The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [115]
I couldn’t believe that the Titanians were seriously involved with Type-2 persiflage, though; they were working on a very different timescale. By the time the Type-2 cowboys got to square one Emily and her fellow outlookers would presumably be halfway to the galactic center. Then I remembered, slightly belatedly, what she’d said about the possibility of improving Titan’s meager ration of the sun’s energy and guessed what Julius Ngomi was really talking about.
“I suppose I am, in a manner of speaking,” Ngomi replied, “but even you and I aren’t likely to live long enough to see the sun boxed in. It’s not so much what we might want to do with Jupiter, way down the time line, as what they might want to do with it much sooner.”
“Which is?” I parried, unwilling to tip my hand.
He looked at me as long and hard as I’d looked at him. Even at three hundred and some, most Earthbounders spend too much time in VE to know how to keep a straight face under intense inspection, but I’d just got back from thirty-odd years on the moon, where people look into one another’s faces far more frequently, and I’d learned how to mask my lies. As it happened, though, I didn’t have anything significant to hide.
“Rumor has it that they want to set it alight,” Ngomi told me, eventually. “They think the outer system could do with a little more native heat, and they figure that they ought to be able to get a fusion reaction going that will turn Jupiter into the system’s second sun, if they can only build robots capable of working at the core.”
The idea was an old one, but it didn’t have a newsworthy movement behind it—and that, I realized, was exactly the point. It was an idea that would never generate any kind of movement among the Earthbound because the Earthbound had nothing to gain by it. On the other hand, if Type-2 really were fated to gain historical momentum over the centuries and the millennia, however slowly, the Earthbound might well have something to lose by it. Rightly or wrongly, the Earth’s owners saw themselves as good and responsible stewards, duty-bound custodians of the future of humankind as well as Garden Earth.
“She really didn’t mention Jupiter at all,” I said, too quickly to stop myself as I belatedly realized that Ngomi’s purpose in broaching the subject wasn’t actually to find out whether Emily Marchant had unthinkingly tossed me a valuable nugget of information but to let me in on his side of the argument: to invite me to plight my ideological troth to him, the invisible hand and the legions of the Earthbound. I was ashamed of the reflex that made me wonder why he was bothering, given that I was a mere historian, irrelevant to the course and causes of humankind’s future. Hadn’t I tried with all my might to persuade Emily and Khan Mirafzal that I wasn’t irrelevant and that the history of death still had lessons to teach us because the ultimate war was still going on, in its patient and muted fashion?
“That’s all right,” said Julius Ngomi, serenely. “Don’t worry about it. Feel free to mention this conversation to her, of course, next time you update her on what’s happening way down here in the Well.”
All the walls on Earth had ears and eyes. No VE conversations, however great the time delay to which they might be subject, were immune from the attentions of clever eavesdroppers. Of course Mister Ngomi wanted me to raise the subject, given that Emily hadn’t seen fit to raise it herself.
“Is she really that important?” I asked him. “I knew she was rich, but not that rich.”
“She’s a very talented lady,” Julius Ngomi said, before swimming