FIFTY-EIGHT

It turned out that my legs weren’t quite as ready for the return to the Big Well as they seemed. The centrifuge can prepare returning lunatics for the shock of bottoming out, but it can’t prepare them for the sheer relentlessness of gravity. While you have levity at your beck and call it’s easy to think that you won’t miss it, but when it’s four hundred thousand kilometers out of reach it suddenly seems like a precious resource gone to waste.

A curious thing happened to me when I got back to Earth and booked into a rehab hostel. While I was enjoying my first long session in the swimming pool—although I wasn’t doing much actual swimming—I was joined by a tall man with unusually dark skin, whose walk as he crossed the polished floor suggested that his legs were not in the least need of readaptation. He swam several languorous lengths before making his way over to the lane in which I was dawdling.

“Hello, Mortimer,” he said. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

As soon as he suggested that I oughtto recognize him I did. It wasn’t so much the hue of his skin as the manner of his speech that tipped me off.

“All history is fantasy,” I quoted at him. “I was only a boy when we met, Mister Ngomi. It was more than three hundred years ago.”

He smiled broadly. “Call me Julius,” he said. “They said we’d never manage to keep hold of our early memories, didn’t they? The falsies, that is. Because serial rejuves and too much nano in the brain left theirmemories pretty much wiped out, they assumed we’d be the same, serially reincarnate within the same body. It’s good to be able to prove them wrong, isn’t it?”

“There’s not much else I remember from those days but bare facts,” I confessed. “You made an impression. It was so unexpected—the inside of the mountain, I mean. The kind of thing of which indelible traces are made. Did you actually come here lookingfor me?”

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I did.”

“Why?” I asked, guardedly. I remembered him clearly enough to be sure that his wasn’t the kind of job you did for a hundred years or so and then put behind you. If he’d been a finger of the invisible hand then, he was probably a thumb by now, maybe even one of the eyes that guided the hand.

“Emily Marchant,” he said, bluntly.

My memory of recent events was much sharper than time-worn indelible impressions. I could still replay the words within my mind, hearing them spoken in her own voice. 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.

“What about Emily Marchant?” I said, frostily.

“Don’t be like that,” he said, still grinning. “I’m not about to ask you to betray any intimate secrets. It’s just that the walls on the moon don’t have nearly as many ears and eyes as the walls on Earth—and the ice palaces of Titan might as well be on another world for all the worthwhile intelligence we get from them”

I didn’t laugh at the incredibly weak joke. “So what?” I said. “Didn’t the Sauls and their cozy circle make a Faustian bargain five hundred years ago that allowed them to keep ownership of Earth in exchange for their assistance in giving everyone with ambition a slice of the cosmic pie? Isn’t it a little late to decide that you want to own the entire solar system?”

“It’s not as simple as that,” he said. “You’re a historian, Mortimer. The next section of your masterwork will deal with the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, so you must be acquainted with the elementary principles of Hardinism.”

“The institution of private property is good because it motivates owners to protect their resources from the ruinous depredations of greed,” I said. “It sounds fine in theory, but if there’s one thing intensive study of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries makes clear, it’s that owners can be every bit as greedy and destructive as competitors fighting to maximize their own returns from a common resource.”

“Hardinism is all about goodownership,” Ngomi informed me, perfectly straight-faced for once. “The Hardinist creed equates good ownership ship with responsible stewardship.What did Emily Marchant tell you about Jupiter?”

I honestly thought that it was a trick question. “Last time she was there,” I told him, “Titan was still in orbit around Saturn.”

“Don’t be disingenuous, Mortimer,” he retorted. “We aren’t interested in the petty Utopia that she and her friends are designing for her pretty glass houses, any more than we’re interested in the fabers’ plans to convert the entire asteroid belt into a fleet of starships to facilitate the Diaspora of the many-handed. Jupiter is different. There could be a real conflict of interest over Jupiter. You might think that it’s all a long way off, but if you and I expect to live forever and a day, we have to settle potential conflicts as early as possible, in case they fester and infect the whole Oikumene. As you’re so fond of saying, there’ll always be Earth-bound humans, and their long-term interests have to be protected. If that means staking a claim to Jupiter, so be it.”

I stared at him for a full half-minute, wishing that my head—the only part of me that wasn’t benefiting from the buoyancy of the water—didn’t seem quite so heavy. “I honestly don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about, Mister Ngomi,” I said. “I will admit that I wouldn’t tell you anything that Emily said to me in confidence, but I wouldn’t lie to you about it either. If Emily and the other rich folk in the outer system have any plans for the development of the Jovian satellites, she certainly didn’t mention them to me. I assume that all the good reasons the outward bounders had for letting Europa and Ganymede alone still hold.”

“It’s not the Jovian satellites we’re concerned about,” Ngomi said. “It’s the planet itself.”

I jumped to what seemed to me to be the natural conclusion. “Are you talking about the Type-2 movement?” I asked, uncertainly.

There had been a lot more talk about the Type-2 crusade of late, even among people who believed that the third millennium was far too soon to start planning for the day when the Oikumene would want to exploit the entirety of the sun’s energy by building a series of superstructures in Earth’s orbit. When asked where the mass would come from—as they frequently were nowadays, by the same casters who had once solicited my views on Thanaticism—Type-2 visionaries were fond of pointing out that Jupiter had enough mass to make a hollow compound sphere with a radius of one astronomical unit and some fifty meters separating the inner and outer shells, always provided that you could transport and transmute it.

I couldn’t believe that the Titanians were seriously involved with Type-2 persiflage, though; they were working on a very different timescale. By the time the Type-2 cowboys got to square one Emily and her fellow outlookers would presumably be halfway to the galactic center. Then I remembered, slightly belatedly, what she’d said about the possibility of improving Titan’s meager ration of the sun’s energy and guessed what Julius Ngomi was really talking about.

“I suppose I am, in a manner of speaking,” Ngomi replied, “but even you and I aren’t likely to live long enough to see the sun boxed in. It’s not so much what wemight want to do with Jupiter, way down the time line, as what theymight want to do with it much sooner.”

“Which is?” I parried, unwilling to tip my hand.

He looked at me as long and hard as I’d looked at him. Even at three hundred and some, most Earthbounders spend too much time in VE to know how to keep a straight face under intense inspection, but I’d just got back from thirty-odd years on the moon, where people look into one another’s faces far more frequently, and I’d learned how to mask my lies. As it happened, though, I didn’t have anything significant to hide.