The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [141]
The overwhelming majority of my Earthbound friends and acquaintances would have said, unhesitatingly, that Emily was talking nonsense. They would have judged that her fears were symptoms of “outer-system paranoia”—a phrase whose use had become so earnest that its users tended to forget that it was a mere slogan and not a real disease. The new breed of Continental Engineers thought of themselves as progress personified, and the Tachytelic Perfectionists considered themselves to be the most ardent campaigners for change that Garden Earth had ever entertained, so charges of decadence simply bounced off them. The idea that the galactic center was home to some unspecified menace seemed to contented Earthdwellers to be silly scaremongering.
When I put some of the points made in Emily’s messages to Mica Pershing her reaction was typical, and exactly what I’d expected.
“The outer system people are all crazy,” she said. “Tricia loses her sense of proportion sometimes when she talks about the benefits of cyborgization, but at least she has a sensible notion of what might count as a benefit. The outer-system people have been carried away by mechanization for mechanization’s sake. They think that because it’s possible to design suitskins that will let them operate in hard vacuum for days on end and live on the surface of Titan almost indefinitely that those are worthwhile things to do. They don’t just want to fly spaceships, they want to be spaceships—and they’re starting to cultivate the anxieties of spaceships. Deep space is a horrible and hostile environment, and the universe is full of it. Planets are where life belongs, but it’s an unfortunate fact of life that comfortable planets are few and far between—and that the farness in question consists of a vile abyss of emptiness. Of course malfunctions happen, even in the most carefully designed systems. Silvers fail—even the high-grade silvers built into kalpa probes. It’s only to be expected—and the only people who find the prospect unthinkable are people who are on the brink of giving up their own humanity in order to become the next generation of kalpas. Earth is where all real progress takes place, because no matter how far the Oikumene extends Earth will always be its one and only heart, humankind’s one and only home”
Had I been anyone other than Emily Marchant’s trusted confidante I might have agreed with Mica, but it would have seemed disloyal to do so—and I was not at all sure that Emily was wrong.
“Even if all that’s true, the Earthbound shouldn’t lose sight of the farther horizons,” I told Mica, earnestly. “We’re fast approaching the day when Earth’s billions will be a minority within the Oikumene—and once that balance has shifted, the spacefarers’ majority will grow and grow. How long will it be before they’re the human race and Earth is just a quaint and quiet backwater where the old prehuman folks jealousy preserve their ancient habits?”
“Personally,” Mica told me, “I don’t think it will ever happen. I think the expansion into space has just been a fad, like Cyborganization. I think it’s hitting its natural limits now and that your friend’s panic is the first symptom of a fundamental change in attitude. I think the outward urge will wither and die, and that the outer system people will begin