He gave her a long look. “I wonder if the Hermeticists who made you left out all the flaws of this old, sad, all-too-human race. You should be the mother of new people.”
“Oh my! Such a responsibility. And when should we get started on that project?”
She smiled, then, and the towerlight was as bright as moonlight, so he could see her smiling, a dim gold shadow in the night, and so he kissed her.
When they paused to breathe, she asked, “Where are you going to stable your horse? We cannot bring him up on the spider car.”
3. Limits
Menelaus Montrose, when he should have been the happiest man on Earth on the happiest day of his life, was aware of an ache in his throat, a bitterness—no, it was a resentment, a feeling that he had been betrayed. It reminded him of the time his mother had thrown his birthday cake to the hogs, because he had not done his chores (it had been his birthday that day, after all, and Leonidas told him it was okay to sleep late). With one part of his mind, he told himself that Del Azarchel was the source of this feeling. Blackie was a cold bastard, no doubt.
Another part of his mind told him it was the future that had betrayed him, the human race itself. Filthy, stupid poop-flinging tool-using monkeys not smart enough to use their tools to better themselves, and live like men, not monkeys.
During the ride up the side of the cable, his mood grew more and more elated the higher they rose. The scattered lights of the city fell away. The ocean was a dark seething mass, still tinted rose-red by the sunset receding westward, but more and more of it came into view as they rose higher, outpacing the dusk.
The car was a bubble affixed to a contraption of legs that were pulled along by induction currents in the cable itself, and the legs were hinged to grow wider as the cable grew wider.
He spoke about the wealth his marriage had put into his hands; he spoke about rebuilding. Why couldn’t the Celestial Tower be restored to its old glory? Why not establish a moonbase, mine the asteroids, put men in space instead of just satellites? And why not colonize Titan?
“And flying cars,” he added. “We’re in the future. There are supposed to be flying cars.”
She said, “And what about Del Azarchel? He will prohibit it. Titan is outside of spy bee range.”
“He cannot really be against a space program! When we were young—well, spittle, colonizing habitats both spaceborne and planetary, ’smostly all we talked on. Besides, the news that the Hermetic is making a second expedition to the Diamond Star might quell the discontent gripping the—uh, the masses.” (He had almost said the Hylics but he caught himself.)
“He woke you because he was desperate to wake Xypotech Del Azarchel—I weary of saying the phrase—I hereby dub him ‘X’-Archel.” (She pronounced it Exarchel.) “By this means he hoped to send to the Diamond Star the only person he trusted not to overthrow him when he returned. Himself. One immortal version of his mind would rule the world while the other—the first of an endlessly self-replicating multitude of Van Neumann ships—would conquer the stars. He has no more need of the human race, for the posthuman starfaring race he intends to be is merely himself, multiplied to infinity.”
“And the rest of Mankind?”
“The myriads of the human race suffer the fate of those spermatozoa who fail to penetrate the egg.”
“Fine. We get to the Diamond Star first, come back, and make his worst nightmare come true, overthrow his damned tyranny, set up something where everyone gets a vote!”
She shook her head. “While it has the romance of directness, it is an inelegant solution, perhaps self-defeating. I suggest that only a plan even more far-sighted and ambitious than his will prevail.”
“Har! Or is it just that you helped designed this worldwide tyranny, so you don’t want to see it blasted?”
She said, “The world we found when the Hermetic descended was not as culturally coherent as some English colony like your America with two hundred years of experience ruling themselves. I had to work with the people who were as I found them, people more fearful of bioterror and plague and poverty than they were of servitude. They have their limitations. And I, my husband, even I have mine. I hope you are not like Ximen, and think of me as some fairy-being with a magic wand?”
“You’re on a first-name basis with him?”
“What? With my ex-fiancée, who raised me from a child, and I lived in a starship within shouting distance of him my whole young life? It would be odd if I were not.”
“So what are your limitations? Can’t hit a piñata while hoodwinked?”
“I don’t know what that is. My limit is that while I can inspire a social and political system for humans to maximize personal liberty within the context of minimizing external conflict, I simply cannot reduce the how and the when and the why to adjust the system to a simple algorithm. There must be a posthuman to make adjustments, personal authority on several levels, wise judges, statesmen who transcend the mere hedonistic calculus of power and politics. You see the problem?”
“The problem is you were raised on a ship, so you think everyone obeying one captain is the norm. The problem is you did not set up a Democracy.”
She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Democracy on a worldwide scale? The Chinese outnumber the Australians, and would have voted to abolish international corporate structures. The Azanians would have merely bribed Africa to vote their way on matters of public import. The Copts would have voted the Jews out of Babylon.”
“I mean a limited Democracy.”
“Oh, but I did limit it! The aristocratic class forms a bulwark against overreaching by the commoners. I encouraged an irenic but established sacerdotal order to create legal sanctuary against overreaching aristocrats. I encouraged a formal system of intelligence-augmented bureaucrats to check the fervor of religious zeal, and also to give a harmless outlet to the morbid impulses of academics. I encouraged the arrogance of the plutocracy to check the warlike desperation of the common man, who otherwise would elevate a despot to check the aristocrats: the plutocrats can only maintain their precarious positions by serving rather than commanding their customers. And so on. The parts are all balanced against each other.”
“What went wrong?”
“Intelligent I may be, but not experienced. Book learning is not the same. I am younger than you are, biologically. I am just a girl.”
“That don’t sound like a mistake to me. You being a girl and all.”
“Yet I underestimated the bull-headed blindness of the male of the species. I put too much faith in incentives, and too little faith in the original sin. You see? The Hermeticists are as a ship in a storm, and I have left them only one safe landing zone: namely, they must organize an expedition to the Diamond Star to replenish the energy of civilization, or else the whole structure will collapse. This means they must abdicate power, and decentralize their Conclave to another structure I have prepared to receive it, the Special Advocate Executive of the Concordat. There are several legal mechanisms in place to do this, including an appointment by agency, or invoking a general convention of the Parliament. The Advocacy includes agents of mine, men I have intermittently trained and cultivated over decades. They have so often acted for the Conclave that the Commons would accept them as legitimate. But…”
Her voice trailed off.
“… But the Hermeticists are too stupid.” He finished the sentence for her.
She nodded sadly. “You speak ill of the men who raised me. They are my fathers.”