Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [120]
"Is it that bad?" Lindsay said, tingling with deja vu.
"You're lucky, old man. You don't have to read it. I've looked through the whole thing. Not one word in there about spontaneous self-organization." Lindsay nodded. "That's a shame."
"Everybody's old in that book. I don't mean fake-old like the Preservationists here. Or weird-old like old Pong."
"You mean Pongpianskul?" Lindsay said.
"The Warden, yeah. No, I mean everybody's used up too fast. All burnt up and cramped and sick. It's depressing."
Lindsay nodded. Things had come full circle, he decided. "You resent the control on your life," he speculated. "You and your friends are radicals. You want things changed."
"Not really," the boy said. "They only have me for sixty years. I've got hundreds, cousin. I mean to do big things. It's going to take a lot of time. I mean big things. Huge. Not like those little dried-up people in the past."
"What kinds of things?"
"Life-spreading. Planet-ripping. World-building. Terraforming."
"I see," Lindsay said. He was startled to see so much self-possession in one so young. It must be the Cataclyst influence. They'd always favored wild schemes, huge lunacies that in the end boiled down to nothing. "And will that make you happy?"
The boy looked suspicious. "Are you one of those Zen Serotonists?
'Happy.' What kind of scam is that? Burn happiness, cousin. This is the Kosmos talking. Are you on the side of life, or aren't you?" Lindsay smiled. "Is this political? I don't trust politics."
"Politics? I'm talking biology. Things that live and grow. Organisms. Integrated forms."
"Where do people come in?"
The boy waved his hand irritably and caught the kite as it swooped.
"Never mind them. I'm talking basic loyalties now. Like that tree. Are you on its side, against the inorganic?"
His recent epiphany was still fresh in Lindsay's mind. The boy's question was genuine. "Yes," he said. "I am."
"You see the point of terraforming, then."
"Terraforming," Lindsay said slowly. "I've seen theories. Speculations. And I suppose that it's possible. But what does it have to do with us?"
"A true commitment to the side of Life demands the moral act of Creation," Gomez said promptly.
"Someone's been teaching you slogans," Lindsay said. He smiled. "Planets are real places, not just grids on a drawing board. The effort would be titanic. All out of human scale."
The boy was impatient. "How big are you? Are you bigger than something inert?"
"But it would take centuries—"
"You think that tree would hesitate? How much time do you have, anyway?" Lindsay laughed helplessly.
"Fine, then. Are you going to live a squished-down little human life, or are you going to go for the potential?"
"At my age," Lindsay said, "if I were human I'd already be dead."
"Now you're talking. You're as big as your dreams. That's what they say in C-K, right? No rules, no limits. Look at the Mechs and Shapers." The boy was contemptuous. "All the power in the world, and they're chasing each other's tails. Burn their wars and midget ideologies. Posthumanity's bigger than that. Ask the people in there." The boy waved one hand at the woven-wire enclosure. "Ecosystem design. Rebuilding life for new conditions. A little biochemistry, a little statistical physics, you can pick it up here and there, that's where the excitement is. If Abelard Lindsay was alive today that's the sort of thing he'd be working on."
The irony of it stung Lindsay. At Gomez's age, he'd never had any sense, either. He felt a sudden alarm for the boy, an urge to protect him from the disaster that his rhetoric would surely earn him. "You think so?"
"Sure. They say he was a hot Preservationist type, but he sundogged off when the getting was good, didn't he? You didn't see him hanging around here to 'die of old age.' Nobody really does anyway."
"Not even here? In the home of Preservationism?"
"Of course not. Everyone here over forty's on the