2312 (42 page)

“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.

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.

T
erminator’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
must
be 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.

Annie Oakley Crater, Dorothy Sayers Crater.

Also craters named for:

Madame Sévigné, Shakira (a Bashkir goddess), Martha Graham, Hippolyta, Nina Efimova, Dorothea Erxleben, Lorraine Hansberry, Catherine Beevher;

also the Mesopotamian fertility goddess, the Celtic river goddess, the Woyo rainbow goddess, the Pueblo Indian corn goddess, the Vedic goddess of plenty, the Roman goddess of the hunt (Diana), the Latvian goddess of fate;

also Anna Comnena, Charlotte Corday, Mary Queen of Scots, Madame de Staël, Simone de Beauvoir, Josephine Baker.

Also Aurelia, the mother of Julius Caesar. Tezan, the Etruscan goddess of the dawn. Alice B. Toklas. Xantippe. Empress Wuhou. Virginia Woolf. Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Evangeline, Fátima, Gloria, Gaia, Helen, Heloise.

Lillian Hellman, Edna Ferber, Zora Neale Hurston.

Guinevere, Nell Gwyn, Martine de Beausoleil.

Sophia Jex-Blake, Jerusha Jirad, Angelica Kauffman.