforming efforts began, stymieing certain methods and vastly complicating the process. In medicine, the rapid uptake of longevity treatments and genetic and bodily modifications meant that all humans in space and many on Earth were experimental creatures. Haste was the defining characteristic of the Accelerando, and after that they could only ride out the crashes of the Ritard, grab the tiger by the tail and try to fix things on the fly

the beautiful terraria in their thousands, jewel-filled geodes, spinning like tops, hopped out of Pandora’s box, never to be recollected

SWAN AT HOME

They came into Mercurial orbit and the great rock rolled under them, coal black except for a sunlit crescent that glowed like molten glass. Down to the spaceport in the dark, then over to the platform and into the rebuilt Terminator. See what the city looked like new and raw.

In some ways it was much the same. They had used 3-D printers to make reproductions of everyone’s furniture, so her room lay in a little uncanny valley of its own and had to her the feel of a reconstructed room in Pompeii. But to the west, in the forward half of the town, meaning the park and the farm, it was raw, raw, raw. She saw this walking down the Great Staircase from her room to the bow: the city was treeless, mere slabs of steel and molded plastic and foamed rock. All kinds of past selves came back to her at once—the one that had built terraria, the one that had looked down on the city incandescent, the one in the park with the swings and the jungle gym. They had never come together before like this, and she felt herself as a new thing.

Everyone in the city turned out to be like that. It was a very emotional week, greeting her old neighbors, her friends, her colleagues, Mqaret. One day they even held a short funeral for the old town. There needed to be another spray of rare earths made into the new soil matrix, which was local rock crushed and mixed with nutrient-laden aerogels, almost ready for the inoculant from the California central valley, some of the best soil on Earth. But they needed the rare earths puffed down before they applied the inoculant, so they used these rare earths in the funeral ceremony, dropping them from a rising balloon as they had with Alex’s ashes and so many others, with the Great Gates of the Dawn Wall open and the horizontal sunlight illuminating the swirling masses of dust.

After that most of the population returned to their pre-burn routines, to keep the place running while the reconstruction teams built what was not yet repaired. There was endless talk of restoration or change, the old versus the new. Swan plumped for the new and threw herself into the work of the farm and the park with grateful passion. Earth was such a—such a… She didn’t even know how to say it. It was ever so much better to be home, getting her back into her living and her hands dirty.

The farm took precedence for obvious reasons and was being reconstituted as quickly as they could do it. Different principles were being enacted in different plots, many taking advantage of the century of agricultural improvements since the city had been built, which included many new plants that were more soil-based than the earlier hydroponic styles introduced in the first Terminator’s farm. That version had eventually become too small to support both the population of the city and the sunwalkers, so now they were adding an extension at the bow. The new soils they laid down were often structured by spongelike matrices of nutrients, allowing for quick root growth and very precise irrigation. Techniques had also improved for manipulating diurnal cycles in ways that fooled plants into growing and producing as much as thirty times faster than they would have in the natural world. These accelerated plants had also been genetically engineered for speed, so that it was now common to grow a dozen crops a year, necessitating a big input of appropriate minerals and nutrients. The soil had to be grown to keep up with the crops.

Swan only consulted when it came to distributing the inoculants into the soil, because the cutting edge of everything else was far past her; she merely joined the young farm and park ecologists and listened to them explain their latest theories, and then spent her time out in the first prairie of nitrogen fixers—bacteria, legumes, alder, vitosek, frankia, all the other plants that were best at turning nitrogen to nitrates. Even this phase of the process could now be pushed faster than ever before. So it wasn’t too many months before she was walking down long rows of eggplant, squash, tomato, and cucumber. Each leaf and vine, branch and fruit, splayed up toward the sunline and the farming sunlamps, each plant expressing its own characteristic form, all of them together extremely reassuring in their familiarity. The farm was her family, part of her all her life, and the current generation of young people came and asked her questions about those years—why this way, why that? Did you have a theory? She floated possible answers when she couldn’t remember the old reasons. Mostly it had been a matter of space considerations, and doing things to keep things going. Was it ever any different? Material constraints, budget issues, diseases, but seldom a matter of efficient design, of an inherent cause.

As the new farm began harvests, and the park’s trees and other plants quickly grew, animals were brought in from the other terraria. They were doing an Ascension this time—not Swan’s idea, she didn’t approve, but kept her mouth shut and only observed what appeared to be an Australian-Mediterranean combination; and it was in fact lovely to watch the animals show up, nosing around nibbling and looking for lay-bys and nests. Wallabies and Gibraltar apes, bobcats and dingoes. Eucalyptus and cork oak. There were lots of terraria in the Mondragon sending along animals to help.

Swan spent her time in the farm, tended the winter starts. New scrub jays were out there cawing like small crows, nailing worms and bugs that ventured to the surface of the soil. Some looked at her thoughtfully, as if judging her for some avian quality she wasn’t sure she had. Don’t start speaking Greek to me, she begged them. I can’t take that. They looked at her in a way that reminded her of Inspector Genette’s gaze.

Sometimes after work she went to the very bowsprit of the city and stood watching the city slide forward on the tracks, making the hills on the horizon shift against the stars. The hills, as always, were either very black or very white. The constant shift from black to white (only occasionally the reverse) made the landscape a kind of mobile, her position at the bow part of a heraldic image—an elite riding the point of history like the figurehead of a ship—but the ship rode on tracks visible to the horizon, its course set in a powerful path dependency. And the whole thing if halted would burn to a crisp. And under it all ran a horrible black tunnel, a cloacal umbilicus running back to some original sin. Yes, this was her world, all right: a ride into the dark and the stars, on tracks she couldn’t easily leave. She was a citizen of Terminator, living in a little bubble of green, gliding over a black-and-white world.

In the evenings after work Swan walked up to her room on the fourth terrace down from the top of the Dawn Wall. She would change clothes and then walk to a restaurant, or to Mqaret’s rooms.

“It’s good to be home,” she said to Mqaret. “Thank God we rebuilt.”

“We had to,” Mqaret said.

“What about your work?” Swan asked him. “Didn’t you lose all kinds of stuff?”

Mqaret shook his head. “Everything was backed up. We lost the experiments in progress, but nothing else. And there are equivalent experiments going on in lots of places.”

“Did the other labs help you get going again, like with the animals?”

“Yes. It was mostly our Mondragon insurance, but people were generous. Although a lot of it we had to reassemble ourselves, that’s just the way it is.”

“And how are things going, are you learning useful things still?”

“Yes, useful, sure.”

“Anything about the thing from Enceladus? Didn’t you say you might learn something important from that?”

“It looks like it sits in the human gut mostly, getting by on detritus that runs into it. In that state it lays low, and exists like a lot of the bacteria in your gut. But if a lot of extra detritus appears, it multiples and mops it up, then when that’s gone it dies back. Plus also a very little Enceladan predator is lurking in there too. So together they function almost like an extra set of T cells. They don’t even add much to your fever.”

“I know you still think I shouldn’t have done it.”

He made his eyes go round as he nodded slowly at her. “No doubt about that, my dear. But I will say that because of you and the other foolish people who ingested it, we know more than we would have otherwise. And it seems like it might turn out all right. Because you ended up surviving an awful lot of radiation, and that’s probably because your aliens helped to clear your system of all the dead cells flooding it. That’s one of the worst impacts of radiation, the sudden flood of dead stuff everywhere.”

Swan stood staring at him, trying to think what it might mean. For a long time she had refused to face the fact that she had been so stupid as to have eaten the alien bugs. She had gotten expert in not thinking about it. To go mad—to hear the birds speaking in Greek… she knew that part could happen. But to have something good come from it…

“That’s what you saw in my blood?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Well,” she said, “I hope you’re right.”

He gave her a look. “I’ll bet you do.” He shook his head unhappily. “We’re trembling on the brink, my dear. You don’t want to fall off now.”

“On the brink like always, right?”

“I don’t mean the brink of death. I mean the brink of life. I wonder if we might not be on the edge of a breakthrough in our longevity treatments. Some kind of gestalt leap forward. And pretty soon. There’s so much we’re coming to understand. So, you know. You could live for a thousand years.”

He stared at her, letting the words sink in, watching her to make sure they would begin to percolate. She registered that, and he went on.

“I won’t live long enough to see it. I think we may still be fifty years out from solving certain last problems. But so, you… you should take care.”

He gave her a hug that was gentle, even a little tentative, as if she might break, or was poisonous. But his look was still so warm. Her grandparent loved her and worried about her. And had discovered that her rash act might have found out something useful. It was a bit like St. Elizabeth’s miracle of the roses; caught in the act, but saved by a metamorphosis. It confused her.

Extracts (12)

Isomorphies appear across our conceptual systems. One sees patterns like this—

subjective, intersubjective, objective;

existential, political, physical;

literature, history, science;

—and one wonders if these are different ways of saying the same thing?

Are the dichotomies “Apollonian/Dionysian” and “classical/romantic” two ways to speak of the same thing?

Can there be false isomorphies, as in the “seven deadly sins” of aging, which deliberately evokes the Christian religious system though this is completely irrelevant to aging?

Is isomorphic the same as consilient? The “standard model” in physics would hope and expect to be the foundation of all the disciplines, all consilient with its fundamental findings. Thus physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, sociology, history, the arts all interpenetrate each other and cohere if considered as a single convergent study. The physical studies scaffold our understanding of the life sciences, which scaffold our understanding of the human sciences, which scaffold the humanities, which scaffold the arts: and here we stand. What then is the totality? What do we call it? Can there be a study of the totality? Do history, philosophy, cosmology, science, and literature each claim to constitute the totality, an unexpandable horizon beyond which we cannot think? Could a strong discipline be defined as one that has a vision of totality and claims to encompass all the rest? And are they all wrong to do so?

Is the totality simply praxis, meaning what we do with ourselves and our world? Is there no such thing as totality, but only convergence? Convergence of all our fields of thought into human actions?

At the time of our study, these issues were very confused, and different disciplines took differing attitudes. Some fields focused on strictly human problems. This limited focus was deliberate, a statement about meaning that said that human life should be the subject of study for human beings until we reach a point where we are all well enough we can afford to think about other things.

Some in physics and other disciplines replied to this idea by asserting that many extrahuman realms have decisive effects on the achievement of human justice, so the strongest humanism would arise from a focus including physics, biology, and cosmology, also consciousness science. Justice would be considered as partly a consciousness state, and partly a particular physical or ecological state among symbiotic organisms.

Those holding the anthropocentric view argued that if focusing on the extrahuman realm could have helped to achieve justice among humans, it would have already. Because humans had been extremely powerful for centuries, and yet justice had not arrived.

Physics advocates riposted with the assertion that this failure had happened only because the larger physical reality was still being excluded from the project of justice.

These mirror arguments rebounded back and forth for a long time, not just in the Dithering but all the way into the Balkanization and the fateful year 2312. And so humanity hung suspended in the face of its unenacted project. They knew but they didn’t act. The reader may scoff at them; but it takes courage to act, and perseverance too. Indeed if the reader’s own time is still imperfect, though it be ever so long after the time described here, the author would not be surprised to hear it.

SWAN IN THE VULCANOIDS

Terminator’s council had finally chosen the new Lion of Mercury, an old friend of Alex and Mqaret’s named Kris. Soon after being installed, Kris asked Swan to join a trip being organized to the Vulcanoids; Kris wanted to reaffirm the agreement Alex had made with the Vulcanoids to broker their light transmission to the outer planets. “It was another one of Alex’s verbal deals,” Kris said with a frown, “and since she died, and even more after the city burned, we’ve seen signs that the Vulcanoids are going upsystem behind our backs. It’s made some of us wonder—do you know if Interplan is investigating the Vulcanoids as possible suspects in the attack on Terminator?”

“I don’t think they are.”

Swan didn’t really want to go, or think about Genette’s ongoing investigation, as she was now absorbed in planting the redesigned park. But it would be a short trip, and the work would still be going on when she returned. So she packed her bag and stepped off with Kris and some aides onto the platform nearest Ustad Isa Crater, where there was a new railgun launch complex throwing ships downsystem.

Vulcanized spaceships were bulbous things, heavily protected and windowless. Their runs took them down to the string of thirty-kilometer asteroids orbiting in a zone 0.1 astronomical unit from the sun, meaning only fifteen million kilometers away from the star. Discovered from Mercury in the late twenty-first century, this almost perfectly circular necklace of burnt but stable beauties had recently been colonized, despite their being one thousand K on their sunward sides. These hemispheres, tidally locked so that they always faced the sun, had burnt away to the extent of several kilometers of rock loss over their lifetimes; they were primordial objects, as old as the oldest asteroids. Now they had been occupied like terraria anywhere else—hollowed out, with the excavated material used in this case to make immense circular light-catching solettas. These solettas processed and redirected sunlight in lased beams that could be aimed at receiver solettas in the outer solar system, now blazing like God’s own streetlights in the skies of Triton and Ganymede. The effect out there was dramatic enough that there were more outer satellite settlements asking for Vulcan streetlights than there were Vulcanoids to provide them.

As their sundiver approached the Vulcan orbit, the image shown onscreen represented the sun as a red circle and the Vulcanoids as a loose necklace of brilliant yellow dots across and outside the red. Green lines representing the lased light extended from the yellow dots outward to the sides of the image. The sun bulked large in all the representations. It seemed a fiery great dragon, and yet they kept flying toward it—boldly, rashly—they were too close for comfort. It was a transgression sure to be punished. On one screen it looked like a burning red heart, the grainy texture of flowing cell tops like muscle cut against the grain. They mustbe too close.

From its antisolar side, the particular Vulcanoid they approached was a bare dark rock, a typical potato asteroid, surrounded by a silver umbrella a hundred times its size. The dock was in the middle of the rock. At a certain point near the end of their approach, the asteroid and its soletta created a solar eclipse, and the unnerving sight of the red sun became in the end a mere halo of coronal fire, flailing its electric aura; then they were in the dark, in the shelter of the Vulcanoid’s shade. It was a palpable relief.

The people inside the rock were sun worshippers, as might be expected. Some looked like the sunwalkers of Mercury’s outback, carefree and foolish; others seemed like ascetics of a religious order. Most were men or hermaphrodites. They lived in the closest solar orbit that an object could maintain; the so-called sundivers were craft that only dipped a bit closer to the sun and then fled. This was as close as one could live.

It was inherently a religious space; Swan could accept that, but had a hard time imagining the votaries’ lives. The terrarium inside the rock was a desert, which was appropriate in the circumstances, but extremely uncomfortable: hot, dry, dusty. Even the Mojave was lush compared to it.

So this was a form of self-mortification, and while Swan had tried many such forms in her youth, and during the height of her abramovics, she no longer believed in self-mortification as an end in itself. She also felt that this new technology in the solettas had altered the devotional nature of these people’s lives, turning them into something more like lighthouse keepers. Their new system was ten million times stronger than Mercury’s older light-transferring technology, which would henceforth be rendered historical, like an oil lamp. Both Mercury’s contribution to the Mondragon Accord and its ability to do above and beyonds were greatly diminished by this development, and one part of the compensation the Mondragon committee had suggested was that Terminator should be the coordinating agent and broker for this new Vulcan ability to transfer light; but it was a matter for the principals to work out. As it had been, by Alex; but now that Alex was gone, and the brokerage house had been torched, would their clients and/or fellow citizens remain loyal to the deal? Would they help rebuild their agent, their bank, their old home?

“Well,” one of them said after Kris had described Terminator’s hope that the deal would hold. “Getting light to the outer system is our contribution to the Mondragon and to humanity. We’re in a better position to do this than you are on Mercury. We know you helped us get started, but now the Saturnians are offering to cover the costs of building solettas on all the Vulcanoids that can support them. And they really need our light out there. So we’ll take up as much of their offer as we can. It’s a bit more than we can handle right now, to tell the truth. We’re still fine-tuning the second generations. There are issues we’re still working on. We don’t have enough people to take advantage of everything they’re offering us.”

Kris was nodding. “You need our help to coordinate the whole effort. You’re down here peeling around at speed, getting cooked and getting your stations going.”

They thought that over. Their speaker said, “Maybe so. But when Terminator was out of commission, we had no problems. Now we’re thinking that Mercury should contribute to the Mondragon with things other than light, and leave us to it. You’ve got heavy metals, art history, and Terminator itself as a work of art, a tourist destination for the grand tour and for sun watchers. You’ll be fine.”

Kris shook her head. “We’re the capital of the inner system. With all due respect, you people operate power stations here. You need administration.”

“Maybe.”

Swan said, “Which Saturnians have you been talking to about this?”

They stared at her. “They speak to us as a league,” one of them replied. “But we have the same Saturnian liaison you do—their inner planets ambassador. You know him better than we do, from what we hear.”

“You mean Wahram?”

“Of course. He told us that you Mercurials knew the interplanetary situation, and would understand how important our light is to the Titan project. And to all the other outer planets as well.”

Swan did not reply.

Kris began discussing the Triton settlement and the plan there to stellarize Neptune.

“Yes,” one of the Vulcans replied, “but the Saturnians won’t do that to Saturn.”

Swan interrupted them: “Tell me more about Wahram; when did he visit you?”

“A couple years ago, I think.”

“Two years?”

“Wait,” another of them put in. “Our year is only six weeks long, so that was a joke there. It was just recently.”

“It was since Terminator burned,” the first speaker clarified, looking at her curiously.

Kris filled in the silence that followed, reminding the Vulcans that as the new Lion of Mercury, Kris was now the titular head of their order. But these particular Vulcans were not Greys, as they were quick to inform Kris; they were adherents of some schismatic sect that did not consider the Lion of Mercury to be their head. Nevertheless they were very polite, and Kris continued to try to convince them to keep the deal; but Swan had trouble following the conversation. She was getting angrier at Wahram the longer she considered what he had done, to the point where she wasn’t listening anymore. Right in the time he had said he would work with her, after they had found the ship floating in the clouds of Saturn, he had come down here instead and undermined her cause. It was a hard little sucker punch.