The scan magnified, focused, sped close above the world. He glimpsed a stand of birch, their leaves snaring sunlight; wild horses in gallop; a hillside blue with cornflowers; a village of small homes; a town lifting spires above a harbor where pleasure boats rocked at their moorings and a freighter unloaded its cargo; traffic on roads and aloft; a contrail like a road to heaven, slowly breaking up, where a spacecraft had ascended.All this had Terrans, with their proliferating robots and molecular machinery, wrought in less than three hundred Earth years, while in space their Lunarian allies made the asteroids blossom. All this, despite the fact that on a day not very much further ahead, another senseless cataclysm was to destroy the planet, and nobody knew how or if any creature upon it could survive.
Deep within himself, Venator felt a shudder. Here, if ever, the Faustian spirit had made its absolute manifestation and seized its ultimate home.
No, he thought, the thing went beyond even that. It was not simply sheer, unbounded will, demonic energy and brazen laughter. (“We’ve decided the motto and guiding principle of our government shall be ‘Absit pntdentia nil rei publicae profitur,’” Guthrie had communicated once. “Gracias to the database for fancying it up into Latin. What it means is ‘Without common sense you ain’t gonna have nothing.’” The insult to every concept of a guided society stood brutally plain.) It was that the necessities of the adventure had brought forth something altogether new and strange.
The scan winged onward. Cultivated fields passed beneath, goldening toward harvest. They were few and mainly for chemical production. Basic food and fiber were manufactured, as on Earth or Luna. Those who wished—on Demeter, most people—supplemented with kitchen gardens, orchards, the bounty of wild nature. The scan showed another woodland. It was that nature, the global web of life, which had made this world fit for humans.
But technology could not in a few centuries do the work of evolution through gigayears. The ecology here was inevitably simple, fragile, poor in feedbacks and reserves, always near the edge of catastrophe. Earth’s had crashed again and again in massive extinctions. Demeter’s began to die when it was barely seeded; and there would have been no rebirth. A whole cybercosm could not take over the task of nursing it back to health, bringing it along to ripeness, keeping it in balance as an organism keeps itself in balance, being it … unless that cybercosm permeated the life, and had the awareness and purpose and—love—of human minds downloaded into it … Demeter Mother,
Venator had walked the veldt among lions and Cape buffalo, scaled a glacier, shot rapids, disarmed more than one dement gone violent. From this alienness, he recoiled.
Like a providence, the console said: “Your call.” The view from afar blanked out and Pong’s full-body image appeared. Evidently he had commandeered a similar unit where he was. He saluted. “Reporting, senor.” His face spoke for him: failure.
Venator tasted vomit. He swallowed. “Well?”
“I’m sorry, senor. The persons are gone. As nearly as we’ve been able to find out, they—two of them, male and female—went hastily to the volant they’d come in and skipped off. That was about forty-five minutes ago.”
Proserpina, first and always. “What about the file they were invading?” ,
“I think they left it running, and it finished and turned off. If they’d learned we were on our way— they could have posted an inquiry—that would be a logical thing to do, not disclosing to the net that they were in fact gone. Buying time.”
Venator nodded. His neck felt stiff. “I expect you’re right.” Oh, clever, clever. Lilisaire chose her instruments well. “Have you learned anything about them yet?”
“We’ve just started, senor.” A partial image of a second man entered the field. “One moment, por favor.” Fong conferred. Again to the synnoiont: “TrafCon has-now identified the volant. It went to Springfield Mainport and parked illegally, right at the terminal. Shall I contact the civil police there?”
“No.” What use? “Look at bus schedules. Either the pair are hiding in town or they’ve boarded a flight to someplace else. Who’s the volant registered to?”“Um-m-m—“ Fong squinted offview, at another screen. “Alice Tarn of Niihau, Hawaii.”