of the Crash, I guess. I never was much good at dates. It wasn’t really a crash—more a kind of slow fizzle. The world failed to end, with either a bang or a whimper. It just descended into a kind of torpor. A failure of the agricultural base, spread over six or seven generations. No one cause—just a gradual unwinding of the ecosystem’s balancing mechanism. A couple of wars and their aftermath helped, but they weren’t crucial. Deforestation, soil exhaustion, pollution—they were what did it, by degrees. The fossil fuels never ran out, oddly enough, but getting them out of the ground...that was something else. Mining and industry continued as best they could, but the primary production system went slowly to hell, and took everything else along with it. There was a forced rethinking of priorities. The green machine broke down and the only effort that made any sense was trying to get it working again. They failed. They just had to wait until it repaired itself. A lot of people died...not all at once, as if there were a second deluge or a great plague, but one by one, here and there, a decade or two before their time. Famine spread, until it wasn’t just in Africa and Southeast Asia anymore, but in everybody’s back yard. Everybody—whether he was a Latin American peasant or a citizen of New York, had to start thinking about cultivating his garden—literally.
“There’s a kind of irony, I suppose, that everyone had thought of the ecosystem as something wonderful and eternal, and of the political system as something transient and arbitrary. You might think that during the century of the greenhouse effect, when the climate temporarily went crazy, the first thing to go would be the governments of the day, their bureaucracies and their ideologies. Not a bit of it—they endured, with astonishing tenacity. There were revolutions, and invasions, and all the usual routine things like that, but at the end of the day the map looked pretty much as it had done at the beginning. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere escalated, and it got hotter for a while, but it was surprisingly short lived—we can say this with equanimity now, I guess, though people down there in those days spent their entire lifetimes being surprised. The ecosystem did regenerate, without our doing anything conspicuous to help it except try to stop hurting it. I suppose that on Earth, they’re just about back to where they were in the early twenty-first century, which is not bad considering. But we have had three hundred and fifty years, or thereabouts, when we had to put the very possibility of progress on the shelf, insofar as it depended on Earthly events. Not much went on in the way of research, practical or theoretical, as you’ll probably understand. There is a school of thought, mind you, which says that the Crash didn’t make much difference anyway—that we were already close to the end of progress, at least in theory, simply because we’d already induced just about all that we can induce, given the limits of the human sensorium.
“Having said all that, though, there’s one other point that needs to be mentioned, and that is that one tiny segment of the human race has stood rather to one side of all the troubles. Out here in space, things always looked different. Not that the various habitats in space were ever genuinely independent of Earth—but no matter how short the peasants went, the spacemen always got theirs. They didn’t need so very much, as things turned out, and they could provide a good deal in return—mostly beamed-down power, but even apart from that, the people on Earth were always prepared to give the spacers priority. I think you must know more than I do about the mentality behind that.”
“And progress went on the shelf out in space, too?” she queried.
“That depends what kind of progress you mean,” I said. “Mostly, I’d say yes. There was nothing like Sule a hundred years ago, or even fifty. A research establishment in space was something really strange even when I was at school. The progress they made out here through those long centuries of hardship was simply physical progress. They built things. They gradually extended the human domain. New stations, new ships. All the time, of course, they never stopped looking for new worlds, but we’d grown just a little cynical about that particular dream in recent years.”
She was silent for a few minutes, thinking it over. I let her think. I’d gone on long enough. I was wishing now that I’d brought my drink with me from the party. My throat felt dry.
“So there’s still a Soviet bloc,” she said. “And there’s still a free world.”
“It’s a little bit more complicated than that,” I said.
“It always was.”
“There’s not much real antagonism between them,” I said. “For all that they have different laws concerning ownership, and for all that they still attack one another’s philosophies in the interests of maintaining their own social solidarity, they get along all right. At least, the Soviets-in-space get along well enough with our-side-in-space. There’s another dimension of ‘us’ and ‘them’ now. There’s us—and there’s the ones down the bottom of the big well.”
“Well?”
“Gravity well. Earth is the big well. Mars is the little one.”
“Yes,” she said, “of course. And who exactly is it that is so concerned with maintaining secrecy? Is it us—or is it us?”
“I don’t know.”
“Or care?”
“There’s no payoff in caring. I try to live with it. There’s a school of thought which holds that post-Crash civilization is wiser than pre-Crash because no one expects things to be perfect. We’ve all accepted, so it’s said, that we live in an imperfect world, and always will. Idealism and hedonism, it’s said, have both declined markedly since their heyday.”
“You keep saying: ‘So it’s said.’ Don’t you believe it?”
“How do I know what it was like in the olden days? You tell me.”
“I would,” she assured me, “if only I could look long enough to find out.”
“You don’t really need me to tell you all this,” I said. “There are all kinds of history tapes in the data-store. You could get a blow-by-blow account of the whole thing.”
“I could,” she said. “But tapes don’t necessarily select things in accordance with what the inquiring mind wants or needs to know. And tapes don’t make guesses.”
“Neither do I,” I told her.
“Do you trust Jason Harmall?” she fired at me.
“No one’s asked me to,” I countered.
“Would you trust him?”
“I don’t trust anyone,” I said. “Except my mother. And maybe Zeno. But he looks like a bit of a bastard to me, if that’s what you’re angling for. Why?”
“Dr. Caretta,” she said softly, “I’ve been on a journey of three hundred and fifty years, across the big desert of empty space. I’ve aged over ten years, lived in short stretches of ten and fifteen weeks. I did all that because I believed, passionately, in what the Ariadne was for. I sometimes get the impression that no one here really cares what the Ariadne was for, and that I’m being prevented from getting through to people who might. I want the Ariadne’s mission to be completed. Jason Harmall isn’t going to stop me. I’m looking to you for help...you have to help me make Naxos safe for colonization.”
“Harmall doesn’t want to stop you,” I told her weakly.
“I don’t know what Harmall wants,” she said. “But I’m not taking anything for granted.”
I hesitated before asking, but in the end I just had to. “What do you
