I never disliked Charles, never found in him anything I did not admire. Yet even now, with a century of living between me and her, I can’t bring myself to call that young woman a fool.
I tell all this as trivial prelude to things neither Charles nor I could imagine. I look back now and see the relentless roll of events, building across the next seven Martian years to the greatest event in human history.
Trivial pain, trivial lives. The shiver of specks of dust ramping to the storm.
Part Two
You can go home again, but it will cost you.
In the late twenty-second century, travel between Mars and Earth remained a corporate or government luxury, or a jape of the very rich. A passenger of average mass traveling from Earth to Mars, or Mars to Earth, would pay some two million Triple dollars for the privilege.
The rest had to settle for sending their messages by light-speed dataflow, and that put a natural wall between one-on-one conversations.
From Earth to the Moon, reply delay is about two and two-thirds seconds, just enough to catch your breath and not quite enough to lose your chain of thought. To Mars, delay varied with the planetary dance from forty-four minutes to just under seven.
The art of conversation lapsed early between Earth and Mars.
As soon as I heard I was a finalist for the apprenticeship, I began furiously re-studying Earth politics and cultural history. I had already gone far beyond what most Martians are taught in the course of normal education; I had become, somewhat unusually on Mars, a Terraphile. Now I needed to be an expert.
I had some idea of the kinds of questions I would be asked; I knew there would be interviews and tough scrutiny; but I did not know who would be conducting the examinations. When I learned, I couldn’t decide whether to be relieved or nervous. Ultimately, I think I was relieved. The first interview would be with Alice, Majumdar’s chief thinker.
The interview was conducted in Ylla, in an office reserved for more formal, inter-family business meetings. I dressed slowly that morning, taking extra care with the fresh clothes as they formed beneath the mat on my bed. I scrutinized myself in a mirror and in vid projection, looking for flaws inside and out.
I tried to calm myself on the hundred-meter walk to the business chambers, deliberately choosing a longer route through family display gardens, offset from the main tunnels, filled with flowers and vegetables and small trees growing beneath sheets of artificial sun.
Thinkers were invariably polite, infinitely patient, with pleasant personalities. Also smarter than humans and faster by a considerable margin. I had never spoken with Alice before, but I knew my uncle had established a specific set of criteria for his apprentice. I had little doubt that she would speck me soundly and fairly. But taking into account my age and lack of experience, that little doubt quickly magnified into a bad case of nerves.
A few minutes early, I presented myself to the provost of selection, an unassuming, monk-faced, middle-aged man from Jiddah named Peck. I had met Peck while going through scholarship prep. He tried to put me at ease.
“ Alice ’s hookup is clean and wide,” he said. “She’s in a good mood today.” That was a small joke. Thinkers did not exhibit moods; they could model them, but they were never dominated by them. Unlike myself. The mood dominating me came close to panic.
I murmured I was ready to begin. Peck smiled, patted my shoulder as if dealing with a child, and opened the door to the office.
I had never been here before. Dark rosewood paneling, thick forest-green metabolic carpet, lights lurking serenely behind brass fixtures.
A young girl with long black hair, wearing a frilly white dress — Alice ’s image — seemed to sit behind the opal-matrix desk, hands folded on the polished black and fire-colored stone. Alice had been named after Lewis Carroll’s inspiration, Alice Liddell, and favored Liddell’s vividly animated portrait as an interface. The image flickered to reveal its unreality, then stabilized. “Good morning,” she said. She used a dulcet young woman’s voice.
“Good morning.” I smiled. My smile, like Alice , flickered to announce its illusory nature.
“We’ve worked together once before, but you probably don’t remember,” Alice said.
“No,” I admitted.
“When you were six years old, I conducted a series of history LitVids from Jiddah. You were a good pupil.”
“Thank you.”
“For some months now, Bithras and Majumdar BM have been preparing to journey to Earth to deal directly with various partners and officials there.”
“Yes.” I listened intently, trying to focus on the words and not on the image.
“Bithras will take two promising young people from the family to Earth with him, as apprentice assistants. The apprentices will have important duties. Please sit.”
I sat.
“Does my appearance make you uncomfortable?”
“I don’t think so.” It was odd, facing a young girl, but I decided — forced myself to decide — that it did not bother me excessively. I would have to learn to work closely with thinkers.
“Your ed program is ideal for what Bithras will require in an apprentice. You’ve strongly favored government and management, and you studied theory of management in dataflow cultures.”
“I’ve tried,” I said.
“You’ve also investigated Earth customs, history, and politics in some detail. How do you feel about Earth?”
“It’s fascinating,” I said.
“Do you find it appealing?”
“I dream about it. I’d love to see it real.”
“And Earth society?”
“Makes Mars look like a backwater,” I said. I did not know — have never known — how to dissemble. I doubted Alice would be impressed by dissembling, anyway.
“I think that’s generally agreed. What are Earth’s strengths, regarded as a unit?”
“I’m not sure Earth can be thought of as a unit.”
“Why?”
“Even with com and link and ex nets, common ed and instant plebiscite… there’s still a lot of diversity. Between the alliances, the unallied states, the minorities of untherapied… a lot of differences.”
“Is Mars more or less diverse?”
“Less diverse and less coherent, I’d say.”
“Why?”
“Earth’s people are over eighty percent therapied or high natural. They’ve had a majority of designer births for sixty Earth years. There’s probably never been a more select, intelligent, physically and mentally healthy population in human history.“
“And Mars?”
I smiled. “We value our kinks.”
“Are we less coherent in our management and decisions?”
“No question,” I said. “Look at our so-called politics — at our attempts to unify.”
“How do you think that will affect Bithras’s negotiations?”
“I can’t begin to guess. I don’t even know what he — what the BM or the Council plans to do.”
“How do you perceive the character of the United States and the alliances?”
I cautiously threaded my way through a brief history, conscious of Alice ’s immense memory, and my necessarily simple appraisal of a complex subject.
By the end of the twentieth century, international corporations had as much influence in Earth’s affairs as governments. Earth was undergoing its first dataflow revolution; information had become as important as raw materials and manufacturing potential. By mid-twenty-one, nanotechnology factories were inexpensive; nano recyclers could provide raw materials from garbage; data and design reigned supreme.
The fiction of separate nations and government control was maintained, but increasingly, political decisions were made on the basis of economic benefit, not national pride. Wars declined, the labor market fluctuated wildly as developing countries joined in — exacerbated by nano and other forms of automation — and through most of the dataflow world a class of therapied, superfit workers arose, highly skilled and self-confident professionals who- demanded an equal say with corporate boards.