Damon Knight - Orbit 19

“Even so, we’re a little surprised that the Conservancy would break its own rules for a few tons of rock. And our charges are always reasonable.”

“What would you have asked this time? A couple of Calder stabiles, perhaps, and a Pollock or two?”

The ploy succeeded; for the next twenty minutes they talked not of why Kalkas was traveling to Ganymede but of abstract expressionism. Trojan Port’s Culture Committee had offered a million megawatt-hours for Broadway Boogie Woogie; the Ministers of Conservancy were debating whether or not the sale would be an unwarranted expenditure of an unrenewable resource. Abramowitz had a holograph of the work in his private volume. It was one of his favorite paintings, in part because he thought that Mondrian had worked from traffic-flow statistics. Kalkas said that, for all he knew to the contrary, the artist might have done so.

“I really hope you make the trade. Holos are neat, but they don’t have the feel of the real.”

“No, of course not. But you mustn’t be greedy; Trojan Port already has the best gallery above Earth.”

“Right, right. Hey, would you like to see it?”

“Yes, I would, but only for a short while, please. My adrenalin seems to be close to normal, so I expect I’ll begin to tire soon.”

Trojan Port had begun its Art Space just after the turn of the century but had acquired the most important works in the collection during the past two decades, as the Port Commanders and the Exchange Committee grew ever more knowing not only about trade but about art. When Kalkas had last seen it the Space had been a slender tube near the hydroponics volume, featuring many holos, a few Klees, and a single Chagall. Now the first thing he saw as they entered an enormous sphere was Guernica , upside down. Like the cotes in the Port’s best cafeteria, two hundred or so paintings, sculptures, stabiles, and mobiles were suspended in a scarlet web that filled the volume. A few score orbiters drifted along the strands or hung still before various works, turning occasionally to alter the perspective, sometimes pivoting very slowly on the long axes of their bodies. As Abramowitz towed him along the radii and chords of the display, Kalkas might have been one of his own Attic forebears being given a conducted tour of the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum. Kalkas had little discernment in art and little affection for the works of the Consumption Age, but now he began for the first time to appreciate emotionally how much the Conservancy was paying for the megawatts, the metals, the rare earths, and the machinery to keep its folk alive while the lands grew green again. It is earthborn, he thought; someday it must come back to us.

Abramowitz had not utterly forgotten his diplomatic intelligence assignment, and before they had completed half a circle he asked whether Kalkas might be followed by other travelers coming up. Kalkas found it easy to say that, with luck, there could be several more; hovering before Kelly’s Colors For a Large Wall he thought of adding that some, once up, might stay, but he knew that that would be too suggestive of the truth. He must not provoke the Spaceborn to any thorough and coordinated investigation, for the vital connection could be discovered from a few questions asked in Libya Dome. The risk was already so high that Ferenc Troyant might realize that the inane suspicions he had harbored nearly two decades before had been well founded, that Auckland’s procomps had refused to venture a prediction beyond Kalkas’s transfer to orbit. The only thing that made the gambit practical was the coincidence that the N’yerere process, which would, indeed, require large quantities of europium, was succeeding in the Bitterroot tests.

Soon Kalkas was honestly able to plead weariness. He and Abramowitz rode in a buggy to the hostel. The Communications Officer spoke casually of new facilities or extensions of the port; Kalkas seldom replied with more than a nod or a murmur. At the hostel—a short hexagonal tube boasting a bathcloset in each of its twenty-four private volumes—Kalkas pressed his thumb to a record card, thanked Abramowitz, and went to what he persistently thought of as his room to check the integrity of his luggage. He assumed it had been scanned, and it could have been opened, but nothing was missing or noticeably rearranged. Clearly no one had been ingenious enough to discover that the stainless steel liquor canteen was a cryogenic flask. Neither had anyone cracked the seal on the full cologne bottle to discover that the liquid inside was nothing like cologne. Kalkas broke a different seal, fitted a self-closing straw to the nozzle, and, in defiance of Woomera Clinic, drew a sip of Djokjakarta’s finest scotch.

The Conservancy’s purposes, he thought, might have been better served by a different agent; he had said as much to the Minister of Futurity. But a form of the seduction that had first drawn him up thirty-five years before drew him again: Once more he would be going far and going into strangeness, where the light of the sun is not the light that falls on Earth; once more, too, he would be putting behind him, for a space, all that he most desired to have when he returned. Thus he had agreed to travel some billions of kilometers and fetch, if he could, a gram or two of Cris Troyant’s skin.

He would also arrange for the shipping of several tons of europium oxide, with which N’yerere’s crews would try to turn North America’s sad grey mountains once more black with conifers, but the only prize would be the chromosome sample for the New Breed project. If Cris carried the sort of genes that her heredity suggested, and if those genes were unmixed with catastrophic recessives, and if the requisite clonic crossbreeds could be fixed, then the Conservancy might be able, within a few decades, to send its own colonists into space. Perhaps it would be no easier for these theoretical spacegoing Earthborn to return to their birthworld than it was for the Spaceborn to visit it. The Conservancy’s biochemists, however, would insure that they remained of Earth, and the psychologists would insure that they never forgot it. Most important, they could continue to crossbreed with ordinary Earthborn. The genetic disaster of cross-infertility would not recur. Thus the success of the project would insure for the Conservancy a supply of energy and raw materials not to be endangered by any vagaries of Spaceborn taste or evolution.

“You want a species of inverted Janissaries,” Kalkas had told the Minister of Futurity, and then had had to explain the allusion.

The Minister had agreed. “Yes. Because we cannot depend upon ourselves, and we dare not depend upon the Spaceborn. The procomps forecast a four per cent probability that the woman’s genes are precisely what we require. Even if they are not, the procomps forecast almost eighteen per cent that they can be clonically crossbred to the optimum.”

“Forecast?”

“The procomps don’t think they know enough about the mother’s genetic endowment for a prediction. When the conservation of every earthborn species may be at issue, I think we must pursue even these odds.”

Snug now in the padded, anchored sleeping pouch, Kalkas drew a last sip of scotch and recalled one of his infrequent visits to the Troyant compartment. Cris had been walking sturdily, so it could not have been many months before the Retirement. The little girl had nothing of Ferenc in her, save perhaps a lack of laughter, but she had her mother’s green eyes and shaggy red hair. Kalkas was pleased with that resemblance, which appeared in neither of the child’s brothers. Nothing about her as an embryo or as a puling infant had pleased him, but she had begun to charm him now. He was showing her parents the near-mint copy of the Bonestell Centennial Portfolio that a historical survey group had found in the abandoned Maryknoll Dome when she bounced over to look too. Both Macky and Ferenc were amused by the primitive, though sometimes surprisingly prescient, visualizations of planetary surfaces, but Cris, to whose point of view the reproductions were upside down, gazed at them soberly, occasionally tracing a line or two with one finger. When they came to the painting of the Milky Way as seen from an extragalactic rogue planet, Cris said “Oooo” and for many minutes would not let the page be turned. Macky said something about the child’s liking mandalas.