The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [120]
Unlike Julius Ngomi, the Continental Engineers of Neyu were not in the least interested in any plans Emily and her outer-system friends might have for Jupiter, but they were as interested in the new gantzing instruments that were flowing from the outer system as she had been in those which flowed the other way.
“They’re developing some very useful deepdown systems,” Mica Pershing told me, enthusiastically. “Titan’s core is very different from Earth’s, of course, but insofar as the techniques address the similarities rather than the differences they’re exactly what we need for our own programs. The Coral Sea Disaster set us back two hundred years, you know, because the bureaucrats down in Antarctica became so absurdly hypersensitive about anything mantle-active. It’s not as if we caused the disaster, for heaven’s sake! We’re the people trying to make sure that it never happens again. How can we police the mantle-crust boundary properly if they won’t let us send out adequate patrols? The Titan brigade has stolen a long march on us, and the Invisible Hand is taking its usual protectionist stance on licenses in the name of the Balance of Trade or some such sacred cow, but rumor has it that Marchant herself is more than keen to deal. Did she give you that impression when you saw her last?”
I was very interested to hear all this, although I had to confess that I hadn’t taken as much trouble as I might to measure Emily’s exact state of mind on abstruse matters of potential commerce. Mica’s connoisseur interest in Emily’s techniques allowed me to see Julius Ngomi’s anxieties in a new light.
In Mare Moscoviense the balance of trade between Earth and the rest of the Oikumene had not been a frequent topic of conversation, although one might have expected the fabers to take a keen interest in it, but it was something on which the Invisible Hand would want to keep a very tight grip. Perhaps, I thought, his talk of Jupiter had only been a mask to conceal the real nature of his interest in Emily’s agenda.
Even more revealing, in its way, was the way Mica echoed Ngomi’s use of the phrase “rumor has it.” I had grown up in a world whose communication systems were so efficient and whose multitudinous electronic spies had been so assiduous, that “rumor” had lost all authority. What was known was almost invariably know to a high degree of certainty—but the rapid development of the outer system had changed all that. There were now significant regions of the Oikumene where the notion of privacy was making a comeback—and wherever privacy flourishes, so does idle gossip.
When I told Mica that the primary purpose of Emily’s recent visit to the moon had been to shop around for Earth-sourced gantzing techniques she became even more excited.
“I knew it!” she said. “Melt ice caps and you get oceans. She’s thinking ahead, just as we are, and she’s seeing overlapping concerns, synergistic possibilities. She must be as keen to deal as we are—or would be if only the diehard Hardinists and the Amundsen City mafia would get off our backs. Whoever thought that it was a good idea to put the UN bureaucracy on ice should have been strangled at birth, and Planned Capitalism is just a fancy name for stopping social evolution in its tracks. Tachytelic Perfectionism might be a contradiction in terms, but at least those crazies understand that there’s some virtue in rapidity of change. We’ve got a hell of a long way to go before we can congratulate ourselves that the Garden’s in good shape, and the powers that be aren’t helping us at all.”
It was rather heartening to hear such sentiments from a 380-year-old earthbound emortal. I’d heard so much faber propaganda on the moon that