Instead of making governments almighty, global communications speeded the effective breakup of societies into self-determining coalitions of all kinds, ethnic, economic, religious, professional, cultural, even sexual.
Environmentalist crusaders preached, official agencies strove, but what rehabilitated an Earth devastated by overpopulation and overexploitation was a new set of technologies and the economic incentives and disincentives they brought about.
“There are no final answers, not while humans remain human. Nine thousand years is further ahead than our most ancient written records go back. What changes, what violences, what revolutions will they see? Above all, what revolutions of the spirit? We do not know.
“For the sake of our unborn and the sake of life itself on Earth, let us accept a few small sacrifices and make an irrevocable commitment now to the security of our planet—while we can do it, while we can choose to do it. Our descendants will bless us. Whatever they do, whatever they become, surely they will bless us. But already we, in this our mortal day, will have blessed ourselves.”
3
Afterward Laurinda went topside for a walk. She needed motion and aloneness. In the house she felt too connected.
Evening light streamed low, nearly level. It seemed to fill grass and leaves with gold. A flight of nestbound rooks passed across the sky. Their calls drifted faintly down to her. A breeze cooled the air like a whisper from oncoming night.
Striding, she felt tension and anxiety drain away and peace flow out of the ground. It was as if her England thanked her.
The old church rose ahead. The machines that removed the deserted city had kept this relic, restored it, and maintained it. She spied an unobtrusive guardian robot—scarcely needed, as rare as visitors were. Another tended the graveyard. The names on the headstones were weathered into oblivion, yet somehow the headstones remembered.
So did the church she entered. A window above the doors made its own sunset. Elsewhere the stained glass glowed more softly, angels and saints under a ceiling that arched toward heaven. She could just make out Christ crucified above the altar. Not for the first time, she wondered how the archeologists and the machines—ultimately, Terra Central, in whose database lay all surviving records—decided what to model the emblem on; for the Puritans must have destroyed the original. Or had they? Sometime she should ask. The thought dropped from her. She sat down in a pew and listened to silence. She imagined ghosts gathered around, worshipful and humble, in the deepening dusk.
When she left, only a westward purple remained of the daylight. Soon that too was gone. Now and then she had to glance at the attendant on her wrist, which she had ordered to point the way back. Stars twinkled forth, one by one, more and more. Seen through this slightly misty air they were not as bright or as many as they might have been. Just the same, after a while their multitude and the sense of their remoteness came upon her. Which of those that she could see had intelligences reached by now? She wasn’t sure. News from the explorers came in so slowly. Nor did she follow it very closely, being more concerned with Earth. Probably the explorers were still in Sol’s purlieus. Nevertheless, those machines, traveling close to the speed of light, multiplying themselves wherever they found raw material and sending their offspring onward—in one or two million years the machines would have ranged over the whole galaxy.
Laurinda shivered. Once the vision had been glamorous and glorious. Tonight she began to ache, and recalled that she had eaten hardly anything all day. Yes, she was growing old.
Having descended to her house, she sought the part that was her own, not a workspace or entertainment and communication center or personal clinic but a small refuge for dreams. Virtuals weren’t enough; she wanted reality, which whim could not alter. Wainscot made a background for framed pictures of ancient scenes and shelves of ancient books; the music she played was baroque; a copper kettle gave off steam, and soon her tea was ready and soon thereafter her supper, indistinguishable from one that might have been set forth for Jane Austen.
She didn’t command the servitor to simulate a human retainer, nor instigate a search for a friend somewhere on the planet who would feel like conversing with her. She thought she wished only for quiet, a bit of reading, and then bed.
When a voice like her mother’s contralto spoke to her, she realized that Terra Central had detected otherwise.
“May I interrupt? I would like to say you did wonderfully well. Public reaction has on the whole been positive and enthusiastic.”
“Good,” Laurinda said. “But I was just a single speaker. We need more.”
Her mind went on: The effort you are mobilizing moves softly but is huge. And what if it fails, if the vote does go against your urging? What might you then call upon?
And why do I think of you as a person?
Because you are. Not human; however, an awareness … a soul?
“You were eloquent,” said Terra Central, “and with an insight beyond mine.”
Startlement answered, “How?” What am I, that you are mindful of me?
“Shall I explain tonight, or would you rather wait till you have rested?”
Terra Central was always considerate of her interfaces. Almost always, she guessed rightly. Laurinda’s heart leaped. “Please, now.”
The voice paused before continuing—to calm her a little? “I am dedicated to the well-being of life on Earth. No change I make in myself will change that. Your race is the sentient part of life. But I, as I am, cannot fully understand it.
“Texts, relics, perceptions, talks, are not the same as direct experience. I can follow the thoughts—even a shadow of the emotions—of gentle, rational
