2312 (11 page)

“That’s not strange.”

“So that although Penia is not Poros, she is also not a-poria. She has been called neither masculine nor feminine, rich or poor, resourceful or without resources. And so
aporia
becomes even more an untranslatable term.”

“I am an aporia. And I am in an aporia. This blackliner.”

“Yes.”

All very well, to talk and think—“Thank you, Pauline”—but at the end of it, there was still a week more to live through, and Alex’s death never gone away. She was floating in the bardo, trying to think like someone unborn would think. Full of dubitation, child of a poverty. Would be reborn some other Swan.

But then later—it seemed much later, there in the suspended space of no-time, banging around in her thoughts as they looped over and over—later she came to understand that when the chime
in her suit rang and signaled that this trip was over, they would decant the same Swan that went in. There was no escape.

“Pauline—tell me more. Talk to me. Please talk to me.”

Pauline said, “Max Brod once had a very interesting conversation with Franz Kafka, which he later recounted to Walter Benjamin….”

Homo sapiens
evolved in Terran gravity and it is still an open question what effects time spent in less than one g will have on the individual

decrease in bone strength from 0.5 percent to 5 percent per month in 0–.1 g

repeated exposure to gravity incidents greater than 3 g has been shown to create micro-strokes and raise the incidence of major strokes

the biomedical research community has changed its mind about these questions more than once through the years

aerobic and resistance exercise partially compensates for physiological effects of long-term residence in moderate low g (defined as between Luna’s .17 g and Mars’s .38 g) but there are problems left unaddressed

maintaining a vigorous physical life substantially mitigates

below Luna g, physical etiolation occurs in some organs and tissues no matter how much exercise

statistically very significant results in actuarial tables suggest longevity beyond historical norms is impossible without frequent
return not just to a one-g environment, but to Earth itself. Why this should be so is a matter of dispute, but the fact itself is very clear in the data. We propose to show

one year in every six spent on Earth, with no time away longer than ten years, greatly increases longevity. Neglect of this practice leads to a high risk of dying many decades before

oversterile environments cannot

the famous or notorious sabbatical has been proposed as an example of hormesis or Mithridatism, in which brief exposure to toxins strengthens the organism against greater

Earth’s continuing clutch on space-dwelling humans is physiological and will not go away unless it is fully characterized and all components of it effectively ameliorated

inoculations of helminths (ringworm), bacteria, viruses, etc., impossible to catalog and yet

possible psychological effects also, which means extreme difficulty in defining causation or treatment

not dissimilar to other five-hundred-year projects in intrinsic difficulty

effects are cumulative and lead to dysfunction

increase in longevity is a statistical fact but no guarantee for any particular individual. Life choices shift the probabilities of

regenerative therapies continue to improve

the biggest jump in the longevity graphs came at the start of the Accelerando, and many feel this was not a coincidence. There is a surge of energy that comes when you realize you may live much longer than you had thought possible. Problems that later complicate the picture don’t become evident until

the statistics are suggestive but the causes are not yet

life is a complex

STD, sudden traumatic death, insoluble

people should minimize their time in the lowest and highest gs if they want to maximize their chance at newly normative extended lifetimes, which keep getting longer

no real sense of what might be possible if improvements continue

could we live for thousands of

people compromise, they cut corners. They want to do things, they indulge their desires, their love of adventure

to have to return to Earth, so dirty and old, so oppressive, such a failure. So much the sad planet

they swore they would live by accident, but they were young at the time

most older spacers go home to Earth as advised, one year every seven, because these are the ones living the longest and the effect is self-reinforcing

the hunt continues for a fuller explanation

E
arth’s thirty-seven space elevators all had their cars full all the time, both up and down. There were still many spacecraft landings and ascents, of course, and landings of gliders that then reascended on the elevators; but all in all, the elevators handled by far the bulk of the Earth-space traffic. Going down in the cars were food (a crucial percentage of the total needed), metals, manufactured goods, gases, and people. Going up were people, manufactured goods, the substances common on Earth but rare in space—these were many, including things animal, vegetable, and mineral, but chiefly (by bulk) rare earths, wood, oil, and soil. The totals came to quite a flow of physical mass up and down, all powered by the counterbalanced forces of gravity and the rotation of the Earth, with a bit of solar power to make up the difference.

The anchor rocks at the upper ends of the elevator cables were like giant spaceliners, as very little of their original asteroidal surfaces were left visible; their exteriors were covered with buildings, power units, elevator loading zones and the like. They were in effect giant harbors and hotels and, as such, extremely busy places. Swan passed through the one called Bolivar and settled into one of the hotel cars without even noticing it; to her it had just been a complicated set of doors and locks and corridors, getting her into yet another set of rooms. She was resigned to the long ride down to Quito. It was an irony of their time that the trip down the elevator cable was going to take longer than many interplanetary
voyages, but that’s the way it was. Five days stuck in a hotel. She spent the days attending performances of Glass’s
Satyagraha
and
Akhnaten
, also dancing hard in a grueling class designed to get people toughened up for one g, which sometimes hit her pretty hard. Looking down through the clear floor, she got familiar again with the great bulge of South America, gaining definition below them: blue oceans to each side; the Andes like a brown spine; the little brown cones of the big volcanoes, bereft of all their snow.

I
t was almost an ice-free planet now, with only Antarctica and Greenland holding on to much, and Greenland going fast. Sea level was therefore eleven meters higher than it had been before the changes. This inundation of the coastline was one of the main drivers of the human disaster on Earth. They had immensely powerful terraforming techniques off-planet, but here they usually couldn’t be applied. No slamming comets into it, for instance. So they bubbled their ship wakes with surfactants to create a higher albedo, and had tried various levels of sulfur dioxide injected into the stratosphere, imitating volcanoes; but that had once led to disaster, and now they couldn’t agree on how much sunlight to block. Much that people advocated, and many of the smaller projects that were in action already, cut against other proposed or ongoing projects. And there were still powerful nation-states that were also corporate conglomerates, the two overlapping in Keynesian disarray, with the residual but powerful capitalist system ruling much of the planet and containing within it its own residual feudalism, there to fight forever against the serfs, meaning also against the horizontalized economy emerging within the Mondragon. No, Earth was a mess, a sad place. And yet still the center of the story. It had to be dealt with, as Alex had always said, or nothing done in space was real.

I
n Quito Swan took the train to the airport and got on an airplane flight to New York. The Caribbean’s cobalt and turquoise
and jade were brilliantly vivid; even the brown underwater outline of drowned Florida had a jasper sheen. The stunning gloss of Earth itself.

A much steelier ocean crashed whitely into Long Island as they descended over it, bumping and slipping in the air. Then they were landing on a runway somewhere on the mainland north of Manhattan, and at last she was out of the various travel containers, the rooms and vehicles and corridors and hallways, and under the open sky.

Simply to be outdoors in the open air, under the sky, in the wind—this was what she loved most about Earth. Today puffy clouds were massed overhead at about the thousand-foot level. Looked like a marine layer rolling in. She ran out into some kind of paved lot filled with trucks and buses and trolley cars, and jumped around screaming at the sky, then kneeled and kissed the ground, made wolf howls, and, after she had hyperventilated a bit, lay on her back on the pavement. No handstands—she had learned long before that handstands on Earth were really hard. And her rib still hurt.

Through gaps in the cloud layer she could see the light-but-dark blue of the Terran sky, subtle and full. It looked like a blue dome flattened at the center, perhaps a few kilometers above the clouds—she reached up for it—although knowing too that it was just a kind of rainbow made it glorious. A rainbow that was blue everywhere and covered everything. The blue itself was complex, narrow in range but infinite within that range. It was an intoxicating sight, and you could breathe it—one was always breathing it, you had to. The wind shoved it into you! Breathe and get drunk, oh my, to be free of all restraint, minimally clothed, lying on the bare surface of a planet, sucking in its atmosphere as if it were an aqua vitae, feeling in your chest how it kept you alive! No Terran she had ever met properly appreciated their air, or saw their sky for what it was. In fact they very seldom looked at it.

She collected herself and walked over to the dock. A big grumbling water ferry took on her and many others, and after
negotiating a crowded canal, they were out in the Hudson River and going down to Manhattan. The ferry moved into a dock on Washington Heights, but Swan stayed on it as it plied its way down the Hudson side to midtown. A few parts of Manhattan’s ground still stood above the water, but most of it was drowned, the old streets now canals, the city an elongated Venice, a skyscraper Venice, a super Venice—which was a very beautiful thing to be. Indeed it was an oft-expressed cliché that the city had been improved by the flood. The long stretch of skyscrapers looked like the spine of a dragon. The foreshortening effect as they got closer made the buildings look shorter than they really were, but their verticality was unmistakable and striking. A forest of dolmens!

Swan got off the ferry at the Thirtieth Street Pier and walked on the broad catwalk between buildings to the High Line extension, where people filled the long plazas stretching north and south. Manhattan on foot: workers pushing narrow handcarts on crowded skyways, connecting island neighborhoods suspended between skyscrapers at differing heights. The rooftops were garnished with greenery, but the city was mostly a thing of steel and concrete and glass—and water. Boats burbled about on the water below the catwalks, in the streets that were now crowded canals. All the aerial plazas and catwalks were jammed with people. As crowded as ever, people said. Swan dodged between the bodies of the crowd, working the border between the two directions of traffic, glorying in all the faces. They were just as heterogeneous as any spacer crowd, but the people were very much closer to an average size—rather short at that—with many fewer smalls and talls. Asian faces, African, European—everyone but Native Americans, as she always thought in Manhattan. Talk about invasive biology!

A building she passed had pumped out its old floor and now operated down there in a kind of big bathtub of air. She had heard that submarine and intertidal real estate was booming. Some spoke of pumping out the subway system, which still worked
wherever it had run aboveground. Below her the slop of water threw up a big ambient sound. Human voices, and water splashing, and the cries of gulls back on the docks, and the rush of wind through the canyons of buildings; these were the sounds of the city. The water below was completely chopped up with intersecting wakes. Behind her, down the avenue to the west, mirrorflakes of broken sunlight bounced on the big river. This was the thing she loved—she was outdoors, truly in the open. Standing on the side of a planet. In the greatest city of all.

S
he hopped down some stairs and got on a vaparetto going down Eighth Avenue. The ferry was a long low-slung thing, with seats for about fifty people and room for another hundred to stand. It stopped every few blocks. She hung over the rail and gazed up and down the canal: a river canyon, with buildings for canyon walls. Very Futurismo in appearance. She got off at Twenty-Sixth Street where it was bridged by a long esplanade, extending east all the way to the East River. Lots of the east-west streets had overhead platforms like this, and the crowded canals under them were shaded almost all day long. When the sunlight slanted through slots, it laid a bronze glaze on things, and the blue water turned pewter. The New Yorkers did not seem to notice this effect, but on the other hand, there were twenty million people living here despite the flood, and Swan thought that beauty was not completely irrelevant to the phenomenon, even if people chose to keep mum about it. Tough guys, it made her laugh. Swan was not a tough guy, and not a New Yorker, and this place was astonishing and she knew the locals knew it. Talk about landscape art! “ ‘The geography of the world is unified only by human logic and optics,’ ” she chanted, “ ‘by the light and color of artifice, by decorative arrangement, by ideas of the good, the true, and the beautiful!’ ” You could sing Lowenthal’s entire oratio on the catwalks of Manhattan, and no one would care.