Green Mars(36)
“Whatever you say,” Sam remarked, which got him a sharp glance from Fort.
• • •
The following morning it was sunny and warm, and Fort decided the weather was too good to stay indoors. So they returned to the beach and set up under a big awning near the firepit, among coolers and hammocks strung between the awning poles. The ocean was a deep bright blue, the waves small but crisp, and often occupied by wetsuited surfers. Fort sat in one of the hammocks and lectured on selfishness and altruism, taking his examples from economics, sociobiology, and bioethics. He concluded that strictly speaking, there was no such thing as altruism. It was only selfishness taking the long view, acknowledging the real costs of behavior and making sure to pay them in order not to run up any long-term debts. A very sound economic practice, in fact, if properly directed and applied. As he tried to prove by means of the selfish-altruism games they then played, like Prisoner’s Dilemma, or Tragedy of the Commons.
The next day they met in the surf camp again, and after a meandering talk on voluntary simplicity, they played a game Fort called Marcus Aurelius. Art enjoyed this game as he did all the others, and he played it well. But each day his lectern notes were getting shorter; for this day they read, in their entirety, Consumption— appetite— artificial needs— real needs— real costs— straw beds! Env. Impact = population x appetite x efficiency— in tropics refrigerators not a luxury— community refrigerators— cold houses— Sir Thomas More.
That evening the conferees ate alone, and their discussion over dinner was tired. “I suppose this place is a kind of voluntary simplicity,” Art remarked.
“Would that include the young scholars?” Max asked.
“I don’t see the Immortals doing very much with them.”
“They just like to look,” Sam said. “When you’re that old . . .”
“I wonder how long he plans to keep us here,” Max said. “We’ve only been here a week and it’s already boring.”
“I kind of like it,” Elizabeth said. “It’s relaxing.”
Art found that he agreed with her. He was getting up early; one of the scholars marked every dawn by striking a wooden block with a big wooden mallet, in a descending interval that drew Art out of sleep every time: tock . . . . . . tock . . . . . . tock . . . . . . tock . . . tock . . tock, tock tock toc-toc- toc-toc-to-to-to-t-t-ttttttt. After that Art went out into gray wet mornings, full of birdcalls. The sound of the waves was always there, as if invisible shells were held to his ears. When he walked the trail through the farm he always found some of the Eighteen Immortals around, chatting as they worked with hoes or pruning shears, or sat under the big oak tree looking out at the ocean. Fort was often among them. Art could hike through the hour before breakfast with the knowledge that he would spend the rest of the day in a warm room or on a warm beach, talking and playing games. Was that simple? He wasn’t sure. It was definitely relaxing; he had never spent time like it.
But of course there was more to it than that. It was, as Sam and Max kept reminding them, a kind of test. They were being judged. The old man was watching them, and maybe the Eighteen Immortals as well, and the young scholars too, the “apprentices” who began to look to Art like serious powers, young hotshots who ran a lot of the day-to-day operations of the compound, and perhaps of Praxis too, even at its highest levels— in consultation with the Eighteen, or perhaps not. After listening to Fort ramble, he could see how one might be inclined to bypass him when it came to practical matters. And the conversations around the dishwasher sometimes had the tone of siblings squabbling over how to deal with incapacitated parents. . . .
Anyway, a test: one night Art went over to the kitchen to get a glass of milk before bed, and passed a small room off the dining hall, where a number of people, old and young, were watching a videotape of the morning’s session with Fort. Art went back to his room, deep in thought.
• • •
The next morning in the conference room Fort circled the room in his usual way. “The new opportunities for growth are no longer in growth.”
Sam and Max glanced at each other ever so briefly.
“That’s what all this full-world thinking comes down to. So we’ve got to identify the new nongrowth growth markets, and get into them. Now recall that natural capital can be divided into marketable and nonmarketable. Nonmarketable natural capital is the substrate from which all marketable capital arises. Given its scarcity and the benefits that it provides, it would make sense according to standard supply/demand theory to set its price as infinite. I’m interested in anything that has a theoretically infinite price. It’s an obvious investment. Essentially it’s infrastructure investment, but at the most basic biophysical level. Infra-infrastructure, so to speak, or bioinfrastructure. And that’s what I want Praxis to start doing. We obtain and rebuild whatever bioinfrastructure has been depleted by liquidation. It’s long-term investment, but the yields will be fantastic.”