and Max rolled their eyes and glanced toward the kitchen.
“Maybe he always wanted to be a teacher,” Sally said.
“Maybe he wants to keep Praxis growing ten percent per year,” George said, “full world or not.”
Sam and Max nodded at this, and Elizabeth looked annoyed. “Maybe he wants to save the world!” she said.
“Right,” Sam said, and Max and George snickered.
“Maybe he’s got this room bugged,” Art said, which cut short the conversation like a guillotine.
The days that followed were much like the first one. They sat in the conference room, and Fort circled them and talked through the mornings, sometimes coherently, sometimes not. One morning he spent three hours talking about feudalism—how it was the clearest political expression of primate dominance dynamics, how it had never really gone away, how transnational capitalism was feudalism writ large, how the aristocracy of the world had to figure out how to subsume capitalist growth within the steady-state stability of the feudal model. Another morning he talked about a caloric theory of value called eco-economics, apparently first worked out by early settlers on Mars; Sam and Max rolled their eyes at that news, while Fort droned on about Taneev and Tokareva equations, scribbling illegibly on a drawing board in the corner.
But this pattern didn’t last, because a few days after their arrival a big swell came in from the south, and Fort cancelled their meetings and spent all his time surfing or (it turned out he did both) skimming over the waves in a birdsuit, which was a light broad-winged bodysuit, a flexible fly-by-wire hang-glider that translated the proper motions into successful flight. Most of the young scholarship winners joined him in the air, swooping around like Icaruses, and then dropping in and planing swiftly over the cushions of air before every breaking wave, air surfing just like the pelicans who had invented the sport.
Art went out and thrashed around on a body board, enjoying the water which was chill, but not so much as to absolutely require a wetsuit. He hung out near the break that Joyce surfed, and chatted with her between sets, and found out that the other ancient kitchen workers were good friends of Fort’s, veterans of the first years of Praxis’s rise to prominence. The young scholars referred to them as the Eighteen Immortals. Some of the Eighteen were based at the camp, while others dropped by for a kind of ongoing reunion, conferring about problems, advising the current Praxis leadership on policy, running seminars and classes, and playing in the waves. Those who didn’t care for the water worked in the gardens.
Art inspected the gardeners closely as he hiked back up to the compound. They worked in something resembling slow motion, talking to each other all the while. Currently the main task appeared to be harvesting the tortured apple bushes.
The south swell subsided, and Fort reconvened Art’s group. One day the topic was Full World Business Opportunities, and Art began to see why he and his six fellows might have been chosen to attend: Amy and George worked in contraception, Sam and Max in industrial design, Sally and Elizabeth in agricultural technology, and he himself in resource recovery. They all worked in full world businesses already, and in the afternoons’ games they proved fairly good at designing new ones.
Another day Fort proposed a game in which they solved the full world problem by returning to an empty world. They were to suppose the release of a plague vector which would kill everyone in the world who had not had the gerontological treatment. What would the pros and cons of such an action be?
The group stared at their lecterns, nonplussed. Elizabeth declared that she wouldn’t play a game based on such a monstrous idea.
“It is a monstrous idea,” Fort agreed. “But that doesn’t make it impossible. I hear things, you see. Conversations at certain levels. Among the leadership of the big transnationals, for instance, there are discussions. Arguments. You hear all kinds of ideas put out quite seriously, including some like this one. Everyone deplores them, and the subject changes. But no one claims that they are technically impossible. And some seem to think that they would solve certain problems that otherwise are unsolvable.”
The group considered this thought unhappily. Art suggested that agricultural workers would be in short supply.
Fort was looking out at the ocean. “That’s the fundamental problem with a collapse,” he said thoughtfully. “Once you start one, it’s hard to pick a point at which one can confidently say it will stop. Let’s go on.”
And they did, rather subdued. They played Population Reduction, and given the alternative they had just contemplated, went at it with a certain amount of intensity. Each of them took a turn being Emperor of the World, as Fort put it, and outlined their plan in some detail.
When it was Art’s turn, he said, “I would give everyone alive a birthright which entitled them to parent three-quarters of a child.”
Everyone laughed, including Fort. But Art persevered. He explained that every pair of parents would thus have the right to bear a child and a half; after having one, they could either sell the right to the other half, or arrange to buy a half from some other couple, and go on to have a second child. Prices for half children would fluctuate in classic supply/demand fashion. Social consequences would be positive; people who wanted extra children would have to sacrifice for them, and those who didn’t would have a source of income to help support the one they had. When populations dropped far enough, the World Emperor might consider changing the birthright to one child per person, which would be close to a demographic steady state; but given the longevity treatment, the three-quarters limit might have to be in effect for a long time.
When Art was done outlining the proposal he looked up from the notes on his lectern. Everyone was staring at him.
“Three-quarters of a child,” Fort repeated with a grin, and everyone laughed again. “I like that.” The laughter stopped. “It would finally establish a monetary value for a human life, on the open market. So far the work done in that area has been sloppy at best. Lifetime incomes and expenditures and the like.” He sighed and shook his head. “The truth is, economists cook most of the numbers in the back room. Value isn’t really an economic calculation. No, I like this. Let’s see if we can estimate how much the price of a half child would be. I’m sure there would be speculation, middlemen, a whole market apparatus.”
So they played the three-quarters game for the rest of the afternoon, getting right down to the commodities market and the plots for soap operas. When they finished, Fort invited them to a barbecue on the beach.
They went back to their rooms and put on windbreakers, and hiked down the valley path into the glare of the sunset. The trail led around the south side of the lagoon, and there on the beach under a dune was a big bonfire, being tended by some of the young scholars. As they approached and sat on blankets around the fire, a dozen or so of the Eighteen Immortals landed out of the air, running across the sand and bringing their wings slowly down, then unzipping from their suits, and pulling wet hair out of their eyes, and talking among themselves about the wind. They helped each other out of the long wings, and stood in their bathing suits goose-pimpled and shivering: centenarian flyers with wiry arms outstretched to the fire, the women just as muscular as the men, their faces just as lined by a million years of squinting into the sun and laughing around the fire. Art watched the way Fort joked with his old friends, the easy way they towelled each other down. Secret lives of the rich and famous! They ate hotdogs and drank beer. The flyers went behind a dune and returned dressed in pants and sweatshirts, happy to stand by the fire a bit longer, combing out each other’s wet hair. It was a dusky twilight, and the evening onshore breeze was salty and cold. The big mass of orange flame danced in the wind, and light and shadow flickered over Fort’s simian
