Seven

Although my memories of the period are understandably hazy I feel sure that I had begun to see the fascinationof history long before the crucial event that determined my path in life. I’m sure that I took the kernel of that fascination with me from the valley, and I’m fairly sure that I had it even before I climbed the mountain to Shangri-La for the first time. I must have, or the meeting in the mountain could not have had such a powerful effect.

I have, of course, reproduced the details of my first conversation with Julius Ngomi and Sara Saul with the aid of records made at the time, but I do remember, even to this day, the impression left on me by Ngomi’s careful heresies. There was already something within me that responded to the mantra, “All history is fantasy,” and to the idea of a mountain whose bowels were constipated with the archival detritus of past ages.

In the context of my university studies history seemed—in stark contrast to the disciplined coherency of mathematics or the sciences—to be magnificent in its hugeness, amazingly abundant in its data, and charmingly disorganized. I thought of myself as a very orderly and organized person and looked to the study of history to loosen me up a little—but I looked forward even then to the day when I might be able to impose a little of my own orderliness and organization upon the hectic muddle of the past. I was determined from the very beginning that myvocation was to enhance understanding by negotiating between different accounts of how and why and by calming the waters of dissent. If, as Julius Ngomi had suggested, truth was what I could get away with, I wanted to get away with something virtuous as well as grandiose—but I arrived at Adelaide without having the least idea of exactly what that might be.

The last thing Julius Ngomi said to me before I left the valley—the last thing he was to say to me for more than three hundred years, as things turned out—was, “History is okay for amateurs, kid, but it’s no work for real people. Historians have only interpreted the world and its révolutons —the point is to change it, carefully, constructively, and without any more revolutions.”

I didn’t realize at the time that he was quoting or that the quote was deeply ironic. Nor did I realize that his parting shot and Mama Siorane’s reflected fundamentally dissonant views about the way the future would and ought to be shaped.

“Forget what Papa Dom says about the Universe Without Limits,” she said. “He thinks that the imagination has no boundaries, but it keeps running into the most important boundary of all: the boundary of action.History is a good subject to study because it’s all about the waves of hopeful imagination breaking on the rocks of effective action. History will teach you that the future of humankind can’t be a matter of designing ever-more-comfortable VEs. History will teach you that if you don’t actually doit, you haven’t achieved anything at all—and when you’ve learned that, you’ll be a doer too, not a mere dreamer.”

All Papa Domenico added to that was a rude observation about Mama Siorane being as full of shit as the mountain—by that time, alas, my secret had crept out. If Papa Dom could have foreseen that Mama Siorane would die on Titan, gloriously doing instead of merely dreaming, he might have modified his opinion—but he might not. They both deserve full credit for practicing what they preached—Papa Dom went to Antarctica to work for the UN and cultivate the delicious sensations of self-sufficiency, and he died in his VE hood exactly as he would have wished.

The ostensible purpose of a university is to constitute a community of scholars in the interests of further education, but its real purpose is to constitute a community of actual bodies in the interests of further real-space interaction. It would, I think, be too great a wrench were young people to go straight from the flesh-intensive microcosm of a parental home to the adult world, where almost all relationships are conducted almost exclusively in virtual space.

I had, of course, been interacting with other children of my own age in virtual space throughout my time in my parents’ hometree, but I had not met a single one in the flesh until I went to Adelaide. I felt that this put me at something of a disadvantage because almost all my contemporaries had been able to arrange occasional real-space encounters, and those who were city-bred were already used to actual crowds. On the other hand, that I had been reared in a remote mountain valley gave me a hint of exoticism that few of the other new arrivals possessed. I didn’t make friends easily, but no one did. I was exhilarated by those I did make, but I felt even as I made them that they would be temporary. The accident of contemporaneity hardly seemed to be a sound foundation for lasting intimacy. Perhaps I made too much, secretly as well as overtly, of my having climbed precipitous mountain slopes and seen things that normally remained hidden. Perhaps my fascination with history was magnified so rapidly partly in order to provide me with an excuse for solitary study and private preoccupation. In any case, I was less sociable than the average, but was not at all distressed by it.

It was during my second year of study, in 2542, that the defining event of my life occurred: the event that took my magnified fascination and gave it a precise shape that was never significantly modified thereafter. Before I boarded the sailing-ship Genesisin March of that year, I was a dilettante historian pecking here and there at the whole broad sweep of social evolution; when I finally came safely to shore, I was a man with a mission, a man with a destiny.

EIGHT

Genesiswas a cruise ship providing tours of the Creationist Islands of the Coral Sea. Many of the islands were natural, but the majority were artificial. Two centuries before, the first new islands raised from the seabed had been regarded as daring experiments paving the way for the more extravagant adventures of the Continental Engineers, but the business had soon been routinized. Custom-designed islands had been easy enough to sell or rent out during the twenty-fifth century, to provide bases for large-scale commercial endeavors in Liquid Artificial Photosynthesis and sea farming or to host the artistic ventures in ecosystem construction that gave the islands their familiar name. The latter market had weakened somewhat in the wake of the Moreau scandal, when the UN insisted on instituting much tighter controls and much more careful monitoring of the Creationists’ endeavors, but the longest-established islands remained significant arenas of ecological research as well as popular tourist attractions.

Children reared in less unconventional environments than the one chosen by my foster parents were often taken on educational voyages like the one offered by Genesis.I had never believed Papa Domenico’s assurances that the habit was an obsolete and functionless vestige left over from more primitive times—like any child denied anything, I had instead formed the determination that as soon as I was my own master, I would make good on my parents’ omission. I had already toured the Blooming Outback and the reforested Nullarbor, the former by bus and the latter by hot-air balloon; the Genesiscruise seemed a logical next step.

It was not only the series of destinations visited by Genesisthat was held to be valuable but the experience of being under sail. Genesiswas powered by wind alone, and its silver-controlled system of sails was represented by its owners as a marvel in its own right. The control of a sailing ship was said to be one of the most challenging of all the tasks given to artificial intelligence because of the complexity and unpredictability of the forces that had to be met and transformed into smooth directional travel. So, at least, Captain Christopher Cardigan—who insisted on referring to his own vessel’s AI as “Long John”—assured the party of twenty that boarded the Genesisin Brisbane on 22 March 2542.