Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [131]
“I can understand the fact that you don’t approve of me, either personally or in terms of what I represent. One of my grandfathers was part of the consortium which funded Adam Zimmerman’s scheme to take advantage of a worldwide stock-market crash—one of the men who really did steal the world or corner the future, according to your taste in clichés. The other was the man whose pioneering work in biotechnological cementation made it possible to build homes out of desert sand and exhausted soil that were literally dirt cheap, thus giving shelter to millions, but you probably think that the good he did was canceled out by the enormity of the fortune that flowed from the generations of patents generated and managed by his sons—my uncles. I am the old world order personified: one of a double handful of men who really did own the world by the end of the twenty-first century.
“Oddly enough, the fact that we still own it today has a good deal to do with Conrad Helier. Had he not put the New Reproductive System in place so quickly, the devastations of the Crash might have extended even to us; as it was, his efficiency allowed rather more of the old world order to be saved than he might have thought ideal. Nor has he put an end to the ancient system of inheritance, as his own legacy to Damon clearly demonstrates. When I and my fellow owners die—as, alas, we still must, in spite of all the best efforts of the Ahasuerus Foundation—we shall deliver the earth into safe hands, which can be trusted to keep it safe for as long as they may live. Eventually, there will arise a generation who will keep it safe forever.
“You may think it terrible that effective ownership of the entire earth should remain forever in the hands of a tiny Olympian elite, but ownership is also stewardship. While the earth was effectively common land it was in the interest of every individual to increase his own exploitation of it at the expense of others—and the result was an ecocatastrophe which would have rendered the planet uninhabitable if the Crash had not been precipitated in the nick of time.
“We cannot and will not tolerate further threats to the security of Earth, because Earth is too precious to be put at the smallest risk. Our news of the arks is old, and the news sent back by our more ambitious probes is hardly less recent, but the fact is that we have so far found no sign of any authentic extraterrestrial life. There is no threat in that discovery, but there is no promise either: no promise of any safe refuge should any extreme misfortune befall Earth. The pre-Crash ecocatastrophe might well have caused the extinction of the human species, and nothing like it can ever be permitted to happen again. If our outward expansion into the universe is to continue—and I agree with Conrad Helier that it ought not to be the exclusive prerogative of clever machinery—then it must continue in response to opportunity, not to threat.
“True progress cannot be generated by fear; it has to be generated by ambition. You may well dread the prospect of a wholesale retreat into artificial worlds of custom-designed illusion, but it’s pointless to try to drive people from their chosen refuges with whips and scorpions; they’ll only try all the harder to return. The real task is to offer them real-world opportunities that will easily outweigh the rewards of synthetic experience.”
“When your new nanotech VEs hit the marketplace, that isn’t going to be easy,” Damon observed. “Or did the Mirror Man’s little lecture about products not being made for the market mean that you intend to bury the technology?”
“What my colleague was trying to explain,” Saul said, “is that we’re not developing such technologies solely with a view to putting new products in the marketplace. We have much broader horizons in mind, but we’re not going to bury anything—not even para-DNA. We have more faith in humankind than Conrad Helier does. We don’t believe that the people of Earth, however meek they may become, will want to retreat into manufactured dreams twenty-four hours a day.