"No, a youngster."
"Out of the question. A terrible precedent. Wait a moment. Is it Abelard Gomez?"
"The very same."
"I see That boy troubles me. He has Constantine blood, did you know? I've been watching the local genetics. Genius turns up in
that line like a bad roll of the dice."
"I'm doing you a favor, then."
"I suppose so. Sorry to see you go, Abelard, but with your current ideological cast you're a bad influence. You're a culture hero here, you know."
"I'm through with the old dreams. My energy s back, and there s a new dream loose in Czarina-Kluster. Even if I can't believe it. At least I can help those who do." He stood up stepping back
prudently as the cat inspected his ankles. "Good luck with the
mice, Neville."
"You too, Abelard."
CHAPTER NINE
CZARINA-KLUSTER PEOPLE'S CORPORATE REPUBLIC: 15-12-'91
The engines of wealth were at full throttle. A torrent of riches
was drowning the world. The exponential curves of growth hit
with their always deceptive speed, a counterintuitive quickness
that stunned the unwary and dazzled the alert.
The circumsolar population stood at 3.2 billion. It had doubled
every twenty years and would double again. The four hundred
major Mechanist asteroids roiled in a tidal wave of production
from an estimated 8 billion self-replicating mining robots and
forty thousand full scale automated factories. The Shaper worlds
measured wealth differently, dwarfed by a staggering 20 billion
tons of productive biomass.
The primal measurement of Circumsolar Kilobytes soared to
an astronomical figure best estimated as 9.45 x 1018. World
information, estimating only that available in fully open
databanks and not counting the huge empires of restricted data,
totalled 2.3 x 10 27 bits, the equivalent of 150 full-length books
for every star in every galaxy in the visible universe.
Stern social measures had to be adopted to keep entire populations from disintegrating in an orgy of plenty.
Megawatts of energy sufficient to run entire Council States
were joyfully squandered on high-speed transorbital liners.
These spacecraft, large enough to provide every comfort to
hundreds of passengers, assumed the dignity of nation-stales and
suffered their own population booms.
None of these material advances matched the social impact of
the progress of the sciences. Breakthroughs in statistical physics
proved the objective existence of the four Prigoginic Levels of
Complexity and postulated the existence of a fifth. The age of
the cosmos was calculated to an accuracy value of plus or minus
four years, and rarefied attempts were under way to estimate the
"quasi-time" consumed by the precontinuum ur-space.
Slower-than-light interstellar travel became physically possible,
and five expeditions were launched, manned by star-peering
low-mass wireheads. Ultra-long baseline interferometry, beamed
from radiotelescopes aboard the wirehead starships, established
hard parallaxes for most stars in the Orion Arm of the Galaxy.
Examinations of the Perseus and Centaurus Arms showed troubling patches where patterns of stars appeared to have an ominous regularity.
New studies of the galaxies of the Local Supercluster led to
refinements in the Hubble Constant. Minor discrepancies caused
some visionaries to conclude that the expansion of the universe
had been subjected to crude tampering.
Knowledge was power. And in seizing knowledge, humanity
had gripped a power as bright and angry as a live wire. At stake
were issues vaster than any before: the prospects were more
dazzling, the potentials sharper, and the implications more stag-
gering than anything ever faced by humanity or its successors.
Yet the human mind still had its own resources. The gifts for
survival were not found only in the sharp perceptions of the
Shapers, with their arsenals of brain-stretching biochemicals, or
the cybernetic advances of the Mechanists and the relentless
logic of their artificial intelligences. The world was kept intact
by the fantastic predilection of the human mind for boredom.
Mankind had always been surrounded by the miraculous.
Nothing much had ever come of it. Under the shadow of cosmic
revelations, life still swathed itself in comforting routine. The
breakaway factions were much more bizarre than ever before,
but people had grown used to this, and their horror had
lessened. Frankly antihuman clades like the Spectral
Intelligents, the Lobsters, and the Blood Bathers were somehow
incorporated into the repertoire of possibility and even made
into jokes.
And yet the strain was everywhere. The new multiple humanities hurtled blindly toward their unknown destinations, and the vertigo of acceleration struck deep. Old preconceptions were in
tatters, old loyalties were obsolete. Whole societies were para-
lyzed by the mind blasting vistas of absolute possibility.
The strain took different forms. For the Cataclysts, those
Superbrights who had been the first to feel it, it was a frenzied
embrace of the Infinite, careless of consequences. Even self-
destruction eased the unspoken pain. The Zen Serotonists aban-
doned the potential for the pale bliss of calm and quiet. For
others the strain was never explicit: just a tingling of unease at
the borders of sleep, or sudden frantic tears when the mind's
inhibitions crumbled from drink or drugs.
For Abelard Lindsay the current manifestation involved sitting
strapped to a table in the Bistro Marineris, a Czarina-Kluster
bar. The Bistro Marineris was a free-fall inflatable sphere at the
junction of four long tubeways, a way station amid the sprawling
nexus of habitats that made up the campus of Czarina-Kluster
Kosmosity-Metasystems.
Lindsay was waiting for Wellspring. He leaned on the dome-
shaped table, pressing the sticktite elbow patches of his aca-
demic jacket against its velcro top.
Lindsay was a hundred and six years old. His latest rejuvena-
tion had not erased all outward signs of age. Crow's feet webbed
his gray eyes, and creases drooped from his nose to the corners
of his mouth. Overdeveloped facial muscle ridged his dark,
mobile eyebrows. He had a short beard, and jewel-headed pins
held his long hair, streaked with white. One hand was heavily
wrinkled, its pale skin like waxed parchment. The metal hand
was honeycombed with sensor grids.
He watched the walls. The owner of the Marineris had
opaqued the inner surface of the Bistro and turned it into a
planetarium. All around Lindsay and the dozen other customers
spread the racked and desolate landscape of Mars, relayed live
from the Martian surface in painfully vivid 360-degree color.
For months the sturdy robot surveyor had been picking its way
along the rim of the Valles Marineris, sending its broadcasts.
Lindsay sat with his back to the mighty chasm: its titanic scale
and air of desolate, lifeless age had painful associations for him.
The rubble and foothills projected on the rounded wall before
him, huge upthrust blocks and wind-carved yardangs, struck
him as an implied reproach. It was new to him to have a sense
of responsibility for a planet. After three months in C-K, he was
still trying the dream on for size.
Three Kosmosity academics unbuckled themselves and kicked
off from a nearby table. As they left, one noticed Lindsay,
started, and came his way. "Pardon me, sir. I believe I know
you. Professor Bela Milosz, am I right?"