“Still . . .”
“Oh, I know.” She laughed. “It’s a position a lot of my old colleagues wanted but never got. Chalmers, Bogdanov, Boone, Toitovna— I wonder what they would have thought if they had seen it. But they backed the wrong horse.”
Sax looked away from her. “So why did Subarashii get the new elevator?”
“The steering committee of the TA voted that way. Praxis had made a bid for it, and no one likes Praxis.”
“Now that the elevator is back, do you think things will change again?”
“Oh certainly! Certainly! A lot of things have been on hold since the unrest. Emigration, building, terraforming, commerce— they’ve all been slowed down. We’ve barely managed to rebuild some of the damaged towns. It’s been a kind of martial law, necessary of course, given what happened.”
“Of course.”
“But now! All the stockpiled metals from the last forty years are ready to enter the Terran market, and that’s going to stimulate the entire two-world economy unbelievably. We’ll see more production out of Earth now, and more investment here, more emigration too. We’re finally ready to get on with things.”
“Like the soletta?”
“Exactly! That’s a perfect example of what I mean. There’s all kinds of plans for major investment here.”
“Glass-sided canals,” Sax said. It would make the moholes look trivial.
Phyllis was saying something about how bright things looked for Earth, and he shook his head to clear it of joules per square centimeter. He said, “But I thought Earth had some serious difficulties.”
“Oh, Earth always has serious difficulties. We’re going to have to get used to that. No, I’m very optimistic. I mean this recession has hit them hard down there, especially the little tigers and the baby tigers, and of course the less developed countries. But the influx of industrial metals from here will stimulate the economy for everyone, including the environment-control industries. And, unfortunately, it looks like the diebacks will solve a lot of their other problems for them.”
Sax focused on the section of moraine they were climbing. Here solifluction, the daily melting of ground ice on a tilt, had caused the loose regolith to slide down in a series of dips and rims, and although it all looked gray and lifeless, a faint pattern like minuscule tiling revealed that it was actually covered with blue-gray flake lichen. In the dips there were clumps of what looked like gray ash, and Sax stooped to pluck a small sample. “Look,” he said brusquely to Phyllis, “snow liverwort.”
“It looks like dirt.”
“That’s a parasitic fungus that grows on it. The plant is actually green, see those little leaves? That’s new growth that the fungus hasn’t covered yet.” Under magnification the new leaves looked like green glass.
But Phyllis didn’t bother to look. “Who designed that one?” she asked, her tone of voice implying that the designer had poor taste.
“I don’t know. Could be no one. Quite a few of the new species out here weren’t designed.”
“Can evolution be working so fast?”
“Well, you know— is polyploidy evolution?”
“No.”
Phyllis moved on, not much interested in the gray little specimen. Snow liverwort. Probably very lightly engineered, or even undesigned. Test specimens, cast out here among the rest to see how they would do. And thus very interesting, in Sax’s opinion.
But somewhere along the way Phyllis had lost interest. She had been a first-rate biologist once, and Sax found it hard to imagine losing the curiosity which lay at the core of science, that urge to figure things out. But they were getting old. In the course of their now unnatural lives it was likely they would all change, perhaps profoundly. Sax didn’t like the idea, but there it was. Like all the rest of the new centenarians, he was having more and more trouble remembering specifics from his past, especially the middle years, things that had happened between the ages of around twenty-five to ninety. Thus the years before ‘61, and most of his years on Earth, were getting dim. And without fully functioning memories, they were certain to change.
• • •
So when they returned to the station he went to the lab, disturbed. Perhaps, he thought, they had gone polyploidal, not as individuals but culturally— an international array, arriving here and effectively quadrupling the meme strands, providing the adaptability to survive in this alien terrain despite all the stress-induced mutations. . . .
But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless— a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches’ tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd.