“With that single masterstroke of genius you transformed the symbolism, the mood, and the dynamism of the whole situation! You not only gave us the chance to be partners in an enterprise, you left us no possible alternative but to combine forces. You made us take the crucial first step on the way to being partners in allour enterprises, combining allour forces. Hell, you forced us to all be heroes together!”

“What?” I said, querulously. “I don’t understand.”

“You will, Morty, you will. We were stuck—until you forced us to suspend all our arguments, to divert all our attention and effort to the business of saving the author of The History of Death.Now we’re not stuck any more. Now, we haveto make progress. You can’t imagine the capital that the casters are making out of that final plaintive speech of yours, Morty—and that silver’s probably advanced the cause of machine emancipation by two hundred years.”

“You mean,” I said, very slowly, as the import of what she was saying sank in, “that all that desperate babbling was recorded?”

“‘Recorded’!” Emily retorted, disgustedly. “You really don’t understand politics, do you, Morty? We put it out live, almost as soon as we started eavesdropping. While the silver was transmitting the mayday its channels were wide open, even though its eyes and ears had been squelched. We heard everything—and so did the world. Common enterprise, Morty—the very best resources of the Earthbound and the Outer System, focused on a simple mission of mercy, a race against time. We always knew we were going to win, of course, but the audience didn’t—even the ones who’d followed the development of the new generation of smart spaceships. To them, it looked like a long shot, exactly the kind of miracle you thought you needed—and no one aboard had any reason to explain that it was actually a piece of cake.”

“And it helped you?” I queried, uncertainly.

“It certainly did. All our differences were set aside, for the moment. Once things like that have been forgotten, even momentarily, it’s very hard to remember them exactly the way they were. Your little meditation might just have succeeded where everything else had failed, in putting Humpty Dumpty together again and healing the breach in the fabric of the Oikumene.”

“All I did was fall into a hole,” I pointed out.

“Even if that were true,” she said, “I’d be forever grateful for your exquisite timing. But you also kept talking. That’s always been your strong suit, Morty. Whatever happened, you always kept talking. I have to go now—because I have to keep talking too. The ice is broken, if you’ll forgive the pun, but we have a hell of a lot of talking to do before we get the course of history flowing smoothly again. There are a lot of issues that need to be settled. Jupiter’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

I forgave her the ludicrously mixed metaphor as well as the pun. I was in an unusually good mood. In fact, I was alive.

Julius Ngomi came to see me too, though not until much later.

“All history is fantasy,” he said.

“If you hadn’t told me that,” I lied, “my life might have taken a very different path.”

I was a diplomat now, I thought. I owed it to the world to play the silver and tell the man exactly what he needed to hear. Anyway, he was the clever hypocrite who’d once told me that the truth is what you can get away with.

“You’re world famous now,” the clever hypocrite told me. “Also rich—not by my standards or Emily’s, of course, but far richer than you’veever been before. Access fees to The History of Deathestablished a new world record within hours of your not-so-final testament being sent out live from the good ship Ambassador.That’s where you are, in case nobody’s mentioned it.”

“So I understand,” I replied. “It’s not everyone who can put the Oikumene back together again just by lying here in bed, but I guess some of us have the gift and some of us have to work instead.”

“It won’t last, you know,” he added, grinning as broadly and as luminously as he could. “Another nine-day wonder. Next week, something else will be news. You’d think that emortals would have more staying power than that, wouldn’t you? But time marches on, sixty seconds to every hour and seven days in every week. Everything that happens live is only reallyimportant while it’s happening—and in the end, it all ends up inside mountains, the litter…”

“… that dare not speak its name,” I finished for him. “Do you ever worry that there might come a day when those little habits and catch-phrases might one day be all that’s left of you?”

“I used to,” he said, “but that was before I heard your little homily. If you can teach a low-grade silver to value its own life and personal evolution, who am I to resist the power of your rhetoric? It’s a pity there aren’t any Inuit left to sell ice to.”

“Somehow,” I said, “I get the feeling that you’re not quite as grateful as Emily seems to be for my heroic efforts on behalf of the unity of the Oikumene.”

“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 andthe 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 authenticcommon 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 ownershipirrelevant. 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 allknew 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 Ambassadorto 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 Ambassadorwith 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.