Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [126]
"How was your trip?" Lindsay said.
"The Ring Council is dull! Sorry I wasn't here to meet you." He signaled the servo. "What are you drinking? Fantastic chasm, the Marineris, isn't it?
Even the tributaries are the size of the Grand Canyon in Arizona." He pointed past Lindsay's shoulder at a gap between towering canyon walls, where icy winds kicked up thin puffs of ocher dust. "Imagine a cataract there, pealing out in a thunderband of rainbows! A sight to stir the soul to the roots of its complexity."
"Surely," Navarre said, smiling slightly.
Wellspring turned to Lindsay. "I have a little spiritual drill for doubters like Yevgeny. Every day he should recite to himself, 'Centuries . . . centuries .. . centuries.' "
"I'm a pragmatic man," Navarre said, catching Lindsay's eye and lifting one eyebrow significantly. "Life is lived day to day, not in centuries. Enthusiasms don't last that long. Flesh and blood can't bear it." He addressed Well-spring. "Your ambitions are bigger than life."
"Of course. They must be. They encompass it."
"The Queen's Advisors are more practical." Navarre watched Wellspring with half-contemptuous suspicion.
The Queen's Advisors had risen to authority since the early days of C-K. Rather than fighting them for power, Wellspring had stepped aside. Now, while the Queen's Advisors struggled with day-to-day rule in the Czarina's Palace, Wellspring chose to frequent the dogtowns and discreets. Often he vanished for months, to reappear with shadowy posthumans and bizarre recruits from the fringes of society. These actions clearly baffled Navarre.
"I want tenure," Lindsay told Wellspring. "Nothing political."
"I'm sure we could see to that."
Lindsay glanced about him. It came to him in a burst of conviction. "I don't like Mars."
Wellspring looked grave. "You realize that an entire future destiny might accrete around this momentary utterance? It's from just such nuclei of free will that the future grows, in smooth determinism." Lindsay smiled. "It's too dry," he said. The crowd gasped and shouted as the surveyor scuttled rapidly down a treacherous slope, sending the world reeling. "And it moves too much."
Wellspring was troubled. As he adjusted his collar, Lindsay noted the faint bruise of teethmarks on the skin of his neck. He turned down the forest soundtrack on his armband. "One world at a time seems wisest, don't you think?"
Navarre laughed incredulously.
Lindsay ignored him, gazing over Wellspring's shoulder at his claque of followers. A young Shaper in a fuzz-elbowed academic jacket was burying his elegant face in the floating red-blonde curls of a tigerish young woman. She tilted her head back, laughing in delight, and Lindsay saw, half eclipsed behind her, the stricken face of Abelard Gomez. There were two surveillance dogs with Gomez, crouched on the wall behind him, their metal ribs gleaming, their glassy camera faces taping up his life. Pity struck Lindsay, and a sadness for the transient nature of eternal human verities. Wellspring plunged into impassioned argument, sweeping aside Navarre's wry comments in a torrent of rhetoric. Wellspring waxed eloquent about asteroids; chunks of ice the size of cities, to be dropped in searing arcs onto the surface of Mars, blasting out damp oases in a crust-ripping megatonnage. Creeks would appear at first, then lakes, as steam and volatiles peeled into the starved air and the polar ice caps dissolved into vaporized carbon dioxide. Crater oases would be manned by teams of scientists, biosculpting whole ecosystems into being. For the first time, humanity would be bigger than life: a living world would owe its existence to humankind, and not vice versa. Wellspring saw it as a moral obligation, a repayment of debt. The cost was irrelevant. Money was symbolic. Life was the real. Navarre broke in. "But it's the human element that must defeat you. Where's the appeal to greed? That's where you