Heavy Water_ And Other Stories - Martin Amis [75]
“You put it to him?”
“Yes. On the neural radio. When your scientists talk about their great moments of revelation—a feeling of pleasant vacuity followed by a ream of math—they’re usually describing a telepathic assist from Mars. This Aristarchus happens on a completely coherent heliocentric system. He spreads the word around the land. And what happens? Ptolemy. Christianity. You weren’t ready. So we all had to sit and wait two thousand years for Copernicus. Stuff like that happened all the time.”
Murmurs died in the dark chill. Pioline (solar neutrino count) gave an emphatic and breathy moan which had in it elements of anger but far more predominantly elements of grief. As the silence settled the janitor on Mars gave a light jolt of puzzlement and said, “You’re uncomfortable with that? Come on. That’s the least of it. Welcome to middenworld.”
“But some things took?” said Lord Kenrick. “You shaped us? Is that what you’re saying?”
“… Yeah I fucked with you some. Sure. Hey. I was programmed to do that. I had—guidelines. Some things worked out. Others didn’t. Slavery was all me, for instance. Yes, slavery was my baby. That worked out. All worlds dabble with it, early on. It’s good practice for later. Because slavery’s what the Ultraverse is all about. Okay, on Earth, you could argue that it got out of hand. But on a nonculling planet it seemed like a necessary development. Even in its decadent phase slavery had many distinguished though often irresolute advocates. Locke, Burke, Hume, Montesquieu, Hegel, Jefferson. And there’s an influential justification for it in the holy book of one of your Bronze Age nomad tribes.”
“Which?”
“The Bible. Any last questions?”
“Just what the hell is this tripwire thing?”
“Again, part of the program. Contact with Earth could not be established until you went and tripped that wire. Which you did on June nine: the day I buzzed Incarnacion here.”
“What was it about June nine?” asked Montgomery Gruber (geophysiology). “We looked into it and nothing happened.”
“You mean you looked into it and you think nothing happened. Plenty happened. Some asshole of an otter or a beaver sealed off a minor tributary of the River Lee in Washington State … along certain latitudes a critical fraction of microbal life committed itself to significant changes in its respiratory metabolism … the forty-seven billionth self-cooling cola can burped out its hydrocarbons … and there was that mild forest fire in Albania. And there you have it. You wouldn’t know how these things are connected, but connected they are. All this against a background of mobilized phosphorus, carbon burial, and hydrogen escape. The necessary synergies are all locked in.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning the amount of oxygen in your atmosphere is starting to climb. At last irreversibly. It won’t feel any different for a while. But by the end of the Sixties it’ll hit twenty-seven percent. Yes I know: a pity about that.”
Incarnacion and Miss World turned to each other sharply. Because the scientists were now shouting out, gesturing, interjecting. Miss World said, “Please, sir. I don’t understand.”
“Well. It means you’ll have to be very, very careful with your heat sources, Miss World. At such a concentration, to light a cigarette and throw a match over your shoulder would spark a holocaust. It’s all a great shame, because this is the kind of problem that’s easy to fix if you catch it early on. In the coming years you’ll have to work awful hard on volcano-capping and storm control. To no avail, alas. Here’s another thing. It seems, anyway, that the solar system is shutting down. There’s a planetesimal out there with your name written on it. An asteroid the size of Greenland is due to ground zero on the Iberian peninsular in the unseasonably torrid summer of 2069. At ninety miles a second. Now. There might have been a window of a couple of days or so at the beginning of the decade: you could have duplicated