“Now, pardon me,” he said, rising. “We’ll talk again later. Meanwhile, carry on.”
“Yes, Captain,” Chandor whispered. In his face bewilderment struggled with something that dared not yet be rapture.
Nansen had ported his aircar two or three kilometers from the Venture building. He liked to walk. He did not like the stares he drew on a street. Not that they meant trouble. Most were friendly, many close to adoration, especially in this city. A few were wary or even resentful — Envoy had brought great strangeness to Harbor, and already the changes were felt — but not blatantly. Nor did anyone hail the famous man, though some nodded or gave him the hand-to-temple salute of deference. He simply didn’t enjoy being a spectacle.
The boulevard was wide, lined with the sweetly curved double trunks and feathery orange foliage of lyre trees. Vehicles glided along it, pedestrians through the resilient side lanes. The buildings behind were seldom more than ten stories high, set well apart on lawns of golden-hued native sward or green terrestrial grass. They ran to fluted or color-paneled facades with turrets elaborately columned and spired. Argosy was founded about six hundred years ago, by Kithfolk who despaired of wandering. Assimilation was not entirely complete. Ancestral genes revealed themselves here and there in small, trim bodies and craggy visages. More pervasive and meaningful was ancestral tradition, an ethos half forgotten, now stirring awake. It made Argosy a favored site for an organization that aimed to launch fresh emprises among the stars.
And Harbor itself is a favored world. Jean’s world. We were lucky, arriving when we did, when a new civilization is reindustrializing the planetary system and dynamic individualists are seeking their fortunes. It can’t last.
Though who knows what real interstellar traffic, whole fleets of ships, might bring about that never was before in human history?
Having claimed his car, he set it to wheel out past city limits and take off. Field drive, miniaturized for bubbles like this, would make it safe to land and lift anywhere. That alone meant enormous wealth for the innovators. But let somebody better qualified find the right managers to reap it. Nansen was no businessman; his skills and goals lay elsewhere.
From above he spied a cluster of buildings lately erected, laboratories for research and development in the nascent technologies. The League’s financial backers did not lack vision — if their vision was largely financial, what of it? — while today’s computers, robotics, and nanotech made for rapid progress.
The sight fell behind him and he flew over a tawny plain. Shagtrees lined riverbanks with vivid yellow, fireplumes with scarlet. This part of Duncan had reverted to nature during the death agonies of the Mandatary; several circular marshes were warhead craters. Reclamation was under way, hampered by disputes over ownership. Twice, however, he crossed a broad swathe of green, cropland and pastureland, where a village nestled as a center for single farmsteads.
Not too favored a world. Population rising steeply again, more and more lands overcrowded. Yes, technics feeds, clothes, houses, medicates everybody, but it can’t create living space; and poverty is relative. The economy today is ruthless; for each person who succeeds, a hundred or a thousand go under. And there are other malcontents, misfits in religion, politics, lifeways — and some who look at the stars with a pure kind of longing.
At least open land could still be had, square kilometers of it, if you could pay. Nansen’s aircar slanted down toward his estancia, where Dayan awaited him.
He had not copied the house of his childhood. That would have been a mockery, here where grass was only slowly spreading outward and only terrestrial saplings rose from it. Flower beds decorated a lawn, but a big arachnea dominated, like a spiderweb against the sky, swaying and rustling in a wind that smelled faintly of spices no human ever tasted. Two dogs lolled near the porch, panting in the warmth, but the glittery mites dancing in the air around them were not insects, and a sunhawk overhead, watchful for prey, had four wings. Yet the house was high-ceilinged and rambling, stone-floored, red-tiled, and a fountain played on the patio.