It surfaced in the minutes that followed, breaking through the normal reserve of Eythil’s race toward Kenmuir’s. The spaceman was familiar with most of it, but he listened throughout, because here was a need to speak. Moreover, he heard a few aspects that had not touched on him before.
While the asteroids were invaluable sources of minerals, as the comets were of ices and both were of organics, by themselves they did not suffice. A large body is required for the chemical fractionation that creates usable concentrations of most industrial materials. Hence prospecting and mining on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. On Mercury they were carried out entirely by machines—although even for them, Venus was too costly. In environments less horrific, humans were marginally employable: those humans whose desire for a frontier brought them there. Above all was Mars—to which Lunarians, especially, went in the high days of the Selenarchy. Terrans, too, could reproduce in that gravity field; but at first their numbers were less, because few were accustomed to land that could kill them. Mars remained a province of Luna until the Federation took them both over—“and we should yet be of Lunarian name,” Eythil said. “Is not a member nation supposed to govern itself? But nay, afar on Mars we have less autonomy left us than here where we circle Earth.”
“Well, you’ve gotten proportionally more Terrans,” Kenmuir pointed out. “Whether or not they were bora there, they’ll think, act, vote according to their psychological bent and their culture.”
“You speak like a sociotech.” Contempt edged the word.
“I don’t mean to,” Kenmuir said mildly. “One is apt to read a lot on space hauls. It makes for a bookish vocabulary. Oh, I am not only a Terran by race, I’m an Earthling. But I do sympathize with you Lunarians. All the old, irreconcilable issues are rising again, aren’t they?”
-which once made Luna declare itself a nation, independent and sovereign: birthright, property right, education, the survival of a civilization that openly rejected certain basic ideals. He had often wondered what would have developed if it had stayed clear of the Federation. Idle imagining, of course. When reaction to the War Strike doomed mighty Fireball, the end of separatist Luna was in sight, however long a delaying campaign Niolente and her cohorts might wage. Yet, in some hypothetical quantum-mechanical alternative reality—
“Under the Covenant, the Assembly and High Council should at least respect our constitution,” Eythil maintained. “But nay, more and more they reshape the ‘fundamental ethic’ clause to bring down olden law and ways. Decision passes ever more from living beings to machines.”
Intelligent machines, Kenmuir thought, not subject to human corruption and cruelty. Yet undeniably this was governance by … aliens? The Teramind bore something of the awesomeness of God, but it was not God—too remote, not fallible enough. As for the day-to-day details of life, maybe what gnawed some people worst was just a sense of having become irrelevant.
“It isn’t due to any conspiracy,” he argued. “It’s the, the logic of events. The former nations scarcely exist any longer. They’ve broken up into thousands of different societies, in fact and often in form. The Federation has had to take over many of their duties. Without an integrated world economy, everyone would starve.”
“Scant value has that economy had for us Martians of late.”
“Well, declining demand for minerals.”
“We could adapt, in a self-chosen fashion. But nay, it must be in Earth wise. You speak of the Federation as the sole viable government that is left. But that means that naught stands between the lone person and it.”
“I know. History shows your fear is reasonable. Also, anomie is demoralizing. But you have to agree, the Federation government doesn’t try to run people’s lives for them. In fact, many of its interferences with you Lunarians have been to curb arbitrary powers of the Selenarchs that they aren’t supposed to possess in a republic—”
Perhaps fortunately, the wall speaker announced: “Ambient space is now known to be safe. You may lift when you please, senores.”
Silence fell between them, and prevailed while they went to the vehicle, launched, and flew. Eythil might have been nursing his anger, or might have gone into some unearthly mind-realm of his own. Kenmuir had begun to feel a vague headache and feverishness. He wondered whether it was nerves, dread that he might somehow fail Lilisaire … whatever she wanted of him. The westering sun rose higher as the trajectory bore him in that direction. Earth, too, shifted across his sky, easterly and northerly. It shone at late first quarter, a blue crescent marbled with white clouds which, widespread over nightside, captured enough light from the stars and from below to make that part of it ghostly gray. So had it been when first she summoned him.