23 Ice Day The presidential yacht, alias Inter-Island Ferry Number 1, had certainly never looked so handsome at any previous stage of its three-centuries-long career. Not only was it festooned with bunting, but it had been given a new coat of white paint. Unfortunately, either paint or labour had become exhausted before the job was quite finished, so the captain had to be careful to anchor with only the starboard side visible from land. President Farradine was also ceremonially attired in a striking outfit (designed by Mrs. President) that made him look like a cross between a Roman emperor and a pioneer astronaut. He did not appear altogether at ease in it; Captain Sirdar Bey was glad that his uniform consisted of the plain white shorts, open-neck shirt, shoulder badges, and gold-braided cap in which he felt completely at home – though it was hard to remember when he had last worn it. Despite the president’s tendency to trip over his toga, the official tour had gone very well, and the beautiful onboard model of the freezing plant had worked perfectly. It had produced an unlimited supply of hexagonal ice wafers just the right size to fit into a tumbler of cool drink. But the visitors could hardly be blamed for failing to understand the appropriateness of the name Snowflake; after all, few on Thalassa had ever seen snow. And now they had left the model behind to inspect the real thing, which covered several hectares of the Tarna coastline. It had taken some time to shuttle the president and his entourage, Captain Bey and his officers, and all the other guests from yacht to shore. Now, in the last light of day, they were standing respectfully around the rim of a hexagonal block of ice twenty metres across and two metres thick. Not only was it the largest mass of frozen water that anyone had ever seen – it was probably the largest on the planet. Even at the Poles, ice seldom had a chance to form. With no major continents to block circulation, the rapidly moving currents from the equatorial regions quickly melted any incipient floes. ‘But why is it that shape?’ the president asked. Deputy Captain Malina sighed; he was quite sure that this had already been explained several times. ‘It’s the old problem of covering any surface with identical tiles,’ he said patiently. ‘You have only three choices – squares, triangles, or hexagons. In our case, the hex is slightly more efficient and easier to handle. The blocks – over two hundred of them, each weighing six hundred tons – will be keyed into each other to build up the shield. It will be a kind of ice-sandwich three layers thick. When we accelerate, all the blocks will fuse together to make a single huge disk. Or a blunt cone, to be precise.’ ‘You’ve given me an idea.’ The president was showing more animation than he had done all afternoon. ‘We’ve never had ice-skating on Thalassa. It was a beautiful sport – and there was a game called ice-hockey, though I’m not sure I’d like to revive that, from the vids I’ve seen of it. But it would be wonderful if you could make us an ice-rink in time for the Olympics. Would that be possible?’ ‘I’ll have to think about it,’ Deputy Captain Malina replied, rather faintly. ‘It’s a very interesting idea. Perhaps you’ll let me know how much ice you’d need.’ ‘I’ll be delighted. And it will be an excellent way of using all this freezing plant when it’s done its job.’ A sudden explosion saved Malina the necessity of a reply. The fireworks had started, and for the next twenty minutes the sky above the island erupted with polychromatic incandescence. The Lassans loved fireworks and indulged in them at every opportunity. The display was intermingled with laser imagery -even more spectacular, and considerably safer, but lacking the smell of gunpowder that added that final touch of magic. When all the festivities were over and the VIPs had departed to the ship, Deputy Captain Malina said thoughtfully, ‘The president’s full of surprises, even though he does have a one-track mind. I’m tired of hearing about his damned Olympics – but that ice-rink is an excellent idea and should generate a lot of goodwill for us.’ ‘I’ve won my bet, though,’ Lieutenant Commander Lorenson said. ‘What bet was that?’ Captain Bey asked. Malina gave a laugh. ‘I would never have believed it. Sometimes the Lassans don’t seem to have any curiosity – they take everything for granted. Though I suppose we should be flattered that they have such faith in our technological know-how. Perhaps they think we have antigravity! ‘It was Loren’s idea that I should leave it out of the briefing -and he was right. President Farradine never bothered to ask what would have been my very first question -just how we’re going to lift a hundred and fifty thousand tons of ice up to Magellan.’
24 Archive Moses Kaldor was happy to be left alone, for as many hours or days as he could be spared, in the cathedral calm of First Landing. He felt like a young student again, confronted with all the art and knowledge of mankind. The experience was both exhilarating and depressing; a whole universe lay at his fingertips, but the fraction of it he could explore in an entire lifetime was so negligible that he was sometimes almost overwhelmed with despair. He was like a hungry man presented with a banquet that stretched as far as the eye could see – a feast so staggering that it completely destroyed his appetite. And yet all this wealth of wisdom and culture was only a tiny fraction of mankind’s heritage; much that Moses Kaldor knew and loved was missing – not, he was well aware, by accident but by deliberate design. A thousand years ago, men of genius and goodwill had rewritten history and gone through the libraries of Earth deciding what should be saved and what should be abandoned to the flames. The criterion of choice was simple though often very hard to apply. Only if it would contribute to survival and social stability on the new worlds would any work of literature, any record of the past, be loaded into the memory of the seedships. The task was, of course, impossible as well as heartbreaking. With tears in their eyes, the selection panels had thrown away the Veda, the Bible, the Tripitaka, the Qur’an, and all the immense body of literature – fiction and nonfiction – that was based upon them. Despite all the wealth of beauty and wisdom these works contained, they could not be allowed to reinfect virgin planets with the ancient poisons of religious hatred, belief in the supernatural, and the pious gibberish with which countless billions of men and women had once comforted themselves at the cost of addling their minds. Lost also in the great purge were virtually all the works of the supreme novelists, poets, and playwrights, which would in any case have been meaningless without their philosophical and cultural background. Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Tolstoy, Melville, Proust – the last great fiction writer before the electronic revolution overwhelmed the printed page – all that was left were a few hundred thousand carefully selected passages. Excluded was everything that concerned war, crime, violence, and the destructive passions. If the newly designed – and it was hoped improved – successors to H. sapiens rediscovered these, they would doubtless create their own literature in response. There was no need to give them premature encouragement. Music – except for opera – had fared better, as had the visual arts. Nevertheless, the sheer volume of material was so overwhelming that selection had been imperative, though sometimes arbitrary. Future generations on many worlds would wonder about Mozart’s first thirty-eight symphonies, Beethoven’s Second and Fourth, and Sibelius’s Third to Sixth. Moses Kaldor was deeply aware of his responsibility, and also conscious of his inadequacy – of any one man’s inadequacy, however talented he might be – to handle the task that confronted him. Up there aboard Magellan, safely stored in its gigantic memory banks, was much that the people of Thalassa had never known and certainly much that they would greedily accept and enjoy, even if they did not wholly understand. The superb twenty-fifth century recreation of the Odyssey, the war classics that looked back in anguish across half a millennium of peace, the great Shakespearean tragedies in Feinberg’s miraculous Lingua translation, Lee Chow’s War and Peace – it would take hours and days even to name all the possibilities. Sometimes, as he sat in the library of the First Landing Complex, Kaldor was tempted to play god with these reasonably happy and far-from-innocent people. He would compare the listings from the memory banks here with those aboard the ship, noting what had been expunged or condensed. Even though he disagreed in principle with any form of censorship, often he had to admit the wisdom of the deletions – at least in the days when the colony was founded. But now that it was successfully established, perhaps a little disturbance, or injection of creativity, might be in order … Occasionally, he was disturbed himself either by calls from the ship or by parties of young Lassans being given guided tours back to the beginning of their history. He did not mind the interruptions, and there was one that he positively welcomed. Most afternoons, except when what passed for urgent business in Tarna prevented her, Mirissa would come riding up the hill on her beautiful palomino gelding, Bobby. The visitors had been much surprised to find horses on Thalassa, since they had never seen any alive on Earth. But the Lassans loved animals, and had recreated many from the vast files of genetic material they had inherited. Sometimes they were quite useless – or even a nuisance, like the engaging little squirrel monkeys that were always stealing small objects from Tarnan households. Mirissa would invariably bring some delicacy – usually fruit or one of the many local cheeses – which Kaldor would accept with gratitude. But he was even more grateful for her company; who would believe that often he had addressed five million people -more than half the last generation! – yet was now content with an audience of one … ‘Because you’ve descended from a long line of librarians,” Moses Kaldor said, ‘you only think in megabytes. But may I remind you that the name “library” comes from a word meaning book. Do you have books on Thalassa?’ ‘Of course we do,’ Mirissa said indignantly; she had not yet learned to tell when Kaldor was joking. ‘Millions … well, thousands. There’s a man on North Island who prints about ten a year, in editions of a few hundred. They’re beautiful – and very expensive. They all go as gifts for special occasions. I had one on my twenty-first birthday – Alice in Wonderland.’ ‘I’d like to see it someday. I’ve always loved books, and have almost a hundred on the ship. Perhaps that’s why whenever I hear someone talking bytes, I divide mentally by a million and think of one book … one gigabyte equals a thousand books, and so on. That’s the only way I can grasp what’s really involved when people talk about data banks and information transfer. Now, how big is your library?’ Without taking her eyes off Kaldor, Mirissa let her fingers wander over the keyboard of her console. ‘That’s another thing I’ve never been able to do,’ he said admiringly. ‘Someone once said that after the twenty-first century, the human race divided into two species – Verbals and Digitals. I can use a keyboard when I have to, of course – but I prefer to talk to my electronic colleagues.’ ‘As of the last hourly check,’ Mirissa said, ‘six hundred and forty-five terabytes.’ ‘Um – almost a billion books. And what was the initial size of the library?’ ‘I can tell you that without looking it up. Six hundred and forty.’ ‘So in seven hundred years – ‘Yes, yes – we’ve managed to produce only a few million books.’ ‘I’m not criticizing; after all, quality is far more important than quantity. I’d like you to show me what you consider the best works of Lassan literature – music, too. The problem we have to decide is what to give you. Magellan has over a thousand megabooks aboard, in the General Access bank. Do you realize just what that implies?’ ‘If I said “Yes”, it would stop you from telling me. I’m not that cruel.’ ‘Thank you, my dear. Seriously, it’s a terrifying problem that’s haunted me for years. Sometimes I think that the Earth was destroyed none too soon; the human race was being crushed by the information it was generating. ‘At the end of the Second Millennium, it was producing only -only! – the equivalent of a million books a year. And I’m referring merely to information that was presumed to be of some permanent value, so it was stored indefinitely. ‘By the Third Millennium, the figure had multiplied by at least a hundred. Since writing was invented, until the end of Earth, it’s been estimated that ten thousand million books were produced. And as I told you, we have about ten per cent of that on board. ‘If we dumped it all on you, even assuming you have the storage capacity, you’d be overwhelmed. It would be no kindness – it would totally inhibit your cultural and scientific growth. And most of the material would mean nothing at all to you; you’d take centuries to sort the wheat from the chaff Strange, Kaldor said to himself, that I’ve not thought of the analogy before. This is precisely the danger that the opponents of SETI kept raising. Well, we never communicated with extraterrestrial intelligence, or even detected it. But the Lassans have done just that – and the ETs are us … Yet despite their totally different backgrounds, he and Mirissa had so much in common. Her curiosity and intelligence were traits to be encouraged; not even among his fellow crew members was there anyone with whom he could have such stimulating conversations. Sometimes Kaldor was so hard put to answer her questions that the only defence was a counterattack. ‘I’m surprised,’ he told her after a particularly thorough cross-examination on Solar politics, ‘that you never took over from your father and worked here full-time. This would be the perfect job for you.’ ‘I was tempted. But he spent all his life answering other people’s questions and assembling files for the bureaucrats on North Island. He never had time to do anything himself.’ ‘And you?’ ‘I like collecting facts, but I also like to see them used. That’s why they made me deputy director of the Tarna Development Project.’ ‘Which I fear may have been slightly sabotaged by our operations. Or so the director told me when I met him coming out of the mayor’s office.’ ‘You know Brant wasn’t serious. It’s a long-range plan, with only approximate completion dates. If the Olympic Ice Stadium is built here, then the project may have to be modified – for the better, most of us believe. Of course, the Northers want to have it on their side – they think that First Landing is quite enough for us.’ Kaldor chuckled; he knew all about the generations-old rivalry between the two islands. ‘Well – isn’t it? Especially now that you have us as an additional attraction. You mustn’t be too greedy.’ They had grown to know – and like – each other so well that they could joke about Thalassa or Magellan with equal impartiality. And there were no longer any secrets between them; they could talk frankly about Loren and Brant, and at last Moses Kaldor found he could speak of Earth. ‘… Oh, I’ve lost count of my various jobs, Mirissa – most of them weren’t very important, anyway. The one I held longest was Professor of Political Science in Cambridge, Mars. And you can’t imagine the confusion that caused, because there was an older university at a place called Cambridge, Mass – and a still older one in Cambridge, England. ‘But towards the end, Evelyn and I got more and more involved in the immediate social problems, and the planning for the Final Exodus. It seemed that I had some – well, oratorical talent – and could help people face what future was left to them. ‘Yet we never really believed that the End would be in our time – who could! And if anyone had ever told me that I should leave Earth and everything I loved…’ A spasm of emotion crossed his face, and Mirissa waited in sympathetic silence until he had regained his composure. There were so many questions she wanted to ask that it might take a lifetime to answer them all; and she had only a year before Magellan set forth once more for the stars. ‘When they told me I was needed, I used all my philosophical and debating skills to prove them wrong. I was too old; all the knowledge I had was stored in the memory banks; other men could do a better job … everything except the real reason. ‘In the end, Evelyn made up my mind for me; it’s true, Mirissa, that in some ways women are much stronger than men – but why am I telling you that? ‘ “They need you,” said her last message. “We have spent forty years together – now there is only a month left. Go with my love. Do not try to find me.” ‘I shall never know if she saw the end of the Earth as I did -when we were leaving the solar system.’