Learning the World

What have we accomplished in the past six months?

There are those who’ll say, nothing much. We’re still stuck here, the embargo’s still in place, the emergency’s still in place. To those — I’m thinking of S____ and H____ here, and you know who you are — who think like that, just think back to how it was that midnight when the contact clause was invoked and the boom came down. Or think about the morning after it. It was worse than when we lost the virtualities. It was as if the sunline had gone out and then the lights had gone out. We were stumbling around in the dark. Suddenly everyone was all alone. We couldn’t see in an instant what others all over the world thought. All we had was the people around us and the talking heads on the newslines.

I remember that morning. I never wrote about it at the time because it was too depressing. But look back at it now, compare it with this morning, and it’s downright encouraging. Here is how it was.

Something woke me before the sunline came out, about six in the morning or so. I really needed a bite and a brew, so I climbed into some clothes and pulled on a pair of springy shoes and spiralled down the stairs and jogged off down Windy and on to Dark (is how it felt at the time) and didn’t even pause to pick up the day’s newslines at the hotspot. In the half-light of the farside I noticed people standing in small groups on the street, talking. I didn’t know, maybe I’d missed a big all-night party or something. There was an odd sense of quiet, and I couldn’t quite understand why. I could hear voices, the sounds of early risers rising and early birds reaffirming their property rights, the hum of an engine and the hiss of tyres in the next street.

And then I noticed. The quiet was in my head. Most times of course you don’t listen to the buzz. You don’t read the chat. But you know it’s there in the background, like distant surf, like far-off lights. I stopped for a moment, my heart thumping much harder than the ru

Maybe I hadn’t quite woken up. I didn’t think anything was seriously wrong. A vague, half-formed thought floated through my fuzzy mind that the comms might be down due to the previous day’s bonfire of the virtualities. An even vaguer thought drifted by that it served them right; “them” being, of course, the jury who’d pulled the plug and the Council that had endorsed their decision. It may have been the first time I ever thought of the founders, the older generation, as “them” with quite that emphasis.

As I jogged along a curious thing happened, which had nothing to do with anything that happened later, and nothing obvious to do with anything that had happened immediately before. Looking back, I can see that it may have had something to do with that alone-in-my-head feeling. What happened was this. I became very much aware of being me, and it felt strange. It was as if a wider, cooler mind had found itself in my head, and was surprised to be there behind my eyes. And yet that larger mind was mine. Very odd. It passed in a few moments, leaving me a little shaken, curious, and quite unable to recapture it. I have never found a name for this experience, and though I’ve had it several times since, I can neither induce it at will nor prevent its recurrence. When I tell people about it they either look blank or say: “Oh! You mean you have that too?” But it isn’t a bond between us, not a secret, just a peculiarity, an anomaly, perhaps as random a feature of our minds as the ability to roll one’s tongue is of our bodies. It solves no problem, conveys no insight, and yet leaves me with an impression of significance. It has an aftertaste, but no taste. That impression, that aftertaste, may be its empty secret: it may be a tiny glitch in the process by which our brains find meaning in sense.

But I digress.

I pushed in to the Yellow Wall and found the place crowded. Knowing how gradually it fills up even from about seven or so, this was a surprise. It was full of people who looked like they’d been up all night, and not at a party. Nobody talked much. The place reeked of coffee and inhaler fumes and sweat. The loudest noise came from the wheezing labour of the air conditioner. It was the most squalid atmosphere I’d breathed since my microgravity training. Most people looked down at visible or invisible comms or watched the video wall. The scene came from outside the Council Hall. As I made for the percolator I twitched my ears to pick up the audio. You know what I heard. The cup I dropped was empty. Its crash made everybody jump.

Faces turned toward me.

“You didn’t know?” asked Far Sun Park. One of the New Lamarck kids. I was with her at our last big shock, when we first received news of the transmissions. (Why all those flashbacks to training?) She cried then, and she looked like she’d been crying now, for all that she’d matured in the meantime.

I shook my head. “Has it passed?”

“Ninety-eight to thirty-five,” she said. “No abstentions.”

I summoned a brave face. “Thirty-five? That’s more than we could have hoped.”

Some people looked at me as if I was talking nonsense, but most looked like they wanted to hear what I had to say.

“The emergency can only last a year,” I said. “We can design and train like we expect to go out tomorrow and by the time it’s up, we’ll be more ready to go out than we’ve ever been.”

“They won’t let us go out,” said Far.

“Who’s they?” I said. “A year from now, most of us will have the vote.”

“By that time, they’ll have convinced most of us that the moratorium is a good idea.”

“They’re not the only ones who can do convincing.”

At that point everybody just laughed. I turned away and gathered the shards of the broken cup. Then I got myself the coffee and snack I’d come for. I sat down with it and wrote my first “exile” post and sent it to everyone who’d ever contacted me. I had plenty of time to do it, because nobody wanted to talk to me.

Compare that to how it is now. This morning I rolled out of bed, leaving Grant to sleep, and grabbed my breakfast here. I went to the workshop and did a couple of hours on the habitat virtual tests. I wasn’t the first person in, and the loft filled up fast. When I looked around, the real and virtual spaces were more crowded than the desks, with projects big and wild. Grant’s waterworld resort no longer looks outrageous — there’s a scheme for farming the algae that has so far survived three feasibility studies; an even wilder project for exporting water by whipping waterspouts to escape velocity (don’t ask); some very neat work with using gas giant slingshot effects to get a head start on the long tube; all of which are attracting some founder capital — which of course does its bit to undermine the pro-embargo coalition, by vesting interests in colonization and getting out. On the cultural side there’s a small school of artists over in the corner data-mining Red Sun transmissions — four years behind, obviously, and four hundred years of cultural drift off, but that’s what makes what they make of it interesting, even beautiful.

I’ll tell you a secret: we’ve gained by losing the virtualities. Without that distraction we’re more focused on our work and on our plans. Some of us. The truth is, the workshop is crowded not because too many people are working on projects, but because not enough are to justify opening another one.

And therein lies a problem, one I was reminded of as I walked to the cafe just now for my morning break. The streets and parks were busy. What worries me is what they were busy with. Fun, games, music, talk talk talk. Half a dozen kids loafing, passing an inhaler around, giggling. Nothing wrong with that at a party, but this was ten in the morning! Saw one guy cross-legged on a bench, whittling a bit of bent branch into a vague semblance of an animal. Doubtless he thinks it’s art and that he’s accomplishing something. Not everyone is into starting projects. Some always take more initiative than others. That isn’t the problem. The problem is that too many people who should be initiating projects aren’t, and too many people who should be checking out which project they want to join aren’t bothering. They don’t have plans and they don’t bother even to study. They’re out there playing under the sunline.