“Oho? Was it? So says a man who shot lawyers for a living, back in the good old days.” Her eyes twinkled with mirth.
“There are some that envy me that job. I’ve heard it called a public service, shooting lawyers.” He had to smile.
She did not let her smile show, but there was a lilt in her voice. “Let us excuse it on those grounds, then, and call it the practice of a more excitable era. But perhaps you will tell me more about why your people hanged Mormons?”
“When they stole our women. But who cares who shot first? War changes people, and biowar makes ’em crazy. I weren’t around when the rumors flew that the Mormons were tainted, infected with Spore, and wouldn’t take blood transfusions needed to clean them. I heard stories from my aunt what those rumors did. The Burnings. It must never happen again.”
She said, “To eliminate all diseases was the dream of the Pure Order. They were well on their way to making the race too hygienic to resist the next disease: and there was a next one, and many next ones. No pathogens of this century are entirely natural. Those not caused nor encouraged by bad medical practice of the last generation, are descended from non-self-eliminating biotic weapons from the generation before.”
Menelaus just grunted. “Darwin’s curse.”
“Curse? If so, we must take care with our own curses. The secret of second youth we released to the public I fear will also result in the same dieback cycle, as pathogens robust enough to survive the molecular-level scrubbing the second youth process involves will find themselves alone in a rich and newly-virginal environment, without competition, and without natural defenses against them.”
“Agh! That’s pessimistic talk. You got to have faith that our children will be able to invent the means to fight whatever comes up. We could not just sit on the secret of youth and let everyone’s grammy up and die.”
Rania smiled, as she always did when the talk turned to children.
Menelaus said, “Hellfire, and I ain’t just talking about disease: disease did not cause the Human Torch parades in Utah. One day science will fix things, so this part of us, this vicious part, will be caged up. The Beast. Maybe we can make a child without the gene for sorrow and rage, maybe we can make a thinking machine without the subroutine for hate. Maybe.”
“We have the genes and routines now,” she said. “The cure for hate is forgiveness. The cure for outrage is humility. The cure for sorrow is thankfulness. Even a child can learn these three: no grand scheme of human eugenics to produce the transhuman is needed.”
He gave her a long look. “I wonder if the Hermeticists who made you left out all the flaws of this old, sad, all-too-human race. You should be the mother of new people.”
“Oh my! Such a responsibility. And when should we get started on that project?”
She smiled, then, and the towerlight was as bright as moonlight, so he could see her smiling, a dim gold shadow in the night, and so he kissed her.
When they paused to breathe, she asked, “Where are you going to stable your horse? We cannot bring him up on the spider car.”
3. Limits
Menelaus Montrose, when he should have been the happiest man on Earth on the happiest day of his life, was aware of an ache in his throat, a bitterness—no, it was a resentment, a feeling that he had been betrayed. It reminded him of the time his mother had thrown his birthday cake to the hogs, because he had not done his chores (it had been his birthday that day, after all, and Leonidas told him it was okay to sleep late). With one part of his mind, he told himself that Del Azarchel was the source of this feeling. Blackie was a cold bastard, no doubt.
Another part of his mind told him it was the future that had betrayed him, the human race itself. Filthy, stupid poop-flinging tool-using monkeys not smart enough to use their tools to better themselves, and live like men, not monkeys.
During the ride up the side of the cable, his mood grew more and more elated the higher they rose. The scattered lights of the city fell away. The ocean was a dark seething mass, still tinted rose-red by the sunset receding westward, but more and more of it came into view as they rose higher, outpacing the dusk.
The car was a bubble affixed to a contraption of legs that were pulled along by induction currents in the cable itself, and the legs were hinged to grow wider as the cable grew wider.
He spoke about the wealth his marriage had put into his hands; he spoke about rebuilding. Why couldn’t the Celestial Tower be restored to its old glory? Why not establish a moonbase, mine the asteroids, put men in space instead of just satellites? And why not colonize Titan?
“And flying cars,” he added. “We’re in the future. There are supposed to be flying cars.”
She said, “And what about Del Azarchel? He will prohibit it. Titan is outside of spy bee range.”
“He cannot really be against a space program! When we were young—well, spittle, colonizing habitats both spaceborne and planetary, ’smostly all we talked on. Besides, the news that the Hermetic is making a second expedition to the Diamond Star might quell the discontent gripping the—uh, the masses.” (He had almost said the Hylics but he caught himself.)
“He woke you because he was desperate to wake Xypotech Del Azarchel—I weary of saying the phrase—I hereby dub him ‘X’-Archel.” (She pronounced it Exarchel.) “By this means he hoped to send to the Diamond Star the only person he trusted not to overthrow him when he returned. Himself. One immortal version of his mind would rule the world while the other—the first of an endlessly self-replicating multitude of Van Neumann ships—would conquer the stars. He has no more need of the human race, for the posthuman starfaring race he intends to be is merely himself, multiplied to infinity.”
“And the rest of Mankind?”
“The myriads of the human race suffer the fate of those spermatozoa who fail to penetrate the egg.”
“Fine. We get to the Diamond Star first, come back, and make his worst nightmare come true, overthrow his damned tyranny, set up something where everyone gets a vote!”
She shook her head. “While it has the romance of directness, it is an inelegant solution, perhaps self-defeating. I suggest that only a plan even more far-sighted and ambitious than his will prevail.”
“Har! Or is it just that you helped designed this worldwide tyranny, so you don’t want to see it blasted?”
She said, “The world we found when the Hermetic descended was not as culturally coherent as some English colony like your America with two hundred years of experience ruling themselves. I had to work with the people who were as I found them, people more fearful of bioterror and plague and poverty than they were of servitude. They have their limitations. And I, my husband, even I have mine. I hope you are not like Ximen, and think of me as some fairy-being with a magic wand?”
“You’re on a first-name basis with him?”
“What? With my ex-fiancée, who raised me from a child, and I lived in a starship within shouting distance of him my whole young life? It would be odd if I were not.”
“So what are your limitations? Can’t hit a piñata while hoodwinked?”
“I don’t know what that is. My limit is that while I can inspire a social and political system for humans to maximize personal liberty within the context of minimizing external conflict, I simply cannot reduce the how and the when and the why to adjust the system to a simple algorithm. There must be a posthuman to make adjustments, personal authority on several levels, wise judges, statesmen who transcend the mere hedonistic calculus of power and politics. You see the problem?”
“The problem is you were raised on a ship, so you think everyone obeying one captain is the norm. The problem is you did not set up a Democracy.”