The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [160]
“The bones of contention are real,” he said, blandly. “The spirit of compromise might be soaring over the conference table just now, but nothing fundamental has been altered. The question still remains as to whether the solar system can be managed for the mutual benefit of the Earthbound and the frontier folk—and if so, how. Don’t let Emily fool you, Mortimer. Nine-day wonders only last nine days, but politics is forever. If we can’t find authentic common interests, there will be conflict. Not war, I hope, and not tomorrow, but a real power struggle that someone will eventually have to lose.”
“You think you’re finished, don’t you?” I said, with what I thought was a lightning flash of insight. “You think they’re either going to take it all away from you or—even worse—render your precious ownership irrelevant. You’re facing the prospect of seeing it all turn to litter: Hardinism, responsible stewardship, planned capitalism. All done, banished to the margins of the human story.”
“Don’t be silly, Mortimer,” said Julius Ngomi, sternly. “Ownership of Earth will always be the foundation stone of power within the human community. Always.”
Perhaps he knew more than he was letting on. Perhaps Emily did too—and the fabers, and whoever else was involved. Perhaps they all knew but didn’t want the others to know how much they knew and what they thought it implied. The return of real conflicts of interests inevitably fostered the return of secrecy to human affairs. Eve was right, and there were far too many things being left unsaid by far too many people—but not for long.
At the end of the third millennium we had finally, if belatedly, arrived at the time when the truly important things could speak for themselves, and they were about to do exactly that.
SEVENTY-NINE
Julius Ngomi was right. By the time I shuttled back down to Earth, leaving the Ambassador to continue running rings around the planet, I was world famous. I was also rich, though not by the highest standards of the Hardinist Cabal or the outer-system gantzers. I was, at any rate, richer than I had ever expected to be, and richer than I had ever thought that I might one day need to be.
He was right about my rescue being a nine-day wonder too. He had not been speaking literally, but he was less than forty-eight hours out.
It would be nice to think that Emily’s extravagant congratulatory speech was warranted, but the truth was that even if I hadn’t provided the people aboard Ambassador with a common cause and rough-hewn manifesto, their heads would have been smashed together soon enough. I was always fated to be upstaged by the Pandorans, and rightly so. I was just a human interest story, but the Pandorans’ long-unspoken and carefully checked out news was the biggest headline that had ever confronted the human race. It changed everything, and forever.
The day the Pandorans chose to pass on what their alien friends had told them, having had it proved to them conclusively, was the day that humankind’s apprenticeship as a starfaring species was ended and the Age of Responsibility finally began. It was the day emortal humankind moved beyond maturity into uncharted existential territory.
There was a sense in which the news was already seventy years old by the time it arrived in the system, having crawled here at the speed of light, and there was no prospect of a dialogue. By the time Pandora had come home, if her crew had decided to do so, the fourth millennium would have been well advanced. In such circumstances, there were bound to be a few people on Earth who declared that it was all a hoax—a lie cooked up for political purposes, either by the Pandorans, or the outer-system people, or the dear old Hardinist Cabal—but they were indeed few. We had to wait a long time for the full story and the final proof, but the great majority believed what we heard almost as soon as we heard it and knew what it signified.
The news that the aliens gave the crew of Pandora and the crew of Pandora duly gave to the Oikumene was that life was as widely distributed