He harked back. The heights and heather and bluebells, glens and lochs, old hamlets and friendly taverns of his earlier life. Immensities of forest, prairie, savannah, splendor of horned beasts and lethally graceful predators, birds in their tens of thousands aflight across the sky. An antique walled city, lovingly preserved. A city that was a “single kilometer of upwardness triumphant amidst its parkland. A city that floated on the sea. A village where each home was a dirigible endlessly cruising. A guitar plangent through tropical dusk or in an Arctic hut. And nobody crowded, nobody afraid … unless they wanted to be?
“Y-yes,” he admitted. “Most of it. And where it isn’t, by our standards, maybe that’s what the people choose.” He thought of the Drylanders. “I’m not sure how much choice they have, given what they are. But they’re not forced.”
Aleka cocked her head—the obsidian-black hair rippled—and considered him. “You’re a thoughtful kanaka,” she murmured.
Unreasonably, he flushed. “You make me think.”
“Naw, with you it’s a habit.”
“Well, you open my eyes to what’s around me on Earth.”
Suddenly in the sunshine, he felt cold. What did ht know of Earth, really? Of common humanity? His universe had become rock and ice, the far-strewn outposts of beings whose blood was not his, and one among them whom he utterly desired but who he knew very clearly did not love him. How glad he was when Aleka pulled him back from the stars: “I don’t claim this world is perfect. Parts of it are still pretty bad. But by and large, we’re closing in on the Golden Age.”
In argument was refuge. “How can you say that, when you yourself—”
Aleka stamped her foot. “I said it isn’t perfect. A lot needs fixing. Sometimes the fixing makes matters worse. Then we have to fight. Like now.”
Kenmuir recalled the bitterness of Lilisaire and other Lunarians against the whole smooth-wheeling system. He recalled how the machines of that system were competing them out of space. Asperity touched him. “I take it you don’t share the standard belief in the absolute wisdom and beneficence of the cyber-cosm?”
She shrugged. “Never mind the-cybercosm. We deal with people, after all. And they’re as shortsighted and crooked as ever.”
“But the system—the advice, that governments never fail to take—the services, everywhere around us like the atmosphere, and we as dependent—“ Services that had lately included doping a drink, it seemed; and what else?
“You mean, do I imagine the machines are pure, and humans alone corrupt the works? No.” Aleka’s laugh sounded forlorn. “Maybe I’m eccentric in not thinking the Teramind has anything particular to do with God.”
“Then I’m eccentric too,” Kenmuir agreed.
Through him went: What was the Teramind? Theculmination, the supreme expression of the cyber-cosm? No. The lesser sophotectic intellects, some of (hem outranging anything the human brain could conceive, took part in it, but they were not it, any more than cliffs and crags are the peak of a mountain. A single planetwide organism would be too slow, too loose; light-speed crawls where thought would leap. The machines, ever improving themselves, had created a supreme engine of awareness, somewhere on Earth—
White on a throne or guarded in a cave There lives a prophet who can understand
Why men were born—
and it engaged in its mysteries while, surely, heightening its own mightiness; but it was not omniscient or omnipotent, it was not everywhere.
Its underlings, though, might be anywhere.
He must assume that none were here. Else his battle was already lost.
“I do admit, basically this is a good world,” Aleka said. Her gaze sought peace in the boisterous water. “I don’t want to overthrow it. I feel guilty, lying to our decent, kind hosts. All I want is freedom for my folk to be what they are.”
For which end she did indeed lie, Kenmuir thought, and she would defy the whole civilization of which she spoke so well, until she had won or it had convinced her that her cause was wrong.
Why had it not? Why this secrecy, these … machinations?
“I’m no revolutionary either,” he said, while rebel’ lion stirred within him. “I’d just like to see things, well, shaken up a bit.”