The jaunt to her side was uncomplicated: the room seemed as starkly furnished as a Zen master’s cell, all its fabulous conveniences invisible until they were needed. That was its fourth most expensive feature.
She rode the turbulence of his arrival expertly, and helped him steady himself into station beside her, just far enough away to allow them both wingroom, all without taking her gaze from the window. She had chosen a local vertical that put Earth in the lower left quadrant of the window. Perhaps a fifth of the planet was visible, a lens-shaped slice of Old Home. The rest of the view was of eternity.
They shared it in silence for perhaps a minute.
“Drink with me, Jay,” she said then.
He didn’t care much for alcohol as a rule; he hated what it did to his balance and kinesthetic sense. But he did not hesitate. “Name your poison.” He told himself that it would anesthetize him against having to talk with Martin later.
“Jeeves,” she called, and her AI shimmered into view, oriented to her local vertical and seeming to be standing on air.
“Yes, madam?”
“The good stuff.”
One holographic eyebrow rose half a centimeter. “Very good, madam.”
Both of Jay’s eyebrows rose at least that much. This was not going to be a casual conversation. He stopped rehearsing his account of how clever he had been in Kate’s office.
5
Jeeves moved away without moving his legs, as if he were under gravity and his feet were on wheels, and ceased to exist when he left the humans’ peripheral vision. Tugbots delivered an amber bottle, two bulbs and a spherical table to the spot where he had vanished. As they arrived, Jeeves reformed, and picked them all out of the air expertly as he “rolled” back into view. He placed the table between Eva and Jay and told it to stay there, placed a bulb against either side of its velcro surface and the bottle in the center facing them, so that the table looked like a stylized Pinocchio, and shimmied back a pace. Eva thanked and dismissed him; once again he glided out of view before dissolving.
“I never thought I’d see that again,” Jay said respectfully.
She nodded. The bottle was an ancient quart of Black Bush, about three quarters full. It was something like a century old, and its contents were twelve years older than that, a blend of whiskey so fine that at the time of bottling it could not legally be exported from Ireland. Its source was the oldest distillery on Earth, whose charter-to-distill had been granted in 1608. There probably was not another bottle like it left anywhere in the Solar System. Jay was the only person in the Shimizu besides herself who had ever seen it; they had shared a dram the night Ethan’s goodbye message arrived from Terra.
He steadied her while she poured, a process of pulling the bottle away while chasing it with the open end of the bulb, then pinching off the flow with one thumb while she sealed the bulb with the other. She did it better than the Chief Sommelier in the Hall of Lucullus, losing not a drop of the precious whiskey, fiercely proud of her ability to control her aged fingers. Jay accepted his bulb with thanks. He brought it up past his nose in a slow gentle curve, squeezing slightly so that the nipple dilated and the bouquet came to him. When she had filled her own bulb and replaced the bottle, he raised his in salute, and they drank.
The silence stretched on.
“Silly,” she said at last. “I’ll never get over how silly it is.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“You could blindfold me, tug me around the hotel enough to confuse me, lead me into any room in the place and dock me in front of its window… take off the blindfold and defy me, without looking away from the window, to tell you which Tier I was in. There is no way to tell a real window from a fake one without instruments. And yet this thing is worth every yen it costs me. About the gross annual product of a medium town… and I’d pay three times as much if I had to. Why?”
He seemed to know a rhetorical question when he heard it; he made no reply.
“Why are they so goddam happy, Jay?” she asked then.
“Who?”
She gestured at the Earth. “Them.” Her gesture widened to take in orbital space, then widened farther. “All of them. Our species. The human race in this year of Our Lord 2064. I think I know why the Stardancers are happy—but why people too?”
“I’m not sure exactly what you mean.”
“Exactly. That’s what I mean.” She squeezed more whiskey into her mouth, rolled it around and swallowed. God, she missed her taste buds sometimes. “They probably don’t even seem all that happy to you, do they?”
“I never really thought about—”
“Trust me. I’ve been watching the human race a long time. At this point we ought to be more traumatized than ever before in our history. The Curve of Change is almost vertical by now, like a goosing finger—you do know about the Curve?”
“Sure.”
Of course he did—as a dry old chestnut from a history lesson. For millennia the curve of human social and technological progress had trended upward, but so slowly as to be almost imperceptible… then all at once it had passed some critical threshold and begun climbing sharply. Ever more sharply, the rate of increase itself accelerating steadily, until the race lurched from covered wagons to spaceships, from kingdoms and fiefs to planetary government, from chronic global poverty to staggering near-universal wealth, in a single century. Remarkable. Inexplicable. Where would it all end? And so on.
But Eva had been born into the middle of that century. Just about the time it was beginning to dawn on humanity just how oddly the Curve was behaving. And humanity’s general response had been to run a high fever…
“I don’t mean trivial things, like conquering cancer. I mean substantive changes in the map of reality. When I was a girl, the phrase ‘New World’ still meant North America. Now it means Mars. The Old World—that one right there—is just about unrecognizable, if you look at it any closer than this. The population has more than doubled since I was born, and look at that planet: it’s still green. All the most fundamental axioms of politics, of economics, of industry, have all come apart since the turn of the millennium, obsoleted by new technology. We seem to have a handle on pollution, for God’s sake! After half a century of holding my breath, I’m prepared to admit that it looks like we really may have outgrown war. Thanks to nanotechnology, I’m even getting ready to concede that a day may even come when we’ll have outgrown money… a day when no one alive has to work to earn her living, when nobody will remember—or care—what a ‘salary’ was, or why people gave up a third of their lives to get one.”
“And you wonder why people are happy?”
“Yes! Two axioms I cling to are that change is painful and that humans react poorly to pain. Change that radical and fundamental has to hurt, to confuse, to anger. For the first seventy years of my life, I watched my species grow ever more neurotic, more sullen, more despairing, more bitter. You know what I’m talking about.”
“Well, I’ve read about it, seen records, old flatscreens and so forth—”