Moon Flower (31 page)

“Well, hey, you finally made it, eh? Welcome to Cyrene!”

“Hello, Evan,” Shearer said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The name of the place was Linzava. They had come to it via its rear approach, as it were, over the divide from the Geevar valley to the south. The main access route was via the valley leading north, which they had entered from its top end. It carried a tributary of the river called the Woohosey that Blanborel had described, bigger than the Geevar, that formed the border with Ibennis on the far side to the north.

As at Doriden, the first thing after their arrival and being shown their quarters was some refreshment to reinvigorate them after the day’s travel, starting off with a jug of
pikoe
, a hot herb brew apparently drunk universally in these parts. It was less formal affair this time, in a room of timber beams and mullioned windows enlivened by long, bannerlike wall tapestries. One more person joined them in addition to Eckelan and Nick: a woman of Asiatic appearance that Wade introduced as Elena Hukishido, a biophysicist whose background was in cellular photons — the field that had led Wade into the study of quantum processes. She was from Seattle originally, of mixed parentage, and had come out to Cyrene on the first manned mission — the same one as Wade. She was dressed Terran style in a traditional high-neck dress with slits that revealed shapely legs to good effect. Shearer put her at around thirty-five. They could meet more faces in the days ahead, after they had rested, Wade said. As the company began tucking in to a selection of ribs, roasts, and finger food, he described some of Linzava’s background.

The original house had been built a century or more before by an architect-builder as a hunting retreat, intended later to become a secluded home for his retirement. After he died, his children had added extensions of various kinds and styles over the years, giving the place a something of a haphazard appearance, and then vacated it as the urge overcame them to see more of the world and its life. In later years it was likely that they in their turn would come back, if only to spend intervals away from homes they had found elsewhere. In the meantime, the premises were available for use by other enterprises. And just at the moment, that meant Wade and somewhere between one and two dozen other Terrans from the first and second missions — not all of whom were present at this particular time — and the small but dedicated band of somewhat exceptional Cyreneans who in one way or another had come together around them.

The connection with Doriden was stronger than had been apparent, but the fact was kept obscure to avoid inviting attention from the Terran authorities. With its emphasis on training students, and experimenting with rudimentary technologies, Doriden, in a way, served as a front to disguise the extent of what the Cyreneans were really learning from their Terran contacts.

The plans that Wade hinted at went far beyond Vattorix and Yocala, Ibennis to the north, and other neighboring or nearby states. Zek’s steam-engine project at Doriden was seen as an interim measure to provide the experience and acquaint an initial cadre of students with the concepts involved. Beyond that, moves to develop a pioneer oil-producing operation on a modest scale were already progressing more rapidly than Zek and Blanborel at Doriden had revealed. But it would require all the essentials of a higher-quality engineering base as Shearer had pointed out, along with means for drilling, refining, and transportation, much of which would depend on the cooperation of people and their rulers in distant places. Such contacts were being cultivated right now in various parts of Cyrene. That was why many of the Terrans who had come to Linzava were currently absent.

“I don’t want to sound negative,” Jerri said when Wade had gotten that far. “But can you be sure it will stay as simple as that? I mean, look at the kind of thing that happened with us. It sounds like a recipe for colonial wars. Despite all their history, how certain can you be that it won’t provoke the same kind of thing here?”

Wade banged the table with the palm of his hand and gestured at her as if inviting all of them to witness. “Jerri’s got it, right on! That’s the whole point. The leaders we’re so expert at ending up with would see no other way than to fight over who gets to own what. The Cyreneans won’t. They’ll do it the way they do everything else — which you must have seen by now. They’ll work together for what they know will be better for all of them in the end.”

“Which is all a good reason for keeping the jolly folks back home out of it,” Nick put in from beside Wade. “We all know what their stake is. The Cyreneans don’t want to end up as the work-horses on somebody else’s plantation. They’ll run their own show — the way it should be run.”

“Do you remember how we used to talk about what a different place Earth might have been if Europe had actually practiced the Christian ethics that it talked about, and initiated an industrial era that preserved them?” Wade said, singling out Shearer. He threw out an arm expansively. “Well, this is it, Marc! It’s all happening out there. If we can just get them through the early stages without Earth interfering.”

Eckelan, who had removed his hat to reveal brown, shoulder-length waves and was sitting with Shearer and Uberg, elaborated, using the spare NIDA. Wade hadn’t seen one of the devices before and was impressed. “We are aware of the need to move on to other things than relying on animals. You have seen the sewer they make of Revo. Over half the land that we farm is to grow feed for them. Your friends have told us how it was on Earth.”

As he listened, Shearer began to realize the full enormity of the threat that Wade and this group represented to the designs of Interworld and the interests that it acted for. This world would stand together to resist economic imperialism. The people would refuse to be divided by false promises and accusations, and their leaders would never sell out or betray them. None of the usual methods of creating dependence and then asserting control would work here. The investment in three missions and any prospects for subsequent earnings would have to be written off. Uberg was looking mildly stunned. It seemed to be the first time that he had fully seen all the ramifications too.

Jerri broke the silence that the newcomers had lapsed into. “It’s this business about them just somehow...
knowing
, isn’t it?” She looked at Wade, as if finally hoping for an answer. “How do they work these things out? They’re really not very analytical.”

Wade’s eyes twinkled as he answered. “I’d say they have things in proportion.”

“This wonderful intellect that we thought was going to be the answer to everything is good only as far as it goes,” Nick said.

“And what’s that?” Uberg asked.

“Making machines that work,” Wade replied.

“And that’s it?”

“Pretty much.”

“So what about all the other things?” Jerri asked.

“Such as?”

She shrugged. “Life, the universe, and what it all means. Where it all came from.”

Wade turned up his palms. “Nothing’s repeatable, testable, or really falsifiable. They’re not matters that are accessible to science. But science has gotten away with pretending that they are by claiming false credit through association that rubs off from technology. See, with engineering you’re nailed to a reality check every inch of the way. If your design’s flawed or what you think you know is wrong, your plane won’t fly and there’s no way to hide it. But with the things you’re talking about, nobody knows. All the stuff you hear is more ideology than anything else. A person can go from undergraduate through to retirement and have a comfortable career based on some theory about cosmology or biology that’s totally wrong, and it doesn’t make any difference.” Wade looked from side to side to take in all three of the new faces. On Jerri’s other side, Chev continued eating casually in a way that seemed to say none of this was new. “But as Jerri said, Cyreneans don’t try to analyze what life’s all about. And yet they get it right. The basic things that matter, anyway. The rest will follow.”

“And it isn’t religion,” Uberg put in.

Wade shook his head. “They don’t have any religious ideas here of the kind we know. They have some extraordinary insights to the workings of mind and living processes, and they feel a strong affinity with what you might call a cosmic consciousness that pervades all life. But they don’t try to analyze or reduce it to everyday terms. They just accept what they feel, and are satisfied to follow it as their guide for living.” He looked around again. “And they manage to do remarkably well, don’t they?”

“What they
feel
,” Shearer came in. “I’ve been hearing it all the time, and I still can’t make any sense out of it.”

“You won’t,” Nick promised. “Don’t worry about it.”

“You do feel strange, intuitive things here,” Jerri agreed. “Dominic told us we would, and it’s true. Marc and I have both experienced it.”

Uberg was looking with a faraway expression at no one in particular. “Blanborel back at Doriden said that I should understand it better than anyone, because I’m a botanist.... Could it have something to do with the richness of the biosphere on Cyrene? I’ve seen places that make our tropics look meager in comparison.”

Wade looked at him mysteriously for a moment or two. “You know, Dominic, you’re a lot closer than you think,” he said.

“You sound as if you know the answer,” Uberg answered.

“Oh, yes, I do,” Wade assured him.

They waited. “Well, tell us, then,” Shearer demanded finally.

“Where, oh where to begin?...” Wade sighed and leaned back in his chair. He turned to Elena, who had said little so far. “Do you want to take it?”

Elena finished what she was eating without hurrying and looked around. “Okay, I’ll throw it back. Before we can talk about what’s going on here on Cyrene, we need to go ask that old question about living and non-living things. We use the words all the time, and everybody knows what we mean. So what is the crucial difference that distinguishes them? Does anyone have any ideas?”

It was a frequently heard question, and anyone familiar with it would know that the first answers that people tended to come up with were easily disposed of. Crystals “grew”; explosions, chain reactions, and autocatalytic processes “grew exponentially”; and the synthesis of biological molecules was long past the point where the chemistry that occurred in living things could be claimed as unique. Shearer guessed that Elena had something special in mind and decided to stay out of it.

“Life reproduces itself,” Jerri offered.

Nick responded. “We’re a bit out of touch here because electronic communication’s a no-no. But even before I left Earth they had sambot systems assembling modules the same as the ones they were constructed from, and then passing on their own programs. Wouldn’t that qualify?”

Jerri looked at Shearer. He shrugged. “Okay, I’ll concede it,” she said.

“Let me try refining it a little,” Uberg came in. “A living system
selects
materials from its environment that it builds into
more complex
components, from which it manufactures a replica of itself. How would that do?”

“I’d say that what Nick just mentioned is borderline,” Wade answered. “And there are already designs for self-replicating sambot-factory combinations that will go all the way from raw materials extraction, on up. That would have to make them living, by your definition, wouldn’t it?”

Uberg thought about it and nodded glumly. “I suppose it would,” he admitted. “Although I can’t say I like it.” He looked back at Elena. “Very well. You tell us,” he invited.

Everybody was listening intently by now, although in the case of the two Cyreneans more out of fascinated curiosity, since the concepts involved were unfamiliar to Chev and still relatively new to Eckelan. “We’re agreed that all plausible futures exist and possess equal attributes of reality?” Elena checked.

“Okay.” Shearer acknowledged. The others nodded.

It was one of the implications that fell out of the multiple dimensions of Heim physics, and connected with the earlier “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics. All the futures that might be experienced actually existed “somewhere” — in a way, somewhat like the superimposed images of a composite hologram, but of stupefyingly greater complexity. Exactly how was still the subject of endless debates among philosophers and physicists. Although the mathematical formalism permitted all possible configurations of matter that were compatible with physics, it was generally acknowledged that not every reality that it was possible to construct in theory was necessarily represented. It was inconceivable, for example, that the inhabitants of any reality would spend their lives exchanging meaningless noises instead of conversing, or fill their bookshelves with volumes of blank pages, or one would exist in which birds built their nests upside down. This was what Elena had meant by “plausible.”

Elena went on, “Then here’s my proposition. What makes living and nonliving objects different is the way in which they come to experience the particular futures that they do. The future that, say, a rock lying on a hill gets to experience is determined totally by chance and forces external to itself. It’s like the hero of a Greek tragedy — resigned to enjoy or endure whatever the gods choose to inflict.

“But a living organism, while still subject to those factors, is able in addition, by
altering its behavior
, to change the probabilities of what would otherwise have happened. In many-worlds terms, you can think of it as being able to
steer itself
toward futures that it senses as being more ‘desirable’ as determined by some criterion.” She looked around just a Shearer raised a hand to stop her there.

“I could show you lots of automatic devices that take some kind of action to avoid hazards or gain a benefit,” he said. “A boiler safety valve. The soft-landing system of a space probe. Are you telling me they’re alive?”

Elena nodded as if she had expected it. “Two points against. First, you’re projecting your subjective ideas of what constitutes a hazard or a benefit into those mechanisms. Survival or destruction have no inherent value or meaning to them. Their behavior is imparted by the designers. Therefore it qualifies as an external force that they’re subjected to.”