Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [40]
“That’s a big range,” Sam noted.
Fort nodded, and eyed them patiently.
“But if you look only at models with the most realistic conditions,” Art said, “you usually get between three and eight billion.”
“And the current population is about twelve billion,” Fort said. “So, say we’re overshot. Now what do we do about that? We’ve got companies to run, after all. Business isn’t going to stop because there’s too many people. Full-world economics isn’t the end of economics, it’s just the end of business as usual. I want Praxis to be ahead of the curve on this. So. It’s low tide, and I’m going back out. You’re welcome to join me. Tomorrow we’ll play a game called Overfull.”
With that he left the room, and they were on their own. They went back to their rooms, and then, as it was close to dinnertime, to the dining hall. Fort was not there, but several of his elderly associates from the night before were; and joining them tonight was a crowd of young men and women, all of them lean, bright-faced, healthy-looking. They looked like a track club or a swim team, and more than half were women. Sam’s and Max’s eyebrows shot up and down in a simple Morse code, spelling “Ah ha! Ah ha!” The young men and women ignored that and served them dinner, then returned to the kitchen. Art ate quickly, wondering if Sam and Max were correct in their suppositions. Then he took his plate into the kitchen and started to help at the dishwasher, and said to one of the young women, “What brings you here?”
“It’s a kind of scholarship program,” she said. Her name was Joyce. “We’re all apprentices who joined Praxis last year, and we were selected to come here for classes.”
“Were you by chance working on full-world economics today?”
“No, volleyball.”
Art went back outside, wishing he had gotten selected to their program rather than his. He wondered if there was some big hot-tub facility, down there overlooking the ocean. It did not seem impossible; the ocean here was cool, and if everything was economics, it could be seen as an investment. Maintaining the human infrastructure, so to speak.
Back in the residence, his fellow guests were talking the day over. “I hate this kind of stuff,” said Sam.
“We’re stuck with it,” Max said gloomily. “It’s join a cult or lose your job.”
The others were not so pessimistic. “Maybe he’s just lonely,” Amy suggested.
Sam and Max rolled their eyes and glanced toward the kitchen.
“Maybe he always wanted to be a teacher,” Sally said.
“Maybe he wants to keep Praxis growing ten percent per year,” George said, “full world or not.”
Sam and Max nodded at this, and Elizabeth looked annoyed. “Maybe he wants to save the world!” she said.
“Right,” Sam said, and Max and George snickered.
“Maybe he’s got this room bugged,” Art said, which cut short the conversation like a guillotine.
• • •
The days that followed were much like the first one. They sat in the conference room, and Fort circled them and talked through the mornings, sometimes coherently, sometimes not. One morning he spent three hours talking about feudalism— how it was the clearest political expression of primate dominance dynamics, how it had never really gone away, how transnational capitalism was feudalism writ large, how the aristocracy of the world had to figure out how to subsume capitalist growth within the steady-state stability of the feudal model. Another morning he talked about a caloric theory of value called eco-economics, apparently first worked out by early settlers on Mars; Sam and Max rolled their eyes at that news, while Fort droned on about Taneev and Tokareva equations, scribbling illegibly on a drawing board in the corner.
But this pattern didn’t last, because a few days after their arrival a big swell came in from the south, and Fort canceled their meetings and spent all his time surfing or skimming over the