Keene had heard the analogy before, but he let Foy carry through without interruption. For years, Earth’s experts had insisted that Kronia would never last. When it not only lasted but grew and attracted more numbers, they said it was only through dependence on Earth, and they tried cutting the flow of material supplies to prove it. But the restrictions only served to make Kronia more self-reliant sooner.
Foy went on, “But that was said by Terrans who could only think in terms of a model based on economics. Earth was fixated on economics. It had become the global religion, dominating every aspect of life.” He waved a hand. “Providing for material needs is important, of course, like eating. But like eating, it merely provides a foundation to support higher things. Look at earlier cultures and their works. Earth had brought everything down to the level of the foundation. It ate compulsively, all the time, with no other purpose.”
“An entire Earth culture modeled after Kronia?” Keene said. It was plain enough that this was what Foy meant, but Keene needed a moment to reflect on it. It hadn’t been long ago when Grasse and Valcroix were telling him that the Kronian system couldn’t survive much more of even the colony’s own growth.
“Not just Earth. Beyond it,” Foy replied. “I already said, a culture capable for the first time of reaching for the stars.” He waited for a few seconds, then grinned at the expression on Keene’s face. “The conditioning of a Terran upbringing still shows, Dr. Keene. Forget the dogmas you heard repeated all around you every day of your life back there. This is perhaps the only system that could hold up on such a scale.” Foy made a palm-up gesture with one hand. “How far did Earth’s space programs get on its shopkeeper economics after the military incentives went away? Some corporate exploitation of the Moon. A couple of pilot bases on Mars that never amounted to more than glorified field laboratories. No profit. No aims beyond continuing the safe accumulation of capital.” He shrugged. “And in any case, profit is a poor substitute for a motivation that will fire the passions of a whole culture. I’m talking about what can only be called spiritual—the kind of drive that inspired Europe of the High Middle Ages to create its soaring cathedrals and spurred the spread of Islam from India to Spain. The spirit that expresses belief in something beyond individual existence, larger than the individual, that will endure long after the individual has gone and give meaning to the life that was dedicated to it.”
“You’re making it sound like a new Kronian religion,” Keene said.
Foy glanced at Vorse and inclined his head in a way that said he didn’t entirely disagree. “Something that plays the role that religion once did, anyway. A universal sense of purpose, a quest that will spur a new Renaissance. Except that this Renaissance will be driven by visions of reality, not myth. All religions founded on myth eventually collapse when the myth is exposed.” He paused for a moment. “And what I see playing that role is something that I know is very important to you, Dr. Keene.
“I’m tempted to say ‘science,’ but I don’t mean the dead husk of true inquiry that the word had come to mean in Earth’s institutionalized orthodoxies. I mean the free, creative process that functions within and as part of a universe that it recognizes as itself alive—not some soulless observer of a dead machine. What science should have been. The driving force that by now would already have carried us across the Solar System, instead of selling out to the power structure as the European Church did before it, and allowing itself to be conscripted to serve politics and commerce. I’ve talked to Sariena and Gallian. They know you. It was what you stood for through your whole life back there.”
Keene nodded distantly. Had the human race been spread out and expanding in the way that Foy described, instead of concentrated in one place, the effects of Athena would have been far less calamitous. As things were, only the lucky fact of Kronia’s existence had stood between civilization being obliterated completely, and the future that Foy was painting now. “Is that to be the God of your new religion, then, Jon?” he asked. “Life?”