The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [127]
“The kalpa programmers are crying foul left, right, and center. Earth’s high-and-mighty will back their claims of ownership right down the line, of course, but they must know that their proclamations won’t mean a thing thirty-nine light years away. The Gaean Libs will probably want the whole process stopped, of course, but that’s just hot air. The real fight will be to determine the methods and objectives of the land grab, and no one thinks that there’s the least chance of settling that in advance. No matter who wins the race, the competition will only intensify once the drops get under way. If the New Arkers were united among themselves they’d have a slim chance of putting a few controls in place, but they’ve always been a loose coalition of interested parties with no meaningful ideological center. In order to get their ship ready in time they’ll have to offer berths to every faction that can help, including the Cyborganizers. The likelihood is that they’ll fragment as soon as they arrive. If you think that Hope’s botches added up to a fiasco, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
“Even you’ll have to admit now that everything’s changed, Morty. Earth isn’t the game board any more. The Hardinist case for its careful preservation as the footsloggers’ ultimate refuge has gone right out the window. The galaxy has to be full of worlds like Ararat and Maya. Terra-formable ecospheres must be a dime a dozen. The only mystery is the Fermi paradox. If we’re here, where the hell are all the others? You’re a historian, Morty—you know how hard we tried to obliterate ourselves, and still we made it. The others have to be here too, even if we can’t tune into their beacons, and it’s only a matter of time before we run into them. After that… everything will change again, and nobody can guess exactly how.”
She had much more to say, of course, but that was the red meat. The race was on, and after the race would come the conflict, and after the conflict… the ecocatastrophes and the wars?
I didn’t even recognize the names of some of the factions to which Emily referred so casually. I knew that there were people in the Oort Halo, but I had no idea that they constituted a “crowd” or what their gang mentality might be. I had only the vaguest notion about the composition of the New Arkers and had previously thought of them as merely one more set of eccentrics intent on hollowing out asteroids to make microworlds. I did, however, have some inkling of what Cyborganizers were, by virtue of living with Tricia Ecosura. She often mentioned them, sometimes critically and sometimes sympathetically, but always giving the impression that they were a coming thing, as revolutionary in their own fashion as the newly rampant Continental Engineers.
Under different circumstances, I might have asked Emily to give me a much more detailed account of what she thought the various Maya-bound factions were up to, but it didn’t seem politic. For one thing, I felt that Julius Ngomi was sure to be listening in, and I didn’t want to be his mule. For another, I had to concentrate on the two tasks I now had on hand where there had previously been only one.
I could have taken time out from my history to think about the farthest horizons of the expanding Oikumene, had it not been for the fact that any such time was already spoken for, but I had already agreed to dedicate any and all such time to Lua Tawana, who was growing up quickly. For that reason, I let the matter slide. My reply to Emily’s dispatch acknowledged what she had said but did not engage with it in any intellectually serious fashion. Having not yet parented a child of her own, she probably did not understand,