Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [143]
Pilot pointed out more of the bloated aircraft. Their full significance became clear to Lindsay. The flying machines were like plague vectors, carrying the ideological virus of some calcifying cultural disease. The pyramids towered in the heart of every city, enormous, dwarfing all hope, the strangling monuments of the legions of the dead.
Tears came to him. He wept quietly, holding nothing back. He mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute. They slipped beneath the ocean south of the rocky island chain of Baja California. Pilot opened the hatchway, flooding the cargo hold with water, and they began at once to sink.
They were in search of the world's largest single ecosystem, the only biqme man had never touched.
The surface waters had not escaped. Over the drowned lands of the continental margins, rafts of rotting moss and algae, the ocean's equivalents of weeds, festered in choking profusion. But the abyssal depths were undisturbed. In the crushing blackness of the abyss, larger in area than all the continents combined, conditions scarcely varied from pole to pole. The denizens of this vast realm were poorly known. No human being had ever invented a way to wring advantage from them.
But in the Schismatrix, man's successors were more clever. The resemblance of this realm to the dark oceans of Europa had not escaped Lindsay. For decades he had searched the ancient databanks for scraps of knowledge. The surviving records of abyssal life were almost useless, dating back to the dawn of biology. But even these crude hints lured Lindsay with their potential for sudden miracle. Europa too had the gloominess, the depths. And the vast drowned ranges of volcanic rifts, oozing geothermal energy. The abyss had oases. It had always had them. The knowledge had lit a slow, subterranean fire in his imagination. Life: untouched, primeval life, swarmed in boiling splendor at the fiery edges of the Earth's tectonic plates. An entire ecosystem, older than mankind, clustered there in all its miraculous richness. Life that could be seized, that could be Europa's. At first he had rejected the idea. The Interdict was sacred: as old as the unspoken guilt of ancestral spacefarers, who had deserted Earth as disaster loomed. In their desertion, they had robbed the planet of the very expertise that might have saved it. Over centuries of life in space, that guilt had sunk into a darkened region of cultural awareness, surfacing only as caricature, as ritual denial and deliberate ignorance.
The parting had come with hatred: with those in space condemned as anti-human thieves, and Earth's emergency government denounced as fascist barbarism. Hatred made things easier: easier for those in space to shrug off all responsibility, easier for Earth to starve its myriad cultures down to a single gray regime of penance and pointless stability.
But life moved in clades. Lindsay knew it as a fact. A successful species always burst into a joyous wave of daughter species, of hopeful monsters that rendered their ancestors obsolete. Denying change meant denying life.
By this token he knew that humanity on Earth had become a relict. In the long term, the vast biological timescape that had become Lindsay's obsession, rust ate anything that failed to move. Earth's future did not belong to humanity but to the monstrous weeds, grown strange and woody, and whatever small fleet creatures leaped and bred among them. And Lindsay felt justice in it.
They sank into darkness.
Pressure meant nothing to their alien hull. The gasbags flourished at extremes of pressure that made Earth's oceans seem as thin as plasma. Pilot switched controls over to the water jets epoxied to the hull.