Vorse shook his head. “We put landers down at a few places. The views they sent back could have been from Hades.” He shrugged as if to say all was still not lost. “But the fraction of the surface that we’ve sampled has been tiny. There could be other conditions elsewhere.”
“Our kind has survived comparable events before,” Foy put in. “And they didn’t possess the technical resources that the industrialized world had. It’s early days yet, Dr. Keene.” The cyclic theme of old worlds destroyed and new worlds being born recurred in the myths of ancient cultures as far back as they were recorded. The Biblical Old Testament was not alone in its injunction to go forth and replenish the Earth.
“Rebuilding it should go a lot faster this time,” Keene said. “Kronia was never here before to direct things. We’ve got a repository of knowledge that won’t have to be discovered all over again.”
Foy gave him a long, contemplative look before replying, as if evaluating if this were the moment to broach whatever he’d had in mind in bringing Keene here. Finally, he said, “What we’re looking at, Dr. Keene, isn’t just the prospect of rebuilding civilization. Because of a quirk in recent times that led to the coming together of some extraordinarily gifted people, the circumstances that we have here at Kronia are unique in the history of human existence. As a consequence, we have the chance to found a civilization unlike anything that has existed before—the kind of civilization that visionaries through the ages have imagined, but which have defied all attempts to turn into reality. Some have concluded that it must always be so: that the harsh rules of reality and human nature make them permanently impossible dreams. But we believe otherwise. We believe that the forced cooperation that has been vital to survival out here at Kronia has produced a workable system of human values that could never have happened in the violent, competitive conditions that governed the development of cultures on Earth. If we can import that system back to Earth, maybe we’ll be able to shape a civilization fundamentally different from any that emerged there before, rooted in the same ethic of mutual need and the inherent value of everyone as a unique individual that guides us here.” He shrugged. “And if there do turn out to be survivors there, perhaps we can steer their early development in the same direction, before they begin increasing in numbers and organizing themselves into the old, eternal patterns of power rivalries and conflict.”
“Who are ‘we’?” Keene asked, picking up on Foy’s use of the word. “Who decides these things?”
“Those of us who try to consider where our longer-term destiny might lie, beyond just muddling through from one century to the next,” Foy replied. “After the present crisis has faded to become just another detail on the cosmic backdrop. When a new race has emerged that isn’t divided within itself because of the inherently hostile nature of all its human relationships. Each against all. Take as much as you can in return for as little as you can get away with. That was the underlying rule that drove everything of importance on Earth, was it not? ‘Good business.’ ‘Astute politics.’ How could a sentiment like that ever mold and hold together a civilization capable of moving out among the stars?”
Keene took a moment to adjust to the new dimension that the conversation was taking on. What Foy was talking about now went far beyond just an experiment in organizing a complex, technological society on an alternative basis to the monetary incentive that most people on Earth had regarded as self-evidently unavoidable.
Foy completed Keene’s thought as if he had been expecting it. “Sometimes our system is described as having invented what amounts to a new form of currency: a trade in the recognition of competence. And in some way it turns out to be a very superior currency. It can’t be counterfeited, or stolen, or hoarded—for how can you fake skill or knowledge that you don’t possess, take away another person’s once they have it, or give it to someone who hasn’t earned it? So corruption of the kind that comes with the power to steal legally or to bribe is impossible. And so does enslaving another person to create wealth for your own benefit—for with our kind of wealth the only one who could become rich is the slave.”