"It hadn't any choice," she said. "Overpopulation of Old Earth, for one thing, drove it out."
"Overpopulation was a devil it knew. The unlimited universe was one it didn't. But it went - in fear and trembling, talking of things 'man was not meant to know,' but going; and it scattered its bets as best it could by turning loose all the different cultural varieties of itself society has produced up until then, to see which, if any, would survive. Toward whatever survivors there were, it would adapt. Now that time of adaptation is on us; and the question is, which of two choices is it going to be? The type that'd stop and keep what we have - or the type that'd go on risking and experimenting? Because the human equation that's involved can stand for only one solution. If the dominant survivor is the Bleys type, with its philosophy of stasis, then, for the first time since we lifted our eyes above the hard realities of our daily lives, we stop where we are. If it's yours and mine, and that of those like us - we go on reaching for what may make us or destroy us. The race-creature waits to see which of us will win."
"But if the choices are either-or," she said, "then maybe the race-creature - you know, I've got trouble with that clumsy double word you thought up, you really should try to come up with something better - would be doing the right thing in going with Bleys and the Others if they win."
"No," said Hal, bleakly, "it wouldn't. Because it's a creature made up of its parts, and its parts aren't gods - yet. They and it can still be wrong. And they'll be wrong to choose the Others, because neither they nor it seem to realize that the only end to stasis is eventual death. Any end to growth is death. Never having stopped growing from the beginning, the race-creature's like a child who can't really believe he'll ever come to an end. But I know we can."
"You could still be the one who's wrong."
"No!" he said again. He stared down at her. "Let me tell you about this last year. You know I went back to the Final Encyclopedia; and with what I know now as Paul Formain and Hal Mayne this time I used it as Mark Torre dreamed of it being used - I made poetry into a key to unlock the implications of the records of our past - and the dream of godhood I've been talking about, personal godhood for every individual human, is there in the record. It explodes for the first time, plainly, in the constructs of the Renaissance. Not just in the art, but in all the artifacts of human creation from that period on."
He stopped and looked hard at her.
"You believe me?" he asked.
"Go on," said Amanda, quietly, "I'm still listening."
"Even today," he said, "there's a tendency to think of the Renaissance only in terms of its great art works. But it was a time of much more than that. It was a time of a multitude of breakings-out, in the forms of craft innovations and social and conceptual experimentation. I told you about the Theater of Memory which prefigures the Final Encyclopedia, itself. It wasn't just by chance that Leonardo da Vinci was an engineer. Actually, what we call the technological age had already begun in the pragmatic innovations of the later Middle Ages - now it flowed into a new consciousness of what might be possible to humans. From that, in only six centuries came the step into space… and everything since has followed. In each generation there were those who wanted to stop where they were, like Bleys, and consolidate. But did we? At any time along that uncertain and fearful upward way, did we stop?"
He himself stopped.
"No," said Amanda. "Of course, we didn't."
She turned and darted upwards slightly at him - and he jerked his head away from her. He stared grimly at her.
"You bit my ear!" he said.
"That's right." She looked at him wickedly. "Because that's enough of that for now. There'll be time yet to worry about the enemy before he starts beating at our gates. For now, I'm hungry and it's time for breakfast."
"Breakfast?"
Involuntarily, he glanced at the window and what she had just said was true. They - or rather he, he thought ruefully - had talked the moon down; and the darkness outside was beginning to pale toward day. He could see the grayish scree of the slope behind the house more clearly, looming like a slightly more solid ghost of the future.
"That's what I said." She was already out of bed, had seized his wrist and was hauling him also to his feet. "We've had a large night and we've got a large day ahead of us, starting not many hours off. We'll eat, clean up, and then if you can nap, you take a nap. Your meeting with the Grey Captains is set for noon."
"Meeting?" he echoed. He watched her begin to dress and mechanically reached for his shorts to follow her example. "I didn't even ask you yet about setting one up."
"A notice was sent out to all of the Captains as soon as the Commander of the ship that brought you in sent word you were aboard," she said. "That was what kept me in Omalu yesterday, putting the last minute finish to the paperwork for the meeting. I brought some meat up here with me, Hal Mayne. Not fish this time - meat! How about a rack of lamb for a combination breakfast and the proper dinner you probably didn't get around to having last night?"
Chapter Fifty-seven
Amanda lifted her little air-space jitney off the ground of Foralie with the two of them aboard; and Hal watched Foralie fall and dwindle swiftly away below them, feeling an emptiness in him. It was a moment before he associated that emptiness with how he had felt on his first days on Coby, and how he had felt as Donal, leaving this same house to go out to the stars.
"I'd thought I'd be staying at least a week," he said. Her profile was sharply sculpted against the steel-blue sky beyond the jitney's side window. "But if I can settle things with the Grey Captains today, I'd better get moving as soon after that as possible. Can we stop at the Spaceport by Omalu long enough for me to find out when the next ship is due to be headed back toward Sol and the Final Encyclopedia?"
"That won't be necessary," said Amanda. She was wearing a dark blue linen suit of skirt and jacket, light blue blouse and a single strand of small blue-gray coral beads; and somehow her dress today gave her distance from him and authority. "We're giving you a courier ship and pilot."
He was jolted. It was not the cost of a private ship to Earth that startled him. He could draw interstellar funds to handle that, from the Encyclopedia or probably even from the Exotics, if necessary. Very soon, such funds would have little use, in any case. It was the realization that other people had already begun to think of him in terms of someone whose work was now important enough not to be slowed down by the delays of commercial spaceship schedules. As he was still absorbing that idea, Amanda reached forward to the hand-luggage compartment in the firewall of the jitney; and, without looking down, brought out a sheaf of papers which she tossed into his lap.
"What's this?" he asked, picking it up. The set of pages made a stack at least three centimeters thick.
"A copy of the contract for you to read on the way to Omalu," she answered, with her eyes on the cloud layer ahead above which the jitney was now climbing.
Contract… he smiled sadly to himself. Laying the paper on his knees, he started to read. Such documents would also soon have as little use and purpose as funds of interstellar credit. But at the same time it was touching and a little awesome to hold the commitment of a world of people in his hands, in so small a form as a handful of printed sheets.