“If Diss Ken has been appointed to the Swamp Watchers’ Service,”‘ thought Darr Veter, ‘‘he must be a serious young man.”
Diss Ken, Groin Orme’s son, like all children in the Great Circle Era, had been brought up away from his parents in a school on the sea-shore in the northern zone. There, too, he had passed the first tests made by a local station of the Academy of the Psychophysiology of Labour. When young people were allotted work the psychological specifics of youth — the urge to go farther, an exaggerated sense of responsibility and egocentrism — were taken into consideration.
The huge coach ran on smoothly and silently. Darr Veter went up to the top deck where there was a transparent roof. Far below, on either side of the Spiral Way, buildings, canals, forests and mountain tops swept past. The brightly gleaming, transparent domes of buildings marked the narrow belt of automatic factories at the junction of the agricultural and forestry belts. The rugged shapes of the huge servicing machines could be clearly seen through the glass walls of the buildings.
The monument erected to Zhinn Cahd, the inventor of a cheap method of manufacturing artificial sugar, flashed past and then the arches of the Spiral Way cut across the forests of the tropical agricultural zone. Plantations of trees stretching away into infinite distance showed every conceivable shade of leaf and bark and great variety in the shape and height. Harvesting, pollination and calculating machines crawled along the smooth narrow roads that separated the plantations: countless cables formed a giant cobweb. There was a time when a field of ripe, golden corn had been the symbol of abundance. In the Era of World Unity, however, the economic inefficiency of annual crops was realized and, after all farming had been transferred to the tropical belt, the hard labour involved in the annual cultivation of herbage and bush plants became unnecessary. In the Great Circle Era perennial trees that did not take too much out of the soil and were impervious to climatic changes, became the chief crop.
Bread, berry and nut trees, yielding thousands of different kinds of fruit rich in proteins, produced up to a hundred kilograms of food each. Forests of these trees ran round the planet in two belts covering thousands of millions of acres — true belts of Ceres, the ancient Goddess of Agriculture. Between these two belts lay the equatorial forestry zone, an ocean of humid tropical forests that supplied the whole world with its timber — white, black, violet, pink, golden and grey wood with a silky grain, wood as hard as Lone or as soft as an apple, wood that sank like a stone and wood that floated like cork. The forests also yielded dozens of kinds of resin cheaper than the synthetic varieties, possessing valuable technical or medicinal properties.
The tops of the forest giants were level with the permanent way and waved and surged on both sides like a green ocean. In the dark depths of these forests, in cosy-looking glades, stood houses on metal piles and beside them mechanical spider-like monsters capable of turning these stands of 80-metre trees into stacks of logs and planks.
To the left appeared the rounded summits of the famous equatorial mountains. On one of them, Kenya, was the installation for the maintenance of communications with the Great Circle. The ocean of trees moved away to the left, making way for a stony plateau. Blue cube-shaped buildings appeared on both sides.
The train stopped and Darr Veter stepped out on to the extensive, glass-paved square of the Equator Station. Near the foot-bridge that stretched over the grey tops of the Atlas cedars, stood a white truncated pyramid of porcelain-like aplite from the River Lualaba, surmounted by the statue of a worker of an age long past. The luxuriant silver foliage of trees brought from South Africa surrounded the pedestal whose sides gleamed dazzlingly bright in the sunshine. In his right hand he held a gleaming sphere with four transmitting antennae jutting out from it, his left was stretched out towards the pale equatorial sky. The man’s body, straining backwards as though to launch the sphere into the sky, was the expression of inspired effort. The figures of people in strange clothing arranged around the pedestal at the feet of the central figure increased the impression of effort. This was a monument to the builders of the first man-made Earth satellites, people who had performed miracles of inventiveness, labour and courage.
Darr Veter could never look at these sculptured faces without a feeling of excitement. He knew that the first people to build artificial Earth satellites and reach the threshold of the Cosmos had been Russians, that amazing nation from whom Darr Veter was descended, the people who had taken the first steps towards building the new social order and towards the conquest of the Cosmos….
That day, as usual, Darr Veter made his way to the monument to look once more at the carvings of the heroes of ancient times and to seek in them similarities and differences in comparison with the people of his own day and with himself….
Two tall, youthful figures appeared through the trees, stopped and then one of them rushed to Darr Veter. He placed his arms round Veter’s shoulders and took a stealthy look at the familiar features of that well-known face: the big nose, wide chin, the unexpectedly mirthful turn of the lips that did not seem to fit in with the rather grim expression of the steel-grey eyes under their joined brows.
Darr Veter cast a glance of approval over the son of a famous man who had built bases on the planets of the Centaurus system and had been elected President of the Astronautical Council for five three-year periods in succession. Groin Orme must have been at least 130 years old — three times the age of Darr Veter — but his son was very young.
Diss Ken called over his friend, a dark-haired boy.
“This is Thor Ahn, my best friend, the son of Zieg Zohr, the composer,” he said. “We’re working together in the swamps and we want to do our Labours of Hercules together and after that we want to continue working together.”
“Are you still interested in the cybernetics of heredity?” asked Darr Veter.
“Oh, yes! Thor has got me even more interested — he’s a musician, like his father. He and his girl-friend dream of working in a field where music helps us understand the development of living organisms, that is, they want to study the symphony of their structure….”
“It’s all very indefinite, the way you put it,” said Veter, frowning.
“I don’t know enough yet,” answered Diss in confusion, “perhaps Thor can tell you better than I.”
The other lad blushed but stood up to the test of the penetrating glance.
“Digs wanted to tell you about the rhythms of the mechanism of heredity. As the living organism develops from the original cell it attunes itself by chords of molecules. The primordial paired spiral develops along lines analogous to the development of a musical symphony, or, to put it another way, to the logical development in an electronic computing machine.”
“Really!” exclaimed Darr Veter in exaggerated astonishment. “Then you will reduce the entire evolution of all living and non-living matter to some sort of a gigantic symphony?”
“The plan and internal rhythm of which are determined by basic physical laws. We have only to understand how the programme is built up and where the information of the musico-cybernetic mechanism comes from,” insisted Thor Ahn with the unconquerable confidence of youth.
“Whose idea is it?”
“My father’s, Zieg Zohr’s. He recently published his 13th Cosmic Symphony in F-minor, Colour Tone 4.75 m
“I’ll most certainly hear it! I love blue tones…. Now about your immediate plans, your Labours of Hercules. Do you know what has been allotted you?”
“Only the first six.”
“Of course, the other six will be allotted when the first half has been done,” Darr Veter recalled.