Alien Earth. Megan Lindholm

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      “Exactly.” Deckenson took a quick breath as if he were about to go on, then paused abruptly. He let the breath out slowly, then breathed in twice, slower still, through his nostrils. John recognized the calming exercise. Deckenson looked up at him across the table and smiled suddenly, disarmingly. “Look, John. This isn’t going at all the way I’d planned, and I’m not going to let myself get sidetracked. Poet might be my first option, but Executive was my next, and that’s what I have to be right now. For the sake of poetry later. I have so much to convey to you, and such a limited time. And I desperately need to have your commitment.”

      This sounded familiar. It would go like the last two meetings he’d had with Earth Affirmed people. There would be the same old song of their idealistic concept of a Human-centered civilization, usually followed by a monologue about how they had John’s best interests at heart and that was why he should give them cut-rates. It irked him that this time he might have to strike some kind of deal with them.

      He thought about the previous times he’d been approached by Earth Affirmed. The first two times, way back when, he’d taken on consignments from them. Sticky ones. Never again. The last two times they’d approached him had been, oh, about sixty-five of their years ago, and again about thirty-seven years before that. They’d used the same pussyfooting techniques, long talks that hinted at a very profitable and exciting mission, but somehow never came around to making a direct statement of what that mission was. Each time, after protracted talks, John had gotten impatient and taken his option offer from Norwich and gone on his way. He wished it was that easy this time. He was starting to wonder why he even bothered with Earth Affirmed overtures. He hated to think it could be something as prosaic as curiosity.

      The waiter came and hovered. Deckenson looked almost annoyed. “My regular meal. And John will have the same, but double portions. And more water, please. John, anything to drink besides water?”

      “Stim.”

      Deckenson turned to the waiter apologetically. “Do you have stim here?”

      The waiter frowned consideringly. “Not in the old style, no. But I think our chef can come up with something that is both stimulating and refreshing. Will you trust us?”

      “Certainly,” Deckenson replied without consulting John, and the waiter hustled away.

      “So stim isn’t commonly drunk anymore, either?”

      “I’m afraid it’s regarded as a bad habit. The better restaurants don’t encourage it.”

      “I see. Last time I was in port, it was ‘purity of experience.’ Restaurants discouraged patrons from ordering more than one kind of food or drink at a meal. Background music was regarded as distracting one from the immediate experience. Wearing a perfume that could intrude on another’s olfactory experience was regarded as the height of rudeness. All of that seems to have been replaced.”

      “So you see all this as merely another brief change of consciousness, a swing of the pendulum,” Deckenson indicated the whole room with a wave of his diminutive hand.

      “For me, that describes it perfectly. For you, it’s your life.” The words came out more bluntly than John had intended.

      “Exactly. But some things change in one direction, John, and keep changing. You’ve seen it, though you don’t seem to have attached any importance to it. The Conservancy’s ‘guided evolution’ has not swayed an iota from its headlong drive to keep Humans from having any effect on Castor’s and Pollux’s ecologies. They blindly refuse any of Earth Affirmed’s suggestions to integrate us into the ecologies, preferring instead to force us to live as outsiders, as parasites who try to sustain themselves on the natural flows of life here, without either contributing or detracting from that flow.” Deckenson’s voice was beginning to quiver with fervor. John braced himself against the current of fanaticism.

      “Look what their breeding controls have done to us. People keep getting smaller, in an effort to make even less impact on the planet’s ecologies. Puberty keeps getting pushed back, a side effect of the growth inhibitors. We’re supposed to believe that’s good. The Conservancy talks about an extended juvenile period undistracted by internal hormonal riots, as if sexual maturity were a form of insanity. Our bodies have become little more than mobile containers for our brains.”

      John tried a shrug. It only seemed to electrify Deckenson more.

      “What was puberty when you were generated, John?” he demanded, almost angrily. “Onset at about fifty-two, fifty-five? I see you haven’t made it yet, so that has to be about right. Now it’s sixty-five to seventy, and climbing. Of course, the inhibitors have also pushed our life spans up beyond two hundred years, so that shouldn’t sound so bad. In fact, all the time a Human has before his hormones become obsessed with reproduction is supposed to be why we’ve advanced so far intellectually. We’ve successfully moved a bit farther away from our animal natures. Supposedly.” Deckenson drew breath, and sipped his water.

      “Supposedly?” John was resigned now. The man was a typical poet: he communicated to use words, rather than the other way around. John would just have to ride out the chatter until Deckenson got down to business.

      “Yes, supposedly. Look at me, John. On a scale of twenty, with twenty being the perfect achievement of the Conservancy’s ‘guided evolution,’ I score a seventeen point six-three. We’re not supposed to be able to get casual access to that data, but one can, if one is determined enough. And the interesting thing is that most of us who attain those high scores are determined enough. Perhaps because we, trapped inside these ‘improved’ bodies, sense, more than anyone else, that something is going wrong. Very wrong.”

      “Looks fine to me.” John gave an offhand wave at the restaurant around them. “Things are going better than ever; or at least that’s what the update reports on the Wakeup line told me as we were coming in. Dirty technology is getting cleaner. Use of plastics is almost down to zero, what with the new cell-meld techniques and bacterial information storage system. Waste from harvested asteroids is down to less than six percent, and the on-rock mining techniques do even better than that. The interpopulation of the space stations by the Rabby is obviously a successful venture. The populations on both Castor and Pollux are stabilized at a constant that is ten percent under what was considered the population safety mean for human habitation thirty years ago, and …”

      “Stop there,” Deckenson suggested quietly. “And think about what you just said for a minute.”

      John had more than a minute, as the food arrived just then. John recognized none of it, but it didn’t bother him. Styles in serving food changed just as styles of wearing clothes. There were twenty-two native plants on Castor and seventeen on Pollux that Humans could safely eat. Thirty-nine plants that met all nutritional needs of a Human when eaten in a judicious mix. John had eaten them all, and expected to continue eating them all for his entire life. They could make them look different, and they could vary the flavor somewhat, but what it came down to was that tapa lily was tapa lily, and it was the basis of your diet, whether your gourmet chef prepared it or you ate standard rations from the ship’s dispenser.

      There was a brown rectangle in a brown sauce, a salad, small orange cubes of something, and a tangle of white noodles with pinkish flakes of something in it. The waiter refilled Deckenson’s water glass, and set a small steaming mug in front of John, then departed. John picked up the mug immediately and sipped at it. Stim. Sort of. A little too bitter. He sweetened it with taro syrup from the dispenser on the table and tried it again. Better. But already almost gone. He was beginning to see Deckenson’s point about a world scaled down to smaller people. He set the mug down, but Deckenson had СКАЧАТЬ