Nova

“I feel like diddling my fingers in the ether for another watch. You and Mouse stay tied up. The rest of you puppets cut strings.”

Vanes deflated and folded till each was a single pencil of light. And the light turned off.

“Oh, Captain Von Ray, something—”

“—something we meant to ask you—”

“—before. Do you have any more—”

“—could you tell us where you put—”

“—I mean if it’s okay, Captain—”

“—the bliss?”

Night grew easy about their eyes. The vanes swept them toward the pinhole in the velvet masking.

“They must have a pretty high time of it in the mines on Tubman,” the Mouse commented after a while. “I’ve been thinking about that, Katin. When the captain and me moseyed down Gold for bliss, there were some characters who tried to get us to sign up for work out there. I started thinking, you know: a plug is a plug and a socket is a socket, and if I’m on one end, it shouldn’t make too much difference to me if there’s a star-ship vane, aqualat net, or an ore cutter on the other. I think I might go out there for a time.”

“May the shade of Ashton Clark hover over your right shoulder’ and guard your left.”

“Thanks.” After another while he asked, “Katin, why do people always say Ashton Clark whenever you’re going to change jobs? They told us back at Cooper that the guy who invented plugs was named Socket or something.”

“Souquet,” Katin said. “Still, he must have considered it an unfortunate coincidence. Ashton Clark was a twenty-third-century philosopher cum psychologist whose work enabled Vladimeer Souquet to develop his neural plugs. I guess the answer has to do with work.—Work as mankind knew it up until Clark and Souquet was a very different thing from today, Mouse. A man might go to an office and run a computer that would correlate great masses of figures that came from sales reports on how well, let’s say, buttons—or something equally archaic—were selling over certain areas of the country. This man’s job was vital to the button industry: they had to have this information to decide how many buttons to make next year. But though this man held an essential job in the button industry, was hired, paid, or fired by the button industry, week in and week out he might not see a button. He was given a certain amount of money for ru

The Mouse gazed across the stars. “I remember that sometimes the gypsies used to curse by him.” He thought a moment. “Without plugs, I guess we would.”

“There were factions who resisted Clark’s ideas, especially on Earth, which has always been a bit reactionary. But they didn’t hold out very long.”

“Yeah,” the Mouse said. “Only eight hundred years. Not all gypsies are traitors like me.” But he laughed into the winds.

“The Ashton Clark system has only had one serious drawback that I can see. And it’s taken it a long time to materialize.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“Something professors have been telling their students for years, it seems. You’ll hear it said at every intellectual gathering you go to, at least once. There seems to be a certain lack of cultural solidity today. That’s what the Vega Republic was trying to establish back in 2800. Because of the ease and satisfaction with which people can work now, anywhere they want, there have been such movements of peoples from world to world in the past dozen generations that society has fragmented around itself. There is only a gaudy, meretricious interplanetary society which has no real tradition behind it—” Katin paused. “I got hold of some of Captain’s bliss before I plugged up. And while I was talking I just counted in my mind how many people I’ve heard say that between Harvard and Hell3. And you know something? I think they’re wrong.”

“They are?”

“They are. They’re all just looking for our social traditions in the wrong place. There are cultural traditions that have matured over the centuries, yet culminate now in something vital and solely of today. And you know who embodies that tradition more than anyone I’ve met?”

“The captain?”

“You, Mouse.”

“Huh?”

“You’ve collected the ornamentations a dozen societies have left us over the ages and made them inchoately yours. You’re the product of those tensions that clashed in the time of Clark and you resolve them on your syrynx with patterns eminently of the present—”

“Aw, cut it out, Katin.”

“I’ve been hunting a subject for my book with both historical import and humanity as well. You’re it, Mouse. My book should be your biography! It should tell where you’ve been, what you’ve done, the things you’ve seen, and the things you’ve shown other people. There’s my social significance, my historical sweep, the spark among the links that illuminates the breadth of the net—”