“So do I,” the faber said, quietly. “I just don’t think that Earth is or ought to be that place. It’s not where you start from that’s important, Mortimer, it’s where you’re going.”

“Not for a historian,” I protested, feebly.

“For everybody,” he insisted. “History ends, Mortimer. Life doesn’t—not any more.”

FIFTY-SIX

While I continued to lived on the moon I was half-convinced that Khan Mirafzal was right, although I never followed any of his well-meant advice. The remaining half of my conviction was otherwise inclined. I couldn’t accept that I was trapped in a kind of existential infancy any more than I could see myself as a victim of lotus-eater decadence. Perhaps things would have turned out differently if I’d had one of my close encounters with death while I was on the moon, but I didn’t. The dome in which I lived was only breached once, and the crack was sealed before there was any significant air loss. It was a scare, but it wasn’t a life-endangering threat. The longer I stayed in Mare Moscoviense, the more I came to think of the moon as Antarctica without the crevasses, but with nosier neighbors.

It was always inevitable, I think, that I would eventually give in to my homesickness for Garden Earth and return there, having resolved not to leave it again until my history of death was complete, but there was one more challenge awaiting me after Khan Mirafzal had left the moon for the last time. There was one person in the solar system who had the power to affect me far more deeply in face-to-face confrontation than he and all his kind—and even the footsloggers of Titan sometimes visited the moon.

I received Emily’s message telling me that she had embarked on a shuttle heading for the moon within days of the news coming through that Hope, one of the ancient Arks launched during the early phase of the Crash with a cargo of SusAn-preserved potential colonists, had settled into orbit around an Earthlike planet orbiting a G-type sun some fifty-eight light-years away in Sagitarius.

This news was, of course, fifty-eight years old, but it was no less sensational for that. AI-directed kalpa probes had located more than a dozen life-bearing planets, but we only had hard evidence of multicellular life on two of them, neither of which could be described as “Earthlike” no matter how much generosity was granted to the label. Hope’sfirst broadcast spoke of a world whose atmosphere was breathable with the aid of face masks, with abundant plant life and animals sufficiently similar to those of Earth to allow talk of “insects,” “reptiles,” “birds,” and “mammals.”

Hopehad been sent out to find exactly such a world, ripe for colonization. The generations of its mortal crew had clung hard to that determination while news had followed them that Earth’s ecosphere had not been conclusively blighted. New data regarding the scarcity of planets that could be classified as “terraformable” must have poured into the ship’s data banks while it crawled through the void, but even that had not persuaded the ship’s masters to turn around. Now, they considered their decision to have been vindicated, and their initial howl of triumph was headline news even on Earth.

By the time Emily’s ship actually arrived on the moon, however, the news flow from the world that Hope’scaptain had named Ararat was by no means so enthusiastic. The primitive nanotech systems deposited on the surface had made good progress in gantzing dwellings out of the alien soil, but attempts to adapt local reproductive systems to the manufacture of human foodstuffs had run into trouble, and the first people brought out of SusAn in order to work on the surface—not all of whom survived the revival process—were experiencing unexpected problems of psychological adaptation.

Although the SusAn systems installed on Hopehad been rendered obsolete several centuries before there were some similar systems still in operation, in which the worst of the first generation of criminals sentenced to SusAn imprisonment were still confined, so the news that long-term freezing down seemed to have unwelcome psychotropic effects was not entirely irrelevant to the Earthbound.

Emily was less enthusiastic about the discovery than I had expected, but she made much of the elementary fact that other “Earthlike” planets did exist.

“The real crux of the matter isn’t Hope’schances of establishing a human population on the surface of Ararat,” she argued, “but the evidence they’ve found of an extinct species of intelligent humanoid indigenes. That’s as close as we can come to proof of the fact that we aren’t alone in the galaxy without actually shaking hands with our mirror images. One humaniform race might be a fluke, but where there’s two there must be many more, even if one of the two is already defunct.”

“They’re not entirelysure that the sentients are extinct,” I told her. “Even if they’re still around, though, it doesn’t really proveanything. We’ve been scanning the sky for radio messages for a very long time now, so any other human races that have reached our level of technical sophistication must be very discreet. We mustn’t forget that Hopeis a strange historical anomaly, launched in a blind panic. Our entire philosophy of cosmic exploration has changed since it went out. Other humaniform races might be busy doing exactly what we’re now busy doing: remaking their spacefarers physically and psychologically.”

“We, Morty?” she echoed, twitching an eyebrow. She was lightly cyborgized, and had almost certainly undergone some subtle somatic engineering, but her appearance was much as I remembered it—and mine must have been exactly as she remembered it. Neither of us was the type to go in for cosmetic modification for fashion’s sake.

“I mean the fabers,” I admitted. “The forebears of the future human races: the six-handed, the eight-handed, and all the others that are still a twinkle in the imaginative eye.”

“I’m an old-fashioned ganzter,” she reminded me. “My job is adapting inorganic environments to suit the purposes of the humaniform, not the other way around.”

“Purposes?” I queried. “I thought you were an artist.”

“And all art is useless? I never had you pegged as a neo-Wildean, Morty. I’m the kind of artist who believes in the perfect combination of function and beauty.”

I was mildly surprised to hear that, given that coverage of Titan’s new skylines on the lunar news was usually careful to stress that however imposing they might seem the ice palaces were uninhabitable. When I put this point to Emily, she said: “Uninhabitable as yet.They’re not just pieces of sculpture, Morty—they’re greenhouses. We haven’t yet managed to distribute the heat as efficiently as we might, but it’s only a matter of time and hard work. Titan will never bathe in the kind of solar deluge that powers Earth’s biomass, although some of us are giving serious consideration to ways and means of increasing its meager portion. But it’s still an energy beneficiary, and it’s sitting next door to the second-biggest lode of raw materials in the system. It won’t be easy to manage the economics of exchange, but the day will come soon enough when life on the surface of Titan will be a great deal easier and more comfortable than life in the lunar air traps. If luck is with us we’ll both live to see it. Even if Titan’s core weren’t reasonably warm it could still be done, but the geothermal kick-start will make it a lot easier. Believe me, Morty—all those glittering castles are potential real estate, and within a hundred years, or one-fifty at the most, they’ll be the realest estates on the market.”

“At which point,” I said, “you’ll doubtless become richer by a further three or four orders of magnitude.”

“It’s not about getting rich,” she said. “There isn’t going to be any Hardinist Cabal on Titan. We figure that the highkickers are mature enough not to fall prey to the tragedy of the commons. Forget the Gaean Libs, Morty—we’re the next and last Revolution.”