Learning the World

Who can blame them? Well, we can, and we do. We busy folk call them slackers and birthrighters, because they’re living on their birthrights and not earning or learning. But they didn’t just happen to be born with idle bones. They’re idle because they don’t believe they’ll ever get out, at least not for decades. So we should blame the founders, and all those who voted for the embargo?

No! We should blame ourselves! We’re not doing enough to convince them that the embargo won’t last more than another six months. All we have to do is vote. The voting-age cohort of the ship generation is enough to tip the balance.

I’ve just had an awful thought. If we don’t shift that crowd of slackers, they might vote to keep the embargo.

Think about that. Actually, when I think about that, I get such a terrible sense of suffocation that I gasp. And I think about killing. I really feel as if I could go out and choke slackers with my bare hands.

I’m as shocked as you are.

Synchronic Narrative Storm was showing a group of five-year-olds the big machine that turned bales of mown grass into milkshakes and meat patties when a shadow darkened the sunlight from the doorway. She turned and saw Constantine.

“You grace us with your real presence,” she said, in an electric message with a sharp edge. He smiled and stepped out of sight. Synchronic passed the five-year-olds to the charge of two ten-year-olds, who took over the demonstration so quickly that Synchronic could smell the sizzle before she was out of the door. She found Constantine leaning on the side of the barn, in a pose that needed only a chewed straw between his teeth to complete.

“You have some nerve coming here,” she said.

“Yes, my lady,” he said. He straightened away from the wooden wall and gestured to the pathways. “Care for a stroll?”

“If you must.”

“Thank you.”

They walked between gnarled trees. Mowing machines like large trilobites with baskets on their backs trimmed the verges.

“Feed for the nanotech cow,” remarked Constantine. “A cumbrous process. In the cones we grow food straight from the gunk.”

“You didn’t come here to pass the time of day.”

“No, my lady, I did not.”

“I still haven’t forgiven you, and I’m not going to, so don’t ask.”

The subterfuge of the surveillance still rankled; its exposure, at least, still embarrassed him. She could see his blush in the infrared.

“I didn’t come to ask that,” he said. “Nor to offer mine.”

“You think I need any?”

“Not particularly.” He looked sidelong at her. “Business is business. Can we put all that aside for the moment? Accepting it as unfinished business?”

She shrugged. “If you insist. So what did you come for?”

“We’re in danger of losing the ship generation.”

“I’m aware of the problems,” she said. “ ‘You can’t tell the boys from the girls, they have no respect for their elders, their user interfaces are garish and unwieldy, everybody is writing a book, and their music is just noise.’ Found scratched on a potsherd in Sumer.”

“All true as it ever was,” he said, “but it’s more than that. They were ripe to go out, and now they’re overripe, to the point of becoming somewhat rotten. A significant number are demoralised. Another and better fraction are becoming angry and organised against the founders.”

“And whose fault is that? They were conveniently distracted and constructively occupied with the virtualities until you crashed them.”

He raised a hand in front of him, palm facing her. “I know, I know,” he said. “Let’s not recriminate. As we agreed, yes?”

“Yes.”

“So the question is what’s to be done about it. I think we have to give them hope, and we have to give them constructive work. Real work and real hope.”

“Pla

“Yes, and it’s killing their spirits. The better they are, the more they yearn to put their plans into practice.”

She stopped dead on the path. Constantine took a couple of oblivious steps forward, then noticed and turned around. She glared him in the face. “Don’t open again the question of colonisation. We’re not doing it until at least we get advice from the Red Sun system.”

Constantine spread his hands. “You know you haven’t won the young people over to that. When the emergency goes to referendum they can vote it out, and vote your people off the Council, and colonise anyway.”

“They can vote all they like,” she said. “They can’t force us to invest.”

She thought she detected a flicker of amusement at this, but no note of it reached his voice. “Don’t put them to that test,” he said.

“So do you have anything to propose?” she asked. “Some real work that isn’t virtual?”

“Yes,” he said. “I propose that we let them get to work on real asteroids, but not out in the system.”

“Oh?” she said. “And where would we find these real asteroids? In the slag mountains?”

“No,” said Constantine. “In the hollow spaces of the cones.”

She knew about these asteroids, of course. It was because she had classified them in the wrong mental category that she hadn’t thought of them.

“That sounds very tempting,” she said. “I think we could sell that to the Council. On one condition.”

“Yes?”

“That it counts as colonization, with the settlers emigrating as if they were going into free space. They are, after all, leaving the habitat.”

Constantine smiled. “And therefore can’t vote? Yes, I had thought that aspect would appeal to you.”

“I can see how we benefit,” said Synchronic. “What’s in it for the crew?”

“Same as for the kids,” said Constantine. “Work. Something useful to be getting on with. Trade. Resource extraction.”

“You know,” said Synchronic, “it might be best if the suggestion were to come from the ship generation themselves, and then be acceeded to by the Council. So that it seemed less like a palliative offered by us, and more like a concession won by them.”

“I’ll take steps,” said Constantine.

The town, or miniature city, of Far Crossing had changed since Horrocks had last visited it. This time he arrived in his own hired microlight. He dragged it across the field and parked it at the edge of town, then walked in along the same street he’d walked six months before. Sternward Avenue, that was it. Its familiarity underlined how much about it had changed. It was more crowded and less busy than he remembered. The paintings and writings on the walls were no longer harmonious and decorative. Angry slogans flared in jagged letters. Rock the founders. Rock the aliens. Room to live. Space for us. Elaborate illuminations of names and obscure words. Obsessive, detailed pictures of habitats, fantastically encrusted with weapons; of the aliens, with speech bubbles enclosing improbable dialogue. Trompe 1’oeil murals of climbing plants. The loss of much of the usual electronic buzz and background chatter had shifted illustration and emphasis and communication out to the actual.

Music thudded or moaned from every shopfront and open window, or so it seemed. The air floated pheromones of frustration and molecules of narcotics, stimulants, and hallucinogens. The people in the street affected in their attire a studied casualness — space-rigger fatigues, mesh and nanofibre — or the louche, bedraggled formality of ill-matched, half-fastened outfits like those of people returning drunk from a party. Some of them, Horrocks realised with disdain, were returning drunk from parties. It was the middle of the afternoon.

He felt pinched and short of the ready. The stuff in the shops was out of his reach. Six months of seeing terrestrials stock tank and not much in the way of training fees had left him, not poor, but cost-conscious in a way he hadn’t been before. The thought of Constantine’s scheme put a bounce in his step.