The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [111]
“I mean the fabers,” I admitted. “The forebears of the future human races: the six-handed, the eight-handed, and all the others that are still a twinkle in the imaginative eye.”
“I’m an old-fashioned ganzter,” she reminded me. “My job is adapting inorganic environments to suit the purposes of the humaniform, not the other way around.”
“Purposes?” I queried. “I thought you were an artist.”
“And all art is useless? I never had you pegged as a neo-Wildean, Morty. I’m the kind of artist who believes in the perfect combination of function and beauty.”
I was mildly surprised to hear that, given that coverage of Titan’s new skylines on the lunar news was usually careful to stress that however imposing they might seem the ice palaces were uninhabitable. When I put this point to Emily, she said: “Uninhabitable as yet. They’re not just pieces of sculpture, Morty—they’re greenhouses. We haven’t yet managed to distribute the heat as efficiently as we might, but it’s only a matter of time and hard work. Titan will never bathe in the kind of solar deluge that powers Earth’s biomass, although some of us are giving serious consideration to ways and means of increasing its meager portion. But it’s still an energy beneficiary, and it’s sitting next door to the second-biggest lode of raw materials in the system. It won’t be easy to manage the economics of exchange, but the day will come soon enough when life on the surface of Titan will be a great deal easier and more comfortable than life in the lunar air traps. If luck is with us we’ll both live to see it. Even if Titan’s core weren’t reasonably warm it could still be done, but the geothermal kick-start will make it a lot easier. Believe me, Morty—all those glittering castles are potential real estate, and within a hundred years, or one-fifty at the most, they’ll be the realest estates on the market.”
“At which point,” I said, “you’ll doubtless become richer by a further three or four orders of magnitude.”
“It’s not about getting rich,” she said. “There isn’t going to be any Hardinist Cabal on Titan. We figure that the highkickers are mature enough not to fall prey to the tragedy of the commons. Forget the Gaean Libs, Morty—we’re the next and last Revolution.”
I had to admit that “highkickers” was a much more flattering label than “footsloggers.” I knew that she’d have heard all the jokes about can-can and can-do, so I didn’t even try to sharpen my wit on the term. There wasn’t time enough to waste on that kind of nonsense.
FIFTY-SEVEN
Emily hadn’t come to the moon for a vacation and she was very busy, but she had adopted highkicker notions of personal space and the value of face-to-face contact, so I saw a lot more of her than I might have expected. When she did find time to relax I showed her the sights, such as they were. We went out of the dome together, in ultralight suitskins, so that we could look at the stars and feel the authentic lunar surface beneath our feet.
Because Titan had an atmosphere Emily didn’t see the true profusion of the stars very often, but that didn’t prevent her waxing lyrical about the wondrous sights that the cosmos presented to the inhabitants of the outer system. The view from the moon comprised exactly the same stars, and farside light-pollution was minimal, but mere logic couldn’t shake Emily’s conviction that everything looked better out on Civilization’s Edge. I suppose that it must have been easy to reach that opinion while Saturn dominated the sky. In Mare Moscoviense we never saw Earth.
“One day,” I told her, “I’ll have to come see it all for myself. VE tourism isn’t the same. Now that I’ve experienced Earth-based VEs from a lunar-gravity vantage point I’m even more alert than I used to be to their artificiality.” She knew that it was mere talk, of course. I was already in intensive training for the return to full gravity. She’d come along to the gym with me to put in little centrifuge time on her own account, and we’d played the usual lunatic games with massive dumbbells.
“Why wait, Morty?” she asked, softly. “Why one day instead