stale. "Stability," he said. "The Terrans wanted stability, that's
why they set up the Interdict. They didn't want technology to
break them into pieces, as it's done to us. They blamed technology for the disasters. The war plagues, the carbon dioxide that
melted the ice caps. . . . They can't forget their dead."
"Surely the whole world isn't like this," Vera said.
"It has to be. Anywhere there is variety there is the risk of
change. Change that can't be tolerated."
"But they have telephones. Aircraft."
"Enforcement technology," Lindsay said.
On their way to the Pacific they saw two more settlements,
separated by miles of festering wilderness. The cities were as
identical as circuit chips. They crouched unnaturally on the
landscape; they could have been stamped out from some hydraulic press and dropped from the air.
Pilot pointed out more of the bloated aircraft. Their full significance became clear to Lindsay. The flying machines were
like plague vectors, carrying the ideological virus of some cal-
cifying cultural disease. The pyramids towered in the heart of
every city, enormous, dwarfing all hope, the strangling monuments of the legions of the dead.
Tears came to him. He wept quietly, holding nothing back. He
mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that
the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from
their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final
purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute.
They slipped beneath the ocean south of the rocky island
chain of Baja California. Pilot opened the hatchway, flooding
the cargo hold with water, and they began at once to sink.
They were in search of the world's largest single ecosystem, the only biome man had never touched.
The surface waters had not escaped. Over the drowned lands
of the continental margins, rafts of rotting moss and algae, the
ocean's equivalents of weeds, festered in choking profusion. But
the abyssal depths were undisturbed. In the crushing blackness
of the abyss, larger in area than all the continents combined,
conditions scarcely varied from pole to pole. The denizens of
this vast realm were poorly known. No human being had ever
invented a way to wring advantage from them.
But in the Schismatrix, man's successors were more clever. The resemblance of this realm to the dark oceans of Europa had not
escaped Lindsay. For decades he had searched the ancient
databanks for scraps of knowledge. The surviving records of
abyssal life were almost useless, dating back to the dawn of
biology. But even these crude hints lured Lindsay with their
potential for sudden miracle. Europa too had the gloominess,
the depths. And the vast drowned ranges of volcanic rifts, oozing geothermal energy.
The abyss had oases. It had always had them. The knowledge
had lit a slow, subterranean fire in his imagination. Life:
untouched, primeval life, swarmed in boiling splendor at the
fiery edges of the Earth's tectonic plates.
An entire ecosystem, older than mankind, clustered there in all its miraculous richness. Life that could be seized, that could be
Europa's.
At first he had rejected the idea. The Interdict was sacred: as
old as the unspoken guilt of ancestral spacefarers, who had
deserted Earth as disaster loomed. In their desertion, they had
robbed the planet of the very expertise that might have saved it.
Over centuries of life in space, that guilt had sunk into a
darkened region of cultural awareness, surfacing only as caricature, as ritual denial and deliberate ignorance.
The parting had come with hatred: with those in space condemned as antihuman thieves, and Earth's emergency government denounced as fascist barbarism. Hatred made things easier: easier for those in space to shrug off all responsibility, easier for Earth to starve its myriad cultures down to a single gray regime of penance and pointless stability.
But life moved in clades. Lindsay knew it as a fact. A successful species always burst into a joyous wave of daughter species, of hopeful monsters that rendered their ancestors obsolete.
Denying change meant denying life.
By this token he knew that humanity on Earth had become a
relict.
In the long term, the vast biological timescape that had become Lindsay's obsession, rust ate anything that failed to move.
Earth's future did not belong to humanity but to the monstrous
weeds, grown strange and woody, and whatever small fleet creatures leaped and bred among them. And Lindsay felt justice in it.
They sank into darkness.
Pressure meant nothing to their alien hull. The gasbags flourished at extremes of pressure that made Earth's oceans seem as
thin as plasma. Pilot switched controls over to the water jets
epoxied to the hull. Me kicked in aperture radar, and their
videoboards lit up with the clean green contour lines of the
abyssal floor.
Lindsay's heart leaped as he saw the familiar geology. "Just
like Europa," Vera murmured. They were floating over an ex-
tended tension fault, where volcanic basalt had snapped and
rifted, harsh blocks jutting upward, the cracked primeval violence untouched by wind or rain. Rectilinear mountains, lightly dusted with organic ooze, dropped in breathtaking precipitious cliffs, where contour lines crowded together like the teeth of a comb.
But here the rift was dead. They saw no sign of thermal energy.
"Follow the fault," Lindsay said. "Look for hot spots." He had
lived too long for impatience, even now.
"Shall I kick in the main engines?" Pilot said.
"And make the water boil for miles around? We're deep, Pilot.
That water is like steel."
"Is it?" Pilot made an electronic churring noise. "Well, I'd
rather have no stars at all than blurry ones."
They followed the rift for hours without finding a lava seep.
Vera slept; Lindsay dozed briefly, an old man's cat-sleep. Pilot,
who slept only on formal occasions, woke them. "A hot spot,"
he said.
Lindsay examined his board. Infrareds showed sluggish heat
from deep within the interior of a jutting cliff. The cliff was
extremely odd: a long, tilted plane of euclidian smoothness,
rising abruptly from an oozy badlands of jumbled terrain. An
angular foothill at the base of the cliff lay strangely distorted,
almost crumpled, atop a dome-shaped rise of lava.
"Send out the drone," he said.
Vera pulled the robot's controls from under her seat and
slipped on a pair of eyephones. The robot sculled easily out to
the anomalous cliff, its lights blazing. Lindsay switched his
board over to the robot's optics.
The tilted cliff was painted. There were white stripes on it,
long peeling dashes, some kind of dividing line. "It's a wreck,"
he said suddenly. "It's manmade."
"Can't be," Vera said. "It's the size of a major spacecraft.
There'd be room in it for thousands."
But then she found something that settled it. A machine was
lashed to the smooth clifflike deck of the enormous ship. Centuries had corroded it, but its winged outlines were clear. "It's
an aircraft," Pilot said. "It had jets. This was some kind of
watery spaceport. Airport, rather."
"A ratfish!" Lindsay exulted. "After it, Vera!"
The surveyor lunged after the abyssal creature. The long-tailed, blunt-headed fish, the size of a man's forearm, darted for safety along the broad deck of the aircraft carrier. It vanished through a ruptured crevice in the multistory wreckage of the control
tower. The robot pulled up short. "Wait," Vera said. "If this is a
ship, where did the heat come from?"
Pilot examined his instruments. "It's radioactive heat," he said.