Macrolife (7 page)

“We need a nature of our devising,” Richard said, “one where the natural realm is only a garden. The man-nature alliance on a planet leads to an anesthetic equilibrium, since planets are physically limiting.”

“You mean the small-is-beautiful movements of the last century,” Sam said, “the zero-growth ideas. But we won't have the static society you're afraid of, since we've left the planet.”

“But twelve billion people still live in a halfway house between nature and the nature we can make for ourselves. We could slide back.”

“A mature society, like a mature individual,” Orton said, “reaches the age of reproduction. Macrolife will be our viable offspring. Any number of social experiments can be made within its framework—we've never experimented with social forms on a large scale in our history—and each one will have enough mobility never to come into conflict with anyone. Here on earth, cultures have tended to exclude each other. Macrolife is a class which can include all others, all subcultures.”

“Consider,” Richard said, “that organismic life grows out of a tiny speck into an organism such as man. So macrolife will grow outward from earth and its sunspace, using the units of previous biological and social structures to form larger multiorganismic units. These will grow into the universe, achieving a scale of existence to match the scale of the universe.”

“And you see our three-dimensional cities, and Asterome, as steps along the way?” Sam smiled. “I think, Orton, that you have it in you to be a founding father, and it's rubbing off on Richard.”

“What idiot would dream small if he was going to dream at all,” Orton asked, “or be content only with dreams? These things we've been talking about involve basic reexaminations of life and living.”

“That's a big subject.”

“The point of life,” Richard said suddenly, “is to do more than repeat things. On the other hand, novelty for its own sake is chaotic. What are needed are unifying procedures that will allow novelty to be linked with past achievements. The retained past would become the basis for the emergence of significant innovations. Carried out on a reliable basis, this would be real progress, Sam.”

“Go on, it sounds interesting.”

“Progress is a tension between the notion of perfection and the notion that striving, not finding, is important. Macrolife embodies both ideas, but eliminates the tyranny of striving after material security, destroying that ancient activity's conflict with the search for personal satisfactions. The universe is very rich, so we should not be poor.”

“Poverty prevents us from thinking on the true scale of reality,” Orton added.

“You think we're poor?” Sam asked.

“A trillion-dollar GNP for North America was poor for 1975, and ten times that is poor now, because it is not enough to undertake what is really possible. It's a relative matter.”

“Let me finish my thought,” Richard said. “The conflict between scarcity and personal growth has led to the disruption of civil order by revolutionaries.”

“Tell me,” Sam said, “how would you deal with the boredom of the well-to-do?”

“Macrolife would permit adventure and intensity of any kind, but without that kind of creative disruption coming into conflict with the economic container. Malcontents could always found their own macro-world. Natural worlds might also draw a fair number of disaffected.”

“I'll grant the constructive nature of the idea of progress,” Sam said, “but it seems to me that the overall pattern or direction of progress for macrolife would remain unfathomable.”

“True,” Richard said, “but the human life span winks on and off too quickly to detect any pattern. All of recorded history is too little.”

“Both human and social life spans must increase,” Orton said.

“Perhaps,” Sam said, enjoying the novelty of the conversation, the way in which their egos were taking a back seat to issues, “but what also worries me is individuality. You seem to be suggesting a mass organism.” In a philosophy department seminar, the rivalries would all be just under the surface, driving the nature of the argument.

“Macrolife is the individual's needs written large,” Richard said. “I think it was a commentator on Stapledon who said that the most advanced communities place as high a value upon individual personality as upon the group.”

“An individual insight or innovation,” Orton said, “might easily sweep the group, determining its overall character. Individuals are sources.”

“Symbiotic links develop,” Richard continued, “between individuals and between the community and the world. The community moves toward pan-sentience of self and world.”

“In a sense,” Orton said, “we do belong to a collective mind, since we share physical origin and structure, and in language we share a mental space. Our individual abilities belong at once to the society which recognizes them. We can only be individuals in distinction from others. Individuality is only a problem in societies which value a certain type of individuality above others. I think this is long beyond dispute.”

The waiter brought the brandy and glasses, poured the liquid, and left. Sam picked up his glass and sipped.

“Rudimentary forms of macrolife exist today,” Orton said. “Besides Asterome, there are the mining settlements in the asteroids, various observatories and research stations, the settlements on Mars and Ganymede—anyplace where human beings live in highly structured man-made ecological systems. It was easy to see such systems working in a small spaceship, but on earth we couldn't see the walls for a long time, and some of us can't see beyond them.”

Sam poured himself another drink.

What Orton and Richard were envisioning, he thought, was a historical birth—it would have to be called that—with the earth and sun as parents. One had to think in terms of centuries to see the point, in terms of creative social engineering, a humanity to replace the halfhearted technological humanity of the last two centuries, a humankind that would consolidate its place in reality, to create the first civilization that would have any chance of standing against the eventual certainty of species extinction. Macrolife would be a permanent civilization. “I like the idea of an uncoercive, open-ended culture,” Sam said.

“Think,” Orton said. “A civilization which might see its millionth birthday.”

“Of course, most of humanity can't see any of this,” Sam said. “How large is the group you'll be working with, Orton?”

“There's Japan, hundreds of private fortunes, some heavy-industry backing—including Bulero, I found out. The macrolife group has been gathering all the other space colonization groups to itself during the last decade. Asterome is the prime mover for all this.”

They were silent for a few moments, sipping their brandy.

“Just think of how much there would be to work for,” Richard said. “There would be little that macrolife could not undertake in time. With its exploratory mobility and access to special research conditions, its presence on the galactic stage would place it in a position to contact other intelligent life, perhaps hybridize its culture. The citizens of a macroworld would achieve life for as long as they wanted it—practical immortality would be theirs in the same way that the ancient city-states offered their citizens various cultural benefits. Death is the ultimate insecurity to a conscious being, the break that takes away all productivity and vitality, the meaning of all further growth. Even if there will be those who choose to end their lives after a long period, they will know that macrolife will be virtually immortal.”

“I tend to think,” Orton said, “that we will want to live longer if our vitality continues. It's possible that in time a kind of natural selection will see only the most intense and creative types choosing the long-range life, one that might even last into the old age of the universe…. I wonder what that kind of consciousness would be like.”

The City of God
, Sam thought, only half listening now. The brandy had made him sleepy. How many attempts had there been to raise humanity up to the level of its better self? He thought of Jack, the stuff of his body strewn by incomprehensible forces, the pattern of his consciousness dispersed, dissolving the compact of matter and physical laws, and whatever else, never to be repeated. Death was an infinite cruelty. Where Orton's and Richard's words opposed death, the sorrow of it seemed to recede. Regret mingled with his lifelong disappointment in Jack. There was nothing to be done about it.
Except to take his wife and be a father to his son, who no longer needs a father. Replace him, finish his life for him….

“Macrolife,” Orton was saying, “was first described, using that term, by Dandridge Cole, who died in 1965. The word is a shorthand for the whole range of humanity's social and biological problems. Our spaceborne peoples have already faced them in the industrialization of sunspace. Macrolife is life squared per cell. Man the multicelled organism stands between macrolife and the cell. Macrolife is to man as man is to the cell. Macrolife, Cole wrote, is a new life-form of gigantic size which has fot its cells individual human beings, plants, animals, and machines. Civilizations have had this same structure, except that macrolife is mobile, and it can reproduce…. Sam?”

“The brandy…”

“Sam, do you want to help?” Richard asked, looking at him with Jack's brown eyes.

“What could I do?”

Blackfriar looked at his watch. “It's twelve-thirty, Sam. Want to come up top for some air? It'll clear your head. You look like a lazy rhino.”

Richard stood up. “I've got to get back. Sam, I'll see you in Santa Fe next month. Orton, thanks for helping with the legal side of those firings at the Chicago complex. I'll call you—there's more I can use you for.” Sam felt his nephew's hand on his shoulder. He looked up sleepily, but Richard was already on his way out.

“It's elevators all the way up, Sam,” Blackfriar said. Sam watched him rise, walk over to the old man at the register, and pay the bill. The terminal chimed as it recorded Orton's credit.

Sam got up and knocked over the brandy bottle.

 

The lights in the undercity seemed brighter. Orton held him up by the arm. “I can make it now,” Sam said.

“You never needed much. Puts you away like milk. I hope you followed something of what we said.”

“I really did, Orton. Inside I'm sober, really.”
How can frail beings like us think of doing the things Richard and Orton described?

They walked across the square to the elevator shaft and stepped into the empty lift.

Two minutes later they got off on the first tier of the New City; from there they took the elevator to tier two, one thousand feet above the Old Empire State Building, which stood like an arthritic giant supported by the braces of the New City. A shiny new elevator shot them up to one of the six observation decks rising from the partially complete third tier.

Sam followed Blackfriar up a rampwalk, through the large open portal, onto the huge flat area. Orton was moving quickly toward the transparent barrier at the edge.

Sam came up next to him, and they stood looking down at the lighted canyons which cut through the layers of the city. There were sections still under construction directly below, lit by flashing work lights. New City was a diamond-studded latticework, a leviathan standing on the base of Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. New York harbor was under the great structure, together with the East River, part of the Hudson, the rebuilt Statue of Liberty, lighted entirely by artificial sources, hidden from sun and stars, open only to the ocean.

The Atlantic was dark in the east. Sam looked up at the sky. He felt a chill breeze; the stars twinkled. For a moment the spell of Richard's and Orton's ideas took hold of him and he wished that Janet were here to feel what he felt.

His head began to clear in the night air.

“In the Amazon,” Orton said, “there are places where they've never heard of a spaceship, or oceangoing cities, or that men make a life for themselves on a moon of Jupiter.”

“The present is never the present,” Sam said. “It's layered with persistent pasts.”

Orton was peering at the glowing dial of his watch. “Can you get home without me? I've got to be in Santa Fe by morning to sign some things.”

“I'll stay a while,” Sam said.

He shook hands with the big man and watched him disappear into the lighted mouth of the exit ramp, which seemed for a moment to become the fiery maw of some huge beast crouched under the stars. Then he turned to look out again over the billion lights scattered at his feet.

How did Janet really regard him? Was he just a brother-in-law, a friendly benevolence? Suddenly it seemed absurd that he should be her lover, that she should have any interest in him at all. Orton was perhaps more her type. Orton was passionate about life and seemed to be preparing for some new effort which would redirect his life.

Orton and Richard had stirred something in him tonight, a sense of possible renewal.

The wind grew stronger and colder. He imagined the dawn moving across the continent to strike the windows of Janet's bedroom, lighting up the desert and brightening the snow into blinding whiteness atop the mountains that held up the sky.

A part of him was dead, he realized, the piece of him that had been joined to his brother.

There was little sense of speed as the car moved across the desert under the stars. Sam leaned back and stared up at the moonless June night. The green light glowed on the panel near the bottom of his vision, signaling that the manual controls were locked until Santa Fe Central released him from the road. Only the sudden passing of a sign or cactus reminded him that he was moving at two hundred miles an hour, but that was slow compared to the boost train that had brought him across the continent in less that five hours; the fractional-orbit shuttle would have delivered him in an hour, but like Orton, he liked to think about where he was going before he got there.

Night was an iron bell containing all space-time, the vault of an empty cathedral whose bright lights had been left burning. He imagined the unseen center of the galaxy, the distant altar, where, it was said, lay a massive black hole, a dark exit from the known universe. There suns and dusty clouds circled the eye of the galactic maelstrom, radiating lost energy as they were drawn in.

He thought of his own death, the death of all those he knew, the passing of humanity through historical time.
What are we
? he thought.
What is left? Everything is hidden from us, as if deliberately.

The car slowed, and two other cars whipped by him in the far right lane. It pulled off at exit 99 and came to a stop at the end of a luminous yellow line.

The seat came up with him as he sat up. He pulled the steering wheel out, locked it, and eased the car forward.

He drove two miles down the old paved road and turned off onto the driveway. As he came along the gravel way between the planted trees, he remembered that long ago he had thought of the house as Jack's, later as Janet's; he would never feel that it was his own.

He halted in front of the terrace, turned off the power, got out, and walked over to the night entrance under the terrace. He pressed his palm on the key surface; it glowed and the door opened.

He stepped into the hallway and went through into the night-lit living room as the door slid shut behind him. At the bar he took a small container of orange juice from the cooler, tore off the top, and drank the juice down.

He resisted the impulse to waken Janet. Everything seemed at once to be balanced on a brink, their lives frail, pitiable things, poised in the morning stillness.

 

He waited in the stillness, thinking of Janet, admitting that he wanted her, without question. There would be a life for them, quiet, personal; he would write new books, revise the old ones, make them definitive. Richard would go his own way, like a son.

Poor Orton
, Sam thought.
He has no one….

“Sam,” Janet was saying from far away. “You crept in and didn't wake me.'

He opened his eyes. Daylight flooded the guest room and Janet was sitting on the edge of the bed in a red robe. He found himself ignoring the lines in her face, the slightly crushed look of sleep. “I must have fallen asleep,” he said, wondering how he looked to her.

“Sam…” He rose up and embraced her. They fell back and he kissed her for a long time.

She sat up again. “I look a mess. Who would want to kiss me like this?”

“An old fool like me.” He began to tug at her arm.

“I don't care how old you are,” she said.

“I'm fifty-six.”

“Don't be old-fashioned. Fifty-six is what forty was half a century ago.”

“Anything new from the investigations?”

“Richard may know something when he gets here.”

“How's the company doing?”

“Well enough,” she said with a shrug. “Mike has got things in hand, with help from Richard and Orton, and myself. Bulero goes on without Jack. Richard coming in has helped keep the shares stable, but I know he resents the interruption of his life. I'm sure that's why I haven't met Margot yet—I don't think she likes me.”

“I'd like to know why Jack died.”

“There are stories,” she said, “about something in the yacht's power plant, and that the coffin was Jack's own kind of crazy joke, to cremate himself in public, but we know that Jack wanted to be put in suspension, if there was anything left to freeze. There's more to this than we know.” She seemed to brighten, but with some effort. “Come on, we'll get some breakfast.”

 

“Where are you?” Richard shouted.

“Here in the study!” Janet called back.

Sam looked at her from behind the ebony desk. She sat in the old easy chair, facing him. Her black hair was piled on top of her head, and she was wearing white slacks with a sleeveless turtleneck. The silvery bulerite medallion which Jack had given out for the family to wear many years ago hung around her neck. Sam admired the deep tan and silky texture of her bare arms. She sat secure in his gaze, her long legs set out casually in front of her.

Richard came into the study and stopped with a nervous, catlike grace. He appeared taller to Sam and his light brown hair seemed darker.

“What happened? Look at your clothes,” Janet said. His collarless blue shirt and side-creased slacks were covered with dust, Sam noticed.

“We've got to get out of this house,” Richard said.

“What is it?” Janet asked.

“I'll explain later. We've got to go.”

“I want to know now—tell us,” Janet demanded.

Richard ran a hand through his hair. “The Bulero Complex outside Chicago is falling apart. All three tiers are—well, glowing strangely, as if burning inside.”

“The whole three-thousand-foot pyramid?” Sam asked, trying to imagine the event.

“Yes. There are a lot of electromagnetic phenomena. There's smoke. Everyone has been evacuated.” Richard took an unsteady step forward.

“It must be on the evening news,” Sam said, looking around for the remote control.

“No! Listen—we don't have time. It's the bulerite—it's unstable. When our two ore haulers were destroyed in space…we found the same kind of ash in Jack's yacht and around his disintegrated coffin. When they refloated what was left of the yacht, the bulerite statuettes of Prometheus were gone, together with all the bulerite on the vessel.”

Sam saw fear in Richard's tired eyes, as if something of Jack had taken possession of him.

Jack killed himself
, Sam thought, feeling a guilty satisfaction.

“Earth-moon,” Richard said softly, “it's all built up with bulerite. All our major cities and hundreds of lesser ones, sea-bed communities, the magma and geothermal taps—patients walking around with bulerite hearts and bones.” He looked at Sam with despair. “Even if we could take it all apart by tearing it loose at the adherence joints, which we don't know how to do easily, what could we do with the stuff? It would take years to ferry it off-planet.”

“You're here to warn us about the bulerite in the house,” Janet said. She sounded composed, resigned, but Sam saw the frightened look on her face.

“We've got to leave,” Richard said. “This house is old enough to be in danger. Don't stop to take anything.”

He turned and went through the living room out into the bright desert night. Sam and Janet followed. Halfway across the driveway, Richard looked back and pointed at Janet. “Your medallion—you'd better get rid of it.”

Janet took off the bulerite jewelry and threw it toward the house.

Sam got into the driver's seat of Richard's large rented car. Richard and Janet got in next to him. They sat still suddenly, looking at the house.

Sam had never felt comfortable in it; now the house was an open threat, and he expected it to strike out at any moment.

He pulled the wheel out from the panel. The car started and he drove away, glancing back nervously every few seconds. When he reached the road, Sam stopped the car, and they all gazed at the house among its trees, lights blazing in the darkness.

“Get us out of here,” Richard said.

Sam accelerated.

There was a bright flash of light somewhere overhead.

“The orbital factory,” Richard said.

The brightness faded. Sam peered up through the windshield at the band of stars arching across the sky and down behind the snowy peaks on the horizon. Where the bright, man-made star should have been moving toward the mountains, there was nothing now.

“Did they get away?” Janet asked.

“I don't know,” Richard answered. “The evacuation had started.”

Sam regarded Janet. She sat next to him, looking down, her hands together in her lap.

He drove until he reached the automated highway, and then he braked.

Again they turned to look at the house. It was completely hidden by trees now, but its lights shone through like ghosts congregating on high ground.

“It will happen,” Richard said.

“I don't want to see it,” Janet said.

Sam put the car on automatic and let the road take it.

As the vehicle shot across the desert, Sam sat back and tried to think. Where could they go?

“What's the worst that can happen?” Sam asked.

“Only the worst can happen,” Richard said. “The world's urban areas will go from any of the variations of bulerite's instability. The oldest bulerite structures will go first—all the city mayors have known that since last week. But that will be nothing compared to the magma tap that transmits heat energy to the Caribbean power stations. When that goes, there may be earthquakes and volcanic activity, and a steam cloud that might affect the world's weather. The survivors will have decades of ruination to look forward to, until the last piece of bulerite is gone.”

Sam tried to imagine the political strife during that time.

“Let's hope that this is all bulerite can do,” Richard added, “and that there won't be any more surprises.”

“One thing is sure,” Janet said.

“What's that?” Sam asked.

“Buleros are not going to be liked very much.”

“We may be in danger,” Richard said. “I think it might be prudent for us to get off the earth, maybe to the moon, where some of the cities are not built up with bulerite. Besides, a lot of the stuff there is younger and may take longer to fall apart. Maybe Blackfriar and I can arrange for us to stay on Asterome.”

“As long as only a few people know the truth,” Janet said, “things can still be arranged.”

We'll be criminals
, Sam thought, noting the bitterness in Janet's voice. He wondered about Mars, Ganymede City, the outposts. Would life be any better there?

“I think we might be safe at the old house in Ecuador,” Richard said. “It's outside the earthquake zone.”

“What kind of heart does Orton have?” Janet asked suddenly.

Sam looked at her. “Why, I don't know. It might be bulerite, or older. We'll call him.”

“The phone in this car is out of order,” Richard said. “We'll have to stop at the first booth we see.”

Janet began to check the roadmap screen for the nearest drive-in phone. She pushed a few buttons, programming the car to pull off the road when the time came.

Could we have foreseen all this
? Sam asked himself.
Jack could have done more
. There was nothing to be done now except help himself, and those close to him, to survive. He looked up and saw two falling stars whisper across the sky and fade. He noticed an earthwatch satellite, which circled the earth every ninety minutes, climbing toward the zenith. It was also made of bulerite, growing heavy with the forces that would soon tear it apart.

Traffic outside Santa Fe was growing heavier. There were a dozen cars on either side of them, floating backward and forward as Central adjusted the road flow.

“Richard,” Sam asked, “can any of this be an exaggeration?”

“The longer we ran the computer simulations, the worse things looked.”