“They don’t convey it. Believe what I’m about to tell you: when I was forty-five years old, ninety-five percent of the intelligent, thoughtful university-educated people I knew believed as an article of faith that technology and change were dooming the planet, and that some of us would live to see the Last Days. Just about every one of them had a different candidate for what specifically was going to get us. Nuclear Winter was the big one until the Soviet Union went broke. Within about fifteen minutes, fifty other Ends Of Everything had moved in to replace it: global warming, ice age, the ozone layer, overpopulation, deforestation, dwindling resources, pollution, energy shortage—I can’t even remember them all anymore. Pestilence, famine and plague were evergreen favorites, and you could always find someone who was putting his money on a runaway comet. If you had a taste for the exotic, you could be terrified of flying saucers and empires of alien cattle-mutilators. But just about every adult I knew clutched some form of Ultimate Paranoia to his or her breast. Almost without exception they chose to believe that the End of All Meaning was just over the horizon. If you didn’t know that, you were too stupid or naive to be worth talking to.
“I’m overstating it slightly, because the sample I’m talking about consisted almost exclusively of affluent North Americans. But only slightly. In 1991 a major poll asked average Americans if they would like to live five hundred years, assuming that could be accomplished cheaply and comfortably. Only half of them said yes. Fully half of that society was looking forward to dying.”
Jay frowned and took a drink of his whiskey, forgetting to savour it. “How weird it must have been. To live in an age when the best and brightest worshipped Henny Penny. When the crew of Starship Earth, wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of their ancestors, were on the verge of mutinous panic…”
She nodded. “And then right at the turn of the millennium, just as the worst thing possible happened and the wildest of all those paranoid fantasies came true… just as actual aliens appeared in the sky, changed our destiny for us in great and incomprehensible ways, and vanished again before we could ask them any questions… everybody calmed down. The Curve kept on rising faster than ever, and somehow everybody on Earth seemed to heave a great sigh, and kick back, and relax. Not right away, no, not all at once—but the damn planet has been getting slowly and steadily saner for over sixty years now. And it’s driving me crazy!”
He swirled whiskey around in his bulb, stared through and past the oscillating golden liquid to the planet they both had left forever. “It doesn’t seem all that sane to me,” he said.
“No, I’m sure it doesn’t, to someone your age,” she agreed. “It isn’t all that sane. But it’s sane-er. Do you know that at one time the United States had ten percent of its population imprisoned? Justly? As the best solution they could devise to problems they didn’t begin to understand? Every year the papers told you the crime rate was rising. It’s been falling for over twenty years, now… and somehow that never makes the headlines. The media just aren’t geared up to report good news. You have to dig that out for yourself.”
“I think it has to do with the Curve you were talking about,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“The latest spike in the Curve. The Nanotechnological Revolution. Molecular-scale machines and computers. It’s qualitatively different from the Industrial Revolution or the Silicon Revolution or any of those. For once we got a new technology that cleans up its own wastes, doesn’t despoil anything we cherish, and produces so much new wealth nobody could steal it all. Our first healing revolution. Take the revolution you grew up with, Eva: nuclear fission. They told everyone it would produce power too cheap to meter. Then it turned out the plants were big kludges, and nobody’s power bill seemed to go down a dollar. No wonder they stopped trusting people in lab coats. But this generation got a technology that delivered on its promises.” He sipped his drink again, appreciating it this time. “And come to think of it, that was mostly thanks to the Stardancers. Without them and their Safe Lab, we’d still be skirting the edges of nanotechnology, too scared of someone getting a monopoly on it, or scared of the wrong little nanoassembler getting loose and turning all the iron to peanut butter or something.”
“Or we might have destroyed the planet in a war for possession of the new technology,” she agreed. “Instead we’ve got a UN that means something—and a repaired ozone layer and a healthy ecosystem and nonpolluting industry and a world so fat and rich it hasn’t had even a serious local war for thirty years.”
“The Stardancers kept us honest,” he said. “Thanks to the Fireflies, we had a precious resource: people we could trust to be above human greed and avarice, people with nothing to gain, people who could not be bribed or coerced.”
“Bodhisattvas,” she said.
“If you like,” he said. “Fair witnesses, anyway.”
“No wonder there used to be terrorists trying to kill them. A fair witness can be infuriating.”
“Yeah, maybe—but the last serious attempt was about the time I was born. Even a fanatic reactionary can see they’re just too valuable to the race now: they can live full time in space with no life support, and space is the only safe place to develop little artificial viruses, the only sensible place to collect solar power. Humanity got lucky. We got just what we needed, just when we needed it.”
“Luck, hell,” she snarled. He recoiled at her force. “You just said it yourself. Luck had nothing to do with it. It was those damned Fireflies: they saved our bacon for us, brought us the moon-full of Symbiote that makes a human a Stardancer, and gave it to us, for free. I could kill them for that!”
She could see that she had shocked him. She waited, to see how he would handle it. “This is what you really wanted to talk about,” he said finally.
She smiled. “Pour for us, please, Jeeves.”
When the AI had refreshed their bulbs, she turned to face him directly. He copied her, and they joined a hand to steady themselves in the new attitude. She held on.
“Jay,” she said, “I’m old. I was old enough to vote when the first tourist littered the moon. I was spending a fortune on cosmetic camouflage the year the Fireflies showed up and Shara Drummond danced the Stardance for them. I’ve had a five-cent Coca Cola, and watched the first television set on my block. Flatscreen, monochrome. I’ve owned 78 RPM phonograph records and a hand-cranked Victrola. I’ve buried three husbands, three children and two grandchildren. One of my great-grandchildren in Canada is dying, and I have to keep asking Jeeves her name. Jeeves, what is my dying great-grandchild’s name?”
“Charlotte, madam,” Jeeves murmured from somewhere nearby.
“I have been a success in three professions,” she went on, “and a failure in two. It’s not that most of my life is behind me. All of my life is behind me, receding. I always said I was going to check out when and if my clock showed three figures… and I came here to the Shimizu for that purpose. I stopped controlling my cosmetic age the day I moved into this suite, as a sign that I was withdrawing from human affairs. I’ve been saying goodbye for the last sixteen years. You know most of this.”
He nodded and sipped the Irish whiskey, still holding her hand.
“Haven’t you ever wondered what’s taking me so long?”
He shook his head. “Not once. I figure saying goodbye to life could take me, oh, seventeen years, easy.”
“You’ll find out,” she said. “Old age is not for sissies. I had all my goodbyes said years ago.”