His knee accidentally brushed hers under the table; he became uncomfortably aware of her voluptuous body. She, however, gave no sign of having noticed the contact.
The talk turned to other projects. An observer from prerevolutionary times, had he magically been able to eavesdrop, might have been struck by the complete absence of negative feeling in the young people present. The degree of geniality, the atmosphere of general good-will, would have seemed abnormal to him; it was as if the whole party would at any moment burst into spontaneous applause. But alongside this, he would have been struck by a tremendous sense of energy, of readiness to face and overcome problems of all kinds.
Lian Li moved marginally closer to Antan. “Tell me, is it true there’s a scheme afoot to tap the energy of an entire star?”
Her eyes widened. “Why, yes! It’s the most talked-about thing in Star Project. Alpha Centauri has been picked for it, provisionally. But if it works it will only be a pilot project. Think what it would mean—power unlimited! The ability to terraform practically any planet, to build new planets, to move stars about—you name it.”
There was a good-humoured laugh from Wilboro, a member of Lian Li’s class. “It’s always useful to have yet more power to draw on, I’ll say that. But if you ask me cosmic flight is the thing we should all be working for.”
There were smiles. Wilboro adhered to a school of thought in which “cosmic flight”, as it was called, was almost an obsession. To people of his persuasion spaceflight within the galaxy—or even within the local galactic group, which would not be long in coming now—was scarcely spaceflight at all. In the same way they regarded all local projects—Mars and Venus made habitable, the Earth turned into a veritable paradise—as no more than routine. What they were aiming for was a method of transport that could take men to the limit of the Hubble Sphere and beyond.
After a while the discussion broke up. When the group began to disperse Lian Li loitered near Antan, trying to think of something to say.
She turned to him. “Are you going to join a star project when you’ve finished here, Lian Li?”
“Probably, Antan. But first I might stay in Solsystem for a while. I’ve got interested in submersible work. I’ve already been to one of the subatlantic mines. Next I want to look at the ocean project on Mars.”
“There’s bound to be some submersible work on the second Altair mission. Why don’t you apply for that?”
“Will you be on it?”
“Oh, yes, I’ll be going. I’ve got some pictures I took out there. Would you like to see them?”
“Thank you, I would.”
“Come on, they’re in my apartment.”
He followed her along the corridors of the college, watching her hips swinging beneath her simple gown and feeling a hot excitement which vaguely distressed him. He tried to suppress this feeling, but it was like a tide: it came on and on.
The holos she showed him were gorgeous. He gazed from orbit on the new planet glowing in the light of Altair. He looked on weird landscapes, vast mountains, muddy oceans and great caverns.
“No oxygen in the air yet,” she told him. “We were really lucky: only some anaerobic biology in the sea, and nothing on land. We can transplant the entire Terran biosystem.”
Lian Li knew the problem. As a rule Earth-type planets were already possessed of their own biosystems, which would have to be swept away if terraforming was to take place. Even though none found so far had produced an intelligent species, there were still qualms about exterminating an entire biota.
Rising, she turned her back to him to place the holos in a drawer. Lian Li also rose. As she bent to the small task the nape of her neck was presented to him. Her hair was caught up in a fillet and only stray blonde strands floated loose. Lian Li had but to bend towards her and press his lips to the warm, delicious curve, placing his hands on her hips….
Flushed and unhappy, he withheld the urge. He was already in enough trouble on that score.
She straightened, turning to him with a bright smile. “Well. Maybe we’ll be working on Altair III together.”
“I’ll think about it,” he said, trying not to sound flustered.
Shortly he left and walked to his own apartment in the same building. He stood by his living room window, looking out. He had a good view of the city: buildings interspersed with parks and small woods. If he liked he could tune the window to any of thousands of alternative views piped from around the world. Lian Li, however, preferred to see the here-and-now.
His apartment, like all those in the college’s residential section, was tailored to meet the needs of a single young person. It had a calculated amount of psychological space—large enough to be a real domain, and to entertain in, but small enough to be controllable with little effort. He could furnish and decorate it however he wished, but actually he had left it unchanged since the day he moved in. Rearranging his living quarters was not something that readily occurred to him.
Running the length of one wall was a shelf lined with books. Lian Li took a volume from it, sat down at the table and began to read.
Also on that shelf was a volume to be found in every home in the commonalty. Had Lian Li opened it at a certain page, he could could have read:
“The history of revolution has been a story of repeated effort in which many mistakes were made. Early revolutions were almost entirely economic in their concerns, and even with this limited goal several painful experiments were necessary—several revolutions—before unrestricted access to the economic commonwealth became available to every citizen, both as producer and user, and the impediments to the growth of wealth were removed.
“With the material problem solved, it began to become evident that there were other sources of human suffering than economic inequity. Even when disease and physical disfigurement had been entirely overcome, it could not be said that the perfect society had been created. Emotional unhappiness stemming from frustration, disappointment and general unfulfilment remained rife.
“Revolutionists therefore turned their attention to areas of emotional distress. In this, the natural human desire for happy personal relationships loomed large, and most grief was, at that time, due to the desire for relationships having a sexual element. Revolutionists came to feel deep indignation over the very real sufferings caused by unreciprocated love, and thwarted desire generally, especially as these deprivations were borne by some and not by others.
“The final revolution, then, was psychological in character. Its aim was to eradicate emotional suffering, particularly in the field of personal relationships.
“In this it was successful.
“Success had been due in part to important discoveries that were made during the course of the revolution. The first of these is that human types are highly specific in their permutations, and that attraction between human beings is also highly specific. It was found that while a person might feel attracted in various degrees to countless other people he met in the course of his life, there existed for him, on a world-wide basis, only a very small number of the opposite sex who would inspire in him total love, total fascination and total commitment. In pre-revolutionary society a citizen would sometimes meet with one of this small number, though this was by no means universal. For this love to be reciprocated, however, for the other person to be inspired in the same degree, required a double coincidence that was of a very low order of probability. When rare encounters of this kind did occur, therefore, those involved could be counted fortunate in the extreme.