Existence (42 page)

Hacker knew he should clamber up the nearby beach now, to borrow a phone and call people—his partners and brokers, mother and brother, friends and lovers.

Tell them he was alive.

Get back to business.

Instead, he swiveled in the water and kicked hard at a downward slant, following his new friends to the habitat dome.

Maybe I’ll learn what’s been done to them,
he thought.

And why.

DISPUTATION

Why haven’t we overpopulated the planet?

That may seem an odd question, while refugee riots wrack overcrowded cities that incubate new diseases weekly. Forests topple for desperate farmland, even as drought bakes former farms into desert. Starvation lurks beyond each year’s harvest and human waste is now the world economy’s biggest product by sheer mass. One can understand why some view nine billion humans as a curse, shredding and consuming Earth to the bone.

Yet, it could have been worse. A generation ago, scholars forecast we’d be past fourteen or fifteen billion by now and still climbing toward the limit prophesied by Malthus—a great die-off. It happens to every species that out breeds its habitat capacity.

Trouble is, any die-off won’t just dip our population to sustainable levels. Humans don’t go quietly. We tend to claw and drag others down with us. Out of blame, or for company. Given today’s varied tools of ready wrought destruction, any such event would affect everyone. So, aren’t we lucky that population growth rates are way down? With the total even tapering a bit? Maybe enough to squeak by? Sure, that means old folks will outnumber kids for a while. Well, no one promised survival would be free of consequences.

But
how
did it happen? Why did we escape (even barely) the Malthusian Trap? Some credit the fact that humans can separate the recreational and procreative aspects of sex.

Animals feel a compulsive drive to mate and exchange genes. Some scatter their offspring in great numbers. Others care intensively for just a few. But animals who finish this cycle and are healthy enough, routinely return to the driver of it all—sex—starting the process over again. Its power is rooted in one simple fact. Those who felt its urgency had more descendants.

This applied to us, too, of course, till technology gave us birth control.

Then suddenly, the sex compulsion could be satisfied without procreation, with amazing effects. Everywhere that women were empowered with both prosperity and rights, most of them chose to limit childbearing, to concentrate on raising a few privileged offspring instead of brooding at max capacity. We became a
non-Malthusian species,
able to limit our population by choice, in the nick of time.

Too bad it can’t last. Today, some humans
do
overbreed. These tend not to be the rich, or those with enough food or who have sex a lot. They are having lots of kids
because they choose to.
And so, whatever inner drives provoked that choice get passed down to more offspring, then more. Over time, this extra-strong desire will appear in rising portions of the population.

It’s evolution in action. As time passes, the locus of compulsion will shift from sex to a genetically-driven, iron willed determination to have more kids.…

… and then we’ll be a Malthusian species again—like the “motie” beings in that novel
The Mote in God’s Eye,
unable to stop. Unable to say “enough.” A fate that may commonly entrap a great many other species, across the cosmos.

Before that happens to us, we had better finish the job of growing up.

—from
The Movement Revealed,
by Thormace Anubis-Fejel

33.

STRAIGHT FLUSH

As he changed into formal dinner clothes in the luxurious guest bedroom, one furnishing caught the attention of Hamish Brookeman—a modernized, antique chamber pot.

Not the Second Empire armoire, or the Sforzese chest of drawers, nor even the Raj era rug from Baluchistan. (He needed a Mesh-consult to identify that one, with Wriggles whispering a description in his ear.) Hamish had an eye for detail—he needed one, while moving in circles like these. The mega wealthy had grown judgmental, of late. They expected you to know about such things, to better understand your place.

Hamish was a rich man, ranking five percentile nines—enough to classify him as a member of the First Estate, if he weren’t already a legend in the arts. Nevertheless, there was nothing in this room that he could afford. Not one blessed thing.

And I’m far from the most important guest who has come to this gathering in the Alps. I can only imagine what kind of digs they’re giving Tenskwatawa and his aides, or the aristocrats flying in from Shanghai and Yangon, Moscow and Mumbai.

Of course, Hamish had another reason for scanning, hungrily, everything in sight. Always at the back of his mind was the question:
Can I use this in a novel?

Even when storytelling ceased to be what it had been for three centuries, an author’s hermetic craft, transforming into a hybrid, multimedia team effort, with eye-clickable hyperlinks that required a whole staff to provide … even so, he still had the solitary habit of mind, envisioning the narrative in paragraphs, punctuation and all.

That Heian era tea table would be worth a three-sentence aside, revealing something about the character of the one who owns it.

Or—

I could go on for a couple of pages about this Bohemian Renaissance four-poster bed, with snakes twisting insidiously, perhaps voluptuously, or else biblically, among the deeply carved curly vines. Maybe even write it into the plot as a haunted soul-reliquary … or high-tech life-extension device … or a disguised scanner, meant to read the minds of houseguests while they sleep.

Each of the scenarios was about
Science Gone Terribly Wrong in Unforeseen Ways,
of course. There were always far more potential stories about the penalties of human technological hubris than even he could put down.

But no, the particular item he found squatting by the foot of the damask coverlet was especially interesting. Decorated in Georgian style, the chamber pot was either an excellent reproduction (unlikely in this mansion) or else the genuine eighteenth century article—a late Whieldon or an early Josiah Wedgwood design. And yet, evidently, it was also meant to be in service—the modern, hermetically sealed lid made that plain, along with a soft green night-light, designed to prevent fumbling in the dark. No doubt, when he opened the pot for use, he would also find another light within, to improve nocturnal aim.

Can’t have guests pissing on the rug,
Hamish mused. A functional combination of old and new. And also—just as explicitly—not to be sat on. Not for women, then, or for defecation. Men only. And just old Number One. Any modern person would understand the narrow purpose—for collecting the contemporary equivalent of gold.

But why here, by the bed? Why not simply walk to the loo?

Just fifteen steps took him through an ornate doorway to the elaborately tiled private bath, with heated floor and seven nozzle shower, where nanofiber towels awaited their chance to massage his pores while wicking moisture and applying expensive lotion, all at the same time. The facilities were sumptuous and up-to-date, except …

Well I’ll be hog-tied. There’s no phos-urinal.

The toilet-bidet had every water and air jet accoutrement, along with the latest seat warmer-vibrator from Kinshasa Luxe. But clearly, the porcelain bowl itself simply flushed, straight into the sewer, just like in the bad old days. There was no separate collector unit, or PU. No way for a man to perform the modern duty never asked of women. The one obligation that few women—even the most egalitarian or environmentally dedicated—volunteered to perform.

Back home, Hamish took care of reducing his household phosphorus waste by simply peeing off his bedroom balcony onto the roses … or into a sheltered flower bed outside his office. The world’s simplest recycling system, and adopted by males all over the globe—wherever any nearby patch of nature might benefit—once a mild gaucherie, now an act of Earth patriotism.

To be honest, he enjoyed it, and Carolyn was no longer around to roll her eyes, muttering about a
“so-called crisis that must have been trumped up by macho little boys.”

That brought a smile of recollection … followed by a frown, remembering how, toward the end, she had called him a hypocrite for telling millions of viewers and readers, in
Condition of Panic,
that the phosphorus shortage was a hoax—a plot conceived by fertilizer barons and radical Earthfirsters.

“In that case, why have you put PUnits in every bathroom of this house?”
she demanded, one day.
“You could be consistent. Take it to court! Pay the fines! Flush away!”

Hamish’s standard response—“Hey, it’s just a story!”—didn’t seem to work with her anymore. Not toward the end.

In truth, that novel—retitled
Phoscarcity?
and then
Phos-scare-city!
for the movie version—was one he rather regretted. Denying the obvious had cost him some credibility. But, then, Carolyn never understood—
I don’t like smartaleck boffins telling me what to do. Even when they’re right.

Veering back to the here and now, Hamish wondered about the House of Glaucus-Worthington. For all the luxury of this bathroom, it pretty blatantly ignored the worldwide fertilizer shortage.
Do they bribe Zurich officials to look the other way, when this grand mansion sends all its phosphorus down to the mulching plant, mixed in with toilet paper and poo?
Downstream reclamation was far less efficient, after all. And the Swiss loved efficiency.

Just because you’re a plutocrat, that doesn’t automatically mean you don’t care about the planet. Even if the GWs shrug off this emergency, some of their visitors will be planet-minded types or rich Naderites, who will want to …

… oh …

Okay, mystery partly solved. The chamber pot was a courtesy, for guests choosing to do the planetary correct thing. But such a conspicuously impractical PC solution! Some servant would have to come, perhaps twice or more a day, collect each contribution and then clean the pot.…

For the second time in a few heartbeats, Hamish got the “aha!” moment that he lived for.

I get it. You’re telling me that you can send well-paid, elegant, soft-spoken servants all through this mammoth showplace, emptying and scrubbing antique porcelain
PeeYews
—each of them worth a small fortune—by hand. All right, point taken. You are rich enough to no longer care how many nines you have in your percentile.

Also,
he recalled with a wince,
rich enough to not give a damn about fame … or autographs.

As Rupert Glaucus-Worthington had demonstrated, by smiling faintly, when Hamish tried to hand him a signed copy of
The New Pyramid,
touching it lightly with a fingertip, before allowing a butler to carry it away. And then, with condescension that seemed more indolent than purposely insulting, the patriarch had asked:

“And so, Mr. Brookeman, what is it that you do for a living?”

One cultural gulf between people living east and west of the Atlantic had long swirled around that question. Americans tended to ask it right away, often unaware that it might cause offense.

To us it means “What interesting task or skill did you choose as the daytime focus of your life?” We assume it’s a matter of choice, not caste. Meanwhile, Europeans tend to translate the question to “What’s your born social class?” or “How much money do you make?”
Generations of misunderstanding arose from that simple, treacherous, conversational error.

Only, then, why did Glaucus-Worthington—as European as the Alps—ask it?

Hamish recalled the sense of hurt that question triggered when he arrived at this great house, along with a dozen other guests, all brought in by private stratojet to assist tomorrow’s negotiations. Stepping from limousine to receiving line was no new thing for Hamish. He had been prepared for the usual light chitchat with his host, before butlers took each visitor to private chambers for freshening up.

But Hamish was also accustomed to being one of the most famous people in any room, never subjected to that particular question.

Could it be that he’s really never heard of me? When I answered by offering up some movie titles, none of them seemed to strike a bell. He simply smiled and said “How nice,” before turning to the boffin standing next in line.

Of course, the superrich do have elite pastimes. Interests and activities we can only dream of. Priorities beyond mere …

Standing by the bed—halfway changed from his travel clothes into the obligate white tie and dinner jacket—Hamish blinked in sudden realization.

It’s too much. No person could be that far out of touch. Anyway, all you have to do today is plug a farlai in your ear to get automatic, whispered bio-summaries about anyone you meet. A conscientious host does that, making every guest feel appreciated.

No. The snub was deliberate. Rupert wants to seem aloof, above it all.

But the hand is overplayed.

They’re trying too hard.

Hamish knew what Guillaume deGrasse, his favorite detective character, would say right now.

I can smell fear.

*   *   *

He had no opportunity to share that insight with the Prophet before dinner—only a few moments to offer his capsule summary of meeting Roger Betsby, the self-confessed poisoner of Senator Strong. Tenskwatawa’s dark eyes glittered while listening to Hamish’s brief tale about the daring, the gall, the utter chutzpah of a rural doctor, who seemed so cheerfully—if mysteriously—willing to bring himself down, along with a despised politician.

“So you still have no idea what drug Betsby used to warp Strong’s behavior? Getting him to make such a fool of himself in public?”