When he ended the interlude, she sensed that he must force himself. “You know what I’ll ask of you.”
She looked away, off into one of the screens where the day outside shone. “Do you really believe I can grant it?”
“I can hope. It’s not as if we were at a final decision point. The debate may go on for years.” His voice harshened. “Unless Terra Central strikes it down and orders an action.”
Her head swung back towards him. She stiffened. “What makes you imagine that could happen?”
“I said it before. What force is left in the World Charter or the law of any state? We talk, we vote, we go solemnly through our traditional motions, but the decisions that matter come from the machine intelligences—at the summit, from Terra Central.”
“Not decisions, not commands. Advice, which we do best to follow.”
“You imply the world has become too complex, too precarious, for mere humans to understand and control.”
“It always was, wasn’t it?” she said quietly.
Taken aback, he sat mute for a while. Perhaps he reflected that her books must have given her more knowledge of the historical past, the terrible past, than most people had. At last he replied, “Well, facts, logic, models, calculations, yes, of course we need Terra Central, the whole cybernetic system. But what we want, what we feel, that counts for at least as much.”
“She welcomes this input too.”
He stared. “She …?” he whispered.
“Just what do you wish of me?” Laurinda challenged.
“That you, today, speak for liberty. The last liberty we have. If those proposals go through, we’ll lose it.”
“I don’t agree.” Almost automatically, so often had she explained the viewpoint, she added, “True, if we take her counsel we’ll have to accept certain changes. But largely it will be less a matter of anything compulsory than of giving up some things for the sake of the future. Some parklands must be converted, some volcanoes awakened, some installations built, a number of other programs carried out. To pay for this, a slight reduction in basic credit issue; there will be things we can’t afford any longer, but, really, very minor. No worse. I honestly can’t find sense in the claims your faction has been making.”
“The changes won’t be that minor. Nor the compulsions. Only think of the Siberian forest gone back to steppe, North Africa back to desert, lava burying the Gardens of Hawaii—all the loss of recreation, places to be alone in, to draw a free breath in. More than that, the condemning of property, the displacement of residents. When instead we can simply—”
She cut him off. “Please. We’ve both fallen into our set-piece speeches, haven’t we? Let me just point out that there’s nothing ‘simply’ about your scheme. It carries its own price. And the heaviest part of that price would fall on later generations who were never given a choice.”
“Are you sure of that? They’ll have had nine thousand years to make ready, in whatever way they themselves find best.”
“No, I am not sure. She isn’t. History is chaotic. Nobody and nothing can forecast what the situation, the possibilities and impossibilities, will be in another nine thousand years. We must secure these resources against that day, while we still definitely have them and have the means to use them.”
Starkness yielded to sadness. “But why are we repeating these worn-out arguments, Omar? Did you actually believe you could convince me in two or three hours, or that I could then convince others?”
“It seemed worth trying,” he admitted. “Your influence isn’t negligible. Oh, obviously I can’t change your basic opinion today, if ever. But I was hoping to persuade you to give ours honorable mention, to tell your audience they should listen to us and think seriously about what we have to say.” His voice gathered passion. “Laurinda, I know you love all the life on Earth. But doesn’t the freedom of that life—to cope for itself, to evolve—-doesn’t that matter too? Do you like the prospect of life turned into nothing but a, a pet, controlled down to the last cell by a machine?”
Stung, she snapped, “You know that’s ridiculous.”
The thought flitted through her, not for the first time: Is it? She struck back: “Carry it just a little further, and you may as well join the Stormseekers.”
Memory rose against her will, of a rally in North America. She had seen a bit of it on the news and ordered a complete replay. The words rolled thunderous: “—I say let the Ice come. It won’t be the end of the world, it will be a strengthening and a liberation. Life was never more rich, more vigorous, than last time, in the Pleistocene, nor man more creative, more free. When Terra Central lies dead beneath the glacier, then from the cold tundras to the rainlands around the Equator, men will again make their own destinies.—” The gathering cheered, applauded, waved banners aloft. She took comfort from the fact that they were few, those misfits, misanthropes, technophobes, romantics, irrationalists of every kind. Yet they did warn her of an underlying rebellious lust for adventure, the hunter heritage of the entire race. And … young, blond, tall, broad-shouldered, totally male, how beautiful the speaker was!
Omar’s retort called her back. “That’s unfair. Once you were more open-minded.”
“Or I knew less,” she said.
“Or Terra Central hadn’t become your own center.”
His bitterness bit her. “Are you that angry, Omar?”
He was instantly contrite. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—” They sat silent for a number of heartbeats before he finished: “It seems, after all these years, we can still hurt one another.”
And the years will not return. “Yes, I have changed,” she said. “You too, no doubt, but I more.” Sometimes, lying awake at night, I miss the girl I was. Less her heedless health, dizzying joyfulness, even the quick sharp sorrows, than her dreams that knew no bounds.
“Well, I’ll
