Macrolife (6 page)

The sky over old Manhattan was made of concrete-gray bulerite, a ceiling studded with electric stars and huge, sunlike fluorescent disks. Sam often imagined that he was seeing an overcast sky through circles of glass; it was his way, he knew, of wishing away the city that pressed down on Old New York. The great ventilators could never eliminate the dusty smell of the old streets. He thought of the tomb blackness of Harlem, farther uptown in the basement city, buried now for almost forty years beneath a mile of New City.

But much of the Old City had endured, as had London and Paris, Tokyo, Rome, and major areas of Moscow and Peking—subterranean haunts tucked away in the world's memory like dear, unwanted relations.

The indoor climate of the upper levels was perfect, and the tiers gave an open view of land, ocean, and sky, but it would be a long time before the New City acquired the sense of tradition belonging to the original ground level.

The elevators from the skyport had grown more utilitarian as he had neared the undercity, until he had emerged from the shaft that stood in the square on East Broadway, Old Chinatown.

It was almost ten in the evening as he walked across the empty square and down the street toward the restaurant. As long as there were people willing to live or do business down here, the Old Cities would continue, links to the past that would live as long as the earth endured.

The door was made of wood and glass. Sam paused as three electrical maintenance workers came out. He nodded to them and went inside, saying hello to the owner who sat behind the desk register. A young Chinese waiter showed him to a large table set for two.

Sam sat down, noticing himself in the wall of mirrors at his right. They made the room look larger. His one-piece black evening suit was a bit out of style, and his gray turtleneck was slightly soiled. His hair was getting long around the edges. For a moment he thought he saw something of his youthful self peering at him. He looked up at the Chinese lantern hanging from the ceiling. The waiter brought him a glass of tea. Sam put some sugar in it, took a sip, and looked around at the unoccupied linen-covered tables, speculating about their age. He heard voices behind the Oriental screen in front of the kitchen door and wondered at the efficiency of people who could produce almost two hundred dishes in such small quarters. He thought of the levels above him, open to the sky; the undercity would never see sunlight again, unless the very bedrock of Manhattan were split open. He thought of the magnetic boost-train tunnels, airless arteries as black as interstellar space, running to the terminals in the rock below him.

Jack is gone
, he thought, realizing that he had not reminded himself of the fact for a whole day.

Orton Blackfriar came in and dropped his cane into the rack. He was wearing an old-fashioned tweed blazer, gold sports shirt, slacks from another era, and silver glasses which made mirrors of his eyes, giving him the appearance of a well-to-do panda. He walked into the dining area, stooping gracelessly to avoid hitting his head on the partition.

The wooden chair creaked as he sat down opposite Sam. He took off his glasses and put them in his jacket pocket. “How is Janet?” he asked quietly.

“I haven't seen her since the funeral.” Sam paused. “They got some ashes from the coffin and buried them as Jack's remains. The chauffeur's family and the hearse company are suing Bulero.”

“I asked Richard to join us,” Orton said. “He should be here in a moment. Any more news?”

Sam shrugged. “The investigations are going on as quietly as possible. Bulero is making its own investigation. Things don't look promising for the company. Space shipping is at a standstill. They still haven't found out what went wrong with the haulers.”

“Can the losses be absorbed?”

“If nothing else goes wrong,” Sam said.

Richard came in and sat down in the chair facing the mirror.

“Go on,” he said. “Don't let me stop you.”

“Janet is doing a good job with the company,” Sam said. “She took care of the transition period after the will was read. Everybody looks to her, even Mike Basil. She knows now that she's needed and that Jack did not keep her on out of charity. I think she feels closer to him now than when he was alive.”

“I've been taking care of things on the East Coast,” Richard said. “It's eating into my time. I don't know when I'll get back to my studies.”

“Janet is really good with the accounting computers,” Sam continued. “I'm told that her diagnostic programs are very clever, very useful to the regional directors.”

“Do you resent having to involve yourself in the company, Richard?” Orton asked.

The waiter interrupted them.

Sam ordered first. Wonton soup, sweet and sour pork—all of it made from meat and vegetable culture stock, an industry which was finally competing with animal husbandry and plant farming. Orton spoke Chinese to the waiter, ordering wonton and beef lo mein for Richard and himself.

“I do resent it,” Richard said when the waiter left. “I'd rather be back on the moon, finishing my work. Margot and I would prefer to live on Asterome, where we can have access to facilities for our work. The bio-isolation labs are really fine out there.”

Sam noted Richard's nervousness.

 

They ate their soup in silence. As they waited for the main course, Sam asked, “Have you decided what to do after your term is over, Orton?”

Orton took a sip of tea. “I think I'll take the offer to help run Asterome. There's room to grow out there. I've been reading a lot, talking to people, dreaming.”

“In dreams begin new responsibilities. Watch out.”

“You wouldn't believe the dreams that were shelved by the research priority boards of the last century.”

“Tell me about it,” Sam said, hoping to take some of the lethargy out of himself through stimulating conversation.

“The food will get here before I can finish.”

“Go ahead, Orton,” Richard said. “You know I'm convinced.”

“I can still take an interest in things outside my personal troubles,” Sam said. “So what have you two been talking about?”

The waiter arrived with a large tray. They traded portions of one another's dishes. Sam savored the crisp, factory-grown vegetables. The tea was strong and aromatic. He remembered when Richard had been his student at Princeton, studying philosophy and getting excited about creativity in the sciences; it had been inevitable, looking back, that he would go into physics. Sam sensed that still newer concerns were developing in Richard, and that Orton was somehow involved.

After the meal was finished, Orton took out a cigar, prepared it with a small century-old penknife, lit it with a gold lighter, and took a few puffs.

“It took thousands of dollars to make this great bulk of mine,” he said as he sat back, “which supports a dreaming brain. So I'll dream as well as I possibly can.” The chair creaked as he leaned back. “Of course, any reality made from a dream will sober up a bit….”

“What are you talking about?” Sam asked.

“Let him tell it his way,” Richard said.

Sam watched the cloud of blue smoke forming around Orton, making him look like a demon sitting in mists. “I don't think that planets are the best places for a civilization. They're not necessarily the best we can do at all.”

“You suggest that we all pack up and leave?” Sam said.

“Not at all. I want to sketch a long-term development leading to another way of life, one that will institutionalize the pursuit of ambitious goals for humankind. Part of human life is the need to reassure ourselves about the future that we may never live to see, rather than fool ourselves, as many did in the last century, that there won't be any future and they might as well lie down and die.” The waiter stopped by the table and Orton told him to bring a small bottle of brandy.

“The earth is a biological crib,” Blackfriar continued, “rocked back and forth by the sun—but we've got to grow up, start walking around, or rot. What I want to tell you about is a new kind of human society, one that may become a permanent form of culture.” He was puffing heavily on his cigar. “Picture this: a mobile space colony, supporting more than a million people. No, not a colony, but an organism which can move and grow as long as it can obtain resources and maintain a food supply within its ecology. It's a living organism because it can respond to stimuli through its optical and sensory nervous system. It thinks with the intellects of its human and cybernetic intelligences. And it can reproduce, which is what we expect from a living organism. Its reproduction would be asexual, in part. The mobile world would undergo mitosis, the result of construction by human-directed machines of a complete new mobile container, and duplication of the human, animal, and plant cells by the usual means. If, for example, fifty years is the period for doubling the life of the mobile, then a new vehicle would be built during that time.”

“The new social container,” Richard said, “could be built as an outer shell, only slightly larger than the original, and when completed it would be removed from around the original and its interior work finished. Or the original could expand in size, shell after shell, to the limit of practicality. I suppose it could grow to be as large as a planet.”

“But we're already out in sunspace,” Sam said, “and developing it quite well, as far as I see. Asterome is pretty much the kind of colony you describe.”

Orton flicked a long ash into his ashtray and leaned back, creaking the chair dangerously. “That's not the kind of thoroughgoing development I'm talking about, just as travel within the solar system is not real space travel. Interstellar travel is real space travel. The solar system is our backyard, our Wild West. I'm talking about using the resources of sunspace to create a new kind of social system, free of planets, free of the accidents of nature.”

“The asteroid hollow of Asterome has a completely controlled environment,” Sam said.

“It's only a start,” Richard said. “The organism we're talking about would be a continuation of biosocial evolution on a large scale. It would possess the sum total of human culture and knowledge in its memory banks, much as the cell carries DNA information. Its capacity for expanding human perception, range of experience, and creativity would be limited only by the most basic natural limits.”

“I take it,” Sam said, “that Asterome's interstellar group has something to do with this?”

“Yes,” Orton said. “They've been looking into this prospect for many years. Now, given time, the number of these societal containers would increase. A dozen could be in sun orbit within fifty years. You wouldn't believe the amount of basic research going on now on Asterome into communications, gravity and experimental relativity, methods of achieving near light speeds, and maybe even trans-light speeds. The reason for such research is that it would make it possible to send a mobile world out into the galaxy, to reproduce itself over and over again, growing step by step as population increased.”

“The space colony ideas of the twentieth century,” Richard said, “will not reach fruition until Asterome becomes mobile and reproduces. To really take full advantage of the possibilities, the only instance of macro-life must stop behaving like an extension of a planetary civilization.”

“It would be just as well,” Blackfriar said, “to send a few macro-worlds out of sunspace as to have them circle the sun.”

“It seems to me,” Sam said, “that the vicinity of the sun has room for…millions of such worlds. There's more space here than we could ever use.”

“That's right,” Richard said. “You see the potential. But macrolife is a form of life, and macroworlds are highly complex seeds which we could scatter into the spiral arms of the galaxy, ensuring the survival of human culture—a permanent, open-ended, mature culture. It's something we've never done in our history, a really novel development.”

“All the components exist,” Orton said. “We can use solar and fusion power sources efficiently, and we know how to build powerful nuclear propulsion systems. There's no end to the number of nickel-iron asteroids that we can heat and blow up into hollow containers.”

“It would take a great upheaval to drive us out to the stars on the scale you both suggest,” Sam said.

“I'm talking about a few hundred thousand men and women,” Orton said, “only those who want to participate. I'm talking about branching humanity, something like what's happening to people on the moon and Mars. The humanity I have in mind would remake itself after leaving the solar system, by creating a second nature, maybe even a new kind of human being to live in it.”

“Look at it this way,” Richard said. “Eventually we'll have to open the bigger sky or perish.”

“Not soon,” Sam said. “Maybe millions of years from now.”

Richard shook his head. “Not true. Sun studies on Mercury have shown for some time now that the sun is not the stable star we thought it was. Have you forgotten how close we came to being struck by a large asteroid in the 1980s? Macrolife would be an independent society, retaining its basic, social-container-like form while permitting mobility and a great variety of social systems. With no limits to growth, it would permit a better development of man's freedom and inner resources. A planetbound culture repeatedly reaches a volatile point and attempts to organize itself after the point of greatest danger and difficulty. We're still such a culture.”

“We don't seem to be doing badly at last,” Sam said.

Blackfriar grunted. “True—but consider how much of our success is made possible by that portion of humanity that lives and works off the planet. We may be coming out of industrial adolescence, but I still don't feel safe about human survival. The earth is too fluid, too vulnerable in the perspective of geology, ultimately too limiting. In time it will become completely dependent on off world industries, countryside to the urban space habitats, providing nothing they need except maybe nostalgia.”